XBox Kinect: The new user Interface

Here's my post at YourStory on Kinect. Wonder when Microsoft will create an Official driver for Kinect now that the Open Source driver is available.

YourStory.in: To publish my posts

Worked out an arrangement with yourstory.in to publish my posts on topics related to smartphones,cloud computing and social technology in general. Here's the first post.

The Smart phone War is on

Came across the article from eweek on the latest cell phone sales as reported by Gartner. The article is a jumble of numbers and percentages  that seems to be intent on confusing rather than conveying real information.
Here's what I was able to boil down the numbers to.

• There were 417 million Cell phone shipments in the 3Q 2010 A
• 80.5 million were Smart phones. While defining a Smart phone is one of those 'it depends on who you ask' I gather this is what the analysts mean by a smartphone All iPhones ,All Android Phones ,All Blackberry Phones ,All Nokia phones shipping with Symbian S60 operating system,Windows mobile platform phones and Linux(?) phones.

Here's a Pie Chart  that I quickly put together on the smart phone numbers that I hope simplifies things.

My own Analysis.

1. Android clearly has momentum going for it. With multiple manufacturers putting their weight behind the platform I suppose they would take over from Nokia pretty quickly. I guess Steve Jobs rants and the patent cases against HTC are not misplaced. This fake Steve jobs blog seems to sum  up Apple's fear nicely.
2. Apple continues to have mind share and seems to be gaining at the expense of Blackberry.  Also yes they are extremely profitable so they may be happy not being the market leader but still making tons of money. There is always the fear that this may be a repeat of the PC v/s Mac battle but I do think the times and the markets are different.
3. Blackberry (RIM) will go the Palm way if the Torch and Playbook don't do too well in the marketplace. They do have a dedicated set of users and good phones but the challenge for them is whether they are able to stop Apple from eating into the corporate market. 
4. Nokia continues to struggle losing both marketshare and mindshare very rapidly. With Gizmodo famously refusing to reviewing the N8  saying it's " Like a top-of-the-line horse-drawn carriage released shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon".
5. I do believe Microsoft is late to the party and I would be really surprised if they are able to go beyond 5% of the market share.

 

New Browser in the fray

RockMelt is a new browser that has Marc Andreeson on it's board of directors. It is a first of a kind because it requires a facebook account to gain access to the browser. From the Video it looks to be highly focussed on social networking.From a study by Nielsen from January 2009 the usage is up 82%. Given the exponential rate of growth I wonder what the numbers are by now? As per the study users are spending about 6 hours per month on these sites. If a study were conducted now I would think you would find it at about 6 hours per day.
The internet has evolved from a place to find information to a place where you connect and do things with the people you know. For a lot of the new generation users Facebook and Twitter are the internet and I doubt if they see a difference between social networking on the Internet and real world (what's that?) social networking. While the early days of the internet was all about being anonymous and having an alternate persona the current generation of users see no necessity in hiding things. Probably because it has always been there for them so the trust quotient is higher.
Have to see how it pans out and if they can do better than Flock  that has been around for about 5 years now. I have signed away all my Facebook privileges to get access to the beta so let's wait and see. Watch this space for more.