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All across the country, people are rising up and demanding that the foods they eat be properly identified and honestly labeled. And the constituency of the state of Oregon is no exception, where a trio of legislative bills recently introduced would require that all genetically… |
Author: Serkadis
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Oregon set to ban GM salmon and mandate GMO labeling
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The dark underbelly of sustainable development: Agenda 21
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Healing rights and healing rites: An interview with Nick Polizzi of ‘The Sacred Science’
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U.S. government plans to scan your private emails using cybersecurity program as a cover
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Melatonin treats migraine headaches
(NaturalNews)A recent study showed that melatonin is an effective treatment for migraine headaches. The study Study participants had a history of 2 to 8 migraines per month. They were divided into three groups, those taking 3 mg of melatonin, 25 mg of amityptyline (an antidepressant…
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Mycotoxins are contaminating these 10 food staples
Fungi produce secondary metabolites called mycotoxins. Mycotoxins were discovered in 1962 in London, England, when a peanut ground meal was found to have caused approximately 100,000 turkey deaths. Metabolites from the common fungi Aspergillus flavus had contaminated… -
Is using Chrome OS like going to prison?
Now that’s a question I never expected to ask on Easter morning. But instead of waking up to egg hunts, I’m haunted by Brian Fagioli’s Google+ Chromebook Community post overnight. He stirs up the hornets nest today.
“Using Chrome OS is a lot like prisoners in jail making alcohol in the toilet”, he writes. “Even when you are limited, you will find a way. While it is fun to find a way to do things despite the limitations of Chrome OS, the question remains: why do we choose to put ourselves in jail?”
Fagioli isn’t some troll tweaking Chromebook users. He purchased the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook — that’s the ARM-based model selling for $249 — in January. This morning I asked if he is satisfied with the computer. “Yeah I love it”, he answers. “I use it for personal use but the limitations caused me to install ubuntu in dual boot. Chrome OS won’t let me access file sharing on my home network or even print to my home printer”.
His satisfaction is important context for the rest of his questions: “Why did you choose to buy a Chromebook or Chromebox instead of a Windows or Mac or full blown Linux computer? Why did you choose to limit yourself? Was it just the low price?” The latter two are leading and likely will affect direction of the responses. Nevertheless, he genuinely asks.
“What limitations?” Frank Camuglia asks. “There’s nothing I can’t do on my Chromebook. I think what you don’t understand is that what works for one, doesn’t always work for everyone”.
Fagioli answers:
I own a Samsung Chromebook and love it. However, I can’t connect to a printer without buying a special printer or leaving a desktop running to connect to the printer. I can’t do file sharing with my home network. For instance, if I have family photos on a desktop on my network, I cannot access them with my Chromebook. I can’t connect to IRC without using a web service which, could be logging your conversations. The music player app is very basic. The Samsung Chromebook is $249. A new, better specced laptop can be had for $299 that can run full blown Linux or windows and chrome browser.
“Any OS is a jail”, Falko Löffler asserts. “Ten years ago a Mac user was hearing the exact same thing: Why don’t you use a Windows machine? There’s much more software, it’s much cheaper and there are no compatibility problems. Why bother trying to desperately find a workflow on something exotic like this — OS X thing that no one will use in a few years from now.”
I’ve been a tech journalist for nearly 20 years now, and can atest based on experience that Löffler absolutely is right. But I’ll go further. The Google community of users — that’s more than just Chrome OS or Chromebook — feels a lot like those rallying for Macs, 10 to 20 years ago. There’s similar enthusiasm and sense of actually being a community. The character also reminds of Firefox users, but more before Chrome’s recent rise in popularity.
Michael Romaniello: “Watching my kids use the mini Mac just to go online and watch YouTube and check Facebook, now i don’t worry about a virus when there online. They also use them to watch Netflix. Can’t beat the price. I brought one for myself after using theirs, easy to use and update”.
That’s no answer for Fagioli, who asks: “Are you doing your kids a disservice by dumbing down their computing? I understand it’s easier for you to not worry about viruses but you are hindering their computer education”. I’ll answer that, following on Löffler. Not long ago, that was a common Windows PC rebuttal against Macs — that using them didn’t train kids for the future. I laugh because a Linux user asks this? Linux would prepare kids for what?
