The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Apple, Google and the map wars

    A great look at why mapping is so important today, and what Apple can do to compete in this market.

  • New Yorker’s Remnick Says He Won’t Censor to Make Apple Happy

    Ryan Singel:

    Remnick isn’t swearing off the app store, but in remarks at a Condé Nast breakfast discussion in New York, he made it clear that The New Yorker had no intention of catering to Apple’s whims.

    They and all other news and opinion publications should not have to remove or censor content. I get that Apple doesn’t want porn, but censoring fashion magazines and political comments is going a bit far.

  • The Half Truths of Mark Zuckerberg

    Marshall Kirkpatrick:

    Perhaps that was a slip of the tongue, a mistaken oversimplification of how Zuckerberg intepreted things. It sure doesn’t seem true, though.

    Last December people who had never changed any of their privacy settings had their new defaults set to share far more content publicly, with the world at large. The prompt to re-evaluate was a chance to opt-out of the new changes, but those settings and the defaults were certainly changed.

    Kirkpatrick is really getting to another problem that Facebook is facing: trust.

  • nikf.org ~ An Observation

    Nik Fletcher talking about the iPhone’s lack of Flash:

    I guess judging a device based on actual features and user experience, instead of its ‘inability to run a hypothetical, hither-to-unseen media plugin’, isn’t particularly exciting…

  • Enough With The Excuses, Apple MUST Sell The iPhone At Verizon

    Dan Frommer:

    Rather than go through them one by one with counterarguments, we’ll just say this: The benefits of selling the iPhone at Verizon so completely outweigh every single hurdle that there is simply no way Apple can continue its AT&T exclusive for much longer.

    I am sorry, but this is the dumbest statement I have heard. Small market share does not mean a failed product. Apple is bigger than Microsoft financially, yet Microsoft has the market share advantage. Make no mistake – Verizon and its customers need the iPhone, not the other way around.

  • How Apple could slay Google at WWDC 2010 — RoughlyDrafted Magazine

    Daniel Eran Dilger:

    Imagine what could happen if Apple introduced Safari 5 at WWDC with support for a plugin API (as sort of postulated, teased, hinted or simply hoped for by John Gruber this week), and then demonstrated this new plugin architecture with a free, bundled plugin that blocked web ads. This would be a bit like Tivo for the web, except far easier to do in a way that web advertisers would notice.

    Web blocking plugins are common on Firefox and Chrome, and already exist for Safari (using undocumented or deprecated APIs like SIMBL/InputManager). However, no major browser vendor, and certainly no major platform vendor, has ever shipped their browser with an ad-block plugin, and certainly not one that was activated by default.

    I tell you what would happen – a drop in depression and a rise in productivity.

    Also:

    Web ads are a noxious weed choking the intelligence and sophistication out of our society’s media, and Google is making its massive fortunes delivering this scourge. Do no evil? How ridiculous, that’s Google’s core competency!

    This would be bigger than the iPhone and iPad combined. I could not agree more with Dilger on this topic, the questions comes down to: has Steve Jobs thought about this. That we won’t know unless he releases something like this. I think Jobs is very proud of Safari – it always gets talked up when there is a new version. If you have click2flash installed or any other ad blockers you know just how much better the web is without ads. Imagine that as a native instrument, and Apple was the one implementing it.

    Google would declare all out war with Apple. There would be new ads that bypass it, and new updates to Safari that block the new ads. It would be phenomenally entertaining to watch (much like how Apple went back and forth with Palm over syncing in iTunes for the Pre).

  • Hey Nike, get your crap out of my newsfeed

    Paul of Think Outside In:

    Last week I learned that if you ‘Like’ something on Facebook, you give that entity permission to put updates (read: ads) in your newsfeed.

    I had no clue this happened – really lame.

  • Does Facebook Have a Fatal Cultural Problem?

    Mathew Ingram:

    Given that the network now has close to 500 million users, and their average age is somewhere in the mid-40s, that group of university students who have grown up with Facebook haven’t been the most important segment for the company for a long time now — not to mention the fact that every year millions of younger users have adopted the network as a social hub, and continue to do so regardless of the public outcry over privacy.

