When Apple introduced the iPad Mini, it was the first ever Apple announced that sparked an emotional reaction from your truly. No, it was not excitement or happiness that the company finally reversed a policy put in place by the late Steve Jobs that there is no room for a smaller tablet in the Apple portfolio. My reaction to the iPad Mini announcement was actually disappointment and frustration, maybe even borderline anger.
While the following statement is going to sound funny when taken out of context, I am going to say it anyway. It can’t be easy to be Apple. Relax, I know how much money the company has and I know how far ahead of its competitors it is in the tablet space, but I still stick to my statement.
One of the things I have noticed over the past few years is that technology and the billion dollar industries it creates have gone completely mainstream. While processors, screen resolutions, and data connectivity types were terms used by geeks only a few years back, now, the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy is a topic of discussion among pretty much all parts of the population.
By: Hillel Fuld (@hilzfuld)
Every so often a new technology comes along that you instantly know will be a hit and set a new standard. You know, the original iPhone is an obvious one, but there are other ones that are smaller and also left their impression on the world of technology.
Things like the Kinect, ICQ, the thumb drive, and even different input methods for mobile phones, like Swype.
Well, a new accessory that is now available for preorder for $70 can join the group. It is called The Leap and it basically brings the gestures of Minority Report to real life and let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report?
Anyway, multitouch was brought to mainstream consciousness by the iPhone then duplicated by… well, everyone. Gesture recognition was brought to the market with the Wii and Kinect and that is a hot trend right now, as well. Now The Leap combines the two and brings multitouch technology to the world of gesture recognition, and enables us to interact with our computers in a whole new way that is well, unbelievably awesome.
Take a look and pardon me while I go preorder one right now.
Twitter, as a company, has made its share of mistakes over the years. These include implementing its own retweeting system that makes it significantly more difficult to see how many people retweeted you and who they are (not to mention the fact that when I use the Twitter retweet, I can’t add my two cents to the original tweet, it all kind of defeats the purpose), the Twitter URL shortening service, which seems to break more links than it shortens, or many others. But the good news was that with all these issues, I always had Tweetdeck to fall back on. Then Twitter bought Tweetdeck.
It has been quite a crazy month in and out of the tech industry and while I usually try to post these articles on a weekly basis, clearly, that did not work too well in the last couple of week. But since many (many) people seem to depend on these posts to get up to date, I am forcing myself to get back into the swing of things.
By: Hillel Fuld
It is that time of the week again, time to sum up all the tech news of the previous week in one easy-to-read blog post. This edition of Above the Fuld is a little shorter than usual, as I was on vacation for three days this week. That means no coverage of the Amazon announcement for example, among other things.
OK here goes:
Ever wonder what it is like for Tim Cook to fill the shoes of Steve Jobs? ok ok, maybe slightly immature on the part of College Humor, but c’mon, you know you laughed.
What would a tech summary be without an iPhone 5 rumor? A very interesting video shedding some light on the specs of the upcoming iPhone 5. Or is it called iPhone 4gs? Who knows…
iOS5 will have some pretty neat features, this one leads the pack: We might just finally discover why Apple bought Siri back in 2010. Check out this demo video of the upcoming iOS5 Assistant feature.
Google+ for iOS gets a major update: Finally, the Google+ iOS app is on par with the site and its competitors. Especially the mobile hangouts, which bring video chatting to a whole new level.
Another interesting solution for monetizing Android apps: Startapp definitely thought out of the box on this one by giving developers an easy way to monetize Android apps via search.
While I was on vacation for the announcement, I discussed the Amazon tablet here: Looks like someone has understood that Apple’s success is not hardware or even software-related. It is all in the ecosystem and Amazon has a nice ecosystem of its own!
Finally! Mango is live! An interesting video demo of Windows Phone Mango. Is it interesting enough though or is Microsoft falling behind the curve?
Looks like Facebook for iPad will finally show its long overdue face this week: Facebook is expected to announce a new HTML5 app store along with its new iPad app. Check out some of the screen shots in the post.
A new Skype iOS app is born with Bluetooth support, Anti Shake technology, and (drumroll please) ads! Looks like yet another leading mobile developer is adopting the mobile advertising model to monetize. I wonder if Microsoft was involved in this decision.
Boom! My interview with Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare: Took me over a year to land this interview but it was well worth it. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a mobile fanatic, or just a plain old geek, you will find some gems in this interview.
Been a few weeks since I posted one of these due to a vacation. All I can say is, what a month to choose for a vacation. This month will definitely go down in the books as one of, if not the, craziest months in tech ever. Where do we start? I think I summed it up pretty well in this tweet from last week. Everyone who is anyone in tech had something to announce this month. Google, Facebook, HP, Motorola, Apple, Amazon, and Linkedin are just some of the companies that made some noise over the past month.
Yesterday, just in case you were not online, was Apple’s annual WWDC event. I wrote how Apple’s announcements won’t really change anything for the industry. I was wrong!
By now, we all know that “Geek” is the new “Cool”, and I have met my share of geeks in my time, but David Pogue is on a whole new level. David has been writing a weekly personal technology column for the New York times since November, 2000. He also writes a monthly tech column for Scientific American. In addition, David is a featured guest on various TV shows including his CNBC appearances every Thursday, CBS Sunday Morning, and his show “Making Stuff” on PBS.
Developing an app is far from an easy task. As app consumers, we always hear about the success of apps like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and others. However, as someone said last week at an event I attended, “For every Angry Birds, there are a lot of angry developers”. This is not a post about the challenges of app development, but if we were to sum up two of the major issues developers face, it would be discovery and monetization.
