GRRRR

Just been the victim of some spammer using my email address to send spam, just received over 100 email bounceback messages. How long as email been around now? I fail to see why we haven't come up with a solution for this yet.

I will buy and use a Gphone, if....

1. the service really is free. Has anyone done any studies that a purely advertiser supported model will really work? I mean I believe the costs are too high and someone would have to kick in something for the service
2. it surfed the internet fast and could render almost every page. neither my blackberry nor my treo can do that
3. it let me use it as a bluetooth modem for my laptop
4. it had push email like my blackberry

Like most stuff Google does, it gets a ton of hype but in the end, other than ads and relevancy, it kinda blows. I've used almost everything they offered at one point or another and the only service i still use is search. Everything else is better elsewhere.

Nelson says: Ha Ha

The Real iPhone Sales Report

EQO is cool

For all of you who detest paying hugely expensive rates to your phone companies for long distance calls, this is your Saviour. I've had this idea for a long time but EQO has finally cracked it - its genius. EQO works like this: you run an app on your cellphone which imports all of your contacts. When you want to make a call, it uses a VOIP connection to bridge the local phone networks between you and the long distance number that you are calling. Its like a newfangled version of the old callback services people used to use in order to get around hugely expensive foreign phone company long distance rates. Check them out http://eqo.com

The Best Mobile Application

The app I use on my mobile phone more than any other is: Google Maps. This app is simply the most useful application on my Blackberry. With it I:

1: Never get lost. Who needs GPS when you can pull over and enter the address of the house or business you are currently at, your destination, and it will map your route. Why would it need to know where you are? You can just look around and tell Google Maps where you are. It does the rest.

2: Find stuff you need or want. Lets say you are where you are, wherever you are, and have a hankering for noodles. Fire up Google Maps, enter your location, and search for noodles. Not only do you get all noodle places near you, you get their phone numbers, directions to and from them, and for some of them, user reviews. I used it the other day to find a used copy of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl. After two phone calls, I had the location to the Gamestop in relation to where I was, their phone number and the route to get there.

3: Find my way via landmarks. Switch to satellite mode and you can see - oh ya, that store in in that strip mall, not the other one.

4: Will know exactly how long it will take for me to get somewhere, as the traffic buffer is built in.

I could venture to say that Google Maps is the most perfect application so far for my Blackberry. Can't really expect much more - alternate routes around traffic and walking/cycling directions would be nice but DAMN, this thing works great! I think theres copies for all manner of mobile phones as well.

I like apps that do one thing well, as opposed to a million things not so well. This is one of those apps.

Nice one, Steve!

Always the smart cult-leader, cobble together $200 worth of electronics, give it a nice face and suck the masses into paying over twice as much for it. Genius! Of course, unlike Falwell, Steve can't promise eternal salvation for your hard earned cash.


http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/07/02/teardown-reveals-iphone-parts-cost-two-bills/

My Issue With Apple...

Like I said on todays show

"Apple's products look great, but they are only about 80% there"

If the devil is in the details, then Steve don't give the devil his due. Sure, you can do most things with Apple products, but if you want it all, or specific little things, you are SOL. Case in point - a free phone you can get from Sprint can send pictures in email, the $600 iPhone cannot. It doesn't use 3G etc etc. If you wanna pay for the privilege of being a unpaid beta tester, you go right ahead. Not me. It shore is pretty tho'.

Podcast vs Blog

Well, the firestorm of controversy which originated from my last post basically ended up with these conclusions:

1: Don't bother attempting to get people to subscribe to your podcast. Its just too hard and will remain too hard

2: Most people just listen to your show at their desks anyways so the point is moot.

3: How to get more listeners? Forget point A. Embrace point B. Use a flash app to easily play your show from your site, then use the same old tactics to drive people to your site. You know SEO, blog etc etc etc.

It all comes down to the same thing: a podcast is nothing special. Nothing more special than a YouTube uploaded video, cause the whole downloadable/subscription thing is not worth doing. What makes a podcast a podcast? Obviously not the delivery mechanism.

Maybe podcast = user created audio or video? No, cause YouTube is not full of video podcasts, now is it? So the term podcast means its episodic and you CAN download it. If hardly anyone is downloading, why should we bother.

But thats not the main point of my post. If people listen online, then they can read online. You drive people to your site just like you drive people to your blog. A podcast is a blog.

The Problem With Podcasting

The mainstream market for podcasts is still yer typical horny geek. Look at whats on the top ten - maybe shows like Keith & The Girl are like Stern, and yer typical geek is into technology and scifi. The only easy way to get podcasts is via iTunes, and while there are lots and lots of iTunes subscribers, its still not the biggest part of the population. Podcasting needs to be as easy as: they start playing when you start your car, just like radio. How do we solve this problem? Heres my 2 point plan (can you tell I love 2 point plans?)

