Digital Living

"New" Exciting Product From Apple?

I saw this picture, and I asked myself: are these a series of a great new upcoming product from Apple??

iTablet

iCamera

I don't know the exact answer. But I do sincerely hope so. :-) :-) :-)

Above pictures are just artist's mockup and rendering of what might be coming out "soon" from the Cupertino lab. Nothing is confirmed yet because -- as as we all know -- Apple never reveal anything, until it finally really released.

That makes this upcoming season/product announcement from Apple truly exciting. I really hope such kind of product would be really be announced. If that is the case, such would be truly awesome.

The Magic Of Google Translate!

If you happen to find an interesting online document that you want to read, but -- unfortunately -- such document is written in language that you don't understand, and (at the same time) when you need "someone" to help translate it immediately for you, you can not find one, then translate.google.com probably is the "perfect solution" to your problem.

This simple, easy to use, yet powerful site basically does one thing very well: it automatically translate URL pages and paragraph from one language to another!

I give it a try just now, the steps was simple:

1. Paste the web address (URL) of the online document that you want to be translated.
2. Select the language to translate it to.
3. Press "Translate".
4. Google will start translating the entire online document mentioned for you.

For step 1 I test it with my blog. This is how the original blog document reads (in English):

 

And this is how the translated document reads (in Bahasa Indonesia) -- after automatic translation by translate.google.com is done :

For a translation done by computer, the result is truly awesome. While indeed there are still a few mistakes here and there, overall the quality of the translated document is almost perfect.

Such application/"tool" could be extremely useful for people who need help with translation of a document (both online as well as offline). While before translate.google.com they can't read nor understand anything about it, now they can.

Having such capability constantly available and accessible anywhere, anytime is truly awesome!

How Microsoft Respond To Competition

It is interesting to see Microsoft response to the iPhone challenge. Instead of tackling it directly, on their website Microsoft advertise something like this:

"Windows Mobile -- Over 20 3G phones to choose from".

Reading such respond, and comparing it to similar approach that is taken by Microsoft in defending Vista, perhaps we can now postulate Microsoft "overall approach" in tackling its innovation and excellence based competition:

• If competitor threatened with perfection, answer such perfection with abundance of selection that only Microsoft can provide.
• If competitor threatened with product/design excellence, answer such excellence with scale of market domination that only Microsoft (currently) had.

That means:

• If other company (e.g Apple) threatened Microsoft domination based on perfection of their new product, Microsoft would try to answer that with selection. They might argue: "Why choose 1 (perfect) phone, if you got 20 variety of phones to choose from" ?
• If other company (e.g. Apple) threatened Microsoft domination based  on excellence of their innovative product, Microsoft would try to answer that with dominating market share that Microsoft currently had. They might argue: "Why choose the (excellent) MacOSX, if dominant number of people around the world uses Windows" ?

At a glance, this seems like a perfect answer.Yet as history repeatedly show, such arrogance could be dangerous. It usually also not last very long. Across time: customer typically would choose the most perfect product, at the most affordable price, with the most excellent innovation around.

If such "wording game" continue being used without significant innovation and excellence being introduced back into the company and its product, eventually customer preference might change, and gradually -- as time goes by, the company's product and existence increasingly become irrelevant.

Case 1: at IBM (1980s)

• During the dominant era of Mainframe, IBM people reportedly used to say: "Nobody gets fired buying IBM". Such is a true statement of that time when IBM was dominant, and IBM Mainframe product is a must.
• Yet few years later, when Mini and PC innovation fast forward at rapid pace, unless Lou Gertsner turn IBM to become the "Watson Sr's IBM" as it once was, the fate and future of IBM was in serious danger.

Case 2: at Microsoft itself(1980s)

• During the reign of DOS, Lotus (at that time the largest software company in the world) reportedly used to say: "The Windows market is minuscle (compared to the DOS based 123 market of that time), that way: Microsoft Excel (innovative) development would definitely have small chance to destroy domination of Lotus' DOS-based 123.
• Yet years later, the innovative Microsoft Excel (which runs on Windows) outpace Lotus 123 (which runs on DOS) in its development, innovation and market penetration, and turns Microsoft to be the new king of spreadsheet and office productivity tool of the future.

Lesson learned:

• Perfection could not be answered with abundance of selections.
• Excellence and innovation can not be answered with (current) domination.

Instead the only thing company can do to ensure its survival in stiff innovative/excellence based competition is perhaps to continuously keep its innovation going; and to keep on producing "perfect", "excellent" product that resonates very well with the market preference and needs.

Only through this the company's leadership in the marketplace could be secured; and only NOT through this the company's future could be risked and jeopardized significantly.

Sync, Store, Share & Backup Everything (Before It's Too Late)

You won't believe how fast these days we "consume" our computer hard-disk storage out.

In my case, when I started using my Apple Powerbook G4 2.5 years ago (for heavy duty presentation, design and coding work), I eaten out almost all of my harddisk space (100Gb+ at that time) in merely 12 months.

A year after that, when I start using MacBook (for presentation & design work only), I almost swallow half of the harddrive in 6 months.

The next year, when I switch to MacBook Air (for extreme daily portability) -- with 70Gb storage capacity -- I "knew" it already that the storage capacity will be gone in more or less 9 months or so. And it does!

At the current moment, I still don't know when my iMac harddrive (which stores photos, big size design drawings, video/multimedia stuff and work-in-progress presentation material) will soon "runs out".

Lesson learn from all these probably is this: at all time we need to define "a well planned" strategy of:

   1. What machine we are going to use to create, process and store which kind of data; and why.
   2. Where we would like to store those data, and how move it around later on (if need be).
   3. How we are going to synchronize, backup and restore them up accordingly -- just incase something happen.

