Right On Technology

Today was the day that Apple fans have been waiting for, the new Apple event where they were going to make announcements regarding their new iPod line and who knows what else. Rumors abounded from the return of Steve Jobs, to the Beatles finally available for digital download (9.9.9 being the hint that this was some tie-in to the Beatles Revolution Number 9).

Well, if you were waiting for anything really cool or huge announcements from Apple today, it was certainly a mixed bag. Given the amount of hype, it was probably a let down for most of us. The good news first: Steve Jobs is back baby! I must say it was pretty cool to see Jobs appear on the stage and give his presentation. He looked pretty healthy considering all that he had been through. So, that was rockin’ and the reception he received was certainly well-received. After that, things pretty much go down hill.

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It looks like ASUS is getting ready to jump into the e-reader game, competing with Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony e-reader. ASUS, who essentially invented the netbook, stands on good ground to introduce a capable product that would compete well with other e-readers that exist.

ASUS is claiming that this will become the world’s cheapest e-book reader and it will sport some pretty impressive features. Some of the features included will be built in 3G, a web browser and more impressive, a dual screen form factor touch screen (picture at the link). The dual screen is intended to mimic the style in which we usually read books, however it also offers some interesting possibilities. You could read your book on one panel and surf the web or type on a virtual keyboard on the other, pretty neat concept.

Most impressively, the price point for this new reader is reportedly around $150! This has got to be a scary concept for the Kindle and Sony as both of their premium readers are nearly double that price. The question that remains for both Asus, Sony and any other competitor (and there are a few) that decides to enter this market is, can anyone compete with Amazon for content? Amazon has such a huge advantage when it comes to providing content that this will continue to be a very difficult market to penetrate. No one touches the number of books that Amazon provides at the touch of a button, and as of now the Kindle remains proprietary and DRM protected. Ultimately, my hope remains that Amazon will decide to un-DRM their content so that any device, whether it is Sony, ASUS or whatever, can just access and download books to their reader. I think this actually makes a lot of business sense for Amazon as well. Imagine, instead of being able to sell 1 million books to Kindle only users, you can sell 30 million books to the combined e-book world, it seems like there is more money in doing just that then selling pretty expensive hardware.

The e-book reader is getting ready to explode and finally claim it’s own time, of course, the big 800 lbs gorilla is Apple, should they announce their “i-pad” or whatever they’ll call it, the game changes again. We shall see.

Amazon Kindle

In July, you may remember, Amazon took much flak for “recalling” the George Orwell book “1984″ from hundreds of Kindle e-readers. Eventually, after they were caught, Amazon and Jeff Bezos apologized calling the act “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” While Amazon also issued a credit back to their customers, this didn’t satisfy many users who thought this was a tremendous invasion of their privacy.

The good news is that Amazon has decided to return the deleted books to anyone who was affected by the intrusion, alternatively customers may choose a $30 gift certificate if they so choose.

One student was so annoyed by this by what Amazon did that he has actually filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming that “Amazon ate my homework”. In this case not only did Amazon take his book, but also all the notes that he had included as he read it. Seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I guess you can sue anyone these days. Reportedly the offer of the refund of the book has nothing to do with the lawsuit. Uh huh, sure.

The e-mail from Amazon to their customers who were affected read thusly:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our ’solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission,”

I will say this, Amazon and Bezos are not perfect, but they usually respond well to situations like this. I’m sure this was the fault of some middle-manager somewhere who just didn’t think about the repercussions of snatching a book back from their users’ Kindles, and I do believe Amazon will not allow stunts like this to happen again. However, it does open a whole discussion about who owns digital materials like this. It is a very unsettled area of the law and society is still adjusting to copyrights and licensing agreements in this brave new world.

Photo Source: Shakataganai

Hotmail Down!

It has not been a good week for e-mail. Earlier this week gmail was down for about 2 days, off and on. This caused numerous problems for businesses and people who rely on their e-mail service for their every day communications. It seems that Google isn’t the only one who is facing e-mail challenges though. Reports are that Microsoft’s Hotmail has come down today.

MSN Hotmail has 40 million active members, which, as you can imagine, could cause some major issues for users. Some have claimed that the latest hotmail outage has caused them to be without email for as much as 4 days! Apparently MSN has had a rough time keeping up with demand and there have been frequent complaints about outages and loss of service recently.

According to CNET, a Microsoft customer service representative has confirmed the outage (gee thanks) and blamed a faulty server for their problems. Hotmail has recently been bleeding customers and more and more people decide to switch the gmail as the main provider for their free, web-based e-mail. I’ve just recently made that switch and thus far I’ve been very impressed with the service and storage that gmail does offer. We’ll keep you updated as we hear more about the Hotmail outage and when it is restored, until then, try gmail

Sony is set to start distributing Google Chrome as the default broswer on all their PCs this year. This is the first browser distribution agreement that Google has reached with any major consumer and is figured to help raise the profile of Chrome, which is actually a pretty good browser.

I find it it interesting that Google and Sony would enter this kind of agreement though. Google has complained loudly over the years about Microsoft “forcing’ customers to use Internet Explorer because it is bundled with windows. I find it ironic that Google would now enter into a similar type of deal.

Can this type of deal work? Sure it can, it only raises to expose Chrome to more and more users, which is certainly a good thing. My guess is, though, that it won’t do much to really phase the market penetration that Firefox and IE already dominate in. If I’m just an average user who bought a new Sony Vaio (which says enough about me as a consumer already, gag) am I’m going to be smart enough to even know what Chrome is? Probably not, I’m just going to continue using IE, because that is all I know.

