A reason not to buy the Apple watch

The most famous and least popular app in the future for the Apple Watch is something you don't want but will have anyway. Not that it will do you any good, to protest or otherwise because the app will do you no good, no good at all.
I'm talking about the iTruth, an app that will use the Apple watch's health features, like monitoring heart beat etc, etc, to see if you are telling the truth. Also known as the iTorture, the app will monitor your vitals and like old polygraphs of day by gone. Think of it, the Apple watch will tell you whether your significant other whether you are lying.
Should you buy it? Depends on who is wearing it.

If the iPhone 6 bends, it could be just you

How is it that we are all upset about phones bending in pockets? Isn't this what we've been working for? No more annoying bulges in pants pockets. "Is that the new iPhone6 or are you just happy to see me?" Is it a worthy enough a fiasco, enough to add the '-gate' behind it, becoming Bendgate. Or is it just a feature that was never intended for general release?
Bendy phones, now that is a concept. More of a blast from the past. The last time phones were this curvy was the Nokia 8110. Remember that? The one Keanu Reeves was holding in the movies.

No, not that one.

Yes, that one.

It's been a long time since the Nokia 8110. No, the Huawei concept phone doesn't count because it's not a 'real' phone. We don't count concept cars, do we? And the Nokia 7110 doesn't count either. Nobody wants to remember that train wreck.
No, really. I don't get it. Why is there all this fuss? The phone bends because you sat with it in your pocket. At what point did you not feel the phone poking against you as you sat down. At same point you decided to ignore it as an inconvenience and get on with the business of sitting down. When you made that decision, unconsciously or not, you have passed the point of responsibility. That is, you have decided to sit down with your phone in your pants, heaven be damned.
Your next visit may not be heaven but it'll most likely be the Apple Store.  

Lessons from the MTGOX fiasco

Bitcoin Magazine (Photo credit: zcopley)

As we've all heard, MTGOX has gone under. Now I'm sure we've all heard this because it's all over the mainstream news. It's everywhere. It's a scandal. Ergo, it's newsworthy and deserves to be reported on. They don't understand what is it they're reporting on but they said it anyway. Which questions the quality of news you actually get from mainstream news..
But back to MTGOX. Some say it's a tragedy, some say it was timebomb that finally went off. All we can do is learn from it. And here are the top 5 things to learn from the demise of MTGOX.

1. If you believe in BITCOIN, so will others. So much so, they'll steal it from you. Money isn't evil, it just drives people into doing evil things. So virtual money will drive people to do evil virtually.
2. You need better security to protect bitcoin transactions, better than those used to protect trading card swaps. Apparently Magic just won't cut it
3. Like in the real world, don't expect other virtual banks to bail your virtual bank out of trouble. It's the government's job apparently and they're still trying to get the spelling of bit-coin right. With dash or without.. And like the real world, the other virtual banks have thrown MTGOX under the bus, claiming that it was 'rogue'.
4. The bitcoins that were stolen were not lost, like the mainstream news reported. The total amount of bitcoins that were stolen were about 7% of all bitcoins in the world. Why would anyone steal all those bitcoins and not spend it later. Unless the point was to destroy Bitcoin's reputation. Who would want to do that? After all that time and effort to hack MtGOX? .. except someone who feels threaten by it.. perhaps...er.. forget about what I said. Is that a drone humming above?
5. . ... and finally, if you're gonna steal virtual currency from va irtual bank, steal everything. Everyone will be so upset with the bank, they'll stop looking for you. Really, how many people have you heard talking about getting the guys who did this? Why not go after the people who did this? Unless.. that drone is getting closer isn't it.

Watch out for drones bearing books in Australia

An Australian company is trying to deliver books with drones. That's right, drones.

Here your 50 Shades of Boom

Why wait for tomorrow for that book you ordered when you can get it right now. Two Australian companies are working together to make this happen. Since there is more than one person involved, it's safe to assume it's okay. I mean how crazy can two aussies be?
I know it's hard to compete with Amazon but do we have to resort to armaments?
And I get that some of us can't understand a Kindle. Or that reading from a screen is not the only same as reading from a piece of dead tree. Or that you're afraid of dropping it in a toilet. But really, does your need to read exceed the fear of something with 4 spinning blades showing up to your house or front door. Maybe you shouldn't fear the blades of the drone as much as you should a hardcover falling on your head. Or maybe that's the thing we need to make children read more, the fear of drones showing up with more books.
Can you imagine the swarm of drones flying around the next Harry Potter or Twilight book comes out?

