Vinu’s Online Cloud

My favourite topic - media, gadgets and trends and spice it up with some apple thrashing / defense Will phones replace iPods? Head over to Communities dominate brands for some excellent defense I just loved these 1 2 3 posts …

Some arguments I would like to highlight …

Digital cameras vs camera phones:

Game over. Two of the four are already dead. Why are Canon and Nikon only reporting 30% and 20% growth? If there was any strong market for cameras, they would pick up all of Minolta-Konica’s customers (and be up at least 50%). When two of the world’s largest manufacturers of the industry totally quit, thats a pretty strong sign that the time for that technology is over. Cameraphones today offer 5 Megapixel resolutions, 3x optical zooms, 20x digital zooms, built-in flashes etc. Its not ever going to replace the professional digital camera - the wedding photographer will not show up with a Motorola - but this is a point the camera industry admitted in 2004 - they lost the battle.

iPods, US and musicphones:

The actual current state of musicphones is very alien to those who commented. As most of them tend to be from America, it is to be expected. By accident of timing, the iPod is best selling in North America, and cellphones (including musicphones) are least advanced in America. So what is quite common in Asia or Europe with more advanced cellphones, cellular networks, and wireless carriers, may still seem like impossible for many Americans.

Facts:

So please bear in mind that the FACT of the drop in sales in iPods from 14.1 million to 8.5 million to 8.1 million comes from Apple numbers, and the 40% drop have been confirmed by Apple COO on April 19 and the further 6% drop confirmed by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

Lovely ending!

And we also want to be responsive to all. It does go to the very heart of the topic of this blogsite and our book, that Communities Dominate. We want to engage with you.

And yeah taking it in the Indian context - a place where iPod has permeated to a decent extent thanks primarily to the underground market. I doubt whether the Indian consumer will really go for it! FM is seen as integral part of a phone and digital cameras -  most of them are seeing it thanks only to the feature in a phone .. ha ha! The canons and nikons has missed a huge market … zombies. Canon doesn’t even have a good support / repair center. My DSLR’s lens stopped working and the repair charge was apparently what I paid for buying it in the US … blame me

Ortiz (or ceo as he calls himself! ) says something important which I completely agree to and I am quoting him verbatim:

If you develop an application today, even a mobility application, very
likely it will have some components or functionality on the web. Design
your application with services in mind, services that are exposed and
consumed by your own products, and consumed by others who aggregate
your services with other services to build their core products, and in
turn expose their services for others to use. This philosophy is the
result of the social networking that is part of software development on
the new web - it is about collaboration, as this is best represented by
Mashups:

Mashup:

API X + API Y = mashup Z

Expose your services on the web using some well-understood
mechanisms such as REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS, or simply using your own
HTTP-based protocol. Try to favor REST, SOAP or feeds. Always keep it
simple, but well designed, abstracted, decoupled, published, and
documented.

The return of the platform is pretty cool indeed. You can put
together a serious scalable application - let’s say for a demo of your
prototype, by using some core components that are available right now
on the web, some for free and some for a fee. Example of core services
that you can use now include simple queuing, simple storage, maps, searching, content sharing, and other APIs, from companies that include Amazon, Google and Yahoo!, and from the large number of Mashups - see The Programmable Web.

Just followed the programmable web link (this link is for the blog) and you see nice implementation of a sparkline giving stats on apis and mashups!

Center for Nonviolent Communication (CVNC) talks about 10 things one can do to improve, internal, interpersonal and organizational peace …

1. Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how we would like to relate to ourselves and others.
2. Remember that all human beings have the same needs.
3. Check our intention to see if we are as interested in others getting their needs met as our own.
4. When asking someone to do something, check first to see if we are making a request or a demand.
5. Instead of saying what we DON’T want someone to do, say what we DO want the person to do.
6. Instead of saying what we want someone to BE, say what action we’d like the person to take that we hope will help the person be that way.
7. Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone’s opinions, try to tune in to what the person is feeling and needing.
8. Instead of saying “No”, say what need of ours prevents us from saying “Yes”.
9. If we are feeling upset, think about what need of ours is not being met, and what we could do to meet it, instead of thinking about what’s wrong with others or ourselves.
10. Instead of praising someone who did something we like, express our gratitude by telling the person what need of ours that action met.

Digg this will ya?? for more peace on the net and everywhere around you!