Personal Technology

Windows 8: What’s the Best That Could Happen?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 29, 2012 / Leave a comment

Microsoft launched their new Windows 8 operating system. It appears from all of the reviews that this change is more like Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (When you were like, “woah, what’s this whole Start menu thing?”) than it is like Windows XP to Windows 7 (When you were like,...
Google Voice Individualized Voicemail Messages

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ June 13, 2012 / Leave a comment

Occasionally I find a little feature that I like so much that I post it to the blog. Today, that feature is Google Voice‘s individual contact options. You can literally customize to the level of having different messages for each of your contacts. This can also be done at the...
Live TV Fights Back

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 11, 2012 / Leave a comment

Live television is more profitable then recorded or “On Demand” television. People have no choice but to sit through the ads, and that means the advertisers pay more money if people watch your show live. The problem is, people have lives (and they don’t like ads). I’ve argued before that...
Another Great Idea

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ March 5, 2012 / Leave a comment

Sometimes you’re scanning through Read, Write, Web or whatever your favorite tech journal is and you see something that makes you go, “well, crap, I wish I could invest in that company.” Such is the case with Twilio. The company is a bit skype-like in that it brings VoIP to...
Playing with Google Music

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ March 3, 2012 / Leave a comment

I have had a little extra time on my hand the past few weeks and one of the tasks I’ve taken on is playing with Google Music. Essentially, it’s the service that competes with the music portion of the new iTunes/iCloud offering. As far as I can tell both services...
Microsoft Will Win By Forfeit

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ February 17, 2012 / Leave a comment

The world is going to change. It’s moving in to the cloud. It’s moving on to your phone, your tablet, your netbook. In 5 or 10 years, you won’t use a desktop (there’s a good chance you already don’t), you probably won’t even use a laptop as we know it...
Integrating Services and Why Google Doesn’t Bother Me

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 28, 2012 / Leave a comment

Every couple of months I go to see a short little man who works at the Nordstrom’s in Charlotte to talk work clothes and usually buy a few shirts, a pair of pants or two and sometimes a pair of shoes. I know that Nordstrom’s is not the cheapest place...
What Made Steve Jobs Rich

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 11, 2012 / Leave a comment

Different industrial titans have risen to their throne for different reasons. Henry Ford and IBM figured how to make something that previously had to be built by hand in an efficient, industrial manner. Thomas Edison came up with a completely new invention. Bill Gates created an ecosystem by enabling both...
Why Would RIM License Blackberry 10?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 10, 2012 / Leave a comment

There have been a few rumors that RIM may be licensing their new operating system to other hardware manufacturers. This is surprising because it would seem to undercut Blackberry’s hardware business. My first reaction to this news was that they are probably considering spinning off the hardware and becoming purely a software company....
The Myth of the Virtual Desktop Comes to the Phone

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 9, 2012 / 2 Comments

A few years ago I wrote a 40 page whitepaper on Virtual Desktops. I extolled the virtues of what seemed to me to be an obvious decision. You take the hundreds or thousands of desktops in your office and cost $600 per system and replace them with little boxes that...