There are more and more reports about Apple’s push for placing iPads into schools.
This one here says Apple also tries to maintain the price within 500$ for each student and to make available as much free educational content as possible.
Why just pushing the device into a RIM dominated corporate world, while they can also be more efficient attracting future corporate employees?
The last part of the article was interesting, though: “Critics maintain that there are less expensive devices which would fulfil an e-reader textbook function, the majority of which would also have WiFi connections”.
Poole’s argument goes like this:
“By “chrome” I don’t mean Google’s browser of that name, but all the pseudo-solid, pseudo-3D visual cruft that infests user interfaces in modern computing. […]
Unless you are browsing in full-screen “kiosk” mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminum or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them.
It’s already a news that not all the apps in AppStore are compatible with iPhone for Verizon.
TechCrunch digs a bit and finds out the complaint is originated by “AT&T Navigator” app that refuses to run on Verizon iPhone. The cause is this app’s traffic being actually billed by AT&T on a “per MSISD” base, therefore using the app on any other carrier is impossible. You can say it’s a chipset issue, because the app tries to authenticate thru the GSM SIM number, but I’d say “the reports of [a chipset issue] have been greatly exaggerated”…
AOL owns now Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch, which means, by their calculations, around 117 million unique readers. It seems they’ve got now everything they needed to become no 1 media company in tech. It only seems so.
The most important condition would be for AOL to support this new community of editors and maintain its quality. That’s a big shift in company’s structure and objectives and it’s not related to AOL’s previous success as an ISP.
This is the newest Google tablet OS Market. It should be called AppStore, but the name was an Apple pending patent…
It seems Apple didn’t manage to also protect the looks.
Engadget
Secured corporate data that you’re using on the PlayBook while tethered is essentially on loan — it’ll disappear as soon as you disconnect [your BB phone]
All the data is transferred between PlayBook and BB phone via encrypted Bluetooth connection. That will limit the extent of tethered traffic, therefore I don’t think we’re going to see massive streaming or syncing between the two. At least there’ll be no AirPlaying, anyway.
I’ve been invited yesterday to an open discussion on this subject: “What would Jules Verne say about the future of the books?”. For me, it was like a deep breath of fresh air, talking and listening to people that I could only hope still exist: the next generation of book editors, publishers and retailers; all young, smart and eager to live the digital book (r)evolution.
It was more of a jam session, and here are some trails that still persist in my mind:
I’ve done some thinking before writing about this article, but sometimes it can be useful to point dumb things out too.
Gizmodo rants against iPad adoption in the classrooms in one of the most incoherent and un-documented way. Maybe I say that because I believe the opposite: iPads are at least as good as any other computer to be used in a teaching class. The news originally appeared in Fast Company then in Time, but their tone of voice is settled and mild; they concentrated on the “mandatory” side of the school decision.
Asymco on Apple’s 3.9 B investment:
By buying an option on production, not production itself Apple has a clever way to “own factories” without actually owning them: gain control over marginal increase in production without the impact from CapEX or depreciation.
“Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked.” –Marco.org
I think we need a bit of disambiguation.
Indeed, Google was built as a passive observer, but its current purposes are no longer sufficiently well served by this definition alone.
There is a lot of fuss lately around the disfluency in reading a text (Telegraph, UsabilityPost and Wired)
Someone has thrown the idea that e-readers are “not so great” because their content is, well, too legible, therefore the learning efficiency is low.
(First thing to notice is all the articles’ authors confused learning with memorization; the kids had to memorize data, not learn how to solve problems)
You may find this paradoxical, but the studies cited by Wired are showing that memorization (not learning!
>Team,
World
>At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health.
My situation is so critical that no matter the costs I have to leave.
>I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.
You’re on your own.
>I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations.
As the number of apps attached to any single device continues to increase, apps create increasingly higher switching costs for users
Asymco analysis on downloaded app increase rate
There is a lot of fuss lately around the disfluency in reading a text (Telegraph, UsabilityPost and Wired)
Someone has thrown the idea that e-readers are “not so great” because their content is, well, too legible, therefore the learning efficiency is low.
(First thing to notice is all the articles’ authors confused learning with memorization; the kids had to memorize data, not learn how to solve problems)
You may find this paradoxical, but the studies cited by Wired are showing that memorization (not learning!
I’ve just figured out: the “magic” of my iPad was never magic for my kid. For her it’s just a beautiful, natural and easy to handle thing she never knew before.
One is trying to make you believe what you see, the other one is making you see what you believe. We’ve seen the latter before and it didn’t turn out well.
“Google was designed to play the role of a passive observer of the internet: web content was created for people, not specific Google queries, and Google would look around, take inventory of what was available, and give it to people who asked.” – Marco.org
I think we need a bit of disambiguation.
Indeed, Google was built as a passive observer, but its current purposes are no longer sufficiently well served by this definition alone.
I don’t think Apple will replace the home button with the multi touch pinch. It’s more probable they wanted to add the gesture as a supplementary home function in case you lose the orientation.
It looks very important for Apple to minimize the friction.
Just to be sure I don’t forget:
The whole story about the newspapers being killed by digital technology is bullshit; what we witness now is the beginning of a huge press disintermediation process, where big corporations are being pulled out from their “middleman” role, letting for a while the writers to face directly their readers. Therefore, the corporations are desperate to keep the status quo, the writers are scared they won’t get paid, the readers feel lost in this new digital ocean.