AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I like scary movies. And today, I got quite a treat as I ventured out of the house to do some chores on a cloudy day in LA. Cloudy cold day that was perfect for a hot coffee with a pastry and a scary movie on Netlfix. I don't like watching them alone at home. Which leads me to this post. Be careful what you watch in public. As you can see, nice day, right? Well, with mobile now, we can take our whole lives with us. Work and entertainment. So I finished watching Quarantine from a couple of weeks ago and started on Quarantine 2, zombie movies where the characters in the plots were, you guessed it, quarantined. In the first movie, a news team followed a fire engine into an apartment in LA and ended up trapped inside by a military force tasked to keep a weaponized rabies that turned the infected into the walking dead. In the second part, it's folks on an airplane and airport terminal. Don't knock it until you try it. Both are good movies that even friends who typically aren...

It's inevitable that the wages and benefits for Chinese workers will increase. We've already seen that happening in China for years. For reasons that are obvious, the media has decided to make Apple their whipping boy in all this. While they have largely ignored its competitors like HP, Dell, HTC, Sony, and others in the Android and Windows market, that include PCs, tablets, televisions, and smartphones, use some of the same factories Apple does. What will happen to the cost of their products? Well, the answer is simple: it'll go up. However, the true question is how this impact this margins of some of these companies that do not necessarily have the benefits of Apple's higher margin. For Android device makers, it helps some what in that they don't have to pay Google for the cost of licensing Android. But facing competition on all fronts, Android device makers could be forced to cut back in features to maintain margin. Perhaps, this has to do with the announ...

I've played Ghost Recon with friends years ago.  In case you're not away of this, Tom Clancy is a novelist who write a lot of spy and war novels.  The most famous is the Jack Ryan series and he has parleyed that into a publishing and gaming empire.   One of the best gaming series in the Rainbow Six games.  Now, Ghost Recon is back - guerrilla style.  I doubt much of the high tech equipments are that high-tech.  I think it's a future our soldiers are headed towards.  What could be even better is if you play the game without the high tech toys and see how you fare. Obviously, you can't do that until the game is released but wow, does the video look good.  Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a Mac version.

Here a couple of interesting benchmarks that provide a partial picture of where Google’s Android And Apple’s iDevices.  Obviously, we know that Android dominates the mobile handset market, both domestically and globally.  However, Apple leads in the only category that it has ever cared about: profits. How about the speed of the latest and greatest tablets and how much money developers are getting? More At  Clouding Around .

Blackberry's maker, Research In Motion, has been having a bad time of it lately and it got worse yesterday.  I don't want to get into the gory details from yesterday's financial call.  Only some personal observations about the market and what stagnation and arrogance can do to one individual or an empire, be it corporate or a political entity. First, there's denial.  I was going to start with arrogance but they kind of go hand-in-hand at times.  Apple went through it in the 90s.  Microsoft, Palm, and countless others went through this during the 2000s with the music players.  And then as if that isn't enough, nearly all of the major mobile device makers were arrogantly in denial about the iPhone. And I'm sure that while Apple has done quite well with the iPhone and other iOS devices, Steve Jobs likely was pretty arrogant when he thought Apple was years and years ahead of the competition.  I'm sure the folks at Cupertino were shocked when Google's Andro...

Okay, this isn't about wireless, politics, or green tech.  Just a life post but a very important one. A payment processor called Global Payments has detected a security breach in which 50K credit/debit card numbers were taken ( CNET ). Both MasterCard and Visa have warned potential customers.  While a serious situation, CNBC and MSNBC seems to think this is more serious than the fifty thousand credit card information taken since they used the word "millions".   Not sure if it's millions of credit card numbers or millions in value. It's likely these two networks believe the situation to be bigger than what's being reported.   Isn't it always like that?  Anyway, check your bank and credit card information just in case?  I've had it happen to me before so I'll be calling my credit card and banks after work today.   Now, if I win the $600+ million in MegaMillion lottery today, I'd be a lot less worried about this breach.  Wish me luck!

Microsoft turned way more than a few potential Windows Phone users when they limit the number of people who wanted to participate in the Windows Phone challenge.  Essentially, Microsoft forfeited.  It's unfortunate that there are no records of how many. I was one of them.  I called up the Century City store in California to participate in the challenge.  I asked how long the line would be but they said the line was about a twenty minutes.  Great, I said, I will be there between  6:30 and 7 PM. However, the store employee said that they're cut off time is 5:45pm. Given the LA traffic and my obligations at work, there was no way I would have made it there in time.  However, the rules said that the challenge is available during store hours. WTF, right?  I was so excited about getting my hands on a Lumia 710.  I was sure that I would eventually get Lumia 900  and Windows 8 a tablet later this year. Redmond can forget about that. ...

This is the kind of innovation that the iPad has spawned...you'll be hearing a lot about this app by tomorrow. What's interesting is who helped fund this app.  Oh, the irony... Source:  Tapose , a lot more at  9to5Mac .

As you know by now, Harry Potter books are now available via Pottermore and they can be purchased on an assortment of ebook stores except for the iBookstore.  The going guess is that Apple wants 30% of the cut but Hogwarts Publishing is saying no to Apple. The question I have on this is who will cave first?  Or not at all? Is it important that you get Harry Potter books in your iBooks app or are you going to be happy with reading them through Kindle or the Nook app? Well, there is a way to get these books on your iPad or iPhone.  These books are in unprotected ePub format so you can still get them via other platforms and then upload them directly to iBooks.  Most folks are suggesting that you do it through iTunes but I wonder if you can do it simply by emailing them to yourself. My guess is that a deal will be struck eventually.  I'm sure the folks working for Pottermore are just as much fans of Apple as Apple fans are of Harry Potter.  What I'm ...

Tim Cook was spotted in China via a Weibo account ( TechNode  via  Appleinsider ).  Weibo is China's version of Twitter.  As I said before, China's growing mobile use will have influence on mobile development and directions app developers take in the future.  And the influence won't just be isolated to Apple.  Others like Google and Microsoft will be impacted as well. While the linked posts focused on the iPhone, you have to know that there is more to it than that.  Apple recently added to its Mac OS a few social and video sharing features native to China, like Weibo In the past, there were talks that a major hangup between Apple and China Mobile was largely due to CM's request to add apps and revenue sharing for apps which Steve Jobs has explicitly ruled out.  So, the direction of iOS development could be influenced further as Apple has staked its future in the Middle Kingdom. How about other mobile players like Google and Microsoft. ...