WebJives - Me & You

Nokia ClearBlack display

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:05:00 -0800

ClearBlack display uses a sequence of polarising layers to eliminate reflections.

You have probably tried polarising sunglasses before now and so have a rough idea of how that works. If you look at a window or the surface of some water using polarising glasses, then they become more transparent – which is why they’re especially good for fishermen. The polariser cuts out reflected light.

Polariser layers used in display solutions are bit more sophisticated than in sunglasses. Light rays actually gets “processed” many times on its way in and out of your phones´s screen.

There’s both a linear polariser and retardation layers between the surface of your phone and the display. When light hits your screen, this is what happens:

It hits the linear polariser, this vertically polarises the light. (Polarising means – roughly – aligning the wave vibration in a particular direction).

Then it hits the circular polariser retardation layer. This converts the light again, making it right-circularly polarised.

Then it hits the screen and bounces off it, switching the rotation of the light to leftist.

It goes back through the retardation layer. When this happens, the light becomes horizontally polarised.

Finally, it hits the linear polariser, since the light is horizontally polarised at this point it can be blocked entirely by this optical solution.

So why doesn’t the light from your phone’s display get blocked? Because it only goes through the second half of this journey so the light is unpolarised when it hits the final filter and goes through.

via conversations.nokia.com

I like it when small innovations can make large impact. Although I am yet to see it in practice, ClearBlack display makes is one such innovation.

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How rebounding economy impacts Facebook

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:50:00 -0800

About the only bad news in the employment report was for Facebook. It can't be a coincidence that its roster of users swelled to over 800 million worldwide during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, as joblessness swelled and with it, free time to spend on Facebook. And in the U.S., jobs are growing in manufacturing and construction, where few people sit in front of PCs, while shrinking in information, finance and government, where most everybody does.

So, as Facebook users go back to work, they will have less time to update their pages and peer at those of others. And fewer office jobs also means less time goofing off at work looking at Facebook (which is broken up by watching videos on You Tube.) And folks who are employed and have a few bucks in their pockets might actually get out and have what used to be called a social life, as opposed to social networking. "Friend" might once again be a noun rather than a verb. It could happen.

via online.barrons.com

As Facebook users go back to work, they'll have less time to update their pages and peer at those of others.

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Google's biggest challenge right now is Staying Relevant

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:01:00 -0800

Out of 20,000 potential matches on YouTube, out of 21 million potential video matches across the web, what does Google’s supposedly sophisticated Universal Search algorithm pick out to display as the top video content to be shown within the top search results?

A cartoon created by a company pitching its SEO software on YouTube as a way for Santorum to solve his Google problem. Wow.

via searchengineland.com

Relevancy took Google to the top, Relevancy (or the lack of it) will take it down.

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Apple's Tim Cook expresses 'outrage' over NYT report on worker safety

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:37:00 -0800

Now, an internal email from Apple CEO Tim Cook has leaked to 9to5 Mac, partially disputing the NYT report.

As a company and as individuals, we are defined by our values. Unfortunately some people are questioning Apple’s values today, and I’d like to address this with you directly. We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern. Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are. For the many hundreds of you who are based at our suppliers’ manufacturing sites around the world, or spend long stretches working there away from your families, I know you are as outraged by this as I am. For the people who aren’t as close to the supply chain, you have a right to know the facts.

via theverge.com

Wonder how an internal mail from Secretive Apple leaks to clear up the image but such emails never leak detailing product releases.

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Sometimes you need a voice from outside to know what's missing within

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:23:00 -0800

“We knew there was an incident in 2006,” he told Threat Level. “But it was inconclusive at the time as to whether or not actual code was taken or that someone had actual code in their hands.”

Following the public claim of hackers earlier this month that they had source code for pcAnywhere, Norton Utilities and other products, Paden said the company went back through its logs and records and “put 2 and 2 together that there was a source code theft.”

via wired.com

Symantec waited for 7 long years and hackers to trash them publicly before investigating and putting "2 and 2" together and we all trusted them for securing us.