Factor number 3 is extremely important. After all, with all these work, thinking and processing being done on our computer, of course we don't want our data to be suddenly just gone. The more machine that we have, the more important it is to have "common storage" that can be accessed by all these machines.

USB based or Firewire based portable harddrives is a great back-up solution if we use only one machine. With smart software such as TimeMachine, we can keep our live harddrive data periodically syncrhonize with the backup stuff.

Yet, if we use multiple machine, attaching and detaching these USB or Firewire portable drives to each machine would be difficult job by itself.

In such case, a "smarter solution" would be required -- either you establish and setup a "Wifi/wireless" harddrive (such as Apple Time Capsule), hence every machine can wirelessly linked up, backed-up, store or synchronize to it automatically, at anytime. Or -- in the near upcoming future -- you can use internet based document management and workflow management solution (code named Worxcode Woorknet). But such would be a completely different story. :-)

The Era Of "Off The Shelf Software" Might Soon Be Over

The era of software as we know it might soon be over. Trends of the past 2 years increasingly show that no longer software would be sold separately. Instead, software and hardware would merge together, transforming into an appliance that buyers can use immediately.

The latest happening in this direction is with Oracle. Recently Oracle announced its "database machine". Being developed for three years, this machine provides out-of-the-box capability. The database machine will sell for $650,000 and store up to 168 terabytes.

What Oracle does is not totally new. Several years ago, we saw similar initiative being done by Google search. A couple of months ago, we saw innovative appliance initiatives being done by KickFire -- an innovative hardware company that embeds MySQL inside its appliance, and optimize it for massive BI processing.

Sun Microsystems is also reportedly working on an optimized machine that would run its acquired MySQL the fastest.

These are all interesting development that directs us to one conclusion: that no matter it is an opensource software or a closed proprietary software, the era of "off the shelf software" might soon be over. Software might soon attached to a machine where it would run, and software in the future most likely will increasingly re-appear as either an appliance, or as a cloud computing services that the world can purchase, or subscribe to.

Such would be one of the most important trend and development of how the economics of mobile computing, desktop computing and massive computing infrastructure might change into the future.

The First Android Phone Finally Arrive In The US

Finally the first Android phone arrive in the US. Called G1, this phone is being offered by T-Mobile and start becoming available in the market.

For those who get curious how it looks like, here's a peek:

Function wise this phone start to have some unique personality which in the future might differentiate it significantly from the iPhone offering and concept. For example:

1. This phone provides physical keyboard, which shall make it very easy and convenient to type in data, versus iPhone "soft keyboard approach" that tends to be slower (and less easy to do).
2. This phone will support and will provide Adobe flash capabilities, which the iPhone lack.
3. This phone OS is opensource and it can be embedded inside any machine, which is totally in contrast to iPhone OS's iPhone-only approach.
4. This phone comes unlock -- hence can be used on any data network -- versus iPhone's exclusive AT&T network scheme and approach.

Indeed the phone is not pretty as iPhone yet. But considering that the mother of this phone is HTC, we surely can predict (and safely bet) that in the future there would be continuous stream of hardware innovation comes into it.

As for Apple iPhone, if this marvelous phone is kept being locked-in as it is today, the old history of the Mac (vs PC) in the 80's might have a very likely chance to happen again. The ongoing development of Android phone might need to be watched out very very carefully.

Dancing Around The Globe

Matt Harding spent his time traveling around the world, and at each place he visited, he did some lovely dance act that makes people and the crowds around him feels fun and excited.

It's really appealing, inspring, awesome, and truly fun to watch.

This is one of his video:

Microsoft's "I'm A PC" New Ad Feels Like "A Pity!" ;-(

Microsoft finally launched a new ad campaign. Their new airshow is based on a new format with a lot of "I'm a PC, I'm a PC, I'm a PC" mantra around.

Despite its 1 minute duration, at the end of the ad there's almost nothing left to really feel excited about.

So far these series of campaign ads are perhaps among the worst campaign ads that is ever created at Microsoft. Ballmerian Microsoft's taste and gesture seem feel awfully different from Microsoft in the past. There's no elegance in these latest ad.

What a PC ... oops I mean: what a pity. ;-( ;-( ;-(

Asus Announces World's First Skype Video Phone!

While skype is probably one of the most beautiful thing that the world experience over the internet today, one of skype's greatest "annoyance" is that we almost always had to turn-on our computer before we would be able to use it.

Well, perhaps not anymore, because recently Asus announces the release of the world's first video phone:

Basically what this device does is enabling people to skype over the internet, using this video phone, yet without needing any computer at all.

Now that's something cool, very useful, nice and superbly awesome! I think if the device has arrived and it is indeed as good as we expect it to be, I think there's no reason why not buy one.

Recently Asus is doing and pioneering alot of pretty amazing thing. After pioneering the Eee/NetPC phenomena a few months back, now they are becoming the first to introduce this? This is really superbly awesome.

The First Google HTC Android Phone Has Arrived!

While yesterday we speculate "what if" one day HTC embraces Google Android OS, interestingly today it was rumored that such device is actually now start being secretly "unveiled" during the Android Developer Conference in Europe.

This is far far faster then we could have expected! Peter Chou is really ingenious! In the next few weeks let's wait for the formal announcement, and in the next few months or so, let's see how other handset manufacturer would respond: especially Samsung and LG, then -- later on -- SonyEricsson and Nokia.
 

This is really exciting! When the formal launch of the "stealth" device started, another new era would then formally begin.