Daedalus Howell

Life, Storied.

google

  • Eyes of the Beheld: Bette Davis and Marty Feldman

    Eyes of the Beheld: Bette Davis and Marty Feldman

    Sometimes, I think Google was invented so Generation X could piece together what happened in the 70s and early 80s before our consciousness was fully-formed. Take today as an example – a little bird on Twitter told me it was Golden Age film star Bette Davis’ birthday. Of course, what first comes to mind when…

  • Google’s Think Quarterly releases The Creativity Issue

    Besides perfecting its search engine, fostering user-generated video and releasing self-driving cars on our roadways, Google also manages to publish a quarterly online magazine from of their UK office. The latest edition of their Think Quarterly (a name, that at first glance, reads like a command to cogitate but once every three months), is “dedicated…

  • Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen

    Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, ?telephone.? Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation ? even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a ‘smart-ass phone? given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts…

  • iCloudius: Apple’s Man in the Sky

    When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the…

  • The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

    When those of a certain generation first hear of the “Filter Bubble,” they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-’90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like…

  • QR is PR: How QR Codes are changing the media landscape

    They look like the bastard offspring of a crossword puzzle and a crop circle. QR codes, also known as “quick response” or “quick read” codes, are often seen lingering on the corner of magazine ads, clothing tags or band fliers as a bridge for our digital and terrestrial worlds through the aid of one’s smartphone.…

  • Groupon Public Voice Guide Fail

    Deal-of-the-day website Groupon might have passed on Google’s multi-billion dollar acquisition offer but it hasn’t forgone using the online search engine and advertising empire’s document hosting services for a memorandum entitled the ?Public Groupon Voice Guide,? which details, with embarrassing clarity, ?principles? apparently ?intended to help new and applying writers learn Groupon’s signature writing style.?…

  • Wolfram Alpha vs. Google vs. Your Brain (on drugs)

    Last month, the big brains of the “computational knowledge” world gathered in central London to explore how “advances in computational technology are unlocking knowledge assets and shaping the future.” The event, dryly named the London Computational Knowledge Summit, was underwritten by Wolfram Alpha, which bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” a tagline so catchy,…

  • SEO as a Networking Tool

    In no way do I purport to understand the alchemy of search engine optimization ? that arcane conflux of meta tags, algorithmic jockeying and ritual sacrifice to Google that produces page rankings and spankings in equal measure. Well, who knows if it’s equal ? that sort of proprietary information lives in some server barn in…