“They still use windows computers in school, and still use the mini mac at times when they need something the Chromebook doesn’t do”, Romaniello answers Fagioli. “The way kids today pick up on new technology i’m not worried at all”.
Jerry Daniels, who uses Chromebook Pixel, is right: “I heard the same arguments about Macs crippling a kid’s tech background and it’s total bullshit. All people with a real tech background know this”.
“In my school district they are going Apple in a big way. Students and some teachers are getting iPads”, Gordon Sroufe writes, directed to Romaniello. “Cost, eventually, will be millions. Chromebooks would have been a better choice for students can reach educational software like Edmodo and faculty can get to power school for admin chores”.
There are currently 4,573 members of the Google+ Chromebook Community. What surprises me in scanning the members: How many of them work for educational institutions — one of Google’s target markets for the computers and an Apple stronghold.
William Dove captures my sentiment:
It’s not limiting yourself. It’s simply preparing yourself for the future. I’m sure some of us still have Windows or OS X machine to tackle the things the Chrome OS can’t but how often do you really need to use it? This is the future of computing, rather we like it or not. Google just happens to be way ahead of it’s time. Ten maybe even 5 years from now, the use of hard drives will not be needed and only come for those that chose to have one to. That’s why I’m choosing to get one.
Chrome OS and Chromebook are definitely controversial topics among BetaNews readers, and a Chromebook Community obviously is filled with enthusiasts. Then there is Fagioli’s forceful and poignant metaphor. So I ask: Is using Chrome OS like going to prison? Comments await your answers.
Photo Credit: Liv friis-larsen/Shutterstock
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256 Shades Of Grey
I want a black and white computer, and I don’t want it out of sheer, wanton weirdness. I actually think it’s a good idea. Here’s why.
A huge, huge proportion of the content we consume every day is text. And, for many, an equal proportion of what they work with is text — be it code, email, or published content like this. For the consumption and creation of text, a monochrome display is all that is necessary, and in some ways even superior to a color one.
Pixels on an LCD like the one on which you’re probably reading this are made up of dots or sub-pixels — usually one red, one green, and one blue. The transistor matrix changes the opacity of a sub-pixel of a given color, and by working together they can create millions of hues and shades. But they work (with a few exceptions such as sub-pixel font smoothing and pentile layouts) only as triads, meaning a display with a resolution of 5760 by 3240 addressable dots has just 1920×1080 addressable pixels. (This is the reason why simply desaturating the image does not improve the resolution.)
If the iPad were monochrome, it would have nearly 800 pixels per inch
Consequently, if you were to remove the color filters, each sub-pixel would become a pixel — all only able to show shades of grey, of course, but pixels nonetheless, and far more of them than there were before. Result: extremely high spatial resolution, far beyond the so-called “retina” point, even at close range. If the iPad were monochrome, it would have nearly 800 pixels per inch. That’s beyond even glossy magazine levels of sharpness, a dream for rendering type.
It would also be brighter, or put another way, would require less backlight, since the removal of the filters allows far more light to pass through. That saves battery. Also saving battery is the reduced amount of graphics processing power and RAM necessary to store and alter the screen state, and so on. Small things, but not insignificant.
It would, of course, retain all of the other benefits of a modern, connected device, remaining as responsive and powerful as any other laptop or tablet, just minus the color. Logistically speaking, adapting existing content would not be that problematic (“time-shifting” apps and other extractors already do this). And it’s more than a glorified e-reader: the limitations of that type of hardware are lethal to many of the methods in which we are now accustomed to finding, consuming, and creating content (to say nothing of the screen quality).
Why black and white? Well, why color?
But what the hell is the point, you ask, if it’s not in color? The web is in color. The world is in color!
Your Instagram feed won’t be quite as striking in greyscale, it’s true. Rich media wasn’t designed for monochrome, and shouldn’t be forced into it. It demands color, and deserves it. Obviously you wouldn’t want to browse Reddit or edit video on a monochrome display. But if something does not require color, it seems pointless to provide it, especially when doing so has real drawbacks.
