Author: Navneet Alang

Ever since they first came about, digital movies have been totally absurd. Not only are they overpriced, they are almost always locked into particular hardware ecosystems. Buy a movie from iTunes and it only plays on Apple hardware; buy the same movie on Xbox Live or the Playstation Network, and it’s the same deal. It’s ridiculous. But it seems like buying a digital movie might finally be about to get better with the arrival of Ultraviolet. It’s a new system from Hollywood that let’s you buy a movie once and watch it anywhere. Sounds like the future we were promised, right? Trouble is, Apple aren’t…

“Tech news is so phenomenally boring!” said Gawker’s Adrian Chen, in the classically confrontational, controversial style of the site. And oh how it’s true. Tech news is boring. Every minute Apple rumor is reported in detail. In fact, each tiny little upgrade or tidbit of info about any hot company – Google, Twitter, Facebook – is talked about endlessly, even if it isn’t particularly relevant. Silly wars between companies and their fans dominate news feeds, and it all amounts to a lot of nothing. As for who’s to blame, it’d be easy to blame readers, who lap up every detail in droves. But there’s another…

For years, the desktop computer has been but a shell of its former dominant self. The world went mobile, and that gray box that your co-workers used to call ‘the hard drive’ seemed destined for an obscure life – if a stable one. After all, it was still going to be used by gamers, programmers, media buffs and others who wanted the power and ease that comes with a powerful computer, a big screen and desk and chair. But recently, we have two more pieces of news that make one wonder: what is the future of the desktop computer, if it has one at all? The first was the iPad sales are now at 11% of the PC market, a figure…

In the few brief moments of respite we get from the constant flurry of Apple rumors, sometimes it seems worth something to think about the broader effects a company like Apple has. After all, though there is always much debate about the gang from Cupertino, it tends to be about technology or features or interfaces. And in this, I’d argue Apple excel. The iPad is vastly superior to any other tablet on the market. The iPhone became a platform rather than a product, and in doing so totally revolutionized mobile. And the Macbook Air and iMac are certainly very pretty, practical machines. But does all this…

Though there are myriad software and services for managing various aspects of a company, they are often divided into components: use one thing for accounting, another for team management, another for internal discussion. It can get a bit unwieldy, particularly in terms of having everyone on the same page. Groupware TeamWox aims to help that by consolidating the numerous different functions – HR, email, document sharing and many more – all in one package. The upshot, beyond increased efficiency, is that the software helps centralize all company functioning so that gaps in workflow etc. can…

For a company that has had trouble understanding social, the response to Google+, the company’s new social network platform, has been remarkably good. But no-one so far has suggested that Google+ will be the proverbial “Facebook killer’. And nor should they. We have no idea how the mass market will respond to Google+, especially since there’s no agreement among early adopters yet. Still, at least in terms of ideas, Google+ is very interesting – innovative, even. In fact, the ideas are so surprisingly good, I think Facebook has a reason to worry – if, of course, they decide not to steal those ideas…

Apple’s iOS, for all its benefits, is notoriously closed. Particularly annoying about this is that you have no access to the OS’s file structure, which means you cannot download music or video clips from across the web. Thankfully a new iPhone and iPad app called Meteoric looks to fix that. Though on the surface Meteoric is a download manager, it actually works by providing the user with a browser. As you browse through sites, links to media content – images, music, video, or any other format that works natively on iOS – can be downloaded simply by long-pressing the link. Upon doing so, you then get…

For the past couple of years, we have been waiting to see whether Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, could rise to meet the challenge of iOS and, later, Android. And for a while, we were hopeful. Looking at RIM’s past and brand loyalty, there was much reason to believe they would succeed despite Apple and Google’s onslaughts. But yesterday, two news stories came out that were symbols of RIM’s (probably permanent) decline. The first was that Apple has enough cash to buy the entire mobile phone industry. The second was that RIM themselves have halved their internal projections for their…

Only a short while after its release, the Nintendo 3DS, the successor to the most popular handheld of all time, sold a mere 97,000 units in the US last month. That is a big deal. After all, who could have imagined just a few years ago that a new Nintendo mobile console would sell so comparatively poorly? Years into its life cycle, the Nintendo DS would sell two to three times that. It is, at the very least, surprising. The reasons for this sluggish start are many. The 3Ds’s launch lineup wasn’t spectacular. What’s more, US$249 is the highest price ever for an Ninty handheld. But with the PS Vita coming out…

Out of the gate, I should say I realize that comparing Nintendo and Apple is odd. One is a gaming company, the other a general purpose computing and software company. What’s more, while Apple recently introduced a software upgrade, Nintendo announced new hardware in the form of the Wii U. So what possible good could come from contrasting their recent actions? But here’s the thing: in their recent announcements, Apple, who are usually the ones to popularize new ways of using tech, simply introduced a mild upgrade, borrowing from other companies, when they could have introduced a revolution….