Slow news week? Not really, but a lot of it is SO freaking boring: Mega court battles between Apple vs. Samsung, Facebook this—Facebook that and just try to find someone who’s not changing their privacy policy today. In spite of that, there’s not much out there that is truly inspiring.
So, here’s the cool shit that I did find this week:
Nokia
OK, not cool when you dump 4000 employees. Many of whom are from your homeland and must now find another way to subsist in -30ºC winters. Nokia has finally made the significant business decisions it should have made years ago—to send the bulk of its phone production to Asia.
All of its competitors have had this production advantage over Nokia since… since before smartphones existed. Not only should this bring down production costs, but most of Nokia’s suppliers are based in China and Taiwan, therefore the lead time of getting parts to the production facility should be greatly improved.
According to this GigaOm article, Nokia stands to save $1,000,000,000 in production costs. The shake-up no doubt comes about due to Nokia’s recent alignment with Microsoft—Redmond will have made some ‘recommendations’.
It all makes sense. So sorry 4000 people.
Nokia again
Oh wow—two bits on Nokia in the one story! Turns out Nokia rule the web when it comes to internet traffic. With mobile devices now accounting for 8.5% of all traffic, Nokia owns about 38% of that.
They might make mediocre phones (except the new N9), but they can still push them out to all the suckers!
I should note that when you compare this to Apple’s iPhone, which comes in second with about 28%, it’s not as impressive. There are really only 4 iPhones out there (5 if you include the original iPhone which didn’t even sell here) versus the plethora of handsets that Nokia currently sells.
3D printed JAWBONE
WTF? Sure, 3D printing isn’t new and I think it’s on the brink of exploding into our everyday lives very soon. But this is a little bit insane. An 83 year old lady was in need of a jaw transplant—so they printed her one out of titanium powder, no less.
There’s no much else to say only, have a look at it:
Ferris Bueller vs. Ferris Bueller + 30kg
You may or may definitely have heard of the Super Bowl. No one in Australia actually understands it. There was a decent amount of hype this last week just about the commercials.
The Super Bowl is traditionally when big business launch a new advertisements that cost a bomb to run. Considering that 111M Americans tuned in to watch it, it might seem worth it.
Doing the rounds on Youtube has been, what is perhaps the most successful ad from this year’s Super Bowl, Matthew Broderick reprisal of Ferris Bueller for Honda’s new CR-V… a drab attempt at a… people mover, van, pseudo-4WD?
Anyway, thanks to AkooTV, here’s a nice comparison between the original movie and the ad. It’s pretty well done and it’s now easier to see why: