What Comes After Panoramic Photos?

Wind back the clock 15 years. Imagine yourself wiping the sweat off your brow after the close call that was the “Y2K Millenium Bug”… Phew, that was a close one wasn’t it?

You take a glance down at your phone, thankful to be alive and decide to give your folks a call to express how grateful you are for planes not falling out of the sky and computers not spontaneously combusting around us.

You finish the call, and decide to take selfie to celebrate the moment… wait? A what? What’s a selfie!!? Yup, that’s right, there really wasn’t such a thing as a “Selfie” back then. Sure people used to take pictures of themselves using cameras pointing the wrong way, but these weren’t globally known as selfies, they weren’t splattered in front of our vision every waking moment of every waking day. They were an occasional bad photo amongst an album, or a snap from a web cam as they increasingly became popular.

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10 Of The Most Iconic Brands In The World

There are a number of brands that are considered superstars in their respective fields. Whether it's fashion, technology or energy, these iconic brands have grown beyond their target audience and become household names.

What do they all have in common then? Quality is the obvious answer, yes – but we're here to talk about how the design of these incredible brands has elevated them to such heights.

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Mac OSX 10.10 Revealed

There was a lot of interesting thing’s going on this week, such as the co-founder of the pirate bay getting arrested, or Justin.tv announcing that they are going to be deleting their video archives on June 8^th. But one thing that really stood out was the WWDC Conference that was held on June 2^nd. Although not a lot of hardware changes were announced, the software side of things did get some big announcements this week. For example the OSX10.10 Yosemite being shown at Apple’s keynote presentation. Although a lot of the changes that were made seemed to be in the visual department, some new features were added to give it some more hype. Giving the new updated OS more mobile controls, this version of the OSX line up is looking more promising by the day.

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Microsoft Releases Office for iPad, and Cuts Support to Windows XP

Although it has been four years it has finally happened, and was the talk of the tech community last week. Finally Microsoft releases the Office for iPad application, which is now on the top most downloaded applications in the iPad’s app store. It may not be the best of office applications, but it was what people were looking for in an office application. It is free to download but you do have to have an Office 365 account to create and edit documents. But you can read documents with no problem. For a more hand on approach to this cool little application, the link below should help you a lot better than a simple explanation.

http://techcrunch.com/video/microsoft-office-for-ipad-hands-on/518175375/

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Is Apple the company who gets to decide the future of wearable computing?

'Wearable computing'. These buzzwords seem to be popping up all over the place these days. From a consumer standpoint - the general adoption of technology moves in stages. First there was the personal computer, then the 'dot com' revolution, then the iPod, then the smartphone and most recently the rise of tablets. From a forward-thinking standpoint right now, the next 'phase' of consumer technology is set to be far closer to us than ever before.

Think back for a moment. Computers used to fill rooms - but then they shrunk. What is the definition of a computer? Some would say a computer sits on your desk and runs an operating system like Windows or OS X. Others would say it's a device which 'computes' things - so while it could be a desktop or laptop computer like we generally think of them, it could also be something as mundane as a calculator or egg timer. That aside, looking at the transition from room-filling scientific 'super-computers' to bag-able, desktop personal computers we can get an insight into how the mobile technology we use today will evolve. 

Mobile technology has and is continuing to evolve. What started with redicolous-looking brick-like communication devices turned into sleek, sexy and character-defining 'all-round' devices. The mobile device someone uses defines their personality. Using an early 2000s flip-phone? You are more likely to be less technically savvy. Up until recently if you used an Android phone you'd be considered a geek. iPhones were for normal people and Androids were for the geeky tech-people who wanted the options and customisation that Android brought to the table. Now? Not so much.

This is because Apple got there first. Apple came in 2007 with the iPhone - the first consumer friendly smartphone. People flocked to it and the rest is history. This helped Apple in their effort to be at the start of almost every new consumer technological 'stage.' Think about it, the iPod was so successful it is pretty much a household, generic name for 'MP3 player.' iPad is the default tablet a normal person would jump to. Same goes for the iPhone. So what does it take for another company to destroy the image of 'this is neat, but it won't be anything when Apple gets into this market' that we see so much when regarding products such as the Pebble smartwatch.

There's no denying that Android is pretty much on-par with iOS in the user-friendliness field these days. Kit Kat isn't annoying or confusing to consumers - much like iOS. Does this new equallity (or lead) mean that Google now has the power to start a technological revolution. Can Google take what Apple despretly wants and needs and be the company who kickstarts and continues to lead the wearable revolution? The only people who can decide this are the consumers. It's an interesting point - how much does brand identity matter? If a consumer doesn't care that the Google logo is on the backface of their new 'smart' watch instead of the shiny Apple logo then perhaps they may just beat Apple in this new industry. But we don't know. We'll have to wait and see.