Linked List: May 3, 2009

Sunday, 3 May 2009

NYT Reports That Larger Kindle Will Appear This Week ★

Brad Stone reporting for The New York Times:

As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha ★

Theodore Gray of Wolfram Research says Wolfram Alpha is more than just a fact engine, it’s a computation engine:

It’s not so much that it would have been impossible to do without Mathematica, but that it would have been impractically difficult. In fact, the easiest way to create Wolfram Alpha without Mathematica would have been to write Mathematica first, then use it. Which is precisely what we have spent the past 23 years doing.

Danny Sullivan on the Wolfram Alpha ‘Fact Engine’ ★

Danny Sullivan has an intriguing preview of Wolfram Alpha, which he describes as a “fact engine”.

Om Malik: ‘Twitter Is Giving Facebook an Inferiority Complex’ ★

What Twitter has over Facebook right now is the ineffable: mojo.

An Aspirational Twitter ★

Rands on Birdhouse and Tweetie.

‘Unlikely to Become Dominant’ ★

Richard Wray and Bobbie Johnson on the iPhone’s future prospects in The Observer:

With so much now at stake, some experts suggest the iPhone will soon become the most important technology Apple’s empire has produced, even, potentially, eclipsing the computer business that revolutionised our lives in the 1980s. There are an estimated 1bn personal computers in use worldwide, but that many mobile phones are sold every year and for many people their first experience of computing will be through a mobile phone.

What they do not see is that the iPhone is not something different than Apple’s computer business; it is the next step in Apple’s computer business.