EnjoyTech

Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering . Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings . Unlike many other people I don't necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition. Infrastructure as true commodity: IaaS is a very well understood category and Amazon, as a vendor, has strong desires to move up in the value chain. This can only happen if storage and computing become true commodity and customers value vendors based on what they can do on top of this commodity storage and computing. They become means to an end and not an end itself. Amazon is introducing many PaaS like services on top of EC2. For example, RedShift is the fastest growing service on EC2. These services create stickiness for customers to come back and try out and perhaps buy other services. These services also create a b

Voice Dream Reader is an app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch that supports people who prefer reading in different ways. Voice Dream can read documents from a number of sources with multiple high quality text-to-speech voices. Users can import PDFs , Word documents, text files, webpages, and even Bookshare books into the app. Once the text is loaded into the app you can listen to it using text-to-speech, highlight the text, search for a specific words or phrases, and get definitions for unknown words. Among many other uses, Voice Dream Reader is a terrific Bookshare book reader for students. Voice Dream also works very well with VoiceOver . Now, with newly released Voice Dream Reader version 3.0, new features have been added that makes the app even more useful. Up until yesterday evening, Voice Dream only supported text. All images and formatting associated with a file were stripped away. With version 3.0 images and formatting within PDF files are retained. Now you can read a PDF in

For an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) it is everyone's job to ensure customer success but it is no one person's job. This is changing. I see more and more companies realizing this challenge and want to do something about it. Sales is interested in maintaining relationship with customers for revenue purposes and support works with customers in case of product issues and escalations. Product teams behave more like silos when they approach their customers because of their restricted scope and vision. Most chief technology officers are fairly technical and internal facing. Most of them also lack the business context—empathy for true business challenges—of their customers. They are quite passionate about what they do but they invariably end up spending a lot of time in making key product and technical decisions for the company losing sight of much bigger issues that customers might be facing. Most chief strategy officers focus on company's vision as well as strategy across li

Today, Apple released iOS 7.1 with numerous accessibility improvements. While these features are not as exciting as the accessibility features added in major releases of iOS they still offer advantages for many users. Most of the improvements focus on making the new iOS interface easier to see for people with visual impairments. Turning on bold text now makes the keyboard, calculator, and in app icons bold in addition to text. A new option found under the accessibility menu allows users to turn on button shapes which makes it easier to distinguish text from buttons. In addition to limiting the parallax effect, reduce motion now limits multitasking animations and animations in the weather and messages apps. iOS 7.1 also allows users to darken colors used in apps to make them easier to view and increase the white point of the display to cut down on glare. Button Shapes iOS 7.1 also includes a number of VoiceOver bug fixes, but some are still present in iOS 7.1. In addition to accessi

Fleksy is an alternative keyboard for mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, and even smart watches. Fleksy uses predictive software that will guess which word you meant to type even if you mistype every letter. As long as your close to the right letters Fleksy will be able to correctly guess which word you meant to type. This means you don't even have to look at the keyboard. If Fleksy does make a mistake you can easily swipe through alternative suggestions. Currently, Apple does not officially support third party keyboards to replace the default keyboard on iOS , but developers can get around this limitation by building an alternative keyboard into their app. Today, Fleksy made it easy for developers to built the Fleksy keyboard into their app. The Fleksy keyboard is now available for any iOS developer who wants to include it in their app. This announcement is very exciting because if developers get on board it will give iOS users the choice of which keyboard to use.