Humans may have mastered technology enough to create humanoid robots (and also freak themselves out in the process with the threat of Artificial Intelligence taking over the world). But no matter how advanced we might be on the tech-front, there is still more than just a little tweaking that our gadgets require right now. The hoverboard fire test below would serve to emphasise our point.
https://youtu.be/825cEptCWc4
The video looks so painful that adult supervision is recommended even just for watching it. As the hoverboard beautifully goes up in flames, it justifies the recent hoverboard scare which had led Amazon to take the product off its website.
This pretty, little hoverboard catches fire while charging and spews flames in all directions as a result of over-heating. Watch it burn like a firecracker in the video and let us know if you still think this previously cool piece of tech is still cool enough.
We told you that Google’s Project Ara had been delayed and now we know why. It turns out that the futuristic phone failed its drop test and caused the the Project Ara team to rework the phone’s current model, completely.
They themselves tweeted explaining why the delay was caused saying that the phone wasn’t fairing well, when dropped. This can pose to be a huge problem when phones today are made durable, at least for typical falls. Google will now have to see how to fix the Project Ara jigsaw, without it falling apart.
Project Ara’s creators now say they’re “testing a signature experience” to attach its modules. It’s not easy to put together a phone that allows you to interchange its core components and we hope that the team can demonstrate its revised design as soon as they’re done with finding the missing link.
When you look at the tech world this year, there have been plenty of innovations, but of course where there are successes, there are certainly going to be failures. Coming up with a list of the top 10 tech fails of 2012 was a bit of a challenge however, not because there weren’t enough, but because there are so many. And most of the entries on this list are debatable to some extent.
1. Aakash Tablet!
In October 2012, Indian politician Kapil Sibal called a press conference. Indian politicians call press conferences all the time, even those with a last name that is not Gandhi. And with two portfolios–he is both India’s minister of human-resource development and its minister of communications and information technology–Sibal typically has a lot he wants to talk about.
But this time he actually had news that would be noticed beyond New Delhi. With a phalanx of reporters and photographers gathered in a government auditorium, Sibal, a Harvard Law grad with a halo of white hair, held up a device he called the Aakash, which is Hindi for “sky.” It looked like an iPad.
The most remarkable Aakash data point was its price: $35. Meant for the millions of students who can’t even afford textbooks, the Aakash is supposed to be India’s iPad knockoff. “There are some moments in history,” Sibal said, taking a long pause, “that will be milestones recognized by future generations. This is one such moment.”
Indians take a certain pride in making things cheaper. The Hindi word to describe this is jugaad, roughly translated as “frugal innovation.” However, the Aakash, never made it to market.
I’ve yet to come across any college student who bought the tablet, either at the subsidized rate or the normal cost. So it tops our list as the biggest fail for 2012!
2. Apple Maps
Along with the rollout of the much anticipated iPhone 5 in September 2012, Apple overhauled iOS, the operating system that runs the phone, its iPad and other mobile devices. A much-hyped feature of the change was Apple’s first effort at its own mapping app — after dumping rival Google’s map software.
The result was so bad that a few days later Apple’s CEO was essentially telling customers to use Google Maps.
Entire cities appeared in the wrong place. Landmarks such as the Washington Monument showed up submerged in bodies of water, and big chunks of the globe appeared as roadless wastelands.
It was a little more than a month later when Scott Forstall, vice president in charge of iOS, was ousted from the company, reportedly, in part, for not wanting to apologize for Maps.
Apple fails are few and far between, but Apple Maps were a definite fail!
3. Motorola India
Motorola Mobility, which is totally independent from Motorola Solutions, had incurred heavy loss last year. Google took over the company for $12.5 billion in May this year. Google had earlier said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Motorola Mobility shut down its India-specific product website as part of its global streamlining process.
“We are streamlining our business and support systems, and unfortunately, we’ll no longer have a dedicated website for India,” a message on Motorola Mobility India’s website said.
“Your local support site will remain open well into the future, and we’ll continue to provide support for our existing products,” it added.
This move seems to be a part of the company’s global downsizing process. In August, it had confirmed its decision to cut off 20 percent of work force and shut down operations in many countries.
So after capturing the Indian customer’s imagination with devices like the MotoRazr and the MotoRokr, Motorola finally bid adieu to the country, leaving many disappointed.
4. HTC One X Wi-Fi Issue
HTC did extremely well for themselves with their new line of Smartphones, the One Series. In June, several reports of WiFi issues on the HTC One X came to light, issues that led to difficulty connecting to Wi-Fi networks and annoying lag when playing games. The issues, which can also negatively affect the handset’s battery life, may have been related to a flaw in manufacturing, was actually confirmed.
Taiwanese manufacturer, HTC, officially confirmed that the device was infact suffering said issues. But having finally come clean on the issue, the Taiwanese Smartphone Giant also claimed to have found its fix, and had changed its production process for the One X to tackle the problem.
