Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Apple’s iWatch looks beautiful. It is a stone cold fact that cannot be denied. The problem comes when you try to nail down its purpose. We’ve all heard the old chestnut “necessity is the mother of invention.” After you take a good long look at the iWatch, there is no denying it is completely unnecessary. Year in and year out, since the rise of the affordable personal computer in the mid 1980s, technology has been society’s problem-solving wizard. Laptops allowed us to work anywhere, iPods allowed us to carry our entire music library with us at all times, and smartphones kept us connected to each other, information and basically our entire lives. Other gadgets have come along to make these innovations more luxurious (iPads, set-top boxes, George Foreman grills…), but none of them are true necessities. Since Steve Jobs’ passing, everyone from impatient stockholders to your Facebook-addicted grandma has been waiting for Apple’s n...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com How long are you willing to wait for a website to load? Five seconds? Ten seconds? Good God, don’t let it happen to me… 15 seconds! Over the last two decades, researchers have found the duration of the American attention span to be dwindling and dwindling. It’s gotten so bad that in 2014 our interests can only be held for a shameful short eight seconds, and tech is one of the leading focus killers. What’s the worse part of any YouTube video? The five seconds we’re forced to watch advertisements before a cat video rolls. What is the maximum amount of characters in a tweet? One-hundred-forty characters, or roughly 30 words, which happens to be just about eight seconds. How long are Vine videos? Six seconds max. This seems really short until you sit through a 15-second Instagram video that never seems to end. The unwritten rule that brevity equals relevancy has a stranglehold on tech. But in all fairness, marketers, entertainer...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Since the turn of century, when the Internet began consuming our attention spans, we’ve all been champions of “Revolution Free.” Napster started the uprising with free music, content aggregators such as Google News and Huffington Post stoked the flames with free news, torrent services gave us entertainment, and social networks gave us communication. While paywalls are starting to cordon off online content, the pulse of the revolution still beats with YouTube as its heart. The idea of free online is, for all intents and purposes, a lie. Whether it’s your local newspaper, CNN.com, Hulu, or even YouTube, all online content providers must pay delivery, storage and also the pesky matter of compensating producers. How are these bills satiated? Advertising. And while others have turned to premium, subscription-guarded content, YouTube has subsisted on advertising for nearly a decade. Whether you’re uploading to or streaming from Yo...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com One of my favorite George Carlin’s one liners was simply “Stay tuned, China’s gonna win.” The sentiment is easy enough. China is a sleeping giant whose might will one day make it the crowning super power. Extending this metaphor to the tech world, the obvious China substitute is Amazon with 2014 being the year it comes out from behind the silicon curtain. In the past nine months, Amazon has released a set top box, its first smartphone, a string of critically acclaimed original TV streaming content, and just last month purchased streaming gaming site Twitch, the largest acquisition in the company’s history. Amazon’s bread will always be buttered by online retail, but these recent power plays represent the company expanding into content delivery, telecommunications, the entertainment world and the fervent gaming industry. Nothing at Amazon is done in haste. It waited almost a decade before entering the smartphone market, and i...