Category Archives: Google

The next phase (and the threat to Apple and Google)

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From Business Insider.

There are two major trends that will dictate the future of the tech industry.By the end of this decade more people will be using the Internet through a mobile device than through their desktop.The Internet is becoming Chinese. Already, there are more Internet users in China than there are in any other country in the world. That lead will only grow. Research firm IDC says China’s market already accounts for 25 percent of the world’s smartphone sales, more than the US’s 17.5 percent.These trends combine to create an obvious reality: Any company that wants to control the future must have a firm grasp on the smartphone market in China. 

Apple’s Big Patent Win: implications

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Interesting WSJ piece by Mike Isaac about Apple’s victory over Samsung.

If there’s one takeaway from Apple’s massive win over Samsung in the most-watched patent trial of the year, it’s this: If you copy our stuff, we’ll go after you.

That’s the message delivered alongside the verdict on Friday afternoon, in which the jury found Samsung guilty of infringing upon six out of the seven Apple patents in question. The result? More than $1 billion in damages awarded to Apple (or $1,049,343,540 if you want to get nitpicky about it), and of course, bragging rights in what has been Apple’s longstanding claim that Samsung devices were “slavishly copies” of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

And now that Apple’s day in court has validated most of its patents and claims, the technology giant is armed to the teeth with enough ammo to go after any and every OEM out there.

The obvious implication is that Android OEMs need to be careful (as Charles Arthur points out). A less obvious one is that this might be good news for makers of Windows phones, on the grounds that they are less vulnerable to IP attacks from Apple than Android OEMs. Hmmm…

Ultimately, this patent verdict is bad news for everybody except Apple — as Dan Gillmor points out in his Guardian column. And it confirms the extent to which the patent system is broken.

Broadband in Ruritania — and elsewhere

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This morning’s Observer column.

A document has come into my possession. It appears to emanate from the government of Ruritania or some other insignificant country. The cover is illustrated by a low-resolution smartphone photograph of an out-of-focus bedspread, but this homely imagery is offset by the brave rhetoric inside.

“We should have the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015,” it declares. “That’s a challenging goal but it’s one that we can and must achieve. It’s vital for the growth of the economy – especially to small businesses that are so often the engines of innovation.”

Quite so. The government of Ruritania is “committed to ensuring the rapid rollout of superfast broadband across the country. Rural and remote areas of the country should benefit from this infrastructure upgrade at the same time as more populated areas, ensuring that an acceptable level of broadband is delivered to those parts of the country that are currently excluded.” It is also believed something called “two-way video conferencing” may encourage Ruritarians to work from home.

There is much more in this vein, together with talk of “a world-class communications network” that will help the economy grow.

Google Nexus 7: first impressions

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My Nexus 7 arrived yesterday. Here are first impressions:

Upsides

  • Yay! It does fit in a jacket pocket. In fact it’s easy to carry about unobtrusively.
  • Battery life: no rigorous test, but seems reasonable. At any rate it’s largely untouched (67% remaining) after a day’s text and browsing work (no multimedia). The Settings panel is very informative about battery use, showing which Apps are using most power.
  • Settings are easy and intuitive.
  • On-screen keyboard: Nice but seems erratically unresponsive at times. (Or else I haven’t figured out how to drive it.) Better layout than the default layout on iPad keyboard. Big plus: because of the physical size of the device and the portrait orientation I can type with two thumbs, like I used to do with my Psion 3 in the dim and distant past.
  • I tried it with Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Pairing was a bit fiddly. But once done, it worked just fine.
  • Nice screen.
  • Lighter than iPad. Easier to use as e-reader.
  • Great autocorrect when typing in Write app.
  • Very simple setup. Google ecosystem works well. Well, it ought to: if they can’t get that right, then they ought to quit.
  • Immediate auto-upgrade to Jelly Bean (where do they get these idiotic names?) You can also set Apps to auto-upgrade. Wonder if that’s also true of the OS. One of the bugbears with Android that drove me into the arms of IoS was the problem of upgrading from one Android version to another.)
  • Neat packaging and small charger.

    • Downsides

  • Portrait only – except for YouTube. I naively thought that this was controlled by software. But it seems to be baked in. This is very restrictive, especially for web pages. Unacceptably small print is the only way it can get everything in. I was completely wrong about this. Jeff Jarvis kindly explained (on Twitter) that there is a tiny icon in the Notifications panel which enables screen rotation to be toggled on or off. But there’s a cunning kicker: the home screen doesn’t auto-rotate; it’s only when one is running an app that rotation works.
  • Front-facing camera. Hopeless for photography. Not particularly impressive but adequate for Skype.
  • Twitter app not as good as the iPad version.
  • Only WiFi. No 3G. (Worked fine with iPhone as modem, though.)

