It was a week this week of sometimes weak innuendo. We refer here specifically a keynote interview Apple CEO Tim Cook took part in, earlier in this Memorial Day shortened week, with Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their 11th annual AllThingsD conference. Based on statements from Cook such as (we're paraphrasing), "The wrist is interesting" and "It's not just about the wrist," a lot of people have suddenly jumped to the conclusion that Apple is ready to jump on the wearable tech and smartphone bandwagon. Is there something to this Apple, wearable tech and iWatch issue, or is it all just idle speculation?
Another thing some folks are speculating about this week is whether or not the larger 10-inch tablets have any real future. Some say they do not. The theory here is that larger tablets - especially and more specifically those larger tablets now being used in the enterprise - are nothing more than a temporary solution to the fact that most of today's laptops still weight too much.
The theory suggests that as Ultrabooks and new laptops/notebooks begin to use the new microprocessors that are now about to ship - such as the Haswell SoCs from Intel, the fact that these processors are hugely more energy efficient and require as much as 50 percent less power will allow vendors to greatly reduce battery size. Such power savings also translate into generating much less heat - so that devices can be built on much smaller and much lighter platforms. If these new machines - which will deliver much more computing power - and keyboards - than tablets can muster and they match 10-inch tablet form factors, why move to a tablet? Why indeed.
Related to this issue is all the industry noise surrounding the imminent death of the entire PC market, a notion that has been perpetuated for almost 18 months now by ongoing reports from Gartner and IDC, suggesting that PC sales are not only tanking but are latterly about to implode. We ourselves take a very dim view of drawing any such PC sales implosion conclusions. In fact, our view of it is that if the PC market does happen to shrink by some percentage - whatever it may be - it’s a very solid reason to celebrate and an indication that new technology continues to successfully emerge and constantly keeps us moving forward.
If the tragic news of the PC's demise is weighing on you and you happen to be a Facebook user, we have a little bit of news to cheer you up. Facebook has confirmed that it is going to take a much stricter view of the sorts of things Facebookers can post. Will this put an end to what has become a significant niche Facebook audience segment that thrills to posts of bad news, evil doings, and a host of other such stuff? We hope so! Of course so far Facebook has "promised" to look into it - whether it will ultimately actually do anything remains to be seen.
If you are a regular or possibly avid user of that other great social network, the Twitterverse, then you are no doubt familiar with TweetDeck and HootSuite. These apps - actually, dashboards - let you monitor Twitter literally as if your entire life depends on it. We've decided to take a TweetDeck vs. HootSuite view of things - if you don't know either or only one or the other this is your chance to get the details - perhaps you'll join in or make a switch. Either way, we've done the hard work for you.
We're going to wrap up the week by pointing out that last week SAP Mobility Services, which deals primarily in SMS messaging (the odds are quite good that some of your messages travel across their network on a regular basis), is tapping SAP's in-memory analytics and database engine HANA to mine some enormously big date from its carrier customers to help them and numerous enterprises better understand your mobile needs. It's dubbed SAP Consumer Insight 365 and it is very cool. SAP HANA is quite an accomplishment in our book, and to see SAP put it to good use serves as both an example of what big data projects are all about and why big data and the ability to truly analyze it in real time is becoming such a critical capability.
Have a great weekend!