1: Since radio is dying, have the biggest podcasting publishers (like podshow) go out and buy some of these radio stations. They don't have to be big stations, just little stations in major markets, and play podcast after podcast. You may have to time delay and bleep out stuff in order to get past the FCC, but it will give the rest of the population access to the podcast. And like in commercial radio, you can run ads in between, make some money, and share it with the podcasters.

2: Right now, iTunes will give you a list of similar podcasts, based on what other people have subscribed to. But this is just connecting podcasts to podcast (tail content to tail content), we NEED some way in which to connect head content (like big radio and TV celebrities) to tail content (podcasts). For example, if you like Howard Stern, you probably like Keith & The Girl, if you like Rush Limbaugh, you probably like THINKfuture Radio, if you like NPR, you probably like Blast The Right. If you read the Chris Anderson whole head-tail content thingy, simply having the tail content available on the net is not enough - you NEED to connect the head content to the tail content in some way. In this way, you can guide folks to podcasts they may like based on the "head" content that they like. Only then can you start drawing people away from the head to the tail. And all of us "tail" folks like that thought.

So ya, its not simple, or cheap, but nothing ever is is it? Although, i don't see how a few programmers in a room cant throw together my point 2. As a matter of fact, one of the big directories should do just that. Are you listening Alley or Pickle or Pluggd?

Is Apple Phasing Out Their Computer Business?

Hot of the heels of the WWDC, I have a comment on Apple's computer business

OK, want I'm about to say may be controversial but hear me out for a second. If you look at Apple over time, when they were just a computer company they were floundering, directionless, and heading to lost even more market share, and possibly die. If you look at Apple, pre-Ipod (I call this the PI era), then they we ready to hit the skids.

Then Jobs said "Let There Be A Consumer Electronics Company Here", instead of a computer company. They launched, iPod and iTunes and saved Apple from the brink of extinction. As the company saw more and more success from the non-computer related divisions, and more and more profit, they have further strayed from the computer by launching Apple TV and soon now the iPhone. Apples profits come less and less from Macbooks and more and more from devices. When the computer business is less than 5% of their business, but 50% of their support and engineering costs, what do you think will happen?

At some point - and here comes the prediction from the Future Hall Of Predictions - Apple will discontinue, or severely restrict, or even allow their computer business to become niche. What is the market share of the Macbook now? 5%? 4%? Barely a blip, barely a market. Sure the Mac faithful will disagree, but look at the overall picture - the overall direction for Mac. When iPod and iTunes and iPhone make up 90%+ of their revenues, what would YOU do if you ran Apple?

the back of beyond

I spent the greater part of the end of last week completely disconnected from the internet and even cell phone service, out camping with my son - and about 100 other parents and kids.

And I hated it. We really do need ubiquitous internet everywhere. Contrary to some peoples belief, the internet augments my life. I don't ever want to be without it. I felt like less of a person when I was disconnected.

Is that wrong? Whats the problem with me wanted to augment my humanity with electronic connections to others all the time? Why not live in the matrix?

Back to People?

When it comes to booking travel, I'm just about ready to give up on the internet. First we have airline sites, then travel sites on top of airline sites, then travel site aggregators on top of them. Even with all of this wonderful disintermediation and reintermediation, we still can't get the best goddamn price! I mean you get the same thing everywhere you go. Whats the point? If you could go through typical cabin and ask everyone what they paid, you would get everything from $200 to $2000, and no rhyme or reason as to why people paid what. You could have rich businessmen paying $200 and regular folks paying $2000 for seats beside each other. I know the airlines like it as is, but there has to be a better way. Is there some kinda secret backroom deal the rest of us can't get access to? Me, I'm ready to go back to an actual HUMAN travel agent.

the battle with technology

my recent battle with technology just shows us how far we need to go. My goal is to get everyone in the world connected to the internet, somehow. We've made some progress with the $100 laptop and now mobile apps being everywhere. Until we get a device in every person in the worlds hands which can both read and write to the internet, then all will probably eventually be lost. Technically, it is possible to have a simple device with a screen and a radio and a recording device which can both play and record off the internet. The problem is not the device. The problem is the infrastructure necessary to support the device. That is going to be the biggest problem going forward. We can create simple mobile read/write devices, but how do we connect them to the internet in the wilds of Somalia, when we cant be connected while driving up Page Mill Road??

Visions

These are cool : Twittervision and now Flickrvision. One wonders how many other visions there are out there. What else can be tracked on the globe? Of course the big difference between these two is that I actually learn more stuff from Twittervision than Flickrvision.