Best Google Glass App: PervAlert

Have you heard of Google Glass? Oh I'm sorry... "Project Glass".
It's the definitive way to know which side of the mirror you are on, non-geek or super-geek.
No, really it's a type of glasses you wear that shows your screen right in front of your eye. Yes, right in front of your eye. It's their way of getting back at their parents for warning them against sitting too close to the TV. Now, there is no way of getting any closer.
But really, seriously, it has it's good side. Like how often have you wondered, while talking to someone, whether the person you are talking to is a pervert. Yes, I know you've wondered about that. More than once. About a single person.
Well, with Google Glass, "Project Glass", you can now know or start to find out and make your own conclusion.. about whether the person sitting in front of you is a pervert. You see, Project Glass is an extension of your Android phone. Well, really Google actually. And like the phone, it needs apps to be useful. Like you can be watching a historical building and an app will tell you stuff about it.
What Project Glass needs is the PervAlert app. It will take a picture of the person you are talking to, do a facial recognition to starting finding out more about the person. It will match the face and using voice recognition and name to show their most recent and top Google searches, popular G+ posts and recent YouTube views. The app will rate the result based on keywords and weigh the result based on the stream and out comes a score..  a PossiblyPervScore. The higher the score, the more likely they are a pervert.
The app will then highlight several plausible excuses to exit the area and show the closes route to your car. Isn't technology wonderful?

Is your Fitbit and Fuelband gossiping with your Aria Smartscale?

It the world of the Internet of Everything, the likelihood of your Fitbit gossiping with your Fuelband is very much a possibility. More embarrassingly so, they'll be able to figure out, together with your Aria Smartscale whether you've been cheating on them.. sorry.. your exercise.
When word gets out to your LG smart refrigerator, it'll start ordering more celery and broccoli, cancelling that bag of Snickers fun size bars. Your treadmill will add on an extra 3 minutes once you start running to compensate for all that lost exercise. The smart thermostat will raise the temperature just a tad so that you sweat that much more. Once the toilet confirms that your sugar and salt level is back on track, you expect peace once more.  

No end to Apple's bossiness

I'm sure that when people got their IOS6 update, the last thing they expected was to get lost. But get lost they did. It seems that the new Maps application in IOS 6, which unlike it's predecessors which we powered by Google, isn't up to sractch.
I'm not saying the people behind the Apple map program were incompetent. They knew that their solution would not be as good as Google Maps. They knew there would be some distance between the two products. Apparently, nobody at Apple took the time to figure out how much that distance was. Given this is a mapping application, where knowing the distance is something people expect the application to be good at, that is appalling. Apparently their product map is also self-powered.
But what amazes me is the bossiness of it. Here you are standing in Paris and you try finding Notre Dame on the map by searching for it. The IOS6 Map application points you to South Bend, Indiana. How that could be more relevant or more famous than the Notre Dame in Paris is beyond me. The next you'll be telling me, I'll be standing in London looking for the way to Liverpool, only to be told to go to the airport for a flight to Liverpool, New York. How could that even be possible?
Look I understand what it is. It's all about the unique Apple experience. But why must you amazingly tell people that greater Notre Dame from Paris is magically in Indiana?

Whacking off to silence

Did you hear? Microsoft just patented a method of silencing the phone. That's what companies do now, method patents. They stop making stuff and just patent stuff instead. Nothing to do with method acting. Except over-doing it makes other people think you're crazy.
So what did Microsoft patent? A way of silencing the phone by whacking it. Yes, you heard me right, by whacking it. Giving it the smack. The five finger salute. Well, I sincerely hope they mean by hitting it. I don't encourage violence towards inanimate technological devices but the alternative is ... well.. As long your whacking it .. you know what I mean.

Back to the patent. So this patent is not really a method patent. It's a patent about the mechanics of silencing the phone when it detects a sudden degree of physical force. Or the technical term, smacking. Apple ...er.. Microsoft patents the mechanism because it can't patent methods. We've been smacking things for ages. If it were ever brought to court, I imagine the judge will just simply interrupt the lawyer, tell them to approach and then smack them silent for wasting the court's time. 

