Control over tethered appliances basically comes in two forms: pre-approval of apps and kill switches. As this blog has documented, Apple has had a very heavy hand in screening apps, but — as far as we know — they haven’t ever used the iPhone kill switch. I was a little surprised to find that out, […]
On April 3, an Adobe technical project manager demonstrated that Adobe’s new Air software could be used to develop across platforms—he created a Reversi game app that runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows 7, Ubuntu, and OS X (see potential caveats in comments here). Cool! As JZ said, via email, “if this is really possible, […]
The NY Times recently published two stories on opposite sides of the ubicomp — distributed human computing — spectrum. On the one hand, there’s the tale of the “human-flesh search engines” in China. The term was apparently meant to refer to the fact that humans are the searchers, but it increasingly means that humans are […]
We’ve previously covered the drawn-out battle between EchoStar and TiVo over EchoStar’s DVR technology, which TiVo claims infringes its patents. The merits of the patent dispute are, as with most, Byzantine, but a jury has found that EchoStar has indeed infringed TiVo’s patents, and appeals courts have affirmed that finding. The key point from an […]
AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates all of […]
JZ has recently pondered the iPad in a column in the Financial Times. Some excerpts of his thoughts… First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone: In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal […]
The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential for future […]
In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. Voila—and […]
As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected. Offhand, I can’t think […]
Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about openness as […]
