Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Glenn Lurie on Dropped Calls and iPhone Exclusives
Glenn Lurie on Dropped Calls and iPhone Exclusives
Here's the video highlights from AT&T President of Emerging Devices Glenn Lurie's interview with Walt Mossberg, who drills down on AT&T's reputation for dropped calls and what will happen once its iPhone exclusivity expires.
A Hands-On History of the Cellphone by Greg Harper
A Hands-On History of the Cellphone by Greg Harper
Gadget freak Greg Harper drops by the D: Dive Into Mobile to show off...gadgets, of course. Check out the All Things D archives for a trip down gadget memory lane.
RealNetworks Unifi's Media in the Cloud
RealNetworks Unifi's Media in the Cloud
RealNetworks is releasing and demoing live onstage its newest product-named Unifi. The cloud media service automatically catalogs your collection (a la iTunes) and lets you stream it to any device, on demand.
Dive Tech-OnLive Now More Than Just a Game
Dive Tech-OnLive Now More Than Just a Game
Way back in June, OnLive demoed its cloud-based mini gaming console in front of a packed house at D8. Today, it is attempting to level-up, announcing a new extension of the OnLive cloud service platform-one that turns just about any device into a console for their cloud system.
Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley at D: Mobile
Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley at D: Mobile
If Dodgeball was, as founder Dennis Crowley claims, the perfect storm of bad timing, then his latest venture Foursquare is a sunny day. In this video Crowley talks about the mechanics of merchant relationships, valuations and frothiness and the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare.
Google's Susan Wojcicki at D: Dive Into Mobile
Google's Susan Wojcicki at D: Dive Into Mobile
You'd have to search a long time to find someone who's been closer to the evolution of Google than Susan Wojcicki. It was in her rented garage that Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched the company, which she joined in 1999. Now, as one of only eight senior vice presidents, she runs Google's most important business units.
Video And Screenshots Of Android 3.0′s Surprise Appearance
The video of Andy Rubin’s talk at the Dive Into Mobile event is up, and you can watch the juicy bit above, where he takes out the prototype Motorola tablet and toys with it for all to see, demonstrating the new Google Maps and “accidentally” teasing video chat capability and some other things.
The pad looks bigger than 7″, the size we heard about, but I can’t swear to it. If I had to take a guess at the screen resolution, I’d go with 8-9″ at 1024×600. It looks thin and rather unadorned right now, but this likely isn’t the final industrial design, so let’s just not worry too much about that. He seemed proud that it had no buttons on it, though, so I’m guessing that’s final.
Rubin mentions toward the beginning of his Maps demo that it’s running a dual-core NVIDIA GPU. So there’s that. I wonder what the CPU is — not an ARM SoC, since the graphics wouldn’t be discrete like that. A new dual-core Atom? Or something new, something custom? He does say a “new” processor, and for that matter a “new” screen, so it could be anything, and the screen might be different from the current crop. (as commenters point out, it’s likely that this it is running a Tegra 2 and Rubin was simply not describing it well)
Here are a few screenshots from the video. Sorry they aren’t very clear, but they’re better than the blurry ones from before.
As for the price? TBD. Unless you want to buy the prototype, about which Rubin said “literally, this thing is probably like ten thousand dollars.”
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The Google Map App on Android phones will soon get a major upgrade which will allow it to render map images a lot faster, incorporate 3D buildings, offer offline caching, and use the compass to orient the map. In a talk this evening at the D Mobile conference, Android chief Andy Rubin gave a sneak peak of the new app.
At the heart of the new app is a dynamic map rendering engine which draws maps as you use them, and offers smoother transitions when zooming in and out of different levels. The dynamic rendering will also make it possible to start to show 3D buildings as you zoom into the street-level view. The touch screen will allow you to tilt and rotate the map and buildings.
The new maps load faster because they require 100 times less data each. Instead of downloading the entire map image for each level, the app downloads meta data which describes the entire map at all different levels and then renders the appropriate sector on the fly. This will start to give Google Maps offline capabilities on mobile phones. It may be possible to cache a map of an entire city on the phone. And for people who use the turn-by-turn navigation in Google Maps, when the new app comes out it will be able to recalculate the route even without a data connection.
The Google Maps app will also use the built-in compass on Android phones to automatically flip the orientation of the map to the person holding the phone. That orientation feature will come in handy when you are coming out of a subway station in an unfamiliar stop, or exiting a building.
Meaningful Work through Passion, not Genius
At the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and the upcoming "Outliers," gives two examples of hard work that later looked like genius. Bill Gates got up at 2am to program as a teenager, while the Beatles played together 1200 times, far more than most bands, before they ever got famous. Success, he believes, is the result of putting your heart and mind into something to create successful, meaningful work.
Are you doing what you were made to do?
Everyone has a passion and something that drives them. What is yours? Are you doing what you were made to do? Watch Joel Comm discuss how to find your passion and live your life to the fullest.
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