It replaced many handsets in the process, earning itself a place in our top 10 fails.
5. Stop Online Piracy Act ( SOPA )
The new law was supposed to be about fighting online piracy. Who’s going to be against that, right?
Answer: Pretty much the whole Internet.
Members of Congress sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and related bills to make it easier to shut down websites that illegally share music, movies and other content.
But opponents argued it went too far and could end up shutting down legitimate sites while stifling free expression in the process.
Unfortunately for backers of SOPA, Web heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Reddit and Wikipedia joined the fight against the bill. Sites went black on January 18 to raise awareness. Members of communities such as Reddit put intense pressure on lawmakers (including soon-to-be GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan) until they dropped their support or went on record opposing the bill.
The unprecedented backlash eventually caused supporters to shelve SOPA, and quite possibly ushered in a new age of Web activism.
6. Blackberry Outage
This tweet just about sums it up!
It was a case of worst possible timing as BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) confirmed it had suffered a significant outage across Europe and Asia, just as the iPhone 5 was launching to the now familiar queues in Apple stores around the world.
An October outage at a data center caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America. (To their credit, RIM ultimately gave away a pile of free apps to the folks affected).
The outage lasted for several days and was the final straw for some users, who abandoned ship for other phones. Add that to a list of Blackberry fails.
7. Zynga
Zynga was riding high. Love them or hate them, its games like “Mafia Wars” and “FarmVille” were everywhere, clogging up Facebook pages and spurring millions of bored casual gamers to pay real cash for virtual cows. Then, it all came crumbling down.”
OK, maybe “crumbling down” is an overstatement. But things in The ‘Ville definitely didn’t go Zynga’s way in 2012.
In October, Zynga announced it was laying off 5% of its employees, Facebook, which gets a cut when people spend money on games such as “FarmVille,” said that income from Zynga was down 20% over last year.
And yesterday, the company announced that it was closing down 20 of its game titles in order to cut costs. FAIL!
8. Windows 8
Many eyebrows were raised on November 12, 2012 when Microsoft announced that Stephen Sinofsky—the president of the Windows division, a driving force behind Windows 8, and a long-time leader at Microsoft—was leaving his post, effective immediately. The odd timing and abrupt announcement led to a rash of speculation. Was Sinofsky fired or did he quit? Was it planned? Are Windows 8 sales that bad? The answer is yes!
Aside from the app selection, many early criticisms targeted the modern UI itself, which throws everything you know about navigating Windows, well, out the window. Early adopters—especially nontechie types—have reported running into issues with the overhauled interface, which is made worse by Windows 8’s near-complete lack of instructions when you boot it up for the first time.
Microsoft hasn’t been forthcoming with sales numbers, and the company declined to comment when asked by various journalists. That institutional reticence makes it hard to divine just how well Windows 8 is actually selling on the streets.
All that said, sporadic leaks, whispers, and data from third-party channels help us paint a partial picture of Windows 8’s sales success—and what we’ve learned suggests that the OS is stumbling out of the gate.
A fail so far, we’re afraid.
9. Facebook IPO
Maybe the dumb money wasn’t so dumb this time.
From the point of view of the company, Facebook itself, of course it was a roaring success. They were able to raise a good chunk of capital to develop and expand the business. That’s what an IPO is, at heart, about. Early investors in the company did well too: they were able to cash out some portion of their earlier investment at good prices. But things went horribly wrong!
If the market were to judge Facebook not a a potential promise but as actual worth today, the stock should be trading around $4.50. It could lose over 85% of its current value (90% from the IPO price, which started at $38) and still have room to fall further. That’s how big a fail the IPO has turned out to be!
10. IPC Sec 66A Of The IT App
The Section 66 (A) of the Indian IT Act continues to haunt the cyber population of India. At a time when a public interest litigation has been filed in the Supreme court questioning the constitutional validity of the section, questions are also being raised about the need for such “draconian” section.
Section 66A of the IT Act criminalises any person who electronically sends any information that is deemed grossly offensive, has a menacing character, which he\she knows to be false but still transmits to cause annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, or ill will, persistently by making use of the electronic communication medium. It also includes emails or text messages that have been sent with the deliberate purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or mislead the recipient. The punishment can be a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.
The act has been in the eye of the storm after it caused the arrest two Palghar girls for allegedly posting Facebook comments against a political party. Earlier, the police had used the same law to arrest Aseem Trivedi for allegedly mocking the Indian Constitution through cartoons that had been put up as banners during Anna Hazare’s rally in Mumbai.
It definitely earns its place in the top fails!
Epic Fail
But the biggest fail of 2012 has to be the inability of our nation to respect women. The recent gang-rape and eventual death of the girl, named by the press as “Nirbhaya” (or fearless) is a BIG black dot on our society. Change is needed, not only in our laws and government, but within ourselves.
So many Big Statements coming in. Where are the big actions?
Have we missed any? Let us know in the comments section below!