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Con Artist Starred in Sting That Cost Google Millions

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:05:00 -0800

The government built its criminal case against Google using money, aliases and fake companies—tactics often used against drug cartels and other crime syndicates, according to interviews and court documents. Google agreed to pay a $500 million forfeiture last summer in a settlement to avoid prosecution for aiding illegal online pharmaceutical sales.

Google acknowledged in the settlement that it had improperly and knowingly assisted online pharmacy advertisers allegedly based in Canada to run advertisements for illicit pharmacy sales targeting U.S. customers.

via online.wsj.com

And all this under Google management eyes and supposedly with their support. That's evil.

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JC Penney Reinvents Department-Store Retailing

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:12:00 -0800

Over the course of a two-hour presentation on Manhattan's West Side today, JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson and President Michael Francis outlined a series of major changes across all aspects of the department store's pricing, promotion, presentation and products. Changes will be unveiled to consumers on Feb. 1.

via adage.com

That's a lot of "talk" without actual "walk" for an ex-Apple executive. So as soon as you leave Apple, you forget the Apple way of doing things.

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Tim Cook: Phone market isn't a two-horse race, 'there's a horse in Redmond that always runs' | The Verge

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:55:00 -0800

asked if the phone market was now a two-horse race between iOS and Android, Cook said that "There's a horse in Redmond that always suits up and always runs, and will keep running.

via theverge.com

Indeed there is a very fast, very pretty horse suited up and running in Redmond but the challenge is that this horse joined the mile rong race almost many lengths behind. So it won't win the shorter races, but will definitely show up in the podium in the long run. Just keep running and you will find this Redmond horse in the corner of your eye, keeping you honest and pushing you to give the best.

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Apple - Record quarterly revenues of $46.33 Billion

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:52:00 -0800

Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 first quarter which spanned 14 weeks and ended December 31, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

via apple.com

Saving this for eternity - make that one year till Apple breaks this record next year same time.

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Gamification of Visual Studio

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:15:00 -0800

With the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, achievements are unlocked based on your activity. Your code is analyzed on a background thread each time you compile. In addition, the extension listens for certain events and actions that you may perform in Visual Studio, reporting progress on these events to the server.

via channel9.msdn.com

Brilliant idea to engage developers and make them learn/use newer coding techniques.

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End of an era at Yahoo

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:35:00 -0800

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), the premier digital media company, today announced that Jerry Yang has resigned from its Board of Directors and all other positions with the company, effective today. In addition, Yang resigned from the Boards of Yahoo Japan Corporation and Alibaba Group Holding Limited, effective today.

In a letter to the Yahoo! Board Chairman Roy Bostock, Yang wrote:

"My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future."

via investor.yahoo.net

Wonder how it feels to leave something which you started and sustained for 17 long years. Yang created an internet powerhouse and more than that a very powerful brand and the way he created and marketed it, Yahoo will always be a young company. Whenever I think of yahoo, I think of young internet savvy people connecting with each other. I hope this stays to end of an era only and not end of Yahoo.

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XBOX 360 growing as entertainment destination

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:28:00 -0800

The hours of video consumed globally on Xbox LIVE increased 140 percent from 2010 to 2011.

In December more than 60 percent of U.S. Xbox LIVE Gold members used entertainment apps on Xbox LIVE – for an average of an hour a day each.

The number of people using entertainment apps on Xbox LIVE increased by nearly 50 percent globally from November to December.

via majornelson.com

One big reason for this is the new Metro design based XBOX Dashboard which puts entertainment to the center.

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Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:58:00 -0800

I just switched the default search engine in my browser from Google to Bing. And if you care about working efficiently, or getting the right results when you search, then maybe you should too. Don't laugh!

The great thing is, of course, you can just switch. Hit up your browser preferences, and swap your default to Bing. I know, I know, but yes I'm serious. Sure, Bing had a rocky start. But if you haven't seen it recently it's worth another look. It has a super clean interface. It's fast. And operators work the way you expect them to. Best of all it's relevant.