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Free Stuff on Twitter!

Introducing Freezly, the newest and easiest way to find free stuff on Twitter. So, who doesn’t like free stuff? I’m always a sucker for “sign up for our visa card and get a free hat” etc. However, Twitter actually has had several contests that I’ve seen that requires minimum effort from the participants. Essentially retweet some message and then qualify for a free item. One of the best promotions I’ve seem was discussed by Mashable and involved Squarespace (an excellent blogging platform like WordPress) giving a way an iphone a day for 30 days. All you had to do was include #squarespace in a single tweet which resulted in their topping trending topics for several days in a row.

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Since the Mac’s new OS Snow Leopard came out yesterday I thought I’d throw up my review of Mac’s latest along with pictures and a review of my new rig. Snow Leopard brings some interesting new features, but over all the update isn’t anything ground breaking, although the polish is pretty amazing. This is version 10.6 to the original Mac 10 OS and comes in at a very svelte $29 bucks (take that Windows 7!). The first nice improvement that Snow Leopard brings is a new 64 bit operating system, which means that all apps can access a much large amount of RAM (usually limited to about 4 gigs under a 32 bit OS). So, this brings more speed and versatility to an already powerful OS.

Another immediate benefit you might see is an instant savings of space on your HD. Apple says you’ll see at least 6 gigs in space saving, but some reports have seen anywhere from 10-20 gigs! Nice! Apple is able to do this primarily due to how they now configure printer drivers, etc.

While there aren’t any real new revelations in the UI for Snow Leopard, there are some minor changes that folks might appreciate. The biggest tweak is the addition of Expose to the dock. Holding down on an app’s icon triggers Expose for that application’s windows, and if you drag a file onto an app, you can then select which window you want to drop it into. Here’s some video:

Additionally Apple has added some updates to Finder, Quicktime, Exchange Control for enterprise solutions, more speed and more stability. You can read some good review here and here.

Bottom line: For $29 bucks this is a no brainer, everyone with a Mac should upgrade, even if you are still running Tiger. I think it’s pretty clear that Apple has priced this so that it is affordable for everyone. This indicates to me that Apple has a plan for big things and wants to make sure that everyone upgrades now. So, my advice is to grab this, extra space, 64 bit everywhere and some nice little additions makes this worth the $29 bucks.

Now to the real cool news, my new iMac! Here are the specs to my new rig:
-24 inch LCD screen
- 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 4 GB of DDR3 SDRAM
- 640 GB Serial ATA hard drive
- Nvidia Gforce 9400 Graphics card
- Yada yada

It’s a nice machine which I’m dual booting Windows 7 on, which runs very nice too. Here are some pictures of me which I call Christmas in August.

Rumors have abounded about the mysterious exploding iPhone for a while now, but maybe this myth is a reality. At least one person is taking this serious, the French consumer minister. It seems Herve Novelli will meet with executives from Apple to discuss incidents in which the Apple product has “spontaneously combusted”. Reportedly at least a half a dozen iPhones have exploded in France, some even having caused injury to one teen’s eye.

Up to this point, the exploding iPhone has been something of a urban myth, everyone has heard about it, but no one has actually seen it. My favorite story is that of a man in Austrailia who contacted Apple after his daughter’s iPhone exploded wanting to get his money back or at least a replacement for it. Apple agreed to replace the iphone, but sent a letter that required him to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the following language, “. . .agree that you will keep the terms and existence of this settlement agreement completely confidential”, and that any breach of confidentiality “may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties”.

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In what I think is pretty cool news, today Sony announced their new e-reader called the “Reader Daily Edition”. This new e-reader by Sony is figured to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, or at least kick some real competition in a market that is nearly controlled by the Kindle. The new Sony Daily Edition will have some pretty impressive features as well. First, it will feature 3G wireless through AT&T. This is an almost must have feature so that users can download books at will. This feature on the Kindle is awesome as it allows you to get books, newspapers and magazines whenever and where ever you like. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at home, wanted a new book, but didn’t want to go all the way to Barnes & Noble or wait for Amazon to deliver it. Instant gratification, gotta love it.

The new Daily Edition will also include a 7-inch touch screen. This is one thing the Kindle lacks; a touch-screen interface, so I think this is a clear winner for Sony. The Daily Edition will also take advantage of open source materials with a new feature called the “Library Finder”. This allows you to access local library materials and download free books offered through your library. Right now it is a pain to do this through most local libraries and the interfaces are generally horrible. What a great idea, kudos Sony! Finally having some real competition in this platform will only mean good things for the consumer. It’s hard to say what the user experience will be, battery life, etc, but having a decent product that competes with the hefty price-tag of the Kindle is good. The Daily Edition is getting good reviews everywhere:

“Sony has given the market what everyone was waiting for in terms of a wireless device,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst who has been covering e-readers. “Not only that, they have gone one step further, and shown their latest product is no copycat of the Kindle.”

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Is it possible that Miami Heat star forward just tweeted his way into rehab? There are indications that this might be exactly what happened. It appears that Beasley has been admitted into an unnamed Houston rehab center under the guidance of coach John Lucas. What’s real interesting (from a tech point of view) is that Twitter might have played a role in his admission to rehab. Souces explain that there was a series of very strange tweets, two account deletions and a twitpic that revealed some very suspicious bags on a table in the background.

As reported above, it appears that Beasely had several updates posted to his account @Gorillabeas. That account has now suspiciously disappeared. Here is a screen shot of his Twitter updates which comes from Twitters cache:

And then follows some responses from friends or followers of his on Twitter:

Photos