Australian police Monday, December 10, warned motorists about using the map system on new Apple iPhones after rescuing several people left stranded in the wilderness, saying the errors could prove deadly.
The warning comes after after a number of people trying to find the town (Mildura) of 30,000 people have become hopelessly lost in scorching temperatures.
One man was stranded for 24 hours last week in temperatures of up to 46 degrees centigrade, and at least three more have had to be rescued after following the directions given on Apple’s new maps, which locate Mildura far from its actual position.
Authorities said tests on the mapping system had confirmed that it lists Mildura, around 500 kilometers (310 miles) northwest of Melbourne, as being in the heart of the Murray Sunset National Park.
[quote] “It’s quite a dangerous situation, so we would be calling for people not to use the new Apple iPhone mapping system if they’re traveling from South Australia to Mildura.[/quote]
Apple dropped Google as its map provider in September with the launch of its iOS 6 software for the iPhone and iPad. But problems quickly emerged with the map detail. Apple received criticism over inaccuracies in mapping data like the mislocation in Victoria, which led to the termination of several people involved with the Maps project, including Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall and Maps manager Richard Williamson.
HULU owners after many speculations and many price bids seems to have decided to not sell the company after all, the news came into play with the bid from Yahoo to buy over HULU, but although many other players stepped in, The company has decided that the best place for it is with the current owners.
Since Hulu holds a unique and compelling strategic value to each of its owners, we have terminated the sale process and look forward to working together to continue mapping out its path to even greater success. Our focus now rests solely on ensuring that our efforts as owners contribute in a meaningful way to the exciting future that lies ahead for Hulu.”
Its been almost 2 full years since the announcement of the 20$ Tablet for the Indian market which has come and gone into release cycle time and again. From changing vendors to dropping manufacturers,Why is Kapil Sibal good at making excuses?
The tablet deemed to be an Indian product from the core, yet manufactured in China? HCL was the first company to refuse the manufacture of this tablet soon to be followed by Wipro, Satyam and others. The manufacturers all possibly gave up on the possibility of such a device, why make it impossible for a device to exist, and if you launch one 3 years later what is the point anyway.
A year ago a touchscreen tablet with Android 2.1 and a resistive touchscreen made sense, the recent news showed a device with a capacitive screen and other bits such as WiFi and USB ports etc. Also news upped the OS to Android 2.2. But is it really happening ? The usual bits are in place and excuses follow. The govt. gave a grant of several hundred crore to the project, an undisclosed amount, but to our dismay we could neither get details of the grant or what actually happened to the device.
A tablet that has touchscreen, WiFi and Android may or may not be able to educate the kids of today. But will definitely be a source of entertainment to them. low price- large screen Angry Birds anyone? There goes the education system down the drain.
Post this discussion the biggest question remains : whether or not the device would be even capable of playing Angry birds? Imagine you pull on the bird and it just gets stuck in mid air!
When we tried to contact Mr. Sibal’s office to get a comment, we got a polite reminder of how the country’s politics are more important
Abhi Anna Hazare is taking too much time!, whatever the Govt. wants to do-will do. You please mind your own business”
-Refused to tell us name – Assistant at Kapil Sibal’s Office
Why does “Anna Hazare” have anything to do with the Launch of a tablet that was supposed to happen last year. If anything the protests should speed up the process not slow it down.
Fortunately for us China is a wonderful country and many companies have started to bring in tablets in the price range of 5-10 thousand rupees. The HCL and Beetel Tablets cost 10,000 and the Reliance tab costs 12,999. With pricing already dropping daily, we can expect a good 2000-3000 tablet before the govt. even begins to allot this “Ration” based tablet. Which will probably end up going to “Politician and Family” as Diwali Gifts.
Here is a “Poof” to the Sakshat Tablet for India. Come on Mr. Sibal we expect a better result with a IT oriented country.
On Monday, DropBox, the cloud storage giant revealed that for four whole hours on Sunday, its entire storage system was available to the public without providing a password. From 1:54PM to 5:41 PM their entire security system failed. DropBox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi wrote on the company blog that:
[quote]This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.[/quote]
The site has 25 million members and has emerged as the the leader in the cloud storage market. The company claims that it is dedicated to security and that during the time of the failure, less than 1% of its users were logged in. When they discovered the breach, the company said they ended all logged in sessions immediately. On Tuesday they also notified users who were logged in about the event.
Such events highlight the problems with cloud storage services. Is your data really safe when you hand it over to another company to hold for you? This is the main reason lots of large enterprises have witheld from the move to the cloud.
Google is blocking users with rooted Android devices from renting movies via Android Market. The reason stated is “due to requirements related to copyright protection”. Android 3.1 is only currently available on the Xoom and Android Market movie rentals aren’t yet available on Android 2.2+ devices. So not a large user base is affected with the blockages.
Now the rooting community is already furious about this fact and it looks like there might be a workaround sooner than the world gets updated to movie rentals.