In short, it's a lot like Google. Not the Google of today, but the Google you fell in love with, the one that put your search results above its financial ones. The Google that delivered.

via gizmodo.com

I've been using Bing as my default search engine for over 1.5 years now, never had to goto Google during this time except for books search. Others are realizing that you can't feed the evil forever and make it stronger.

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Android ain't free

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:35:00 -0800

Microsoft Corp. and LG Electronics have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for LG’s tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. The contents of the agreement have not been disclosed.

“We are pleased to have built upon our longstanding relationship with LG to reach a mutually beneficial agreement. Together with our 10 previous agreements with Android and Chrome OS device manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung and Acer, this agreement with LG means that more than 70 percent of all Android smartphones sold in the U.S. are now receiving coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS.”

via microsoft.com

70 percent of all Android smartphones sold in the U.S. are now receiving coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio. Like Samsung, Acer, HTC - LG also knows now, "Android ain't free".

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2012 - Year of Microsoft

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:06:00 -0800

I’ll say it: I’m bullish on Microsoft in 2012. This could be the year that it shakes its malaise and takes its place alongside Apple, Google, and Amazon as a dominant innovator of the mobile age. For the first time in forever, Microsoft has a couple major products that are not merely good enough. They’re just plain great. I’ve been effusive in my praise for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s new mobile operating system. At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, we saw the one piece that has been missing from Microsoft’s new phone effort—killer hardware. Nokia unveiled the Lumia 900, the most powerful and beautiful Windows Phone to hit the United States yet (it will be released on AT&T sometime this year). Then there’s Windows 8, the spectacular desktop OS that Microsoft plans to release this year, and which will feature a new mobile-friendly touch interface that could make for the first viable Windows competitors to the iPad.

If you consider Microsoft’s Xbox juggernaut, which now features not just games but lots of entertainment apps, you begin to see the outline of a strategy to win big. Here’s a company with a killer mobile and desktop OS, a place in hundreds of millions of offices and living rooms around the world, a great design team, an unbeatable sales and distribution arm, and billions in cash. When you put it that way, Microsoft almost sounds as good as Apple, doesn’t it?

via slate.com

I am bullish too especially with Windows Phone. It will see its best year once Nokia devices start rolling across. HTC and Samsung WP7 devices have struggled when compared to iPhone and Android devices. Nokia will push it the right way in Europe and Asia with its relationship with Telco's and market presence. Windows 8, whatever we have seen is cool, if combined with right hardware, it will excel as a great alternative to iPad. XBOX will continue and maintain its numero uno position. We will see many new ways Kinect's use is imagined but no concrete sellable implementation. Bing will grow even further and gain market share but that gain will come lesser from Google's share and more from Yahoo and others. In my view, 2013 will be even better. Fingers crossed.

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The Third Ecosystem

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:24:00 -0800

Microsoft needs Nokia to be what Samsung is for Android.

Nokia, Microsoft boosted by bullish Credit Suisse report on Windows Phone

Of particular interest, Garcha said that research among mobile operators indicates that they want Windows Phone to become the proverbial "third ecosystem" in a market that is increasingly dominated by Apple's and Google. "We found that 85 per cent of carrier respondents believe that there is a need for a third ecosystem, with 77 per cent noting that it will be Windows Phone/Nokia," Garcha wrote. "Our survey also showed that both subsidy and volume share is expected to be markedly higher for Windows Phone over the next 12 months."

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Windows 8 Storage Spaces

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:57:00 -0800

Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency

Windows 8 provides a new capability called Storage Spaces enabling just that. In a nutshell, Storage Spaces allow:

Organization of physical disks into storage pools, which can be easily expanded by simply adding disks. These disks can be connected either through USB, SATA (Serial ATA), or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). A storage pool can be composed of heterogeneous physical disks – different sized physical disks accessible via different storage interconnects.

Usage of virtual disks (also known as spaces), which behave just like physical disks for all purposes. However, spaces also have powerful new capabilities associated with them such as thin provisioning (more about that later), as well as resiliency to failures of underlying physical media.

