I agree wholeheartedly with this paragraph from Fraser Speirs in How the iPad Wants to be Used:

The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”. The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s not really designed to be a “resource” that many people take advantage of. It’s designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated.

“We need to keep offering these wages to keep the best people.”

So we are repeatedly told by the banks, including those which we, as tax payers, own to some extent. We’ll come back to this.

In the early days of the financial crisis, way back in the summer of 2007 when the first tremors were starting to be felt, we were confidently told by many bankers and economists that we were hitting a blip, a bump in the road which clearly stretched indefinitely on into the sunshine. Including many bankers at the world’s “safest” banks.

How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business?

An answer from Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, on the story that Amazon Web Services was created to use Amazon.com’s spare capacity during quiet periods.

The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.

Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action

I find the conflation of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as one entity to be one of the more frustrating features of the WikiLeaks furore, and was therefore pleased to read Clay Shirky’s analysis of what groups like WikiLeaks mean for the future of, well, the world and democracies—rather than whether Julian’s rape charges are really a US conspiracy to “get at” WikiLeaks.

Like many recent areas directly affected by the changing ways technology provides to mediate access to content—in this case both access to data to leak and the ability to widely and instantly publish leaked data—the reaction generally seems to miss out on the fact that we’re dealing with fundamentally game-changing processes at work.

Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform

A very interesting piece of analysis by Kyle Baxter, and a timely reminder that Google’s motives need not be pure. There’s quite a lot that is not evil, but which is well inside the grey area.

This helps explain some puzzling moves by Google. For example, Android’s market may not be terrible in comparison to Apple’s App Store for paid applications just because Google hasn’t yet finished it; rather, discouraging paid applications on the Android platform is in Google’s interest. If users won’t pay for applications, what will developers use to make money from their applications? Advertising. And Google conveniently owns one of the largest mobile advertising providers, Admob.