Monday: November 14, 2011
Wired would like you to know Amazon's Jeff Bezos owns more of the web than you think.An interesting read for those of you who want to have a little more insight as to just what Amazon does these days on the Interwebs besides selling everything under the sun. There's an interesting chart about half-way down he page that discusses how some important companies rely on Amazon's web services to power their products. If AWS shut off today, well - it's best not to think about it.
Monday: January 7, 2013
Disney unveils next generation guest experience in the form of digital wristbands.The new wristbands will work in tandem with a new Disney app that you can use on your smartphone. The wristband (officially called MagicBand) can be used as your rooom key, theme park ticket, photopass, payment information and even access to FastPass for quicker access to rides and attractions. So long Key to the World cards!
Wednesday: January 2, 2013
Avis acquires Zipcar for a mere $500 million.Avis says it expects to generate $50 to $70 million in ‘annual synergies’ as a result of the deal. FYI: The company booked $7.3 billion in revenue for the full year 2012, and employs roughly 29,000 employees today. The transaction is expected to close in the spring of 2013.
Tuesday: December 18, 2012
TIME pulls the curtain back on short list for 2012 Person of the Year.All eight candidates appeared on TIME’s online reader poll, but none took first place. TIME’s online voters have already revealed their choice for this year’s top newsmaker: Kim Jong Un. More than 5.6 million people voted for the supreme leader of North Korea, although his results and those of other high scorers got a boost from members of Internet forums like 4Chan.
Why Google's GMail outage may be a sign of things to come.The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
Friday: December 14, 2012
University of Chicago receives mystery package addressed to one Henry (Indiana) Jones Jr.An interesting read if only for the care and detail that went into the package itself. The package was received by the admissions department and reportedly almost thrown out until a student worker made the discovery. Could this be some new viral marketing in the making or a student with a really unique application package? Who knows - but either way, this is pretty neat.
Tuesday: December 11, 2012
Yahoo pulls the curtain back on a brand new version of their mail client.Definetly looking forward to giving this a whirl as I'm starting to grow weary of the GMail interface these days. Microsoft Outlook, which I use for work, is moderately simple yet has power features for people (such as myself) who are little overboard in terms of organization. I'd also like to point that GMail's labels versus folders paradigm does absolutely nothing for me. GMail looks like a stream of people shouting at me.
Monday: November 14, 2011
Five future technologies for passenger air travel presented by National Geographic.What does the future hold for passenger air travel? National Geographic takes a look at some future technologies being developed right now. You just might be commuting at twice the speed of sound in a dart-like airplane and then arriving at the airport of the future. Do all airplanes of the future all have free in-flight wi-fi? That would be totally cool.
Engadget's thorough review of the brand new Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon.Engadget covers everything here from the packaging to the performance of Amazon's first real entry into the tablet field. Engadget hails the device as quite an achievement at it's current price point ($200) but they do knock the device some by saying that it can't compete with 'normal' tablets that are currently on the market in some key factors.
Wednesday: November 9, 2011
Nintendo hard at work to find way to use more than one tablet for their next console.It seems that Nintendo had originally planned to have only one controller / tablet accessible to the Wii U at launch time (the other controller would have been your standard Wii-mote variety). Someone at Nintendo must have realized that this would probably be a bad idea so they have been hard at work at trying to make two tablets work for the console. The console's processor and RAM constraints may have played a part in pairing a singular tablet. However, Nintendo may have solved this so multi-tablet gaming may be coming to a living room near you.
Monday: August 15, 2011
Mozilla to do away with version numbers in Firefox with new non-numbered version update.Google has taught us all that people are too busy to remember version numbers these days. It's better just to keep updating software and have to worry about pesky version number conventions. Mozilla thinks this is a good idea and has decided to adopt this release schedule for future non-version-numbered releases of Firefox. Good for them.