Monday, August 15, 2011

Boot up: iPad forecasts, Google 'knew of Oracle infringement', Flickr+Twitter=?, and more

ForecastIt's raining iPads! No, possibly not. Bert Foord during a television Weather Forecast from the Meteorological Office in 1963.

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

"When you're visiting an unfamiliar location, Google Maps for mobile is great for getting an idea of how close you are to your destination, where streets and landmarks are in relation to each other, or just for getting "un-lost." But what if you don't have a data signal, or you're abroad and don't have a data plan? We say that if you use Google Maps for mobile, you'll never need to carry a paper map again. The "Download map area" lab in Google Maps 5.7 for Android is a step in making that statement true even when you're offline."
Neat.

"It "appears possible" that Google knew that its Android mobile operating system would violate Java patents held by Oracle, but decided to go ahead with the effort anyway, the judge overseeing the companies' intellectual property lawsuit said in a letter filed Tuesday."Judge William Alsup made the statement in connection with the so-called Daubert motion Google has filed in hopes of excluding the findings of Oracle's damages expert. Both sides have submitted briefs in connection with a hearing on the motion, which is scheduled for July 21."'In reading the Daubert briefing, it appears possible that early on Google recognized that it would infringe patents protecting at least part of Java, entered into negotiations with Sun [Microsystems] to obtain a license for use in Android, then abandoned the negotiations as too expensive, and pushed home with Android without any license at all,' Alsup wrote in the letter filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California." Hmm.

Iconfactory (which makes Twitterrific) already has an extension. This is all going to play out forever.

"That's an artifact of population density and Flickr and Twitter users. What's more interesting though are the areas outside of the city dominated by blue and orange. For example, in the North America map above, the east is dominated by blue, whereas the west seems to be more orange. "What compels people to tweet over taking a picture and vice versa? Or are we just seeing a Twitter scrape that happened in the early morning, before the west coast woke up?"

"Google's "continuous beta" approach that it used to build [Google search and Gmail] will not satisfy the customers of two new market segments that Google wants to win: smartphone software and enterprise software. "Let me start by saying that Google's move to create its own smartphone platform (Android) was a mystery to me from the beginning. It was unnecessary. Google could have simply focused on creating great mobile software and search products for all of the main smartphone platforms and it would have accomplished its primary goal, which was to create a mobile platform for AdWords."
Quite entertaining to read something that misses the point so well.

That's a pretty big range, but the average is 7.93m. (The median is 8.09m.) Either way it's more than double the 3.2m sold in its first quarter a year ago.

Interesting how HP, with its big corporate sales, is faring worse than the industry average.

"We've never been interested in rights broader than what we need to run Dropbox. We want to get this language right so that you're comfortable using Dropbox with no reservations: what's yours is yours. Instead of trying to add clarifications to the terms, we've rewritten this part from scratch..."
Suitable for those concerned about it?

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