PC vs Mac

So during all of my technical difficulties, I got to use a MacBook Pro for an extended period. And while it was interesting, I don't think I will be switching to it. And its not the big things, its the little things. For example:

1: When I installed stuff, it would frequently just disappear on me. I should not have to drag stuff into the applications folder. Some software actually tells me to do this, while others just do it for me. Even the crappiest freeware shareware Windows EXE files on the internet have decent installers

2: The damn thing doesn't even have a Mic jack, just a line in. Whats the use of that? Ok so maybe it appeals to the musicians out there, but please, whats an additional 5 cent part in a $2000 plus machine?

3: Yes it looks great but its functionality is generally limited. I felt more at home with a 2 button mouse and I could use contextual menus. That is a MASSIVE time saver.

4: The whole same menu bar at the top all the time kinda drove me a little nuts. There were many times when I had no idea which program I was in.

5: Sometimes the dock would indicate that a program was loaded but when I clicked on it it never came to the front, so I had to reload it.

6: I spend a lot of time inputting stuff into web apps. Sometimes for no reason Firefox would just quit on me. So much of the Mac being less buggy.

7: A lot of the cross platform apps are insanely more advanced on Windows than on the Mac. Yahoo! Messenger doesn't even have archiving capability on the Mac.

8: You tell apps to load on startup and they don't - no explanation

On the other hand:

1: The webcam is very nice. Wish I knew the resolution of it so I could buy one like it for my PC. Too bad its a closely kept secret. I mean, WTF?

2: I miss my little bouncy icons when software needs my attention at the bottom. That was cool. Maybe vista has that?

3: The photobooth app is cool. My kids thought it was fun. I took a snappy "emo" shot of myself. That was entertaining for a few minutes.

So overall, its kinda a battle of form over function. If I used my computer for creative things, maybe I'd stick with the Mac. But I don't so I won't.

If you think about it, iPod, iTunes and soon iPhone are the real moneymakers for Apple. Maybe they should just give it up on the computer side.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Crud. When I woke up this morning with all these great show ideas swirling in my head, ready to record them for all of your enjoyment, I looked over at my laptop and it was hosed. I mean, really hosed. It has passed away quietly in the night, a victim of the dreaded BSOD, aka Blue Screen Of Death. For some reason, Microsoft sees fit to set up the system to auto reboot when this happens, so I can’t even read the error on the screen, before it fitfully reboots itself, over and over and over again. Afer toying with the idea of recording it on my Treo as in times of yore (say maybe the first 50 episodes?) I decided to spare you the horrible sound quality and skip the show. I also have a MacBook, so as I dropped of my PC to the help desk at work, I thought, hmmm maybe I can use that. But alas, that too was hosed. I fired it up and it just sat at this little spinning icon under the big gray Apple logo. Sat like that for about an hour. Problem with Macs is that they don’t even give you enough information to even attempt to diagnose the problem. I dropped that one off at the help desk as a picked up my laptop again.

See my previous post? How can it be that in 2007, we still have to resort to repair disks and boot disks and hours upon hours of downtime in order to just get back to where we were? So much lost time, lost money, lost, lost, lost. All the while, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs laugh all the way to the bank. There is no, mass market OS or system thats totally bulletproof. And I think thats unacceptable in this day and age. Why can we build embedded systems which work and work and work, but the simple PC being bulletproof confounds us? People woudl say that its the simplicity of the embedded systems - but some of those are getting pretty complex as well. Why not apply those principles to our lowly PCs and Macs?

Where's The Self-Healing OS?

Today, all of a sudden, just as i was about to start doing my show in the car, my laptop seized up.

Like every other morning I do my show, I take my powered up laptop into my car and put it on the passenger seat. I then plug in my Plantronics USB headset and listen for that ba-bump sound which means it connected fine. Today, nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. It locked up so solid not even a ctrl-alt-delete would call up the task manager. So I powered off. Powered back on and after some finagling, the laptop worked enough to record my show. it then promptly locked up again.

For the rest of the day, I'd be rebooting this thing over and over, sometimes it would work for a bit, then lock up again - forcing a full blown reboot. Sometimes the wireless would work, sometimes not. Sometimes the SD card slot drivers would break, then come back.

So my machines been flaky all day long. I thought to myself, self, this is 2007. Why can't I just run a little diagnostic which is just part of the OS which figures out whats REALLY wrong with my laptop and suggest a fix? What, is the Microsoft economy so fragile that OS's can't self-diagnose and self-repair themselves? If you ask me, we are WAYYYYY past when this should be rote for operating systems. They should all be self-healing by now.

Where is the self-healing OS? Do we really need this HUGE economy around fixing these things?

facebook, myspace, ryze, linkedin, oh my...

God, I think we need some kind of uber social networking meta-site where we can collapse all of our profiles into one place.

