So with it being the middle of September we are getting closer to the end of all the iPhone 5 speculation and the actual release of it. Now people are really starting to talk about what is going on with this Phone. On Thursday the technology blog Boy Genius Report posted images of a new iPhone case from the site of a company called Case-Mate. The images were visible on the company?s site for a short period of time before they were replaced with a curiously cryptic page that says, ?We?ll have your cases when you have your new iPhone.? From descriptions I?ve read of the new iPhone from Apple employees, the images seemed potentially authentic. But it seems that Case-Mate might be sneakily trying to take advantage of the excitement over the phone by posting and then un-posting the images. These things rarely happen accidentally, especially when it comes to new Apple products. So more speculation is really running wild about the design of this case. I have to say Apple is doing some smart things by getting all of this buzz just on a redesigned case. Most of the time the buzz is usually about the functionality of the phone and what it can do better. In this case a lot of the talk has been centered around the new look of the iPhone.
So on Tuesday Steve Ballmer noted that over 500,000 copies of Windows 8 had been downloaded but he did say there was tons of work still to be done to the OS itself.
Ballmer said there are all kinds of opportunities in technology, from cloud-based services to new types of devices.
?Our approach to these new opportunities is centered in Windows,? Ballmer said. ?It?s not about doing something else. It?s about broadly re-imagining Windows. There is no phone, there is nothing on the tablet, there is no operating system on the planet that will ship 350 million units of anything other than Windows,? he said.
So it looks like Windows 8 is getting tons of buzz and is going to be successful. Is Microsoft finally making an OS that can battle Apple’s OS? This is sure to be a fun ride and I can’t wait to see more.
It has been announced that every copy of Windows 8 will come packaged with Xbox Live service built right into the OS. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson says that developers are being shown tools that make it easier to integrate Xbox Live features into PC games during the show, which I’d imagine are the same tools used for Games for Windows Live, only rebranded. With developers going to be able to integrate Xbox Live into PC games could really help the Xbox services and development. Could get more people to PC game versus console game. For those who are really hardcore about their gamer scores. This is a real big step forward for Microsoft’s gaming division if they can finally pull something like this off.
Nintendo needs to change things up and they need to do it fast! The stock has fallen another 5% after they released a new set of games to try and get people to buy their newest handheld, the 3DS. The problem is the niche that Nintendo once went for is falling to the the era of the mobile phone gaming. Free games, cheaper games, all that people like my mother could play at the fraction of the cost of a Nintendo 3DS game. With Nintendo losing this market it is time for a change. It is time to go after the hardcore gamers more, the RPG nuts etc. Sony and Microsoft seem to be able to stay afloat and not do as poorly as Nintendo has done, and why is that? Because they cater to the hardcore gamer. I grew up with Nintendo and I still have love for them, but sadly, I don’t have a 3DS. Why you ask? It doesn’t interest me and I already have my phone which can entertain me just as much as a 3DS could and I don’t have to spend $149 dollars plus $30-50 in games. I can download free angry birds and be content. Breaking down the walls of Nintendo’s old school thoughts are going to be hard to do in my opinion. However money typically sways things and with the shares falling and investors looking for a change could we finally see Nintendo start to go after the hardcore gamer more?
In February, Amazon.com launched its long-awaited subscription video-streaming service as part of Amazon Prime, setting itself up to be a serious rival to Netflix. If we?re honest, it has yet to take off but let?s not be too harsh on a service that is essentially a bolt-on to its existing Amazon Prime annual subscription that offers free two day shipping with no minimum purchase amount for $79/year.
Today however we?re hearing reports via the WSJ that Amazon may soon launch a book equivalent of the service, charging a fixed monthly fee for access to a library of books. Amazon will reportedly offer book publishers a substantial fee for their involvement in the program.
This isn’t the first book subscription service out there for digital content but it could be the most successful with the Kindle. Putting the book subscription with the Kindle is what will make this such a dramatic success. There isn’t any idea on pricing yet from what I have read and I am sure they will make deals with buying a Kindle, for example get a free month with the purchase of a Kindle or something like that. Maybe 2 months and give a free month to those who already own a kindle? My thought is that hopefully the subscription service will be as cheap as Netflix. It is about $7.99 before tax to stream unlimited movies from the internet.
CBSNews.com has severed its relationship with the host of a web show who sent out an erroneous Tweet yesterday saying that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died.
