Total Pageviews

First Image of an Alert Malala Yousafzai Lights Up Social Networks

Last Updated, 9:15 p.m. As The Times reports, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban, to silence her calls for girls' education, continues to show signs of recovery at the British hospital where she is being treated.

In an extensive text update on her condition posted online, doctors at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham said that the gravely wounded teenager, Malala Yousafzai, was able to stand with assistance and communicate by writing. The hospital also released the first photograph of the young activist with her eyes open since she was shot on Oct. 9.

The image rapidly spread across social networks, electrifying supporters of the young woman who cheered the news that, as one Brazilian journalist observed, “Taliban , you lost.”

In the update on her condition, under the heading, “Next Steps in Care,” the hospital explained that Malala “Needs time to recover and recuperate,” adding:

- She is still very ill

- We need to get her strong enough to do reconstructive surgery

- The skull bone will need to be replaced either with her own bone or with a titanium plate

- Surgery weeks to months down the line

- This is a fluid situation and she sustained a very, very grave injury. She's not out of the woods yet, but we are hopeful she will make a good recovery.

Since the shooting, Malala's plight has generated worldwide interest in the news media, as well as among public officials and complete strangers offering to help her. The British hospital also created a page where people can send messages to Malala or contribute donations to support her recovery.

Follow Chri stine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.

Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.



Dallas Mourns Big Tex on Social Media

A photo montage tribute to Big Tex set to music and uploaded onto YouTube on Friday.

For 60 years, Big Tex has towered over the annual State Fair of Texas, wearing his signature cowboy shirt and always a 75-gallon hat. The 52-foot-tall cowboy statue is such an icon in Dallas that when it was destroyed by a fast-moving electrical fire that began in its size-70 boots on Friday, as my colleague Manny Fernandez reports, the people of the city turned to social media to share and to mourn. The mayor vowed to rebuild.

No one was injured in the blaze, which can be seen in cellphone video.

Short cellphone video showing Big Tex on fire

The news prompted Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas to head to the scene, where he vowed that Big Tex would stand again.

Big Tex was even had his own Facebook page, wh ich attracted hundreds of comments.

“RIP…..Rebuild In Pride that's what Big Tex represents to Texans. Love you, Big Tex. ♥,” wrote Suzy Hagar on Facebook.

The Dallas Morning News set up a page for people to leave comments. The newspaper also pointed readers to an article about Big Tex recently turning 60 and pulled together photos of him over the years.

Big Tex charmed visitors with his voice as well as his size. He could talk, as seen here in a YouTube video uploaded in 2007.

Big Tex greets visitors in this video uploaded onto YouTube in 2007

Some people expressed regret on Twi tter for not getting their photo next to Big Tex this year. Others voiced their relief and shared their recent photos with the big, tall guy.



The Mobile Wave Rolls On

Last month, I e-mailed Eric Schmidt with a question on the smartphone patent wars. Mr. Schmidt, Google‘s executive chairman, sidestepped my particular question, but he emphasized the broader context for the intellectual property disputes - the high-stakes competition between Google's Android software and Apple‘s iOS.

“That competition, in my opinion,” Mr. Schmidt wrote, “is the defining competition in the industry today.”

The battle in smartphone and tablet technology - to build so-called platform ecosystems of partners, developers and users - is the underlying theme in not only Google's seemingly disappointing quarterly performance reported on Thursday, but also in a string of recent tech company and industry reports.

The once-dominant personal computer platform is in retreat. The quarterly results this week from Microsoft, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices all point in that direction. Yes, there is a product-transition issue as the mainstrea m PC world pauses while waiting for the upcoming release of Windows 8, Microsoft's new operating system. But the report from IDC last week showed that even Apple's shipments of Macintosh computers were off 7 percent in the third quarter.

Still, people buying fewer personal computers and more smartphones and tablets is a trend that warms the hearts in Cupertino, Calif., Apple's headquarters. That is a tradeoff the company will take gladly, given Apple's lofty profit margins on iPhones and iPads.

The other mobile technology heavyweight, Google, is making a tradeoff of its own. Yes, its profit margins are slipping a bit as more people increasingly use its search and other services on smartphones and tablets. The price paid by advertisers per click is less on mobile devices than on the bigger screens of PCs.

But the mobile ad market is embryonic, although growing rapidly. The business models haven't been figured out yet. Recall, though, that Google was founded and well underway before it figured out the search ad model that made the company an Internet cash register.

The first rule of building a dominant technology platform is to, well, build it fast and build it big. That is what gets that self-reinforcing ecosystem rolling - more users attract more industry partners, more advertisers and more software developers. And the lucrative snowball rolls on.

Larry Page, Google's chief executive, went out of his way to point out on the conference call that 500 million people are now carrying around mobile devices powered by its Android software. That army of Android users is growing daily.

“Scale is Google's performance-enhancing drug,” observed Timothy Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”



How Are 7-Inch Tablets Doing?

Apple is widely expected to introduce a smaller, cheaper version of its iPad on Tuesday, perhaps in response to the crop of 7-inch tablets that have popped up in the last year. But how are those tablets even doing anyway?

It turns out that the number of seven-inch tablets sold by each of Apple's major competitors is small compared to the number of iPads it has sold.

To date, Apple has sold about 84 million iPads. Amazon's Kindle Fire, the second-best-selling tablet, has sold about seven million units; Barnes and Noble has sold about five million Nook tablets; and Google has sold about three million Nexus 7 tablets, according to estimates by Forrester.

That's about 15 million tablets across three companies. And while no single company presents a major threat to Apple yet, it's not a number to sneeze at - after all, that's 15 million more iPads that Apple could have sold. So it makes sense that the company is preparing its own smaller tablet at a lower pri ce, said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester analyst.

“Apple is smart to be acting before it gets to be more of a problem,” she said.

Steve Jobs once dismissed seven-inch tablets, saying they were “tweeners” that were too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad. Several sources have said Apple's smaller iPad will be 7.85 inches, which is a bit bigger than 7 inches but might still be considered a “tweener.” Would these sell nearly as well as the current iPad?

Stephen Baker, an analyst with the NPD Group, thinks smaller tablets are a viable category because they cater to people who don't want to spend too much money on a tablet, or those who just want something smaller to carry with them everywhere.

Ms. Rotman Epps agreed. She said a 7.85-inch iPad could also broaden the product's appeal to women because it would most likely fit in a purse.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)