Top 5 Tech Company Blunders

1. Real Networks & Philips Rejects IPOD Offer

Apple’s Ipod was actually a brainchild of Tony Fadell. He started a company called “FUSE”, which was electronics company. One of his device idea was to create a small Hard Drive Based Music Player. How ever FUSE was failure, to raise fund for company, he started creating device for other companies. He approached Real Networks   with his IPod idea, but Real Networks has rejected the idea, then Fadell Approached but Philips too dropped the idea. The Fadell approached Steve Jobs, who immediately took up the idea, but Steve Jobs was the one who designed the IPOD user interface. The Fadell idea was to provide a Sleek, small and a content delivery system for the customers to fill their pods in a easy way.

Result : Apple controls over 80% of Digital Music world, with ITunes and No need to mention about IPod sales. Real Networks is still the same old player in Streaming  Media world, whose revenue where only fraction of Apple’s IPod and ITunes profits.

2. Yahoo Rejects Face book offer

In 2006, Face Book was about to be acquired by Yahoo for a whopping $1billion, but by then Face Book was only 2yrs old and had around 8 million users when compared to MySpace who has around 100 million users

 

(in picture Mark FACEBOOK CEO)

After the deal came to light, Yahoo’s share reduced by 22% overnight, then Yahoo then CEO Terry Semel cut down the offer money and proposed to by Face Book for $800 million, Face Book refused and the deal is dropped

Result : Face Book has around 250 Million registered users and almost worth $10 Billion and Yahoo is still waiting in the bench, whether Microsoft will Buy it or not

3. Xerox Throws Alto and apple create MAC

Way before Windows and MAC exists the world had a wonderful personnel computer called XEROX ALTO, which runs on their own operating system.

Xerox Alto is the world's first computer with a window-based graphical user interface, a mouse, a Ethernet card and WYSIWYG text processor in 1973. By then PC market does not existed hence they dumped the technology. Until in 1979 Steve Job visited the XEROX PARC and used those GUI and mouse in APPLE LISA by then XEROX was on abandoned the ship mode and left ALTO. After Apple’s success, they realized their costly mistake and released XEROX STAR buy then it was too late

Result : Apple took from XEROX and MICROSOFT indeed inspired from APPLE and rest is history, we cannot imagine a world without Mouse, Word or Windows and computers.

4. The Search engine Before Google

Now Internet Search war was going between Microsoft’s Bing and Google. Let’s hope Bing wins.

Way back in mid 1990, do we had search engine, the answer is Yes. it was called as Open Text Search

Open Text indeed had the logic of now Google’s search based on Back links not on the frequency of search. By 1995 Open Text Corp. claimed that it had indexed every word on the roughly 5 million documents that constituted the Web. In I995 they merged with Yahoo and after two years they abandoned the Open Text Search engine and moved their business to Enterprise Content Managent.

Result : In 1998 “BackRub” was formed, puzzled its the first name for Google, then Google was formed. The rest is history.

5. Microsoft Saves Apple

when I first read this, My reaction was “what??”

Everyone knows Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, but very less know he was fired from his own company in 1985. Since then Apple’s MAC sales had lot of ups and down, Around 1996, Apple was almost to be collapsed, then Steve jobs rejoined the Apple as advisor and negotiated a deal with Microsoft worth $150 Dollars

“Microsoft agreed to release MS OFFICE (Netopia) for MAC for next 5years as they do in WINDOWS and then All MAC OS should have Internet Explorer as a default browser”. The whole MacWorld bowed Steve Jobs for this move.

Result : Steve Jobs became Interim CEO of Apple and then CEO, then he merged his NEXT OS with MAC and released Mac OS X Snow Leopard. The IPOD, the ITunes etc(the list goes on) Apple once again raised from the death bed.

The Actual winner is customers, Apple was still alive and they are still competitor to Microsoft. what would have happened if Apple was killed by Microsoft, we would have a WinPhone nstead of IPHONE and WinTunes instead of ITUNES lolz.

Classic One

This one is special. In 1980, when IBM was interested in making PC, it’s first contact for making DOS Operating System was not Microsoft, Indeed Bill Gates suggested to approach Gary Kildall of Digital Research, author of the CP/M operating system.

Kidall was busy with some other project and fly away for attending some other project delivery. so he let his wife to negotiate deal with IBM but the deal was a failure.

