So, time to change the theme to something that is more interesting for me. From now on I’ll be focusing more on things that I am really passionate about: music, science, technology and the digital future. Stay tuned.

Also, these figures have some additional skew, since the return rate of Xbox 360 has been, according to some sources, as high as 33% in the early life of the console. I repeat, 33%. The return rate of PS3, according to retailers, has been around 1% (with some reports referring return rate of 0.2%). So if you add all this up, actually PS3 has been performing better than Xbox 360 both based on pure numbers, but also in terms active consoles due to the marginal return rate. Remember, sales figures normally quote the number units that have been put into the distribution channel.

While I own a PS3 as it makes a good Blu-ray player and DLNA client, I have no preference whatsoever regarding which console performs better in terms of sales. However, I find it very annoying that people who are paid for doing their job, can not even perform the simplest math and are making big headlines with information that is either intentionally biased or simply overlooked.

While I’ve had my doubts about the whole buzz around semantic web, developments like this and new open APIs for social networks really makes possible building totally new kind of online services that can better utilize social graphs cross-referenced with semantic content. Sound nice, but also a bit scary.

After doing a few ports of GPL libraries and playing around with the UI framework, I can only say that the SDK is the best mobile SDK I’ve ever used so far. My previous experiences are from MIDP (sucks), Windows Mobile (sucks even more) and Symbian (ultimate horror) so my expectations were not that high. However, Apple’s take on mobile programming is simply elegant and pretty straightforward to learn.

My only complain is my personal dislike for Interface Builder. Somehow, I’ve always been more inclined to make user interfaces programmatically, simply because that way one has total control on what is happening. With Cocoa Touch, making UI via code is pretty simple, as long as you read the documentation first and get your hands into the MVC model under the hood. Still, I think I’ll give IB a chance if I get my brain around it :-)

Given the ease of development (well, relative ease compared to other mobile terminals), it is not hard to see AppStore gaining more momentum. 12 months from now, one should have a target audience of 50 million customers or so. So it is not that impossible to sell a few thousend copies of an application if it fits some customer need. I for one will be trying out how the distribution model works for some niche applications and hopefully make a few bucks in the process.

• Mobile, location aware, microblogging: systems like Jaiku automatically know from where you’re blogging. Your presence stream by definition is hyper-local. Multiply the amount of users in a given territory 24/7 and you have more local representatives able to publish events, realtime, than any news organization
• Flickr & YouTube: with current mobile handsets it is dead easy to upload videos and images to 3rd party services. You can attach these to your presence stream effectively becoming a multimedia reporter on the go. While the quality might not be as good as for professional reporters, at least I’d rather see events unfolding in realtime, not after all the interesting has happened.
• Technology investment: none. Just use existing services.
• Aggregating a local news portal: use Yahoo Pipes for regional filtering and a piece of PHP to put the RSS streams together and you have a graigslist of local news. With virtually zero investment.

Sony PRS-505 Reader

Image via Wikipedia

Sony has released a new firmware revision for their PRS-505 Reader. The most notable features are support for Adobe Digital Editions and PDF text reflowing. The latter is most interesting for me, as I tend to keep lot of scientific publications on my reader and those are mostly in PDF format. Now that the Reader is able to nicely reflow the text, you can magnify the font to a more readable size and the reading experience is actually excellent.

If you still have not tried any of the electronic reading devices, I definitely urge you to do it. Once you realize that it is possible to carry around gigabytes of books in a single lightweight device, there is no turning back.

And what am I currently reading? The list is as follows:

The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind

Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

Several academic publications on quantum mechanics.

As the launch of Apple’s new revision of the iPhone is approaching, there has been growing amount of criticism towards Apple not introducing anything really revolutionary with the new product. This critique is normally heard from U.S. and that is understandable, given that U.S. is still lagging behind Europe when it comes to mobile infrastructure. As an iPhone 2G user, however, I must contradict some of these arguments. There are some unique selling points from European perspective:

• 3G. European 3G coverage is getting near 100% and for example in the Nordics, subsidized contracts are only allowed for 3G devices.
• iTunes & AppStore. Try to find as usable for any other mobile handset. You won’t.
• Cocoa Touch. Yeah, there are loads of Windows Mobile phones with touch screen, mainly in the U.S. market. I actively use Samsung SGH-i780 for my corporate tasks and I can only say that there are touch UIs and then there is Apple’s touch UI. Try to guess which one works.
• Mobile Safari. Only desktop grade mobile browser. Don’t even try to mention Opera, it is not even close.
• ActiveSync. While RIM rules the U.S. market, Europe is still wide open for corporate solutions. This might give Apple a chance.
• Battery life. Reviews say that iPhone’s battery life is bad. Well, compare that with any Nokia N-series phone, which are common in Europe, in similar usage scenario and iPhone is not that bad at all.

So it was destined to happen: Google announced that they are also entering the virtual world arena with Lively, a browser based VW implementation. While there has been a lot of buzz and a lot of VC dollars involved with VW business this year, this news means trouble for players like Linden Lab and Sulake. It’s not only because Google is doing it, but because it is certain that Microsoft will follow Google either by rolling their own implementation or by buying themselves to the market – they simply will follow in Google’s footprints after making the mistake of not following with search. This means that smaller players will have trouble with the competition which also makes it harder to raise VC money. That about the business aspect.

The emergence of virtual worlds has been something of a curiosity for me for a long time. The reason is simple: I’m a huge science fiction fan and the development of global telecommunications infrastructure and now virtual reality applications on top of that reminds me of works by William Gibson. Add in diminishing natural resources and shortage of energy and food and things are getting really science fiction indeed – and not always for better. As my favourite writer, J.G. Ballard, put it: “Sooner or later, all science fiction comes true.”

According to pretty much every possible news outlet, Toyota will be adding solar panels to their Prius line of hybric cars. One thing that bugs me in all of these so called “green” goods is that there is no mention of the emissions from the manufacture of such goods.

A solar-electric-gas hybrid might cause lower emissions when in use – however manufacturing all those batteries and solar cells definately produce much more emissions than not manufacturing them. In addition to that, both batteries and solar cells need rare earth materials where the extraction of those from the earth causes considerable emissions, not to mention the amount of chemicals and energy used in purifying the materials. So, how green a green car really is? I think you would be better off with mass transportation if you really want to minimize your carbon footprint.

PS. I’d really want to know the additional emissions from product manufacture for all the goods marketed as “green”, just to be able to make fair comparison with non-green products.

Image via Wikipedia

If you, like me, use Google Bookmarks for centrally storing bookmarks and want to use Safari or WebKit for your daily browsing, the help can be found at MacThemes Forum. The Goggles plugin for SIMBL adds a new menu to Safari that allows you to use Google Bookmarks integrated to the browser. A real lifesaver, at least for me.

PS. I’d recommend using nightly builds of WebKit as they feature a new JavaScript execution core, making AJAX applications far more responsive than on any other browser.