But since you can patent process, the workaround is to re-describe that method as a process. The process has to have an aim. The aim of the process is to turn off the phone. So the process describes the phone being turned of by actions that suspiciously look like smacking.

Great now all those alarm clocks will have to re-design a new way to silence the alarm.

Apple refuses to tell customer the name of their new product

Did you know that naming something gives you power over it? It's true. Look it up on Wikipedia. It's actually the true name. A true name is a name that describes the true nature of it. In tech, that is usually the name of the product. Trust me on this.

Perhaps that is another reason why Microsoft names thing the way they do.
Perhaps also that is why Apple did not call the most recent version of the iPad as the iPad3. Apple is known for hand-holding their customers. They keep hiding details from their users. Making choices for them (by not giving them a choice). At this rate, Apple will soon refuse to tell customers the name of their product. It may give the users too much control over it.  They'll just refer to every new product as it.
Frankly, it's brilliant. There are so many up sides to this.
First, training sales staff will be so much easier. No need to hire someone with the ability to memorize more than one name. No need to remember pesky specifications. Why should they? It's all awesome and magical. "You want one. You don't even know what it is but we know you don't care and still want it."
Second, Apple doesn't have to worry about stocking all the stores with the latest products every time they make a new product announcement. It may confuse first-time customers enough to buy the older version. But technically they asked to buy it. It's still it and that is what they are selling.

Rugby Union and Australia responds to NFL patenting football

In the (possible) containing saga of NFL defensively patenting football

• The International Rugby Board  representing the rugby union attempts to file as prior art. But the same judge threw out the case as he could see no relation to the use of the word "football"
• In retaliation, Australian National Football Council, representing Australian Rules Football, applies for a patent for football in Australia, copying the NFL patent and adding "... for non-wussies."

As a patent defense move, NFL patenting football?

Incomplete reception

You've all been following this fight between Apple and Samsung, right. Someone sues the other guy. The other guys sues back in Germany. They then sue in Australia. Not happy enough, someone sues the other guys in England. And to just make reporters read a foreign language newspaper, they also sue in Korea.
But do you know what this is really about? It's about design patents. What is that you say? Well, it's about how things looks and how if I come up with a design, I should be able to protect it from other people copying it. Problem is, design patents can be pretty vague. And it's about right to say that Apple is saying it has a design patent on a box with rounded corners.
Did you know that there is something called defensive patents? Yes, there is something like that. It's when you patent something so that nobody else can patent it before you. You then use this against anybody else suing you for patent violation. So if you have a design for a pink polka-dot elephant with a short trunk, you should do that.
But seriously, this is about business. Soon people are going to patent everything they can think of. Not only new stuff, but even old things. Even when you've made something, you can still patent it. If you can patent a box with rounded corners, you can patent anything.
It's not hard to see big businesses like the NFL deciding to do defensive patents. The NFL could patent football as a defensive patent. Why? There is no guarantee Apple won't patent a "game where two teams alternatively try to move the a ball across a 100 yard playing field using opposing strategic formations... on a mobile device". And they'll get it, too. They'll even agree to fair licensing to other companies which already make "football" equipment. So no need for sport equipment manufacturers to change "football jerseys" into "football t-shirts". Just pay the licensing fees.

New Business Strategy: Do Business with Samsung, get bought by Apple

You've probably may not have heard that Apple is buying a mobile security firm called AuthenTec for $356 million. Other than creating a few more bearded millionaires, this is probably not would have been a big deal. Apple buys companies all the time, right?
How about a company that just signed a big deal with it's rival Samsung. Now Samsung is wondering whether AuthenTec will do business with them anymore. This is great for AuthenTec. They make the thing that on laptops that you were supposed swipe your finger across to unlock the laptop. They also do that for phones in Japan. So in Japan, you pay by caressing your phone. Maybe Samsung thought that it was a good idea and wanted to make phones that do the same thing. Apple then thought that if anybody is going to swipe their screens, it can only be people who own iPhones. So they essentially bought AuthenTec to keep away the finger swiping technology away from Samsung.
It's also good news for a lot of other companies. So the message is that if you have a cool technology, invest all your efforts in trying to get an exclusive deal with Samsung. The moment you do, expect a call from Cupertino with an offer you can't refuse.
Is this the future of business? It sounds that that 80s joke that ended like "...and in response to Europe acquires Africa while Japan buys South America".

