Jeff Bezos Vs. Steve Jobs: Soon to Fight in Full Color?

Posted yesterday at 10:44 am by Brian Miller

It's an e-reader! It's a computer! It's both!

​You advertise for a job, and the rumors start flying. That's the situation for Amazon, whose modestly successful Kindle device has now become the subject of direct competition with Apple's new iPad.

The NYT and others are pointing to a job listing posted by Amazon that seeks a hardware display manager knowledgeable in LCD screens. Those are necessary for full color, as the iPad uses. Now everyone is speculating that Amazon's next Kindle refresh will also be full-color and—possibly—more of a computer and less of a simple electronic content reader.

This comes soon after Amazon acquired a company called Touchco, which specializes in touch screens (see the TechFlash report). Which, again, would make the next Kindle iteration more iPad-like. But will that make Jeff Bezos less of a retailer and more of an elegant, arrogant, Jobsian designer of overpriced electronic gadgets? If he walks onstage at the next product launch wearing a black turtleneck and jeans, the rumors may be true.

Topics: Business and Technology

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Google Wins Super Bowl, Makes Bing Ads Look Even Worse

Posted yesterday at 6:02 am by Caleb Hannan

Remember the Bing ads where a key word turned close friends and spouses into creepy, monotone automatons? Microsoft's intent was to show how a world ruled by search engines (especially Google) was flooding us with information we didn't need. (A strange tack considering, no matter what they say, Bing is more "search" than "decide.")

Well, before the Super Bowl those ads were just ineffective. Now, in light of the Google spot that some are calling the best tech commercial since Apple's famous "1984," they look downright heartless.

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Topics: Technology

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Microsoft Declares Itself Still Innovative, Not at All Clumsy

Posted Feb. 5 at 7:03 am by Caleb Hannan

"Pay no attention to the former employee behind the curtain!"

​Yesterday, Dick Brass, an ex-reporter who once led the charge to build tablet PCs and e-books at Microsoft, published a fairly devastating critique of his former company in The New York Times. In an op-ed, Brass portrayed the software giant as a company where visionary thinking goes to wilt and die. A product, he wrote, of having "developed a system to thwart innovation."

Microsoft, as you'd expect, disagrees with Brass' assessment of their creativity snuffing.

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Topics: Technology

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Former Microsoft Vice President Describes Environment of "Creative Destruction"

Posted Feb. 4 at 8:09 am by Caleb Hannan

Dick Brass, who spent seven years at Microsoft, holding an Amazon Kindle.

​It's one thing for a simple blogger with no experience inside the halls of Redmond to make light of Microsoft. It's quite another for a man who worked there for seven years to describe it as a company that "routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers."

Dick Brass was a VP at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004. Today, in an op-ed for The New York Times, Brass, who says he "tried (and largely failed) to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago," manages to display admiration for the company that made him wealthy while diagnosing what's turning the former market leader into an also-ran in the world of hardware and innovation.

Brass' main thesis is that a combination of professional jealousy and internecine warfare served (and still serves) to quash creativity in Redmond. For proof, he gives two examples.

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Topics: Technology

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Microsoft Imagines Alternate Universe in Which Bing Is Profitable

Posted Feb. 4 at 5:52 am by Caleb Hannan

No one understood why the toilets in Microsoft's online services division were always clogged.

​Bing, Microsoft's "decision" engine, costs the company a ton of money. How much?

According to Henry Blodget at Silicon Business Insider, Microsoft has spent $667 million for every point of market share Bing has stolen away from Google and Yahoo! since its launch last summer. (A total of three points, btw, meaning a total of $2 billion spent.)

So with Microsoft throwing good money after bad in an effort to earn a seat at the search table, it's OK to be skeptical when one of their VPs tells Reuters this:

"There's no question we intend to make a profit."

Optimism is great. But as Blodget says, when you've been staring at the business end of red numbers for four years now, it starts to look less like positive thinking and more like delusion.

Topics: Money and Technology

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Will Chapman Supports a Family of Five Making Lego Weapons

Posted Feb. 3 at 10:03 am by Caleb Hannan

What kid wouldn't want this little plastic angel of death?

​In this month's issue of Wired, editor Chris Anderson has a great piece on what he calls the new industrial revolution. Using a variety of small-scale manufacturers, including himself, making everything from custom cars to pilot-less drones, Anderson makes a persuasive argument that the open source transformation that forever changed the digital world is now having the same effect on products in the real world.

Or, in his words, atoms are the new bits.

As Anderson shows, manufacturing no longer requires a big warehouse, assembly lines and shipping routes. All it takes is a good idea. And to prove his point, he visited the Redmond home of Will Chapman.

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Topics: Money and Technology

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Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Claims Software to Blame for Toyota Prius Acceleration Problem

Posted Feb. 2 at 7:04 am by Caleb Hannan

The Woz and one of his many Prii.

​Toyota says it's finally figured out why some of its recalled vehicles accelerate uncontrollably. But Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says they might have even more reason to worry.

Speaking at a conference in San Francisco yesterday, Wozniak hinted that the problem lay not in floor mats and pedals as Toyota alleges, but with software:

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Topics: Technology and Transportation

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Twitter Hails Rise of iPad, Death of Amazon's Kindle

Posted Jan. 28 at 6:08 am by Caleb Hannan

Sorry, Mr. Bezos. The Twitterverse says your little friend is on life support.

