Monthly Archives: September 2008
The first Gphone is out
Google “Gphone”, the mobile software platform Android, is out.
In the press:
- Fortune Magazine, Android’s threat to the iPhone
- FT, Google pins hopes on Android’s advance
- Businessweek, The Google Android Phone’s Big Premiere
- Linux Journal, Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux
- NYT, Google and T-Mobile Introduce Phone With PC Features
- SearchEngineLand, First Android Phone: “T-Mobile G1 With Google
- Official Google Mobile Blog, Google on Android
convergence, connectivity and dis-connectivity
Jan Chipchase, researcher at Nokia focusing on ethnography and mobile devices design, has written a nice essay on his blog titled:
A Little Switch With a Big Impact exploring convergence, connectivity and dis-connectivity.
A black swan
“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” is the second successful book of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, after “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life”.
A black swan is an event with three main characteristics:
- It is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility
- it carries an extreme impact
- In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact
Crowded Internet music services
Nokia has announced the launch of Comes With Music service in which people who buy Nokia mobiles will be able to download and keep as many tracks as they wish from participating music companies over a one-year period. Nokia has already the OVI music service on-line.
This makes Nokia a direct competitor of Apple iTunes that at the moment is the market leader and uses the pay-per-track model. However, it seems that Apple is considering the same busines model of “all you can eat” music service.
And now, Sony Ericsson is going to unveil an unlimited music downloading service for its mobile phones.
We are seeing a convergence where mobile phone companies, mobile operators, Internet companies, media companies and software companies are going after the same business. It appears that the Internet music service market is going to be particularly crowded.
Nokia uses Microsoft DRM, Apple uses its own DRM but has recently made available DRM-free songs called iTunes plus. Amazon makes available the songs in mp3 format and are DRM-free. Sony Ericsoon, we do not know yet.
Nokia OVI, Sync
Nokia Ovi is the new door (Ovi is the Finnish word for door) to the Nokia Internet services.
Among these services I have tried the sync, the service that allows you to save your phone contacts and calendar events. And it worked smoothly and fine. Now I have my data backup in the Internet and I can access them whenever I want. It is an idea that has gone around for years, and now we can see it in practice.
There are many things that can be improved. For example, it is possible to search my contacts by name. Why not also by phone number, address or email, etc.? And why do not make the service accessible for all kinds of phones including non Nokia´s ones?
Of course, the sync service went online recently, many improvements are possible and the OVI services are tagged “beta” which includes continuous updates and upgrades. Good start overall.
Google Chrome is out!
Google has just announced Google Chrome, a new revolutionary open source browser. To explain what it is and how it works Google has used a comic that you can find here.
You can download Google Chrome as soon as becomes available at this link.
Matt Cutts first comments after the announcement.