Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
On falling in love with audiobooks. "There are exquisite pleasures to be derived from hearing how a talented actor brings forth characters and stories—often in a way that points up one’s own inner-ear tone deafness to certain books"
The future has arrived: Two tetraplegics, paralysed and unable to speak, have regained some independence. They can control robotic arms by power of thought alone. Tiny electrodes implanted in the motor cortex work the magic
"Glancing at a photo of the Pebble smartwatch, you wouldn’t notice anything too different or special about it — it looks like an understated digital watch." But it's much more than that. This promises to be a watch unlike any other
The meteoric rise of smartphones. "In 1982 there were 4.6 billion people in the world, and not a single mobile-phone subscriber. Today, there are seven billion people in the world—and six billion mobile cellular-phone subscriptions"
MIT professor discusses social networks, and social robots. "People feel that they are not being heard, that no one is listening. They have a fantasy that finally, in a machine, they will have a nonjudgmental companion"
In defence of texting and email as height of sophistication. They do not signal the end of formal writing, rather the start of a unique innovation. "They are not 'writing' in the sense we are accustomed to. They are fingered speech"
"RIM’s best hope for navigating safely out of the valley of the shadow of death is to restore its centrality in the life of diehard business users." And that's exactly what CEO Thorsten Heins is planning for. Can he succeed?
It may look as if Research In Motion is doomed, but brands have recovered from worse positions before. It's not time to throw your Blackberry away just yet. Here's some sensible, general advice on how to turn the business around
Long feature takes us inside the patent litigation between Apple and Samsung, and what it means for the wider ongoing commercial struggle between Android and Apple. A dense read, but some interesting points for the committed
Reporter decides to try hacking. "I got an iPod Touch to be my experimental ninja device. I wanted to push it as far as I could. If Apple was limiting me in any way, I wanted to break those limits. I had no idea what I was doing"
"I’ve covered the company as a reporter for more than a decade, since before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye." In brief: It's not a perfect employer, but it's pretty good. You can see why people want to work there
Turns out Apple's app store isn't as carefully controlled and curated as you might think. For $9,000 Chang-Min Pak will make sure your app shows up on Apple's most popular list. Although nobody understands quite how he does it
"As we all know from our Blackberries, work invades leisure; but as we also all know from our iPhone, leisure invades work"
