As expected, Apple just sent out invites for an event in Cupertino next week on October 27th. The tagline on the invite, "hello again," is a clear reference to the Mac, which was originally introduced with the word "hello" in 1984.
When patients are admitted to hospitals today, they typically have a white board mounted in their rooms where caregivers list their names, medicines and medical notes to help guide the care of the patient.
But at the newly built Jacobs Medical Center in San Diego, white boards have given way to Apple iPads and Apple TV in each room, where patients will be able to log in once they are admitted. Using the iPads, patients will be able to access deeper details about their caregivers, in-room controls for lighting, window shades and room temperature, as well as peruse their personal medical records and details about their treatments and upcoming procedures. Using Apple TV, patients will have access to entertainment and streamed video, as well as maintaining connections with friends and family using social media and video including FaceTime and Skype.
Inside this four-bedroom stucco house in Alameda, California, Kaiserman, president of the technology division at construction company Lennar Corp., was pitching a vision of a home controlled via iPhone or iPad.
Tap your phone, and AC/DC’s “Back in Black” blasts. Tap again, and the bath runs at a blissful 101 degrees. Sweet, right? Of course, your dad might view it as a bit over the top. All told, $30,000 worth of gadgets and gizmos were on display here, many run with Apple’s free HomeKit app.
But if the web is relayed through text that’s difficult to read, it curtails that open access by excluding large swaths of people, such as the elderly, the visually impaired, or those retrieving websites through low-quality screens. And, as we rely on computers not only to retrieve information but also to access and build services that are crucial to our lives, making sure that everyone can see what’s happening becomes increasingly important.
We should be able to build a baseline structure of text in a way that works for most users, regardless of their eyesight. So, as a physicist by training, I started looking for something measurable.
Fogg presented the results of a simple experiment he had run at Stanford, which showed that people spent longer on a task if they were working on a computer which they felt had previously been helpful to them. In other words, their interaction with the machine followed the same “rule of reciprocity” that psychologists had identified in social life. The experiment was significant, said Fogg, not so much for its specific finding as for what it implied: that computer applications could be methodically designed to exploit the rules of psychology in order to get people to do things they might not otherwise do. In the paper itself, he added a qualification: “Exactly when and where such persuasion is beneficial and ethical should be the topic of further research and debate.”
Fogg called for a new field, sitting at the intersection of computer science and psychology, and proposed a name for it: “captology” (Computers as Persuasive Technologies). Captology later became behaviour design, which is now embedded into the invisible operating system of our everyday lives. The emails that induce you to buy right away, the apps and games that rivet your attention, the online forms that nudge you towards one decision over another: all are designed to hack the human brain and capitalise on its instincts, quirks and flaws. The techniques they use are often crude and blatantly manipulative, but they are getting steadily more refined, and, as they do so, less noticeable.
In 1973, a former schoolteacher named David Bunnell got a $110-a-week job as a technical writer for a tiny Albuquerque-based maker of calculators called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Inc., or MITS. In later years, he admitted that he knew virtually nothing about electronics at the time. But he was there in 1975 when MITS introduced a microcomputer, the Altair 8800. The machine kicked off the PC revolution, including inspiring two budding computer nerds named Bill Gates and Paul Allen to write a version of the BASIC programming language, which led to them founding a company they called Micro-Soft.
Starting in April 1975, Bunnell edited MITS's newsletter about the Altair, Computer Notes—a periodical that, as far as I know, was the first devoted entirely to the subject of personal computers. He went on to start Personal Computing, one of the first slick magazines on the topic. Then he cofounded both PC Magazine and PC World, the Coke and Pepsi of PC publications. And then Macworld—both the magazine and the trade show. At one point, four of the top 10 computer magazines were ones he'd started, and PC Mag, PC World, and Macworld are all still very much with us in online form.
A few weeks after Steve Jobs posed for the cover of the first issue of Macworld, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to be on the cover anymore.
So David Bunnell, the founder of Macworld, used one of the oldest tricks in publishing: He lied about the magazine going to the presses.
The new iPad app, IBM Watson Element for Educators, offers insights on students to teachers, including: “data on interests, accomplishments, academic performance, attendance, behaviors and learning activities.”
While on site for a marine casualty where more than 100 people were helping with the response, every person I saw using a phone, except for one Samsung Note 5 user, was using an Apple iPhone. There are several reasons I consider the iPhone 7 Plus to be the best phone for business, especially when you need your phone to perform reliably for long periods of time or the job just doesn't get done, and they include:
Late yesterday Apple filed a trademark infringement cases against Mobile Star LLC for selling counterfeit power products such as power adapters and charging cables through Amazon.com. Apple believes these counterfeit products could lead to fires and are therefore a risk to the public.
To use the tagline 'Hello Again' demonstrates... er... courage?
The new Macs better be significantly better.
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Thanks for reading.