Kev's Development Toolbox

July 16, 2012

Google I/O Glass demo – most awesome conference demo ever?

I hadn’t watched this up until now, I’d read about it and it sounded pretty cool, but after hearing Leo Laporte and guests talking about it on TWiT episode #360 I had to take a look at the video.

Turns out, this demo of Google Glass with live hangout session from parachuters, guys on bikes and absailers tag teaming the delivery of a pair of Google Glass glasses back to Sergey on stage in the conference has to be one of the most awesome tech demos I think I’ve ever seen. Pretty awesome. You have to watch this to get an appreciation of what they actually did.

July 13, 2012

Remaining Digg.com assets sold for $500k to Betaworks

Digg.com, the social news site, has sold off it’s brand, technology and website for the bargain price of $500k to Betaworks, who are looking to revive their own news sharing site with Digg’s technology. Previous parts of Digg were also recently sold – The Washington Post bought half of Digg’s staff for $12 million, and LinkedIn bought patents from Digg for a reported $4 million.

All together, that not a bad sum, but back in 2008 Google was rumored to have offered $200 million to buy them out, an offer which they refused.

It’s incredible how fast companies rise and fall in the internet world. AOL was at one point the largest ISP worldwide and now all but disappeared. Netscape was the choice of Internet browsers and webserver software was widely used – now long gone. Yahoo is also possibly on the brink of disappearing, now largely irrelevant as the world around them has changed faster than they’ve been able to keep up with. It’s an interesting and fast changing world out there, and as technology continues to evolve and change, there’s going to be plenty more companies who are are the top right now, slowly disappear over time.

July 11, 2012

2007-2008 Macs will be oldest models supported by OS X Mountain Lion

For the next upcoming Mac OS X release, Mountain Lion, the oldest models supported (depending on type) will be those released around 2007-2008.

I have an Early 2008 MacBook Pro which I use as my daily machine, and it’s still going strong. I’ve maxed out the memory and replaced the HDD but other than that I don’t have any immediate plans to replace it. Looks like I just squeezed in under the wire though to get Mountain Lion support, so an upgrade maybe on the cards sometime in the next couple of years.