Kids these days….

I always hear adults discussing how “kids these days” are so different. They listen to their music too loud and they spend too much time watching television. Now I don’t know how loud “kids back then” listened to music, but I can tell you times have changed. Today sitting around the table at Thanksgiving, I was reading with my little cousin. We were going through things that started with the letter E and she went through the pictures identifying. “elephant, egg,…” then we came to an envelope. She looked at it for a second then sat up and said “Oh! Email!” We could not tell her she was wrong because as far as life is today, an envelope means email. Later we are playing some friendly Freedman Family Wii, and my five year old cousin dominated all of us. That is not to say that all kids are good with technology, but they have so many more options and have been exposed to the Internet and high-tech equipment at such a young age. It will be incredible what they will be offer to the technology world in the future. I have always considered myself much better at computer than my parents and grandparents, but we have a good forty years in between us. My cousin, barely a decade younger than me has already advanced so far. It seems like every game we used to play is now virtual or has sound effects. I wonder what we will say about the “kids these days” in another ten years.

Dear old people: stop

In these modern days it seems more and more old people are trying to stay young by engaging,or attempting to engage in new technologies and programs popular with youth. From 80 year old grandparents trying to use computers for the first time to 50 year old parents on facebook trying to see what all the hype is about. “Dear old people, stop its getting extremely annoying trying to teach you how to use things.” But really, i don’t get why does it take hours to teach someone how to use, for instance, an ipod. It has 4 buttons! how is it that complicated. I think there is a logical solution to this whole problem. Old people need to just stick to their typewriters and tape players and stop trying to be young and hip. Even Face book founder Mark Zuckerberg agrees.

He told attendees at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford that old people (over 30), are just well, a little slow.
“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated, adding that successful start-ups should only employ young people with technical expertise. (Zuckerberg also apparently missed the class on employment and discrimination law.)

“Young people are just smarter,” he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. “Why are most chess masters under 30?” he asked. “I don’t know…Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.”

Everybody has their niche and some people have not realized this.

Blogging from a blackberry?

With todays new technology people can do some of the most amazing things. I’ll give u an example. If anyone were to walk into the room I was in right now they would just think they saw a teenage boy texting to his friends but really I am doing my hw on my cellphone at work on a slow morning. Technology has allowed for some of the most amazing things. Sadly this was not as easy as it should have been but it was still possible. For instance the browser on my blackberry does not support wordpress, which brings me to my next point. Most of this technology we had today has come about by people making their own software, sharing their ideas, and having others build upon it. In order to get this to work I had to download “opera”. This is a 3rd party software for the blackberry that actually works better then the browser installed as with wordpress. Technology has come a long way but if we want it to exceed the limits we see we should let our technology be open because someone may come up with a new idea for it that could revolutionize life for us all. Who would have thought I could work, do my hw, and blog all at once from my cellphone.
Ps hopefully this is long enough because its so hard to tell on this lol)

Texting Elephants?

When I first read the headline “Texts from elephants warn rangers of trouble,” I thought that it was pretty cool that an elephant was sending a text message.  We have all heard of dogs dialing 911 to save their owners, but hearing about an elephant is pretty uncommon.  I clicked on the link in order to get the story, and I was a little disappointed to find out that elephants are not sending text messages.  However, the actual story is pretty interesting too.  Becuase elephants were raiding crops in Kenya, they were being shot in order to help the farmers.  The Save the Elephants group placed a SIM card in a collar on one of these elephant in to warn rangers when he is getting too close to the farms.  This way, whenever the elephant gets too close, rangers can scare him away, saving his life.  Sending text messages is something that most of us do every day.  It is something that we are all used to; however, I doubt any of us have ever thought that it would help save an elephants life.  Its interesting to know that the technology that we use everyday to talk to our friends is being used to save elephants and farmers at the same time because someone thought of an original way to us this technology.  Maybe instead of looking for the newest invention, we should spend time thinking how the technology we already have can be used in new ways.

How Much is the Google “Brand” Worth?

As a follow-up to Adam’s post on Google’s new Chrome Web browser, this BusinessWeek article by Andy Beal raises some interesting points about substance vs. media hype in the branding of new technology.

If you have read any technology news in the last week–blogs, newspapers, listserv posts, you name it–you have probably witnessed a swell of excitement over Google’s new product announcement. Technophiles have hotly debated whether it would, like many of Google’s products, revolutionize the Web; they have discussed issues of corporate monopoly; they have eagerly anticipated getting to test-drive this new toy; they have read the slick comic book-style product announcement.

But the question remains, should we believe the hype?