Apple's Real Problem? Competition from Itself

The '57 Chevy of phones has yet to be exceeded (cc Gonzalo Baeza)

Apple's genius -- making it so that the hardware behind its mobile devices is, to the average consumer, invisible and irrelevant -- is also, perhaps unavoidably, its achilles heel. Announcements like today's, which are mostly about upgrades of the internals to the existing iPhone 4, are bound to disappoint.

This disappointment derives not from the substance of the upgrades. (A phone that is seven times faster, pulls data down better than ever, includes an awesome camera and an AI-powered voice-recognizing digital assistant is nothing to sneeze at.)

Rather, the problem is that Apple's core competency thus far has been in making us not care about the guts of its phones. As Dan Frommer notes:

Remember that what makes an iPhone an iPhone is mostly software. Apple's iOS is still what matters the most, and that doesn't need a new case design to be great.

There will always be phones with larger displays, better cameras, and faster or more affordable data plans than the iPhone. But so far, developers have yet to figure out how to use that power to give consumers an experience that is substantially different from a middle-of-the-road iPhone like the 3GS.

So I would argue that the real competition for the iPhone 4S isn't the Samsung or HTC whatsit --it's free 3GSes or whatever else is on sale at your favorite carrier.

In our household, we've got both a 3GS and an iPhone 4. You'd think the technology journalist would have the latest and greatest, but no. I got my phone first, so that's the one I'm stuck with. The thing is, occasionally we borrow each other's phones. And functionally, there's no difference, except that I'm less worried about breaking my 3GS, because of its superior case design.

The simple fact of the matter is that for most tasks, the real bottleneck is the performance of the network. Smart phones have hit a plateau -- what was a new and transformative technology has become mundane for the early adopters. And it's going to stay that way. Smart phones, like computers, have become tools. All that matters now is the software.

source: technology review

Steve Jobs Dies: Apple Chief Innovated Personal Computer, Created iPad, iPod, iPhone

Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56.

Jobs died "peacefully," surrounded by family members, his family said in a statement.

Neither Jobs' family nor Apple revealed where he died or from what cause, though in recent years Jobs had fought a form of pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant.

"We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed awaytoday," read a statement by Apple's board of directors. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts."

As Jobs' death was announced, the homepage of Apple's website switched to a full-page image of Jobs with the text, "Steve Jobs 1955-2011."

Clicking on the image revealed additional text that was credited to current Apple CEO Tim Cook in a separate memo to Apple employees.

"Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being," the text read. "Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

Reaction to Jobs' death came from far and wide -- even from the White House.

"Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs," President Obama said in a written statement. "Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

ABC News/ABC News

Apple founder, Steve Jobs has died.View Full Size

Steve Jobs in 60 Seconds Watch Video

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011 Watch Video

Jobs Tribute: Founder, FriendWatch Video

Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and, with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak, marketed what was considered the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.

Shortly after learning of Jobs' death, Wozniak told ABC News, "I'm shocked and disturbed."

Later, on ABC News' "Nightline," he said it was hard to imagine, in some ways, how the world would move forward without Jobs.

"You get shocked when people you know die," Wozniak said. "And this was closer to when John Lennon died, or JFK or Martin Luther King."

Industry watchers called Jobs a master innovator -- perhaps on a par with Thomas Edison -- changing the worlds of computing, recorded music and communications.

Click Here for Pictures: Steve Jobs Through the Years

Jobs' rivals in the development of personal computers, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, immediately reacted to his death and highlighted his importance to their industry.

Allen called him "a unique tech pioneer and auteur who knew how to make amazingly great products."

Gates extended his condolences and noted in a written statement that he and Jobs "have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives."

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come," Gates added. "For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely."

A more recent contemporary in the tech world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, also weighed in with a statement on Jobs.

"Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend," it read. "Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you."

Click here for more reaction to Jobs' death.

Jobs continued to innovate in recent years even as he battled severe health problems that prompted leaves of absence from Apple.

In 2004, he beat back an unusual form of pancreatic cancer, and in 2009 he was forced to get a liver transplant. After several years of failing health, Jobs announced on Aug. 24, 2011 that he was stepping down as Apple's chief executive.

"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know," Jobs wrote in his letter of resignation. "Unfortunately, that day has come."

Nevertheless, he remained as chairman of the corporation, a new position created just for him.

source:abcnews

Modified iPhone Can Detect Blood Disorders

A cheap lens that enables a cell phone's camera to discern the shapes of cells in a blood sample could make it easier to diagnose conditions such as sickle-cell anemia in places without medical infrastructure.

The system was developed at the University of California, Davis, and is designed to allow field workers to photograph blood samples from patients, and then send the micrographs to doctors via the cellular network for interpretation.

Although others have coupled microscopes to cell phone cameras, the Davis group aimed to make its device inexpensive. It did this by using a very simple lens that is made from a single ball of glass about one millimeter in diameter and held in position in front of the camera with a small piece of rubber. That small size results in a high curvature that provides good magnification, says Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu, a physicist with Davis's Center for Biophotonics, Science, and Technology, and the leader of the research team. Because a cell phone camera also uses lenses with a short focal length and a miniaturized sensor with very small pixels, it's optically compatible with the small ball lens. "You couldn't do this with a regular camera, the distances there are too big," says Wachsmann-Hogiu.

