Fan To Pro - The Blog of Professional Geekery

New Market for the Playbook?

A shipment of Playbooks, over 5000 units, were stolen last week.  The truck carrying the shipment disappeared when the driver when into truck stop in Indiana.  Apparently, someone found a new market for the tablet - the black market.

In the same article, the UK's telecommunication regulator is concerned that it's too easy for kids to find porn using Blackberries.  RIM has offered filters, but only one British network has implimented them.  Mind, a teenager looking for porn will find ways around filters.

What a way to top of a year...

-- Scott D

Turnaround Time for RIM?

RIM's execs have announced that they have slashed their salaries to $1 (assumed to be Canadian) after a year of disaster piled on top of disaster for the company.  Delays in the Blackberry 10 smartphone and the low sales of the Playbook didn't help, either.

The slashing may be symbolic, but it could mean that the execs want to turn the company around.  Playbook OS2.0 is in development and will be aimed at businesses already using Blackberries, and the new Blackberry is just waiting for energy efficient chips.

--Scott D

News from the North - Dec 11

More Phones Hacked
Okay, not quite so bad as the above would imply. However, the News of the World's phone hacking scandal has reached over 800 people whose phones have been hacked. Coupled with products such as the one from CarrierIQ, phone privacy should be a far more important issue than it currently is.

RIM's Anno Horribile Continues
The Indonesian government is threatening to cut Blackberry data services unless RIM provides state access to users' messages. RIM is trying to work with Indonesia's government, though, and has installed the mandatory filters.

--Scott D

News from the North - Dec 10

Social Media Brought Together
A new device called MagnetU will let you broadcast your social media (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) profiles to everyone around you. The device will also alert you when it detects a profile in the area that is similar to yours. Great for extroverts; not so great for those who like some privacy.

Online Memorials
Working from an idea already in use in Seattle, a Regina, SK company, Remco Memorials, is offering a way to bring up memorials on smartphones while visiting a grave. The company will provide a QR code to be added to grave markers that, when read by a smartphone, will go to a webpage that can be added to by family and friends with the password.

Canadian R&D Spending to Rise
Canadian firms are intending to increase their research and development expenditures, the first such increase since 2007. However, Canadian R&D is still lagging in terms of GDP. Most of the R&D work (approximately 75%) is done in Ontario and Quebec.

Samples Missing
Geeks interested in sapce exploration may want to develop a tracking system for NASA, who has lost or misplaced 500 samples of material from space since 1970. The missing pieces, including moon rocks and meteorites, were part of the 26 000 samples loaned out by NASA. Some of the missing samples may have been returned but not checked in.

Kill Your Cable and Phone
Washington, DC, is funding a 100-gigabit network to be made available to universities, businesses, and anyone willing to resell the service. Such a service bypasses the backbone that was built by a telco or a cable company, and was created to serve areas of Washinbton not served by those companies. A step like this could be the first in turning high speed Internet service from luxury to public good.

WebOS Released

Hewlett-Packard is releasing WebOS as open source software.  While the company will still support WebOS, the move allows other programmers to take the source code and modify it to their own needs.  This could be a move to get people to use both the Palm Pre smartphone and the HP TouchPad, both of which use the OS.

--Scott

Screen Size People, Screen Size!

What mobile devices and semi-mobile devices will succeed?  What ones will fail?  Which of the exotically-named consumer electronics clamoring for our dollars and time appeal to us - and to others?  What devices will succeed that we want our books, games, etc. on?

We look at these devices and want to know this.  We want to get our best value.  We want to make sure we get the media we create on the more profitable device.  But what will succeed, what will fail?

Well there are many reasons and factors, but I really think people are missing the kind of obvious factor in what makes success in SmartTabletPhoneBooKNet market.

The screen.

Thoughts on Technology, Geekery, And The Change in What Wait Time Is

I now see waiting time a lot differently.  Those times at the dentists office or the train station?  They're no longer annoying, or where I try to figure out what have to do with myself.  They're productive times.

Why? Because I have a Smartphone.  I have a computer that just happens to make phone calls.  I can spend that time reading, checking email, updating people, and more. I think of my wait time far differently now than I did a few weeks ago

The Web? There's an App For That

I can't imagine what I'd do without the web.  Research, news, game tips, general amusement, and more are all there online.  Anyone can make a web page and create a new resource.  The web is vital to what I do, to my life, to my job - and I imagine you're the same way.

However we also know the web has problems.  We get bad pages and embed ads, corrupted sites and bad formatting.  How many of us have a few ad blockers, script busters, and other tools to make web-surfing easier?  How many of us sigh as we try and help our less computer-literate friends and relatives navigate the complexities of the modern web?  The web, for all its benefits, is complicated in many ways that frustrate our enjoyment of it.

Kindles, BlackBerries and The Importance Of Thinking Forward

When people go into the tech business, they dream of creating the latest gaget, the thing that's going to end up in everyone's pockets, the device that's going to transform society. Sometimes, these things happen - or, if people don't completely innovate a new product, they improve on an existing one.

But, as two news stories that came up this week pointed out, just because you're on top of the tech heap dosn't mean you're going to stay there forever.

The "WHY?" Behind That "WHAT?" Takeover

When news broke last night that Hewlitt-Packard had purchase Palm, a great cry of "WHAT?" went up throughout the geekosphere. Okay, we all knew a Palm sale was coming - the surprise was the buyer. HP made no logical sense. The company hadn't even been mentioned in the rumor mill, which, as of late, had focused on Lenovo.

The "WHAT?" was inevitably followed by a "WHY?" But the merger does make more sense when you don't look at the whole, and break it down into its parts.