    This is a major problem – the people who made the service popular are unhappy and now are in the minority and being ignored. This is what happened to MySpace and they are doing just swell now aren’t they.

  • 73 Democrats tell FCC: drop net neutrality rules

    Matthew Lasar:

    A slew of House Democrats have sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission warning the agency not to go forward with its plan to partially reclassify ISPs as common carriers, a move needed to impose net neutrality rules.

    Figures.

  • Motorola Shadow Spotted

    8mp Camera, that is sick.

  • McCann ACD/Flash Enthusiast Sends Message to Steve Jobs

    This is stupid. I bet he still uses an iPhone too – hypocrite.

  • Facebook Rolls Out New Privacy Options

    This does very little to address some of my other concerns, but it is still an upgrade.

  • U.S. Is Said to Scrutinize Apple’s Online Music Tactics

    Brad Stone:

    The magazine reported that representatives of Apple’s iTunes music service were asking the labels not to participate in Amazon’s promotion, adding that Apple punished those that did by withdrawing marketing support for those songs on iTunes.

    Hardly sounds illegal to me.

  • Flexible Sony Screen Can Be Wrapped Around a Pencil

    Charlie Sorrel:

    The 4.1-inch OLED screen is thin. So thin that it is measured in micrometers. 80μm to be precise: A human hair is a comparatively hefty 100μm.

    Before I die I hope I hear someone say: “I remember when iPads used to not bend.” That would be sweet.

  • Apple Passes Microsoft to Become Second-Largest U.S. Company by Market Capitalization

    Wonder who Ballmer fires today – probably the head janitor.

  • McAfee Buys Trust Digital Mobile Security

    Curt Hopkins:

    Trust Digital’s offerings support iPhone OS, Android, Web OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian mobile operating systems. McAfee expects to mesh these with its ePolicy Orchestrator, its “enterprise-class, open platform to centrally manage security for systems, networks, data, and compliance solutions.”

    My guess is that mobile security is going to be big business – we constantly hear about laptops with corporate data being lost, imagine now all the smart phones that are carrying the same data.

  • iPad: The Reason Behind Microsoft’s Reorg?

    David Worthington:

    The executives that assumed Bach’s responsibilities report directly to CEO Steve Ballmer, and Bach’s management layer was eliminated.

    This re-org may or may not having anything to do with the iPad, and it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Allard is the guy you want to keep to fight the Android/WebOS/iPhoneOS devices. On top of that Ballmer is the one that needs to go, not the one that needs to start micromanaging the company.

  • Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition Goes Live

    Chris Anderson:

    I’m delighted to announce that Wired’s first digital edition is now available for the iPad and soon for nearly all other tablets. We have always made our stories accessible online at Wired.com, but as successful as the site is, it is not a magazine.

    It’s $4.99 and a whopping 527mb (makes what I mentioned about Android a couple of days ago more relevant) for just one month’s issue. Something has got to give with this pricing. That said in the few minutes I have had to play with it, I am impressed.

  • J Allard’s goodbye note: ‘No chairs were thrown’

    Mary Jo Foley:

    Allard’s note was entitled “Decide. Change. Reinvent,” and doesn’t mention the canceled Courier tablet project, which my sources claimed contributed to Allard’s decision to resign.

    I think when your company throws away an awesome project such as the Courier, well then you kinda have to resign.

  • Twitter Attracts Malware – Not Twitter for iPhone

    Original title from InformationWeek was: “Twitter For iPhone Attracts Malware”. Which is blatantly misleading.

    Mathew Schwartz:

    One recent attack, which aims to swipe users’ banking information, is capitalizing on the release of the first official Twitter iPhone application. Click a link in an attacker’s Twitter post — one offending message says it’s the “Official Twitter App” — and get directed to a website hosting a Trojan application. Run it, and your Windows PC can end up compromised by a worm that’s gunning for your online banking credentials.

    This is no different than using Viagra to attract people to click links, InfoWeek just wanted the site traffic.