Enough articles have been written about engineering crunch in the valley while some solutions like increasing equity grants to engineers have been suggested, the bigger issue of the broken recruiting pipeline has not gained the attention it deserves. Its a job of recruiters to source potential candidates and most recruiters are compensated in form of a percentage (usually 20-30%) of the annual base salary of the hired individual.
In Feb 2014, WSJ is reporting that Nokia is working on an Android phone.
In Sept 2010,
Anssi Vanjoki, outgoing head of Nokia’s smartphone division, likens mobile phone makers that adopt Google’s software to Finnish boys who “pee in their pants” for warmth in the winter. Temporary relief is followed by an even worse predicament. [source]
As someone who has advocated Android for Nokia in the past, I think its just too late now to do that.
One of the biggest challenges to Intel’s x86 hegemony in the consumer market has been the emergence of smartphones where ARM-based processors have 90% market share. The PC market where Intel has a stronghold is declining at (estimated) 10% annual rate.
While a lot of coverage has been to given to Intel’s decline in the consumer market, I believe Intel has a tough road ahead in server market too. One major advantage Intel has is the amount of (legacy) code which has been written for x86 (the same thing which keeps Cobol on life support), this advantage is diminishing rapidly due to following trends.
Electronic money is all about ledger (transactions) which tells who sent money to whom, in standard financial system, central/federal/reserve bank (different nations have different names for these) and by extension, financial institutions are “trusted” to maintain that ledger. Any work which requires a “trusted” party can in principle, be done using cryptography without requiring a “trusted” party and bitcoin is manifestation of that applied to ledger. For more thorough treatment have a look at original paper or this blog post.
A security company reverse engineered Snapchat’s android client and found all the api endpoints (source).
Bigger issue: The published proof of concept of using “find friends” feature to find whether a phone number is registered on Snapchat or not, and if it is, then its associated username and location of the user.
Their claim was that despite informing Snapchat about the hole, Snapchat did nothing about it.
As expected, someone published data of 4.6M registered users (source) using the proof of concept provided. Snapchat responded saying that soon users will be able to opt-out of find friends feature.
There are two choices while writing on this topic. One is to write a detailed and accurate port. The other is to write a short post. I preferred the second approach and had added appropriate links to dig further.
Wikileaks released a set of United States diplomatic cables on Nov 28, 2010, popularly referred to as Cablegate. Let’s consider the events which happened afterward.
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Nokia is facing some serious issues some of them are technical, but the major issue right now is how it can rebrand itself as a smartphone manufacturer (rather than just a mobile phone manufacturer).
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An article on how the internet-centric era supplemented by smartphones is giving tough time to Intel and Microsoft and why the two giants of Desktop-centric computing era are not able to retain their stronghold in the consumer market anymore.
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