Uh, oh, aquí llegan los iAds. De una primera lectura, no parece algo tan salvaje como lo que hace Google, pero cuando una compañía de tecnología se mete en el negocio de la publicidad, mal asunto para la privacidad.

This adds up to what has been happening during the last two years, and it’ll continue this way if Nokia does nothing to address the high-end market. What’s happening there is affecting the brand and will in the future jeopardize its presence in the market.

Instead of going down the X5 path Nokia needs to focus in one model, hardware and software, and get it right. But even then I’m not sure it’ll avoid a rather nasty scenario for them.

At least in sites like this. Try it with and without Safari Reader and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

In the other hand, when reading a site with good design in mind like this, using Reader doesn’t even cross my mind. And that’s because the whole site experience is adding value to you, the reader.

I really think despite the nice features (3D display, 3D camera) Nintendo has lost the war of portable casual gaming. Phones won it. There’s still opportunity in the kid market though.

La Facua lleva a Google a la Audiencia Nacional por la toma de datos que realizó StreetView en WiFis de ciudadanos españoles:

La iniciativa de la organización se basa en el artículo 197 del Código Penal según el cual: “El que, para descubrir los secretos o vulnerar la intimidad del otro, sin su consentimiento (…) intercepte sus telecomunicaciones o utilice artificios técnicos de escucha, transmisión, grabación o reproducción del sonido o de la imagen, o de cualquier otra señal de comunicación, será castigado con las penas de prisión de uno a cuatro años y multa de doce a veinticuatro meses”

Se veía venir.

This is hurting Apple image a lot. A guess that’s what happens when you link yourself to companies that are not up to the quality standard you follow.

Pretty straightforward but a bit delusional. I can’t seem to find Google ads at any place in the demo. I’ve got to say though that the concept seems the closest thing I’ve ever seen yet to what I’d like to see at my living room.

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

As always, a must read.

First, restricting their news sites to paid subscription-only, and now this. These guys just don’t get it.

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

Not to mention one of this huge deposits is of the critical tech industry metal Lithium. I agree this is good news for Afghanistan, if it eventually translates in the wealth and progress of its citizens. But there’s also another question:

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region.

Uh, oh. Guess who’s not leaving the country anytime soon.

Nice review of a nice application with good intentions, but I’m afraid this is just yet another proof that Apple is contributing to create a huge information and content management problem with their iTunes-as-a-broker and the apps-as-content-silos strategy.

iOS4 clearly falls short in its capabilities to manage files, versions, synchronization and sharing, not to say in providing the tools to mitigate the problem. Developers are struggling to create relevant solutions to problems that can only be solved by services provided by the platform. Apple needs here to dramatically boost their operating system capabilities here; simplicity can’t be an excuse for not trying to find a better solution.

Ross Rubin, in the Switched On Engadget column:

But now the indications are stronger than ever that Apple will imbue its music player-turned-mobile platform into a carrier-free vehicle for bridging the space of face-to-face communications and the time between capturing video and editing it.

Apple (together with Nokia) is indeed the mobile phone manufacturer that’s closest to it. But this is not the carrier-free that matters the most. The carrier-free that’s still waiting to happen is when mobile device sales and data access services are totally decoupled, a model that will succeed when carriers are brave enough to design a valid go to market strategy for the growing number of data-connected devices.

The challenge is to stop controlling and subsidizing the terminal and start adding value to their side of things, that is, the access. As the number of connected devices per person grows, a competent contract model that’s appealing for both the end and corporate user is needed. Just thing about the cost of having a laptop 3G USB modem, a 3G-enabled phone and a 3G-enabled iPad. All of this when already paying for a DSL connection.

They know what to do. They just don’t have what it takes yet.

The problem with an Android phone running a phone manufacturer’s homebrew software, like HTC’s Sense or Sony’s TimeScape, is well known: You’re going to wait a lot longer to get the freshest version of Android

This is assuming normal users are aware there’s a freshest Android version, which is highly improbable.

I’d really like to believe this is the only fragmentation problem Android is getting. Fragmented hardware is doing Android a lot of damage, and it’s a real shame because this is what’s preventing me from considering it as an option right now.

I’ve gotta admit though that Froyo looks very tempting compared to the iOS4. In my opinion Apple mobile OS is OK today, but it’s gonna be a huge weakness in the next few months if Android keeps its improvement rate and Apple does nothing about it.

At last, a unified input device for Macs and iPads (my bet is the iPad will support it) that’s been long coming.