The only place I really filled out a full profile was at Ryze, and I hardly ever use that any more. I set up a MySpace page, but I just kept getting spam friend requests from people selling either stuff or themselves. I have a LinkedIn profile, which I used for a bit for my business connections, but thats also gotten a bit dusty. Funny how you can tell when people are looking for work or are about to start looking for work, they all seem to update their Linked In profiles. Maybe Linked In should sell a service to employers - if an employee is updating their profile, alert their HR that this person might not be too happy in their job. Now I have a Facebook profile, based on the prodding of some of my listeners.

Mebbe I should stick to one and just go with it. I'd love to see some uber service come about which just aggregates 'em all. Even better, it would be smart if one of the leading services, like Facebook, just figured out some way to gather the others' profile data. Are you listening, Mark?

bleeding edge tech

You see, we love messing around with new technologies, if its not part of our job, its something we just love to play with - its our version of toys - sure we can't afford that Porsche but we can load a copy of the latest twitter clone and futz around with it. the key is that while we go jump on things and play with them for a while, that doesn't mean that they are great things, or useful at all. Sometimes its just novelty, this is the cool new thing that everyone is playing with. The true key is staying power, if you can consistently use something over a period of say, a month, and are still using it and finding it useful, then maybe its has "legs". Of course, it could also mean that its fulfilling a need but not perfectly (see 80% rule) so the time is ripe for competitors to swoop in a take over. Of course you have to be better and more perfect, otherwise the leader will win - until something better comes along. What I've found lately is that a lot of this bleeding edge Web 2.0+ stuff is really little tiny cool features that other products SHOULD have. Like twitter should be in instant messenger. Or in Windows Vista.

80% rule

I've found over the last little while that all of the technical stuff that we do only seems to address 80% of the problem - twitter is a great little status server but you have to update it manually, the same can be applied to so many things. Why don't we have some kind of buddy that watches everything we do then helps us out. there is just not enough automation out there - why cant my Tivo see that a movie I have on my Netflix list is going to be on TV and record it for me, then tell Netflix to cancel that movie from my list. Why can't there be something out there that scans all the TV on my Tivo and sends me emails telling me that there is stuff I might want to watch. Is this the Web 3.0 we've heard being talked about - adding layers of AI and automation to whats out there on the web right now?

wither web 2.0

i had free passes to the web 2.0 expo this last week but guess what - i didn't go. Why you ask? Well, there were a number of different reasons but the main one was that it seemed to defeat the whole point. The whole idea of the web and web 2.0 is user involvement and community building. Web 2.0 is about people, not computers. So a face-to-face conference talking about technologies which are supposed to make distances and face-to-face meetings unnecessary, seemed unnecessary. Why have the conference at all? Maybe its because most attendees understand that its a facade. Web 2.0 is all about getting people talking to each other - but in no way can it replace the face-to-face contact. Or can it?

wikipedia is your friend. just not my friend.

while not strictly tech, i gotta say that wikipedia is just about the most awesome resource in the world. i use it daily. the only problem i have with them is that they just keep on deleting the entry for my show as being "not important enough". I mean, come on people. I've done my show for over 2 years now, over 380 episodes, and have had over 335,000 downloads over the last year. What does important enough actually mean?

allergies

maybe i should explain my tagline. a long long time ago when i first started my podcast , there were very very few political podcasts. in fact, most people who podcasted and listened to podcasts were geeks and techies. Which explains still to this day that most of the top podcasts are still tech based, although there's a lot of juvenile humor (if you can call that humor) podcasts out there now. One listeners came across my podcast in those heady early days and said - Future's show is good, but he seems to be "allergic" to talking about technology. in fact here is the exact quote: " Love the show; one of my favorites. Not much tech talk; Chris seems allergic to it." Well, I love the quote so I'm using it. So there. I'm surrounded by technology every day. I'm totally immersed in technology. So I figured, why not talk about it. I can't go into too much detail on the stuff I do every day, since by day I work doing new product development for a very large, well known internet company. but theres a lot of tech stuff I can talk about. So I will. Also, not fit to podcast.

portable media

i dont have an ipod and will probably never have an ipod. i use my treo 650 as my media player. i use pocket tunes 4.0 to download and listen to music on my treo. i use the yahoo music jukebox and subscribe to yahoo music unlimited to go in order to put tracks on my treo. i can also use this in order to put podcasts on my treo to listen to. pocket tunes also has the ability to listen to streaming audio off of the internet, which IMHO, is where things are going in future. podcasting, just like satellite radio, is an interim technology.

cell phones

i have two cell phones. i carry my treo 650 as my home phone. i tried to use skype as my home phone but i just find its too tied to my residence. therefore i've moved most everything to my treo as my home phone. i have a blackberry 8700c for my work phone. i carry both phones at all times. its a pain in the ass sometimes but usually necessary.

all of my contacts are on my work phone since it auto syncs with my blackberry. blackberry rocks. i love the way everything happens immediately and automatically. no more syncing! that was always a problem with my treo.