Here are three big things in technology this week… that is to say; three things that really took my fancy.
What bubble?
Facebook is going public. Yup Zuckerberg, who allegedly decided to make Facebook in this historic IM conversation, is taking his little ‘project’ to market. And the market has lofty expectations—analysts are predicting up to $100,000,000,000 (Dr. Evil voice: one-hundred-billion-dollars) worth of expectations. Or at least, that's what the value of the company will be, should it raise the $5B in cash that it is after.
With 800M users, that hundy billion would value 'our' data at $125 per head—okay, that's a low budget wedding reception these days. But to the losers who complain that statuses of I don’t want to go to work and pictures of my dinner are annoying—investors want to rub it all over their naked bodies. Hmmm, what’s going to happen to our data when investors get involved? And this is nice!
Crunchies
I’m a bit over the term ‘cloud computing’, but marketing people and the media have seized it with two hands and are dropping references left, right and centre. I’m now going to leverage my use of the word “dropping” to nicely segue into news about Dropbox…
The cloud service that holds your data for free just got voted Best Overall Startup and Best Cloud Service in Techcrunch’s Crunchies awards. Well deserved I say! I’ve had a crack at a few cloud services; there’s the much hyped Apple iCloud—which I’m sure will save me when next I lose my iPhone, but day to day I don’t really use it in meaningful ways. I hope that changes.
I’ve also got this Amazon Web Services cloud thing—but I’ve not had the time to figure it out (i.e.: it’s too complicated for me)… and that’s the end of that really.
But Dropbox is easy. It’s easy to sign up for, it’s easy to use, it’s easy to access across platforms and it’s easy to share. There’s a whole review in that sentence.
Shooting Round Corners
Whilst it’s not happy news, it’s certainly impressive news: some assholes have developed bullets that can self-guide themselves to their targets. You, the sniper, can fire your round in the right direction and let it home in on your target 2km away. Meanwhile, you’ve gone back to Skyping your 'mom'.
OK, so perhaps the heading is a little misleading—I’m not going to lose sleep over it though—but it’s only a matter of time before this:
Becomes this:
Then we’re all fucked—Gary Oldman can be one mean mthrfckr! But seriously, as bad as the act of killing is, where’s the skill in that? What happens when civilians get their mitts on self-guiding bullets?