Personal Technology

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...
DropBox’s Nifty Android App

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 7, 2012 / Leave a comment

Every now and then a “cool” moment happens that makes me excited to be a technologist. I like to share them here when I can. The other day I went to lunch with my mother and received a Skype message about halfway through from a friend. He was working on...
New Toys Part 2: The Motorola Xyboard

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 1, 2012 / Leave a comment

Yes, I bought something called a Xyboard, let me tell you why. First, I had decided that I needed to give having a tablet a try. I have looked at the Apple iPad and it is a very cool device which created the market the same way the Macintosh, iPod...
2012 Crystal Ball: A Year of Clarity in the TV Industry

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 29, 2011 / Leave a comment

When you think of the evolution of television you need to think of it in two parts. First, there is a need for televisions to evolve from a communications and software perspective. Essentially, your television, like all the other screens in your life from your cell phone to your tablet...
New Toys Part 1: A Review of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 27, 2011 / Leave a comment

Thursday of last week I went to the toy store (Verizon Store) and picked up two new toys. A Motorola Xyboard and a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, my intention is to review both of them this week. First up is the phone. What I really wanted was a Droid 4, but...
The Silliness of Marketing

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 19, 2011 / Leave a comment

I received an email last week from Verizon informing me that the Galaxy Nexus had arrived in stores. The picture of the main portion is above. The Galaxy sounds like it’s going to be an amazing phone, what I don’t understand is why the ad doesn’t say that! The phone...
Amazon Silk’s “Cloud Acceleration” Isn’t Working

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 7, 2011 / 1 Comment

When Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, one of the most interesting features was the browser, Silk. The idea is that Silk will cache entire web pages (including all the bits that come from third parties) on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and have them ready for super-fast delivery. The most popular sites...