Harry McCracken

Kodak Instamatic

I’m part of the problem: I never owned a Kodak digital camera. In fact, I’m not sure if I ever owned a Kodak camera–not counting disposable ones–period.

Until now, I’ve thought of Foodspotting mostly as an iPhone app which my wife uses to share photos of her meal when we dine out. She loves it. So do enough other people that a million pictures have been uploaded since the app’s launch, making it feel a bit like an Instagram that’s entirely devoted to things you can eat.

But there’s probably a limit to how many folks there are in the world who want to obsessively photograph food. So the new version of Foodspotting that launched this week is designed to broaden the app’s appeal. The photo sharing’s still there -- but it feels more like one feature in an app whose primary purpose is to let large numbers of people find and see the best dishes at local restaurants before they place an order.

So it’s official: By merging its various privacy policies into one master policy that permits it to intermingle the things it knows about you, Google has become evil. Or at least that's the stance of Gizmodo's Mat Honan, who isn't alone in his furor:

In a release exuberantly titled “Lumia 900 Introduction to Trigger Smartphone Renaissance for Nokia and Microsoft,” IHS iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam has some predictions about where the phone market is going between now and 2015:

Largely based on Nokia’s strong support, Windows Phone is set to regain the No. 2 rank in the smartphone operating system in 2015. Finnish-based Nokia in 2009 lost its second-place worldwide ranking because of rising competition from Google Inc.’s Android and Apple Inc.’s iOS.

In 2015, however, Windows Phone will account for 16.7 percent of the smartphones shipped, up from less than 2 percent in 2011, according to the IHS iSuppli Mobile & Wireless Communications Service at information and analysis provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). This will allow Windows Phone to slightly surpass Apple’s iOS to retake the market’s second rank behind Android, as presented in the table below.

isuppli

That’s awfully confident-sounding. Windows Phone is “set” to become #2 by 2015 and “will” have market share of 16.7 percent and “will” overtake iOS. And hey, it’s an analyst who knows his stuff doing the talking, so the rest of us should pay attention.

Judging from the turnout for our live coverage of Apple’s education event–which was much sparser than for something like the iPad 2 announcement–a lot of tech enthusiasts lost interest in today’s news when they figured out that it didn’t involve any new hardware. That’s a shame. The news–a new textbook-friendly version of iBooks, a free book-creation tool called iBooks Author, and a spiffier version of the iTunes U courseware app–has as much or more potential to make its mark on the world as any new iPad or iPhone could. Everything looks really, really cool.

Kodak Instant Camera

So Eastman Kodak has declared bankruptcy. Right now, Twitter is like a wake for this most beloved of American companies. I refuse to speak of Kodak in the past tense, though: bankruptcy protection is not a death sentence, and when it says, as it does in its press release, that it intends to ”emerge a lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company,” I’m rooting for it to do exactly that.

Americans, as Winston Churchill famously pointed out, can be counted on to do the right thing -- after exhausting all other possibilities. It’s the same deal with tech companies. The wonders they bring us are many, varied, and never-ending, but they’ve always been accompanied by an equally rich assortment of misadventures and wrongheaded ideas. The successes and failures feed off each other, propelling the entire industry forward in herky-jerky, unpredictable fashion.

It may just be me, but I can’t remember many years as peculiar as 2011 turned out to be for this business. Even demonstrably gifted and sensible people like Netflix’s Reed Hastings seemed to fall victim to a fever that made them do strange, ill-advised things. I hope that 2012 is a tad less weird, but 2011 has been fascinating to cover, and never, ever boring.

The Rock and Bill Gates introduce the original Xbox at CES in 2001.Microsoft has announced that next month’s Steve Ballmer keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas will be its last, and that it won’t have its own booth at the show. The move is unquestionably reminiscent of Apple’s 2008 decision to pull out of Macworld Expo, although Microsoft will still be a part of the show in other ways. It’s just ending its traditional, high-profile presence.

And what a long tradition it’s been. It started, of course, not with Ballmer but with Bill Gates. And it didn’t begin with CES. For years, a Gates keynote kicked off the now-defunct COMDEX show: He did them in Vegas in November and sometimes at Spring COMDEX in other cities.

Putting the kibosh on one of 2011′s biggest non-stories, Bill Gates has said he isn’t going to return to full-time work at Microsoft. Thank heavens. His current gig as a philanthropist matters far more than anything he might do to nudge Windows Phone in the right direction or get Windows 8 off to a good start. (I’m convinced that when the world remembers Gates in a century or two, his philanthropy will be the first thing that comes to mind; Microsoft will be the second career that also deserves a mention.)

Bill Gates

The notion that Gates might have staged a Microsoft comeback seems to have been wishful thinking more than possible reality. Microsoft faces lots of challenges. Some people think that its current CEO, Steve Ballmer, is doing a lousy job of tackling them. Who better than its co-founder to rise to the challenge? Wouldn’t it be pretty much like Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, which worked out OK?

It’s been a busy week for mobile applications that mimic the feel of a magazine, but with content from an array of sources. First, iPad hit Flipboard arrived on the iPhone. Then Google unveiled Currents, an iOS and Android app which basically answers the question “What if Google had invented Flipboard?”

Now Zite, another iPad mainstay, is joining Flipboard on the iPhone. The company recently gave me a sneak peek and a bit of hands-on time with the app.
In some respects, Zite is an awful lot like Flipboard. Both programs pull in stories from a bevy of news sites and blogs, and weave them together into an addictively browsable, continuously updated package. But Zite is also fundamentally different from Flipboard. It uses your activity on Facebook or Twitter to help it begin to figure out what topics you’re interested in, so it can create sections about them. Then it analyzes your use of the app to fine-tune its story selections. (You can also add sections manually.)

Flipboard, by contrast, relies heavily on the links your social-network friends share, and allows you to add sections for feeds from specific sites and services, something which Zite doesn’t allow. It’s just now beginning to add the sort of algorithmic story-selecting technology that’s at the heart of Zite.


The single best thing about Flipboard is its amazingly polished, clever user interface. Zite, on the iPad and the iPhone, doesn’t come close. But it does get the job done. On the iPhone, a scrolling list of categories is up top, and a list of articles sits below. As with Flipboard, the iPad and iPhone versions sync up so your customizations show up in both places.


It’s good to see Zite on the iPhone. And we might see it in a lot of other places eventually. The company–which is now part of CNN–says its long-term goal is to be available everywhere, including other operating systems and the Web.

How do I feel about the major makeover which Twitter unveiled yesterday? Well, it’s been hard for me to come to any conclusions, at least when it comes to the iPhone version. For some reason, it’s refusing to show me my timeline and @replies. Some other folks are reporting problems, too, and the fixes they’ve suggested aren’t helping me. I presume it’s a bug that’ll get fixed.

(It’s also showing me an outdated list of my Direct Messages that’s missing the recent ones -- a glitch I’ve been encountering on multiple platforms for a long time.)

Can the iPad replace a PC?

Ever since Apple announced its tablet nearly two years ago, the Internet has been awash in discussion of this question. Most of it has had a pretty theoretical feel and has gravitated towards conventional wisdom. A piece by Gotta Be Mobile’s Will Shanklin comes to the typical conclusions: