Apple Unveils Product-Unveiling Product

SAN FRANCISCO ”At a highly anticipated media event Tuesday at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs introduced a new Apple product he said would “revolutionize” the process of unveiling new products throughout the world.

apple-unveilsarticle.jpg

Trinity switches to Gmail

A college that can’t manage their own email? Next you’ll be telling me about a college that can’t develop their own website!

ENN: Trinity College, Dublin has become the first European university to adopt Google’s Gmail application as its standard e-mail system. The college’s 15,000 students will change over to the system in October, and will retain their @tcd.ie e-mail suffix on the Google system for life. Welcoming the announcement, Google’s European sales and operations director John Herlihy said: “We are very excited to be partnering with an august and progressive college such as Trinity on this project. Their vision of how technology can enhance student life and build a long term relationship with college alumni is shared by Google”.

EDIT: Peter asked me to point out that UCC does manage their own website. In fairness though, I never suggested they didn’t — development is about design and implementation, and configuring a third-party CMS is hardly implementation. If configuration of the CMS takes up more than half the work, why bother with it in the first place?

Peter also remarks that UCC doesn’t employ any full-time designers of it’s own, but I’d bet that out of the thousands of students in UCC, there are more than a few that would produce far better than the frankly quite drab end-result. They’d appreciate the money a hell of a lot more too, no doubt a ridiculous amount?

ENN Journalism

I don’t know why ENN is even still in my reader. Here’s an article about a new SIMI website that apparently lets you grep the history of a car. 200 words in the article, and not one of them is linked to the website, despite plenty of opportunities. Click on the author link to report it, and you get an empty mailto. I despair, so I do.

The website is here by the way. It took me five seconds to Google SIMI to find it, and paste it into this post. The site is a turd, but that’s a whole other post.

Cisco acquires Tribe.net

A very odd purchase. Cisco should stick to the old hardware, imho.

News.com: Cisco Systems announced on Monday one of its most unusual deals: it has purchased the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social-networking site.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by an eight-employee company called Utah Street Networks, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

I met Twenty!

Big ups to Twenty Major for winning the Most Humourous Post category in Saturday’s Blog Awards. I was well chuffed to be sponsoring a category again this year, so being the first to present an award to the elusive Twenty was a big bonus. :)

Dr. Ruth Was Israeli Sniper

No, seriously. Snopes says so.

“When I was in my routine training for the Israeli army as a teenager, they discovered completely by chance that I was a lethal sniper. I could hit the target smack in the center further away than anyone could believe. Not just that, even though I was tiny and not even much of an athlete, I was incredibly accurate throwing hand grenades too. Even today I can load a Sten automatic rifle in a single minute, blindfolded.”