A perceptive article in the Economist on how, during a recession, the price decreases implied by Moore’s Law come to dominate the performance gains – the rise of “good enough” computing.
The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves… The “good enough” approach also works with software. Supplying “software as a service”, via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, among others, usually means sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software. Google Docs lacks the fancy features of Microsoft Word, for example. But hardly anyone uses all those features anyway, and Google Docs is free.
The minimum I need in a device is wifi and the ability to run VNC, VLC, a flash-capable browser and basic Skype. All the remaining size and weight should be touch-screen and battery. I would pay slightly more for embedded GPS and bluetooth. An SD card slot would be nice. Something between the iPod Touch and ASUS Eee PC would be perfect. The Archos 7 is also close.
Also on the ‘less is more’ theme, the best widgets from CES 2009 were embedded web servers the size of an espresso cup for less than $100. Plug in any drive and the contents are served to your local network as well as across the net.
Start-up Cloud Engines PogoPlug and Ctera’s CloudPlug are each introducing a small box in late 1Q for $79. The box connects to any flash drive or hard drive using USB, and uses an Ethernet connection to your router to enable access to them from anywhere on the net.
Pogue gives some modern-day depression advice: unsubscribe from cable, satellite TV and movie channels in favour of internet TV, netflix, FTA HD. Move to a pre-paid cellphone contract & cut use. Eliminate your fixed line service. Buy refurbished hardware. I think video games could be the entertainment refuge like movie theatres were in the 30’s and in this environment the Wii is a runaway success.
Pew Internet & American Life Project said 53% of American adults played video games and one in five played daily. The teenage gamer figure was, as expected, much higher at 97%… Older gamers preferred PCs or laptops, while the teens favored the consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation, or Microsoft Xbox… Nintendo’s revolutionary Wii gaming console, with its motion sensing controller, sold 800,000 units during the Thanksgiving week. The figure is more than double the 350,000 units Nintendo sold for the same week in 2007… As of September 30, the company had sold more than 35 million consoles worldwide, which makes it the best selling platform for the current generation…
Three simple devices won the market’s support in 2008: the Wii, the Flip and the iPhone.
Nintendo has sold more than 30 million Wii game consoles since they were introduced two years ago… The machine is dimwittedly simple. The console itself is hardly bigger than a DVD. It lacks the deep rich graphics, the rumbling sound and any of the violent games of the Microsoft Xbox 360. But at $250, it is outselling the more expensive Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 combined by almost 2 to 1… The $130 Flip camcorder is also simple and half to a third as expensive as camcorders made by Sony or JVC that have optical zoom, an optical viewfinder and special effects… Pure Digital says it has sold more than 1.5 million Flips since it introduced the product line in 2007… The Apple iPhone is one of the easiest-to-use devices ever created. At $300, plus a two-year contract that quickly pushes the real price to $1,800, it is hardly in the thrift class with the Wii and the Flip. But it is one of the most popular consumer electronics devices of 2008.
SIA reports semi sales are not holding up well. Intel, the engine of the industry, has cut revenue estimates by 20% lately.
Semiconductor sales dropped to $20.8 billion in November, from $23.1 billion a year earlier… Sales through the first 11 months of the year rose 0.2 percent to $232.7 billion… November sales were 7.2 percent lower than the $22.4 billion in October 2008. Excluding memory products, chip sales declined 4.8 percent to $17.3 billion. Sales in the Americas fell 19.5 percent while in Europe sales fell 13.9 percent. However, the Asia Pacific region had the smallest decline, 6.2 percent in sales.
The tenuous internet link to the Middle East was damaged again.
Parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe experienced Internet and telephone outages Friday when three undersea cables between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged… The affected cable systems, which run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy, carry more than 75 percent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe, and the United States… The cable system that was cut is known as SMW4 cable or South East Asia- Middle East-Western Europe 4. It connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France… France Telecom said it plans to send a boat to fix the problem and should have service restored to normal by December 31… In January, undersea cables outside Alexandria were also damaged, disrupting about 70 percent of the communications network in India and the Middle East.
The iPhone Dev Team (not affiliated with Apple) is promising a software unlock for the iPhone 3G by the end of 2008… Unlocking and jailbreaking have lost a bit of their luster with the release of the iPhone around the world and the huge response to the App Store, but there will always be some group of users who doesn’t want Apple or their local carrier to dictate how they use their phones.
Google has found that by monitoring search terms it can predict outbreaks of flu up to two weeks faster than the traditional CDC system. Anyone can access the data.
Although bird flu cases are on the decline since 2006, it is just as deadly as ever. 38 cases and 29 fatalities in 2008 bringing the cumulative totals to 389 and 246.
MiBook is selling a $130 video player/book reader along with cookbooks and other “how-to” titles on SD chips for $20 each. Markets are cooking, DIY, travel and appears to be targetting women. 7″ LCD screen.
Unlike electronic books that focus on text alone, miBook stands out in that it combines text with video and sound, fusing the strengths of books and TV. miBook can also be used as a digital photo album and frame, allowing users to show their photos individually or as a slideshow. miBook also plays home videos, Internet videos, and MP3s.
An eBay for music – a innovative new service is providing online store-fronts to people who want to sell their old mp3 files. In response to queries about why users wouldn’t sell the same file over and over, Bopaboo says they “take a digital fingerprint through every upload that prevents a user from uploading to our service a track more than one time.” This is death to the record companies (and eventually studios), and DRM.
Sellers register and then are given an MP3 store, where they can upload the music they want to sell. No DRM-wrapped music is allowed. Bopaboo buyers can search for music in all the usual ways, and the site offers a seller rating to help shoppers learn a merchant’s reputation…
Truphone is offering an application to make VOIP calls over wifi from the iPhone and iPod Touch; of course Skype is available if you unlock the phone.
The Truphone application allows users with a Wi-Fi connection to make and receive phone calls via voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, with other iPod Touch owners, users of the Google Talk’s messaging service, and customers of Truphone’s Internet telephone service. The company said it expects to add the ability to handle landline calls.
Nokia launches it’s current answer to the iPhone: the N97.
The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz), 3G (HSDPA 900/1900/2100MHz) Symbian-based smartphone features a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and a whopping 32GB of onboard memory that can be expanded with a 16GB microSD card… integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth… integrated A-GPS sensors and electronic compass… full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen… The Nokia N97 is expected to ship in Europe during the first half of 2009, with an estimated price of 550 euros.
CNET hunts up some superior antivirus software from Vietnam; for only $17/yr.
Online retail spending rose 15 percent on the all-important Monday after Thanksgiving from a year earlier, and it appears set to continue to outperform offline.
This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%.
Blu-Ray is struggling to gain traction, for all the reasons I outlined a year ago.
On average, Blu-ray movies account for about 6% of prerecorded disc sales. But that’s only when the top 20 Blu-ray and DVD titles are compared; when the full libraries of both are taken into account, Blu-ray’s share is a good deal less. By some reckonings, the real share is around 4%… So far, only 1.5m Blu-ray stand-alone players have been purchased in America. But Sony has also sold 5.7m PlayStation 3 game consoles, which include a Blu-ray player… And if you’ve never seen real high-definition videos (Blu-ray or HD-DVD), you’ll probably be happy with up-sampled DVDs. Besides, at the distance most people sit from their television sets, the resolution of the human eye isn’t good enough to tell the difference.