A few insignificant stabs at the Goliath

Let's distribute the power a little bit, right? How about rewarding an old friend?

Mobile Safari

Chrome

Safari

A brief summary of why Apple sued Samsung

Here's a very, very brief summary of why Apple sued Samsung for $2.8b and not others, and probably why Apple easily convinced the jury that the case is theirs (but only for $1b, not $2.8b):

http://bit.ly/T9Lek1

On people saying "Apple has no choice, it has to come out with an iPad mini."

Sorry to say but it seems you people don't know Apple just that well yet.

#lightbulbmoment How to make sure you don't get trapped in your own filter bubble

In a recent post, I wrote links to websites and a video describing how using Google might trap you into a filter bubble of your own, and how an alternative search engine could help you avoid that.

After discussion with a friend though, a light bulb went up.

What if someone creates a program that could artificially and regularly post arbitrary queries to Google? That way, Google becomes confused as to what filters exactly they will use when they send you search results. Of course, that would eat up some resources on your computer, but I think it's not going to be so much and it could be worth it.

To all developers out there, any takers? Or any thoughts?

[Mac / OS X Tips] Let your computer read text for you. For free.

What do these names have in common? Karen, Lee, Sangeeta, Moira, Fiona, Tessa, Daniel, Emily, Serena, Agnes, Jill, Kathy, Princess, Samantha, Vicki, Victoria, Alex, Bruce, Fred, Junior, Ralph, Tom, Albert, Maged, Ting-Ting, Sin-Ji, Zuzana, Ida, Ellen, Claire, Xander, Mikko, Julie, Sebastien, Thomas, Virginie, Anna, Steffi, Yannick, Alexandros, Eszter, Damayanti, Paolo, Silva, Kyoko, Narae, Yuna, Stine, Agata, Raquel, Joana, Simona, Milena, Laura, Javier, Paulina, Diego, Monica, Alva, Oskar, Narisa, and Aylin.

They're all the different (normal) voices available for you to use in OS X on your Mac, starting from OS X Lion. For previous versions of Mac OS or OS X, there are a lot fewer options to choose from. But basically they have support for 22 different languages including more than one different variants of English, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese. There are also a few funny "novelty" voices for American English.

So yeah, this has been a feature of the Mac since it was introduced in 1984. Siri's voice is actually the same as Samantha's voice.

Check out how to enable speech recognition on your Mac on this TUAW article. If you plan to install all the voices though, it will take up close to 20Gb of space on your system, so better choose only the ones that you could really use.

"Microsoft Did the Impossible: The New Hotmail Is Fantastic"

Check out the article on Gizmodo. If you want, you can go right ahead to the new Hotmail, but actually it's not on Hotmail.com, it's on Outlook.com.

Google tracks you. Here's an alternative search engine.

First, check out this website: http://donttrack.us/
And this: http://dontbubble.us/

Then learn about online "filter bubble" concept introduced in this TED Talk:

An opportunity for Yahoo!

You guys have probably heard about Yahoo! hiring its new CEO, Marissa Mayer, who was employee #20 at Google, and mom-to-be. It was a big surprise move for Yahoo!, but there was quite a warm reception towards the hire. Mayer is the 5th CEO of Yahoo! in the last 5 years. With Mayer on the helm, people are now more hopeful about the fate of Yahoo! which just hasn't grown as much as the 8-foot behemoth that its younger distant cousin (Google) has.

I am a little bit sentimental about Yahoo!, as it was my first picture of the internet. I remember advertised on an old ISP's brochure back in 1995 a photo of the old Netscape browser loaded with the Yahoo! homepage with that old red Yahoo! logo, a search bar, and a directory of websites. The brochure said something like "all the information in the world right at your fingertips." Something like that.

Oh how small was the world wide web back then. That was around the same time we first had a legit brand new PC. We have had second-hand XTs with green on black monochrome screens and a DOS-based OS before that. Our new PC had a color screen, a CD-ROM drive, and Windows 3.1. And we bought it with a modem and immediately applied for an internet connection. The PC had Netscape pre-installed, which was pre-configured to have www.yahoo.com as the homepage. Yahoo! was the first website I ever visited. It was also my default homepage for a very long time.

