Tag Archive for crowdsource

| January 20, 2015
Comments Off on Palm Now A Chinese Mobile Company

Palm Now A Chinese Mobile Company

Palm Now A Chinese Mobile CompanyLet’s take a trip on the way-back machine and visit the first cool – gotta-have-it tech toy, the Palm Pilot. I had several versions of the Palm Pilot, The Palm V was the best version, but the  PalmOne-m515 had a color screen. The oft traded PDA builder moved from Palm to modem-maker US Robotics. Which was later purchased by 3Com, and then Handspring. Next, it was PalmOne/Source and finally purchased in 2010 for $1.2 billion by HP, where many tech firms go to die.

Palm logoNow ChinaTechNews.com reports that the Chinese consumer electronics group TCL recently announced that they will acquire the Palm brand. HP is selling Palm as part of Meg Whitman’s struggles to right the floundering HP (HPQ).

Li Dongsheng, chairman of TCL Group, claims the Palm acquisition is different from their purchase of Alcatel’s mobile division. According to the Chinese firm, Palm has its fans in America and its operating ideas are similar to Apple (AAPL). They believe this type of fandom can give Palm strength. Li said the Palm brand still has value in some of the global markets and people expect its re-emergence to continue to offer innovative products.

ChinaAccording to the article, TCL will launch new Palm products at the end of 2015. TLC plans to position Palm as a high-end smartphone brand. Maybe in China, the Palm name is an innovative mobile terminal brand, which will be closely related to users and fans.

Variety reports from CES that TCL said that it will re-create Palm in Silicon Valley. In the statement TCL claims:

Palm has always carried a lot of affect and emotions … That’s why TCL has set the direction to rebuild the brand involving Palm’s very own community, making it the largest scale crowdsourced project ever seen in the industry.

The firm will back the crowdsourced development of new Palm products with 5,000 engineers and seven research and development centers around the world.

Guo Aiping, CEO of TCL Communication, told ChinaTechNews.com that this acquisition is limited to the Palm brand and it does not include other assets such as employees.

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First, another US company sold to the competition. Just saying.

I agree with ArsTechnica they hypothesize this move could be seen as TCL’s attempt to break into the U.S. smartphone market under a well-known brand. Other Chinese companies such as Lenovo, which now owns Motorola, have a similar strategy of operating in America under a well-known brand.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 15, 2011
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Happy B-Day Wikipedia

Happy B-Day WikipediaWikipedia is 10 years today. The “multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project,” was launched on January 15, 2001. The New York Times says Wikipedia will celebrate its 10th anniversary with conferences and parties across the globe, including in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, organized by its community of users.

An early example of crowd-sourcing, allowing regular people to shape the content of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia went live with no fanfare in 2001. There were doubts whether people would contribute or if the information they submitted would be reliable. 10 years later, Wikipedia, is an important source of information for millions of topics according to the NYT. Although it has suffered its share of inaccuracies and hoaxes, Wikipedia remains among the Internet’s most visited sites.

The percentage of all American adults who use Wikipedia to look for information has increased from 25% in February 2007 to 42% in May 2010. This translates to 53% of adult internet users according to the Pew Internet report. Pew says that using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (done by 47% of internet users) and the NYT says Wikipedia is more popular than eBay.

Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that oversees Wikipedia, told the NYT, “Wikipedia is modest. It isn’t a beautiful site. It looks a little awkward — sometimes the writing is a little bit awkward.” But she added that people still have “a deep and abiding affection for it.”

Wikipedia is working to improve the site. Among the initiatives the NYT points to are:

  • Opening its first overseas office in India
  • A partnership with 16 universities to have professors assign students to write about public policy,
  • Increasing the number of experts who contribute, and
  • Recruiting museums, which could offer better images for the site.

Wikipedia’s plan is to make it easier to add new articles and photos to the site. Tweaks to the underlying software are intended to streamline the service, although Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia told the NYT the site would never become flashy. “We are not going to become Facebook, we are not going to become MySpace or YouTube.”

Do you use Wikipedia? Does Wikipedia need to become more like Facebook?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 8, 2009
Comments Off on Check Your EULA

Check Your EULA

I have been trying out EULAlyzer  2.0 from Javacool Software for a couple of months and have found the results to be interesting to say the least. EULAyzer scans the software publishers’ End User License Agreements (EULA) for privacy risks, unwanted software, and other surprises like pop-up ads, sending personally identifiable information, or using unique identifiers to track the user’s activity.

EULACheck Your EULAlyzer searches the publishers’ documents for what the vendor calls “words of interest” and then assigns its “Interest Rating” to the program. Like other anti-spyware programs, EULAlyzer ranks risks on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how crucial the disclosed information can be to the user’s security based on suspicious wording. The product also includes a search function that can be used to perform user-specific keyword searches of the entire EULA.

The copy and paste function can be used to quickly find suspicious parts of web-based license agreements, website terms, privacy policies, and other similar documents. By default the program scans for language that deals with:

  • Advertising
  • Tracking
  • Data Collection
  • Privacy-Related Concerns
  • Installation of Third-Party / Additional Software
  • Inclusion of External Agreements By Reference

EULAlyzer leverages the power of crowdsourcing through a related  EULA Research Center, which optionally allows users to anonymously submit license agreements they scan to enlarge the underlying database of EULA’s and further improve the program.  There is also a web forum available to provide support on the application.

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EULAlyzer is a proactive tool in the fight against malware. In the enterprise, this tool can be used by those responsible for developing and maintaining disk images. It can also be used by the compliance staff to quickly flag potential issues and pass them up the line to SME or the legal department.

EULAlyzer is no substitute for reading the EULA. We all know that the EULA should be read and understood before proceeding with any software installation. What EULAlyzer does is save time and effort by flagging the most onerous parts of a EULA for your review to focus on potentially riskier behavior.

I found EULAlyzer interesting and effective. It made me realize the lengths that software manufacturers go to hide the details of the EULA. The EULA’s are buried deep down in sub-sub-sub directories, cryptically named and/or huge. The web-based EULA for Adobe Acrobat Reader is part of a 282 page PDF.

As for the application itself, I would like to see better explanations of the items the program flags, either through an in-depth help file or a web-based resource.

EULAlyzer is a donation-ware application that is free for personal and educational uses (there is a corporate version also available ) Compatible with: Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

NOTE: This blog does not provide legal advice. It can only highlight information that you may want to consider before making your own decisions to proceed or not. You should always consult a lawyer (or other competent authority) for advice on legal issues.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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