You’ve seen the apps that prevent procrastination, or make the user focus on a task, by blocking out distractions and the like. At some times, we want a tool that does one thing, and at other times, we want a tool that does others. That’s why computers are so great: They can switch between, say, text-focused work mode and image-focused movie mode in an instant.
They’re like Swiss Army knives: a corkscrew one minute and a can opener the next. But, as I tried to suggest in my previous column, if you tend to open a lot of wine bottles and very few cans, wouldn’t you prefer that you had a dedicated wine opener, without a bunch of other tools attached? That it can’t open a can is tragic, but more than made up for by its facility in its chosen task.
There will always be a place for the essential alone
I believe some people would not only be unperturbed by an inability to watch videos or what have you — in fact, they may prefer it. We already have different computing tools for different purposes, and we don’t demand that they all do everything — I have a laptop so I can write, as I am at the present, while enjoying some fresh air and coffee. I have a desktop for games and heavy productivity. I have an iPad for this, and an e-reader for that, and a phone for this, and a camera for that. What’s one more, especially when it would be, I believe, quite good at what it does, even if that’s “only” working with text?
There’s also a less practical, more aesthetic reason I would enjoy a black and white device. The content we consume and the ways we navigate it have become loud and colorful, and to me it does not appear that this profusion of saturation has been accompanied by a corresponding subtlety of design. The eruption of capabilities has made many lose touch with the beauty of austerity, and what’s billed as “minimalism” rarely is. There is a set of qualities that sets that starkness apart, and while we have always enjoyed ornamentation, there has always been (and will be for the foreseeable future) a place and purpose for the essential alone.
On that note, I think it would be an interesting experiment, and highly beneficial one, to attempt to rebuild, say, Facebook or an OS, without any color at all. When you subtract color cues like green for yes and red for no, or implicit boundaries based not on contrast and flow but on different coloration, the problem of presenting and consuming the information concerned is totally changed. Perhaps one would learn better the fundamentals of layout, flow, proportion, and so on, and that would inform the color world as well.
I read a lot, and I write for a living. I want a specialized tool for doing those things, just as a logger would want an axe instead of a big knife, or a runner a good pair of shoes instead of slippers. In the end, I like the idea of a black-and-white device and interface for many of the reasons I like black-and-white photography. It’s different, and has different strengths, and both requires and provides a different perspective. For me, that’s enough to at least want it on the table.
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What it takes to be a mobile hit: Five friends, zero VC dollars and lots of chutzpah
Remember back to 2009, when the iTunes App Store was just over a year old and the iPad hadn’t even hit our hot little hands? At that time corporate spending on mobile was mainly about advertising to consumers — give me an app! — or freaking out about employees bringing in their own devices. But five college seniors looked at the burgeoning mobile environment and saw an opportunity.
Not the same opportunity as the creators of Angry Birds, or any number of design shops that popped up to help stores, online publications and everyone else build apps. No, these five founders — who met in a an aviation club at the University of Texas at Austin — saw in mobile the chance to make substantive changes in how enterprises do business. So they founded a company — Mutual Mobile — to do it.
The bootstrapped startup has built a successful business developing mobile apps for companies as varied as Google and Adidas. Companies such as this one, a quiet success that has gone relatively unheralded in the press, are defining our shift to mobile, as much as the obvious hits are. Here’s how it did it.
Lesson 1: Find your passion, the follow it
Mutual Mobile made its debut in April 2009 in Austin and two months later signed PeopleFinders.com as its first client. It wasn’t an enterprise company, but it was money in the bank, and the resulting app (Are They Really Single?) was more than just porting that company’s website to a mobile platform. Instead it took the premise behind the site — doing background checks and lookups on people — and packaged that expertise into a single purpose mobile app for checking out if that person you just met at the bar was really single.
It took one month for PeopleFinders.com to recoup the cost of developing the app. “That’s how powerful a mobile experience done right can be for a business,” says John Arrow, the CEO of Mutual Mobile.
