Tag: design

  • Why I want the iPhone to succeed

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    I’m glad the iPhone’s is here – and I have very selfish reasons for wanting it to succeed. That’s because even without the cellular telephony, it looks like something I’ve been wanting to buy. But it’s also because after years of writing about smartphones, I’ve seen the established players become lazy and complacent, go down…

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  • The Emperor’s New AI

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    “It looks like you’re trying to have a conversation with a computer – can I help? In the early 1970s, no science show was complete without predictions of HAL-like intelligent autonomous computers by the turn of the century. The Japanese, fearing their industrial base would collapse without a response to this omniscient technology, poured hundreds…

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    Are Google’s glory days behind it? – Colly Myers

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    Colly’s prognosis was sound. In December 2008, Google announced its intention to make “social search” a significant factor in its search results – the end of the hegemony of the algorithm. “It’s a well known aspect of man and machine systems. Complex systems with no control fall over. Every example of it you can think…

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  • Whatever happened to… the smartphone?

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    At one time, the future of mobiles looked simple. The smartphone was a new kind of gadget that was subsuming the pager, the camera, the PDA, the Walkman, and almost every other iece of technology you could carry – and offering it in volume at an irresistible price. Often free. Over time, every phone would…

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  • The cost of an “Always On lifestyle”

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    About a year ago, a man I’d never met before showed me pictures of a dramatic episode in his life. These showed him driving his wife to the hospital, where she was about to give birth. There were dozens and dozens of these pictures, and in each one his wife was looking progressively more grumpy.…

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  • Mobile data too complex, too flakey – poll

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    But still we do it. Actually, we don’t – even with 3.5G networks it’s almost always quicker to ask a stranger than it is to look something up on a mobile phone. And more fun. Punters are giving flaky mobile data services the cold shoulder, a survey has revealed. 64 per cent of those surveyed…

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