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Listed below are comments made by neuroblogr between Thursday, 11th December 2008 and Monday, 17th August 2009.

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Time for an Apple rumour 11:55am on 17 Aug 2009 The rumours of the birth of an iPad are highly exaggerated. An iPad can be born, quite easily too. But would you love fingering the screen all the time, and importantly accept that your screen real-estate is shrunk by all kinds of on-screen-keypads all the time? An iPad that you would use to only watch videos and listen to music could use the screen as an input device. And btw, such a device exists - it's called the iPod :-) However, if you would want to send email and blog your way to glory, an un-compromised screen is a no-brainer. Unless of course Apple (or somebody else) invents clever methods of using the screen as an input device without compromising the content real-estate. Seems unlikely to happen this Sept. But I'd love to be wrong.
Will Spotify change the music biz? 09:43am on 04 Mar 2009 @11 Melodymaker

I get the drift..music production doesn't cost the heavens, music distribution doesn't cost heavens either. Artists and marketing do cost something. But an industry born with a silver spoon in its mouth needs to get to terms with this fact. Also, audio quality has clearly been overrated (by technophiles, and especially IP holders).

So, change is on it's way. last.fm and spotify, amongst others are ushering it in, in the western world. Certain other parts of the world are less worried about legalities and payment structures etc for their entertainment. And why not.

Hopefully, I will wake up one fine morning to a world of free entertainment - free as in beer and as in freedom. Of course I would need to pay if I seek a premium (such as ad free, high quality, portability etc etc). The internet is to entertainment what a tap is to water. And a bit more. Because, for the discerning audience, the internet can offer the premium bit too...So, one can go ahead, get her evian. I'm happy with the tap water.
BBC iPlayer on Virgin: 100 Million Views 08:25am on 16 Feb 2009 Great news ! And what's the next step? Can folks living outside Britain expect something? Would beebs consider getting iPlayer straight into (connected) TVs ..and sort of become THE new teletext (sorry, MHEG was a distraction). I know this is a long shot, but is BBC considering something like this..for, let's say the post-depression future ?
Are you still reading? 07:29am on 13 Feb 2009 Are many of us barking up the wrong tree? Kindle or any such thing is not replacing books or reading - it is only replacing paper as in dog eared, sepia tinted, coffee stained or plain simple crumpled, aged, torn paper.

No, I wont make a case of e-books being more environment friendly than paper books, because I don't know whether e-books, depending on server farms for content feeds, are integrally less environment friendly than the forest-depleting paper books.

But I will make a case for progress. For the benefit of electronic archiving when compared to hard-copies, for portability, for convenience (yes, you can use the Kindle in the loo and wait for the likes of 3M to come with a coating film that makes it use-able in kitchens).

As a school going kid several summers ago, during the annual visit to my maternal grandparents, I came across, in one of those cobwebbed attics, a stained, sepia tinted book on Newton's first law, and the word inertia. The book might be dead a long time now, but the word lives.
Is Apple recession proof? 03:23am on 02 Feb 2009 Is apple recession proof? The more appropriate question is "Will apple continue to prosper, recession or no recession?"

Apple has been riding a wave of innovation, beginning with the all transparent, curvy iMacs of the last decade, then the often unnoticed, but amazing business innovation of the iTunes concept and then climaxing with the touch phenomenon in the mobile phone.

And then what? Has apple reached it's level of incompetence? Honestly, that wouldn't be surprising at all. This is the time when apple insiders will call for milking their past innovations - to make more money from the iTunes, to sell more iPhones, in more countries, with more operators, to sell more macbooks and make cheaper ones, to become a volume player and steal market share from microsoft, nokia, dell, HP, symbian, sony...in effect, the finance guys take over leaving the tech innovators behind, by focusing on what all good companies do - MONEY. Money in various forms - market share, EBITA, gross margins, cash flow, operating capital. Quarterly finance stories will replace the significance of the annual apple ritual of tech innovation.

Apple is recession-proof in the sense that it wouldn't have to fire staff, reduce bonuses or stand in the line for free soup. On the contrary, apple insiders will carry fat bonuses, well deserved, from innovations done in the pre-recession era. For a couple of years...

And then, Steve returns with a bunch of crazy new ideas. Or a new Steve and a new apple are born.
Yahoo's silent Chief 04:12am on 29 Jan 2009 Perhaps David Brent would be proud, but George Bush wouldn't..at least not yet.

Someone needs to dis-un-occupy the space of malapropism that has been rendered empty since the big O took over the mic at the white house.
A lesson from tech hell 07:43am on 19 Jan 2009 One of the least understood aspects of technology is that it takes time to mature. The marketing guys constantly talk about the "ultimate" gadget, and yet, six months later there is the next generation of that ultimate gadget, this time, even more "ultimate" than before.

Take for example optical disc players - standalone or in home theaters or PCs - each one in the last 8 or 10 years claiming to outplay the other..and each one, "hanging" or crashing or rebooting or plain-simple getting stuck for one disc or another ...We simply don't yet have a disc player which has grown over these pains of (in)compatibility and fragility.

This is also true for projectors and laptops. Often projectors refuse to work with certain laptops (or vice versa) because of technology generation gaps....Also true for codecs and containers...

There will come a time when technology standardization will mean one real survivor. We can already swap files between Windows, Mac and Linux. This was not the case a few years ago ...Hopefully we can connect any laptop to any projector, any TV to any BluRay player, move music between PCs and phones and home theaters etc..and then have common / standard software paradigms including user-experience concepts ... Sure this will take time - and no marketeer will acknowledge this. Because there is only one eventual winner - decided by the consumers. Every frustrating consumer experience will only help select that one eventual winner. This frustration is the price we pay for creating the perfect world of the future ..we owe it to ourselves.
The Valley Visionaries 09:36am on 18 Dec 2008 Yes, there once was a time when people wore shirts and ties, and proof-read their (hand-written) articles. Today, we can blog and tweet and issue wireless updates over a 3G network using a mobile phone while listening to MP3...these are the times of multitasking and zero downtime..and do we need them! Coming back to this blog, perhaps the author should try her hand (or thumb) at tweeting..the format allows for smaller errors and more importantly, for easier corrections!
Kosmix - searching for optimism 02:45am on 12 Dec 2008 Hey guys, the valley startups are not merely into the familiar B2C (business to consumer), more often than not, they are into B2B (business to business).

This company, like many others, has a business case in the B2B market - if they get their tech innovation right.

Making a successful B2C business case - especially for a startup - is extremely challenging. Both startups and their investors should be crazy to only target a B2C success.

So, startups take the B2B route (of lesser resistance) and selloff at the right price. They even go by a fancy name - "serial entrepreneur".

Journalists, especially not the ones in the valley circuit, are not endowed with the eye for spotting this difference. Bear with them.
Kosmix - searching for optimism 10:55am on 11 Dec 2008 These are dotcom bubble-gummers, but with a difference. Their past lives have included astounding successes as the (sale of) junglee.com - a site with no success, but a concept worth a lot when in the right hands. So, yes, I wouldn't count on them to make the greatest search engine - i would expect them to make inroads into search that either microsoft or google would want to buyout their IP. Wait and watch....

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