Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There is nothing simple about technology. While all you need to write the most basic of websites is five or six lines of code, try programming something as complicated as a multimedia website like YouTube or a layered smartphone application like Facebook and you’re getting into millions of lines of code (potentially billions). But beyond design, programming, and delivering digital media content, there is also the extremely complicated business side of technology. So many websites, social networks, applications, and software packages are nothing more than ideas. There is no secret recipe that is impossible to crack. So to protect hardware and software manufacturers from intellectual property theft there’s patents, a federal government designation that legally plant a creator's flag on an idea, innovation, and invention. But following a recent Supreme Court decision that entire system is in trouble. It may not seem like the s...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The future is gonna be great. Computers are gonna be the size of coins, they’ll be able to process videos and games quicker than you can read this run-on sentence, and screens will be floating holograms in the air… At least that’s what I’m told. See every spring the world’s tech giants hold their annual developer conferences and use their moment in the limelight to proselytize their version of the tech future. This spring the most bombastic version of the tech future came from Facebook, who in so many words said the end of the smartphone is nigh. Dubbed “Facebook F8,” the annual developer conference is the routine moment for Mark Zuckerberg to throw out his pie in the sky ideas. In 2015 is was connectivity and messaging. In 2016 Zuck waxed poetic on the imminent omnipresence of artificial intelligent mobile assistants (think next-gen versions of Google Now, Amazon Echo, or Siri). As for 2017, well apparently we’re a stone's th...