    • Mixed

  • Apps ecosystem seems more chaotic than the IoS one. (This may be a reflection of my unfamiliarity with Android, not having used an Android device for 18 months.) Some apps, however, seem pretty good. Kindle for example. Ditto a note/journal writing tool called Write. Ditto Evernote. Nice integration between apps — eg between Write and Evernote. WordPress blogging app seems better than the IoS one. (Memo to self: check for upgrade on IoS).

    • Overall

    Pretty good. Half the price of an iPad. Reasonable performance, good screen and some really good apps. And it fits nicely into your pocket.

    Can’t figure out what the business model or marketing rationale is, though. I don’t think it’s really aimed at the iPad. So is it aimed at the Kindle Fire? (Since I haven’t tried the Fire I don’t have any basis for a comparison.) Most of the existing reviews seem to say: nice kit, pity about the content. But I’m not interest in ‘consuming content’: I want a device that I can use for the work that I do, which mainly involves thinking about, generating and editing ‘content’ (note-taking, newspaper columns, lecture drafts, outlines, photographs). At the moment, the iPad software ecosystem is proving brilliant for all of these uses — but it took time for the necessary apps to appear. The Nexus 7 is nowhere near as good for these purposes at the moment. But perhaps the necessary software will eventually arrive.

    Other reviews

    Charles Arthur — Guardian

    Wired.co.uk

    Tech Review

    PC Advisor

    Daily Telegraph

    Arstechnica

    Patent absurdity exposed at last

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    This morning’s Observer column about Richard Posner’s landmark ruling.

    What brings Posner to mind this Sunday morning, however, is not his views on obesity but on intellectual property. You may have noticed that in the last few years the world’s biggest technology companies have become lavish patrons of the legal profession. Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Amazon and others have being suing one another in courts around the globe, alleging that they are infringing one another’s patents. The resulting bonanza for lawyers has long passed the point of insanity, but up to now the world’s courts seem powerless to make the litigants see sense. As a result, judges find themselves allocated the role of pawns in what are effectively business negotiations between global companies.

    Until now. What happened is that Posner, in an unusual move, got himself assigned to a lower court to hear a case in which Apple was suing Google (which had purchased Motorola in order to get its hands on the phone company’s patent portfolio) over alleged infringement of Apple’s smartphone patents. Posner listened to the lawyers and then threw out the case. But what was really dramatic was the way he eviscerated the legal submissions. At one point, for example, Apple claimed that Google was infringing one of its patents on the process of unlocking a phone by swiping the screen. “Apple’s argument that a tap is a zero-length swipe,” said Posner, “is silly. It’s like saying that a point is a zero-length line.”

    Is there a correlation between forward-looking Google searches and prosperity?

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    Fascinating research paper in Nature on “Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward”. Summary:

    In this study, we present a cross-country analysis of search engine queries, and demonstrate a strong link between behaviour online and real world economic indicators. By considering searches for years represented in Arabic numerals, an almost ubiquitous written representation, we can evaluate worldwide interest in years in the future (such as “2013”) and years in the past (such as “2011”). These representations have previously been considered in an investigation of a large corpus of text from books, where analysis suggested that authors’ interest in the past has decreased over time7. Here, we compare the predisposition of Internet users in different countries to look more to the future, or more to the past. We find that the online “future orientation” of a country is strongly correlated with the country’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

    Google’s glass eye

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    From The Register:

    Google has been showing off the expected capabilities of the augmented reality spectacles that it is calling Project Glass.

    The early concept designs show wire-framed glasses with a display above the right eye which shows off personal schedules and location-based information. Also included is a camera, a microphone for calls and voice recognition, a GPS, and (presumably) a wireless connector to make the whole thing work. The Chocolate Factory has set up a page on Google+ to get feedback and released a video about a ukulele-playing hipster to show how the glasses would likely work.

    Park your Porsche elsewhere

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    Lovely idea: “17 Easy Ways To Offend Googlers” — a list of things that offend against the corporate culture. I particularly like #17:

    Acting like a rich guy

    A Google employee “threatened to take a baseball bat to any fancy new car that would appear after the IPO.”

    “In The Plex describes a case where, after Android’s acquisition, one employee (I believe it was Andy Rubin) had to park his Porsche elsewhere.”