Y. Karp? Why Not!

The time had finally come. How could I possibly label myself a geek of any sort if I voluntarily stuck with my old Android Gingerbread 2.3 operating system? My Samsung Galaxy Note needed to be updated and besides, I needed a nice, juicy project. I was waiting for Google to announce Android 5 at Google I/O 2013. When no announcement was forthcoming, it was time to take the bull by the horns and turn Gingerbread into Jelly Bean. I have never upgraded a phone's operating system before. I was mildly afraid of bricking my phone, although I knew that if anything bad happened, I could take it to "a guy I know" to sort it out. But to be truly geeky (and to save the cash), I knew that I had to embark on the Android OS upgrade adventure on my own. The first thing I did was look on-line for some instructions on how to perform an upgrade. There were a number of different flavors of Jelly Bean 4.2.2 available, but I settled on the  ibtimes.co.uk  website, which provided all of th...

Lately, I have taken to listening to audio books while jogging. Thumping, pumping, energetic music helps to get the legs moving, but surprisingly, a good novel can do the same thing. The first audio book I listened to was Kidnapped, written by Scottish novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, and read by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina  (a Librivox recording). At first, the narrator's voice grated on my nerves. After all, the story is set in Scotland, yet it was read in an American accent. However, Mark's reading style is so easy, that I soon became swept up in the story and forgot about the accent. I never studied English Literature, but I have an appreciation for good writing. Robert Louis Stevenson had an amazing talent for building up the story and creating suspense. His characters were so rich and full of life, I could almost see them standing before me. I promised myself not to listen to the audio book unless I was jogging. And because the author's writing...

Bill Gates famously wrote in a 1996 essay that "content is king" - what people want on the Internet (and in broadcasting) is "deep and extremely up-to-date information". The higher the volume and quality of your content, the more subscribers you will attract. That's a pretty simple formula and it can be applied to almost any business. For instance, the greater the variety of goods on the supermarket's shelves, the more customers they are likely to get. Graphic: kpis.co Sounds great, but it's only true to a point. There comes a time when quantity and quality no longer play as vital a role in consumer choices as perhaps they once did. Take, for example, mobile phone apps. As of October 30 2012, both Apple and Android have 700,000 apps . Microsoft is catching up. But who really cares what the numbers are? Once they reach critical mass, another thousand means little. And apps (or their equivalents) on one platform are available on the others. Put anoth...

Sorry, folks. In a senseless act of insanity, Blogger decided to randomly delete this post. (Ironically, it was about content, something this blog post doesn't have.) I will reconstruct the blog post from an early draft and re-post it. Follow on Twitter: @ykarp Follow on Google+: +Yossi Karp Subscribe to Y. Karp? Why Not! or follow on Facebook (see the side-bar). Add this blog to your RSS feed reader.

The question "How many people keep a daily journal" on  Askville by Amazon provoked responses that range between "more people" and "less than half". Whatever the real number, people have been keeping diaries for hundreds of years. Wikipedia says that a work called To Myself by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius could possibly be one of the first diaries ever written. One might think that keeping a diary is a more feminine passtime. However, the appropriately named website, artofmanliness.com, provides a short list of famous men who kept a journal: Theodore Roosevelt Thomas Jefferson Charles Darwin Benjamin Franklin Lewis and Clark Andrew Carnegie Ralph Waldo Emerson Captain Cook Winston Churchill Sir Edmund Hilary Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton artofmanliness.com gives three main reasons to keep a journal: Your children and grandchildren will want to read it. It can bring you to your senses. Journaling grants you immortality ( Woody Allen : ...

In a conversation with the Mars Curiosity team at NASA, US President Barack Obama asked them to call him if they find aliens . Later on he said: It’s really what makes us best as a species – the curiosity we have, yearning to discover, the pushing boundaries of knowledge. But these sentiments don't jive with his proposed 2013 budget, which includes drastic cuts to NASA funding . In his opinion, government-funded space research and exploration (even with its valuable tie-ins with military advancement) should not be the government's concern. Despite the obvious advantages to the economy and defense, space is just not a priority. But Obama has badly misread the landscape. The world is abuzz with space news: the Curiosity mission to Mars (Aug 2012) the death of Neil Armstrong (Aug 2012) the international space station (Sep 2012) the retirement of the Space Shuttle Endeavor (Sep 2012) amazing images beamed back from Voyager 1 from the edge of interstellar space (S...

For the past few weeks I've been zipping around town in my brand new Hyundai i800 CRDi 2012. The nine-seater car was converted from the commercial version to a passenger vehicle to accommodate a pneumatic wheelchair lift. The back panels were removed and tinted windows were installed. A proper floor and ceiling were put in the back, along with air conditioning and seats. For all intents and purposes, you can't tell that this was once a commercial vehicle.   Purrs Like a (Large, Overweight) Kitten The i800's build quality seems very good. The internal fittings are simple, but the car seems to be constructed solidly. The only rattling sounds come from the wheelchair lift, which has so many moving parts, it can be forgiven for groaning a bit when I hit a bump in the road. Road noise is higher than I would have expected, and the diesel engine isn't very quiet, but it's by no means a loud car - at least from the inside.   Leviathan The car is a beast to drive....