Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Brent and Eva have been playing with Firefox personas, which are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your browser. They’ve creating some excellent Kobayashi Online logowear for Firefox, and have been pleasantly surprised to see one of their seven personas has had more than 60 active users!
Eva is hopeful that Apple’s iOS 5 will, indeed, make the iPad magic device after seeing a charming video from Simon Pierro. While it can’t change the weather, the iPad update let Simon take the sun out of the sky, and into his pocket. Facetime has been updated so that in addition to being able to share a conversation, you can share a glass of milk. While the video looks to be the product Simon’s slight of hand, we hope that iOS 5, which Apple gave a sneak peak of earlier this month, shows at least some of the sparkle of this video.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently spoke in Cannes about how the mobile phone will replace the browser as the world’s next “primary development artifact”. Roberto is wondering how this will affect Web design and online writing as we know it. His guess is that websites will have less copy, more images, but fewer icons and menu items. We’ll be glued to our phones to find out.
At an Elvis Costello concert, Daveed was surprised by the lack of restrictions on recordings and photos. Many years ago this would’ve been unheard of, given that content providers have put the kibosh on anything that may infringe on their copyrighted materials.
In the event that the top content providers and US Internet service providers actually come to an agreement on piracy crackdown system, which seems to be in the works, Canada will surely be under pressure to follow suit.
Skeptical that piracy can be curbed through strong-arm tactics, Daveed wonders how long will it be before the cultural industries learn to live with current technology and use it for profit, rather than fight it – a fight they are bound to lose. For the time being, Elvis Costello isn’t afraid of fan recordings.