A very interesting presentation on Internet and the economy presented by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday.
BusinessInsider summarizes the presentation as follows
Mobile internet is bigger than you think. iPhone is becoming THE mobile platform. Social media, mobile devices are changing communications and commerce. Mobile internet trends in Japan show how the future will be. (Hint: Not much mobile advertising) Carriers will be crushed by demand. The Walled Gardens collapse. Apple wins, Google maybe wins, Research In Motion withers
The number of mobile subscriptions is actually expected to reach 50 billion subscription in 2020 (even bigger than what Mary thinks, 10+ billions is mentioned in her slides). Apple is no doubt a major driver, but Google services are not to be forgotten. Also the android platform is being pushed and adopted by many manufacturers. Despite the iPhone’s popularity, I think it is still possible for other handsets to make a breakthrough. To a large extent, I seem to agree with Meeker about mobile internet trends, except for mobile advertising.
Take a deeper look into Mary’s presentation here and let me know what you think Read More »
Few days ago, I wrote about the 10/GUI: the new concept of user interface to PCs. Today, Apple launched the world’s first multi-touch mouse called “Magic Mouse”. The top shell of Magic Mouse is one seamless multi-touch sensor and inside is a chip which according to Apple tells exactly what you want to do. Whether you want to click, scroll, swipe or simply rest your hand. Magic Mouse does not mix up these actions.
The magic mouse points and clicks like a regular mouse however without the buttons and the scrolling wheel. You can practically click anywhere along the Multi-Touch surface. Brush one finger along the top surface to pan a full 360 degrees. Swipe a finger along the surface to scroll, just like on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can adjust the sensitivity from the System Preferences. And just like an iPhone or a MacBook trackpad, Magic Mouse detects the number of fingers you are using at any given time. This fits perfectly to advance through internet pages in Safari or browse albums in iTunes. Although this is not quite the 10/GUI concept, but Apple have certainly realized that the Multi-Touch technology introduced a breakthrough in the way people interact with the device, through gestures.
Watch the video below to see the magic mouse in action Read More »
It is confirmed that Microsoft reached a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates into their search engine Bing. However, it only took few hours for Google to announce that they also got a similar deal with Twitter. No clear information is yet available regarding Facebook.
You can try the beta version of Bing Twitter implementation here, but don’t be surprised when you get the following message if your locale is not set united states.
TWITTER BETA
Sorry! Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.
If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States.
Note: Changing your locale will affect all Bing pages. To change your locale in the future, click the United States link at the top right corner of any Bing page.
The feed from Facebook is said to work pretty much in the same way as with Twitter, however this is not available yet since Facebook has not opened its feed to public and they “need to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg. The weird thing in the story that Sandberg doesn’t mention any money involved in this deal, which of course I don’t really believe.
Number 7 used to be my lucky number or at least a number that I feel optimistic about until Microsoft decided to call its latest Windows release: Windows 7. I got this strange feeling about Windows 7 already when I was announced back in 2007. I thought they might add some fancy icons and give it more glance and fresh look but underneath it will be the same old crap. Some people might say, well Windows XP was a stable operating system, probably the most stable operating system Microsoft ever made. How good is the performance of an operating system when it crashes hundreds of time everyday, eats up all the processor capacity and the memory available?
Many of you have probably heard the joke about having a “virus” on the computer called “Vista” !
The engineers at Intel scratch their heads everyday to improve their processors and the manufactures dumps more and more memory into the PCs, for Microsoft to run their latest Windows. Read More »
Google released their Q3 earnings report, which seems to be very good.
Here’s briefly some of the figures from the report
EPS $5.89 (better than analysts predictions) Net revenue of $4.4 billion Revenue up 7% sequentially Google Sites revenue up 8% Paid clicks up 14% sequential Price per click drop a modest 6% Free cash flow was $2.5 billion
If you are interested in more details , you can check the complete report here
However, what is really interesting to show is actually the graph from SiliconAllayer Insider showing Google’s free cash flow trend.
If this trend continue they will reach Microsoft in about a year. Microsoft has been dominating the software market for personal computers with their windows and office packages. Their dominance is not going to last long and I have several reasons to prove it. Read More »
Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gives an interesting presentation about “High performance at massive scale – lessons learned at Facebook” held at the center of networked systems at UC San Diego.
Some impressive facts presented
Facebook have 300M active users (no big secret) They now have 30,000 server, adding new capacity daily. They store 80 billion images (20 billion images in 4 sizes). They serve 600,000 photos/second. They generate more than 25 terabytes logging data per day They have 230 engineers on staff, which means a ratio of more than 1 million active users per engineer…
The touchscreen concept have proven to be a successful interface in mobile devices especially on mobile phones like the Iphone for example. The concept itself is however not new, many manufacturers have been looking into implementing the touchscreen in desktop computers. Microsoft came up with its Surface product which is a multi-touch computer, however it is not a solution that could replace the standard mouse+keyboard+screen interface that we are using today. If you haven’t heard of Microsoft Surface before, you can check out this video to get an idea about what is does and how it works.