Now, until just a few weeks back, I had iGoogle as my browser homepage. Yahoo! to me has just become a mess with all that clutter of news that I'm not interested in and so forth. Yahoo! Messenger's video chat is just not fast enough anymore. Skype is just the king of video chat. And Gmail Video Chat is just so much more accessible. Yahoo! Mail - oh, again, all that clutter. Gmail is just so much better with the cleaner design and all its (spam) filters. Yahoo! Groups - how ugly is that site nowadays. There's Facebook now for that.

But iGoogle is going away soon. So now I've had to live with over a dozen extensions on my web browsers just to access the same info from the "gadgets" I had on iGoogle, but it's nowhere near the iGoogle experience. I want a mission control view of all things important to me when I launch my web browser. E-mail. Chat. Weather. Time zone clocks. A list of links to my favorite websites. My calendar. Notes. Tasks.

Of course, Microsoft's Metro "live tiles" UI could fill that gap, but still, I want all that when I launch my browser - on a desktop PC or on a Mac or a mobile device. Also, I probably won't be using a device that runs Windows 8 or Windows Phone within the next two years at least.

I see this being the homepage of the internet (again) as one opportunity and a key strategy for Yahoo! Bring the old widgets and "My Yahoo!" back, but in a form fit for the internet today, of course. If they can become everybody's homepage - that's a lot of eyeballs and visibility and brand recall again. Be ever present at the starting point for many on the internet: the browser. They could strike deals with companies to become the default homepage on web browsers (with Apple, for example, on Safari on both OS X and iOS). Be useful again. Don't have clutter. They just need people using their products again.

Of course, simply capitalizing on Flickr's popularity, and just simply drastically improving it, should also be a no-brainer. Flickr could be their ticket to the social networking party, to compete at least with Google+, which is said to be frequented by photographers. Facebook is already the undisputed king of social.

And maybe YM, too. But cloud storage and services are seemingly the new thing now. They should probably dip their toes in that, too. Think iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. And even Amazon's S3 service. All the players are playing that game. How about acquiring Tumblr? Well, I don't know if Tumblr is open to an acquisition, but that would be great for Yahoo!. Twitter is definitely out of the question, as it itself is a king in social micro-blogging (and in a sense, a competitor of Tumblr). But Yahoo! definitely needs to get into the content creation space like blogging. Bring back Geocities, but a whole new Geocities. Well, it's not that simple.


The key is, by being that "homepage" of the internet again, by bringing back to life something like the "My Yahoo!" service, they will be creating a platform. It's all about creating platforms. Facebook, Twitter, not to mention Windows, Xbox Live, OS X, iOS, Android, Chrome. Developers can develop widgets (i.e. mini apps) for the Yahoo! homepage. Everything can live there. Games included, and so on. There's of course the Chrome Web Store, but it just doesn't cut it for me. It's one thing to play Angry Birds, and another thing to play Angry Birds while looking at my e-mails and the weather and a few other widgets.

Hmmm. I just looked at My Yahoo! right now, and I guess the problem is just it's really ugly. The columns are just so wide on my current screen resolution. It was still made for 640x480 screens. I guess that's all the problem with all of Yahoo!. They haven't been updated (properly). Of course, functionality first before form, but functionality is not something that they own. That said, yes, new products are necessary, too. But that said, it's easier to build on what they have right now. The new products will just come for as long as they stay alive and they attract talent.

When will we have ultra-reliable, sufficiently fast, but not significantly expensive/elitistic* internet in the Philippines?

By elitistic I meant "generally inaccessible to most people," or too expensive to the point that only the 1% can really benefit.

Anyways, any predictions as to when 1000Mbps internet will arrive in da Pilipinz?

This webpage shows a short video clip of the public launch of Google Fiber in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Google introduces scientific calculator interface

You can actually already do many calculations using Google Search. For example, google "sqrt(pi)" and you will be given the square root of 3.14.... But now, Google introduces a full scientific calculator interface once you do google a calculation, to continue with further calculations. Check out the example at this link.

Open letter to YouTube

Dear YouTube/Google,

I'm already starting to get fed up with this. Most of my videos uploaded on YouTube are my own personal recordings, with overlain music I mixed using GarageBand's royalty-free loops (as stated in Apple's terms."