Technology

MacWorld 2008 Conference & Expo

Steve — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:43:47 -0500

The MacWorld Conference and Expo 2008 kicked off beginning of this week. I am not a Mac user, more for economical reason than technological. But secretly I have always been an Apple fan and consistently been impressed by the products that came out of Apple each year. And so I looked forward to this MacWorld Expo with great anticipation to get the "Wow" effect, just as it was last year when they revealed the iPhone. I thought the iPhone was not only a great innovation on the part of Apple, it basically leads the pack in the telecommunication world. The latest statistics was that in the first 90 days, iPhone has captured 19.5% of the SmartPhone marketshare. To date they have sold 4 millions iPhone, about 20,000 each day. That certainly says something about this product.

Amazon launched new e-book reader

Steve — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:12:28 -0500

On Monday, Nov 19, 2007, Amazon finally released its own e-book reader, called the Kindle. It comes with a price tag of $400 and not including reading material. You can get the specs and see a video of it here.

More than just an e-book reader, the concept of buying your book at any place at any time is quite an attractive one. Although I don't know if I would want to give up totally on going to a book store to browse books on the shelves, something that I am so used to. There is just something about that activity I enjoy that makes it more than just browsing a book in a book store. I guess partly it is the atmosphere. But I can see the advantages of being able to buy your book and read it immediately, without having to wait for it to ship to you. Amazon says that each book generally takes less than a minute to download.

Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux

Steve — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:42:09 -0500

Skype 2.0 Beta for Linux, the Great Revolution, was released on November 7, 2007.
Even though I am not a serious Skype user, but because I'm getting into gear on migrating to Linux, particularly to Ubuntu, this release mean that it is one more plus for the migration. Skype 2.0 offers the new video calling functionality which has been the most requested feature for Skype for Linux. One other feature I thought would be a useful one is the automatic answering of incoming calls. One could set up a video cam with Skype and turn it into a monitoring device, that you can dial in anytime from remote to view the scene, for example at home.