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 “On a long enough timeline the survival for everyone drops to zero.” That paragon of pessimism comes courtesy of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” and the disturbing wisdom of the phrase can be applied to pretty much everything. Your career, your life, our planet — all of it will one day cease to be. This same principle applies to businesses as well. Standard Oil, Kodak and Lehman Brothers are just few examples of corporate juggernauts who once dominated an industry before falling to father time. The tech industry is no different. However, as the Internet nears 25 years old, some falling giants refuse to give in to their mortality. Case in point? Yahoo. For all the billions of dollars the Internet has generated, none of it would be possible without the search engine. Of course Google is currently the king of searching the information superhighway, but it was far from the first. Webcrawler, AltaVista, Lycos and many more started ...

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...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com In today’s world, technology is inescapable. When we’re not spending our working hours staring at computer screens, our eyes are fixed on TVs, tablets and the ubiquitous smartphone. This environment is the reason so many companies want a piece of the action. It seems every business wants to build an application, operating system and, most prevalent, proprietary phones. After Apple reset the industry with the iPhone, every tech company — including Google, Microsoft, Samsung and the better-late-than-never Amazon — unveiled its own smartphone. Building a company-branded phone allows organizations ground floor access to consumer behavior and purchase patterns, and as the world’s biggest online retailer, no one wants this data more than Amazon, who introduced its first smartphone, the Fire, last month. Of course, to enter the Android- and Apple-dominated marketplace, it needed a killer feature. Amazon’s must-have? “Firefly.” Sold...

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 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 Just as television networks kick off another season of reality shows, sitcoms and dramas, a deluge of media outlets are pondering the future of TV. With advertising dollars being spread thin between cable television and the rise of online video, will TV follow the path of the daily newspaper industry? It might be too early to forecast TV’s demise, but just for kicks, I’d like to throw out one idea that could potentially throw the TV world into disarray. What if Google gained exclusive rights to livestreaming NFL games online? On its face, the idea sounds preposterous: Why would a tech giant possibly want the rights to streaming NFL games? Well the answer is quite simple. Google is much more than Web searches and smartphones. In recent years, it has quietly turned into a media giant. YouTube, which is owned by Google and is the fourth-most heavily trafficked website, is arguably the place for online entertainment. It streams Hollywo...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com If there is one thing technology is not, it’s cyclical. Once it becomes outmoded, technology is more or less immediately forgotten. Bulky computer monitors, floppy discs and audio cassettes are but a few tech innovations that can only be found in landfills, never to return. Still, the last few years have seen one dead technology claw its way back to prominence, the animated GIF. Way back in 1997, it seemed the Internet was a proverbial wasteland of eternally looping, animated cartoon images. It was practically a prerequisite for every website to be crammed full of flaming skulls, burping Homer Simpsons and flashing neon “under construction” graphics. However unlike audio cassettes and floppy discs, GIFs did not slowly sail into the sunset; they simply dropped off the map. So why are they back with such a vengeance? The beauty of GIFs is how perfectly they encapsulate our five-second attention spans. Whereas YouTube, Facebook and ...

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 Last week I survived something I will forever deem the most treacherous act of technological perpetration in my life, full stop. After almost eight years of uninterrupted service, Google shuttered its longstanding RSS reading service, Google Reader. RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds are the paper delivery boy of the Internet. Millions of websites use RSS feeds to syndicate content automatically to website subscribers. Nearly every major website and news distributor on the planet uses this technology to deliver content; CNN, ESPN, Google News, Twitter, Facebook and many, many more. RSS Readers, such as Google Reader, allow users to aggregate and subscribe to these feeds and bypass the need to visit dozens of sites each day for news and entertainment. While Google gave plenty of warning that it was terminating its RSS reader site, for diehard content curators such as myself, it was a devastating gut punch. While Reader wasn’t the most ...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com A recent Nielsen survey revealed that now more than 51 percent of adult Americans own smartphones. It’s no mystery why. Web searches, mobile applications, social networks and much more supply its users with answers to nearly any question within seconds of being asked. But what about providing answers to questions that you’d never think to ask? Location, location, location. No matter if you’re standing in Manhattan, Des Moines or Pohdunk, your phone is the divining rod to the undiscovered adventures and information surrounding you. Location and GPS-enabled smartphone applications host treasure troves of data, reviews and details on nearly every business, school, state park and everything in between. Yelp and TripAdvisor, maybe the most popular and easy to adopt for gadget novices, allow their users to search for specific businesses or categories for information. Foursquare, a GPS-enabled social network and discovery application, all...

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...