Then IBM approached Bill Gates to create a new OS, then came MS DOS, which is indeed based on Tim Paterson's Quick and Dirty operating system (QDOS), which was itself based on CP/M.

Before DOS, Microsoft's biggest products were versions of the BASIC programming tool. After MS DOS, rest is history

is born ;)

Disclaimer

I came across a article in PCWORLD, just sharing those in this blog space

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Opera Mini 5 Browser : First Cut

The Browser wars does not stop in Desktop Arena it’s continuing in Mobile Phones too and the latest one in town in Opera Mini 5 Beta Browser.

Opera 4.2 was most successful Mobile Browser for All Java Based Phone, NOKIA , BlackBerry etc, now Opera Mini 5 is trying to compete with all touch screen phones and other browsers like Mozilla's Fennec and the Skyfire browser. Let’s see it’s new features

Desktop Like Speed Dial

Now Opera Mini 5 Beta offers the same look and feel of Speed Dial which exists in Opera 9 or Opera 10 Desktop web browser, this is really a great feature indeed, Opera Mini 5 will offer you a small snapshot of the web page

Picture : New Speed Dial Option 

Tabbed Browsing

This is really a cool feature now Opera offers tabbed browsing in Mobile Phones too, This feature is highly successful with touch screen phones but they have Keypad navigations too for other phones. Tabs allow users to browser several sites simultaneously. This helps users easily jump from one page to another with the

Picture : Tabbed Browsing in Normal Java or Keypad phone 

Picture : Tabbed Browsing in Touch Screen or Blackberry phone 

Picture : Web Page Showing New Page Option 

Password Manager

Now we get a cool password manager with new opera Mini 5, automatically stores passwords in the mobile phone in Opera Mini  virtual memory bank. But I personnel feel this feature is dangerous what happens if my mobile phone is lost???

Copy & Paste Feature

This best loved feature of windows Copy & Paste is now available in Opera Mini 5, what else we want its really a great feature for a mobile browser to have this option

Picture : New Copy & Paste Option 

The BlackBerry scoop

Opera offers a special version of the Opera Mini 5 beta for BlackBerry. Designed specifically for BlackBerry devices, Opera Mini 5 works seamlessly with BlackBerry, including opening links and copy-and-paste functions. 

Touch Screen & Keypad

We have new feature for Touch screen phones with a keypad

 Picture : New Touch Screen Keypad

Includes new cool touch screen settings and find in the page options etc

To download Opera Mini 5, visit m.opera.com/next from your mobile phone browser and download the Opera Mini 5 installer specific to your phone. This will install as separate software so your phone can have both Opera Mini  4.2 and Opera Mini 5 Beta for you to explore the options

A Loud Speaker Which you only can hear : Not a Science Fiction

Surprise Surprise imagine you are in a Car and the Music System is playing and there are 4 members in the car and each one wanted to hear 4 different song. what will you do??

The simple answer is, i will use my IPOD or MP3 player but what about this weird idea there are 4 loud speakers and each one can hear without wearing a head phones or ear phones, looks like science fiction that technology is called Hyper Sonic Sound (HSS)

How it works?

A Normal Loud Speaker will convert electric signals to Sound Waves and propagate through a medium such as air or water. Let me put in simple words, normal speaker acts as bulb when switched on light spreads on for full room, HSS is like LASER light , it can be beamed through a direction and always travels in straight line

Hyper Sonic Sound uses nothing but ultrasonic energy. Ultrasonic sounds can be directed as a beam and it will not heard by human ears. With the combination of an ultrasonic powered emitter and a proprietary signal processor/amplifier, HSS can focus sound into a tight beam for optimal sound directionality and intelligibility. Similar to a beam of light, HSS uses ultrasonic energy to “shine” your sound on a very specific area. HSS converts music or voice into a complex ultrasonic signal prior to amplification. Once emitted, the converted sound forms a sound column in front of the emitter, which remains focused as it encounters a listener located in the narrow column of sound

Inventor

This technology was invented by Woody Norris, founder of American Technology Corporation in 2002.

 

In the Above picture Norris with HSS Speaker

Norris was the winner of the 2005 Lemelson-MIT Prize for his invention of a "hypersonic sound" system which allows sound to be focused with high precision, Norris is currently the chairman of two companies he founded - American Technology Corporation in San Diego and AirScooter Corporation in Henderson.

