The Coolness Factor Spring 2013

This has turned out to be the most needed and productive aspect of my Nexus 7. If tablets are to take over this will be the very indispensable thing that pushes them over the top.

Notifications are often overlooked and seldom promoted in hype but I have personally come to believe notifications have enhanced and enriched my Internet life and experience beyond what I thought possible.

It is improving features like notifications that develops will find important opportunities and as users we will make the best use of tablets and smart phones.

Who has time to hunt and peck through hundreds of installed apps to know what to do next? Notifications helps us order our digital lives and journeys. We can say we have gone buying web surfing to a more effective form of process thanks to notifications.

With Notifications we are alerted to:
New emails
Late breaking news items
Contacts from Linked In, etc.
App upgrades
Schedule reminders
Feeds
Invitatations
Downloads and uploads

This is the chant and mantra for companies as big as RIM, LG, Nokia and Dell. Even Mighty Microsoft is singing that song, heck, they are leading the choir.

Remember Gateway and Compaq Computers? Sometimes an exit is quiet and unexpected. In other cases it is loud and anticipated. In many other instances the decent and decline can be slow and uncertain leaving the company to teeter of the edge of oblivion for years if not decades.

In all cases it is painful for those that have invested their faith and futures.

It is the nature of business that companies will sooner or later encounter peaks and valleys. It’s when the valley is as deep and forbidding as the Grand Canyon that blame is cast, heads begin to roll, excuses are made, and desparate attempts to recover and regain lost glory that things get specific. Some would like to believe that in the wake of the loss of Steve Jobs that even lofty Apple may be on the ledge of its own deep drop into the valley.

The incredible thing is that this can be the very catalyst for change. Innovative companies see this as the perfect and exact moment to change the direction and culture of companies too long mired in inertia unable to change with the times and trends.

As if we need another term in our lives, now we get “cryptocurrencies”. The latest and so far the most successful incarnation is “bitcoin” (Winklevi)

None of us really know what the hell they are but according to all the hype we want it.

So have the geeks actually created a way to make money?

I sense a scam to be revealed some day leaving many to wonder how they could be so foolish.

Another nothing week tech wise or is this just my opinion? It seems that news has slowed down or I have become jaded and numb to the blurbs that masquerade as news these days. I am not sure what would move me but it must be something other than new law suits and companies moving into the wheelhouse of other market leaders.

So let begin the roundup of Bits & Bytes:

Apple developers, fans and fanatics all poised for Apple WWDC 2013 (SF)
T-Mobile moves into the iPhone world, no contract marketing hype is challenged

Talk about an unnecessary solution to a problem that does not exist. Google is it. I immediately get an impression of elitism and privilege that puts me off desiring one. Now we are hearing the coming spy-like features and capabilities.
When a couple of casual Google glass users are severely beaten or shot for their “snitch potential” and a few more are injured in brutal snatch and grab attempts we might then begin to reconsider the real risks and negative social impact of technology that lies beyond what is simply cool.

We did not wisely contemplate this in the emergence of laptops nor smart phones much to the regrets of hundreds maimed and injured users to this point.

Some have fun living on the edge. Inventors of the first Atomic and Nuclear bombs did not know whether their toy would destroy everything but they took the chance and risked the survival of the planet and all mankind.

Have we let our sense of adventure take over where common sense should have prevailed.

In our never-ending pursuit of the new and cool we seem to have mindlessly and casually sacrificed basic protections and precautions. What we have opened up is a virtual Pandora’s Box of invasive technologies that hold the potential to undermine or overturn our most precious rights and needs.

The gap between the digital haves and have-nots has certainly narrowed in distressed communities such as among seniors, the disabled, low-income and youth on one hand, on the other hand far more disruptive gaps have erupted and will widen along other dangerous fault lines threatening to tear apart any allusions we have about ubiquitous communities.

In the related areas of mobility device utilization, App solutions and useful web services there is new work that needs to be taken up and done.

Other promising areas include training, access, support, and overall consumer affordability.

Many individuals once disconnected and outside the ecosystem have given into smart phones and tablets these tools have brought a sense of cool and cache that appeals to forner virtual Luddites.

The best description I’ve heard of Google Glass described it as “a Segway for your face”. In that report most respondents didn’t welcome nor did they appreciate the covert and intrusive nature of the device.

I personally pursue what I think are cool gadgets and devices but Googpe Glass is one that causes me to pause and rethink my pursuit of newly emerging tech. Can wearing a cool device instantly brand one as uncool?

If everyone is wary of you then you become a privileged pariah, an outsider potentially spying on the rest of us. Using technology to gain an advantage. This then is a new sort of privilege limter to the rich and well connected. These were the fears of Philip K. Dick and other futurists that saw the danger inherent in runaway technology.

Building a boundary around you to protect your privacy.

We need to exercise much greater caution and scrutiny in our selection of which technologies and tools we incorporate into our digital lives.

More specifically we must know more about the ethics of those that create them. Blind faith does not work.

When I peeked in on Google Play this morning I was surprised to find a new user interface that was an improvement on what came before. I long thought Google could do better considering this is where the revenue flows from.
Other companies should take the hint and get busy updating their early attempts and resist resting on their laurels when they find something that works. The catch is that the changes must be better, much better and not just an incremental update. Yet it must be consistent with what users expect and require.  Change for change sake is useless.

Every week some new supposed trend crops up and causes many to scurry around to figure out how to make it pay. Some are just passing fancies, others may hold actual potential. Folks often do not wait to see it play out and mature into a real thing. They spring upon it like hungry feasters in a famille and suck the marrow out before it has had a chance to catch.
The latest buzz trend to reach my desk has been titled “responsive design”. Before I even Google it I sense it has to be something to do with marketing.

Have you trashed spam messages only to see then reappear in your inbox? I suspect that hackers have figured a way to do this successfully to get around your annoyance with their unwanted and unsolicited messages.
This takes up your precious time and virtually kills your off email productivity.

I am absolutely amazed at the overall lack of interesting and compelling technology news coming out these days. It used to be that not a day would pass without countless leaks, rumors and such mark ring it onto our pages. Somewhere along the line we reached a saturation point. It wasn’t that no new phones were coming out or fresh lawsuits being waged. I think what happened was that the little person got sick and tired of the doings of the instant millionaires and billionaires wrangling to take over the world that we turned off, tuned out and just didn’t have the time to worry ourselves about their issues.

There were however short bite-sized bits of news and information worthy of notice. It is the focus of Bites & Bytes to ferret these out for you.

Bits & Bytes:
HTC One is a hit among reviewers and pundits
Samsung Mega sets out to bridge the phone/tablet (phablet) gulf.

Some profound moves are being made by dominant companies to leverage their good fortune to extend their brands into other promising industries and eventually take over.
Folks are still waiting for Apple to move into Smart TVs. Facebook is eyeing the whole phone ecosystem. Twitter has a hard on for all sorts of content plays.

Bits & Bytes for mid April:
HTC having issues getting out of the blocks and off the line
Apple’s IPhone 5 experiencing a strong resurgence.
Users starting to get really bored with Social Media.
Social Media plauged with an abundance of useless and annoying marketing schemes and scams.