[ While You Were Out :: Silicon Valley ]
The iPad, FounderDating, Twitter news, and a primer on Cloud computing

Apple’s iPad, announced Wednesday, looks poised to revolutionize the e-book, netbook, publishing, advertising, and game industries. Then again, it could go down in history as a feminine hygiene-insensitive flop, as predicted by MadTV three years ago. (We’re guessing the latter.)

The iPad is basically a larger version of the iPhone with no unique features. It’s got no stylus or handwriting recognition to please old-school tablet PC fans, no serious operating system to appeal to your typical multitasking PC user, no camera or significant increase in memory to convert iPhone and iPod Touch users, and no Flash support or widescreen-friendly aspect ratio to woo YouTube/Hulu and movie buffs. And the name. THE NAME!

FounderDating, a “matchmaking” service for aspiring startup entrepreneurs looking for same, held an event in San Francisco on Thursday. Okay, so the Silicon Valley startup garden (or the fields surrounding the Farm, if you will) now has a pollination ground, various incubators, just enough water (VC), and the most fertile economic soil in years (since our economy recently shat itself). Want to place bets on which industry will start harvesting first?

Twitter won’t stop being in the news. They rolled out their “Local Trends” feature recently, and news outlets have been taking notes on tweeting trends about everything from the State of the Union to “alternative” names for the iPad. Even Bill Gates recently joined. Now Japan, in a rare reversal of technology early adopterism, is finally picking up the Twitter slack. Let it be known, though, that Japanese girls were already micro-blogging cheesy romance bestsellers on their cell phones during the train ride to school in 2000. Stephenie Meyer and Biz Stone, eat your hearts out.

Y&F’s Techie Phrase of the Week: Cloud Computing

Now that music is moving into cloud computing (think Pandora, but with a paid subscription for unlimited, on-demand access to songs), the term is starting to show up in news and popular parlance. For the less tech-savvy, let us explain.

Definition: Cloud computing basically means using online products and services to store and manage your data. (“The Cloud” is a fancier name for “Internet”.)

Examples: You’re using it already. Gmail, Facebook, YouTube and blogging clients like LiveJournal and WordPress are all cloud applications.

Advantages: When you store files in the “cloud”, i.e. other people’s servers, you’re not using your own PC’s memory, and your files can be easily accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.

Drawbacks: Internet privacy is a fake idea!