AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

This is a very bad day for RIM workers.  First, there was the 5K job cuts that's coming.  Then, there's also the more than half a billion dollar loss by the company during the last fiscal quarter.  Well, expect more pain, guys. Blackberry fans who wanted the same OS that runs on the Playbook to run on their Blackberry superphones will have to wait until the second quarter of 2013.  You've got another 9 to 12 months of waiting to do.  At the current page of mobile innovation and competition, that's a life-time. RIM will be going up against the iPhone 5 and maybe even the Galaxy S IV.  On top of that, Windows 8 phones could prove more popular than Windows Phone 7.5 devices now. I don't want to say that we should close the book on the iconic messaging device company but certainly, I hope someone scoops them up.  Some with deep pockets who can make it work. Who will benefit the most now that RIM's missteps has begun to put the company's liveli...

I’m thinking of setting a website for folks who wanna quit social media like Facebook, for whatever reasons that are yours, and this way, we can kinda support each other through the process.  Then I thought “why, that would be like a social thing occurring online which in and of itself is a media”. So, no.  Instead, I’m gonna go through it myself and share whatever anxiety that I may feel during the whole process.  I’ve quit Facebook two other times and its for the same reason as this third time:  Facebook is just fraking with the users. In the latest episode, they purposefully changed your e-mail without tell us.  Why, Zuckerberg? Then there’s the  Facebook-sanctioned stalking app .  I’m sure if it is used in the right way, it can be fun and engaging.  However, as with any tool, it can be used in dark ways.  Now, when Google unveiled it’s Buzz and Wave products that allow tracking and opened up many privacy issues, there was a huge ...

Source:   Pocket Gamer . Frak!  Seriously.  Infinity Blade, a mobile game that was born on the iPhone, from Epic Games is the most profitable game it has released.  Yes, more than mega-hit Gears of War on the Xbox.  There is a but (I think). Given the investments versus returns, IB does provide Epic a better return than GoW.  However, I reckon GoW, given its volume, likely generated more profit. Having said that, Apple's iPhone and iPad has done a number on the sweet racket that Nintendo and Sony has had with portable gaming, it's interesting to hear that it is also beginning to affect how a powerhouse developer like Epic sees mobile gaming. And with all the rumors swirling around about Apple's HDTV plans (or not) and possibly of bringing iOS gaming to the Apple TV, I'm sure Epic, EA, and others eagerly look to bring more of their game craft to the home via mobile devices. The question that mobile gamers would like to know is that with incr...

Source:   Visual News . You have to check out these pics and then the Youtube video below.  I had thought about keeping it until Friday movie clips but just can't wait to share it so here it is.  Using a couple of drawing pads, an artist by the name of Nagai Hideyuki created the following 3D looking artwork. All of this is drawn by hand.  But I wonder if it's possible for some enterprising mobile developers to come up with an app that automate the process.  Sure, you'll still have to be creative with the art but for those of us who are depth impaired, maybe it'll help, yeah? Just utterly incredible.  And here are just a few examples and more over at  Visual New . Here is  Mr. Hideyuki's personal website  if you wanna check out more of his crafts.  Highly recommended. Now, here's a cute little video of a little creature that fell from its mother's nest and wit...

Siri is raw and in beta.  Could be in perpetual beta because it’ll be constantly learning new things.  Google’ rumored Siri-killer will likewise be in the same state of learning new tricks.  But there is one thing that I like any voice-enabled service like Siri to be able to do right away – contact emergency services and it should so easy that a toddler can do it. I know that many toddlers know how to make calls these days.  It’s amazing how brilliant some children are.  But an one-click emergency service that even a three-year old can activate would be pretty useful.  In the example above, a fictional three-year old saves his mother.  It could be a grandparent, another relative, or a sibling who needs emergency medical services. Imagine the following scenario: Toddler finds a parent or grandparent unconscious.  He/she shook the adult but got no response.  So the toddler goes to the smartphone and presses the home button. Intel Ass...

Tis the Season for...ads.  Political ads to be exact.  And it's not late night that is drawing inspiration from real ads but TV shows that are getting into it.  Rather it's fans that are getting into it. The following are three humorous ads based on the popular HBO show Game of Thrones.  And yeah, they're very well done, especially the first one about who the real king is and if he's even fit to be king, a play on the birthers. Enjoy and have a great weekend! Source:   Blastr .