Sing to your picture frame

Why go out and embarrass yourself in karaoke bars when you can do that in the comfort of your home. A company called Yeylol is selling digital picture frames that can double up as a karaoke player. I'm not sure which is more embarrassing, you singing karaoke at a bar or having people catching a glimpse of you singing to a picture frame. Makes a great basis for the insanity plea at your murder trial.

Lawyer: "And what did you see your neighbor Mr. Rogers do every night through his bedroom window?"

Witness: "He was singing to the picture frame."

Lawyer: "Who in their right mind sings to their picture frame every night?"

It's really a PC that has all sorts of functions. One of them is apparently that you can hook it up to closed circuit cameras. I have question: Why? Do you want to narrate their break-in? Provide a play-by-play. "They have gotten past the iron gate and are attempting pick the front door lock with what looks like a standard pick. Will the BruteBolt 5000's tumber's be able to withstand the onslaught? Or will it prove to be a 500 dollar investment up in smoke?"
Or provide a sound track to the robber's adventure with your human beat box?

So you can serenade your intruders away? Wait. That maybe not too bad. They might be frightened enough by the wailing to give up and go. 

FedEx wants use flying drones. What could go wrong?

Have your heard that FedEx want to use flying drones in the US? Apparently they want to use it to send packages. What next? UPS to use drones to do door to door delivery ? What are they going to do? Drop packages from the sky to each house? Should we have to be worried being bonked by dropping packages soon?
You know, they are going to have driver-less cars soon. But it'll probably start with trucks. So you can imagine a driver-less UPS truck pull up, opens it's hatch and out comes this hovering flying drone with your package. No harm there. There hasn't been any warning whatsoever about robots taking over the world. It's a novel idea. Nobody has thought about it. So it's probably safe.
You know what will happen? The drones will just hover over the to neighbor's house and ask them to sign for your package.  I'm sure they will be willing to do anything to get a flying drone with 4 spinning rotor blades off their doorstep.
Update: Apparently, Amazon is thinking the same.

Dead but not down: Tech bringing back the dead to perform again

There is a growing concern about the technology that brought back Tupac to the stage at a concert recently. No, Tupac didn't rise from the dead, although there are many reasons he would do so if he could. This was a computer generated Tupac. Yes, it is the descendant of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park ...but with more bite.
This is disturbing because of two things. First, now that we can have live action holograms, it won't be long before it moves from the stage to the big screen. I mean movies. Hologram actors acting with live ones. It's a director's wet dream. Producers are outright in delirium. Imagine bringing back Cary Grant to act with ... Justin Beiber. Second, since actors can continue to act even after they are dead, we might as well etch the Oscar for best Actress with Meryl Streep's name.

Why people are really mad about Google's new privacy policy

You've all heard it by now.
People are upset with Google. You can't blame Google. They were trying to do the right thing. Google announced changes in their privacy policy. Then they put it everywhere, telling people to read about it.
That's when people got upset. That's where they got it wrong.
You know why people were upset? Google tried to make them read. You don't make people read, especially important stuff. No wonder people were upset.
When was the last time someone tried to make you read stuff and liked it?

The most successful failure

HP can't catch a break. First they wanted to get rid of WebOS. On the same day, they hinted they no longer wanted to make PCs.
First, you can't fool anybody. HP hasn't been making PCs for a long time. It's all made in China-land.
Second, we know you have been thinking of this for a while.
But it's not all bad news. They figured out a way to clear the shelves full of WebOS tablets. HP priced it so low, WebOS tablets literally flew off the shelves. You can hear America taking in a deep breath and suddenly 300,000 tablets were gone. HP suddenly were successful at something.
If you call making a 200 dollar loss on each tablet a success.

Now they want to make another run. They want to make more tablets to sell.
Let me get this straight. You made a ton of them and couldn't sell them.
Then you sold all of them and loss a boatload of money.
And you want to make more?

HP, how many whips do you have in your closet? Are you sure you're not into leather and chains. I'm saying it's a problem. What you do on your own time is your business. But mixing business and pleasure is not the way to go.