Technology Guides

Since Canadians or anyone outside of the U.S. for that matter can’t get a hold of free movies and TV shows online for free I decided to go hunting for a way to. Now personally I love Hulu or any of the sites that Hulu gets their content from, I couldn’t find a way to hack onto it using Linux and it was hard as well for Vista or Mac users. So I gave up (sorry it was just getting to time consuming) and so I decided to try and find some sites on the net that would offer the service to users like me. Again I kind of failed but my search engine skills aren’t the best. So one day I stumbled on this site called TV Shack (no I didn’t use Stumbleupon but I’m sure it’s on there by now).

This site has a huge database and I haven’t come across a link that doesn’t work because they use a community system where users update the collection and offer multiple links in a very clean way so it’s not overwhelming like some other websites. They have a TV Show, Movie, Anime, Music and Documentaries database that offer enough selection for even the pickiest person. The huge benefit of this site is that they offer the whole series and not just the last 5 episodes.

You also don’t need to register on the site but if you want to add links because the site needs to be able to moderate what links do go up there and make sure that they do actually work.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Google and Apple have just started competing with each other and things started warming up with the release of the Google Android smartphone but now things may start to heat up with the release of an Apple search engine to compete with the cash cow leader in that department, Google.

This makes total sense for Apple as its brand is gaining ground whereever it enters including a market share in the smartphone industry that has doubled since 2008 from 5.3% to 10.8%. (Nokia has a 41.2% share and RIM has 19.9%). Now it’s rumoured that they’re going to release a search engine.

Now let’s try and figure out if this makes sense when you break down the numbers. Currently Google is the reigning king in this department by a long shot with an 83% market share but this is largely because everyone associates search with Google and so naturally people go there to do their searches. Increasingly though people want services that are more convenient and thus they are searching on the go with their Blackberry’s, iPhones or other mobile devices.

Now this is where it gets complicated because all the major search engines (Bing by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and possibly Apple) are promoting their respective sites very hard and with Google launching its browser recently and it rumoured OS, Google is continuing to strengthen its lineup to protect its search engine and revenue stream. Microsoft on the other hand will make its own search engine the default on IE and the default search engine on Windows is, you guessed, it IE. Both these platforms have a stranglehold on their respective market and thus it makes easier for users to use Bing and you should see a steady increase in its usage over the next bit. Apple on the other hand is slowly gaining market share in the OS department where Safari is the default, but where the growth can occur is the smartphone department and that’s where this battle will be won or lost.

The key thing to note is whether or not Apple can continue to grow the iPhone and knock down Nokia and keep up with RIM. If that happens Apple has a serious chance of gaining some huge money because then the default search engine on the iPhone will be Apple’s version instead of Google. Where Google can gain is if the Android takes off and what RIM decides to do. Whether they go with Google, Apple or even Microsoft as their default search engine may determine how far Apple gets.

There really is so much at play here for Apple and in the end there’s too many variables for Apple to worry about to even think about entering but knowing Apple they want their own stuff and so I would not be surprised if they release it anyway. That’s my take and let me know yours.

Popularity: 9% [?]

So the results of the contest are, drum roll please.

Bob Gold!!

Congratulations Bob and spend that gift card wisely .

Popularity: 1% [?]