While it’s half time now in America, according to Mr. Clint Eastwood, we’re probably in the middle of the second quarter in the mobile war.  For a while, folks, tech pundits, bloggers, and analysts, have kinda given Android a 50+% share of the market with the iPhone somewhere around 25-30% and the rest to be split up between RIM, Windows Phone, and others. Well, I’m gonna tell you that is very premature.  The dynamics of the mobile market, both smartphones and tablets, are is great flux.  No need to recap what’s been going on.  Just know that the latest development in mobile is Microsoft’s entry into the hardware business. And Microsoft is a company that has a reputation for not necessarily getting it right the first time around but doing whatever it takes to get it right.  Patience and persistence.  Microsoft doesn’t really have a choice.  This is not a market that it can afford to lose out. So, we just learn that Amazon is furthering its rea...

Source:   Forbes . Forbes thinks this is stupid but they want it. I think it's brilliant and I want it.  It's a concept iPhone with a clear black that when you look at the iPhone, you can see clear through whatever is on the other side. Again, I want it!  I think this is possible (eventually) and it could really make even today's thinnest smartphone look obese thickness-wise. Obviously, there are gonna be issues like making the circuits, memory chips, CPU, and a bunch of other stuff really, really small.  I reckon it'll  have to be like 10 to 20x smaller than what we have today and up to 50x more power efficient.  If you look at this thing from the side, there really is no place for you to put a battery. Having said that, I've always believed that we can reach this level of tech sooner rather than later.  Look at how calculators have shrunk over the years.  Look the collection of calculators from  laurentian . And remembe...

I'm still waiting for more details to come out before chatting up (or down) Microsoft's Surface which I think has a lot of potential - so much so that I think Apple/RIM/Google fans could be in for a rude (maybe wonderful) surprise. Meanwhile, these videos are circulating the Web - a Surface tablet that froze during Monday's demo in Los Angeles.  It's quite interesting to watch because the poor MS exec had to cover for the Surface freezing on him during one of the most critical demos in Microsoft's history. While Youtube videos are calling this a fail, which it kinda is, mere points to the attention that Surface is generating.  I can totally see my next tablet being a Windows 8 device but there are a lot of issues that Microsoft has to work out and provide much more details about what the Surface tablet is really capable of. Obviously, you can go with a safe choice in the iPad.  And Android fans can go with the Samsung Tab 10.1, the only Android table...

I like that Twitter was integrated into iOS 5 and I use it quite a bit.  With iOS 6, I’m not as crazy as with Facebook integration largely because the lack of safeguards by Facebook to protect its users.  And now, they’re looking into lowering the age bracket that can join the social site, I’m afraid things could will be much worse since Facebook isn’t interested in protecting the children from predators and the bad elements of social media. So, it falls to Apple and what it is doing to safe guard iOS and Mac users, many upon many are children. So, Apple, I ask you this:  what is Apple doing to safeguard the privacy of its loyal users?  Is Facebook free to figuratively walk through Apple’s data centers and literally sift through the millions upon millions of bits of information about us? I understand that if I share something via iOS 6 through Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg would have access to that information.  Well, what if I don’t want to share my loca...

I don’t want to get into rumors but I would like to speculate on this one:  Apple may be giving podcast producers and listeners their own app. And if this is true, wow, this could be a huge deal depending on how far Apple wants to take this.  I think it’s quite possible that this could be a part of what Steve Jobs said to his biographer when he said he cracked television.  If I’m right, Apple could be cracking more than just television but video and audio broadcasts as we know it.  And broadcasts would no longer be known as “broadcasts” but as podcasts as well. When I learned about this standalone podcast app, I started digging through Internet tubes to find out as much as I can about it.  They all kind of reported the same rumored details.  So, it left me to wonder and do what I love to do: speculate wildly.  Here goes. Apple could go further by giving the app the ability to subscribe to podcasts, whether in video or audio, and allow produc...

Source:  GottaBeMobile  via The Verge .    Okay, so there’s the iPad and an assortment of Android tablets today.  Oh, and let’s not forget the Kindle Fire.  That’ll be joined by some new Windows 8 tablet soon which will be announced today by Microsoft at 3:30PM PST .  Now, these are likely spy-pics of Google’s Nexus tablet.  Looks like a 7” variant (I say variant because I’m sure we’ll see other Nexus tablets in various sizes).  From the pic, it looks like it’s called Nexus 7.  From the imagine, we can gleam that the resolution is quite possibly 1280 x 960, which is at a much higher resolution than its likely closest competitors with the Kindle Fire’s and Samsung Tab Plus 7’s anemic 1024 x 600.  If I may go a step further into the rumor world, Apple’s unicorn iPad coming in between 7-8” is suppose to have only 1024 x 768.  Is this pic for real?  I hope so.  And there’s chatter that Google could pric...

