A 25 year old engineer named Sun Danyong has committed suicide because he misplaced a prototype of the 4^th generation iPhone (more info). He was working for Foxconn (more info), the company that manufactures iPhone for Apple (more info).  Sun was responsible for shipping 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple. The story goes that when he reported this to his boss at Foxconn he was interrogated and later goons of Foxconn illegally searched his apartment and then physically abused him. He later committed suicide by jumping from a 12-story building on 16^th July. Foxconn has issued a statement apologizing for the tragic incident and ordered an internal management enquiry.

Apple has confirment the news and spokesperson Kristin Huguet told CNET

“We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death, We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect.”

This raises some chilling questions regarding the pressure faced by employees (both of Apple and its supply chain) because of the secretive nature of the Apple and the inhuman practices followed by outsourcing companies in developing countries.

Follow-Up

Finnish cell phone giant Nokia (more info) has filed for Cseries trademark in Finland. Nokia presently has 3 categories of handsets- NSeries (for Entertainment), ESeries (for Business) and the famous four digit series (for everything other than E and N series). What does C stands for is a difficult guesses because no one know how Nokia brands its handsets. Any idea about E and N in E Series and N Series? Nokia threads its user base into four categories Connect, Live, Achieve (ESeries) and Explore (NSeries), but what category of users will be targeted for CSeries is still not know. What i don’t understand is how Nokia found room for another series when its whole product line is already so overcrowded with every kind of mobile phone under the sun. We should hear about this from Nokia in the upcoming “Nokia World” in September. I could only make out 3 possibilities

i). A very high end kinda phone/tablet to compete head on with iPhone and other internet consumption gadgets.

OR

ii). A very low end phone for developing markets because there is huge demand of such kind of devices there.

iii). Or, as rumoured Nokia is coming out with Android Handset?

Let us C.

Follow-Up

TechCrunch has published yet another set of sensational Twitter documents after the Twitter security breach scandal. Though Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has written “It’s important to note that we have been given the green light” but Twitter’sco-founders deny this in their blog post and tweet.

Highlights-

Twitter on Google : This says it all “Can we do to Google what Google has done to others?” and “Google is old news”. In almost all the meetings Google (more info) comes up on the radar screen of Twitter some times as a threat and sometimes as a partner.

Twitter on Facebook : Twitter asks “How could Facebook kill us?” and answers this by giving possible solutions like Facebook(more info) adopting real time search, copying Twitter’s features and making status messages more public.

Apart from this Microsoft (more info) is ruled out as a partner because twitter thinks it will affect their brand. Twitter is also paying heavy attention on real-time search, revenue model & how to handle RSS. Twitter also says “only type of acquisition we are interested in are ones where we stay in charge.” One important thing that comes out very clear is Twitter’s vision. They want to be the pulse of the planet with 1 Billion users by 2013!

Follow-Up

To be precise TechCrunch has received 310 “confidential corporate and personal documents of Twitter and its employees” by an unknown hacker (“Hacker Croll”). Some documents are as detailed as the executive meeting notes, E-mails of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (more info and his blog), partnership agreements and even financial projections and a lot more… TechCrunch says that it is not going to publish all the documents but will publish information “that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections”. From these confidential data we get a glimpse of Twitter’s own projections –

25 million users in 2009,

100 million in 2010,

350 million in 2011,

Finally becoming the first Internet service to reach one billion users!

How can a company like Twitter (more info) be so casual about its security? And what about the poor authentication policies used by Google? This is not the first time Twitter is attacked by hackers, earlier in May Biz Stone (more info and his blog)confirmed an attack and this time around Evan says

“Yes, we did suffer an attack a few weeks ago and are familiar with this list of stuff. This is unrelated to the hack of twitter where someone gained access to user’s accounts.”

How safe is your information on the cloud?

Update : Response of Twitter “Twitter, Even More Open Than We Wanted”

Follow-Up

This time MS has come out with some really intriguing feature in Office! The big news is that Office 2010 (more info) will be over the clouds and you can have a ride on them for free (if you have Windows Live ID). Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available and it will be released by 1^st half of 2010 though a beta will be available by this year end.

Let’s get started

Word 2010 – will have a new “paste preview” option which will allow users to hover over different paste options and see the preview of their paste.

Web Version – will look almost similar to the desktop version and MS has named it ‘Document fidelity’.

Excel 2010 – Sparklines is the most creative upgrade in Office this time. This will allow users to view a visual snapshot image of a data trend over time within a particular cell.

Web Version - not comparable to desktop Excel and has limited features.

PowerPoint 2010 – This has graduated to totally new level with some real cool upgrades like Video and Image editing (simplified versions of iMovie and Photoshop probably).

