Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Almost from the moment Steve Jobs passed away, technology pundits have been hounding Apple over its lack of innovation. It is almost as if Steve Jobs was the puppet master who sparked every idea and controlled his engineer’s every coding move. The truth is Steve Jobs had a brilliant way of looking at a piece of equipment understanding almost immediately how a human would interact with it if there were a computer inside. Apple’s problem now is in the nearly five years since Jobs’ death practically every device, appliance, and piece of apparel has had a computer installed. The world isn’t as ripe for techno-upgrades. It’s no longer about innovation, but iteration, and that is Alphabet’s bread and butter. When you get right down to it, Alphabet (formerly Google) has not really invented much. Web search, social networks, email and device-to-screen content sharing all existed years before Alphabet waded into their waters. YouTub...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com YouTube should not exist. With more than one billion users, trillions of hours of content, with more than 80% of users coming to the site from outside the United States, YouTube is a truly unimaginable thing. Billions of people owning iPhones makes sense; it is a tangible good that people pay for and use dozens of times every day. YouTube is a streaming site that requires no monthly fee to use and no login to access. With costs like server space for videos and bandwidth to deliver videos It is a miracle it survived long enough for Google to acquire it, and yet somehow it did. As startling as YouTube’s success is, Amazon is not impressed. In fact, Amazon just rolled out its own user-generated video platform it hopes will match and eventually best YouTube with its “Amazon Video Direct.” Amazon is not a company that backs down from a challenge. First off, it devoured the book buying and publishing industry. Shortly thereafter it ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There’s something about paying full price that just makes you feel like a sucker. Our impulsive friends push passed sticker shock and demand the satisfaction being in on the ground floor of what’s cool. The more prudent among us are willing to wait for a price to drop. But the most impressive shoppers are the ones who buy early but clip their way to a cut fee through coupon clipping and lucrative rebates. Interestingly enough as the digital age has started to take route, bargain shopping has only grown with rewards programs and coupon applications becoming exception popular. Even with the decline of print, somehow the Sunday edition of every paper continues to be extremely popular. The reason is simple; the coupons. For decades the easiest way to find quick discounts was the Sunday paper. Well if you thought the internet couldn’t steal anything more from newspaper industry guess again, because coupons are just as readily onlin...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Cleaning up one’s publically held image is difficult to do. Being branded a cheater, or a dangerous place, or “not cool” can be a death sentence in the public eye. In 1970s New York City was known the world over as a cesspool of moral decrepitude and crime, The New England Patriots have been battling the label of cheaters for 10 years now, and Donny Osmond has easilly been the lamest man in music since the release of “Puppy Love” in the early 1970s. New York cleaned up it's act, The Patriots have pretty much ignored the cheater cries, and Donny Osmond is just too far gone to really turn it around. Of course there is another way to right a drifting reputation, and that’s make a splash before too many people know about your misdeeds. In technology “bots” find themselves on a serious course-correcting path to public acceptance. For years now bots, or programs with the sole purpose of replicating human interactions and decision...