Apple announced a bunch of new features like Maps and Facebook integration.  They got all the attention. Oh, Passbook is nice and it's not getting much love from blogs.  Nor are a bunch of small unhighlighted improvements that taken together shows how Apple's attention to details make iOS and the iPhone and iPad so popular among mobile warriors. Here are a couple that I like: Geofencing for Find My Friends and Reminders.  Seriously, how awesome is this?! Better privacy features - this will give the user more control than Google or Facebook will ever give its users. Store improvements - as good as the App Store is now, Apple will continues to try to make it even better for app discovery.  The same goes for iTunes.  In fact, Apple is moving the podcasts over to a standalone app.  And when you download/update an app, iOS doesn't take you away from the store.  It has been an annoying "feature" we've had to put up with for years. Different mail signa...

The day Steve Jobs returned to Apple, no one then could have thought that Apple would still be around today let alone remain one of the most valued companies in the world.  And through it all, Apple has resurrected its Mac computers, disrupted markets, created new devices, and continue to innovate to this day.  Easy, right?  Definitely not. Sure, Steve Jobs, now Tim Cook, and the rest of Apple made it seem easy but I’m sure it’s the challenges of creating the perfect Macbook or crafting a device that they themselves would want to use and the continual assaults on its position is what is driving them forward. Today, Macs are selling at a healthy clip but its still computers installed with Windows that dominate the market.  Apple just refreshed its Macbook lines from the Macbook Pro with the new Retina Display to the Macbook Air, it’ll look like the back-to-school season is going to be a blow-out one for Apple.  Still, the PC market will be dominated by W...

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve put up any awesome Friday movie clips and while I’ve got a few more zombie-themed ones, I think I’ll go in a different direction.  No Pixar stuff this week either.  It’s from a movie that I didn’t think much of but, more and more, I think when I first saw it, I did it know.  Yup, that’s right.  I watched the move wrong. I wanted great acting, smooth dialogue, and a Oscar caliber story.  But with a bunch of anging former action stars, all you’re gonna get are loud over the top explosions with our heroes winning seemingly impossible battles and bad guys who cannot hit anything at all with their guns. That was The Expendables.  And now, I can’t wait for The Expendables 2 to come out.  This time around, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger will be joining the fight.  I saw the commercial for it during either the Stanley Cup Finals (which the LA Kings won its first ever championship despite East Coast bi...

My iPhone 4 died yesterday so I went to the Apple store hoping that they would replace it with an iPhone 4S as I’ve heard from various online reports.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.  There was some kind of part that the Apple genius replaced quickly within a couple of minutes and I was sent on my way.  However, I did not leave without getting a good look at the new Retina Display Macbook Pro. Wow, oh, wow, oh, wow… On so many levels, the RDMBP is the perfect laptop for a majority of the mobile market.  From a design perspectively, Apple said this was the best Macbook they’ve designed.  I think they did a great job with the Macbook Air, particularly, my 11” Air so it was kind of hard to top but I think many fans will at the very least agree it’s on par with anything Apple has come out with.  The thinness of the RDMBP was apparent sitting next to a regular Macbook Pro.  And the lid with the screen was sickly thin (but in a good way). I...

Competition is good for consumers in general.  And specific to the mobile market, the continuous battle between the various tech giants has been great for us mobile fans.  And with Apple’s Siri, it was an answer to Google’ voice commands.  And Siri, with its beta problems, is clearly setting the mark to hit.  So, I wonder where is Google’s , or Microsoft’s, response to Siri? Yesterday, Apple unveiled iOS 6 with a marginally improved Siri.  I reckon it’ll still be a beta feature through the life of iOS 6 because I think there is just too many basic functions, that while works, require more improvements.  And this has offered Google an opportunity to upstage Apple, RIM, or Microsoft. Perhaps, we’ll see Google’s Siri killer baked into Android 5 when Google releases it later this year.  Or it could operate as a standalone app being made available on competing mobile platforms.  Right now, we just don’t know yet.  In the past, there were r...

Mark this day.  Verizon’s ridiculously expensive shared plan is going to do in the wireless providers and give more boost to the prepaid market.  Why?  The stupid $30 a pop cost for regular phones and $40 a pop for smartphones.  And considering that many industry observers believe the rest of the big four would follow suit, it looks more like this is about the carriers trying to “meterize” data. Remember, AT&T regretted going with the unlimited data plan and I’m sure its competitors at the time were like “what are you thinking”? So, what happens now?  As a Verizon subscriber, I find this plan to be idiotic and once my  service is up, I’m likely to shop around.  So far, my family plan only has onewo smartphone and if I were to add more and be forced to switch over to Verizon’s new plan, I will definitely be leaving.  Grandfathered unlimited data plan be damned.  Obviously, I could go the unsubsidized route and keep my current plan....

