Is 7" the new 10"?

7" devices are a rage.
After the success of the first 'wave' of 7" devices (1st Gen. Kindle Fire, Nexus 7), and the iPad Mini cannibalizing both iPad AND iPod sales for Apple, the 7" (to 8") tablet category seems to be taking over the tablet market.

After playing with 7" devices for a while (Both nexus and iPad mini), I can definitely understand why. The form factor is simply more successful than 10" tablets. Easy to hold with one hand (iPad Mini feels as light as a kindle), good enough to work with (Thumb type is possible) - Seems like this is the spot for tablets.

So, while 10" tablets are getting more and more laptop-like (Windows 8 convertibles, for example), 7" devices will get retina-quality screens, and probably become the new form factor size for tablets.

The untapped computing power

Now that cloud computing has taken over the web, it's time to think what would be the next step. Considering that the cloud providers are making money out of renting CPUs and storage. But there's already a lot of CPU power and storage connected to the web, and not being used most of the day.

This thought kind of takes me back to a '97 project called seti@home. That project used home PCs to parallel process radio signals from space. And though users didn't gain much from this project except for a thank you mail, times have changed since.

My wife, who has a day job, has a PC connected to the internet, operating all of the day. Imagine you can rent your computer for processing power or storage. Such network infrastructure already exists, and it would be pretty simple to install a client which receives jobs or lends storage for a cloud based network. As most search/ image processing/ big data analysis engines use map reduce and distributed storage nodes, such a network could provide a reliable, viable alternative to current cloud providers.

Been doing a lot of thinking about this lately. Who wants to join me and implement such a network?

Reading time #4!

- The good people at gosquared.com got some nice tips for node.js:
https://engineering.gosquared.com/10-vital-aspects-of-building-a-node-js-application

- Stats from 2012 are here. Samsung sells a lot more phones than Apple. Twice.

- If you're a geek, this guy is hilarious.

- "2013 will be all about the ecosystems, not just the hardware": Here are some trends to watch for, curtesy of techradar.

And, finally, have a happy 2013!

The instant presentation effect

This week I've attended a strategic brainstorming session.
During this session, we divided our group into smaller groups, each with the task of analysing strengths and weaknesses of a certain solution.
While most of the groups wrote down their notes in their notebooks, and presented their outcome while reading from it, I took a laptop, and jotted down the team's effort into a 6 slide power point presentation in our company's template:

• Topic slide - Solution name
• Solution main principals
• Customer analysis
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• End slide ('Thank you').

Coming up with a structured presentation was far more effective than reading your conclusions. The impact was immediate, and the message was clear.

And it wasn't more complicated than writing down your ideas.

Give this method a shot the next time you brainstorm. Your message might become much more effective.

For more ideas about how to write effective presentations, my friend Jan Schultink has a great blog (And presentation design company :) 

Facebook stabs spam

The war on spam has failed. Though email providers like Google and Microsoft get a relatively good spam detection rate, there will never be a 100% success rate. And these guys are getting smarter.
Even Facebook were not left out, and many people get spam sent to them (check your 'other' message box...)
Well now Facebook are making a stand against spam, by charging 1$ per message to someone you don't know.
I think that's actually nice.

Mobile web and sandboxing

I've had a few discussions in this blog about mobile web vs. native in app development.
One of the major problems with creating a mobile web app was performance. When an app needs to display a large list of items, rendering a huge DOM tree with lots of layers causes app performance degradation, resulting in poor user experience.
Well - The guys at sencha came up with a neat idea - 'Sandboxing', which means fragmenting your content items into small iframes.
The basic motivation behind this is that it's easier for the browser to render lots of smaller DOM frames than rendering one huge DOM tree. With multi core processors (And supporting OSs like iOS5/ Android 4 and above), this approach becomes even more effective.

You can read more about it here.

[Thanks Danny Livshits for the link]

Google services outage and android crashes

Yesterday afternoon, I've started experiencing hiccups in my Galaxy Nexus (Running 4.2.1).
Crashes, phone getting stuck without provocation from my side, sluggish performance.
Turns out Google's services had a major disruption yesterday.
Coincidence? I don't think so. Problematic? Very much. But this is what we sign for, and this is why Google's devices are so cheap... Actually, Apple's devices are the same in terms of cloud dependency (Siri, iCloud etc.), but you pay more...

In the meantime, legislation is having it's way with Apple's software patents. That is good news for ANYONE creating software these days. (Read the last paragraph of this post for more).