The news from Google that they have released Quickoffice, their Microsoft Office competitor, for free immediately gave me my headline for this post. […] With Quickoffice, you can edit Microsoft® Office documents across your devices, giving you the freedom to work with anyone no matter what hardware or software they’re using. Quickoffice also integrates seamlessly with Google Drive storage so you can safely access your files from anywhere. Not everyone agrees with my cart metaphor. On Twitter, for instance, Stuart …
Category: Experimenting
I guess it’s inevitable that everyone reporting on Spirit for Twitter likens its self-destructing tweet service to SnapChat, the mobile app for real-time picture and video messaging that self-destruct after a sender-defined time, up to ten seconds. Spirit is similar in outcome – tweets you send that you mark with a certain hashtag will automatically delete themselves after the set time has passed. You get a lot more time flexibility than just ten seconds though: minutes, hours and days. The …
A topic Shel and I discuss in this week’s FIR podcast episode 715 is commenting on blogs. More specifically, about the conversation that can happen in response to a post someone writes and publishes on a blog, and where the conversation actually takes place. Increasingly, it’s not on the blog itself – it’s on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere across the social web except in the comments section of the blog post that prompted someone to add their two pence-worth. Here’s …
With some fanfare in the tech press, hot video app Vine made its debut today on Android devices. Until now, the popular Twitter-owned app has been available only for Apple devices. There’s no doubt that Vine has captured imaginations worldwide since it launched in January, just four months ago. In that short time, it’s acquired over 13 million users who have published millions of 6-second looping video clips they created on their iPhones and iPads. Among those millions of clips …
The first thought that crossed my mind when I tried out Google’s new “conversational search” functionality in the latest version of its desktop Chrome browser was Star Trek. You don’t have to be a huge fan of the sci-fi TV series (and films) to remember the ways in which Captain Kirk (Picard, Janeway, etc) did search or asked a question. “Computer?” they’d start saying, and then speak. That also reminds me of the rudimentary speech commands with the first-generation Kinect …
Since starting this blog in 2006, I’ve been the sole writer and publisher of content, making only a couple of exceptions over the past few years with content written by named guest writers. I strongly believe in transparency where disclosure of interest is the default. If I’m in any doubt about whether to disclose something or not, I tend to err on disclose. So before I get to the precise point of writing this post, I’d like to state a …
4G – the marketing term that covers the next-generation cellular standards LTE, HSPA+ and WiMAX – is rolling out worldwide and LTE is currently available in more than 60 countries. It’s generally seen that LTE is the fastest 4G service and is the one that is the subject of a just-published report by Open Signal, a UK-based network testing company. The report examines the state of LTE around the world and contains some useful trend metrics for the lay reader: …
It was good to see news last week that EE’s 4G cellular data coverage now extends to nine more towns across the UK. That translates as 4G currently available in 28 towns and cities covering 45 percent of the population, with another 27 towns planned to have 4G by the summer. The UK’s first mobile operator to offer 4G is on record saying it intends to make its higher-speed mobile data service available to 98 percent of the population by …
The buzz about Vine – pro and con – is non stop. BBC News has a great 6-point analysis of why they think it will continue grabbing attention: Stop motion animation is alive and well Ads work at six second length People tend to do rather than say Artificial limits help hype a social media offering Aggregations of Vine are mesmerising Cats/porn dominate every platform on the internet All credible. Read the detail behind each point on the BBC website. And …
