AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

Apple should come out with their own magazine for the iPad that would serve as a model for other media publishers to follow. Another alternative is for Apple to work closely with a couple of major magazines that can serve as showcases on how to transform print into the digital age. Nexus One, Google's model smartphone, was a brilliant move even though it did not sell in the numbers expected but it did act as a showcase device for other device makers to follow and gave a kick in the butt for those in the Android market. Without it, the Android market may not be where it is at today. It is why Google continue this with Nexus S. It's a model that Apple can follow. Steve Jobs should lead a team that can put together and publish an Apple-backed magazine. I don't know what subject it could be about. Anything really. But it will allow Apple to lead the way and show how to leverage technology and tools such as social media that are readily available for publishing a dig...

I don't know where this came from but I found it absolutely ridiculous when I heard it. And if I had to guess who the culprit is, I'd have to say it came from an idiot Wall Street analyst. So, essentially, there is talk about Verizon would announce the availability of a CDMA iPhone at CES beginning next week. Right. Verizon Wireless will announce to the world that Apple will make available the iPhone on its network. This is the same Apple that left Macworld a couple of years ago and said that it doesn't want to be a part of any trade shows that force it to make announcements when it was not ready. The same Apple who's Steve Jobs said that by making announcements so close after the Holidays, its engineers were not able to spend time with their families. So, bottom-line is this: Apple makes its own product announcements. Apple does not give up control to someone else to market their products and risk being screwed up or misrepresented to the consumers. When...

I know that Apple has made it easy to design, code, and publish apps for the iOS devices.  Three hundred thousand apps and likely five hundred thousand apps by the middle of 2011 is a testament to how Apple can really shine when it wants to. However, outside of iTunes and the App Store, Apple's effort into other media has been met with mediocre success as with TV and movies.  And it has so far floundered with ebooks.  What should Apple do? How about an iBookstore SDK?

I do own a couple of shares of Apple that I did not sell from way back when things were still bad. As a believer, albeit naïve at the time, I thought things would turn around. The naïve part would have come true had Steve Jobs not entered the halls of Apple Proper and took things over and shook the music, PC, and, now, the mobile markets. I was watching a CNBC video today where two analysts, pretty much clueless about tech and what we mobile warriors are about, took both sides of the Apple stock. One thinks it’ll go up while the other thinks things about to come to a head for Apple’s stock price. Where do I stand?

I've been using the iSpot for about three weeks now with the iPod Touch.  My goal is to determine whether the combination of these two devices, iSpot providing wireless Internet and the iPod Touch acting as a communication gateway, can effectively replace the more expensive iPhone 4 with its $70 and up monthly plan or other smartphones with similarly priced monthly fee. In my last update, things more or less worked out as I had hoped.  More than less.  To quickly summarize, I hooked up my Google Voice number to my Whistlephone number.  Whenever I dial out, I use the Google Voice app which then connects to my Whistlephone app.  The iPod touch will notify me of an incoming call, I'd answer it, and the call to whomever goes through. When someone tries to call me on the Google Voice number, the call gets forwarded to Whistlephone (Whistlephone offers free domestic calls in the US).  Great and it's free. And while it was not intended to be so, this past Christma...

As it happened, I ended up babysitting on this fine rainy weekend in Southern California. And one of the things that I thought my brother and his wife had really ruined for my god-son is that they allow him to watch a lot of TV. Well, no more. In the past, we would spend all day watching TV. There was just no way to entice him to do anything else. Even when we are playing, he wanted the TV on. It's the same for the baby (14 months old). With the iPad, the TV was not on until my brother's wife turned it on because she wanted to watch. Still, my nephew paid no heed to it. He was content with drawing and playing matching games on this magical device. Still, I have to say that the iPad is no substitute for human interaction. I forced him to sit through a couple of physical books and played with his toys. But in a short time, he has been able to learn and trace some letters. So, I am not a TV guy for kids and the proliferation of iPads and tablets will really ...

Just for fun, I like to go to the Apple's online store and put together various Mac configurations.  From Macbook Air all the way to the 17" Macbook Pro, it allows me to see just how much a decked-out mobile Mac computer will cost.  Then wisely, I close the browser. On a couple of occasions, I even put it on my shopping cart.  Just to feel what it's like. Obviously if I wanted to, my credit doesn't have the heft to carry such a balance anyway.   But I was struck by the fact that there still isn't a quad-core CPU option for any of the MBP while PC makers happily sell them to users.  Perhaps that is why I never went ahead and ordered a MBP, 15" or 17", because for the same amount of money, I could have gotten a 27" iMac with quad-core support that'll let me fly when I work on my videos. So yesterday, I learned that Intel's Sandy Bridge mobile chips will only come out with quad-cores at first had me really excited.  Perhaps, we'll see 2011 a...

Apple announced the Mac app store will be available on January 6th, 2011.  Imagine waking up to this this morning.  Apple isn't known for making product or feature announcements without a major press event.  However, we have known for quite some time that the app store was going to open up soon.  But the question remains:  is the Mac app store going to have as big an impact as the iOS app store? Only time will tell but given some of the chatters, the MAS (Mac app store) will have quite a few restrictions.  No demo.  No in-app purchases.  Kind of a bummer.  But perhaps this is likely because we are merely in the infant stage of the store and Apple will incorporate new features once both developers and end-users have had time to work out the kinks and the bloggers have had their say.  Isn't that what happened with the iOS app store? And I have questions that I think most users will want answered: Will we need an iTunes account to use it or...

Convention says that the iPhone 5 will not be out until the middle of 2011.  June has been the month that Apple released new iPhones since the iPhone 2G.  That did not change for the 3G, 3GS, or the iPhone 4.  Could 2011 be the year that Apple changed all that?  Here's why I think perhaps they might go ahead and change things up a bit. There is a lot riding in the mobile market.  Tens of billions and Apple and Google are locked in an epic war for supremacy.  And with Google and its multiple Android hardware partners, they can easily stagger their device releases through the year, giving mobile warriors the appearance that something new and fresh is coming out of the Android camp.   But with Android 3 release coming in the first quarter, giving Google the ability to attack the tablet market, I think Apple is in a position to consider moving up the time table for the iPhone 5 release.  Just this week, Best Buy in the US gave out the iPhone 3GS for f...

With the arrival of iOS 4.2.1, Apple finally gave us the ability to print from the iOS devices via AirPrint.  And while that is a great feature to have, I am one of those who will not benefit from this new feature.  And today, with new firmware upgrades,  With Instapaper, iBooks, and Goodreader, I have been able to get just about everything I need from the Web and books without having to print them out to read.  This is especially true when I use the iPad.  Think about it.  Instant access to all the files I need with apps on the iPad.   Unless a mobile warrior is in a specific job where printing docs is necessarily, I don't see the rest of us who use the iPad to consume information finding all that much use with AirPrint. And frankly, will Android need this feature?  I am sure Google will have a similar implementation as Android push deeper into enterprise.  HP will most assuredly add direct printing into its future Web OS devices.   But...

After some hairy moments with Fedex on the delivery of my iSpot, I finally got in after days of back and forth with more customer service agents than I hope to deal with. And yeah, I am very happy with this mobile investment. In fact, I was able to get it up and running in less than 5 minutes of opening up the box the iSpot came in.