Apple! Please fix stupid ...

We all love Apple for all the products that they come up with. At times, we also cringe at their overprotectiveness of  interests: like blocking flash, not allowing scripts, not allowing real background processing, muscling publishers to give a cut to Apple in subscriptions and sales but this latest one is truly absurd.

If the reports from Where 2.0 conference are true, then someone needs to take a real deep look at what is going on inside Apple. The new bunch of over-zealous managers are thinking features sans compliance (who we still love as they are very bright individuals) and are acting like mindless soldiers to a few who are running this company with an iron grip and laying the foundation of a highly intrusive monopolistic technology org that makes mockery of all international rules just because they get a few products right. Someone needs to stop this absurdity either from inside apple or through government regulation. Someone needs to question the people who are making these calls.

Its is pretty scary when you associate location information with the demographics of people who use iPhones. Believe you me, someone has got a handle on 75% of wealth on this planet. There are huge business, social, and political ramifications of a small act of recording location information on subscribers / users of the phone. I will not preach but who so ever did this at Apple or the provider, my friend you are plain stupid (blinded by recent success) and few can fix stupid on this planet, they come in all shapes and forms.

Is anyone at Apple listening? Whats going on buddies? Hey you bright apples, find the bad apple in your team and fix stupid!

“Adaptive bit rate aware long form DRMful Content” with far better quality than some other competing aggregators. We have worked with a few other aggregators but HBO Go is my personal favorite. Its been a great association with HBO teams. Well done Tringers!

Brace for impact. HBO Go goes live on May 02, 2011

Enjoy the HBO Go Ads:

One more format to construct magazines!

Hi tringers, given our history of working closely with Woodwing and having played a rather important part in development of a few key lego pieces, nothing delights me more than the decision from Woodwing to open source the format that they (along with Time, Inc.) worked hard to conceive and develop. It is a step in the right direction.

We have been working on a similar format – a format that has a lot of buzz around it – HTML5. What I would like to see tringers accomplish is marry ofip with HTML5 and work towards making interactive publications even more pervasive.

Once again, good luck Woodwing!!

So here we go, the first one:

Objective C would say - never mind till you follow a hierarchy

In Objective C , you can always cast a pointer to an instance of one class to a pointer to an instance of its superclass implicitly. This works for indirect superclasses as well. For example: NSMutableArray is a subclass of NSArray, which is a subclass of NSObject. You can cast an NSMutableArray to NSArray or NSObject. Casting in opposite direction, however, requires an explicit cast.

For those who are new to type casting, converting an expression (general term used for structs / objects and more) of a given type into another type is known as type casting. In a number of languages implicit conversions are limited to standard types where the risk of losing data precision is minimal, acceptable. C++ is an example of a strongly typed language. Objective C, on the other hand, relaxes the rule slightly. Layout of any object is defined by the instance variables (ivars) in the root class, then by the instance variables in each subsequent class down the hierarchy. Subclasses can only add new instance variables, not remove or rearrange ones from the superclasses. this means that it is always safe, in terms of memory layout, to cast a pointer to an instance of one class to a pointer to an instance of another. From OOP point of view, this means any subclass will always respond to all of the messages that the superclass responds to. Pretty neat hmm.

Objective-C also introduces a new pointer type: id. This is roughly analogous to void*, when it comes to casting rules. You may cast any object pointer to type id any you may cast id to any object pointer type, implicitly.

Historically when Smalltalk was conceived, intent was to define a general purpose language on a single sheet of paper. Objective-C inherits a number of its features from Smalltalk. In short it adds Objects to C.

A word of caution: In most circumstances, type of objects you are dealing with is already known. If you not dealing with generating structures / objects on the fly, avoid casting (implicit or explicit), too much of cumbersome class hierarchies and the damn polymorphism. Remember any operation that the runtime needs to do for you adds up and in the embedded world, each operation is worth dollars and pounds.

Any cool examples of Typecasting are welcome!

Lets take pride in our “Trending Sessions” and have more of them every month. Our predictions were spot on Nokia strategy to rebound from the gallows. Indeed Mind melting does work. What excited me the most was our trainees coming up with insightful predictions and being spot on.

As for Nokia, It would have been nice if they had given the consumers some more option .. why chose one when you can have both (MS and Android)? Maybe the story inside is more ugly than what meets the eye. Maybe they needed the money more than the platform putting MS in the driver’s seat. None the less, good for the industry.

Moral of the story: If you keep your eyes and ears open (with mind chugging along), its not difficult to predict trends. As an SI and a growing tech. services/solutions company, being able to understand technology trends gives us a unique perspective on how to plan our growth.

Hopefully, at Tringapps, we have created an environment that encourages people to think beyond the status quo and build innovative products and solutions. Understanding trending is an integral part of making the most out of paradigm shifts.

Let me also take this opportunity to announce a $5000 dollars prize (Open to all tringers in US, India and Philippines for anyone who gets the maximum number of “spot on” tech. predictions right.

The areas are:

Cloud Computing, Mobile Processors, Graphics and display screens, Mobile Platforms, Smart Phones, Tablets, HTML5, Gaming Consoles, Internet TV.. and anything that is cool for tringapps to watch out for!

Media in a multi-device world

Lets call it the “Digital First” strategy as one of my friends in a major media company loves to call it!

Most M&E companies now view their digital evolution as critical to meeting consumer demand in a mult-device (next gen. devices) connected world. In this new world, these M&E companies are quickly learning that their opportunities for growth are staggering. Equally staggering are the challenges of navigating the realms of technology and content. However, seizing these opportunities requires new thinking about how Media and Entertainment content is created, curated, packaged, distributed and sold.

On one side M&E companies must develop ways to differentiate themselves through a branded customer experience strategy that offers premium content and services to their customers. This enhanced value may come from the following dimensions: Format and additional content, timing, availability & interoperability and sharing & engagement. On the other side, the strategy needs to include technology enablers to support the “digital first” strategy.

The more we work with a number of large media and entertainment customers, the more we realize that content alone will not suffice. To succeed, media and entertainment companies will need to research consumers’ general media spending habits, both online and offline, to identify patterns between their media consumption and media spending behaviors. Media and Entertainment companies will be more likely to see their online paid content strategies succeed in countries where internet users’ online spending is more aligned to their online media consumption habits.

I am sure Corporate Strategy groups of number of our customers have the same realization and are actively working to realign their strategies to fit multi-device connected “world”. If they are not, no matter how big or powerful they are .. they should get ready for a tectonic shift in the landscape – more Huffington Posts, Flipboards, Netflixes and Pandoras are around the corner making the conventional players irrelevant and obsolete.

A number of our customers / megacorps are hard at work to find the right answers and are laying down plans; from ad revenues to monetization to delivery of content to these new emerging distribution channels. However, even the best laid out plans can fail if their infrastructure and processes aren’t up to the task. M&E companies must build or lease (cloud) world class infrastructure to support their digital initiatives. They need to build intellectual property management systems that manage contracts, rights and royalty agreements, along with digital supply chains, that make digital content easy to store, search and exploit throughout the enterprise and beyond.

As the media and entertainment companies continue to develop creative ways to generate revenues, they will, at times, launch products before they have built the operational infrastructure processes to support them. This period, from idea to execution, creates significant risks of error and inefficiency. Nevertheless, media and entertainment companies will continue to push the envelop in product innovation to meet evolving consumer demands – to reach them where they live, work and play.

We, at Tringapps, take pride in being at the forefront of this paradigm shift and we wish luck to all our friends in the media industry to innovate and bring their content to ever increasing list of distribution channels; as their success means our success.