Playbook first tablet to be FIPS certified

July 22, 2011
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The Blackberry Playbook is now the first tablet to gain FIPS certification, which means that it meets US government standards for data security and encryption.  Playbook also won Best in Show and Best of FOSE in handheld devices at the federal government IT conference in Washington DC this past week. This certification and these awards [...]

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Facebook delivers video-chat for the masses

July 8, 2011
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Like a lot of other folks, on Wednesday I was playing with the newly launched video chat capability on Facebook.  Done in partnership with Skype, it brings video chat to the masses via the 750 million Facebook users out there. First I chatted with Larry Lisser in San Francisco.  Not a good experience.  Grainy, laggy [...]

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PVR’s 10th Anniversary a Legacy of Mediocrity

July 8, 2011
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According to the Globe and Mail’s Hugh Thompson, next month will mark the 10th anniversary of the Personal Video Recorder, or PVR, in Canada.  And what a boring and dull ten-year old our PVR has become.  Almost none of the promise of the PVR’s first released in 1999 has ever been realized here.  Instead, our [...]

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eComm 2011 doesn’t disappoint

July 6, 2011
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Each year around 300 people gather together for three days in San Francisco at an invitation only event to plot the future of communications. The event is Lee Dryburgh’s eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference. You can think of it as TED, for the communications industry. Topics have ranged from Voice over IP, to the Internet [...]

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Open Standards

June 27, 2011

I’m at eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference, for the next couple of days. Over dinner last night a heated debate erupted over open standards in telephony, the genesis of which was my Voice 3.0 piece posted on Friday. I didn’t explicitly state that open standards are important to the Voice 3.0 vision. Dan York took [...]

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Voice 3.0: The Emergence of the Voice Web

June 24, 2011
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In October 2005, I published The Voice 2.0 Manifesto. The Manifesto’s theme was the marriage of voice to the web, and all of the accompanying technological and business shifts that might occur as a result. Five-and-a half-years later, some – indeed I would argue many – of the predictions made then have come true, or [...]

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Lytro: the technology that brings bad photos into focus.

June 22, 2011
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People who know me know that I’m a photo geek.  I love great photos, and I like to flatter myself that occasionally I might even take one or two. Every photographer has encountered the problem that Lytro (unveiled yesterday) solves – an incorrectly focused image.   Lytro’s innovation is to place an array of “micro-lenses” in [...]

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Seesmic’s decision reflects on their business, not Blackberry

June 21, 2011
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Yesterday the Seesmic team blindsided RIM with news that they would no longer develop Seesmic for Blackberry.  They were very public about it, and the only explanation offered was they would “discontinue support for Blackberry in order to focus development efforts on our most popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows 7.”  The press seized [...]

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Bre.ad: half baked, and maybe already toast.

June 19, 2011
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Bre.ad, the new link shortener promoted used by Lady Gaga, is a bad idea.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the quick recap of bre.ad is as follows: Shorten links by simply navigating to http://bre.ad/{your URL}.  It’s a little easier and simpler than visiting the bit.ly or ow.ly site. When visitors click on your bre.ad link, [...]

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Living with Playbook, two months later

June 15, 2011
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When RIM launched the BlackBerry Playbook in mid-April, I grabbed one and started using it.  You might have noticed that I didn’t write about it the time.  The same as other writers, my initial take on the Playbook was that it had a lot of promise but wasn’t ready for prime-time.  Some websites didn’t work, [...]

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