Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Fear’

It’s Time For Microsoft To Turn Itself Upside-Down

There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them? You wouldn’t give up a goose that laid golden eggs either. But the the goose is getting old, and people are getting tired of eggs. What’s the next step?

Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.

Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…

Read the whole story…

Quanta working on 3.5-inch smartbook-as-phone, hates our thumbs

Without pictures or firm form factor details, it’s hard to tell exactly what Quanta is driving at here (or who it’s driving at it for), but the concept of a “computer in an iPhone form factor,” as Quanta Chairman Barry Lam so tactfully puts it, doesn’t fill us with much hope for usability. At least it probably won’t look as terrifying as this modded Dell netbook pictured above. Quanta says it’s building a “smartbook” device with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, with voice calling and web browsing the primary functionalities. We’re not really sure what even qualifies this as a “smartbook” if it’s really in an iPhone form factor, but perhaps it’s to run some sort of full-featured OS. Unfortunately, Moblin and Windows seem out, because there’s Qualcomm and ARM under the hood. If this is indeed in some sort of fold-up form factor, our greatest fear is another Viliv N5 or UMID mBook BZ experience — we just don’t think we could relive that sort of pain.

Quanta working on 3.5-inch smartbook-as-phone, hates our thumbs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Electronista  |  BusinessWeek  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Iomega’s iConnect turns thumb drives into NAS drives, puts it all online

Iomega’s iConnect turns thumb drives into NAS drives, puts it all online originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PRNewswire  |  Iomega  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Want Everyone To See Your Credit Card Transactions? Of Course You Do. Meet Blippy.

As the Internet matures, slowly but surely everything we do in the real world is going social. But there’s a limit to how much information we can explicitly share on all the various services. A new service, Blippy, launching today in private beta, has an interesting way to take something you do everyday, buy things with your credit card, and automatically push those transactions online for others to see and interact with.

Yes, I know this is a controversial idea — that’s part of what makes it potentially a great one. Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it. This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time. There is actually a lot of data tied into the transactions we make, and Blippy takes that and makes it social.

Obviously, there will be some transactions you don’t want published for all to see on the Internet. That’s why one of the core ideas behind the service is that you’d only have one credit card (most people have many these days) that is your “Blippy card.” That is to say, you’d have one card that you know all the transactions you do on it get published. That itself creates some interesting social dynamics, as maybe you’ll start manipulating your spending habits on your cards to show just a certain side of yourself. And just imagine the fun everyone will have if you accidentally make an embarrassing purchase on this Blippy card. The service hopes to alleviate that fear by doing something like giving users a sticker to put on the card that’s their Blippy card, so they remember the transaction they’re about to make will be broadcast. That’s also an interesting way to spread the service naturally, when others see that sticker on your card and look into it.

“The big question that Blippy answers is ‘What are your friends buying?‘,” co-founder Philip Kaplan (also known in the tech circle as “Pud”) explains. That is of course a take off of Twitter’s question “What are you doing?” — which was recently replaced by “What’s happening?” The key to all of those questions is simplicity. And despite being a concept that you have to think about the ramifications of, Blippy is perhaps even more simple because it employs what Kaplan dubs “passive sharing.” Again, you aren’t explicitly sharing anything via something like a message, your actions (buying things with your credit card) are being automatically pushed to the web.

“Blippy provides transparency into normal everyday things,” Kaplan continues. This actual fits in perfectly with something Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted: “Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible.” That is exactly what Blippy is doing. Interestingly, Blippy also seems like a perfect compliment to Square, the new project by yet another Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey. Square creates the potential for anyone to take be able to take credit card transactions with their mobile device. Imagine paying for something from a local street merchant, and it immediately showing up in your Blippy stream.

But for now, the service is focusing on some of the bigger transactions you make. For example, when you buy something on iTunes, you can not only see how much the purchase cost, but also a detailed list of what was bought. The people that follow your Blippy stream can then comment on and “like” these transactions. This type of deep integration is only available for a few services right now, like iTunes, Amazon, and Zappos, (other transactions, you can only see the place and the price, not the actual item) but you can see that eventually this is where they’d like to go. Just imagine the potential affiliate fees alone!

And because the actual purchase prices are made visible, there are other interesting dynamics, such as, being able to tell if you’re getting ripped off with what you’re paying for a gym membership or on your Comcast bill compared to what your friends are spending.

