Category: Kev’s Blog

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Competing music cloud offerings

Everyone has (or is about to announce) their own cloud based music offering right now. I’ve got almost all my mp3s of every CD I own uploaded to Google Music, the new albums I buy from Amazon mp3 are stored in their cloud offering, and now Apple is expected to launch their offering.

The film industry apparently has a cloud based offering cooking, called Ultraviolet, which is expected to layout the standards for offering cloud based movies. Pretty soon, all music and video physical formats will disappear, or at least become niche like vinyl.

Now we just need to get bigger pipes to our houses, oh, and remove the ridiculous capping on monthly bandwidth usage. AT&T – if you implement the 150GB bandwidth cap for my neighborhood then we’re switching to Comcast cable.

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Jobs not keen on MobileMe either

I have a Mac, it’s my main computer at home. I’ve always wondered what the attraction of the MobileMe service is/was. It just doesn’t offer enough to justify the cost – to me it’s way overpriced.

Considering with my Android phone I get automatic email, calendar and contacts sync’ing between the online services, my Mac at home plus my phone FOR FREE I have to wonder why anyone would pay $100 for a year of providing this service is just beyond me.

Apparently Jobs also felt the same way when the service was launched, according to some recent quotes talking about the MobileMe development team: “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation…” apparently Jobs said, “You should hate each other for having let each other down”. Wow. Ok. So you don’t like MobileMe? Guess I’m not the only one..

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Location data tracked by iOS and Android devices

Security researchers discovered this week that iOS devices continuously track users physical location and store this data on the device. The data is also sync’d with your desktop if you use iTunes. What’s interesting is apparently this has been long known by Law Enforcement Agencies, who can use this data in investigations. This data is also transmitted back to Apple every 12 hours.

Android devices apparently also report location data back to Google – it sounds like WiFi MAC address location data is sent back to help triangulate a users location to provide location based services using this map of collected MAC addresses. This is similar to the MAC address collection that Google got into trouble for when they collected similar data from their StreetView cars (when they arguably collected far more than just MAC addresses and the location).

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