Several other clients soon followed until the firm was doing well, with about 75 employees by the end of 2010 and 100 revenue-generating clients. But with the launch of the iPad that year, and some self reflection from Arrow, the team realized that the consumer business might be big, but it wasn’t what they cared about. So Mutual Mobile started firing its clients.
The result was those two dips in revenue as it ditched lucrative consumer-facing customers, including its last holdout Adidas, so it could focus on the enterprise and what they needed. “It was a tough decision to make, but it was the right one for us,” Arrow said. “And while it was hard to see those dips in revenue, we knew where we wanted to go.”
Today the firm only has 48 clients and $26 million in revenue — all from enterprise companies — at the end of 2012. Plus, it has 375 people who are thinking about mobile computing as more than just apps, but as an overall trend toward computing everywhere.
Identify the real trend
What does Arrow find so compelling about developing mobile products for enterprise customers? It’s not the devices.
“Apple isn’t going to make an iPhone 15,” Arrow says. “If you think that, you’re not thinking about mobile in the right way.” For him mobile is shorthand for adapting the computing to our daily lives and habits as opposed to expecting us to adapt to them. Sure, we may still need desktop computers, but Arrow is confident that computing will be everywhere.
The Briggo coffee-making robot lives inside that cube.
For example, his firm last year built an application for a robotic coffee kiosk on the University of Texas campus for a company called Briggo. Students and professors can order their coffee through their phones or at the kiosk and pick up a made-to-order beverage on the way to their class. The app tracks their location and gives the wait time for their coffees based on where they are as well as how busy the machine making the coffee is.
Other examples are further out there, such as the research Mutual Mobile is doing on haptics — the vibrations your phone makes are an example of haptics — as a source of ambient information. Arrow wonders if it might become a type of code for conveying information, akin to Braille. He sees it having potential in places like airplane cockpits or other information-dense environments, but stresses that its use in an actual product is at least six months out.
No VC means no one to break your fall
In the meantime, Arrow’s staying focused on the business, which he said he wants to grow to $100 million in revenue by 2015. This is a big number for a company that is entirely bootstrapped and has no venture capital investment. Arrow says he’s well on his way to achieving that goal. But to get to this point he’s had to do some detective work in the early days trying to find enterprise customers — or partners with enterprise customers — that were ready to change the way they did business with regard to mobile computing.
His first enterprise client came really early on, and is still with Mutual Mobile. The customer, Greenway Medical wants to help doctors use mobile devices when completing rounds and to access patient records. But getting Greenway as a client was more about Greenway seeing the iPod touch as a potential solution and seeking someone — anyone — who might be able to help, and stumbling on the young Mutual Mobile.
The Greenway Medical iPad app.
It was also important that they would trust an unnamed startup headed by a 20-something CEO. When Arrow co-founded Mutual Mobile he was 21. This week he had his 26th birthday. That was one reason that Mutual Mobile veered into serving consumer clients such as PeopleFinder.com or Gowalla. Those clients were eager for mobile apps and trusted startups.
“Back in 2009 there weren’t enterprises betting on mobility and we had to figure out how to bootstrap this company when there wasn’t even an addressable market yet,” Arrow said. “We knew consumer was our only option … and when Philips and Google and Verizon came around later we were able to apply all that we had learned. If we had started this company in the early part of 2011 or late 2010 we would have lacked credibility and had no infrastructure and no skillset to help, and clients would have been right to avoid this immature company.”
Arrow also thinks that if he had VC backing he wouldn’t have been able to pass up the lure of easy dollars from more consumer-facing clients. Those dips in revenue may never have happened. He probably would have also been asked to move his company from Austin to the Bay Area. So far he’s content to stay VC free, but given the appetite VCs have for putting dollars into older companies with big sales in hot markets, someone may convince him.
In the meantime, Arrow and Mutual Mobile are content to ride a massive wave of interest in enterprise mobile. One of the strongest signals for Mutual Mobile may have come last month when IBM announced its mobile first initiative, validating the type of experience and work that Mutual Mobile has been pushing on its clients since 2009.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.- Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
- What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
- Analyzing the wearable computing market
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Congressman vows to end the TSA and stop airport tyranny
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