iPhone4idiots

Excuse me while I go off iPhones and even mobile devices to talk browser market share. Ever since Google Chrome launched in December 2008, it’s been steadily gaining market share at the expense of Internet Explorer and Firefox. While the slow death of Internet Explorer seems inevitable, I’m a little surprised Firefox is slowly losing as well. This year alone Chrome’s market share has risen from the mid teens to almost 25%. Firefox has fallen from just over 30% to the about 25%. That’s right Chrome will shortly be the 2nd most used browser behind only Internet Explorer. IE has fallen about 5% to just above 40% market share. For the record, Safari, Opera and all other browsers account for less than 10% combined. Continue Reading…

Google Translate was released this past week as a free native iOS app. The app can translate 57 languages in text and 15 languages can be spoken into your iPhone with the text being displayed. What’s really impressive is the app can speak 23 languages aloud! In my own personal testing with English to Spanish and Spanish to English it did fairly well. While not perfect it does a good enough job to where it would be very helpful in situations where you are trying to communicate with someone. The app is simple enough to figure out how to use in minutes. You can see the in the photo here I have it set to translate Spanish to English. I tapped the microphone and let a co worker, Julio, speak into my iPhone. Julio said the translation was essentially correct. However, when he tried throwing in a curse word the app failed. Nevertheless, this app is making great strides. Since its free I would recommend anyone try it out if they ever think they’ll be in a situation where translation might be needed. I sure could have used this to ask, “Can you please point to which items on the menu are fish?” when I was in Spain years ago.

So if you love tech/social media like me you probably realized Microsoft died a long time ago. Death to the Darth Vader of tech. The company that was easy to love to hate. Sure they are still a player and Windows isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, but about the only product they have with growth potential is X-Box. The three companies I see battling to be the dominate player are Apple, Google and Facebook. While I love all three in many ways there are also things I can’t stand which got me thinking – which do I consider more evil? Continue Reading…