There’s also the potential to have private accounts that maybe a businessman would only share with his assistant to let them know what’s being purchase and explain things a bit better in the comments. Again, yes the idea is controversial, but there are a lot of interesting things that could come of it, if people are willing to be this transparent.

The idea was so compelling to Kaplan that he actually left his role as an Entreprenuer In Residence at Charles River Ventures to join fellow co-founders Ashvin Kumar and Chris Estreich in the venture. Kaplan is best known as the guy who started FuckedCompany at the end of the first Internet bubble, and went on to start AdBrite. I had a chance to meet with Kaplan to talk about the service and shot the video below of him explaining the core concept of Blippy.

Again, Blippy is launching as an invite-only private beta today. Visting their homepage for a way to sign up to be notified when they start letting other people in.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Read the whole story…

Creepy robotic heads serenade your wallet from deep inside the uncanny valley

No, it’s not the Boyz II Men reunion tour, these are three other singing robots manufactured into a performing trio. The animatronic heads from artist Nathaniel Mellor are part of a $75,000 art piece on sale at Art Basel Miami Beach 2009. The faces are controlled by servos which in turn are controlled by a computer. The uncontrolled fear you’ll feel when watching the video is, however, completely natural.

Continue reading Creepy robotic heads serenade your wallet from deep inside the uncanny valley

Creepy robotic heads serenade your wallet from deep inside the uncanny valley originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  YouTube  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Americans fear online robberies more than meatspace muggings

A new survey shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, that more Americans are worried about being robbed online than they are about being mugged in real life. The bi-annual Unisys Security Index found that Americans fear fraudulent use of their personal credit and debit cards significantly more than they fear for their personal safety; and, in a change from the previous March survey, Americans fear for the nation’s security even more than they do the security of their finances. Americans are also much more concerned about pandemic flu viruses than they are computer viruses, and they’re a little less concerned about paying their bills than they were in the first half of the year.

Read the whole story…

iFixit shamelessly molests the new White MacBook with screwdriver

Filed under: MacBook

You have to admire, and fear, the eager curiosity of the folks at iFixit. When they come across a cool new product, they immediately tear it into bits and pieces — I just pray they never launch a site devoted to domestic pet care. iKilledit.

This time they’ve taken their scalpels and screwdrivers to Apple’s newly released white MacBook polycarbonate unibody laptop and posted photos of every gory detail.

Like all iFixit teardowns, the process is thoroughly documented and designed to provide users with a guide for upgrading, repairing, and otherwise disassembling the hardware (in hopes the process is reveresable). And judging from the looks of things, this MacBook is very easy to upgrade, once the bottom plate is removed.

If you’re curious to learn what makes this MacBook tick, check out iFixit’s detailed teardown.

TUAWiFixit shamelessly molests the new White MacBook with screwdriver originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

2 People Died In A Sweat Lodge Last Night. And Deleted Tweets Have Surfaced.

Last night, at a retreat in Arizona, two people died and another 19 had to be hospitalized after something went horribly wrong at a sweat lodge. Normally, such a story, while interesting, wouldn’t be right for TechCrunch. But there’s a tech angle here.

Apparently, the man who rented the place and threw the retreat, author James Arthur Ray, is also an avid Twitter user. And yes, during the night of the incident he was tweeting about it. Ray later deleted those tweets and all the tweets about the retreat. But, as Mark Maunder discovered, they’re still available in Twitter search. And a couple are pretty interesting:

JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?

JamesARay: Day 5 of SPW. The Spiritual Warrior has conquered death and therefore has no enemies, and no fear, in this life or the next.

Now, we’re not presuming to know what happened that night, and authorities are still looking into the matter. But those are two very odd things to say on a night when two people died. And deleting them, obviously, does not look good.

The fact that these tweets still exist in Twitter Search is very interesting. Twitter recently updated its terms of service agreement, making it very clear that “your tweets belong to you.” But that ownership for whatever reason, be it technical or otherwise, doesn’t fully extend to the point that when you delete a tweet, it is gone forever.

This isn’t a new issue, but this could bring complete control of your data on Twitter to the forefront. If you delete a tweet, it’s not really gone, so be extra careful about what you say.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Read the whole story…