If it’s also true it’ll be supporting handwriting recognition, my Pogo Stylus is going to rock the world.

Update: seems a crafty mac user did a cardboard mockup using the leaked pictures. Dimensions look quite accurate.

El auto no considera que el hecho de que la página albergue publicidad pueda considerarse un lucro directo ya que la inserción de la misma va en función de las visitas al sitio y no del número de descargas realizadas.

Esto sienta un precedente, cómo decirlo, interesante.

Aún no entiendo cómo pueden recopilarse muestras de datos personales de forma inadvertida. Sea inadvertido o no, esto es un delito.

Venera7 will be following El Jobso’s keynote as always from Engadget and MacRumors. No Gizmodo this year (we guess it’s their fault after all) unless they manage to somehow solve the situation they got in in the first place by hiring someone that purchased his way in.

Remember, the keynote will start at 10:00 am PST. This is 19:00h @ Spain mainland and 18:00h @ Canary Islands. We’ll be posting our opinions and comments are soon as new announcements are made by Steve. Let’s hope there’s some meat after the dessert Google brought us with Froyo!

For old timers, it’s been a while since our last post in Venera7, right? Yup, we’re sorry about that. Please let us explain it a bit before reintroducing ourselves. For our new readers, Welcome! You may well skip this unless you’re interested in manifesto-like posts.

Some time after our last post, the site went offline because of attacks to our blog’s codebase. Once recovered, we never managed to go back on line again because of innumerable problems with our previous hosting company. But all this is behind us now. We’re back.

OK, fair enough. This isn’t all. Technical problems were not the only ones that made Venera7 slowly fade away. Personal projects and real life issues also got in the way of what it takes to maintain and evolve a site like this. This, and certain love-hate relationship we both have with the blogging community, a feeling that is really hard to explain and that has some times discouraged us from posting. Those who are a bit like us will quickly follow our drift. Anyway, and despite our M.I.A, we’ve been closely following what’s been happening this last two years in the tech arena; more than once, while passionately discussing about some hot topic or some idea over a cold beer in our favorite irish pub we’ve discovered ourselves thinking out loud: “we should post about this!”

But there’s one thing pushing us back online that we think is even more important than plain geek longing. It’s the overwhelming feeling that we can do better.

Although there are some absolutely great sites out there, there’s something missing in most tech blogs and sites you can read nowadays. Blogging and tech news has gone pro, and with this going pro something really important has been left aside. This something is the fresh, beginner-like view of the people that makes a living with technology, that lives and breathes it and has an opinion about it. This people is not the people that’s feeding the Internet and that’s fed by it in a closed, staled cycle. Nor is the people that’s professionally involved in it per se like tech news journalists or full time bloggers. We’re talking here about people whose experiences are driven from real life, not from something they just read in someone else’s blog or twitter feed.

We think there are way too many side interests in the pro community, biasing what you’re reading big time. internet is a great channel, anyone can make a difference if they really care, if they’re passionate about it. In a world crumpled with never ending iterations of the same topic, overwhelmed with bland, white-noise-like pseudo informative technobabble, opinion and personal view is what makes a difference. This is what we think is the future of blogging, and that’s why we think we just can do better.

But enough of this; let’s talk a bit about what’s new. There are some small changes to the site indeed. We’ve implemented two types of posts that give us more flexibility to post and what’s more important, add more value to what we’re saying. You’ll see how this works when the number of posts start to grow, but basically we’ll have regular posts commenting on what’s going on in the tech world and longer posts that are full-grown articles and Venera7 meat and potatoes. We hope to keep a good posting rate on the former and to be publishing at least one of the latter per week. We’ll see how this goes and adjust over time.

Also, from a language prospective, the site may look to you as a bit of a mess: we’ll be using indistinctly english and spanish. Why is that and when we’ll be using one or another is explained to some extent in our Spanglish? section.

And that’s it: now it’s time to show the proof is in the pudding. We really hope you stay with us this time and enjoy the ride.

If this is true, and I’m betting it is, Safari users will get a much needed pack of features. I’m hoping too we’re getting back Safari plugins.

Apple badly needs to take back the lead of the new browser wave they started with WebKit. Enhancing Safari and by letting it to be enhanced the easy way is a step in the right direction.

Great to watch if you want to hear from the man himself Apple’s keys to success. And in this dark times for tech companies it’s always energizing to listen to a CEO that’s still so passionate about what his company does.

A shame though that interviewers weren’t pushy enough to prevent Jobs from spinning out that freely from giving clear answers to some knotty issues like the Apple policy and the app store approval process.