“Where do you get the time to write so much as a company CEO, and more importantly, shouldn’t you be closing deals or doing something more useful?”
Fair enough.
Do What Comes Naturally To You
Some entrepreneurs are technologists, others are salespeople, a few are storytellers.
TechCrunch
We’re hosting a panel to discuss the good and the bad about all the consumer data that companies are using. Come join in at 5 p.m. CT (that’s Texas time).
[Read more]
CNET News
Research in Motion’s tumultuous year seems to keep getting worse, as ridicule springs up over a company blog post and graphic featuring so-called “Be Bold” superheroes — an apparent attempt to boost the appeal of its RIM Bold smartphones to the youth market.
Computerworld News
(Told you so.)
Back in November, the Internet was in a flurry about a fire that had engulfed a Chevy Volt that had undergone a particularly aggressive crash test, and then had been set aside on a lot without following GM’s battery-draining protocol. Two other fires later occurred in relation to other safety tests. Though the news seemed to give fodder to EV skeptics and other friends of the fossil fuel industry, the fact of the matter was that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that it had no reason to believe the Volt was “at a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles.” I called the whole thing a tempest in a teapot.
Although unaffected for now, other surveillance technologies may face similar scrutiny before long.
Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the conviction of a man sentenced to life imprisonment on the basis that key information used to prosecute him had been illegally obtained.
And can he save the BlackBerry brand?
The leadership is changing at Research in Motion Ltd., the Canadian company behind the iconic but troubled BlackBerry. Co-CEOs (and cofounders) Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced that they were stepping down on Sunday, after 20 years at the top, to make way for a new chief, Thorsten Heins, formerly the company’s COO. And boy does Heins have his work cut out for him. RIM’s grip on the smartphone market has been eroding—it lost 75 percent of its value over the last year—with the meteoric ascent of iOS and Android. (A recent international service outage didn’t help matters.)
The EU talks tough on data protection.
The European Union is about to propose new rules on data protection, according to several sources. Among the proposals will be the possibility of levying stiff fines on companies for losing customers’ data, and a so-called “right to be forgotten” (the same one I wrote about last year). Not everyone is happy about the proposed legislation, and we can expect to see a debate drag on though the legislative process.
I don’t often get a chance to write about a startup from my home country (Belgium) that I’m super excited about, so consider me a happy camper. Meet CheckThis.com, a new micro-publishing service that lets you create and share a single, good-looking Web page in mere seconds.
CheckThis is designed for people who need a little more space than a tweet but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a new blog. In literally instants, you can use CheckThis to create a stand-alone page to sell your bike, hire a new developer for your startup, tell people what you’ve been up to today, set up a really quick poll, share an Instragram or Flickr photo, a party invitation with a map, a Vimeo video or whatever other simple need you might have. Quick, simple, beautiful.
TechCrunch
The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week
A roundup of the most important energy stories from the past week.
As Kevin Bullis mentioned on Wednesday, the Obama administration declined to issue a permit to TransCanada for the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would carry crude made from oil sands from Alberta to multiple destinations in the U.S., ending at the Gulf of Mexico. The president left the door open for the company to refile the proposal, one of many reasons to think that this story is far from over. (Read more at The Hill’s E2 Wire and Bloomberg.)
Matias offers keyboards that are simultaneously innovative and retro.
All this talk of late about how our devices are hurting us is making me think I need to revamp my workspace. I already use a standing desk, but I have yet to take the crucial step of elevating my laptop screen and buying an external keyboard, meaning I’m forever hunched over. A new series of external keyboards from a company called Matias might just be the trick to ending my–and your–ergonomic inefficiencies at home or at the office, all while adding the ability for you to type straight to your iPhone with the press of a button.
Under certain market conditions, cartels arise naturally without collusion. This raises important questions over how the behavior should be controlled.
The price of gas is a puzzle. Monitor the average price in gas stations in a particular city and it will vary dramatically, sometimes in a matter of hours and often in ways that appear cyclical.
The wheels of fate that led the photography company into Chapter 11 began spinning in 1975.
No one is really surprised that Eastman Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection. What might surprise some people, though, is that the digital camera, the device that led to the company’s undoing, was invented at Kodak in 1975. Here is a 2005 piece that includes an interview with the engineer behind it.
