Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com When you run down the reasons for being on different social networks, so many are clear as day; Facebook connects you with friends and family, Twitter gives us insight into public discourse, and Pinterest illuminates the creative works of the world. For these and a handful of others, the utility of their site is obvious. However, for every thriving network, there are half a dozen useless sites. Topping the list of trivial online communities is LinkedIn Before you get indignant, I freely admit that I — like 300 million others — have a profile that I occasionally update on LinkedIn. At first blush, the utility of the site makes sense: a network for job seekers and business professionals allowing them to network (in the way your dad and college career counselor champion). Thousands of companies use the site to promote their brand and allow job seekers to follow their career opportunities. The problem is, outside of providing a ...

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 There has never been a better period in all history than present day to be an idea guy. No matter if you have zero coding, engineering or sales skills, the information age is ripe for creative people to brainstorm game-changing ideas and find the right people and funding to make it happen. Sure, 40 years ago Steve Jobs co-created Apple Computers with no programming skills, but would Apple exist today without his Apple conspirator Steve Wozniak and seed funding from multimillionaire Mike Markkula? Think of all the Jobs-like geniuses who never came to pass because they weren’t surrounded by the right supporting cast? Today, two elements fuel the dreams of the would-be Steve Jobs among us: social networking and crowd funding. Before the advent of online social networking, it was practically impossible for unknowns to connect. Unless you, your friends or your colleagues could personally program computers, your dreams of tech inno...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The rise of high-speed Internet and online streaming video over the last decade has definitely shaken the broadcast and pay TV business. While burgeoning Web technology has contributed to lower ratings and dipping revenues, it appears what the TV industry is most afraid of is a tool older than the medium itself, the antenna. Aereo , an online streaming video service, leases customers dime-sized antennas that retransmit locally broadcasted TV content over the Internet. This means someone living in Oregon can lease an Aereo antenna deployed in New York City and watch TV content hours before its broadcast in his or her actual time zone. The streaming video start-up has upset the broadcast TV industry so much, it’s scheduled to defend its legality before the United States Supreme Court in April. Broadcasters are challenging Aereo’s legal right to stream their content online without paying providers retransmission fees. Cable pro...

  This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Many of my childhood Saturdays involved the errand of tagging along with my father to his office to pick up something he forgot. He worked in a cubicle maze for a large financial institution in Des Moines. To a small child, spending anytime there was pretty much the equivalent of being sent to “time out.” But for me, I loved those little trips, because my dad’s office had a magical door. Even though the office was dark and locked for the weekend, every time my dad came within 10 feet of the door, it would open without any provocation. It wouldn’t do it for me or my brother, but it did for him, and I was spellbound. Years later I would come to understand the building used a technology similar to RFID (radio-frequency identification), meaning a passcard in my dad’s wallet unlocked and opened the door from a few steps away. Today RFID is everywhere, eliminating the need for punch-codes and easing product tracking. While ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com What is a dollar worth? If we’re being literal, the value of a dollar is tied to the gross domestic exports of the country. But if the recent recession taught us anything it’s that if the stock market takes a plunge, the dollar in your pocket could quickly be worth half its value. So came the hot-button alternative currency, Bitcoin. Unregulated, anonymous, global and short on supply, Bitcoin is one of many “cryptocurrencies” that could supposedly save the U.S. from future recessions. Why is gold so valuable? Because it is rare, and there is a finite supply. That concept of supply-and-demand is the basis for all cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Existing purely as a digital currency of exchange, Bitcoin and its peers offer a way for investors and consumers to safeguard their earnings against recessions and other economic disasters. How? Bitcoins’ value is derived solely from demand and supply. If investor interest grows, ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com In January, a 1991 Radio Shack print ad was circulating the Internet. It featured 15 different top-of-the-line consumer electronics for the time: a portable CD-player, a VHS camcorder, high-fidelity speakers, a desktop computer and many more. Combined, all of the items could be purchased for just more than $3,000 and maybe fit in the trunk of a car. Today, all 15 of those electronics are obsolete, replaced by any common smartphone, which, in some cases, are sold for one penny and fit comfortably in your back pocket. The industrial revolution has brought the world some amazing inventions — automobiles, airplanes, radio, television — but few, if any, have the explosive potential of the smartphone. Barely a decade since first being introduced, and already one out of every five people on the planet owns a smartphone. The computer for sale in Radio Shack’s 1991 advertisement featured a 20MB hard drive, early office suite softw...