Friday, March 16, 2012

Copying Leads To Competition, Competition Leads To Innovation

Marco Arment, the creator of the popular read-it-later tool Instapaper, has an excellent blog post discussing copying, innovation, and the best ways to react to competition. Arment discusses a new Instapaper competitor called Readability, which launched last week and received a lot of praise for including custom fonts, something Instapaper lacks:

I could have interpreted this defensively and complacently: “Georgia and Verdana are great, versatile, highly screen-readable fonts! I don’t need to do what competitors do! Newer isn’t always better! My crusty old fonts have some technical advantage that you don’t care about!” And so on.

That would have just made me look stubborn and out of touch, failing to understand (in fact, trying very hard not to understand) why newer fonts could be attractive to customers, and failing to admit that I should have done it first.

Instead, I’m taking this misstep as a wake-up call: I missed an important opportunity that’s necessary for the long-term competitiveness of my product. So I’ve spent most of the last week testing tons of reading fonts, getting feedback from designers I respect, narrowing it down to a handful of great choices, and negotiating with their foundries for inclusion into the next version of Instapaper. And the results in testing so far are awesome. I wish someone had kicked my complacent ass about fonts sooner.

Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors.

This is someone who understands how innovation and iteration really work. Interestingly, when Readability was announced last year, it had a different focus and was actually going to work in conjunction with Instapaper, but then it morphed into a direct competitor. At the time, other developers tried to shame them for that, but Arment himself was unsurprised and untroubled, saying "this is a very big and increasingly crowded market, and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully share it."

He never tried to claim that copying was wrong or even unneighborly—not then, and not today. Arment clearly respects his competitors, recognizing what they bring to the table and using it as motivation to improve his own product. That's the mark of a true innovator.

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Police Academy actor explores the history of video game SFX

From Pong to Portal, actor/comedian Michael Winslow looks back on the history of sound effects in video games as only he can.


Actor Michael Winslow is probably best-known as the guy who made all of those crazy sounds in the Police Academy movies, but he recently contributed his noise-making talents to a short video looking back on the evolution of video-game sound effects.


Produced by G4TV, the two-minute video has Winslow beep-bop-booping his way from Pong to Portal, and offering a timeline of sorts for some popular games’ use of SFX. There’s an extremely short list of games represented (only six?!), so the video is clearly aimed at providing a showcase for Winslow’s talents rather than a comprehensive analysis of SFX history.


Still, it’s nice to see hear Winslow’s talents put to good use as he recreates the soundtrack to Ms. Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros.


By the way, if you don’t remember him from the Police Academy films, maybe you’ll recall his part as the radar-monitoring guy in Spaceballs who has trouble finding “the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps.” Now that is comedy gold.


View the original article here

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Apple Because Siri Doesn't Always Work Right

Technology doesn't always work quite as well as the advertisements claim. But is that any reason to sue? Apparently, yes. Some guy is trying to kick off a class action lawsuit against Apple because Siri doesn't work quite as well as it does in the TV ads. I imagine this lawsuit is going nowhere fast. Perhaps next time the guy should try asking Siri for legal advice...


View the original article here

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The new iPad has CIOs quaking in their cubicles

Apple’s newest iPad has some new elements that could make it a (bigger) hit in the enterprise, such as a higher-resolution screen for video conferencing and presentations as well as taking dictation. But it has become increasingly clear to corporations that their networks can’t handle the iPad or, really, most of the devices employees are bringing into their walls.

We have done a lot of coverage on how iPads have made inroads into the enterprise, with 64 percent of mobile workers now carrying a tablet, and that will rise to nearly 80 percent within the next six months, according the Mobile Workforce Report (you can see the iPad breakdown below). In general, the number of mobile devices coming into corporate networks has grown to 3.5 devices, up from 2.7 in 2011, according to the same report, which was released earlier this week.

So many devices, such a static network

But the problem with iPads and mobile devices in general is that they move, and so your network resources have to move too. Or at least adapt to ensure that when someone has an impromptu meeting by the water cooler, there is enough network capacity to serve those devices. Before, when people computed and connected from their desks, it was much easier to predict where the network needed to have the most capacity.

Much like the networking trends happening inside the data center or out on the cellular networks, where scale and flexibility are becoming essential ingredients, the networks inside companies are due for their own tune-up, driven in part by devices like the iPad. As our computing has become more mobile and varied depending on the device, the once-staid world of networking has had to adapt — everywhere. The best explanation so far of this trend comes from Pradeep Sindhu, the director, vice chairman of the board and CTO of Juniper. In an interview with Om last year, Sindhu said:

The nature of traffic today is increasingly dynamic. And so the old ways of addressing and building networks, with very statically provisioned technologies, like circuit switching, is essentially dead. So you have to rethink this architecturally. Point number two is that I believe that the traffic is going to get a lot more stochastic in nature. In other words, unpredictable, both with respect to any given circuit and with respect to the sources and destination the amount of usage will continue to explode and they will get more and more dynamic and unpredictable.

GoDaddy.com, LLC.

Companies also have to figure out how to revamp their corporate device policies to ensure data is kept secure. Aruba, a wireless equipment firm, offers this slide to explain all the considerations an enterprise must think about.

The iPad and the big enterprise networking shift

As the new iPad launches with better screens and better video conferencing and presentation capabilities, those responsible for corporate networks are a wee bit concerned. Depending on whom you ask, some are very concerned. Brocade, which on Tuesday launched a series of products that makes corporate networks programmable and flexible, polled 120 IT managers and found that about half are worried in some way about anticipate traffic changes thanks to the coming iPad.

And even if the iPad isn’t mentioned by name, the trend of bringing in consumer devices to the network is leading to opportunities not just for firms making tablets such as Apple but also those on the back end charged with building and securing corporate networks. Companies like Brocade, Aruba, Cisco and others are watching today’s launch and hoping it drives a few more CIOs to ring up their salesmen.

View Original article here.

 

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Don't Buy Antivirus Software, Vendor Says

Trend Micro's consumer security product manager has recommend people not to buy antivirus products, including his own. But there is a method to his madness, he assures.

David Peterson, consumer segment director for Trend Micro's ANZ business, said only a handful of the top 10 security threats these days are viruses, with downloaders, Trojans, keyloggers and phishing scams filling up the list.

As such, he believes standalone antivirus software is best suited for infrequent users of the Internet such as dial up users, or those who want protection from nasties on USB keys.

"There is a niche for it but there are also people outside that niche who are buying it."

He said standalone AV products are there because the market demands it. "I wish they wouldn't. I don't recommend buying antivirus products," he said, referring to Trend Micro's and its competitor's products.

What is important is complete protection. "You are better off get Internet security suites," he said.

Peterson has support.

"Trend is correct," said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

"Standalone AV is no longer sufficient for protecting endpoints; however, this does not mean that signature-based mechanisms don't provide value. They just don't provide the value they used to and the vendors haven't adjusted pricing models to reflect the diminished effectiveness of standalone AV," he said. "The ideal endpoint security product is an endpoint security platform that provides organizations with a variety of styles of protection for endpoints -- firewalls, AV, anti-spyware, application control, device control, behavioral monitoring and so on. This enables organizations to pick and choose the styles of protection appropriate to the endpoint -- which will likely be different combination for desktops, laptops and servers. Even among severs this will vary by role. "AV is just component of the endpoint security platform."

Trend Micro joins a swag of security companies to release security suites this month. It's claims Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security Pro 2009 is significantly faster than last year's effort. Others released in September include BitDefender Total Security 2009 and BullGuard Internet Security 8.5

View Original article here.

 
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