This war with Apple is starting to piss me off. Google rolls out great new features for maps, for example, that are only available on Android.
Jon Brodkin via Ars Technica
Indoor Maps was added to version 6.0 of the Google Maps application for Android, and will presumably be added to additional mobile platforms in the future. We asked Google if Indoor Maps will work on desktop Web browsers, but were told that “the new indoor maps feature of Google Maps is only available on Android mobile devices at this time.” Microsoft, by the way, already has indoor mapping of major malls for Windows Phone and indoor mapping of airports and malls for the desktop.
5 Reasons Google Is Sweating Apple - Kit Eaton
A good description of how Apple is going to mess up Google’s plans: Siri in search; Apple’s rumored purchase of C3 in maps; Apple’s television push; Apple’s “iPay” versus Google Wallet; and Apple’s relentless product direction which makes Google look like academics.
Kit Eaton via Fast Company
By drawing together a few recent insights about Google’s moves and Apple’s innovations, one might wonder if Google is afraid of falling behind its rival—for good.
I Cracked It
The rumors are flying about Apple rolling out a game-changing TV, because of Walter Isaacson quoting Jobs as saying ‘I cracked it’. Some level of reserve is appropriate, I guess considering how old and entrenched the TV industry is. But, isn’t that a perfect recipe for disruption?
I’ve been talking about Apple’s push to win ‘the battle for the livingroom’ for years. Given Apple TV, and the rise of the post-PC world, Apple will obviously continue the push into the living room. Apple TV is to the next Apple Television as Newton was to the iPad. A foray, an exercise: a hobby, as Jobs said.
The company has gone from having 30% of its 100 million users active every day in January 2011 to over 50% active daily users today. The recent iOS 5 Twitter integration has notably increased signups 3x.
Twitter Is At 250 Million Tweets Per Day, iOS 5 Integration Made Signups Increase 3x
The iOS 5 effect for Twitter. When will Apple buy them, and make Twitter a core protocol of the coming social operating system? iOS 6?
(via bijan)
(via bijan)
There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.
- Farhad Manjoo, The Great Tech War Of 2012
Manjoo says all four giants — Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon — will all ‘win’, which is just another way of saying that 2012 is just a battlefield, not the entire war.
BlackBerry Picked the Wrong Day to Die
Brian Barrett via Gizmodo
[…] for those worried about the company’s future, the fact that this was a systemic failure and not third-party havoc should be positively chilling. They don’t know what happened. They don’t know how to fix it. They just know that it’s their own fault.
Meanwhile: Apple. There’s been plenty written here and elsewhere about iOS 5, which is clean and user-friendly and functional. The iPhone 4S will be here in two days. And when you’re abandoned in a data-less desert, there’s no more tempting oasis than Apple’s. Your shit’s broken, iTunes calls out. Ours is shiny and new. Yes, iCloud could well unravel into another MobileMe. But that doesn’t mean the grass on its side is any less green today.
Oh, man. Sell RIM, buy Apple.
Amazon appears, if anything, to be following Apple’s lead, not Google’s. The company’s statements following the Fire’s release indicate the device will only accept apps from Amazon’s own Appstore for Android, not directly from software makers or Google’s Marketplace.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