Press on something, and it presses back.
We all know that we are frail creatures, that life is short and precarious and fraught with risk, and that often its greatest pleasures are the very things that lead us all the more swiftly to our inevitable undoing. I wish I could tell you that our gadgets offered an exception to this rule. Instead, a medical doctor has come along to tell us that our touchscreens are hurting us.
Physicists predict that metamaterials ought to generate an entirely new kind of force that can be turned on and off with the flick of a switch
Back in 1871, James Clerk Maxwell predicted that light exerts a force on any surface it hits. This radiation pressure was experimentally discovered some 30 years later and has since emerged as a hugely important force that is now exploited in systems such as solar sails and laser cooling.
Details emerge about the next-gen Apple tablet.
Bloomberg has the skinny on the iPad 3, or claims to. Three is the magic number here: it took three reporters, and three anonymous sources, to bring us roughly three details about the third iteration of Apple’s tablet.
A CES gem with a sleek design and Android connectivity.
I’ve spent time on this blog advocating for the idea of the smart watch as something more than a fad — something that could make a small but significant disruption in the world of connected devices. Though I had previously thought the smart money, so to speak, was on the well-reviewed but oft-delayed Meta Watch, it looks as though the watch to watch might be a Sony offering hidden away amidst the many wonders of CES last week. (CNET called my attention to it.)
A simple mathematical model of the brain explains the pattern of murders by a serial killer, say researchers
On 20 November 1990, Andrei Chikatilo was arrested in Rostov, a Russian state bordering the Ukraine. After nine days in custody, Chikatilo confessed to the murder of 36 girls, boys and women over a 12 year period. He later confessed to a further 20 murders, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.
The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week
No Entailing Laws, But Enablement In The Evolution Of The Biosphere
The results of the latest analysis are not entirely reassuring.
Sometime in the last few billion years, disaster struck one of Earth’s nearest neighbours. Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today.
Nokia’s Windows Phone is the fruit of a multibillion-dollar partnership.
Reviews are coming in of the Nokia Lumia 710, a low-end smartphone and Nokia’s first to run Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. The L.A. Times, for instance, gives it a nice little review, saying, “Is the Lumia 710 a good smartphone or not? Simply put, it is.” At $ 49.99 on a two-year T-Mobile contract, the phone is not hugely ambitious, but the specs are all there: a 3.7-inch touchscreen, a single-core 1.4-gigahertz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, 512 MB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, a 5-megapixel camera with flash. The whole thing performs well, per the Times; and the reviewer was especially impressed with Nokia Drive, a turn-by-turn voice navigation app.
The pleasure of outdoor e-reading just got more pleasurable.
One of the joys of the Kindle, as I’ve discovered anew while traveling in summery Argentina, is that it enables you–indeed, encourages you–to read in the brightest of sunlight. Now, with a new cover called SolarKindle, that benefit becomes a gift that keeps on giving.
3-D TV isn’t catching on. Why?
Last week, in complaining about needlessly skinny televisions, I pointed out that 3-D televisions–which were supposedly the great frontier in TV tech a year or two ago–have not turned out to be such a hit. (Only 1.1 million 3-D TVs sold in 2010; one analyst puts 3-D TV penetration at just about 3% in the U.S.) Wired‘s Christina Bonnington has a thorough report looking at just why it is that 3-D TV failed to be television’s savior.
Unfortunately, yes.
As soon as things get smart, something stupid also happens: they become vulnerable to attack. This was the case (though over-hyped, perhaps) of printers that cybersecurity researchers warned could be hijacked and theoretically set on fire. And now, argues Willie D. Jones of IEEE Spectrum, it could be the fate of our latest smart devices: our cars.
A new kind of display technology could allow several people to watch and interact with the same screen but see different points of view
Visiting an interactive 3-D environment is often a lonely experience. The need to wear a special headmounted display or to look at different screens means that it can be hard to interact meaningfully with other users.
Ira Glass resurrects a debate about treatment of workers at Foxconn.
Mining, textiles, retail—these are the industries that are most likely to violate worker’s rights, right? Nope— turns out the electronics industry is worse, according to a recent report from Oekom, a sustainable investment research firm. (For more on that report, check out the breakdown of its findings at GreenBiz.)
Recent Comments