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Why is the Internet full of lists? Headlines with numbers in them? Pictures filling out social network feeds? And what is with all the random bolded text on the Internet? The answer to all of the above is your brain and eyes. Our eyeballs are naturally attracted to pictures over text, bulleted lists over four-sentence paragraphs, headings that promise exact values over ambiguity and areas of importance in text over uniform print. Remember in school textbooks how pages broke information into color-coded sections with diagrams and bolded keywords? That is exactly what the Internet has become. Buzzfeed is huge because it has mastered all these techniques. At any point on Buzzfeed’s front page, a good deal of the headlines have numbers in them, promising listed information for easy consumption. Lists are akin to information junk food easy to consume and process for quick consumption. Altogether these concepts form the id...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The last couple years have been a nonstop thrill-ride for Hollywood. While box office revenues have broken records, the real suspense-filled adventure is not happening on the screen but inside the theater projector. Fewer terms are more analog than film, a physical medium that stores single frame pictures in sequence. But the last decade has seen everything analog supplanted by the more cost effective digital. Actual film is rarely used, theater sound is digitally disturbed, 3D, iMax, and high frame rate projection have made choosing your movie going experience akin to building a custom burrito, and studios now digitally distribute movies instead of delivering film reels to theaters. How will this transition impact the moviegoer? Unless you live in a rural area not much, but for the industry as a whole it’s outright revolution. Digital projection is both a godsend and a death sentence for the entertainment world. Shipping ha...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Privacy is officially dead. Never mind domestic spying by the National Security Agency or social network over-sharing; those threats can only stalk you online. The real-world, real-time menace is facial-recognition software that can connect strangers to your online social presence without your knowledge. To this point, facial-recognition software has primarily been used in the consumer venue by online photo services to help users automatically identify people in pictures, which is a fairly innocent tool, but it was only a matter of time before a company connected the super-computers in our pockets to the boundless dossier of personal information volunteered online, and that company is Nametag. As if pulled straight out a scene from “The Terminator” movies, Nametag software allows smartphone and Google Glass users to snap a picture of any face they see, and, within seconds, match it to online profile images such as Twitter, ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For tech geeks everywhere, doomsday came last week. On Jan.14, a federal appeals court struck down government regulations commonly referred to as “net neutrality,” the laws that forced Internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all Web traffic the same. Whether you were reading a blog post, sending an email or streaming a movie, net neutrality meant ISPs had to load all sites at the same rate and not some content over others. Confused? Net neutrality is like that, but at the heart of the discussion know that this means money. Think of it in terms of tiered TV subscriptions. Cable providers such as Mediacom or DIRECTV can host certain channels and not others based on the fee to carry them, beyond that, they can charge customers more for premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. With net neutrality potentially dead, ISPs can tier Internet sites and content in much the same way. Imagine Internet service where email and news sit...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For gamers everywhere, Christmas has come early — the long-awaited next generation of gaming units has finally hit store shelves. Within 10 days of each other, both Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s XBox One hit the market this past month and together opened up the console gaming world to a new echelon of button-mashing entertainment. While Playstation and XBox loyalists spend the coming weeks embroiled in heated arguments over whose platform is superior, let me save you from becoming collateral damage. Neither the Playstation 4 nor the XBox One is worthy of your time or money. There’s no denying the unbelievable player experience, realistic graphics, processing power, back catalogue of games or gamer mindshare that Sony and Microsoft have to work with. The trouble lies in the world these two platforms find themselves in — the mobile gaming and wireless world. The rising tide of mobile gaming is undeniable. More than on...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Christmas may be three weeks in our rearview mirror, but for tech nerds the world over, January’s Consumer Electronics Show is the real reason for celebrating. For years this annual mega-conference has been the venue for companies to release the latest and greatest tech innovations. In recent years, CES saw the unveiling of 3D TVs, eye-controlled computers, futuristic concept cars and much more. This year, it seems, curved flexible glass smartphones are the most buzzed about gadget. As powerful as smartphones are, few treat these miniature computers with the respect they deserve. They’re tossed in purses, sat on while in back pockets, their screens are mashed up against keys and loose change, and most likely one in three of you reading this have suffered the arrhythmia-inducing cracked screen. Until now the only defense against our reckless behavior was hard plastic cases and thin screen covers. Flexible phones are the answer ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com One constant with