Category: technology

2Mar

Foursquare to OpenStreetMap

2 Mar 2012 pbenavent

Foursquare has made a great change. They’re moving from Google Maps to Open Street Maps.
This is not only a simple map change. Google Maps and Open Street Maps they both have different approaches.
While Google is a Foursquare has choose Open Street Map because:

It’s a crowd-sourced global atlas, and it’s kind of amazing! It’s like Wikipedia for geography.) We love the idea of open data, and were happy to try it out. (Source)

Now, my two cents; is it going to penalize Foursquare in any particular way from Google’s point of view?

8Feb

RIM Blackberry, where are you going?

8 Feb 2012 pbenavent

I thought Nokia has was unfocused when they don’t re-act in front of Apple’s and Android’s innovations. Now it seems that RIM with they Blackberry are in the same situation.

Playbook was a nice idea, I’ve try a test unit for a minutes and people from RIM told us very interesting things about how it was going to be.

T2M or Time to Market is crucial and they have been late. Dozens of cheap and affordable Android are flooding stores, for Christmas, for valentines… and if you want a more high quality device you may choose among Mototola Xoom, Asus EEE Pad Transformer, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 and for sure iPad. I give a try to all of them, you won’t go wrong with them. There, for sure, differences.

But, how many people do you know that uses a Playbook? How many Playbook have you seen on a store? The fact is RIM is offering a free Playbook to developers who send them an Android app able to run on their device.

I’m sorry, but being late is the same as loosing your North.

6Dec

Handmade technology & art(ist)

6 Dec 2011 pbenavent

After a week dealing with software updates, and thinking how far I feel from main subject from this personal & technology notes, suddenly I found this TED-Talk. It makes me reconcile with human being, where hand-made stuff, art and artist, makes us feel, again, like a child.

29Oct

Amazon in Spain

29 Oct 2011 pbenavent

Couple of weeks ago Amazon has come to Spain. As long as I’m Amazon customer (both UK & USA sites) I have a look on it. Nothing new, just Amazon. There’re two things where Amazon may have a great impact in Spain:

  • digital books, because the lack of good aproach from publishers, they seems to be blind
  • distribution, because they portfolio, price and cost on delivery

I need books, traditional ones not digital, for my yet not finished university studies. So I check my university online store and Amazon. In short: Amazon is cheaper (even more, if I consider Amazon offer free cost delivery and my university charges an amount for it). Amazon is easier.

The truth must be told and I’ve to admit Amazon has no stock, but honestly, is this particular case I can wait a few days.

In conclusion, IT technologies may help -significantly- to bussines success; easiness in use, delivery efficiency, cost reduction, process management… that’s what you may find after my buy decision in Amazon.

5Sep

Goodbay Planet, hello WordPress

5 Sep 2011 pbenavent

Lately I’m being helping a friends in getting together a couple of blogs. Those blogs are on different platforms, with different publishimg rythim.

My friends wants to put it all together in a single website, all this blogs ordered by publishing time, the most recent at the top of the page. The ideal scenario is all has to be done automatically.

Inmediatly I think about Planet using sindication. There’re different software for this purpose -truth must be told and there’re not so much options- for instance; Planet requieres Python.

But a very good friend of mine -thank you Jaime- found an interesting plugin for WordPress that really gets the same results without such requirement, much more easy to install and very very easy to manage for a non expert admin.

So, deal done! The plugin is FeedWordPress (as long I remember that’s the plugin name)