Netizen

Monday, December 24, 2012

So I Got My Seven Inch Android Tablet

Believe it or not, this is the first "touch" device I have owned. I bought it online at nomorerack.com for 75 bucks, tax included. The market price is 200 bucks.

The Nexus 4 I did manage to place an order for the final week of November is still nowhere in sight. I am thinking it might show up by mid January. And so I needed to get my hands on something. I happened upon this deal. It says Made In China. Go China.

I was thinking the 99 dollar seven inch Nexus 7 rumor might be true. So far it does not seem to be holding. Heck, the 199 dollar Nexus 7 has long been out of stock.

I am too active when I am surfing. I am constantly typing away. So for me touch is not where it is at. It is nice to have. But it was never going to be heavy duty.

I got into the obvious games - Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Temple Run - and stacked up some books on my Amazon Kindle app. That Kindle app might be the key attraction for me.

I also had to go online to buy a case for the seven incher. I think I paid six bucks, and free shipping.

I might be running late, but below $100 is the right global price point for this tablet. This is the "one laptop per child" we all have been waiting for. I expect functionalities to get better over time.

I can see me reading books on the train.

It is a sorry little thing though. I think it has 2GB of spare space. And the battery might last a little over two hours.

Wait until I get my hands on my Nexus 4. Now that comes with bragging rights.

Nexus 4 Magic Waiting To Happen
Nexus 4: My First Smartphone
The Best Christmas Gift One Can Hope For

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook: Coalition Partners

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. True, these are the tech giants at the cutting edge, and it is but natural that they might have turf wars - good for the consumer - but I still see it as them working together to eat up more and more of the traditionally offline action. More and more advertising will move to the digital realm. More and more searching will happen online. More and more buying will happen online. More and more socializing will have online components.

Analysis: Amazon, Google on collision course in 2013

Lurking in the shadows for both Google and Amazon is Facebook with its own search and advertising ambitions. .... "Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset.... So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision." .... 96 percent of Google's $38 billion in 2011 sales came from advertising. ..... But Amazon's newly developed "DSP" technology, which taps into the company's vast store of consumer purchase history to help marketers target ads at specific groups of people on Amazon.com and on other websites, could change all that. ... "From a client's perspective, the data that Amazon owns is actually better than what Google has.....They know what you just bought, and they also know what you are right now trying to buy." ..... By showing ads for products that it may not actually sell on its own website, Amazon establishes itself as a starting point for consumers looking to buy something on the Web.

Can Google Challenge Apple Without Apple's Manufacturing Prowess?

Steve Jobs did the marketing pizazz, it was Cook who really built that chain capable of churning out tens of millions of pieces of a new product in the first quarter after release. ..... They can actually execute on a large scale out there in the physical world.

Flowers In Bloom

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The X Phone

Finally Google is getting into hardware. The Nexus line was warm up.

Google Designing 'X Phone' to Rival Apple, Samsung

Seven months after being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion, Motorola is designing its marquee handset with cutting-edge features to stand apart from existing phones when it is released next year ..... using a bendable screen .... Motorola is also expected to work on an "X" tablet after the phone .... only one billion of the world's seven billion people use smartphones, calling that "an incredible opportunity." .... Motorola wanted top-notch features for the phone's camera and photo software, such as better color saturation and the ability to take panoramic shots .... materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes .... Motorola plans to enhance the X Phone with its recent acquisition of Viewdle, an imaging and gesture-recognition software developer .... The South Korean company shipped 40.3% of all Android-based phones in the third quarter .... Google could begin adopting an integrated approach of having its Motorola and Android units work more closely together, like Apple does with its hardware and software teams .... Google has filled Motorola's top ranks with several dozen Google executives and product managers, many of whom didn't have previous experience with hardware ..... Google sees that relative inexperience as an advantage if it wants to revolutionize smartphone design

Sugarcoating

Venezuelan sugar cane (Saccharum) harvested for processing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bioengineering has much to offer. Energy can be bioengineered. And there might not be green house gases.

Bacteria Use Photosynthesis to Make Sugar for Biofuels

ultra-cheap sugar at high yields using photosynthetic microörganisms ..... 10 times more sugar per acre than sugarcane. It expects it can further engineer the bacteria to increase this yield, to as high as 30 times more sugar per acre than sugarcane.