The downside of using a ball lens is that the resulting image is significantly distorted, except for in one very small area directly behind the lens. The Davis team solved this problem with software. To take an image using its system, the software takes multiple photos of a blood sample as either the camera or the sample is moved about; the software then combines the images into a larger, undistorted image. The current prototype can resolve features about 1.5 micrometers across.

While the system was developed using a relatively expensive iPhone 4 with a five-megapixel camera, Wachsmann-Hogiu says it could be adapted to cheaper phones with one or two megapixel cameras, which are more likely to be found in poor countries. Wachsmann-Hogiu believes that with mass production, an accessory based on a plastic, rather than glass, lens design could be produced for around $2, cheap enough to be broadly adopted in poor countries. 

Quick comparison: The upper row shows blood cells imaged using a traditional microscope. The bottom row show the same samples imaged with a smart phone. The left column is normal blood, the middle column is from a patient with an iron deficiency, and the right column is from a patient with sickle-cell anemia.
UC Davis

Ramesh Raskar, a professor at MIT's Media Lab, agrees that leveraging ubiquitous technologies is the key to improving health in poor countries. "There are more than four billion phones out there," he says. "I can't imagine more than one million microscopes are sold per year." Raskar's own Netra project is developing cell phone attachments that can be used for eye exams. He says work like that of his own and the Davis group is part of a "beautiful" trend that lets global health initiatives "piggyback on scalable platforms like cell phones."

The Davis team, which will present its research to the Optical Society of America's annual meeting next Wednesday, is planning a series of field tests and is in discussions with manufacturing partners to commercialize the technology. Wachsmann-Hogiu estimates the system could reach the market within two or three years. His team is also working on an accessory that lets a cell phone act as a spectrometer, built by stretching electrical tape with a narrow slit over the ends of a plastic tube. Light from a sample is diffracted by passing through the slits before falling on the phone's camera, creating a spectrum that could be used to perform basic analyses of blood chemistry.

source:technology  review

Facebook Shares Its Cloud Designs

If you invented something cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful than what came before, you might want to keep the recipe a closely guarded secret. Yet Facebook took the opposite approach after opening a 147,000-square-foot computing center in rural Oregon this April. It published blueprints for everything from the power supplies of its computers to the super-efficient cooling system of the building. Other companies are now cherry-picking ideas from those designs to cut the costs of building similar facilities for cloud computing.

The Open Compute Project, as the effort to open-source the technology in Facebook's vast data center is known, may sound altruistic. But it is an attempt to manipulate the market for large-scale computing infrastructure in Facebook's favor. The company hopes to encourage hardware suppliers to adopt its designs widely, which could in turn drive down the cost of the sever computers that deal with the growing mountain of photos and messages posted by its 750 million users. Just six months after the project's debut, there are signs that the strategy is working and that it will lower the costs of building—and hence using—cloud computing infrastructure for other businesses, too.

Facebook's peers, such as Google and Amazon, maintain a tight silence about how they built the cloud infrastructure that underpins their businesses. But that stifles the flow of ideas needed to make cloud technology better, says Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's director of technical operations and one of the founding members of the Open Compute Project. He's working to encourage other companies to contribute improvements to Facebook's designs.

Among the partners: chip makers Intel and AMD, which helped Facebook's engineers tweak the design of the custom motherboards in its servers to get the best computing performance for the least electrical power use. Chinese Web giants Tencent and Baidu are also involved; after touring Facebook's Oregon facility, Tencent's engineers shared ideas about how to distribute power inside a data center more efficiently. Even Apple, which recently launched its iCloud service, is testing servers based on Facebook's designs. Eventually the Open Compute Project could exist independently of the company that started it, as a shared resource for the industry.

Facebook's project may be gaining traction because companies that manufacture servers, such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, face a threat as business customers stop buying their own servers and instead turn to enormous third-party cloud operations like those offered by Amazon. "IT purchasing power is being consolidated into a smaller number of very large data centers," Frankovsky says. "The product plans and road maps of suppliers haven't been aligned with that." Being able to study the designs of one of the biggest cloud operators around can help suppliers reshape their product lines for the cloud era.

However, not everyone wants servers to run just like Facebook's, which are designed specifically for the demands of a giant online social network. That's why Nebula, which offers a cloud computing platform derived from one originally developed at NASA, is tweaking Facebook's designs and contributing them back to the Open Compute project. Nebula CEO Chris Kemp says this work will help companies that need greater memory and computing resources, such as biotech companies running simulations of drug mechanisms.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, which sells open-source cloud software to help businesses manage customer relations, sees challenges for Facebook's project. "There have always been efforts on open hardware, but it is much harder to collaborate and share ideas than with open software," he says. Nevertheless, Augustin expects the era of super-secret data center technology to eventually fade, simply because the secrecy is a distraction for businesses. "Many Internet companies today think that the way they run a data center is what differentiates them, but it is not," he says. "Facebook has realized that opening up will drive down data centers' costs so they can focus on their product, which is what really sets them apart."

