Weekend Reading – Thanksgiving Edition
Something ELSE in The Smartphone Market
We rarely lead our Weekend Reading Feature with a blog post, but it’s hard to get past this intriguing opening by Richard Lai in “Engadget“: “Folks, today might be the day when you start to notice how ancient our smartphones have become, even if they only came out in last few months.”
Lai details debut in London this week of a new smartphone and smartphone platform bearing the name “ELSE.” This Linux based smartphone from Israel’s Emblaze Mobile was “built from scratch” and features a sleek design and, by all accounts, an amazing user Interface. Read about, look at and watch why ELSE may be a game changer in the smartphone market in this Engadget post.
Future of the PC
Speaking of game changers, Jon Fortt writes in “Forbes” about the competing trends driving development of personal computers. Fortt asks, “Will tomorrow’s PC be a nimble netbook or a high-def laptop?” then details an explanation of opposing views offered by Google and AMD.
A Life Beyond Twitter?
One of the genius aspects of Twitter is how it engendered and surrounded itself with a vibrant devepoer ecosystem. Many of you reading this post are using third party apps and services built for and around Twitter. But could Twitter eventually walk away from this ecosystem? A “Portfolio” magazine article by Anthony Duignan-Cabrera examines how Twitter’s business interests are evolving and how developers are prepaparing for life after TWitter no longer needs them.
In a sometimes amusing companion piece by Jacqui Cheng of “Ars Technica,” Portfolio looks at the social networking behavior of young people. Is the generation of people under 35 taking social networking too far? One stat from the article: 36 percent of under-35 users admitted to checking Twitter/Facebook/texts immediately after getting it on.
In Case You Missed It: Search Engine Minimization
Traditional media is evolving so it can thrive in the New Media era. As part of that evolution, some online news resources are switching from free to subscription based distribution models. News Corp. chief Rupport Murdoch has concerns about news from his company’s various media brands being indexed in the Google search engine. With Google readers can find snippets of News Corp. articles, not only threatening his revenue model, but also be mislead by lack of context. So Murdoch is taking steps to block News Corp. news content from appearing in Google search results. As Bloomberg’s Greg Bensinger and Brian Womack point out in this story, News Corp. is not the only media outlet taking this dramatic step.
