Siri may infringe old Excite patents

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real […]

By |January 14th, 2012|2012|73 Comments
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Prediction #2: Amazon and Bezos supplant Apple and Jobs

If Apple gives up its position of industry leadership in 2012 the only company capable of assuming that role is Amazon.com. What other company is there?  In the PC space giants like HP and Dell are good followers, not leaders. Intel doesn’t even see itself in such a leadership role. Microsoft is having trouble just holding onto what it has already while Google is a herd of cats. Oracle is too enterprise-centric and everyone else is too darned small. That leaves Amazon.

This doesn’t mean Amazon is a perfect or even an easy replacement for Apple as a design leader because in many ways Amazon is so much less than what Apple has become. But in […]

By |January 2nd, 2012|2012|117 Comments
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Prediction #1: A new CEO for Apple

2012 will be a year of great transition in the technology industry with the big changes coming more on the corporate level than in products. Sure, Windows 8 is on its way as are any number of new products, services, and whole companies, but the major story playing-out is who will lead the mobile transition?  Will Apple continue its resurgence even without Steve Jobs?  Will Microsoft retain its market share dominance and find a way to translate that into the mobile market as PCs continue to whither?  Will Google beat Facebook?  Will Facebook beat Google?  Will some tablet dethrone the iPad?  How will the industry look a year from today?  I think that every one […]

By |January 2nd, 2012|2012|92 Comments
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For Mobile OS's, Three's a Crowd

I was speaking recently at a software company very interested in mobile apps. One of their concerns had to do with which operating systems to support.  Should they do them all?  Just a couple? My advice was that three’s a crowd.

Technical markets tend to divide like bettors at the racetrack where five percent win, 10 percent break even while 85 percent lose. Turning these numbers on their head and applying them to mobile OS revenue, IOS (iPhone, iPad, iGizmo to be named later) will generate 85 percent, Android 10 percent (because it is Open Source and free) leaving only five percent max for mobile OS number three, which could be Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 […]

By |December 20th, 2011|2011|93 Comments
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Apple looks for its checkbook

Just a short thought. Apple has lost control of the iPad trademark in China but retains it in the rest of the world. Readers warn that China will be soon awash in iPad clones.

ProView Technologies, the Taiwanese company that presently controls the iPad trademark, was near bankruptcy until yesterday. Apple has $80 billion in cash.

Do we really think Cupertino will let go of an important trademark in what will eventually be the largest IT market in the world?

I don’t think so.

By |December 8th, 2011|2011|37 Comments
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