For weeks, I’ve been hearing Apple fanboys pan Verizon’s Motorola Droid ads as too geeky and unappealing for the mass market. I’ve been hearing fanboys claim that nongeeks can’t understand “open development”, that they’d be scared off by images of stealth bombers. Then I read an essay by Paul Graham about the abuses of the iPhone app store, and I suddenly realize the genius of Verizon’s nongeek-alienating marketing strategy. More →
Google’s recent demo of Chrome OS answered several important questions about how a browser-only OS would operate. One of those questions is how it would handle removable storage. As you can see when the demo unit is attached to a digital camera, using a Web browser as a file browser works pretty well. That should come as no surprise, since Windows has integrated Internet Explorer with its own file manager for the last twelve years.
While it’s fun to see a Microsoft Web app opening a file in Chrome OS, it’s rather telling that the demo game is Flash chess. This demo apparently came a bit too early for the launch of hardcore cloud gaming service OnLive. Let’s hope Web apps and games mature into far more impressive fodder for Chrome OS once it’s released next year.
Before you get drown into the waves of news items explaining what Google Chrome is and what it is not, let’s not forget one of its most important feature which might make it click among Internet security geeks, like us.
The Official Google Blog explains why Chrome OS is very a secured OS by saying that since all apps that you will use will be living within the Chrome browser, Google has made sure that security was given utmost priority. More →
Google Chrome OS is designed to run nothing but Web apps, so a lot of OS UI concepts will have to be remapped. Your applications become browser tabs, your browser windows become multiple desktops, and your widgets become overlay panels.
Yes, it feels a little weird. With cloud computing services getting more and more robust, we may have to get used to these browser-based UI concepts by the time Chrome OS becomes available next year.
Google gets extreme in its push to get users to the cloud with Google Chrome OS. It’s essentially a browser running on a very slim Linux build — so slim, in fact, that you can’t run any native apps on it. Instead, Google is counting on the HTML 5’s enhanced ability to access client machine resources. More →
Video captions are useful not only for the hearing impaired and the deaf but also for video owners as well as it improves search findability of videos and machine translation. The thing is adding caption to videos before uploading them can be a pretty dauting task. The YouTube folks know this, and so they just rolled out two useful features – automatic caption or auto-caps and auto-timing.
Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice for automatically generating video captions. The captions are no where near perfection but since this is a new feature, it is bound to improve in time – hopefully. More →
Before Facebook started counting shares and Twitter started counting retweets, Digg pretty much invented social news. Sensing more mainstream services encroaching upon its turf, the geeky pioneer is not content to rest on its laurels. At a Web 2.0 Expo keynote today, Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson discussed new and future Digg features.
Listen up for juicy tidbits on how to market your new media startup.
(Via Neal Rodriguez.)
Nokia has officially made available another one of its so called flagship, highly pocketable mobile computer – the N900. Actually when it was announced recently, I had a hard time distinguising it from the rest of the mobile computing devices that are available today.
But anyway, it’s out in the flesh. Just waiting for all of you Americans looking for your next gadget purchase. Or if you haven’t found that perfect gift for your love ones, the N900 could be it. More →
Hulu, that streaming video site available only in the U.S. and which is consistently gaining some steam since its launch has teamed up with Norah Jones. This will bring Ms. Jones videos of songs from her latest album – the Fall available to all U.S. Hulu users.
Hulu, which is currently running the postscript of their interview with Nora Jones has also put up a page dedicated to the singer. More →
Still not convinced of social media’s return on investment? Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, shows us how social media has paid off for business big and small, from JetBlue to Burger King to Ford Motors.
Their crappy Seinfeld ads aside, Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter & Bogusky said it best: “You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in social media… The old media paradigm was PAY to play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to PLAY to play.”
