Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Did Sprint Sell Its Soul for the iPhone?

Posted by Ed Oswald on October 3, 2011 at 3:40 pm

Sprint needs something, anything, to keep it relevant. It is staring two huge rivals — Verizon and AT&T — in the face, and will become the odd man out if the AT&T merger goes through. So what is it to do?

If you believe what the Wall Street Journal is saying Sprint has done, you all but sell your company’s soul for the iconic iPhone.

Sprint is likely to lose money on the iPhone deal through at least 2014, the paper reports, but it seems to think that the device could be key in keeping the carrier relevant. The gamble carries a lot of risk: Sprint could find itself straddled by a costly deal that could bring the entire company down if it fails.

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Twitter To Sell Political Advertising

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 21, 2011 at 12:04 pm

With the 2012 campaign expected to cost candidates well over a billion dollars, it’s no surprise that companies that count on advertising are angling to get a slice of that huge pie. Twitter is one of them, and plans to market its advertising services to the campaigns thanks to a key hire of a former political marketing executive from Google.

Twitter told Politico that it plans to sell ads through features such as promoted tweets and trends. At least five campaigns have already signed on to the new offering, including Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign. Twitter declined to specify the other participants.

One thing it will not do is insert ads within user’s timeline, a new advertising option that it has been experimenting with over the past few months. It also plans to differentiate a political ad from a standard one: the ad will carry a small purple checkmark.

You won’t see the standard “I approve this message” tag on tweets. Twitter won’t display them directly with the tweet, however hovering over the tweet would show who purchased the advertising if the campaign decides to disclose it. (It should be obvious anyway, since the ads would direct to a URL or Twitter account where the identity would be disclosed, I’d guess).

I wonder if like TV and radio, Twitter will become a sea of political ads in the days before an election, with the candidates sniping at each other continuously. Let’s hope not.

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Did Case-Mate Just Reveal The iPhone 5 Design?

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 16, 2011 at 9:51 am

What’s a day without an iPhone 5 rumor? What your looking at here is one of the images of apparent iPhone 5 cases that was posted to accessory maker Case-Mate’s site briefly on Thursday before being pulled.

The company says its “inside resources” claim Apple would indeed be launching two phones in early October, the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. I don’t know why Case-Mate is jumping into the rumors game, as that’s our job, but I do digress…

BGR reports though that the page we’ve linked to here is different from a page they saw, which included a gallery of case images that has since disappeared. Either way, the now ever-more rumored tapered design akin to the iPad 2 seems to what Case-Mate is basing their case designs on, and it does appear noticeably wider.

Now this just could be Case-Mate reacting to the increasingly more frequent rumors of a wider and thinner iPhone 5, or they actually could have inside information. Personally, I’m hoping that either way, they’re right.

I’m no fan of the iPhone 4 design, and I remember in the days after that infamous Gizmodo leak saying “I hope this isn’t it.” But alas it was, despite my (and some others’) belief that this was way too utilitarian in design to come out of Apple. Thus, I’m happy to see Apple return to a sleeker design with the iPhone 5.

Either way Apple, could you hurry up? This iPhone 3GS is getting long in the tooth, and I’m getting impatient. If I have to wait any longer I may have to go to the dark side (Android, that is)! Perish the thought.

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The Beginning of the End of The Plug-in

Posted by Ed Oswald on September 15, 2011 at 5:12 pm

When the modern World Wide Web first came to be in the mid 1990s, there was no such thing as a plug-in. The Web was a basic place, and function was more important than flashiness.

Times changed and so did developers’ preferences.

Soon, sites wanted to enhance the web experience beyond what HTML alone could provide, and Java, Flash, and other technologies were brought to the Web. Overall it worked as intended and made the Web more lively, but there were issues.

First off, plug-ins led to a more uneven browsing experience than issues surrounding how different browsers render pages ever did. If you didn’t have the plug-in or couldn’t install it, pages did not appear as intended. Look at devices that don’t support Flash (iOS, I’m talking about you): their users are locked out of a significant portion of the Web.

Moreover, these plug ins opened up our computers to additional security issues. Most security issues on the Web come as a result of the attacker making his or her way into your computer through an exploit found in a plug-in. Think about it: a significant number of major security flaws have been found here.

It shouldn’t be a surprise then that Microsoft is following Apple’s lead in moving away from Flash, and plug-ins generally. IE10 for Windows 8 will come in two flavors — one for Microsoft’s new Metro interface, and another for the desktop. Metro won’t support plug-ins and will instead support HTML5 as well as possible, says Windows chief Steven Sinofsky.

“Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers,” he argues. “Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI.”

I have to applaud Microsoft here. Plug-ins, in this day and age, are outdated and unnecessary. Some have criticized Apple’s stance on this, but lets face it: modern Web technologies can provide nearly the same experience.

