akosner

Zillabyte radically simplifies the process of setting up a web crawler. More and more data-minded developers and marketers are looking to create custom data sets from the open web and these kinds of components combined with ZBs infrastructure will make it much faster and easier to roll your own big data. One to watch.

Follow up post here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2014/04/04/aha-mom...

What keywords did you use? Curious to see how unrelated games might have been related to your keywords.

I have a theory. Last week there was a big story about how Facebook was “dead and buried” because teens didn’t want to be on a service that their parents had moved into. Now, when it comes to security, the parents care a lot more than the kids. Could Snapchat be playing fast and loose with the security of their user data as a way of scaring away the grownups?

This would be a clever ploy but for one damning fact. A large share of Snapchat’s users are minor children. Could anyone, from the CEO of Snapchat to the perpetrators of SnapchatDB really think that risking the broadcasting of the phone numbers of 12-year-old girls and boys is a risk worth taking?

For more, see: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2014/01/01/4-6-mil...

The only dog I have in this fight is my iPhone 5S! My big question is whether the problem is hardware or software. The necessity to press the fingers just so and the UI validation giving, in effect, a false positive makes it seem like software. For Apple's sake I hope so. Software updates are a lot easier and cheaper than hardware recalls.

Right. That's the point I was trying to make. Even if this little poll has a margin of error of 10% that still would leave more than 10% of people with a problem, but not talking about it yet.

See comment above. This is a real story, not "link bait," but thanks for the vote of confidence!

A Polar poll shows 23% of respondents complain of "too many fails." (http://www.polarb.com/131862) and certainly that has been my experience. I wonder whether more people are not overtly complaining about it because users feel that they are "doing it wrong," not that the software might have been too fiddly for release.

Twitter is becoming more like Tumblr in its pursuit of in-line media. Vine is only the most recent example.

The developer angle, from the story: "The combination of the building out of the platform and Twitter's pushing away of third-party developers has the company somewhat at a crossroads. In order to serve each type of user best, Twitter has to give users more ways to filter their timelines (i.e., all tweets by people I follow with video, or all tweets with video and a given hashtag.) But experimenting with these kinds of "client" features is what the dis-invited third-party developers do best. Perhaps there is a middle ground where developers can write "plug-ins" to allow users to transform their experience within Twitter, the most popular of which Twitter would buy and fold into the main product."

Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!

See my reaction to Condon's story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/faceboo... As he suggests, “The only way to prevent re-posted content is to unlike everything.” And as Facebook continues to abuse the Like function, or to allow (or at least be unable to prevent) third-parties from abusing it, many users may find themselves doing just that, or ditching Facebook altogether.

I wonder how much of a house of cards would be necessary to distance MEGA from such indexing sites and yet still profit from it. Dotcom did say he is interested in new business models. How new could it be?

I like the logical chess game that Dotcom is playing here. Even if everybody knows that some of the storage will be used for copyrighted material, it can't be proven that ANY of it is. There are many legitimate reasons why people want secure, encrypted and private storage, so innocent until proven guilty (which can't be proven!)

There is a larger point here about technology in general. The things that are supposed to make us happier are not, in fact, making us happier. To the technologist, more pixels and faster frame rates are an undisputed good. As Kevin Wines from THX tells me, “When film was the only medium for cinema, using lower frame rates was based on economics. With film, directors and producers would have had to use more film, making it cost prohibitive to use high frame rates, but now that we use digital data, there’s no fiscal reason not to use high frame rates.” No reason, of course, other than that the impact on viewers may be different than what the technologists were expecting. To people in the user-centered practices, every product, and every feature of every product, is a proposition, a question we ask users. Like the ophthalmologist giving an eye exam, “better now, or now?”

http://onforb.es/VPE5u2

My take on Google Voice Search vs. Siri, including the mystery of the missing NHL standings data. http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/10/31/google-...

Can you site a source here? That's an important distinction.

I was just responding to the fact that David Holz referred to existing touch apps as "legacy" apps. It does have a charge to it which is why I used it in the headline. What I would think all the hackers would like about the Leap is that it progressively enhances on top of existing touch (and GUI) UIs. It will replace those things to the extent that it's useful to people, but it doesn't seem like it breaks anything downstream of it.

I like that. I think that's part of the appeal here. I don't mean the electrodes in your brain part, but that there is no friction between your volition and something happening on the screen.