Tag Internet

Entries 16 Total

Adobe and Flash vs. Apple, the iPad and HTML5

Oct 29, ’10 7:08 PM

So it would seem Apple is help­ing to win the battle for an open web based on HTML5.

Mefee­dia, a video search engine, is report­ing that “54% of web video is now avail­able for play­back in HTML5 (H.264 mostly)”. Up from 10% in January.

Mean­while Adobe has bit­ten the bul­let and is build­ing HTML5 export cap­ab­il­ity into Flash Pro, their Flash author­ing tool. And not a moment too soon.

Nack makes a per­tin­ent point about Adobe’s motives:

Flash is great for a lot of things … It’s not the only game in town, how­ever, and Adobe makes its money selling tools, not giv­ing away players.

Indeed indeed. And what they’ll be pissed about is that any­one can build HTML5 author­ing tools, which means they’re not the only game in town either. With Flash, Adobe is the only game in town and they were well on the way to com­pletely con­trolling rich con­tent on the web. Con­trol this and Flash Pro would have become a money tree for Adobe, degrad­ing the web in the process.

What does Apple have to gain from an open web and the demise of Flash? The same thing as every­body else, a level play­ing field.

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Impressive augmented reality coming to Bing Maps

Feb 15, ’10 12:16 PM

Demon­stra­tion by Blaise Aguera at TED of the impress­ive work they’ve been doing behind the scenes on Bing Maps. (click through for the video)

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How to confuse a Facebook user

Feb 12, ’10 7:39 AM

Read­WriteWeb, a pop­u­lar tech­no­logy web­site, has a page that ranks highly in Google’s search res­ults for “Face­book login”.

Check out the com­ments on the page. They’re filled with com­plaints from con­fused Face­book users who think that this is the new Face­book login page.

Quite clearly many people do not use book­marks, or simply type “facebook.com” in the address bar but instead they Google for what they’re after and click on the first res­ult assum­ing it is correct.

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Apple iPad will choke innovation

Feb 1, ’10 12:59 PM

While I’m a big fan of the iPad’s ease of use, this aspect wor­ries me.

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The main problem with Wolfram Alpha

May 19, ’09 8:11 AM

John Timmer’s take on Wolfram Alpha:

… the biggest issue is that, in the pro­cess of cre­at­ing the data store behind Alpha, all the con­text behind a num­ber — who pro­duced it, what were their meth­ods, how was the raw data obtained, is the num­ber actu­ally rel­ev­ant for a given ana­lysis, etc. — is stripped …

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Wolfram Alpha, a new way to find facts

May 17, ’09 11:49 AM

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine you’re likely to hear a lot more about and it went live with a test run today. It’s not a search engine in the same way as Google, which indexes and searches web­sites, but an answer search engine, which indexes and com­putes facts.

Wolfram Alpha about page:

Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambi­tious, long-term pro­ject to make all sys­tem­atic know­ledge imme­di­ately com­put­able by any­one.  You enter your ques­tion or cal­cu­la­tion, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and grow­ing col­lec­tion of data to com­pute the answer.  Based on a new kind of knowledge-based computing.

Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research describes the secret behind Wolfram Alpha:

The secret weapon that has allowed us, and no one else, to assemble such a vast lib­rary of algorithms, in such a diverse range of fields, is Math­em­at­ica.

Math­em­at­ica is famil­iar to sci­ent­ists and engin­eers as the most power­ful, most gen­eral tool for sci­entific com­pu­ta­tion, a role it has played since Ver­sion 1 was released in 1988.

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Time to ditch Facebook?

Feb 18, ’09 10:20 PM

Have you ever thought it was a bit creepy that Face­book, a profit-driven organ­isa­tion, has such an intim­ate know­ledge of you, your friend­ships and fam­ily links? Ever con­sidered leav­ing Face­book because of such creep­i­ness? Maybe now is a good time.

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Passionato

Feb 11, ’09 8:50 PM

And now for some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent, for those of you who like to listen to clas­sical music. I’ve been mean­ing to blog this for a while:

Passionato.com — this is how digital music dis­tri­bu­tion on the net should work: decent length pre­views, DRM-free (mean­ing no restric­tions on which devices you play your music) and avail­able in lossless file format (mean­ing the files are com­pressed without sac­ri­fi­cing the integ­rity of the audio, as hap­pens with lossy formats like MP3).

They could improve their search func­tion, but the show-stopper is price: if I find an album I like what’s to stop me from pur­chas­ing the CD for cheaper? I’m not a huge buyer of music but I would be if digital dis­tri­bu­tion com­peted with CDs.

Check out more on their about page.

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Easily encrypt your internet telephony calls

Dec 1, ’08 1:50 PM

Send­ing inform­a­tion over the inter­net can be like using post­cards and VoIP (iChat, Skype, Gizmo, Google Talk, etc.) is no exception.

To solve this Phil Zim­mer­mann, the cre­ator of PGP, the most widely used email encryp­tion soft­ware in the world, cre­ated an applic­a­tion for encrypt­ing video and audio calls over the internet.

It’s called Zfone and it’s as easy as start­ing the app up before you begin a call (all people on call need the app). It works with Win­dows XP, Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux. The only VoIP app it doesn’t work with is Skype because Skype doesn’t use open stand­ards, unlike every other VoIP app in the world, so you’re bet­ter off without Skype (use iChat, Google Talk, Gizmo or any other option out there).

Highly recom­men­ded, down­load it here.

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The Fear and the closed internet

Oct 3, ’08 8:55 AM

Dar­ing Fireball’s John Gruber explains why he thinks the man­age­ment of some of the closed aspects of Apple’s iPhone App Store are flawed.

And if that interests you, you might also be inter­ested in this inter­view with Jonathan Zit­train and a review of his new book, The Future of the Inter­net — And How to Stop It.

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