To me, the most attractive part of this switch is the additional security benefits. I’m hoping that this change spurs developers to wean themselves off of these unnecessary technologies, making the Web safer for all of us. Bad news for Adobe? Maybe, but hey even they are preparing for a life without Flash.

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Google+ Makes It Easier To Say “I’m Just Not That Into You”

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 26, 2011 at 8:52 am

Somebody annoying you enough in your Google+ feed (Robert Scoble, maybe? Just kidding, buddy!) that you’d rather not read their incessant posts? Are you not doing anything because you think blocking them is just a bit too harsh? Well, the fine folks at Google have added a new feature to the social networking service just for you.

Now available is the “Ignore” option. Rather than blocking people from seeing and interacting with you and vice versa, it will remove their posts from your stream and disable notifications on their posts. What it won’t do is prevent them from seeing or interacting with your content however.

This seems like a useful feature for the celebrities that Google is now trying to attract to Plus. They can ignore those overzealous fan that’s just a bit too obnoxious. The best thing about Ignore is the ignored person isn’t notified, so no hard feelings.

Ignore is rolling out now so it may not immediately be available to you, but when it is you’ll be able to access the option through one of the following: from your circles themselves, by clicking on the down-arrow drop down to the right of the post in the streams, or from the notifications window in the Google bar.

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Google’s +1 Button Gets More Useful

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 25, 2011 at 1:26 am

When the Google +1 button first appeared, it really had only one purpose and that had to do with search. As you +1’d stuff around the Web, all it would really do is highlight pages you recommend to your circle of friends on Google’s search results.

That was before Google+. Now, the +1 button can do much more, and the company realizes this. The feature will act a lot more like Facebook’s “Like” button: when you +1 something, it will now appear in your stream to be viewable to allow your followers.

I should mention that on your Google +profile, there has always been a +1 tab where your +1’s (as long as you were logged in to the account you have a Google+ profile with) were stored. It’s buried, though, and I’m willing to bet many didn’t even realize it was there.

Just like the “Like” button, the new +1 button will allow you to comment on what you’re +1’ing. It will also allow you to select who you want to share it with, a feature Facebook recently added to its own offering.

It’s good to see that Google is making these changes . I guess you could call it the natural progression for the +1 button as social sharing becomes more important to Google in light of Google+’s dramatic gains in popularity.

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How Not To Release A Tablet

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 19, 2011 at 1:15 pm

With all the hubbub surrounding HP’s shocking announcement of the death of of WebOS and its various devices such as the TouchPad, there’s been a whole lot of finger pointing. But the most stunning revelations may have come from TheNextWeb’s Matt Brian.

WebOS was tested on an iPad 2, Brian says. The results? It performed beautifully–more than two times as fast as the TouchPad, and running WebOS through Safari on the iPad 2 produced similar results.

If this is true it means HP’s crappy hardware killed the platform, and not the OS itself. That just floors me.

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Is Apple Considering Adding Mini Projectors to iOS Devices? Could Be Cool!

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 11, 2011 at 11:01 am

Patently Apple is one of my favorite sites to watch for news on Cupertino’s latest and greatest, and its latest post is no obsession. The site has dug up patents that indicate the company has worked on the idea of  integrating pico projectors into iOS devices, as well as developing some type of projector accessory for Mac devices.

What’s a pico projector? The devices have become popular as a low-cost way to project an image anywhere.  I’m seeing more and more of them at tech shows lately, although typically as a standalone device and not integrated like we’re seeing here.

There’s definitely a cool factor: as well as offering the projection capabilities you’d expect, Apple’s patent involves making the projected images gesture enabled. Say you have two iOS projecting devices side by side, for example. You could transfer the projected content from one device to the next by swiping. Pretty cool, eh?

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Another Print Publisher Turns to Tablets

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 9, 2011 at 4:28 pm

In the latest news of print media companies turning to tablets,CNN reports that its sources say media conglomerate Tribune Co. plans to develop its own tablet device that would in turn be offered to subscribers.

Tribune publishes several major dailies, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and the Baltimore Sun, as well as several smaller papers, plus a host of television and radio outlets.

The plan sounds to me to be a lot like a similar pilot program. soon to be underway in Philadelphia. There, local papers plan to sell devices at a discounted rate to support digital editions.

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Chrome OS: Hacked!

Posted by Ed Oswald on August 4, 2011 at 1:29 pm

Well, somebody’s finally done it. Google’s been selling us for quite a while on just how secure Chrome is, and they haven’t really lied to us. Getting into the OS or the browser for that matter has proved pretty darn difficult. But at the Black Hat security conference two researchers with White Hat Security have gotten into Chrome OS.

The flaw is in ScratchPad, a Chrome app that allows users to compose text files and then save them to Google Docs. Through it, the attacker can gain access to a person’s e-mail, contacts, and Google Docs and Voice accounts. Give Google some credit here though, the two redarchers working on this — Matt Johanson and Kyle Osborn — said they spent months looking for a hole, and must have only found one now.

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