40 years ago, in 1969, a man made his first step on the Moon.
At the same time a boy made his first sight of the Earth. What have these two man have in common?
Omega Speedmaster watch!
Apollo 11 images courtesy of NASA
Archive for the ‘News from around the Web’ Category
40 years ago in the Universe…
Monday, October 12th, 2009Unhappy users of Nokia OVI store
Monday, June 29th, 2009My last post on Nokia Ovi application store seems to proove the points. One month after its launch the online store provokes negative impressions and comments on the Internet. I’ll cite one of them related to poor customer support posted by Matthew Miller on Nokia Experts blog. I totally agree with arguments in that article and comments from Nokia users. In this time of economic slow down when users are desperately trying to get more for less, Nokia allows such an arogance to strip down the customer support to lower levels yet rise high revenue margins for their application distribution services. That obviously does not make them competitive to other mobile phone and application developpers and they continue to loose the market.
Last weekend I’ve met friends, a small mobile application development team, and discussed their view on the future of Nokia. They’ve totally agree that Nokia’s attitude does not favour small developers with restricted budget and they are turning to Apple. I bet there are many others in the mobile development industry that will follow the same trend with catastrophic results of Nokia Ovi store. That explains why there is such a poor offer of new contents for Nokia phones. Nokia continues its old strategy to release plenty of new phone models but they don’t realize that it is not what customers want.
Now I’ve regret even less that I’ve switched from N95 to iPhone…
Gundam 30th anniversary
Friday, May 22nd, 2009In April 1979 a TV series called Mobile Suite Gundam featured a giant robotic suite piloted by a human who was seated inside machine. Not only innovative in the world of manga and anime this serie, still popular 3 decades later, inspired creation of biosuites and robotic design.
Sunrise studio started construction of a full scale Gundam at Tokyo’s Odaiba to mark the anniversary. gundam30th
Spring time…
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Apologies for not writing for more than 3 months. This winter was particularly cold but the snow was great and ski slopes fantastic. 
Finally the spring time arrived with “sakura” in its
cherry in blossom
full blossom.
On the less interesting side, the economic crisis still prevails in news headlines causing markets to zig-zag. I suggest enjoying the spring time instead! Companies with loads of cash are investing in other companies (Oracle acquiring Sun, Cisco acquiring Tidal, Symantec - MI5, Apple acquiring …;-) )
There are plenty of news in space exploration, no extraterrestrials yet.
In mobile technology nothing spectacular. Nokia is in its decline still, Apple released software version 3.0 for iPhone in its beta with the SDK for developers to practice. It is hard hit for those developing missing features for the current iPhone release, like MMS, copy/paste, etc No major breakthrough in innovation as you already know. KDDI in Japan announced solar phones. Sounds good for this summer on the beach! And it looks great. Much better than chunky back-pack accessory that Nokia released for its phones. Anyway I think I’ll switch to iPhone from my Nokia N95 despite simpler camera and lack of other features. Why? Just because it has some great applications. I’ll still keep my 2 years old N95 as a navigation tool (I’ve paid for 3 years navigation license), and for the great blogging tool called Wavelog (from telewaving.com) that will be very handy to keep you up to date on all my blogs during summer trips… Yes, I know there are blogging clients for iPhone, but when I make a photo with N95 like the cherry blossom above, I’d like to post it directly from the phone. Also some YouTube videos that iPhone will eventually be able to record with release 3.0 of its software. To conclude, one phone for the beach and one for city. And no BlackBerry!
Apple is not a one man show, it’s a lifestyle and it will go on…
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Journalists (both on-line and off-line or paper based) are trying to make headlines with news that Apple is going to face difficulties while Steve Jobs is on a medical leave. What should make a headline is that Steve is a remarkable person with some great achievments. But Apple, there is no doubt, was here, is here and will stay around!
As I wrote before in last 20 years I’ve started personal computing with ZX Spectrum, switched to Apple II, moved to Windows, to Linux and finally, back to Apple again 2 years ago. Apple did have difficulties throughout its history but it reinvented itself and created a wide portfolio of great products that have a solid foundation and critical user mass. More importantly, I base my statement that Apple (with Mac OS X) will be an important player in personal computing during the years to come on the fact that kids these days prefer Mac OS X over Vista. This was not the case only few years back.
Some might argue that home users are not the majority of personal compter users, the most of the market is still in corporate world. This is statistically true, but more I see people bringing their personall Macs to their offices and using them along the corporate PC… Isn’t it quite the same with iPhones? Just look around.