tudor.totolici

Apple has just announced that this January’s MacWorld event will be the company’s last, and that Steve Jobs won’t be giving the event’s much-anticipated keynote. I find this fascinating. First there is the opinion that Apple wants to lunch products as they are ready to sell and not wait to make a major announcement in January or July. Also rumors say that this decision has to do with Steve Job’s health.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers.

It is because of the trade shows that blogs across the land halt EVERYTHING and dedicate that hour or so for headlining everything Apple announce.  They are a major player in providing the Hype that Apple has received, most in part due to the trade shows, the “secrets”, the skepticism. On the other hand there is nothing stopping Apple hosting their own special events, as they often do. They get the same hype, and cost a  lot less.  So the answer can not be here, in the lack of marketing ROI.

Microsoft runs its developer conference and Apple will no doubt continue to run its WWDC event.  But what can be the motive for this decision that created a lot of rumor among fans all over the internet?

Everybody is making predictions for 2009  (or not). This is always a hot trend for the end of the year. But what about 2010 and beyond? Here is what i think:

• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the Internet, rather than by geography or kinship.
• Copyright will be dead in the digital world.
• Most people will have happily traded their privacy for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices.
• In a reaction to the virtual world we will establish zones (bars, clubs) where reality is not augmented.

What do you think will happen?

The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version.

Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

One thing i find interesting about this version besides the all talked about auto-update feature is that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen.

Here is the official video showing more of the options:

Soon after Tasks and SMSes, Gmail has just added a its own viewer that lets you view PDFs in your Web browser. It’s blazing fast, and it does include a search function, and lets you download or print the PDF if you really need to.

There are two other benefits to this, the first being the updated page view which lets you hop around the document a whole lot faster. The other is the built-in zoom, which scales the text to fit your monitor with a higher degree of detail than the text resizer found in your browser.

However before you try it out yourself you need to know the new PDF viewer doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, but works just fine in Chrome. Is this the beginning of a pattern of Google not playing nice with Mozilla?

MPI lunched last week okidoki.ro, a search engine aimed to take google’s place as the number one romanian search enigne. A great PR move by Orlando Nicoara. In Buzz Marketing, Mark Hughes describes this as being the “David and Goliath” tehnique.

And i agree, even from a business perspective it’s a great time to take on the big players. But they are a long way from getting market and mind share. Trilulilu did it about a year ago with a lame copy of youtube. But  they had the entrepreneurial spirit pushing them foreword, people supported them as a start-up not as a media group.

I am sure Adrian Sarbu has the funds to support this project for a long time but without some real relevence in the search results i predict that by the end of 2009 we will see roll-over display ads on the search results or worst: tooth paste commercials behind the text.