Quirky thoughts from an old man.
“The Apple of My Eye” was originally used in English and perhaps Hebrew to refer to the pupil of the eye. Sometime in the late middle ages it began to mean something or someone that one values greatly. How this happened is murky and of course the first usage is often attributed to Shakespeare.
Nurit is the apple of my eye.
The only known Saguaro in Bordeaux, France
“The Paramount concern of man is status: how to achieve it, how to display it.”
Tom Wolfe, author
Why are people willing to spend $300 more for an Apple product than for a functional equivalent from Microsoft, Garmin, Google or Samsung?
I suspect that a large part of the higher price is the status bestowed by being an “Apple” person. In effect Apple is a private club and you can join it by paying the premium and displaying the logo…..or maybe the controlled environment that Apple offers is worth the money.
It also works for BMW, Louis Vuitton, Tesla and Whole Foods.
Do you have an eReader of some kind? A Kindle, an iPad or a Nook? Then you will probably know what I’m talking about in this post.
EBooks don’t have real pages so the intuitive feel you used to have about how far you are through a book is lost. Don’t get me wrong I love my old Kindle and now I almost exclusively read books on my iPad but I need more data than “location 3 of 11,415”
Here is the opportunity. Build an app that is better than eyeballing a bookmark in a print book and far better than the percentage they give you on an eReader. This new app will actually calculate how many hours it will take you to finish the book you are reading. It will take into account your historic reading speed and the degree of difficulty of this particular book based on other peoples speeds through the book and give you good data. I would buy it for a few dollars and so would many others. But the real opportunity is that Amazon or Apple would buy it for a lot of money.
I’m giving you this idea.
What do you have for me?
See my idea for Facebook Search
I got a new iPad for my 65th birthday. And I’ve been filling up my time figuring out how to transfer all of my data and apps and setting from my iPad one to this new one.
Because it’s new I’ve also been thinking about security and for me that means the likelihood that I will lose it. I have already had to go back to numerous restaurants to retrieve my iPad or my iPhone. The problem is that if you set the security so that only you can use the iPad then others can’t access it far enough to get you contact information.
I did put one of my business cards inside the back of the cover but it could easily be overlooked. I couldn’t tape one to the outside of the cover with any of the tapes or glues that I had and then I had an idea: Take a photo of my business card and use the photo as the start-up screen.
I made three samples:
I settled on Chairman Mao for the test.
I probably should add a sign that says “reward if found.”
I let you know if it works.
The only commercial application I could think of was if a company like Zynga or the Angry Birds people were willing to build a template to that just happened to have their logo on it.
Things change. This little change will have big repercussions.
In a remarkable coincidence my old iPhone was dying and going out of contract at the same time. So I took the easiest path and stopped by the AT&T store nearby and bought the new iPhone 4S. I was able to transfer my information and upgrade my apps with no difficulty and for a few weeks I really didn’t use the new phone any differently.
“Oh what a tangled web”
But I had SERI in my pocket and I saw the little microphone at the bottom of the memo and email pages so last week I gave it a try. Conclusion: The new transcription program built into the 4S is incredibly good.
I have been trying to be able to dictate into a machine and have it type a transcript for more than a decade and all of the programs I ever tried were crap. Now here on my phone is one that works. It means less typing and faster communications. It also means more messages sent in haste without reflection. Isn’t technology grand.
Walter Mossberg wrote about it today in his Wall Street Journal article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303772904577335792574509780.html?KEYWORDS=mossberg
The WSJ is difficult to read if your not a subscriber. So try both links or do a Google search if you’re interested.
More importantly see if your phone has speech transcription technology and give it a try. This btw is another argument for Starbucks to get together with Apple and/or Android and bring the Genius Bar to the Coffee Bar. To make this kind of change people are going to need a little hands on instruction.