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2010 Yearly archive

To have loved and lost, an iPhone

By: Ahmed Meer
21-08-2010
Mobile

Ah wise words – it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved an iPhone at all. Whilst holidaying I went for an early morning swim at one of the worlds most beautiful beaches and strolled into the ocean without realising I had both my iPhone and wallet in my pocket. These are the days that followed post drowned iPhone 3GS:

Day 1 – 100% Denial. Ah its cool don’t fret its never let me down yet. I know once I dry it and power it up again it will work. I place my iPhone on the beach to dry and go back into the water. Once I get back home theres still water in screen so I remove the SIM and put it in a bowl of rice (A Google search prompted me to do so).

Day 2 – All the water seems to have evaporated. Hope stil lives that it will work now once I charge this bad boy up. I plug it in and leave it on charge for the rest of the day intermittently pressing the power button and the middle button in.

Day 3 – It all begins to set in as I come to terms with my loss; Acceptance. I spend a day weeping. I put my SIM card into my old Samsung E900. I find my entire life a year ago on this phone – old pictures, messages, memories. At least I have a contact list again even though its a year out of date.

Day 4 – Inability to check the weather in the morning during clothing session results in unfavourable body temperature throughout the day.

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E3 Conference 2010

By: Ahmed Meer
16-06-2010
Conference, Technology

X-BOX 360 Slim

Shipping NOW! With built in N-Wireless and 250GB hard drive. They have finally solved the overheating and noise issues lets just hope they tested it properly this time.

Project Natal has been re-named to Kinect during its unvieling at E3. Kinect will change the way we play games especially with its face, body and voice (without headset) recognition software, this could change everything! Not just gaming.

Kinect is the next generation of game interaction and its going to open up a can of innovation when its released on November 4th world-wide. Here is a video detailing how advanced Kinect really is, welcome to the future:

I can’t wait for Star Wars on Kinect, It will sprout a whole new generation of the Star Wars Kid. Kinect and a cieling mounted projector is the way to go. Imagine Guitar Hero and Rock Band on Kinect – you won’t even need to collect all the instruments and cluter up your living room, you will just truely be an air band.

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Google I/O

By: Ahmed Meer
21-05-2010
Conference

The two day Google I/O conference ended yesterday with a ton of exciting news from the team over at Google. The event showcases all the projects Google have been working on for the past year and this year they did not disappoint.

During the event Google’s CEO really shot down Apple and really made a point to show the products and services they were delivering were completely going to cater for their shortcomings. In short heres what we can expect from them:

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Ben and Jerry’s Co-founder on socially responsible businesses

By: Ahmed Meer
17-05-2010
Ideas

I scream, you scream, we all scream for socially responsible companies!

I find myself in agreement with Ben Cohen’s views on how businesses need to learn to use their power not just for self interest but to benefit society as a whole. Brands are slowly learning that their customers now demand they be more responsible both environmentally and socially.

A recent example of this was the Nestle Palm Oil debacle with Greenpeace. Nestle has since amended their ways and have announced that they will align themselves with The Forest Trust. Their recent news adds:

TFT, a global non-profit organization, will help Nestlé to build responsible supply chains by identifying and addressing embedded social and environmental issues. Nestlé is the first global consumer goods company to become a TFT member.

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HP Slate and WebOS

By: Ahmed Meer
12-05-2010
Mobile

As you may already know HP has recently bought Palm for a tidy sum of 1.2 BILLION DOLLARS! Ah Palm it really was a shame you couldn’t sell the Pre. It had such good hype and really was a great phone. Its staggered release in Europe and their marketing campaign lead to the ruin of them and as such Palm even severed it’s ties with their digital agency Modernista who were responsible for (take a deep breath) this.

So now that the giant that is HP owns Palm can we hopefully see that beautiful operating system WebOS on the Slate? WebOS by the way is Palm’s awesome multi-tasking, gesture loving operating system that currently ships on all their new shinny devices including of-course the Palm Pre. With HP’s rival Dell delivering an impressive range of Android phones soon, HP have decided to join the game to secure their share in the mobile market. Having WebOS on their side certaintly gives them the home advantage.

Since the iPad was unleashed on the market 1 million units have been sold in the US and pre-orders in the UK are already off to a great start for release date of May 28th (update – pushed back to June 7th now). HP thought they had the upper hand with the Slate providing a fully blown OS (Win 7) but as usual they forgot their target audience. You can’t sell to the average geek anymore, you need to go mainstream! Target the bubble gum chewers, the Tamagotchi crowd, right?!

HP Slate

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My Future Mobile

By: Ahmed Meer
02-05-2010
Mobile

For 10 months now I have sported an iPhone 3GS, and I have to admit that I finally feel like I’m living in the future holding a friggin’ tricorder! On occasion I find myself just leisurely unlocking the phone with a slide of my finger, scrolling the numerous screens and then locking it again without having any intention to use the device for anything purposeful. The high quality capacitive touch screen, mid-range processor and the phones slick UI really make this phone such a joy to use.

Apple lures us into their minimalistic designed stores and an hour later we leave with a giant smile on our face, an empty wallet, a shiny new toy, and a collection of extremely overpriced third party accessories (I still hate to admit it but I paid £175 for my iPhone and unbelievably forked over £25 for a little piece of plastic to slightly protect only half of the phone). But DAMN do they produce beautiful products. The software/hardware combination is so bespoke and well crafted that it really is just a must have product. So yes the iPhone in its current form is marvellous but what does apple have in store for us next and just how far behind is the rest of the competition?

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Adobe vs Job’s

By: Ahmed Meer
02-05-2010
Project

An open letter written by Steve Jobs has been posted on Apples website citing his reasoning behind not allowing flash on the iPhone/iPad. Jobs seems to be on an absolute tirade to destroy flash on the internet whilst claiming his toys as leading the new revolution of the internet and pronouncing flash as old as the mouse. Take this snippet from the letter:

“Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. ”

There are in fact rollovers in HTML (CSS hover tag) and there are many javascript rollover menus on the web. With the anticipated release of Flash 10.1, the ability to take advantage of multi-touch and gesture controls already seems to show Adobe are trying to innovate in this field

Flash allows the internet to be all it can due to CSS and JavaScript’s bad performance and infantile language state. However Jobs is not entirely wrong with some of his accusations as the Flash player really does have its shortcomings. I believe the problem lies solely with Adobe not improving the platform and changing it to withstand the fate of time. The obvious problem being is that Flash is a big black box, a compiled binary file that is quite closed. The not so obvious problem which is very hard to address is that flash is both a designer and developer platform. You can’t make the platform to intense for the designers as you then alienate them and visa versa. AS3 was a big step for flash which brought about a much stricter compiler and a push towards a more object orientated programming language. This has stopped some really sloppy programming but that has not been enough to cure the problem.

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Facebook goes social, again.

By: Ahmed Meer
26-04-2010
Facebook, social media

On April 21st at Facebook’s F8 conference the new Open Graph platform was announced as the most ‘transformative’ step facebook has ever done for the web. Open Graph essentially opens up the internet to the social networking domain.

Open Graph

Facebook is the largest growing social networking site on the internet. Last year they stacked up a record 200million new users to the site bringing facebooks total user base at 400million. Top brands have already been quick to add Facebook’s connect api to their digital media campaigns bringing a move towards the social web. However FB connect can be quite a droll to configure and often prompt users consecutively for specific access to their information. This will all be remedied as Mark Zuckerberg outlined the platforms changed policies and new feaures:

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