Technoholik

Apple has some 50,000 workers around the world, but few of them would argue that it’s a guy currently on sick leave who has done more than anyone to turn the Silicon Valley institution into the most valuable company in the world.

The California-based consumer electronics company achieved that lofty status on Tuesday when its unstoppable run helped it briefly blast past Exxon Mobil in market capitalization.

Though volatile trading quickly overturned the coup, the company’s long-term trajectories signal that it is only a matter of time before Apple takes the top spot for good.

That will be a remarkable vindication for Steve Jobs, 55, the college dropout turned technology visionary who did as much as anyone to instigate the PC revolution after launching Apple in 1976.

Now he has done more than anyone to usher in the post PC-world, where the data and content that matter most to people and companies is available at every moment on myriad devices.

The basic outline of his rise, fall and triumphant resurrection bears the hallmark of a morality tale of the digital age. He saw the future of computing when he founded Apple together with Steve Wozniak, and pioneered the use of a mouse and a point-and-click command process after seeing the concept at a Xerox research lab.

His idea was promptly copied by Microsoft, which made its Windows software available to anyone and quickly captured a dominant market share in the rapidly growing market.

Mr. Jobs’ insistence that Apple software run only on Apple machines was a large part of the reason he lost a boardroom power struggle in 1985, prompting him to leave the company.

While Apple’s fortunes dwindled to the status of a struggling niche player flirting with bankruptcy, Jobs developed Pixar Animation, which would become one of the most successful film studios, and a new computer company called Next.

He was called back to Apple’s helm in 1997 and promptly set about transforming Apple from a puny weakling reliant on the life support of Microsoft to the world’s most valuable company.

Mr. Jobs’ driving idea was that the sci-fiction vision of a digital future -- where we would video-conference with wristwatch devices and download movies and music over invisible networks -- was just around the corner.

As other companies remained trapped in gradual refinements of existing technologies, Apple would make this future happen.

The first step in the grand strategy was the iPod, launched almost a decade ago. In the whiz-bang age of the iPhone and Android, it this device seems awfully humble, but 10 years ago it revolutionized the way people listened to music, combining software and hardware in a beautiful package that for the first time made it easy and intuitive to make huge music collections portable.

He revitalized Apple’s computers with the iMac and established iTunes as the unrivalled online store for the purchase of music and video. Within six years, Apple sold more than 100 million iPods, while five years after the 2003 launch of iTunes it had sold more than 5 billion downloads.

Apple completed its rout with the 2007 launch of the iPhone.

Just four years ago the idea that hundreds of millions of people would routinely use the internet over their mobile phones seemed hallucinatory, given the clunkiness of existing smartphones and their software. But Jobs knew better.

In one fell swoop, Apple came from nowhere to dominate what quickly became the biggest consumer electronics market in history and overtake such market leaders as Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft.

Even that did not satisfy Jobs’ ambitions for Apple. Last year’s launch of the iPad swept aside decades of tablet computer failures to create yet another new market for Apple to dominate while bringing down the curtain on traditional PCs.

Apple is far from done.

The big question is whether Jobs will be around to lead the next phase, as questions about his health remain unanswered, says tech blogger Jesus Diaz of the gadget site Gizmodo.

“It was Steve Jobs’ unique vision and his strict command of a brilliant troop of engineers that made -- and still makes -- it all possible. Together, they created the future,” Diaz said.

“If Jobs goes, Apple could face the same long decline as Microsoft and Sony. I’m convinced that Apple can’t be Apple without Steve.”

 BigAdda.com, one of India’s popular social networking sites has just announced that it is planning to close its social networking business and will now be relaunched as an e-commerce portal.

When BigAdda was launched by Reliance Entertainment, in 2007, social networkers had high hopes that this would be the next big thing in the digital space. The site even had popular celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Harbhajan Singh blogging on it, and TV channels using it for promotional purposes. But, with the dominance of Orkut, Facebook and other global players in the social networking space in India, the buzz created by BigAdda soon fizzled out.
In an email that was sent to its subscribers, BigAdda said:

We value and appreciate your long standing support for Bigadda.com. In the past few months we explored our potential as an ecommerce portal by providing branded products at profitable deals to you and have found immense success. We are reaching newer heights everyday and hence are planning an expansion in the same arena.

We request you to download all your personal collection of blogs, audio files, video files and images from Bigadda.com as we are scaling down our Social Networking services.

In the midst of all its redesigning, rebranding, and design unification, Google has gone ahead and made some feature changes to its other properties, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps for Android. Check them out below:

Gmail

Over at Gmail, Google added the inbox style option, allowing users to quickly switch between style presets in a tab-like format, or a dropdown menu. There are five different style presets, to be used depending on personal taste, usage scenarios, etc. Google listed the five inbox style presets in a blog entitled “New! Pick your favourite inbox style,” and over the next several weeks, it is expected to unveil other inbox styles as well.