Although it seems like a cool product, and will certainly find suitable areas like in hotels, restaurants but I can’t see that product as the next generation of desktop computers. The reasons are described in the next video but can be summarized by this title “not a practical solution”. The concept I believe might be the new generation of human-computer interaction is presented by R. Clayton Miller and shown in the same video below. It consists of splitting the touchscreen from the screen itself. The mouse+keyboard placement relatively to the screen is proven to be convenient for the user. Imagine that you can use 10 fingers multi-touch instead of a single pointer, and different actions result in different events (zoom-in and out using 2 fingers, moving objects using 3 fingers, …) It might feel strange and many would consider it awkward in the beginning and wonder why would someone change something that is working, the same reaction that followed the invention of the mouse in early 80s by Xerox.
In 1984 a prominent PC columnist commented the release of this new computer with a mouse: “There is no evidence that people want to use these things.”
It’s not about changing a way of working rather that opens a new horizon. We were able to achieve what we have today because of that single pointer GUI. When applications will take advantage of the 10/GUI, it will be adapted by the majority and become a natural transition from the normal mouse+keyboard interface to the new multi-touch screen. Watch the video to learn more about the 10/GUI concept Read More »
Kraken are legendary sea monsters said to have lived in the Scandinavian waters between Norway and Iceland. This sea monster made its first appearance in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest The scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee launched the Kraken: a supercomputer monster, the first academic supercomputer to break the petaflops barrier. The flops or flop/s is a measure of computer’s performance and stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second. The Kraken is based on the Cray XT5 model that was renovated and the system consists of 16,000 x 2.6 GHz processors with 16 cores and 129 Terabyte memory. When the system was started this week, it set a record of 1,03×1015 flops performing more than 1 thousand trillion operations per second, a huge achievement in the academic research environment.
Every time I buy a new electronic device, PC and accessories in particular, I can’t help thinking about the price development and the fact that despite the price pressure, the end customer always pays the same about of money for the same product class over the years. It seems a bit complicated to explain but I found that someone else have spent a lot of time on the subject. Matt Komorowski made some history research and collected data for the price of a hard drive over the years (price per GB). The diagram below shows the hard drive cost per gigabyte from 1980 to 2009. Not strange for a mathematician and software engineer like Matt to formulate the graph in a mathematic equation that gives the price of hard driver per gigabyte storage over the years between 1980 and 2009. Most likely, this expression can be extended to the future as long as the consumer electronics follow the same trend. So you can predict how much the price of a hard drive would be in 2020…
Price = 10-0.2502(year-1980)+6.304
Anyway, back to my idea, if you plot the “mass-production” available storage capacity by year on the right y-axis, I believe you will a linear line rising from 1980 to 2009 that will cross the blue line somewhere between $150 and $300 which corresponds to the average price of an average hard drive over the years. I don’t share the enthusiasm as Matt to look up data and plot them to see if it matches my theory, but probably some other statistic freak out there might do it and share it or even prove that my theory is wrong..
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. The developers of Google Maps started working on the Wave project in 2007, in Sydney, Australia and they presented a live demo of Google Wave earlier this year at Google I/O Event, the developer conference that was held in 27-28 May, in San Fransisco. Last week, Google sent out 100,000 invites to Google Wave – I didn’t get one yet But if you are interesting to learn more about Google Wave and I suggest you take a look at least at the 10 minutes overview video because this will be the next thing on the web. As Google Wave developers said it, the product answers a simple question
What email would look like if it was invented today?
Check out this video by Stephanie and Greg, product managers of Google Wave
Did you get excited by the overview video? Are you ready for some more actions? Here’s the 80 minutes demonstration from Google I/O Read More »
The magic mouse points and clicks like a regular mouse however without the buttons and the scrolling wheel. You can practically click anywhere along the Multi-Touch surface. Brush one finger along the top surface to pan a full 360 degrees. Swipe a finger along the surface to scroll, just like on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can adjust the sensitivity from the System Preferences. And just like an iPhone or a MacBook trackpad, Magic Mouse detects the number of fingers you are using at any given time. This fits perfectly to advance through internet pages in Safari or browse albums in iTunes. Although this is not quite the 10/GUI concept, but Apple have certainly realized that the Multi-Touch technology introduced a breakthrough in the way people interact with the device, through gestures.