The offending Tweet was sent from the Twitter account of What?s Trending, a web series independently produced by Disrupt Group and anchored by Disrupt co-founder Shira Lazar.
CBSNews.com had been hosting the web series since May. But the show and Lazar had no newsgathering partnership with CBS News. In fact, the following disclaimer ran after each show: ?The What’s Trending show is produced by Shira Lazar Productions and the Disrupt Group, who are solely responsible for the content, opinions and viewpoints.?
Lazar, through the What?s Trending Twitter account, issued a somewhat flippant apology on Friday for the Tweet: “Apologies — reports of Steve Job’s death completely unconfirmed. Live on.”
Later, she issued another apology from her own Twitter account: ?On behalf of all of us at @disruptgroup we sincerely apologize for the inaccuracy of what was tweeted earlier today. ? EP/Host @WhatsTrending.
I am sure Apple and Steve Jobs will be taking some action on this, as it is a disgrace that anyone would make such an erroneous report about a mans life.
Lowe?s home improvement stores, in an effort to keep up with its largest rival Home Depot, will be deploying Forty two thousands iPhones to its employees, reports Bloomberg. The devices will be used to help answer customer?s questions as well as ring out purchases. This is a very similar system to the one that Apple uses in its Retail Stores, although the EasPay devices that it uses are based on iPod touch hardware.
The devices will be rolled out to the tune of 25 phones per store and is being introduced in conjunction with an online app for Lowes customers called MyLowe?s that will allow them to view documentation like manuals, warranties and paint formulas. If these devices are anything like the ones in Apple Stores, they will be outfitted with a hardware package that includes an extended battery and a credit card processing slot.
The iPhones will also be used to replace the scanner guns that the stores are using to look up product information and check inventory. They will keep their calling, email and texting features as well.
In yet another Building Windows 8 blog entry by Steven Sinofsky, there is a demonstration of Microsoft’s upcoming operating system’s fast boot time. In the demonstration, Windows 8 boots up in less than 2 seconds. Pretty amazing.
Microsoft focused on three key goals for improving the boot time. First, there has to be effectively zero watt power used when off, there needs to be a fresh session after boot, and there needs to be very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC. Microsoft’s solution? A new “fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate.”
“Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested),” Sinofsky states.
So this means Windows 8 will boot faster thanks to the less work done by resuming from a hibernated system session compared to a full system session. “We added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well,” Sinofsky mentions.
There has been rumblings throughout the online video world have been that Hulu is on the market and there have been many suitors from Amazon, Yahoo, and even the dish network. Well now it looks like Google is stepping in on this and making a play for Hulu. There is no confirmed bids yet and this could be either rumor or conjecture at this point. However the bids have been reported to be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion for Hulu. Google seems to want something much more than that, and is willing to pay much more to get it. If you want to speculate, you could imagine Google asking for access to more content, for a longer period of time, and perhaps offering up a couple billion dollars more.
Since that?s not what Hulu?s owners have put on the table, ?normally we would have thrown people out if they?d said that,? says an executive familiar with the sales process. But Google ?indicated that there?s enough money? involved so that Hulu?s owners are at least thinking about continuing the discussion.
One big problem with the Google proposal: Hulu was created in large part as the TV networks? response to YouTube, and their fear that Google would swallow up the Web video ecosystem.
So could Hulu back off from Google to stop him from controlling the market or could we be looking at something were Google will get what it wants and take a strangle hold on the video web market. Only time will truly tell on this one.
So the phone market have been pretty miserable for Microsoft. 6% is where Microsoft is and let me tell you it looks like it is getting smaller. So what could Microsoft do to get people interested in this? Well they could be putting Windows 8 into their phones in the coming future. There are some clues that this is exactly what Microsoft is planning to do. When I first saw the preview videos of Windows 8, with its touch and tile-based interface, people thought immediately of Windows Phone, which has a very similar looking interface. Instead of app icons, both use tiles which can display data and images from the underlying apps without opening them. The tiles themselves become a dashboard displaying the real-time data behind every app. This could be a step in the right direction for Microsoft. The fact that they are late to the party is a bad thing but could of been a great thing. They could really make sure they had top tier product by learning from the mistakes of Android and iPhone but yet they seem to sticking to the bottom, so they weren’t able to leverage anything. Maybe this Windows 8 speculation will give their phones more buzz and a change to get a bigger share of the market.
