This article in the Globe and Mail isn’t news to me, since I know a few people in the Vancouver tech community who quickly snagged iPhones from south of the border once it was released this summer. But it’s nice to see the mainstream media has caught onto Canadian dissatisfaction with both Apple’s sluggishness at bringing the iPhone up north and the atrocious data rates of Canadian wireless carriers.
Check it out, if you’re so inclined.
so feel free to check them out on page six of the newspaper, found in this here pdf file.
I’m a firm believer that the fanciful tales of drones and controlled demolitions spun by 9/11 “Truthers” (worst….name….ever!) are utter nonsense. It’s nice to see Noam Chomsy, a voice of reason from the Left, express his disdain for such theories and point out how utterly illogical they are. Check out parts one and two of his thoughts below.
Although it hasn’t been widely reported in Western media, the fact that novels for mobile phones outsold print books in Japan in the past year did briefly hit the news this past summer… the fact that people in Japan regularly read books on their cell phones is a story in itself though.
After Wired (still the usual outlet for tech stories to break into the mainstream) wrote it up early in 2007, there was a similar story a few months later in the Economist, and finally just a month or two ago, The Wall Street Journal did a small piece on it. However, surely the fact that the country showing us where mobile technology is headed shunning print books for e-books deserves a bit more media attention.
A new book by GQ reporter Robert Draper called “Dead Certain” details just how out of touch President Bush is with reality. In a great review of the book in the New York Times, it’s revealed that Bush was convinced there were WMDs in Iraq three years after the invasion, and displays a colossal ignorance of both Iraq’s past and the nature of Islam. And that despite the continued bloodshed in Iraq, he remains sure that history will acquit him. Good luck on that one, George.
Yahoo! (what, they’re still around?) just published a story on how now Japanese consumers in general are avoiding buying personal computers at all. There was a news article a couple years back about how the move to using mobile phones for online activity in Japan meant that an increasing number of young adults entering the workplace had never even touched a computer, so the Yahoo! story isn’t very surprising.
With Internet connected game consoles, mobile phones with advanced surfing and email capability, and TVs that can download movies (legally) directly from the net, the trend shows no sign of slowing, unless the PC makers can come up with something new to woo the masses. Knowing Japan, that just may happen, though, and when it does it’ll likely be something pretty crazy…
Myself and my friend Jon hatched upon the idea a while back to make a video podcast about East Vancouver, the neighbourhoods where most trends in this town originate before they get co-opted by the mainstream. Think of the neighbourhood around a university crossed with the grungier part of town and you get the general idea. After a few fits and starts with schedules and editing, we finally got this thing put together, and we’ll be doing more of them in the immediate future.
Jane Chalmers, the head of CBC Radio, has resigned after five years on the job, citing a “major midlife redesign.” Every time the CBC revamps, which it inevitably will with this development, I get worried. Mothercorp always decides they need to target the youth market, make a bunch of shows no-one wants to listen to, and then repeats the process a year later. There are notable exceptions…Search Engine and Spark, both new shows, are pretty decent, and the CBC seems to have finally figured out that CBC Radio 3 does a fine job of appealing to a certain set of youth (the ones that like good music and hate Nickelback) and have left it to do its thing.
Plus, I listen to CBC almost exclusively via podcasts (along with, quite frankly, most of my media consumption.) So as long as they don’t screw up their online offerings, I’ll be happy. Meantime, keep up with all the goings-on at CBC at Inside the CBC, the official Mothercorp blog.