​No gadget lives forever. And the Amazon Kindle won't be an exception. But, perhaps because of the alluring alliterativeness of the term "Kindle-killer," there's been more than the usual preoccupation with the demise of this first-generation e-reader.

Yesterday Apple introduced its new everything, the iPad. Did it live up to the hype? Did it not? That's still being decided.

But thanks to Twitter, the tech world was able to share how it thought the iPad will affect life for Jeff Bezos' favorite bath-time toy. The (very hasty) consensus: If there is such a thing as a Kindle-killer, the iPad is it.

After the jump, five gut reactions plucked from the Twitter-stream.

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Topics: Technology

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Seattle Blogs: Apple iPad Revealed!

Posted Jan. 27 at 2:08 pm by Caleb Hannan

Engadget

Apple's new savior device shares its name with a tampon. Of course.

​Today's blogs are all hype, little delivery.

- TechFlash provided the best local coverage of Apple's unveiling of the newest thing you can't live without. And hey, waddya know: It's just a bigger iPhone that costs $500!

- SeattleCrime says that a woman started a ruckus on Metro after a fellow passenger refused her offer for a hug. Which goes to show you: If someone on the bus asks you to hug it out, you hug it out until it can't be hugged out no mo'.

- Strange Bedfellows reports that city workers are taking to the web to protest Mayor Mike McGinn's decision to cut 200 senior-level jobs. Somewhere, someone is making a joke about how if government was always this responsive, there would be no need for cuts.

Topics: Media and Technology

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Video: New Boeing Lasers Blow up Stuff Good

Posted Jan. 27 at 8:01 am by Caleb Hannan

Boeing developed a laser so cool it had to call it the MATRIX. Now its found a way to use its truck-mounted Laser Avenger to destroy union jobs IEDs.

Tech blog PopSci says that the laser explodes artillery using its "hot stare." Which sounds like a way of describing the lascivious look you'd get from a stranger 'round closing time, right down to the burning sensation that comes later. (Hiyo!)

Ahh. Sometimes it's nice to just sit back and appreciate America: Where the sophisticated ruthlessness of Bond villainry meets the buttoned-up drab of a line-item in a defense appropriations bill.

Topics: Technology

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Bill Gates on Google's China Stance: "They've Done Nothing and Gotten a lot of Credit For It."

Posted Jan. 26 at 8:01 am by Caleb Hannan

"And furthermore, these 'O' glasses are too foggy. Harumph, harumph."

​Before flying to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland to accept his crown as Emperor of the New World Order announce an expansion of his foundation's vaccine program, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stopped by the offices of The New York Times and delivered a soft backhand to Google's cheek.

Mr. Gates declared himself unimpressed and a bit perplexed by Google's recent threat to drop its search business in China to protest Chinese censorship of search after attacks apparently intended to spy on Gmail accounts of human-rights activists. "They've done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it," Mr. Gates said.

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Breaking News: Amazon's Kindle Offers Worse Newspaper-Reading Experience Than Actually Reading a Newspaper

Posted Jan. 26 at 7:01 am by Caleb Hannan

If only this hopeless square knew there was a prohibitively expensive way to get his morning's news.

​Science has just proven something most people already know: That reading a real newspaper is preferable to reading one on an e-reader.

Over a six-month period in 2009, University of Georgia researchers asked residents of Athens, Georgia to read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with an Amazon Kindle DX. Unlike its smaller cousin designed for book-reading, the DX is pitched as a newspaper replacement. But researchers found that people preferred the messy ink and paper version.

According to the study, youngins think the DX is less versatile than their iPhones, older people miss reading Family Circle and doing the crossword puzzle and all ages agree that paying $500 to read a 2D paper is stupid. Hurray for consensus.

Topics: Media and Technology

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Signs Mac Laptop

Posted Jan. 22 at 5:16 pm by Caleb Hannan

It's 5 p.m. on a Friday. GO HOME. But before you do, check out Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signing the laptop of a Trevecca Nazarene University student in Nashville, Tennessee. (Hey, he's a good sport!) And for a close-up of the signature, click that little line thingy below.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

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Topics: Technology

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An X-Ray of Boeing's 777

Posted Jan. 22 at 2:28 pm by Caleb Hannan

​Nick Veasey specializes in enormous, time-consuming x-ray photography. The image above, of a Boeing 777, took three months and 500 separate x-rays. The video after the jump, taken from the annual TED conference, shows how he got it.

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Topics: Technology and Transportation

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Bill Gates Wants an Apple Tablet Just Like the Rest of Us

Posted Jan. 22 at 11:00 am by Caleb Hannan

Hat tip to Photoshop extraordinaire Charles Pollard for executing such a vivid fever dream.

​On Wednesday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates introduced Gates Notes, a blog he described as a way to show the world what he's thinking about. But thanks to super-secret technology I can't tell you anything about, Daily Weekly was able to get a sneak-preview of Gates' thoughts. And as it turns out, the World's Richest Man is just like us: Dude just wants to get his hands on a tablet.

Topics: Technology

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