Articles from Contributor
Get Ready for June 11, iPhone and iPad Owners
This may be a minority viewpoint — in fact, I’m positive it’s a minority viewpoint — but I get far more excited about new versions of Apple’s iOS than I do about new iPhones and iPads. There’s only so much Apple can do to …
Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight Review: An E-Reader That’s Not Afraid of the Dark
If ever a technology was defined by its highs and lows, it’s E Ink, the monochrome screen system used in e-book readers from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and other companies.
Its virtues are downright amazing. E Ink uses power …
A Brief, Inaccurate History of the Mythical ‘iPhone Nano,’ 2007-Present
Let us examine a legendary Apple product that has never arrived — and yet just won’t go away.
Hate the New Gmail? Here’s How to ‘Fix’ It
First, a disclaimer: I like the current version of Gmail, which Google started to preview last summer and then rolled out in November. I found the old one insufferably cramped and claustrophobic, and am positive that the airier …
Adobe’s Creative Cloud: All the Creative Software You’ll Ever Want
For years, Adobe sold Photoshop, Illustrator and its other applications for creative pros primarily in stand-alone boxes — like items on an à la carte menu. In 2003, it bundled them all into a multiple-course feast it called …
What Are You Doing to Google Patents, Google?
When Larry Page became CEO of Google (again) a year ago, he declared that the company was going to put more wood behind fewer arrows — which has translated into shutting down some of its myriad side projects to focus on the big, …
Lost Audio: Steve Jobs Compares Himself to Jeffrey Dahmer’s Mother
Of all the reporters who ever covered Steve Jobs, nobody is more closely associated with the man than Brent Schlender. The former Fortune editor spoke with Jobs frequently for stories, over many years. He kept lots of tapes of …
I Bought Something from a Best Buy Vending Machine, and It Didn’t Go So Well
Sometimes fate is just plain mean. On Wednesday, I wondered if Best Buy’s best strategy for reinventing itself might be to radically reduce the selection of products it stocks and institute a no-frills customer-support policy. …
Wonderopolis Gets Smartphone Apps
Last year, we named a site called Wonderopolis to our list of the year’s fifty best sites. Created by the National Center for Family Literacy, it publishes a wonder each day for parents and kids to share — answers to burning …
Another Way to Save Best Buy: Make It More like Costco
Just about everybody, it seems, is full of helpful advice for Best Buy on how it can fix its business. I provided my suggestions back in March. (That was before the company’s CEO, Brian Dunn, resigned under mysterious …
Twitter’s Promise: Unexpected Sanity in the Patent Mess
Adam Messinger, Twitter’s top engineer, has blogged about a new concept that the company plans to implement and advocate for. It calls it the Innovator’s Patent Agreement:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps
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