"blackberry" entries

Upward Mobility: Predictions for 2014

All predictions are for entertainment purposes only!

It is a generally accepted requirement that all technology pundits attempt a yearly prognostication of the coming 12 months. Having consulted my crystal ball, scryed the entrails of a falcon, and completed a 3 day fasting ritual in a sweat lodge set up inside a Best Buy, I will now tempt the Gods of Hubris and make my guesses for the year in mobile.

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Upward Mobility: Should There Be Only One?

Admittedly, the idea of Ballmer, Cook and Schmidt all battling it out Highlander-style is appealing...

As long as most people can remember, the smartphone space has been a contested one. Before the iPhone became temporarily ubiquitous, RIM and Palm were fighting it out to own the market, and today you have a plethora of platforms to choose from, including Android, iOS, Windows, and Blackberry. And because many mobile OS vendors license their products to third-party manufacturers, some mobile operating systems have little market share wars of their own, such as HTC fighting it out with Samsung and Motorola for the Android customer base.

I’ve talked before, in the context of languages, about the damage that the paradox of choice can bring to societies. Having more product choices may not make us any happier, or even lead to better products, but only create the vague uncertainty that whichever product choice we make, it wasn’t the correct one.

For obvious reasons, a monopoly doesn’t usually work out that well either, at least in mature markets with stable standards. Very few will argue that Microsoft’s most innovative years occurred during the period that they sat “fat, dumb and happy” with 90%+ desktop market share. But I would argue that there comes a time when some choices should be left to die a dignified death, and that both Windows and Blackberry mobile products are at that point.
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Building native apps from JavaScript using Appcelerator Titanium

An interview with John Anderson

In this interview, the author of Appcelerator Titanium: Up and Running describes how Titanium can be used to generate native mobile apps from JavaScript code. He distinguishes the Titanium platform from native API programming and from other popular JavaScript platforms for mobile devices. We look at the way Titanium exploits the expressiveness and flexibility of JavaScript, and some of the directions that the Appcelerator company is taking Titanium.
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Developer Week in Review: 2012 preview edition

A look at the developer stories that will define 2012.

It's a brand new year, time to look ahead to the stories that will have developers talking in 2012. Mobile will remain a hot topic, the cloud is absorbing everything, and jobs appear to be heading back to the U.S.

Developer Year in Review: 2011 Edition

It was a good year for mobile, HTML5, Drupal and Hadoop.

It's time for our annual look back at the year that was, when mobile ruled the world, HTML5 PWNED Flash, Drupal and Hadoop were the hot buzzwords for your resume, and a new batch of languages tried to become stars.

Commerce Weekly: Cyber Monday lives up to hype

The biggest online spending day ever, observations from a Groupon Now merchant, and RIM's NFC play.

Cyber Monday 2011 was the biggest online spending day ever. Also, a restaurant owner explains why he likes Groupon Now, and RIM pins its hopes on NFC. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Developer Year in Review: Mobile

Our look back at 2010 starts with the year in mobile.

The past year brought new success for Apple, a breakout for Android, a windfall for lawyers, and app stores galore.

Four short links: 6 October 2010

Four short links: 6 October 2010

Poetry Translation, Smartphone Sales, Freedom for Machines to Read Information, and Free jQuery Book

  1. “Poetic” Statistical Machine Translation: Rhyme and Meter (PDF) — Google Research paper on how to machine translate text into poetry. This is the best paper I’ve read in a long time: clever premise, straightforward implementation, and magnificent results. There’s a very workable translation of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” into a different meter, which you’ll know isn’t easy if you’ve ever tried your hand at poetry more complex than “there once was a young man called Enis”. (via Poetic Machine Translation on the Google Research blog)
  2. Android Most Popular Operating System in US Among Recent Smartphone Buyers (Nielsen blog) — the graphs say it all. Note how the growth in Android handset numbers doesn’t come at the expense of Blackberry or iPhone users? Android users aren’t switchers, they’re new smartphone owners. (via Hacker News)
  3. Government Data to be Machine Readable (Guardian) — UK government to require all responses to Freedom of Information Act requests to be machine readable.
  4. jQuery Fundamentals — CC-SA-licensed book on jQuery programming. (via darren on Twitter)

Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation

Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Read more about the features of Google Maps Navigation.

iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

While a steady stream of so-called iPhone Killers are filtering into the market, Apple’s momentum continues unabated. Inspired by his own experiences upgrading to the Blackberry Tour, the author ponders why so many solution providers confuse delivering a bunch of ‘chicken parts’ with producing an actual, living, breathing chicken. BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.