Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There is truly no better time of year to give or get a gift than right now. No matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, celebrate Kwanzaa or simply indulge in the spirit of the season, it seems most people embrace the giving spirit that comes with December. Chances are you already have all your gifts purchased, wrapped and ready to set under the tree. You’ve bought your kids some toys, your dog a squeaky toy, and you’re all excited for your spouse to rip open his or her gift of a shiny new tech gadget. Well, not to go all Grinch on you, but a huge swath of the hot tech gadgets on the market are pointless and simply bad gifts. Take a moment to look at your smart phone, the wondrous piece of technology most of us gift ourselves every two years (when our cellular service provider ends). Your smart phone is a camera, a computer, a health tracker, a gaming station, an entertainment gateway, a backup storage device, a universal remote, an...

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 The tablet is a quandary; it’s a stretched out smartphone that supposedly offers a computing environment similar to a laptop or desktop. Its size allows for easier reading, and its mobility offers the ability to work practically anywhere imaginable. Even with these advantages over smartphones and stationary computing systems, tablets are not tech necessities. In fact, as sales are starting to show, owning a tablet is most definitely a luxury. Even prior to its initial release in 2010, Apple’s iPad was a hot commodity. Everyone had fallen in love with the iPhone and thought a tablet version not only made sense but would revolutionize computing. Four years later, the iPad is still cool, but the revolution never came to pass. Altogether 195 million tablets were sold in 2013. But what a difference a year makes. Whereas the iPhone continues to see growth in sales, the iPad has actually seen a 10 percent sales dip over the last ni...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Continuous growth is the demand of every shareholder and blight of every company. Everyone from CEOs down to mailroom clerks wants to rake in profits as much as investors, but failure to recoup bigger and bigger profits can quickly kill their job and reputation. How do companies bring in new riches? Through diversification or innovation. To stay relevant and profitable, practically every company must diverge from its initial path. Microsoft started as a software company, Apple was a computer manufacturer, Google a search engine and Facebook a social network. While all these companies still hold a major footing in these arenas, they’ve all pushed into other industries with varying levels of success. Apple makes the majority of its profits from phones and digital sales, Google is in advertising, software development and content distribution, and after entering the stock market in 2012, Facebook started spraying a firehose of cas...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Listing off tech industry power players is no easy task. Sure you start with hardware and software giants such as Apple, Google and maybe Samsung, but what about the Internet properties? That means Facebook, eBay, Twitter, Amazon and possibly Yahoo. But then there are high tech manufacturers and information service providers yet to be considered: Intel, HP, IBM and Oracle, for example. The list could go on. Now, if we were building this list in the ’90s, it would have been hard to argue that a truer giant of the industry existed other than Microsoft. Windows, the operating system offered by Bill Gates’ high tech software company Microsoft, is the most dominant creation in the history of software. No matter the iteration — 95, 98, XP, ME, NT, Vista, etc. — Windows controlled an impossible share of the consumer, professional, enterprise and government markets. However, the rise of mobile computing cracks the Microsoft monument, ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For all of its hip commercials and excellent word-of-mouth buzz, Apple’s iPhone is still second-best. Market analysis from this past quarter revealed four-fifths of the world’s smartphone users are Android users, Google’s mobile operating system. As dominant as 80 percent sounds, why does it feel like Google’s stronghold is an outright lie? Android’s quiet climb to the top of the smartphone world wasn’t about marketing or innovation but pure and simple undercutting the competition and providing the alternative. While the iPhone was undoubtedly the best smartphone for four or five years after its release, it was expensive at first and only available to AT&T customers. Since it first hit the market, Android has been available on practically every carrier, offered extremely similar functionality, and it practically reset the scale for what smartphones should cost. One of the major differences between Android phones and iPho...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There are two sacred cows in smartphone-user experience: battery life and constant connection to information. One of the best features of smartphones is the ability to notify users of new content through a background tool known as push notifications. For years popular services such as email, text messages and social networks have used push notifications to alert users of updates with little uproar, but a new trend in application development is pitting these two sacred cows against each other. Since Foursquare wove user geographic location into the social media universe back in 2009, developers have been frothing at the mouth to capitalize on user location. Global positioning system (GPS) technology has been a standard feature on all smartphones since the original iPhone. At a moment’s notice, users can find directions, traffic information and local businesses, but too much GPS use drains the phone’s battery extremely fast. U...