> The talks with AMD could also be part of a competitive leveraging strategy to keep Intel interested in retaining Apple’s core business, similar to how the company has been rumored to be discussing plans [to use Microsoft’s Bing search](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/20/apple_microsoft_in_talks_to_make_bing_default_iphone_search_report.html) engine in preference to Google’s on the iPhone. In case you haven’t noticed yet, this is part of a pattern. Apple has never quite had full control over its destiny when it comes to processors. Just as it has always been held hostage by big software companies like Microsoft and Adobe on the Macintosh.

What Apple wants is complete control over the speed of its emerging technologies. Since it is one of the few companies out there steadily investing in innovation, it can’t afford to wait around for others to adapt to its rapid deployment of new technologies.

Hence, the talks with AMD. Even if Apple never uses an AMD chip in a Mac or iPad, talking to AMD serves as a reminder to Intel that Apple can make that change any time it likes. Same goes for Microsoft and Bing, vs. Google search.

This is also exactly why Apple wants to eliminate Flash. One more technology that Apple is powerless to control, and which Adobe has historically been lax in supporting on the Mac side.

It’s called learning from your past mistakes. Jobs doesn’t let you screw him twice. Just ask the people at Disney about that.

> The browser, media player, photo gallery, and e-mail client on the WebStation are all from “Cupcake” (Android 1.5), and work just about the same. However, every single site the browser pulls up is first rejected as an untrusted source (even Google and Gmail!). So you have to click through and accept every one. For Web services that are usually Android apps like Twitter and Facebook, this quickly becomes tiresome. I’m sure companies will come up with better “iPad Killers” eventually. But right now, this is the what is being presented to the world as an Android tablet.

And some people wonder why Apple has been so successful?

Note, this device also demonstrates perfectly what’s wrong with the Android App market, and why developers aren’t flocking to write Android apps. This is a device made in 2010, and yet it’s running Android OS 1.5, not the current 2.1. So many Android apps are incompatible with it. You can’t even use the Android Marketplace on this device, in fact. So a developer has no way to easily market his or her apps to owners of this device.

As much as most of this tablet’s shortcomings are Camangi’s fault, I blame Google for the complete lack of discipline that has led to next to no quality control in the Android universe.

> There will be two “pillars” to Twitter’s business model, Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo said at the company’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco. The first, announced earlier this week, is [Promoted Tweets](http://www.macworld.com/article/150571/2010/04/twitter_ads.html), which lets advertisers pay for sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results for certain keywords. I don’t know. Seems like the classic old “bait and switch” to me. Very few companies have gotten away with giving a service away for free, and then suddenly changing it to either a paid service, or an ad-based service. It seems like they are going about it carefully, only adding ads for search results so far, but it’s only a matter of time before we all start seeing ads in all our feeds. It’s a slippery slope, and some people are bound to reject this idea.

I wonder if Twitter plans on adding ads to Tweetie, now that it has purchased the app from Atebits. I sure hope not.

The only question is what other free service will step in and take those disgruntled users from Twitter? I can hear the wheels spinning in garages all over the Silicon Valley right now.

Commercial accounts could work, provided that companies can get people to follow them. At least if the ads are “opt-in”, users won’t be so quick to feel betrayed.

This is the classic Internet Startup problem all over again. We really haven’t learned anything from the original Dot Com bubble burst.

Is there really no room left in the world for a company that simply charges a fair price for its services from the get go?

> The iPad’s Web share grew steadily from April 3 until the weekend following the launch, April 10 and 11. At that time, the number peaked at 0.04 percent both days before settling back down as users went back to work. Comparatively, NetApplications recorded an average of 0.04 percent for BlackBerry devices over the [month of March](http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8), while all versions of Android together came in at 0.07 percent, as did Windows Mobile. The iPad, in 10 days, has already almost caught all Android devices combined, in terms of Internet use. This isn’t total number of devices, mind you. Rather, it’s a measure of how much the device is being used for Internet tasks.

Considering Apple hasn’t sold that many of these devices yet, that number is very impressive. And it shows that when you build a good product, people actually use it, as opposed to buying it and then letting it sit idle in a corner somewhere. That leads to future upgrade sales to more satisfied customers.

Also of note: None of these devices runs Flash. The next time an Adobe zealot tries to tell you that Flash is on 98% of all computers, remind him or her that Web traffic on mobile devices needs to be calculated into that number. Give it time. Sooner or later, there will be more tablets and smart phones using the Internet than desktop computers.

> **The first three Shrek films are to be converted into 3D, Dreamworks studio has announced.** > > Ahead of the release of the fourth film in the series, Shrek Forever After, the studio said it was converting the first three for a 3D Blu-ray release. As if it weren’t bad enough that Hollywood is pilfering my childhood with hundreds of film versions of bad old 80s TV shows (A-Team, Dukes of Hazzard) and remakes of movies that weren’t good the first time around (Clash of the Titans), now they’re going to re-release movies from the last decade in 3D.

Count me amongst the non-believers in the whole 3D thing. Paying more for blurry movies that I can’t watch without putting on germ-ridden plastic glasses is not my idea of a good Friday night out.

But Hollywood has seen the dollar signs, and they will stop at nothing for an excuse to charge us $15 to see Titanic again. How long will it take idiot America to figure out the ruse?

Re-releasing Shrek 1, 2, and 3 in 3D might help speed it up a bit.

Talk about killing the golden goose.