David Lidsky's Blog, page 4773

The 50 Most Innovative Companies...on the iPad

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Here are some examples of the ways our Most Innovative Companies are taking advantage of Apple's new tablet.

Facebook: Interestingly, Facebook hasn't released a dedicated iPad app yet--but "Facebook Ultimate," a Facebook iPad app with no connection to those behind Facebook, has managed to crack into the top 10 paid apps in just two days' time. It's made pretty clear that this is an unofficial app, so once Facebook does enter the fray, they'll probably knock Facebook Ultimate way down the...

iPad's Sales Figures Better Than iPhone's

Apple has just sent out its sales figures for the iPad's debut on Saturday, and the company is claiming *rips envelope open* 300,000 units were shifted on Saturday alone. Not bad, although, the pre-sale feeding frenzy made one analyst revise his initial estimate of 250,000 to 300,000 tablets in the first weekend, to between 600,000 and 700,000 (Yes, Gene Munster, that means you). But how does that compare to sales of the iPhone, Cupertino's first mass-market device it sent out?

Back in June...

Jan Chipchase, Nokia's Usability Guru, Leaves for Frog Design

Chipchase is perhaps the world's most admired expert in "human-centered design": Knowing how people use their gadgets, and how to design for them.

Frog Design--already one of most influential design firms in the world--has just caught a very big fish: Jan Chipchase, formerly Nokia's chief usability researcher, is leaving the Finnish firm and joining Frog as Executive Creative Director of Global Insights.

Chipchase will be based in Shanghai, and that tells you a lot about both what Frog is...

Space Shuttle: No iPad, but Still Awesome

Just a few hours ago NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery sprang from its launch pad on legs of fire, bound for space--for the very final time at night. It's a mark of the end of an era in space discovery...and it'll sadly go unnoticed by many.

This is Shuttle mission number STS131, and Discovery's 6:21AM departure from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center is essentially a ferrying trip, hauling tons of cargo up to sustain the operations in the International Space Station and delivering a new...

10 Essential iPad Tips & Tricks

Any idiot can use an iPad at a basic level. It's designed that way. But even still, there are things that you're just supposed to magically know—things no one ever necessarily tells you. So we're here to help.

The Hard Reset

The single most common thing people don't realize about the iPhone OS (from my experience) is how to perform a hard reset—which you'll find extremely useful in cases when the system freezes.

Just hold the top (power) and bottom front (home) button for a few...

Lifelike Geminoid F Robot Creepily Blurs Boundaries of Reality

We cover a lot of robots here on Fast Company, sometimes exciting tech, sometimes promising for healthcare, or the future of daily life...and sometimes outright creepy. The latest Japanese android is firmly in this category.

She's a product of the Intelligent Robotics lab at Osaka University and robot builders Kokoro Co. Ltd., and she's dubbed Geminoid F (the "f" is for female.) And all that use of the word "she" is justified, as the bot is quite definitely convincingly female--which...

Apple's iPad is Speedy--Because it Has to Be

The iPad has landed, rocketing its gleaming metal tech down on the dusty computing world to set up a new Tranquility Tablet base. But report after report notes iPad is anything but "tranquil"--it's blazingly fast. Why? It kinda had to be.

Before Joe Public got his mitts on Apple's wondertablet this weekend, we'd heard a few mentions from folk who used one at its January launch event, and then the official reviewers late last week, that one of the most impressive features of the iPad was its...

iPad Jailbroken After a Mere Day on the Market

Jailbreaking a new iPhone OS device is almost a race these days, but we never expected the hackers to break through the iPad's security in one day. And yet, that's exactly what they've done.

MuscleNerd, an apparently well-known member of the iPhone Dev Team (the group of tinkerers responsible for most of the jailbreaking of the iPhone and iPod Touch), managed to use a similar technique with the iPad as with the iPhone for a preliminary jailbreak. The hack seems to be a browser-based exploit...

Are Paid Newspaper Apps Floundering on the iPad's Opening Weekend?

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There are a few news stories today, started by Rafat Ali at PaidContent, saying the old media newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad are flailing. Ali says despite the buzz, these apps "are barely present in top paid apps, whether by
number of apps downloaded, or by the gross revenues from their apps." It's not that that isn't true, but it's certainly not the whole story.

If you take a glance at the bestselling paid and free apps in iTunes, you'll see why Ali says what he says. Seven of...

iPad's First-Day Stutters: Problems Charging Over USB and iPhone App Upscaling

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The underlying problems, things like the lack of multitasking, expandability, the anemic iBookstore selection--all that stuff has been covered in the initial reviews. It's something else entirely to actually have an Apple iPad in your hands, playing with it--you'll discover quirks that only come from use, and the internet community has been very vocal about them.

Charging (or Not) Over USB

Consumer Reports reports (ha!) that charging the iPad over USB is, at best, hit-and-miss. Plugging an...