• Classic - This is the default inbox style most people are used to. In the Classic inbox, messages are ordered chronologically, with your most recent email at the top.
• Priority Inbox - Important and unread messages appear at the top of your inbox, then starred messages, then everything else. Each section can be customized further, so you can create your own inbox style.
• Important first - This style puts important mail at the top of the page (both read and unread messages). Everything else is in its own section at the bottom of your inbox. You may have noticed that we turned on importance arrows for everyone a few weeks ago; this inbox style separates messages with these arrows from those without.
• Unread first - Simple: unread mail at the top; everything else at the bottom.
• Starred first - Starred messages at the top; everything else at the bottom.

To use the feature, users will have to turn on the Inbox Style feature, and then, will have tabs of the styles on top until they settle on one for more than a week, at which point, the styles will be available via dropdown menu.

Google Docs

Google Docs has seen two new major changes, better document sharing on the go with the improved Google Docs for mobile, and new features for Google Docs videos. The new Google Docs for mobile allows tablets and mobile devices to easily sort and share one or more of their Google documents, either as a link, or as an attachment.

With the new Google Docs videos features, Google now allows users to insert videos from their Google Docs lists to their Google Sites, or embed them on the web, and also caption them.

Google Maps

Google recently introduced many new features for its Google Maps for Android application (bringing it up to version 5.7), and you can check them out here. In the meanwhile, it also added the “Download map area” feature to Labs in Google Maps. Google also wants to take the opportunity to point users to the Labs section, where many new features are available for them to try, such as Measure, and Scale bar.

While the ‘Download map area’ option goes a little against Google’s whole always connected philosophy, it is mighty useful for those times you won’t have access to a data connection. The feature allows users to download a section (10-mile radius) of any map when they have internet access, so that they can use that as an offline, passive guide for when they don’t. So while there is no real navigation element, Google hopes the level of detail, as well as the streets and landmarks depicted will help nonetheless.

It is quite next to impossible to imagine a camera without a lens. But thanks to Cornell scientists, we now have a camera that has no lens, no moving parts and costs very little money to make. The scientists call this revolutionary camera Planar Fourier Capture Array. Instead of using a lens, it uses the wave-like properties of light to capture what it is looking at. The image construction is later done by algorithms in a computer.

The prototype of the gadget, developed by a group lead by postdoctoral associate Patrick Gill, is a hundredth of a millimeter thick and half a millimeter on each side. Elaborating on 20p restriction, Gill says in a press statement: "It's not going to be a camera with which people take family portraits, but there are a lot of applications out there that require just a little bit of dim vision."The only set back this camera suffers is its limitation to see about 20 pixels on a side. However, the researchers believe that the camera, in spite of its limitations, could be of great use. The fact that it is very tiny and no moveable parts means it can be integrated with several gadgets. Since it is very low costing, it will be easy to manufacturer. In addition, people can make innovative usage of the dim vision capabilities, perhaps use as eyespot for a robot or device.

The scientists have named the camera a Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA) as it is based on the principles of a mathematical tool called the Fourier transform. Each pixel in the PFCA counts for one component of the Fourier transform of the image. The image is later constructed using that algorithm on a computer.

The scientists are presently working on the camera's resolution and overall efficiency.

Not too long ago, Adobe released the first preview of a project code-named Wallaby, which is a tool that can input Flash project files and convert them to use HTML5 and other new web technologies. Google’s latest lab project has a similar purpose, but works in quite a different way.

Visit the Swiffy lab page and you will be asked to upload a SWF file, which their tool will then convert into a version that uses HTML, JavaScript, CSS and SVG; taking advantage of some of the latest web standards. Currently their output will only work on WebKit-based browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Swiffy converts the imported Flash animation into JSON, which is a JavaScript-based plain text data format. This data is read by the pure JavaScript Swiffy runtime, which then renders the animations described by the JSON object as SVG, making use of newer features offered by HTML5 and CSS3.

Social networking has long been Google's white whale. The company has done plenty of dabbling in the space, releasing Orkut, which has failed to catch on in the US, and rolling out Buzz to the relative indifference of its massive user base. Announced today after seemingly endless leaks, Google+ represents a major push for the software giant. The service began showing itself to a smattering of users last night, as a black bar across the top of various of the company's properties. A "+You" button on the far left of the bar currently brings you to the service's landing page, offering a tour of the many features that fall under the Google+ umbrella. Get to know the services better after the break. 

Tumblr, the combination blogging platform and social network, has been growing rapidly of late — so rapidly that it is now racking up about 8.4 billion pageviews a month, according to a blog post from president John Maloney. One of the big drivers for this growth appears to be teenagers, who are using the site as a kind of combination of Facebook and Twitter, to share photos and other Internet “memes.” But will Tumblr ever figure out how to make money from this massive user base? Other social networks have grown just as large and still failed.