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What people love and hate about the iPhone 4S

TechDept — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:22:47 +0000

Here’s a look at what people love and hate about the iPhone 4S from ChangeWave Research.

As you can see, people love Siri, the ease of use, and the nice camera. They hate the battery life and the fact that it doesn’t have 4G.

By Jay Yarow and Jon Terbush for Business Insider, 01 Dec 2011.

How social technologies are extending the organization

TechDept — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:00:21 +0000

Companies are improving their mastery of social technologies, using them to enhance operations and exploit new market opportunities — key findings of our fifth annual survey on these tools and technologies, in which we asked more than 4,200 global executives how organizations deploy them and the benefits they confer. When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share, respondents say, confirming last year’s survey results.

By Jacques Bughin, Angela Hung Byers, and Michael Chui for McKinsey Quarterly, Nov 2011.

Hardware companies will have to quit the tablet market in 2012

TechDept — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:00:38 +0000

Because hardware companies like Dell, HP, and Acer have so few advantages over companies that offer content as well, DigiTimes reports that they may be getting out of the tablet game entirely next year.

Content companies like Amazon or Barnes & Noble can subsidize their tablets like crazy — they’ll make their money back after the fact as customers buy content to make the tablets more useful.

Consider the $200 Kindle Fire — Amazon has no problem selling it at a loss because it can pull itself back into the green with e-book sales.

By Dylan Love for Business Insider, 17 Nov 2011.

It’s official: flash mobile player is dead

TechDept — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:00:41 +0000

Adobe confirmed what reports were saying all morning: It’s done with the Flash Mobile Player and has now thrown its lot in with the HTML5 crowd — for mobile at least.

“We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and general manager for interactive development in a blog entry this morning.

The company that built Flash and famously fought with Apple CEO Steve Jobs on the necessity for its support on all mobile devices now contends that HTML5 is the right path for mobile devices and its developer partners. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms,” wrote Winokur.

By Lance Ulanoff for Mashable, 09 Nov 2011.

16 examples of steve jobs being a huge jerk

TechDept — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 09:00:04 +0000

When it comes to Steve Jobs, there’s the “Good Steve,” and then, there’s the “Bad Steve,” says biographer Walter Isaacson.

His mammoth personality could inspire those around him just as easily as it could tear them down.

Here are 16 examples of when he did the latter.

By Dylan Love for Business Insider, 25 Oct 2011.

The digital living room isn’t here yet

TechDept — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:00:52 +0000

Despite all the hype around Netflix streaming, and Apple’s iTunes movie store, the fact of the matter is that the physical disc is still the king of home entertainment, Dan Frommer at SplatF reports.

As you can see in the chart below, digital streaming/sales only accounted for 19% of the home entertainment market in the third quarter. The rest of sales comes from DVD/Blu-ray discs.

As Frommer points out, this means there’s still plenty of room for growth for Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and others to attack the market.

By Jay Yarrow for Business Insider, 01 Nov 2011.

Truly amazing: quantum levitation

TechDept — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 09:00:55 +0000

Visit site

By the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC)Videos posted on YouTube, 16 Oct 2011.

The future of social gaming isn’t all about facebook

TechDept — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:00:03 +0000

The bulk of social gaming revenue in the next three years will not come from Facebook, as you might suspect, but rather from alternative platforms that are dominant in other countries.

In a study conducted by SuperData Research on behalf ofViximo, a social games and applications platform, it found that non-Facebook social gaming will explode to $5.6 billion in 2014, up from an estimated $3.2 billion this year.

At that level, the study found that it will represent 65 percent of the overall projected revenue, including both Facebook and non-Facebook social gaming networks, which together are expected to hit $8.6 billion in 2014.

By Tricia Duryee for All Things D, 11 Oct 2011.

Qwik fails: 15 disastrous product launches that were quickly killed

TechDept — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:00:12 +0000

This morning, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced that Qwikster is no longer.

Hastings decided to listen to shareholders and consumers and kill Qwikster before even giving it a chance.

Was it the right move?

Netflix shares plunged around 7% today while the rest of the market rallied. Investors clearly aren’t impressed, but they may just be responding to the company’s acknowledgement that Qwikster.

By Aimee Groth and Jay Yarow for Business Insider War Room, 10 Oct 2011.

Convert word documents to clean HTML

TechDept — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:00:42 +0000

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