Buying [in]security

The recent purchase of Motorola Mobility by Google has dominated the news, so I would like to share my thoughts on some other aqusitions.

Two products I both use and love were recently purchased. Evernote just announced it had bought Skitch, which was immediately folllowed by Skype snapping up GroupMe. Both products are noticable players in their respected market, and I look foward to watching the outcome. I think the recent purchases bring an exciting future, as well as many un-answered questions.

Although both Skype and Evernote both stated their acquisitions will run independently, I see more integration happening with Evernote and Skitch. This is clear, as Skitch immediately announced their product would be free, and soon available to every platform under the sun. Evernote has a excellent history of developing and marketing to all platforms, so I think that is a huge benefit to brining Skitch to a larger population. I undoubtedly think the Evernote acquisition of Skitch will see a extremely fruitful future going forward.

As for Skype and GroupMe, I would love share the same optimism, but I am certain the decisions and impact of this acquisition will be completely dwarfed by the recent acquisition of Skype itself by Microsoft. Although I believe Microsoft has more potential for Skype than the previous owner Ebay, I am still very doubtful. There has not been any real announcement regarding how Skype will integrated with any Microsoft products, but oddly enough mostly Facebook integration. I believe GroupMe is a powerful platform, but it is unclear how it will fit in with both Skype, and ultimately Microsoft, and the lack of any specific announcement regarding futures changes is concerning.

I look forward to watching messaging, voice and video calling, and screen sharing and how the landscape for these markets will be changing with the recent acquisitions.

Browsing the future

Mozilla Firefox releases a new version, and plans to phase out version numbers. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer seems to be headed towards a more rapid release schedule, with version 10 preview announced. Google Chrome is already on a very fast paced release schedule with both stable and unstable builds getting updated regularly.

The web browser as we know today seems to be changing at warp speed in comparison to what it once was.

I recently had a very notable experiance regarding this. When Upgrading to Mac OS X Lion, I recently decided to try the Canary build of Google Chrome.  Canary is a slightly less stable version, where builds are release more often. During my first few days of use there was many features not implemented for Mac yet such as Full Screen mode, and the scrolling was not entirely smooth like it should be. 

But only after using it a few days, I realized the scrolling was fixed due to a background update. There was an unintrusive notification that when clicked allowed me to relaunch Chrome to the latest version instantly. No waiting, rebooting, or versions changes. Just one click, and done. Once Chrome opened again, the Full Screen mode was avaliable, and worked flawlessly.  

I was very thrilled and amazed and how trivial this process was, and have come to accept this is the future of what I know as a web-browser.

Im very glad to see that concepts such as version numbers and release dates are quickly becoming outdated and irrelevant to the end-user, and because of this I believe the browsing experience on the web is rapidly becoming a more friendly place for everyone.

My Phone Setup

iPad means business

on my iPad:

I would have never guessed this would be the case, even a year ago.