The Tethering / Hotspot Debate: No, You’re Not a Thief. But Somebody Else is a Highway Robber.
Interesting debate at ZDNet over wireless data plans: James Kendrick claims that unpaid tethering makes you a thief. Thankfully his fellow ZDNet-er Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has the common sense to dispute this tethering thief nonsense. Yes, technically if your wireless contract includes an anti-hotspot clause and you turn this feature on, you are in violation. Of [...]
How Google’s Android language architecture is dead wrong
I love my HTC Desire. I held on to my Sony Ericsson P800 for 5 years, turning from an early adopter into a laggard, sending mobile text-only tweets via WAP up until the early Summer of 2010 – that started to feel awkward at some point. So in August I entered the “always on” world, [...]
Square responds to VeriFone
As Techcrunch said this morning, Welcome to the Jungle, mobile payments is huge, and only going to get bigger in the longer run. For those who are unaware of what happened yesterday between Square and VeriFone, you can catch up on it here. The good ne…
My first experience with Square Credit Card Processing
Over the weekend we participated in a local comic book convention, and always there is some new gadget even at conventions where people might not think that there is going to be high technology.
Living with iPad
Just before Christmas I joined in with the iPad crowd. The last straw was an XBRL event at ICAEW back in November when 5 of my colleagues who were speaking or supporting Twinfield at the show all had iPads and I didn’t. I started to look seriously at the tablet concept to see how it [...]
What Honeycomb and Android Tablets Mean for Businesses
Google is set to announce their first tablet-oriented Android operating system, codenamed Honeycomb. At Box, we’ve been waiting for this moment since we started seeing significant traction with our apps for both the iPad and Android phones, with nearly 400,000 downloads to date. With the introduction of Honeycomb, we’ll begin working immediately on a tablet-centric version of our Box Android app.
How did we get to this point?
Control Swing
In 2007, Apple took the control from the carriers and put it in the hands of device makers when it launched the original iPhone. Here is an excerpt from a Wired article. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, [...]
Deciphering Amazon’s Android App Store Strategy
Last week, Amazon unwrapped a marketplace for Android Applications pitching it as a credible alternative to Google’s own Android Marketplace. This move has generated both excitement and concerns from pundits. There are some who wonder about this move by Amazon and there are others who worry about how the fragmentation of marketplace will affect the [...]
Motorola Takes Us a Step Closer to Personal Computing Nirvana–and it’s Not Even a Computer
It took five years, but the personal computing nirvana vision I first heard from Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu is becoming reality. The concept that I discussed in The Cell-Phone Aware PC May Be a PC-less PC, and other posts is simple. Instead of a plethora of situational devices with redundant computing capacity, carry around just [...]
Notes from my own Start Up
One of the reasons that I have not been blogging as much as I would have normally is that I am in the throws of a start up launch. We will be officially started on the new year, and I promise not to spam everyone with a PR note in your e-mail box extolling the [...]
Business Analytics on the Samsung Galaxy Tab
Earlier this week, I had a quick chance to use the new Samsung Galaxy Tab — the first serious tablet rival to the iPad — and check out its analytic / business intelligence capabilities. The device runs Android 2.2, which supports Adobe Flash, so the first thing I tried was a couple of dashboards suitable [...]
Google Docs Editing: My iPad Just Got More Useful
Today Google announced that document editing is now supported on your mobile browser. This means that we can now edit documents from iOS and Android devices. This move made my iPad more useful in my personal and professional lives. As I told in my Sliderocket post yesterday, we are seeing an increase in the use [...]
Finally Something Good on the Privacy Front–from Google Latitude
Recently I’ve been experimenting with Google Latitude: I wanted to see if I could use it to replace the “family locator” function that most mobile carriers offer at a premium price. This would require that your child or elderly parent or whoever’s whereabouts you care about carries the phone in their pocket with the display [...]
Open: The Ultimate Buzzword
Yesterday morning, while exercising, I found myself thinking that I wanted to write a blog post about “open vs. closed” and how the whole argument (open source, openstack, open business models) had gotten so confused that the word “open” meant NOTHING anymore. And then Apple released it’s earnings. Apparently, I’ve got some sort of secret [...]
iPad And IT Admins: VMware Jumps Into iPad Mania
This is my third post in the last ten days on the iPad in the enterprise meme and the main reason is that this meme is refusing to die anytime soon. VMware is the culprit this time. At the VMworld Europe conference on Tuesday, VMware CTO, Steve Herrod, announced about VMware’s plan for this device [...]