Technical Description

“The piezoelectric transducer emits sound at frequencies above the human ear's 20,000-cycle threshold. Unlike low-frequency waves, the high-frequency signals don't spread out as they travel through air. Yet they do interact with the air to induce a related set of ultrasonic waves. These waves combine with the original waves, interfering to create an audible signal, focused into a beam.”

“The speaker (shown above) was pointed at someone one hundred yards away. The listener heard the sound as if through headphones - despite the ambient noise from a nearby freeway - and people two feet to either side heard nothing. Sound from an HSS speaker can travel up to 150 yards without distortion or loss of volume; anyone outside the beam path hears nothing.”

Source :Hypersonic Sound (HSS) - Loudspeaker Just For You

Applications

The potential is much

• Personalized Car Music System (provided your Music player plays two or more tracks)
• Laptop speakers that only the user can hear
• Grocery store displays heard only by the person standing directly in front of them
• Workers on the flight line on aircraft carriers
• Multi Screen Television, (it will be really cool)
• Kiosk, ATM’s etc
• Alarm Clock which only you can hear and others can sleep nicely (these are my ideas)

But as of now it seems American Technology Corporation has abandoned this technology for their large scale business. Even I too moved out of Electronics and came to softwares hmm what to do.  I came to know this when I tried to get Google for my final year project in 2005 :)

WWE Smack Down vs Raw 2010 : First Cut

This October is really going to be great, two of my favorites are releasing first is Windows 7 and next is my all time favorite game WWE Smack Down vs Raw 2010.

I am playing this game over 9yrs now, from 2000, I even bought my Sony Playstation 2(PS2) only for playing this game. Ok enough of my story let’s come to the game

Intro

its the 11th Sequel of the WWE SmackDown Series, which started in 1999 published by THQ. Its been available in PS2, PS3, PSP, XBOX 360, WII and Nintendo DS but not available in PC, The game has around 60 playable characters and it includes the WWE brands like SmackDown, RAW and ECW too.

What’s new?

WWE SmackDown vs RAW (SVR) 2010 has a lot of new promising and long waited feature we will list that one by one

WWE Story Designer Mode

The wait is over, new SVR 2010 have a new feature called WWE Story Designer Mode, which will enable players to create their own stories for weekly shows like Smackdown , Raw and ECW, it has the ability to design the cut scenes to vola this is a huge option, which I have been waiting so long. Let’s see after game  is released

Above is a sample screenshot of WWE story designer.

Improved Create – A - Wrestler

The Roster (Players) have been improved a lot, in the previous version of the game clothes are were painted to the body but here the clothes are 3D, it renders separately and moves according to the Roster and it give real life feel(this feature is available only in PS3 and XBOX 360)

New Paint Tool

A new cool awesome paint tool is provided, so that you can draw your own Tattoo on your wrestler even for superstars like undertaker.  You can choose a 128×128 or 256×256 pixel canvas sizes to design logos and tattoos, it contains pen, fill, shape tool and lots.

Create A Finisher : Diving Finisher

THQ has promised about 30% more content in the Create A Finisher move, A new concept of Diving Finisher, which will allow the user to choose their own taunts, dive and even distance too.

 

A Snapshot of XBOX 360 create finisher option

Game Play

The game play and keys almost remains the same and new tutorial video has been added for new comers to this series, the submission locks reversal system has been changed to timing system.

The HUD(Heads Up Display) has been scrapped and new system is available ,the Momentum meter is available as a small Halo underneath each superstar, while HUD icons and information relevant to the match will be displayed around the superstar. The body damage Meter has been replaced with visual cue in player’s act

New HUD Options

Super Star Threads

For the first time, WWE superstars can have change the color of their costume and our own design dress alls, you can simply change the dark black undertaker outfit to Blue if you want, without designing costume for him from scarp

New Collision Game Engine : technology update

This game has taken a new collision engine called Havok Game Engine, which will give real time collision effect, It means in old days (just before release of Star Wars : The Forced Unleashed) all the collision are pre animated, when ever you shot a ball or object it will do the same. But Havok will give you real time experience, each collisions are calculated in some math and gives you awesome effect eve time a different one.

WWE SVR 2010 Poster

That’s all for now, I am waiting with my fingers crossed for this new game oh my God, it’s a real stress buster you know lolz .

Let the Game begins……. Are You Game?

Disclaimer

Picture taken from Wikipedia and Google search

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