These are a few of my favourite things
by Bryan Peters
CBC reports that Amazon.ca has added more than a million new items for sale today. The new products added are in the areas—"stores"—of wireless products and musical instruments. That brings the total number of stores on the Canadian site to 16.
First released as part of a 2004 DVD box set, The Birth of the Lightsaber was posted on YouTube a few days ago.
Coolest weapon ever!
[via The Verge]
Been meaning to link to this for a few days. Spot on.
[via The Verge]
I just couldn't not link to this—double negative, I know. Thanks to The Verge for posting this and choosing the awesome headline.
Today Twitter rolled out two new features that allow users to tag up to 10 people in a photo and also allow up to 4 photos to be attached to a single tweet. So far, it only works on the web and Twitter's official apps.
[via The Loop]
The Verge and others reported today that Amazon is inviting the press to an event next week in New York.
Please join us for an update on our video business
from Peter Larsen
They are also rumoured to be launching a free video streaming service.
Re/code reports that Microsoft is selling subscriptions to Office 365 as in-app purchases, which means that Apple gets its customary 30%.
Microsoft has done nice work to create a touch-friendly and capable Office suite for the iPad. It’s a boon for Office 365 subscribers, and worth a look for nonsubscribers who use Office a lot.
…this new trio of apps (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) isn't at all what we expected. In fact, it's a lot better.
…kudos to the Office for iPad team. They’ve created a suite of “free” apps as good or better than anything Apple has created.
Make no mistake about it: These three apps are feature-rich, powerful tools for creating and editing Office documents. They look and act like their Office 2013 counterparts on Windows. And although these iPad apps obviously can’t replicate every feature of the full desktop programs, they deliver an impressive subset of those features. Anyone who was expecting Office Lite or a rehash of the underwhelming Office for iPhone will be pleasantly surprised.
I have no idea what took them so long, but Microsoft finally unveiled Office for iPad today. I've been saying that they've been missing out for a long time by not having Office on iPad—but I didn't had a blog before, so I have no way to prove it—much like I felt Blackberry waited too long to take BBM cross-platform. I realize that it is a very difficult decision to take one of your biggest exclusive selling features and open it up to competing platforms, thus possibly eliminating a major reason for consumers to stay on your platform, but you have to recognize where the market is going. If you don't act fast enough, you can end up like BBM and get overtaken by WhatsApp or iMessage.
I remember a brief holdout period where friends of mine wouldn't get rid of their Blackberries because of BBM. It really was ahead of its time. But, eventually enough momentum built on iPhone and Android that the BBM holdouts switched and most of them use iMessage, or WhatsApp if they are talking cross-platform. Has anyone heard that WhatsApp was sold to Facebook for $19 billion recently? By the time that BBM was released for iOS and Android it was no longer a leader in mobile messaging or a must-have app.
Back to Microsoft, I'm not saying that they are in nearly as dire straights as Blackberry was—still is—but I think there are some parallels nonetheless. The iPad has been on the market for about 4 years and in that time people have managed to get along okay without Office on their iPad. Maybe they're using Apple's Numbers, Pages and Keynote. Maybe they're using Google Drive's cloud documents offering. I think Microsoft thought keeping Office off of the iPad would draw more people to their Surface tablets, but that didn't work out well for them. The difference between Microsoft and Blackberry is that Office is still so entrenched in the enterprise market and Microsoft is much more diverse than Blackberry ever was. Windows and Office are still their big money makers (more than 50% of revenue combined, with Office at about 30%), but they have their server business, and their entertainment and devices division, as well. My fear for Microsoft is that Windows, Office and devices (non-Xbox) are all tied together. As more computing goes mobile, then less people are using Windows and all of a sudden Office isn't as ubiquitous. I've said before that I think their future lies in the server side of the business. I still think that's the case. Windows mobile really isn't getting traction in either smartphones or tablets and the PC market has started to retract. They might be in bigger trouble than most people think right now.
I think they're next mistake is pricing, and it will be interesting to see if and when they decide to revise their strategy. The apps are free to download, but that only allows you to read or present with them. If you want to create or modify anything, you need an Office 365 subscription, which starts at $100 per year for Home Premium and goes up from there for businesses. I don't think that will fly when Apple's apps are free and so is Google Drive. I will wait anxiously to see how that works out for them. The next few years will be very interesting where Microsoft is concerned.
Some pretty good tips here from Katie Boehret at Re/code.
The Wall Street Journal has some new details—released by Apple on the eve of another patent trial with Samsung—about the invention of the iPhone. Unfortunately, the WSJ article is behind a paywall, but there is some coverage and excerpts over at iPhone in Canada.
The secret meeting room where most of the design decisions for the original iPhone’s software were made is “hallowed ground” to Greg Christie, who designs the software interface for products and one of the first members recruited to work on the device in 2004.
It doesn’t mean that the windowless room, lit by fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, looked like anything special. Christie recalled the walls had signs of water damage from a flood in an adjacent bathroom. A few images covered the walls including one of Apple’s “Think Different” posters of famous graphic designer Paul Rand and another of a large chicken running around without its head.
Wow! After buying Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, then WhatsApp for $19 billion last month, Facebook is right back at it. This time they've bought Oculus VR for $2 billion, as they announced today. Well, I have no idea what to make of it yet, but you can't call them cheap or cowardly. If they want it, they go out and get it.
It should be noted that Oculus VR started with a Kickstarter campaign for their Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in 2012. According to Re/Code, to date they've sold 75,000 units of the first version Rift to developers and just announced version two.
Some folks have done the math and it looks like Apple sold it's 500 millionth iPhone sometime in the past few weeks, but they've been quiet about it.
It took them more than three and a half years to sell the first 100 million, but have sold another 400 million in about the last 3 years. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January of 2007, he set a goal of reaching 1% of the global handset market in 2008. At the time, that represented about 10 million phones. Here we are at a cumulative total of 500 million iPhones. Pretty impressive.
[via MacRumors]
Apple's latest "Your Verse" is about and iPad app developed by the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to help monitor and treat concussions. It's amazing what technology can do in the right hands. Check it out here.
[via iPhone in Canada]
Yesterday, Google announced that it is rolling out Google Now to its Chrome browser. It may take a while for it to make its way to you, or you can manually enable it now by going to chrome://flags and enabling Google Now notifications.
For those of you that don't use Google Now or don't know what it is, you're really missing out. If you are a user of Google services (mostly Gmail and Google Search), and own a smartphone, it's a great tool. It's basically predictive, real-time notifications based on your search history, location and possible email history. If you have a flight coming up for which you've searched on Google or received a boarding pass through email, Google Now will display a card with details of the flight and its status. It will tell you real-time traffic info on how long it will take you to get home or to work from your current location, display local weather, tell you the sports scores of your favourite teams, and much more. It's built into Android and is part of the Google Search iOS app. The Verge has some good coverage of the service here.
Really Microsoft? Really? After bashing Google in their "Scroogled" ads for the last few years about about their use of user email data to better targeted ads, Microsoft is caught snooping at user email. Apparently, they scanned a blogger's Hotmail account to trace Windows 8 leaks back to a Microsoft employee. They scariest part for me is that they ran this by their legal department and got the go-ahead.
I'm not a huge fan of Google using my personal data to target ads at me, but I least I know why they're doing it and I know what I've gotten myself into. This is a whole other level, in my opinion. After running an entire ad campaign against Google, Microsoft does this, and seems to think it's okay.
Hypocritical and shameful.
Good tip from Wired on how to remove DRM from songs you bought on iTunes from 2003 to 2009.
