AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

It's Friday afternoon here in the Pacific Standard Time.  The sun is up, the freeways will be clogged for another four hours, and the parties have even started yet.  And the rest of the world is well into their weekend.  So, it should be a slow news day, right?  Ordinarily, Friday afternoons are perfect time to unveil bad news that no one wants folks to pay attention to. So, it's odd that there are plenty news on the Apple Watch that are somewhat positive - longer battery life than expected.  As in 25% longer with double the actual usage time ( 9to5Mac ).  And this is news leaked to an Apple-centric blog and not to a major news outlet like Bloomberg or the WSJ.  Why now?  At the start of this post, I had wanted to make you, the readers, decide whether this is more controlled leaks from Apple to build hype through the weekend or Apple had somehow lost control of the flow of information.  Only yesterday, Bloomberg shared juicy bits about a few...

Source:  The Verge . Amazon bought some game studios a couple of years ago in hopes of launching exclusives that it hope would stimulate sales of its own Android-forked OS devices, the Kindle Fire tablets and its ill-advised foray into the mobile phone market, the pretty much dead and Fire Phone.  It's like Fire tablets are not doing too well giving it has been many quarters since Amazon crowed about how many millions it has sold without actually giving the public a number. This is pretty much the reason why Amazon is bring more of its game over to iOS.  One title, Tales from Deep Space, has been giving good reviews and the newer games should be pretty decent.  As an iOS gamer, I'm pretty happy with this.  From a competitive stand point, there are two takeaways from this.  First, exclusives are not working out too well for developers unless it's on iOS.  Second, Amazon with its bad bet on the Fire Phone may have killed off its mobile hardware business ...

When it came down to it, the iPod was just a MP3 player.  Plain and simple.  But as with anything Apple is involved with, the iPod has an unusual and unique take on how we listened to music and interact with it.  Click-wheel and gigabytes of storage in forms of a hard drive and, later, flash memories.  It will be the came for Apple's car.  But here's the thing, Apple has been prefectly willing to let someone else make the cars as long as their dashboard work seemlessly well with CarPlay. And with delays after delays, I think at some point, Apple got fed up and decided it was better off making a car running its own unique interface.  And while it's not set in stone, should Apple truly unveil its own car, the auto industry has no one else to blame but itself.  Take Toyota for instance.  It is not only dragging its feet on CarPlay and Android's take on the car, it supposed believe that its proprietary take is better for Toyota going forward.  Su...

Source:  9to5Mac . The Swiss watchmakers are not just rolling over for the potential Apple Watch jugganaut.  In fact, Swatch among others will debut smart watches at Baselworld next month, weeks after Apple's March 9th event.  It'll be interesting to see if Apple Watch lives up to hype and whether Apple has a couple of more surprises up its sleeve. Then the tech and watch world will have to see if the traditional watchmakers have what it takes to upstage Apple.  Designs and features aside, there is one very important aspect with Apple and non-Apple watches:  only the Apple Watch has full integration with Apple's ecosystem and iOS devices.  Furthermore, Android watches have full integration with most Android devices but not necessarily all.  It'll be interesting to see what a Swatch smart phone will feature and how it'll work along side a smartphone market dominated by Android and iOS. One very important thing to consider here.  The Apple Watch wil...

Here is a short video clip of an actor pretending to be an a robot.  With the sound effects, he really hit it out of the park. I'll say this much.  We are a long way from androids let alone robots.  And for AI in human forms to have fluid human like motions, it will be even further into the future.  Perhaps after Apple is done with the iPhone and the iCar, maybe we can have the brilliance of Cupertino bring us the iRobot. Or will it be called "Siri"?

Even before the smartphones were integrated into our daily lives, before Blackberries, the original iPhone, and the HTC G1 , there was the Palm Pilot.  And I could not be more excited by it when Dave the Mobile Warrior showed me his Palm from US Robotics.  It was an eye opener.  Prior to that, I was using Casio made personal digital assistants (PDA) with black-and-white screens. But the Pilot was a competely innovative device that was the future.  If you consider just how forward thinking the Palm was, even with its ancient input with the plastic stylus, you knew this was the future.  And let's be honest, be it the iPhone or a Galaxy Note, they owed their DNA to the Palm.  And when I upgraded to the Palm Zire with an integrated camera, that was the moment when I realized the value of having a mobile computer that you can carry in  your pocket and you take everywhere with you.  The only thing I carried around in my pocket, then and now, is my walle...

In reading dozens of articles about certain rumors that either is more and more concrete with each passing hour, there are a couple of takeaways about a potential move into the automotive market by Apple. First, in hiring a former head of R&D from Mercedes, Apple ain't gonna build a minivan that may or may not be electric only and may or may not be self-driving. Have you see Mercedes' non-sedan vehicles. Ugly! Jony Ives and his team should have soemthing for us that should give Telsa a run for their money. So, no minivan. Second, how is your awesome HomeKit enabled and Apple streaming video service working out for you on your awesome Apple TV 3 and Apple Home Cinema 4K panel? What, no? Yeah, it's been years in the making and no evidence that Apple has "cracked" televsion as Jobs alluded to in the Walter Issacson Steve Jobs biography. The Apple TV started off as a hobby and only in the last year when Tim Cook took that label off and, yet, we are still ...