When it comes to viruses, Microsoft is a victim of its own success. Why write viruses for any other operating system when Microsoft controls the lion’s share?

The low number of viruses for Mac has led Apple to make that fact one of the centerpieces of its “Get A Mac” ad campaign, portraying PCs as sick while good ol’ Mac is fine and dandy.
[more...]

I had a chance to test out the new BlackBerry Storm for a good period of time today. Mostly, I paid attention to the clickable screen, which is certainly what puts the new touch-screen BlackBerry in a different league from any other smartphone.

It really does click, but the surface itself isn’t tactile when your finger are running across it. It is very helpful that it lights up brightly when you’re hovering over the right location, and having the touchpad lengthwise on the screen definitely comes in helpful.
[more...]

Matt Drudge, while tacitly supportive the Bush administration’s support of surveillance techniques that could be described as somewhat Orwellian, is always paranoid about Big Brother spying on the sovereign individual. Google tends to catch his eye, and one of his first non-election “red font” stories in awhile involves Google’s new service, Google Flu Trends.

Here is what Google is doing: they are aggregating reports of influenza across the country by using information gathered from search queries and identifying places where the flu is catching on. They then cross-reference this information with trends from past years, and make it available to the public without naming names.
[more...]

My girlfriend is on T-Mobile and was looking for a new phone, so we headed on down to the T-Mobile store to have a look at HTC’s new G1, the first phone built to run on Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Thus far, I absolutely love this phone. The best part is the way it feels when the screen is slid out and the keyboard is revealed. The BlackBerry-esqe trackball is ideally placed and allows you to basically have access to a keyboard and mouse while the entire screen is available for viewing (and touching, should you choose). But it’s not necessary to take your thumbs out of typing position to click on something as the trackball is quick, accurate, and clickable.
[more...]

One of the biggest pains about getting Mac in March was that Netflix Watch Instantly didn’t work on Mac. In fact, the main reason I wanted to get XP on my Mac through Bootcamp was so I could use this feature, especially after they teamed up with Starz and added over a 2500 extra movies.

Now, instead of Flash, Netflix will roll out the feature using Microsoft’s Silverlight.
[more...]

Google has launched Gmail for Mobile 2.0 today for BlackBerry and J2ME supported phones. I tried it out on my Nokia E71, and it works great, except for one problem: Nokia gives me almost immediate alerts for new mail while Gmail takes much longer.

The interface is great, and there are some new perks that will make people happy, like the ability to write email when the signal is gone (this will help big time on subways). It also allows for very simple multiple account management, which was demonstrated on my phone by easily moving between my personal and work Google Apps Gmail accounts.
[more...]

There’s a good article by Christoper Weiss in Adotas about how an ad network’s targeting tactics are becoming the number one attribute companies look for when choosing a network–even more so than the network’s site inventory. In a poll, targeting was a close second behind inventory in 2007, but since then the stakes have been raised exponentially as targeting technology has become more acute and advertisers have become more aware of the value of sophisticated targeting.

This is why you’re seeing a lot of interest in Fetchback lately. Have you noticed lately that you will visit a site (an example for me is the page for Wynn hotel/casino) and ads for that site will come up on several other sites over the next weeks and months? These sites are all working with Fetchback, and their specialty is retargeting.
[more...]

I have to admit, a lot of the blogs I read were not particularly excited about the first iteration of the Android platform on HTC’s G1 phone. Although few have taken a real look at it, the consensus was that it was pathetic in comparison to the iPhone.

But not so fast. While there have finally been some early (and mixed) reviews, the only thing that matters for Google, HTC, and T-Mobile is how many of these phones they sell. Word is now that 1.5 million have already been pre-ordered–a number that doesn’t include retail sales, and the holidays are coming. That ain’t half bad.
[more...]

The Amazon Kindle 2.0 is on its way (images thanks to Boy Genius Report), and it doesn’t look too different from the original. But the bigger question is about whats on the inside, and the handful of new pictures didn’t come with any specs.

It also appears that the unit still uses only EV-DO to download books and has lost the extra SD slot, but it appears to have at least five times the memory of the wimpy original 256MB model. It is slightly wider and taller than the old Kindle, but is also thinner. Making the Kindle smaller doesn’t make sense since its goal is to maintain the functionality of a book. While many are reading books on the iPhone (as many as 400,000 units have been moved), it’s hard to see a device as small as the iPhone really challenging something like the Kindle.
[more...]

Oracle has announced its first ever hardware venture, and it’s generating a lot of buzz with promises of unbelievable data query performance, from 10x to 50x today’s data warehouse standards. As Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said today at the OpenWorld Conference, “For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is ten times faster.”

Exadata is a combination of Oracle software and HP hardware, but it’s got Oracle’s name all over it. This move by Oracle is similar to what Apple does: produce their own intertwined hardware and software packages and make the argument that the two go best together, not unlike iPod and iTunes.
[more...]