Web Version – video editing is not included but most of the other features are.

Outlook 2010 – E-mails will appear in threads (of conversation).

Check out the Office 2010 Movie and this for loads of other videos.

Desktop version of 2010 will allow multiple people to work on same document with the help of so called co-authoring tools.

After this news Microsoft jumped by 2.7 percent to $23 (Nasdaq up 1.2 percent at 1777.50).

All the Office applications will run in Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer and MS is optimizing it for Chrome.

Office Online definately looks a lot better than Google docs. What say?

Follow-Up

Yesterday Google answered a few questions related Chrome OS in its blog post and today co-founder Larry Page (more info) and CEO Eric Schmidt (more info) were present at a conference to field more of them. Schmidt said initially (when he came to Google) he was skeptical about Chrome (more info) because

“At the time, Google was a small company” and “Having come through the bruising browser wars, I didn’t want to do that again”.

But after looking at the initial prototype of Chrome (build by developers hired from Firefox) he was convinced that this could be a game changer.

Here are excerpts from the interview

Page on Chrome OS: “I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way [of internet]”

Schmidt on MS: “Microsoft is welcome to put Internet Explorer on our operating system,” but “it’s highly unlikely they would do it”.

Schmidt on Android: “Although it appears they are two [Chrome OS and Android] separate projects, there’s a great deal of commonality,” and he even hinted on the merging the two in near future. Well looks like even Google is confused between the differences!

Schmidt on Twitter and facebook: “We were worried that these guys might be competitors, but it

looks like people who use Twitter and facebook start using Google more.”

Schmidt on Apple: “I’ll talk to the Apple people. At the moment, there’s no change”

Page on Online advertising: “It is something we’re working really hard on,” and “is likely to be the next billion-dollar business at Google”

We have read that Microsoft is planning some big announcements on Monday (Online MS Office?)….wait and watch!

Follow-Up

The most important news of the year – Google will launch Google Chrome OS by mid of 2010. First of all what is Chrome OS ?

Google says

“the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web” “so it is our effort to re-think what operating systems should be”

It is going to be totally open sourced (code will be released by the end of this year) and will run on both x86 as well as ARM chip set. Software architecture? “windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” and Web is going to be the obvious development platform.

Chrome OS could prove to be an assassin of MS and I mean this in a big way. Google is completely changing the paradigm of OS. Until now an OS was typically considered to be a static program lying in side your hard disk whose main purpose was to boot your system and then handle most of the controls to the application programs like browser etc. This approach will take a back seat now and starting from Chrome OS, OS will be totally integrated with the web. Of course the earlier paradigm will still be around but that might just slowly but very surely vanish into thin air down the road.  This is the starting of a new era… Google is ready to redefine the Operating System.

Every passing minute there are reviews coming and the blogosphere is almost flooded with this updated from Google. Anyway I am cutting it short here. What will happen to Win after Chrome OS is out in the market? and Apple-Google relationship? What about Chrome OS itself?- Good, Bad, Ugly?  Follow-Up (loads of them this time) and decide for yourself.

Follow-Up

iPods(more info) getting camera? Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has reported that according to “sources in Asia” Apple is planning to embed cameras (very similar to the iPhone) in iPods. Here is the crux of the story

“Apple has placed an order for a massive number of camera modules of the type that they include in the iPhone. These are inexpensive cameras, in the $10 range”.

Going futher, MacRumours.com has stamped the story by releasing the images of iPod (Touch and Nano) cases with a camera slot.

How much can we trust an unknown source in Asia? Time will tell, but one thing is for sure, it looks quite logical and ROI for Apple will be really high in this case. So I guess either Apple will roll out iPods with cameras by this year end or will start planning to do so now (after these rumours)….. or do they even have to plan? It is gonn be a cake walk for Apple! Follow-Up this story and judge for yourself…

And one more thing {;)}, there are speculations that the size of the order is so large that – Everything but Shuffle may have a camera in it soon!

Follow-Up

Today Bing (more info) has added “a bit of twitter” to its searches. As Bing says in its blog

“Starting later today, when you search for these(prominent Twitterers) folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results”.

Though currently it is not indexing all the Tweets and will only include Tweets from a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers. Bing has picked up these profiles based on follower count and volume of tweets. So, now if you search for say “ashton kutcher Twitter” or “ashton kutcher Tweets” or even “@aplusk” then the result whould be some thing like this.

Though it is not entirely real time with a reported lag of around 10+ minutes, but we can expect this time window to shrink in coming months.

So when can we expect Google(more info) and others to follow suit? I guess this should be an obvious upgrade to all the search engines since real time data is becoming such a critical player in the search arena. And Google needs the real time search juice badly especially after this.

Follow-Up