Stuff worth typing about

Microsoft’s director of game platform strategy has announced on his blog that he will be leaving Microsoft for the sunny shores of Amazon. Andre Vrignaud stated in his blog post that, while he is excited about where Microsoft is going, he is intrigued by what Amazon is looking to do.

It is ‘what Amazon is looking to do’ that has most people talking, however. People, from developers to CEO’s, move from company to company fairly frequently; companies look to bring in established talent or fresh blood to keep their business alive, and employees like to keep things interesting for themselves also. As someone in my sixth year at my current day job, I can understand the appeal of moving jobs to keep yourself sane.

So there is nothing unusual about the move itself, the bigger question is what it means. What is Amazon looking to do? Andre pretty much summed it up in his post with the line;

Can’t really talk about details at this point, but it’ll become pretty evident soon enough… and you all know where my passions lie.

It seems at the moment that every major tech company is making a move in the every tech market. Amazon have their video streaming service, their music store and their eBooks, and seem to be making a move on the gaming market. Apple have iTunes, Apple TV, and are making more of a push on the gaming and eReader front. Microsoft has Zune(kind of) and Xbox, which is incorporating more and more video. Google are into everything, but that is not unusual.

If things continue, we should expect to see a Microsoft eReader, an Amazon phone and an Apple gaming console (iBox?) before the end of 2011!

Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz have successfully created a tiny optical device and integrated it into a silicon chip that, basically, allows optical signals to be received directly, rather than being converted to an electronic signal first.

There are implications for quantum computing in this story, but what I am most excited about is what this could mean for power. The fact that the signal no longer has to be converted to (or from, for that matter) an electronic signal means lower power consumption, and that is good. Computing power has progressed rapidly, holding with Moore’s Law, and these days, a huge number of us carry a small computer in our pockets (I’m talking about your phone!) all the time.

It would not be inconceivable in the near future for our phones to replace our desktop computers and laptops, and instead of buying a laptop, you buy a laptop-like enclosure with a screen, keyboard, media drive, etc, and your phone just slots into. What’s the one thing that is hampering our progress to this glorious future? Battery power.

The reason for this is simple; computing power may progress according to Moore’s Law, but batteries are chemical, an entirely different field of science, and relatively little improvement on the battery front, when compared to improvements in processing power. It would seem that the the most effective way around this, until some major advancement in small scale power storage is made, would be to lower the power requirements of the hardware, and things like this optical device (just to bring you back to the story) and OLED screens are doing just that.

It shouldn’t be too long before we have mobile devices that can run for longer than their predecessors on the same amount of power, despite being ridiculously more powerful.

My final story for today is the new Google logo. I like the fact that Google put the effort into creating these logos; it makes me feel better about Google when some of the more worrying stories emerge, but they do it often so I don’t like to talk about it unless it’s really cool, because it feels like cheating, or scraping the barrel for news.

Todays logo, however, has significance in the wider Google picture. At the moment, when you go to the Google homepage, the logo is greyed out. As you type your search query, the Google logo colours up, one letter at a time, in sync with your keystrokes. If you delete your query, the letters are greyed out again. The general consensus (mine included) is that this is to do with the ‘live results’ search that they have been testing.

The live results are, well, just what they sound like. Instead of you typing a search query and pressing enter to get your results, the results update as you type. So if you were searching for ‘John Bullock,’ as you typed, you would be shown search results for ‘J,’ then ‘Jo,’ then ‘Joh,’ and so on. This is a nice feature, and it is no surprise that Google are paying close attention to their search engine as (I believe) it is their main source of income.

Google currently have the lions share of the search market, and competitors, like Bing, have tried eat into that share with big marketing campaigns and pretty homepages. While I wouldn’t class myself as a ‘fanboy’ of anything, I am a fan of Google, and it is good to see them rolling out features like this. That said, I hope they give you the option to turn it off; I imagine the constantly changing search results as you type could become annoying if you spend as much time on Google as I do.

Some other stuff

2K have announced TopSpin 4; the next instalment in their Tennis sim series. While no real detail has been given, 2K promise an ‘uncanny level of realism.’ I was a big fan of TopSpin 3, and I’ll be happy if they just improve the movement of my player so he doesn’t run like he’s soiled himself!

Samsung have announced that they will be releasing a dual-core processor for mobile platforms, codenamed ‘Orion.’ This isn’t a massive story, as a number of companies already have dual-core mobile processors out, but I felt it tied in nicely with the above story about our phones getting more and more powerful.

Finally, in news that makes me cry, a story on Cnet by Chris Matyszczyk, about a Twitter post from Dustin Curtis (@dcurtis) saying that, allegedly, 3% of Twitter’s infrastructure is taken up by Justin Bieber. Given the size of Twitter’s operation, this translates to racks of server space. Depressing.

That’s all the news that interested me today. Check back tomorrow for more of the same… but with different stories. Hopefully.

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