Motorola has long made the best modems a consumer can buy for their home DSL/Cable connections — Google now owns that. That prospect scares me as the last thing I want is a party with a vested interest in what, where, and how I browse the Internet to be standing between me and the Internet. Google is now that party — of course they may never leverage it, but do you really believe that?
(via Shawn Blanc)
Matt Drance has been on fire lately with some very thoughtful posts over at Apple Outsider. On the Google vs Microsoft mud slinging contest over a lost bidding war for patents;
Matt Drance:
The first failure was lack of clarity: specifically, letting the Chief Legal Officer write nearly 500 words of unstructured whining. How many ordinary people understand lawyers, let alone sympathize with them? A piece of communication this important should have been painstakingly reviewed: its prose; its tone; its presentation; its source; and my goodness, its facts. It’s quite clear that nobody examined the post with a level head.
He concludes:
The sad thing about all of this is that the patent system in our industry is in fact horribly, cynically broken. Google had a terrific opportunity to make that case and shift public opinion in its (and I believe in the long term, everyone’s) favor. Instead, it cried like a rich kid who lost an auction.
Definitely worth a read.
Thanks to the patent system, the tech market is looking more like Parker Brothers’ “Monopoly” game every day
It’s kind of sad that we’ve reached the point where every time a tech company passes “Go” in Silicon Valley, they have to sweat over landing on someone’s patented hotel space and cough up billions of dollars if they want to keep playing.
Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at putting Facebook out of business. Like they previously tried with Buzz, and Wave, and Orkut.
My first reaction was best summarized by Alex Hackbart:
I need another social network account like I need an asshole on my forehead
I do love competition however, since it should (theoretically) only benefit the users. Still as a user I’m quite indifferent about it. As a developer on the other hand it’s interesting to keep an eye on it. If it takes off I’ll probably will have to work with the API at some point in time. The video’s found in the read link are very well done and certainly worth a look.
There is however one big difference with the situation in which Google+ is released compared to Google’s other attempts at a social network: Android.
Just yesterday Google’s Andy Rubin announced that over 500,000 Android devices are activated every day. Google could theoretically go ‘all Internet Explorer on Facebook’s ass’. Pre-installing Google+ on every single Android handset sold from now on like Microsoft did back in the day with Internet Explorer and thereby killing Netscape.
Oh wait.. I forgot about Android fragmentation. Never mind…
A interesting new project from Google:
Swiffy converts SWF files (the file format for Flash) to HTML5. It allows Flash authors to make their animations available on modern browsers without the need for a plugin.
I’m still skeptical it will be used a lot or do anything to reduce the use of flash. Ideally, though, flash could be used as a fallback for when HTML5 is not available instead of this being a fallback for when Flash is not available. I think however the latter is more likely.
Beginning today, users can finally perform mail server searches and confirm appointment requests from their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This means that you’ll be able to search for messages in your entire mailbox, not just for emails stored on your device
About time! Now I can finally lower my “Mail Days to Sync” setting from “No Limit” to something more convenient like “1 Week”.
More than 100 new types of website markup for content like movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more will allow search engines to better understand and present what they find on the pages that show up in search results.
This is big
I guess they will not start using their own solution (yet).
Shawn Blanc wrote an excellent piece on the state of cloud music services. My setup is exactly like he describes:
In an ideal world I would always have access to my whole iTunes library from my laptop, Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Most people solve this by purchasing a Mac Mini and setting it up as the shared media library for the house. This is a pretty good and clever solution for home media library, and would solve most of my problems. The trouble is that: (a) a Mac mini isn’t cheap; (b) if I’m not at home then I don’t get access to those songs; and (c) if I don’t use the mini for syncing my iPhone and iPad then I can’t get all the music and movies I want onto those devices.
And I concur it’s a pain in the ass for syncing. I was forced to move my music library off my laptop after I switched to a SSD (My iTunes library is 170 GB while my SSD is 120 GB).
Shawn is less than impressed with the current offerings from Google and Amazon and prefers owning his music instead of renting it. Living in the US Shawn doesn’t have access to one excellent cloud service we have in Europe however, Spotify. Spotify allows you to stream your music to native Mac, Windows and mobile clients. They also allow you to purchase music. But you don’t need to purchase the songs to sync music to your iPhone or Android device for offline playing which is excellent for traveling abroad. And their pricing is comparable to Rdio, € 9.99.
Nilay Patel:
It’s also clear that Google places tremendous value on collecting location data, and it acted swiftly when it determined Skyhook’s deal with Motorola might threaten its ability to collect that data. Hell, one of the headings in Google’s summary judgment brief is “Skyhook was not entitled to deprive Google of its contractual right to collect location data on Motorola Android devices.” Can’t say it much plainer than that, really. And Google’s doesn’t hesitate to use its muscle to get what it wants from OEMs — it revised Samsung’s app license to specifically require Google location services be installed and used by default. Whether or not Google’s behavior is anti-competitive is a matter for the court to decide, but it’s definitely aggressive.
(via lonelysandwich)
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt Spotted Together Again (via Daringfireball)
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