Reuters’ Felix Salmon discusses the changing nature of Web journalism, where the SEO-friendly days of yore are starting to get a bit more social, which is good for high-quality but much-more-expensive reporting. Salmon’s point? The commodity approach, which has the side effect of diluting quality brands, is still easier, though it’s far more me-too in nature. (ht Matt)
Author: Aulia Masna
Former tech journo, used to write for Macworld, DailySocial, e27. Ex , ran a national startup initiative program in Indonesia. Very much into the news.
Asia to US Tech Media Usually Means East Asia
Whenever I read US publications referring to Asia, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that they forget about countries other than China and Japan. Sometimes they include South Korea but often they leave out Southeast Asia where more than 600 million people live, or South Asia in which India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and their neighboring countries are home to more than one and a half billion people.
What they often refer to as Asia is actually no more than East Asia. The center of Asia? That’s around Azerbaijan.
Why does it bother me? Because I live in Southeast Asia and apparently we Southeast Asians don’t count.
When an article talks about Yahoo selling off its Asian assets, most of the time they mean Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, not Yahoo Southeast Asia which is based in Singapore.
When somebody talks about Apple’s Asian operation, that’s their Foxconn factories. Apple’s Asian market? China and Japan. Apple South Asia, headquartered in Singapore, which covers South and Southeast Asian markets, isn’t even in the radar of these bloggers and journalists.
Why do they do it then? Laziness. They assume people would immediately link those East Asian countries to the points they’re trying to make because apparently in the grander scheme of things, Asian operations outside those countries don’t matter. Rather than be correct, they’d rather be lazy. Why? Because it’s more work. It’s four more letters to type every time.
20 common grammar mistakes
Linguistic intricacies have always been a pet subject of mine since high school and perhaps formed the foundation of what I now do for a living, and that is being a writer and editor. Reading an article like this one helps people (including myself) discover the proper ways to use particular words and identify context more correctly.
My favorite among the 20:
Impactful
It isn’t a word. “Impact” can be used as a noun (e.g., The impact of the crash was severe) or a transitive verb (e.g., The crash impacted my ability to walk or hold a job). “Impactful” is a made-up buzzword, colligated by the modern marketing industry in their endless attempts to decode the innumerable nuances of human behavior into a string of mindless metrics. Seriously, stop saying this.
A really funny positioning for tech blog readers. Which one are you?
source : The Next Web
60% of Indonesia’s Consumption is Domestic
From the BBC:
However, analysts said that Indonesia has benefited from the fact that a huge part of its growth is driven by domestic consumption.
“Indonesia is one of the least exposed economies in the region, with a vast domestic market and a relatively small share of exports to gross domestic product, so it is insulated from volatility in the global economy,” said George Worthington of IFR.
Domestic consumption accounts for nearly 60% of Indonesia’s economy.
Businesses should take notice.
Monetizing Mobile is Facebook’s Greatest Challenge
Jenna Wortham for the New York Times:
Amid the jaw-dropping financial figures the company revealed last week when it filed for a public offering was an interesting admission. Although more than half of its 845 million members log into Facebook on a mobile device, the company has not yet found a way to make real money from that use.
“We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the risks it faces.
The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.
To reduce system cost and eliminate the extra package required for the Audience chip, Apple cut a deal to integrate the noise-reduction technology directly into its A5 processor, which appears in the iPhone 4S. This technology is critical for the new phone because not only does it improve call quality, it blocks out background noise when users provide voice commands to Siri, the intelligent assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Without this noise reduction, Siri would be unusable even with a modest amount of background noise.
Recently I had installed Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation on my 3GS. While the underlying software that power these apps and Siri are from Nuance, the above finding by The Linley Group could be a reason why Nuance’s Dragon software titles have difficulties in a crowded room in my phone.
Apple is of course known to refrain from introducing or featuring technologies and abilities that have yet to meet its own threshold of acceptable performance in its products.
Another reason that have come up in the past for the lack of Siri in older products was the possibility that because Siri is still in beta, the company may be testing and collecting data to eventually deliver a more complete experience.
Of course, should Apple offer Siri in older iPhones, the value of iPhone 4S will be diminished greatly, and Apple certainly doesn’t want that to happen given that the company still sells the 3GS and 4 for the lower end of the market.
Internationally though, it makes little difference since Siri doesn’t offer much of an assistance beyond dictation and personal reminders outside of the United States at the moment anyway. Additionally, its linguistic limitations makes Siri practically unusable in many markets.
/via @charlesarthur
The Linley Group offers a possible reason why Apple is limiting Siri to iPhone 4S.
The LA Times brought up the issue that Scottish people have with Siri. Despite being part of the UK, the Scots clearly have such thick accents that Siri has trouble understanding them. The results are obviously unfortunate for the Scots and for Apple but make for some humorous exchanges. At least Apple knows it has a wee bit of problem over the Atlantic.
Avid Studio goes to the iPad
AllThingsD:
“We’ve seen a shift in how creation is happening, and it’s really happening on almost any device,” said Tanguy Leborgne, vice president of consumer and mobile technology strategy at Avid. “We think the tablet is more than just a consumer device; more and more people are creating on it.”
The app will be iPad only for now and costs $4.99 for the first 30 days after which it will be $7.99.
If there’s anyone out there who still say the iPad is a media consumption device, go suck on this.
AuliaSays 