every holiday season is the TV “Christmas special,” and this year NBC’s “Sound of Music Live” was easily the biggest. While most viewers enjoyed the broadcast with simply a cup of eggnog and a roaring fire, a good deal of the audience “hate watched” it. These nefarious TV viewers shared the experience with millions of others by partaking in the social virus known as live-tweeting. Twitter is hands-down my favorite social network. The ability to immediately exchange information with others outside your social network is extremely powerful. One byproduct of this immediacy is live-tweeting, where one or several Twitter users post a series of tweets detailing a live event. In its short history, live-tweeting has been used for a handful of truly historic and informative events (i.e. the 2012 election, the death of Osama Bin Laden, etc.), but more recently, many have hijacked it for what could be considered evil. ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com One thing that denotes a city from a major metropolitan area is an extensive mass transit system. While Des Moines’ labor force may worry about our daily “rush minute,” cities like New York and Chicago have to worry about bus and rail schedules, not to mention full-on gridlock. Maybe Des Moines will someday grow large enough to warrant a rail system of some sort, but if a recent rash of ridesharing networks has anything to do with it, it may never be necessary. The real bane of traffic jams worldwide is single-rider vehicles, miles of four-door cars with only the driver’s seat occupied. Hoping to fill those seats with would-be carpoolers, social rideshare networks have popped up, thanks to smartphone applications such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar. These applications enlist willing drivers to rent their vacant car seats to passengers. Rather than having to choose between braving roadway congestion or the horrors of public transit, ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Somewhere in America a giddy tween-ager is right now being handed his or her first cell phone along with that parental warning: “Remember, once you post something online it is there forever.” Thankfully forever now has a pit stop, and it’s an application called Snapchat. While I won’t profess to be fully attuned to youth culture, I do know this: Snapchat is in: Facebook is out. For those even more out the loop, Snapchat is a social messaging service that allows users to send multimedia messages with a shelf time of 10 seconds or less. Basically, users can share content privately with their social circles without their entire Facebook network of friends seeing it (i.e. mom), and it will self-destruct protecting the user from potential fallout. Much has been made about the nefarious aspects of Snapchat: lewd photos, offensive or harassing content and the potential to bypass the self-destruct feature via screen capture. But in t...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Whenever a new website pops up and becomes super popular, eventually everyone asks the same question: How does this site make money? Usually sites first make it online with minor personal investments followed by private investors, but all investors want a return, and more likely than not that means advertisements. Though most people often tune out the ads, a festering type of advertisement can camouflage itself in the content a person actually cares about. This infestation is known as native advertisements. All Internet users have seen them hiding in plain sight — in search results, Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter feeds, even CNN’s main page — posts and links that look like normal content but are actually advertisements. Some say “sponsored” or “promoted,” but others are not so aptly defined. Google was even sued into fine-print labeling their native ads. Regardless, though, they often prove to work. Currently reaping roughly $2 b...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com For gamers everywhere, Christmas has come early — the long-awaited next generation of gaming units has finally hit store shelves. Within 10 days of each other, both Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s XBox One hit the market this past month and together opened up the console gaming world to a new echelon of button-mashing entertainment. While Playstation and XBox loyalists spend the coming weeks embroiled in heated arguments over whose platform is superior, let me save you from becoming collateral damage. Neither the Playstation 4 nor the XBox One is worthy of your time or money. There’s no denying the unbelievable player experience, realistic graphics, processing power, back catalogue of games or gamer mindshare that Sony and Microsoft have to work with. The trouble lies in the world these two platforms find themselves in — the mobile gaming and wireless world. The rising tide of mobile gaming is undeniable. More than on...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com With the passing of daylight savings time, and two of the more gluttonous holidays approaching, maintaining a healthy lifestyle becomes nearly impossible this time of year. As easy it may be to give in to winter laziness, there is an entire niche industry of tech gadgets designed to keep the susceptible on the path to good health. In the past five years the health and fitness world has ridden the smartphone wave to help users monitor their activity levels. From diet tracking applications such as SparkPeople and MyFitness Pal to phone-synced gadgets such as Nike’s popular “Plus” line of products, technology can help you track every detail of your exercising efforts. The problem comes when deciding which tool to use. Most fitness apps are free, but require serious dedication to update, whereas Nike’s products are exceptionally smart but expensive. Thankfully there is a middle ground tool that offers the robust monitoring and...

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...