The paradox in iCloud

I’ve been sort of following WWDC, You know: what the sentiment was, what the novelties were and, obviously, what Steve Jobs oracled that fine day at the West Coast. Steve Jobs was, could it be any different, the ultimate keynote speaker and his brilliant master stroke that day was: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device, we're going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud." With this bright future claim, Jobs introduced, what Apple refers to as iCloud. And this is how it works: iCloud is integrated across Apple desktops and Apple mobile devices to ensure that all of your Apple computers can synchronize contacts, calendars, email, apps, music, photos, and more. Most likely, iCloud can be integrated not just in Apple machines but in machines that run on any given OS. So Apple is offering a fully integrated service while at the same time other companies offer parts of the service (i.e. Amazon's latest music service, Google's Gmail inbox, Youtube, Dropbox, Wiggio, Flickr) no one combines it all into one seamless service that also works across a set of hardware devices. And it's free. Now, isn’t that nice?

Tagged with: interdependency, hq, icloud, media, paradox, apple,

A literate paradox

According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) 97% of the population of men and women between 12 and 75 years have used the Internet in 2008. That is an amazing number, I’d say. 20% uses the Internet at somebody else’s place, like at a friend’s place, 47% uses the Internet at work and 18 % in school. 6% uses the Internet somewhere else, meaning in an Internet café, hotel, etc. So, what do these figures tell us? To be frank, I wouldn’t know.

Tagged with: paradox, literacy, visuals, internet,