Considering that this is a focus on social and mobile warriors, new Macbooks coming out of Cupertino (headquarter of Apple Inc) are always welcoming news and drives traffic for Mac and mobile blogs such as this one.  As of now, we are a bit over an hour away from Tim Cook kicking off Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. So, let's do a bit of speculation on what new Macbooks will have and what is more important to us mobile users.  Retina Display has been much rumored/speculated about in the blog world.  Even mainstream media, which now relies on us for much of their news, are beginning to pick up on this.  So, I ask you.  Between Retina Display and battery life, which is more important to you? As the proud owner of an 11" Macbook Air, I am quite happy with the screen quality.  I have never made the mistake of comparing it with my iPhone 4 Retina Display nor my mom's 2012 iPad with its own Retina Display.   Sure, I would be am...

What Apple has planned for iOS 6 will largely be known by Monday after the keynote.  New features, new apps, and, hopefully, some surprises as well.  For instance, there is too many in the media that has reported on Apple replace Google Maps with its own implementation for that not to be true.  Furthermore, Google’s hastily put-together media even to showcase its own future mapping offerings suggested this as well. How about other Google apps?  The other one that quickly comes to mind is Google’s Youtube app.  Will that be replaced soon enough?  After all, Apple has replaced Youtube with Vimeo on the desktop iMovie app.  They haven’t done it yet on the iOS app but you can bet that’ll happen sooner rather than later. I reckon it’s possible that Apple could displace Youtube with Vimeo starting with iOS 6 since that’ll also happen with an iMovie update once iOS 6 is released, likely this fall. However, Youtube remains a popular app and destination ...

Cnet and macstories have pics showing iOS 6 banners being put up for Monday's keynote address by Apple's execs. What will Apple unveiling?  There's a lot of chatters/rumors/speculations as to what Apple will offer iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users.  New features like Apple's own mapping app is often speculated about as is the possibility of a link up with Facebook, finally. A couple of things to watch out for.  How will Apple address app screen resolutions if the iPhone gets a new screen size and resolutions?  At the same time, will there be features that Apple won't talk about that it might hold off until October when the new iPhone is expected? Also, Tim Cook offered very little on Siri other than that there is much that it can do.  When will we hear more about that?  Monday or in October? More at macstories and cnet .

Source:   Wall Street Cheat Ask Google how things are with Apple?  Well, the relationship between Apple and Google is like the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War at best.  Not long ago, the two were allies in a war against Microsoft.  Then mobile war with  iOS and Android trying to get ahead ruined everything.  Now, proxy wars are being waged and there are blogs that are dedicated to tracking them. But this is about Facebook, the current reigning social media king. You’d think that Google and Facebook’s competition would mean that Facebook and Apple could hook up.  That has not been the case.  In fact, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg likely fought over how they could work together and nothing came of it. However, last week, there is signs of that but Facebook’s main patron has always been Microsoft.  Tim Cook complimented Facebook and asked for patience on what Apple and Facebook could be working on.   And now, this post...

Here’s a crazy idea that I got from reading this Toucharcade post that said Microsoft might release an app that will allow the Xbox to stream content to phones and tablets.  While that’s interesting and all, I think it is a small step towards what Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony should be doing with their console ecosystem and the first one to implement what I’m about to suggest could have something that will not only save their gaming business but possible dominate it. The TA post suggests that Microsoft’s Xbox app could augment the game playing experience.  The example provided is one where playing Halo could allow content to be streamed to a tablet and display maps or other information pertinent to the game play. However, with us all being on the go these days, even for some hard-core gamers, I think it would make sense to give users more content away from the living or bedroom.  This is why I suggest that if one of the big three console makers could allow use...

Source:   Techcrunch . It's official.  Given what TC is saying and what Tim Cook said earlier this week at the D10 about Facebook.  Essentially, Tim had some kind words for Facebook and asked the audience, those present during his live interview and those of us watching from the Web, to "stay tuned" about collaboration between Apple and Facebook. When Apple graced us with Twitter integration in iOS 5, it was not surprising that Facebook or Google+ were part of it.  After all, there was some falling out between Apple and Facebook, mostly between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckie (boy billionaire who lost 40% or so if his net worth since Facebook's IPO), over Ping that left Ping pretty much dead from day one and Facebook looking very much weakened without any mobile strategy to speak of.   As for Google+, well, just one word:  Android.  No way Google+ will find its way into iOS outside of official apps.  No way Google+ will be integrated in...