[Editor’s Note: Pay attention here – chances are that if you do, you’ll be more interested in the iPhone as well. –mrh] It feels like it’s been more than two months since the iPad was announced. The masterful PR craze that preceded it was only matched by the public backlash. Now that the waters are quieter, I would like to ponder a little about our upcoming iLife. Do we really need a tablet? Tablets are nothing new. Back in 2004, when I was still studying, I was the proud owner of a convertible Acer Tablet PC. I took notes, read comics, ebooks and watched series during class(muted and with subtitles of course!). In 2006, Intel introduced the Viiv, which was another attempt at introducing the tablets to the mainstream consume

Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is the news reader of choice for much of the Silicon Valley tech-setters -- more so than Techcrunch because it has a much wider selection of articles. I often see Gabe at press events, he has a press pass like other journalists. But is he a journalist? After all, he doesn't write any of the stories that appear on Techmeme. It seems that the Austin based conference South By South-West (SXSW) doesn't think he's a journalist because it refused to give Gabe a press pass. Does SXSW think that Gabe's Techmeme is a simple news aggregator and therefore not media? Probably. But Gabe is not just a software engineer with a news algorithm and a server. He's better viewed as the editor-in-chief of Techmeme with a large staff o

I have been using Pandora's online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix's "watch instantly" queue. As I investigated the service more, I came to understand exactly the challenge of what it takes to be truly multi-platform in the current era. It isn't just about having both Web and mobile phone versions of your service, but how you have to go deep into a lot of different devices to appeal to your customers. The cool thing about Pandora isn't that you can create your own custom radio station that will try to find music based on a particular artist or

As we prepare to venture over to Austin for SXSWi I'm prepping my Android HTC Hero with all the latest geo-location apps to help me stay on top of all of the activities. Last year seemed to be about what was coming and this year seems be all about 'where we're at right now.' Yes, Gowalla, Foursquare, britekite, plancast and A/R apps are going to have a big week and be all over the news. Yes, we've seen this coming for awhile but we're here and we should take heed now. The world is closing in around us, our meta-data and our social graphs are getting packed in close. I'm all for discovering hidden communities, great eating establishments and tiny music stores when I'm on the road but I'm getting pulled in too many directions. If we're to s

I spotted a surprising article today over at Gizmodo.  It was surprising not for the fact that it deemed talked about piracy in general, but the attitude it treated piracy.  The story focused around Apple App Store piracy, which it found in general to be at about 10% or less for most apps, and deemed it not a big deal. Here’s the money quote: At first I found many developers' silence on the issue curious. But after talking to a few, and finding out the scale of the problem, it makes sense: An app developer has nothing to gain by taking their fight public — Apple is clearly aware of the issue, and it's not like you can somehow convince hardcore pirates to start paying for all the dozens of apps they steal, because they we

MG Siegler on Techcrunch mentioned the other day that the location-based software company Foursquare is airing their first commercial on cable TV channel Bravo. Are we ready for that? While it is true Google has added that feature to their new product Buzz  and Maps, the question remains whether we really need to show and check where everyone is? I added that function to my in-laws' smartphone because they were always calling me asking directions to certain destinations while enroute to the place. Connecting them to Google's Latitude was the logical step to them and me. I'm not so sure that same practicality applies with Foursquare, though. Just the fact that sites inciting crime are brave enough to capitalize on location based a

Earlier today, Skype and Samsung announced that the free VoIP app would be available on the company’s new Samsung LED 7000 and 8000 series models, due to ship within a couple months. The TV set continues to be the home’s convergence point for the technologies we early adopters have all been using for years. Internet video, time-shifting, gaming, music and more have been available on console gaming platforms as well as cable set-top boxes for a few years now. The last piece of the puzzle unavailable to all but the most adventurous of set-top box hackers continues to be voice connectivity. These units are shipping now to Korea (US availability coming soon, is the closest answer I can get). Users will still have to buy a FREETALK TV Cam

I believe that 2010-2020 will be the decade of augmented reality (AR) causing fundamental changes to the way people interact with computers, the world around us, and each other. Smartphones - for now the iPhone 3GS and various Android models - have done away with the need for large backpacks and heads-up displays. If you want an instant clue as to what I'm talking about watch this YouTube video for a glimpse or this one from the last eComm show. AR represents a brand new media type and a new type of user interfaces; the significance of which is on with par with the the first hypertext web browser or the introduction of the digital cellular phone. In fact some might wish to go as far as saying that it's a brand new medium on par with ra

Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices. In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them. This is troubling news (pun intended) for thos

Juniper Networks (JNPR) is announcing some product news around their high end product that delivers 250Gbps and up to 4 Tbps total capacity to release the pressure for providers experiencing rapid grow in their networks. Today, Juniper Networks is announcing a new generation of silicon that enables customers to quickly, efficiently and non-disruptively upgrade existing T Series Core Routers to a full duplex slot capacity of 250 Gbps without service interruption. The new chipset lays the foundation for a total capacity of 4 terabits per second (Tbps) in a single, half-rack system, ensuring that customers can continue to scale the T Series in line with rapidly accelerating service, subscriber and bandwidth growth. Why is This Important