Titanas

Although a webmaster and someone making his living from an ad supported blog, i never thought Ad Blocking is devastating to any site. Ars is making a great point but they also have the balls to admit they failed in blocking content from users with a specific ad blocking software. Pretty interesting stuff in the age of CPMs, bandwidth consumption and hundreds of thousands page views.

Update: A very interesting follow up on ad blocking.

It was about time to move forward on cancer thinking and research. The Cancer Genome Project looks quite promising. Hopefully the reboot in thinking of cancer cure will help fight other diseases too. Genomes, protein folding research and hordes of engineers, poets, mathematicians, developers etc start thinking about cancer.

There is one thing and one thing only that made Nokia the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phone and there is one thing and one thing only that is currently kicking Nokia’s ass. The company culture is engineer driven, period. Everything is build upon this very perception of reality, period. This is how Nokia introduced the world’s first mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman 900, but this is how Nokia is losing market share and market value for the last couple of years.

Fredrik Idestam, Nokia’s founder, was a mining engineer back in 1865. Fast forward 145 years and you will realize that every product Nokia ever made was build upon that engineer driven mentality and Finn influence. Engineers and particularly Finn engineers, combine great talent and technology to build amazing devices but that’s all they do. They build stuff based on the engineer assumption of efficiency and evolution but they totally toss the experience. Engineers are happy when stuff work and specs are pumped even if they have to struggle with 15 different clicks and settings to get the hardware running. Finns are a special specimen of engineering force who don’t give a damn about any of the “in between nonsense” at all.

Nokia is blessed to be the world’s largest handset maker or to put it in other words, engineer driven or not what they do brings €5 billion worth of food to the table. It’s really hard to argue against an operating profit of €5 billion as of 2008 but someone actually did. Apple and Google both set the standards for the next generation of smartphone OS while Nokia is yet not ready to officially announce Symbian Foundation phone and get over the engineer driven design of the powerful N900 beast. Apple is already working on the 4th version of iPhone OS for the new iPhone to be announced June-July 2010 while Google is on speed with 4 major release of Android OS already. As of now, Nokia is doomed to fail on the developed world. Continue reading »

There’s a new cool feature in Google Webmaster Tools. Select your site and click on Labs > Site performance. “This page shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users”. That said what you get is a performance graph overview along with page speed suggestions. This is all nice and cool stuff. I love it.

Using Google’s words, this is an example page from my site and some suggestions on how to optimize it:

Details: Save up to 13.6 KB, 8 requests, 5 DNS lookups and here’s the break down. Continue reading »

God is everywhere, so cellular networks and soon computer networks. There are only a few boundaries to human communication but this is about to change with computers evolving to different sizes, form factors and shapes acting as intelligent tranceivers. The network will soon be everywhere, will watch and listen to everything, will archive and resurrect anything. So is God but before that, here comes the robot (of interconnected and social type).

What it looks like a 64GB or 160GB Intel solid state drive now, it’s the future of computing. Storage was the first step. Integrating storage and computing power is the future. Moore’s law is alive and kicking. Expect cheaper, smaller, faster SSDs with a CPU core or two in the distant future.

The smartphone is more than a phone, it’s a digital projection of our yet to be discovered digital ego. Devices like the Nokia N900 might look like useless to the majority of fishermen but are way too important for everyone, fishermen included. The fine line between online and offline is already blurry but it’s still there. If you want to jump on the always online-i make all decisions on my own-and accept full responsibility, now it’s the time. The boat will still be small or big enough to accommodate our bodies but the real question is where our egos will rest, on the boat or inside a mobile device with the speed of a comet?

For a clear view of the future just watch Marissa’s Mayer PARC talk titled Innovation at Google: The physics of data. Now, think Nokia Booklet 3G and Nokia N900 and iPhone 3GS. It’s the sensors, it’s the wireless broadband, it’s the browser, it’s the apps, it’s the data crunching. Period.

The video is living proof of Nokia N900 3D capabilities using hardware acceleration. Combine that with TV out and the build in accelerometer and you’ll get a new type of gaming machine for those white collars want a break in the office. The game uses Donkey Kong kind of graphics but that’s not important at all. What really matters is the combination of really cool 3D graphics with 3G/HSDPA/WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS and more stuff.

The N900 is the new N95 in every single way. Keep that in mind for accessories and hacks popping up in the next few months.

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