hisaac

Research In Motion, whose BlackBerry phones pioneered wireless email, no longer holds the commanding heights in the smartphone market. With Android, iOS, and even Windows Phone gaining market share, the Waterloo, Ontario, company finds itself in a battle for relevancy. The past year has been especially hard on the once-innovative RIM, but it may be at a turning point. Or the beginning of the end.

An excellent article outlining the rise and fall of one of RIM, makers of the venerable - and once highly sought after - BlackBerry.

This is My Next has a great rundown of reactions to Steve Jobs’ death from various business and political leaders. I think this sums it up best:

…he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world. -President Barack Obama

Name me another super nerd and business leader who would warrant a response from the President of the United States upon his death. There is no other.

It’s amazing to me; it was said that he continued working as CEO until he was physically unable, but I never realized it was quite literally true - he left just a little over one month ago.

I never knew Steve, but I will surely miss him. He quite literally changed the world.

I was recently in Vancouver Canada for a week, considering moving there, when my friend Ariel Hyatt said, “You have to meet this amazing guy Tom Williams. He got hired by Apple when he was only 14. I think the company had to, like, legally adopt him to do it. He’s a go-getter like you. Plus his wife, Jessie is an awesome country artist.”

A nice little story about a 14 year old Canadian being hired by Apple on almost no real basis.

As usual, Ars Technica is wonderful:

One by one, Android vendors have failed by selling tablets the same size as the iPad, for the same or higher price, but without an app store that could rival Apple’s.

“I don’t think this is really an iPad competitor,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg tells Ars. “This isn’t an iPad-killer. The Kindle Fire can be very successful without killing anything.”

Amazon gets it, why does no one else?

Wow… Truly an end of an era. Jobs helped usher Apple into a new league, it’s hard to believe someone else will now be at the helm.

Readability’s new business model is pretty impressive. I really hope it succeeds.

Graphic adventure games struggle to find success in today’s market, but once upon a time they topped sales charts year after year. The genre shot to the top of computer gaming in the latter half of the 1980s, then suffered an equally precipitous fall a decade later. It shaped the fate of the largest companies in the gaming industry even as the games’ crude color graphics served as the background for millions of childhood memories. It gave us Roger Wilco, Sam & Max, and the world of Myst. But few gamers today know the complete history of the genre, or how the classic Sierra and LucasArts titles of the late 1980s and early 1990s largely disappeared beneath the assault of first-person shooters.

This is the article about adventure games I always wanted to write but never got around to. Ars Technica once again hits it out of the park with a well written, well researched article.

Quantum computing, here we come!