Sue O Lee's Blog

Patricia Dunn was the chairman for Hewlett Packard for quite a bit. During her reign a scandal leaked out about HP’s spying endeavors. Apparently they were spying on their employees.

HP used a method called “pretexting” where agents disguised themselves as board members and employees to extract information regarding phone records from phone companies. They also performed a sting operation where a “dummy” codenamed Jacob fed insider information to CNET writer Dawn Kawamoto. This created a false sense of trust. Afterwards, Jacob injected malicious spyware that would afterwards record every keystroke Dawn would write to extract more information. After this became public, Dunn denied any involvement with this ordeal, although it was her who approved it. This led to her quick resignation as chairwoman. She was then succeeded by Mark Hurd.

As you can infer, this was a clear violation of basic employee’s rights for privacy. Hewlett Packard did not make an ethical decision. Although it could be argued that other companies closely monitor their workplaces via surveillance cameras, the employees of HP had no idea this was going on. There was no consent, which led to a huge outburst from the media.

People are aware of video games and its gigantic popularity, but are people aware that these said games can be played competitively AND for money?

In Korea especially, gigantic stages are built just to accommodate the fans of Starcraft, a real time strategy game developed by Blizzard Entertainment. There are teams that are sponsored by big name companies such as Samsung, SK Telecom, and CJ Entertainment.

Now comes a new game, with already a gigantic fanbase, Starcraft 2. There is no question that its popularity not only exists in Korea; millions of views are constantly being hit on Youtube of Starcraft 2 commentaries. People currently utilize Justin.tv and livestream to stream up to date videos of their Starcraft 2 ventures. This is where the Google proposal was made.

Although the conditions for a viable career as a professional gamer is limited in North America, certain people believe that such a dream can be achieved. If this succeeds, we will see a gigantic new market be introduced, in conjunction with new jobs, increased demand in electronics, and a change in the social norm of how we view “sports”.

As you all know, RIM and Apple have been constantly duking it out with their phone line, the Blackberry and the iPhone. Now with Tablets becoming immensely popular and its applications almost limitless, the iPad was released for consumers in April.

The iPad had done extremely well for itself, selling 3 million copies in the first 80 days of its release. People loved the iPad because of its innumerable amount of capabilities. The iPad is giving markets such as the e-reader, portable gaming device, and ultra-portable laptops a run for its money. Although the iPad is one heck-of-a-gadget, it leaves the consumers wanting more; something with Adobe Flash capabilities, a camera for video conferences, and HD video output. The Blackberry Playbook looks to change all that.

As we can see here, compared to the iPad, the Blackberry Playbook offers a front facing 3MP camera and a 5MP camera in the rear, support for Adobe Flash, Higher tech specs (2 1GHz cores instead of 1, 4 times the RAM of iPad) and to top it all off, weighs significantly less; almost half of that of the iPad.

Apple fan-boys should beware, the Playbook looks like a serious contender to kill the iPad as we know it.