The Cloud Is a Lie

The cloud is a lie.  John Kheit argues that if you believe in the cloud, you’re not only a sucker, you’ve been brainwashed into accepting your lot as a 2nd class digital citizen. According to him, the cloud is a lie because it convinces you of at least two Stockholm syndrome things: (1) you don’t deserve to own or control your own data, and (2) security for your data does not matter.

Who's More Intelligent, Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa?

In the battle of virtual personal assistants, Apple and Amazon have strong contenders. Which one is “smarter,” though, Siri or Alexa? Perhaps it’s too early to really call the race, since both personal assistants keep growing and evolving. Be that as it may, Jeff Butts has put both through their paces, and shares his thoughts.

The New Apple Echo Chamber Arriving Soon

Mark Gurman at Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is working on a smart home device, similar to the Amazon Echo, using the Siri voice assistant. Apple doesn’t have a vast product inventory to leverage from like Amazon, and other kinds of assistance depend on considerable, often creepy, personal information. So home automation seems to be Apple’s angle. Will that approach work? Page 2 of Friday’s Particle Debris explores.

At CEDIA, Amazon Will Talk About Star Trek Inspiration for Voice Recognition

Amazon’s Charlie Kindel, Director of Alexa Smart Home, will be speaking at the CEDIA conference in Dallas on September 16. He’ll talk about the inspiration for voice recognition that came from Star Trek, the original series. This interview by CEDIA provides a foretaste of the presentation and includes an inspiring video of Captain Kirk voice querying the Enterprise computer. What’s also cool and interesting is Mr. Kindel’s description of how customer privacy is maintained with the blue and red indicator ring. He also points to the website a customer built to celebrate Alexa. This is nifty corporate messaging.

Troubleshooting Spotlight Issues

Episode #178 I planned to write about some smart home products I’ve been testing, but a confluence of events convinced me to change courses midstream. So I’m going to write about troubleshooting Spotlight this week, since that’s what I’ve been doing all morning.  It all began because I knew I wrote a column about Phillips…

iOS 8 Review: Apple Opens Mobile OS to Developers, You Win

Apple laid the groundwork for the future of its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system last year with iOS 7, and now the company is building on that foundation with the launch of iOS 8. Instead of shocking us with a new look that shuns the old skeuomorphic feel — that happened last year…

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