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source: technology review

Low-Cost Tablet Runs on Three Watts of Power

After a year of testing in a remote village in India, researchers are ready to scale up production of an ultra-low-power $35 tablet called the I-slate.

The I-slate is designed to teach math and other subjects to students whose schools lack electricity or to students who don't have access to teachers at all. The device will enter full-scale production next year, and will be the first device to apply a low-power technology calledprobabilistic CMOS (complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor) to achieve a longer battery life.

The probabilistic CMOS approach is simple: run an ordinary microchip less stringently, sacrifice a small amount of precision, and get huge gains in energy efficiency in return. Probabilistic CMOS (CMOS refers to the technology behind most of today's chip technologies) works particularly well in graphics and sound processing, since human vision and hearing aren't perfect, and small errors are therefore undetectable.

Krishna Palem, a professor at Rice University and director of the Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics at Nanyang Technological University, first demonstrated probabilistic CMOS in 2006. Palem is now working on getting the technology into applications including a low-power hearing aid. In the educational tablet device, Palem says, probabilistic chips will enable huge power savings: the educational tablet will require just three watts of power, meaning it can be powered entirely by small solar cells like those on a pocket calculator.

The I-slate looks similar to an iPad, with a seven-inch liquid-crystal touch screen display. But it's not a full tablet computer—in fact, unlike other hardware supplied to disadvantaged children through efforts such as One Laptop Per Child, it's not a computer at all, and does not have an operating system. "It's an elaborate, single-function device," says Palem. Kids can read from a preloaded textbook or take notes and work out math problems using a stylus on a "scratch pad" to one side of the screen. The device can store a few pages of notes.

Palem's group at Nanyang Technological University is developing the I-slate in collaboration with the Indian nonprofit organization Villages for Development and Learning Foundation and the Los Angeles design firm Seso. Last year they tested prototype I-slates loaded up with a math textbook and exercises at a school in Mohd Hussainpalli, a village about 70 miles southwest of Hyderabad. In this region, electricity is unreliable, and some villages don't have teachers.

Marc Mertens, the CEO of Seso, designed the I-slate interface. The challenge, he says, has been to figure out "what is the ideal way to work with students, while making sure the device does as little as it can" to keep hardware costs and power consumption low. Animations and other complex, media-rich tools are just not possible. The math program is based on the standard textbook used in the region and allows students to move at their own pace, skipping problems if they get stuck, and suggesting which sections to go back to if they can't advance. Teachers can download information from each student's device to monitor their progress.

The field tests, which showed that the students' math skills improved when they used the I-slate, were done using prototypes based on conventional chips. Next year, the researchers will begin producing the three-watt, solar-powered model.

"We keep chewing the hardware down, then evaluating the effectiveness of the interface and the lessons on it," says Palem. "Once we are comfortable with the user interface, we will switch in the [probabilistic] chip."

As Palem's team works on upgrading the hardware, Mertens is working on broadening the curriculum that can be put on the I-slate. It's much easier to design a program to grade math tests than written work, he says. "We're exploring how this device could go beyond math and support more creative curricula," he says.

source: technology review

What Bill Gates Has Said About Steve Jobs Through the Decades

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have been competitors and friends for decades. Here's a look at some of the things Gates has said about Steve Jobs through the years.

"During 1984 Microsoft expects to get half of its revenue from Macintosh software." --- Gates appearance at an Apple event in 1983.

"To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different, it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard." --- 1998, as quoted three years ago in an AllThingsD interview.

"I wish I had Steve's taste. In people and product. It's magical." --- in the AllThingsD interview.

"Steve is going to introduce his transporter." --- Gates' response in the AllThingsD interview when asked what products will appear in the next five years.

"What I can't figure out is why he (Steve Jobs) is even trying (to be the CEO of Apple)? He knows he can't win." --- 1998 interview with I. Cringley for a Vanity Fair article.

"He never turns it off. He's always pushing." --- quoted in the book Gates by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews.

"It's okay." --- Gates' response to what he thought of the iPad, when questioned by Phil Bronstein in the Huffington Post.

"There are very things that are on the banned list in our household, but iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids." --- Melinda Gates, Bill Gates' wife, in 2009, according to the Telegraph.

"The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come."

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it's been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely." --- from the gatesnotes site, October 5, 2011

                                                                                                                                  source: pc world

Google Earth

When it comes to mapping software, Google Earth is unique. Most maps can’t show hills at all. Some only show altitude lines. With Google Earth a person can tilt the map and spin it around. Seeing where the roads go over mountain peeks, and even get a feel for where they can go park to view fireworks, or what the view from a house for sale would be. It’s also great for planning scenic trips through national parks.

NOTE: Don’t rely on a battery powered map or GPS when power failure would leave you lost on the woods.

Keep in mind that it’s smaller on an iPad screen then most printed maps, so not only is it true that you ”can” zoom in, you actually “have to”. The flip side is that you don’t have to flip pages, ever, and you don’t ever run off the edges of the map. Some areas don’t have as much detail as others (out in the ocean, near the north and south poles, ect.), but overall, Google Earth is far better then a printed map.

source: appy  geek