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com In the shadow of the release of the newest iPhones, Apple unleashed on its users something even bigger, the seventh iteration of its mobile operating system (iOS). Every iPhone, iPad and touch screen iPod was given the option to upgrade to iOS 7 earlier this month, and hardcore Apple users were practically counting down the minutes until they could install the update. Based on the sheer number of users who installed the new operating system — about 200 million in the first week — you’d think iOS 7 is a slam-dunk success. However, Apple’s latest user interface is quickly falling prey to the tech plague where nothing’s good enough. Redesigns and interface overhauls are unavoidable. While design fashions go out of style, technologies become outdated and competitors push the envelope of innovative features, the real problem is the belief that tech companies see themselves as sharks. A common, not-entirely true belief is, if sharks stop...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com In film fanatic circles, much is made of the “Golden Age” of cinema, i.e. the 1930s and 1970s. Films from these periods, such as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Godfather,” respectively, are considered the pinnacle of celluloid expression, and the entire movie industry seemed to be enraptured with artistic meaning and bravura storytelling. As wonderfully nostalgic as that sounds, being a cinephile myself, I personally find no era of film more exciting than the one we are living in right now. Why? Technology has leveled the playing field. For roughly $1,000, the most rudimentary pieces of filmmaking can be had with non-linear video editing and prosumer cinematic cameras. Around the turn of the century, applications such as Media 100, Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Adobe’s Premiere Pro started to proliferate across the independent filmmaking community. These programs allowed amateurs to digitize their footage and manipulate it by dragging a...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com Every few years a technological innovation comes along that is so obvious it’s infuriating that you didn’t come up with it yourself. A few recent examples include eBay, the iPod and YouTube, each of which revolutionized its field and practically changed the world. The beauty of these ingenious tech tools is that virtually no one can see them coming, and as soon as they hit, you know immediately that you need it. Two weeks ago I felt this same impulse with the announcement of Google Chromecast, a key-sized device that allows you to wirelessly stream almost any Web content from any computing device to your TV. Streaming content wirelessly from computing devices to television is nothing new. Apple TV has offered this capability for years. What is new is Chromecast’s ultraportability and price. For only $35, users can basically carry their entire video or audio library in their pocket and stream it to any TV or stereo system that ...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com No longer relegated to the fictional worlds of Iron Man, James Bond and Star Trek, sometime within the next two years your friends and family will start sporting computerized watches, glasses, rings and potentially more. You may have heard of Google’s much buzzed-about “Project Glass,” a.k.a. “Google Glasses,” a computer-powered set of glasses that allows its user to record video, take pictures, search the Internet, make and take phone calls and analyze real-time data through heads-up displays (think the “Terminator 2” scene where Arnold is scanning body types in the biker bar). What you probably haven’t heard about are the watches and rings. Apple’s long-rumored, next industry-melting innovation is said to be the iTV, a television that marries the power of smartphones with the content of the entertainment industry. Now comes word that the iTV could possibly sport an innovation on top of an innovation; replacing the classic remot...

If Apple is truly the lion of the computing industry right now, than it seems only fitting that its most recent iteration of OS X is the thorn in its paw. Thanks to less-than-stellar reviews, one going so far as to claim OS X 10.7.3 was " Apple's Vista Moment ," I held out as long as I could to upgrade my MacBook Pro . And if it wasn't for new software requiring the operating albatross, our laptop would be roaming the computer jungle issue free as a graceful snow leopard. Everything I was worried about is true ; Preview windows takes 5+ seconds to buffer files. Finder searches, formally instantaneous, seem to have been refashioned in an homage to Microsoft. Pointless screen animations abound for fullscreens Launchpad and Dashboard continue to be a waste of computing power. Quicktime video playback is choppy. Upon upload, Preferences are rewired for no reason what-so-ever. There's plenty more to list -I could write 500 words on Finder windows alone- ...