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The change from XP to Vista wasn’t as sudden as most would have expected. Despite the craze that has surrounded Microsoft’s newest product, not everybody was ready to drop their former operating system (namely Windows XP, because I doubt many Mac or Linux users made the change) and switch to Vista.
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It was announced on March the 27th, so it’s a good five days away from April Fools. However, it does sound like a prank: “Yahoo! announces that it’s offering free unlimited e-mail storage starting May this year”. When I first found out, it seemed rather far-fetched, and it still does.
Basically, this means that Yahoo! is giving up one method of income, from users who payed 20$ per year for 2GB of space (and it’s losing those money from users starting May, as they will be refunded, if they want to), and it engages in the race to buy a LOT of storage space.
Irrealistic as it seems, this comes at a turning point in Yahoo!’s mail service. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Mail was being launched, a service which was capable of holding up to 4MB of mail, more than an average attachment today.
On the other hand, this might seem like a method of distracting people from GMail’s gimmick of the ever-expanding mailbox. Whether or not it will work, only time will tell. My guess is it won’t, mainly because people don’t look for storage space when they analyze possible e-mail accounts. Not unless they plan on using that space specifically to store stuff, rather than storing them on their on computer. While this might seem like a godsend for those kinds of people, it’s not. Yahoo!’s service states that abusive accounts will be suspended, however leaving their owners with the possibility of accessing their accounts and their stored data.
Instead of a conclusion, let’s look at what John Kremer, the Vice-President of Yahoo! Mail, said in his announcement:
We hope we’re setting a precedent for the future. Someday, can you imagine a hard drive that you can never fill? Never having to empty your photo card on your camera to get space back? Enough storage to fit the world’s music, and then some, on your iPod? Sounds like a future without limits.
Very optimistic words, but is it really possible? My guess is it’s not. Because Yahoo!’s Mail is not unlimited, it just means they will have to acquire an enormous ammount of extra storage space to fit the e-mails of approximately 250 million people worldwide. This is something that you can not do, with today’s technology, with your iPod.
From as far back as I can remember, ads have played an essential part in surfing the web. Because, without ads, communication between websites and their promotion decreases significantly. The vast majority of ads, I must admit, is composed of annoying, blinking, colorful adverts that are meant to catch your eye or trick you into clicking. But are those so profitable that everyone seems to take them into consideration? Read the rest of this entry »
After a while where subscriptions were only possible in certain countries, GMail has recently announced that it opened registrations for users from across the globe. It has even posted a “Sign up” link on their front page. This comes after GMail experienced problems with German and British domains. Get your address for free, here.
Along with the iPhone came a new trend that has taken over just about everything. First, there was the “How’s it going to be like?” stage, when no details were revealed to anyone, and dozens of mockups (some closer to reality, some purely fictional) hit the internet, powered by curiosity. Earlier this year, everyone tuned in to MacWorld, where Steve Jobs presented the long-awaited product. Every detail, every photo and every single aspect of the long-awaited “iPod phone” (as Jobs himself says, iPhone is the best iPod they ever made) was covered in thousands of newspaper articles, tv shows, blog posts and so on.
The iPhone hasn’t reached the marked by now, and still there are a couple of rumours regarding (virtual) competitors. Driven by the media attention that the iPhone is getting, rival companies have started work on their own “iPhone”.
The first one sounds more like a joke than a real thing. It seems that, with some 4 months before the iPhone’s release to the masses, the japanese guys from Meizu created a phone that is almost a hundred percent identical to the iPhone. The photos show a smaller phone, with the icons placed in the same way (one icon has the Windows symbol on it, but the writing is in Chinese, so I can’t understand anything from it), with strikingly similar features (except from what looks like a small secondary camera on top).
This is said to be the Meizu M8, and it’s, in my opinion, just an attempt to get some spotlight from the real thing.
Another “would-be” product that caught my eye is the Asus Asura, which is still in a concept phase. Azura has a design which is similar to the iPhone’s design, but in the same time it manages to bring something different to the table. It appears to be a normal, sliding phone (Although I’m not quite sure how this slidin mechanism will look like - it isn’t very clear from the photos), but what it has new is a QWERTY-type keyboard that popsout from one side, allowing the user of the phone to type a lot easier. Between the two models, I would say the latter has a real shot of success, but unfortunately it’s still in a design stage.
As I’ve said, the iPhone hasn’t even been launched to the general public, and already companies are rushing to copy its design and features. This might make it the best selling phone so far, or it might mean that users will get bored of it even before its launch.
The other day I stumbled upon midomi, a website that’s based on a brilliant idea. You know the times when you know a song by it’s rhythm, but not by its name? The website allows you to search through tunes by humming a part of the song, or directly by typing its name. I’ve tried out midomi and, honestly, I found no replies that matched the song I was singing. Well, to be entirely honest, I have no singing voice whatsoever, so that must be the reason for my bad search. But the website has its vulnerabilities, which I’m going to point out next:
1. The human factor
As it is the case in every project that relies on people, this website is no exception, and is exposed to human error. I’ve encountered several renditions that were far from perfect. Songs that are interpreted awful, or that are interpreted good but the background noise is too loud that it will disrupt any search. Plus, I’ve found songs by Eminem sung by girls, songs by Madonna and Fergie sung by men, and so on.
2. The machine factor
As it is the case with mobile phones, where, in order to access a Voice Tag, you have to repeat yourself several times, this type of search isn’t a hundred percent perfect. Even if you have tried your best to make the song sound as close as possible to the real thing, chances are that, even if the right search is displayed, it might be behind a dozen other bad results.
3. The spam factor
This is a constant threat to every person that runs a website nowadays. YouTube has plenty of spam (may it be in its videos, or in the users’ mailboxes, as I’ve come to know when I received a couple these past few weeks), and it is a much larger company. I haven’t found any spam messages, but I’m sure that, as the website will gain in popularity, they will appear. I’ve also run a small “experiment”, I’ve recorded a piece of a song (with my bad voice and all), and submitted it. No moderation, it went directly into the archives, waiting to be found by the next person. With this in mind, it would be fairly easy for somebody to add a piece of recording that can be described as spam.
With this in mind, I think that midomi.com will spend some time in Beta, as they have plenty to work on.
We’ve all seen the PC vs Mac ads by Apple, there are plenty of them. But now it’s time for the PC to counterattack, with the help of director Laurie McGuinness, who created four small hilarious clips, with the same character personalities (the PC being older, “boring”, and the Mac being younger and cooler), but this time the Mac doesn’t get the spotlight. What I liked about the clips is that they’re not made in order to harm the Mac, and they don’t deny the qualities portraied in the Mac ads, but they observe the PC’s own qualities, without denying the Mac’s. So, without more description, here are the clips:
At work
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