2015 11
The West is not at War with Islam
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Middle East with
NYC had 911, London the July 7th tube attack, Madrid the Atocha train bombs that left over 200 dead and 1000 injured, Boston the marathon bombers, and now Paris had the Charlie Hebdo-Jewish supermarket massacre. All horrible attaks. But each time these bombings and shootings take place commentators argue that this is the beginning of a war between Islam and the West. Over years they have predicted many more innocent victims dying in the hands of Islamist extremists. But much to their surprise, in each of these cases, the murderers were uniquely sick individuals not representative of the 1.5 billion other Muslims and more attacks did not materialize in each city.
The lack of other attacks has shown that the vast majority of Muslims who live in Europe and USA are not willing to join the ranks of the murderers and are as disgusted as non Muslims. They feel towards extremists as we feel towards the Norwegian attacker or the Newtown killer. Does the Muslim religion currently produce more people willing to kill in the name of Islam? I think this is undeniable. But to be fair the West produces a lot of people who are willing to unfairly kill and torture in the name of “freedom” in places as Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. And if we simply count victims, Muslim victims outnumber non Muslim victims at over 100 to 1. The victims of Islamic terrorism in the Muslim world, are mostly other Muslims.
2015 6
AllPlay coming to Gramofon!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Gramofon with
I am very excited to announce that this year Gramofon will provide the ultimate home audio experience with the integration of Qualcomm’s AllPlay feature!
At the moment Gramofon works with Spotify, but AllPlay will increase our music service coverage to include TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Rhapsody, Aupeo, DoubleTwist, Soma FM, and Napster. AllPlay also allows you to stream music stored locally on your phone and play music from a DLNA server.
With AllPlay, Gramofon’s will be able to play music simultaneously over multiple Gramofons around the home. Place Gramofons in different rooms “group” them together to listen to the same music all over the house. You can also pick and choose which speakers to play from and “group” different rooms ex. Kitchen & Living Room.
I am excited for this new phase of Gramofon. Creating a holistic music experience that allows you to play music from your favorite music services/your phone, and listen to them everywhere around the home, is what Gramofon has always strived for.
2015 6
Facebook has become your personal Google
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with
Search on Facebook recently went from useless to awesome. Try searching a person you care about linked to a city, place, verb or noun and see for yourself how relevant to you Facebook search results now are. Facebook search is what it should have been all along, a search about those you care about in relationship to you. As a result there is more of a reason to use Facebook as a diary, a memory repository. Today our one year old David went under water for the first time, I recorded a video, put in on Facebook. Before the new Facebook search it would have been hard to find it in, say, 2017. I would have had to go through the 2015 timeline. But now I will only search “David water”. Try that with Google. Facebook is now a great personal search engine.