Here is a surprisingly controversial statement: The iPad is going to be huge. Tablets, in general, will someday soon not merely outsell personal computers, but actually replace them, even in businesses, and in productive capacities for which people currently believe “only a PC will do.”
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Microsoft is building a team of elite engineers to cook up “disruptive technologies”—just like the folks on Google’s secretive “X” team who brought us the self-driving car and are hastening the day that robots take over.
Google is fighting a war on multiple fronts—against Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—and is outspending them all in the one area that will be critical to winning the future: the cloud.
Apple has still got some gas in the tank.
Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer predicted in January that Apple will generate the same amount of revenue this past quarter—the company releases its financials today—as it did a year ago. Analysts agree with him. Apple generated more revenue than ever in the the first fiscal quarter of 2014, which includes the 2013 holiday season. But it’s entirely possible that fiscal 2014 (which runs through September) will be the first time since Steve Jobs returned to Apple and turned the company around that revenue will not grow from one fiscal year to the next.
In technology, it’s sometimes good to let a pioneer figure out the pitfalls of a new market. Apple’s iPod transformed music listening after countless lesser MP3 players failed to make a real dent.
Here’s an open secret about tech companies that many investors fail to appreciate: As long as they’re not breaking the law, they’ll “disclose” whatever numbers about their business—users, units shipped, etc.—cast them in the most favorable light. And sometimes, those numbers don’t reflect reality at all.
More Americans age 65 and older own either a tablet or an e-reader (27%) than own smartphones (18%)—the reverse of the proportions for the general public, according to the Pew Internet Project’s latest study on how people access the internet.
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A pair of advocates—they do legitimate research too, but their ardor is so intense, it’s hard to call them scientists—believe that they will, within their lifetimes, make ours the first generation of humans to live forever.
In May 2013, Google soft-launched a straightforward scheme for sending money to other people. It lets you connect Gmail with a Google Wallet account and send money to a friend for free (from a linked bank account) or for a small fee (from a credit card).
Justine Tunney is an engineer at Google. But she’s also, by her own account, a founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Other Occupy protesters take issue with that description, but one thing is for sure, she was active and visible in Occupy for three years.) At the intersection of these two unlikely facts is a third—Tunney recently launched a petition on the website of the White House to appoint Google chairman Eric Schmidt as “CEO of America,” replacing president Barack Obama in what would amount to a bloodless coup.
Storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz was an early investor in Facebook. It also put money into Instagram, which sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012. And now, Facebook has bought another Andreessen Horowitz investment, virtual reality startup Oculus VR, for roughly $2 billion.
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Twitter is showing signs of its age. But no one seems to agree on what—if anything—should change about the service. About the only thing critics can agree on: As powerful as Twitter is, it’s still inaccessible to new users.
Apple is a fantastic hardware company. And when the rumored iWatch (probably) arrives, it will no doubt be a thing of beauty. But there’s good reason to think that the key to a successful smartwatch won’t be its hardware, but its operating system.
The White House is testing alternatives to the long-time favorite smartphone of President Barack Obama, reports the Wall Street Journal. If Obama does switch to an Android-based phone, from BlackBerry, it would be a major blow for the ailing Waterloo, Ontario-based company.
Recently I sat down with Dmitry Grishin, the billionaire co-founder of mail.ru and head of the world’s largest venture capital fund devoted solely to robots, Grishin Robotics. As you might expect from someone who has put $25 million into robotics startups, he’s bullish on the potential of robots (as he defines them) to become an area in which fortunes will be made in just the next few years.
First, a video of strangers kissing took the internet by storm, only it turned out to be an advertisement starring models and actors. Then a filmmaker recreated it with everyday people, and the results were kind of creepy. Not to mention a whole raft of parodies. But what the internet has yet to realize is that this whole kerfuffle was predated by a 2004 advertisement for the Science World museum in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Today Google finally pulled the curtain back, at least a little, on its long-rumored plans for a smartwatch. First, Google rolled out a couple of slick videos showing off how its Android mobile operating system will work on its smartwatches.
The head of the world’s biggest pool of venture capital devoted solely to robots is sitting on the edge of his seat, speaking so quickly I can hardly take notes, his boyish enthusiasm reaching a fever pitch. “People usually call something ‘robots’ when they don’t know what they are doing,” says Dimitry Grishin, billionaire co-founder of Mail.ru. “Once it does something useful, we call it a vacuum cleaner, a car, whatever. Look at the cash machine—there are a lot of devices around now that 50 years ago people would call robots.”
Let’s face it: you don’t go to conferences to watch a bunch of blowhards try to fill 50 minutes with empty talk followed by a 10-minute Q&A mostly eaten up by “this is more of a comment than a question” guy. You’re there to network. Here’s how to transform the average conference from a litany of soporific sessions into the most valuable and enjoyable work thing you’ll do all year. The best part is, tackling conferences this way means that in most cases, you won’t even have to register—just show up.
The most successful technologies are those aimed at what Steve Jobs called “things people want to do.” That is, they answer a human need that has remained constant throughout history, rather than cater a particular “market.”