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Amazon: JP Morgan Rebuts Goldman; Sales Set to Beat

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:51:00 -0800

JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth this afternoon reiterates an overweight rating on shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) in what amounts to a direct response to the somewhat negative remarks this morning by Goldman Sachs’s Heather Bellini.

Bellini had written that comScore’s estimate of 15% growth this quarter might mean Amazon’s sales would miss expectations if the company turned in only its average upside of 23 percentage points above the that overall growth figure.

But Anmuth observes that Amazon’s outperformance relative to comScore data has been expanding this year, averaging 33 percentage points in the last three quarters.

Anmuth believes that means Amazon could deliver at least 32 percentage points of growth above comScore’s figure, turning in 47% growth. That would put Amazon’s total sales growth ahead of the 44% that Bellini cited as the consensus that Amazon has to beat.

via blogs.barrons.com

Case of Analyst alignment?

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Why Google paid $1 Billion for three years to Firefox

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:09:00 -0800

Kara Swisher: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal, Besting Microsoft and Yahoo

Google saw 11.7 Billion searches according to the November 2011 comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report. Firefox has 25% browser marketshare. If we assume that all 100% of Firefox users have Google set as the default search engine, that means 2.875 Billion searches on Google are coming from Firefox.

Revenue per search for Google was around $36.5 per 1000 searches in 2010 (http://www.thestreet.com/story/10839436/google-higher-search-market-share-expected.html). Assuming the same number for now and doing simple maths - for 2.875 Billion searches, it comes to 104.9 Million per month. So for the year, they are making $1.2 billion per year. $300 million as Traffic Acquisition Cost to Firefox is 25%, which is very low number when compared with large publishing partners or content networks.

I don't doubt the statement by Google Chrome Developer, Peter Kasting that Firefox is a partner. Both are making money, one more than other.

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Windows Phone issues are two - Late entrant & Switching costs

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:52:00 -0800

Way too late.

Two to three years in the hole, the only way Windows Phone can win the market now is to make a product that is leaps and bounds better than what’s out there. They need something that’s an iPhone-in-2007 type product. The product they have, while good, isn’t that.

It’s not enough to be better. (And we can argue as to whether iOS or Android or Windows Phone is better.) You need to present a product so good that people have to buy it. Windows Phone isn’t close to being that. I’m sorry, but it’s just not.

And one other big reason for that is something else Kindel oddly downplays: apps. Even if you think Windows Phone is better than iOS or Android right now, you’re unlikely to buy it because all of your favorite apps are available on those competing platforms and very few are available for Windows Phone.

via parislemon.com

MG Siegler responds to Charlie Kindel and nails it when he says that one of the key reasons Windows Phone has not done well is that it was late to the market.

iPhone has an First Mover advantage.

Early Mover or First Mover Advantage is the advantage gained by the initial occupant of a market segment. This advantage may stem from the fact that the first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match.

FMA is the sometimes insurmountable advantage gained by the initial or “first-moving” significant occupant of a new market segment. This advantage may stem from the fact that the first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match. Originally made apparent by the ever booming Internet phenomenon, it has recently been on the decline due to the recent economic situation. It is important to note that the first-mover advantage refers to the first significant company to move into a market, not merely the first company. In order for a company to try and become a first-mover that company needs to figure out if the overall rewards outweigh the beginning/underlying risks. Sometimes first-movers are rewarded with huge profit margins and a monopoly like status.

This gets complicated by Switching costs and buyer's choice under uncertainty also come into play when you have FMA.

Switching costs, late entrants must invest extra resources to attract customers away from the first-mover firm. Buyer choice under uncertainty, buyers may rationally stick with the first brand they encounter that performs the job satisfactorily. For individual customers benefits of finding a superior brand are seldom great enough to justify the additional search costs that must be incurred. Switching costs play a huge role in where, what, and why consumers buy what they buy. Users, over time, grow accustomed to a certain product and its functions, as well as the company that produces them products. Once a consumer is comfortable and set in their ways they apply a certain cost, which is usually fairly steep, to switching to other similar products.

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