Geek Smack!
I was interviewed on newspaper and TV this week for my Google Glass. Right after, the second pair broke. My diagnosis was a bad power button. Second pair off to Google. Also passed the 4 year mark on Day in Tech History. 1,500 episodes is coming up fast.
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Geek Smack! episode 270 Tech News:
Windows 8.1
-The updated Microsoft OS will be released in October
Facebook Gets Speech
- Facebook acquires Speech recognition company Mobile Technologies
Apple Event
- Apple’s September 10th event will focus on iPhone
LG Stunt Injures 20
- LG thought shooting BB guns at balloons was a good idea…
Microsoft Flip-flop
- The Kinect does not need to be connected to the XBox One
AOL Boss Fired
- AOL CEO Tim Armstrong fires Abel Lenz for taking a picture of him
Hyperloop
-Elon Musk’s new idea for California high speed rail
Geekedia of the Week
Pirates of Silicon Valley - In preparation for the upcoming Jobs movie, we look at another Geek movie about Steve Jobs called Pirates of Silicon Valley. Anthony Michael Hall as Bill gates. Noah Wiley as Steve Jobs.
Geek Smack! Geek News
Cleared Jetpack Ready
- A Martin Aircraft Company jetpack has been given the OK by aviation regulators
LED Kinetic Power
- This LED screen generates power and light when you touch it.
Buggy Nexus 7
- Nexus 7 touchscreen having problems. Google is looking into it
Firefox OS on eBay
- The Firefox ZTE phone can be bought on eBay, then turned around and resold at a higher price.
Leaked Sony Lens
- Sony attachment can turn a phone into a 20 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Lens
RoboBees
- To counter the bee population problem, scientists have created robotic bees to collect pollen
Geek Smack: Blackberry’s Direction – Should they Sell?
I remember when Blackberry started taking over the smartphone market. Anyone that had a PDA of the early 2000s wanted a Blackberry. The phone was a burdon for any IT administrator because the OS didn’t talk too well with internal IT infrastructure and people would always email from their Blackberry email instead of the company email.
Of course, when the iPhone came into the game, Blackberry held ground for a while but was eventually finding themselves on the losing end of the phone market – like the PDAs before them.
Blackberry has been struggling. Their newest Blackberry 9720 debuted this week with an older Operating System installed just to keep people interested.
What do you do when your market share was 50% in 2007 and now 20% in 2013 (1)? What do you do after people abandon you? Do they come back?
Nokia shows it can happen, even if your not the dominant system. Nokia is the top worldwide phone (but not the top smartphone). When times started to change, Nokia made a hard decision – dump the Symbian OS they used and switch to another – in their case, Windows 8 – and be exclusive to it.
While they are not beating Apple by any means, they do have a stable phone and are reaching with new features like a 41 megapixel camera.
Blackberry needs to look in that direction. Android is an open source system – why not take that and merge with the Blackberry software people know and love? WebOS is another open source system. People loved their Pre phones and many were upset when the hardware was discontinued. A Blackberry WebOS phone might be the one thing that revitalizes Blackberry.
The easy thing to do is sell. Most likely it would then get picked apart and Blackberry will be no more.
But the better thing would be to give those Blackberry fans something that gets them looking back at the device. Especially the business community, which can keep money coming in and companies in business.
Geek Smack! is a weekly video show and podcast that comes out every Tuesday evening. Your host: Jeffrey Powers – talks tech news, IT news and geek news for the week. Geek Smack! is ©2013 under a Creative Commons no-deriv license. Dog Days of Summer – enjoy it! If you would like more information about what is technology, recent news, Geekazine, and Jeffrey Powers, feel free to contact him. Jeffrey Powers does interviews, just ask!