i finally got the upgrade to Windows Vista for my Dell XPS 410. my $2,000 PC that sits neath my TV.
the immediate results of my "upgrade":
i am flying out to Israel in a few hours, and i want to fix at least some of these issues so maskit will not kill me.
$#&* Microsoft.
i have been playing with the wii console for a week now. i had to pay a premium to get it (on ebay) cause i could not find any in the stores in our area.
tom came over for the weekend and we spent a good chunk of time playing with the wii. as a testament to the poor shape of both us, we had more workout playing baseball on the wii than we had otherwise for months.. (tom actually complained about sore muscles…)
nintendo did a GREAT job in putting together a fun experience. while microsoft and sony focused on technology, developing chips and processors, nintendo focused on the user experience.
it is a new gaming experience, and it is easy to imagine where it will go from here (actually no need to imagine i saw the future of gaming in wired's nextfest a couple of months ago). gamers will not only be great consumers for energy drinks, but will also have to buy deodorants and shower gel, cause they'll be running, jumping, fighting and dancing for real in a virtual world.
we played till every night till 1am or so when we had to quit, since our reflexes were not as sharp and we started losing games and dropping points in our rankings. it is addictive, and it is really a good workout.
in the skype 3.0 beta that i am using they added a bunch of features. one of them is a new button in the chat window offering the user to “do more”. this is currently used for games, but seems like a type of a place to throw in junk.
following on my previous post on what makes me switch between online services i’d like to extend a small piece of advice to skype/ebay: do less.
there is also an additional tab on the main window for joining “live conversations”. doesn’t seem like a mass market feature to me.
they should look at what happened to icq, aim, yahoo and msn. too many features are hurting the user experience. their challenge is how to promote new capabilities to the user, but whatever the new feature is, it does not worth messing up the user experience.
their core business is free (or cheap) calls made simple, and getting people to buy skype credits (mostly for skypeout and skypein). this is where they should focus.
so i decided not to buy the zune (apparently like many others..).
two main reasons why i will not buy zune:
i think microsoft made a big mistake with the way they implemented the sharing. unlike the weight which is a design mistake that can (and will) be corrected in v2.0 the DRM decision is a philosophical one.
until they will not change their approach i will not be buying it.
Nokia announced today the Nokia 6300. it’s way-too-late foray into the thin phones category. which is still much thicker than competing models from Motorola and Samsung.
the picture above is of Nokia N93. i saw it on the wall street journal. below the picture it had the standard copyright reference “Nokia Corp.”, i accidentally read it as “Nokia Crap”… a little freudian slip, but one that truly reflects what i think of this device.
a $700 handset/brick that is bulky and ugly.
tom sent me this one this morning.
i am not sure it is real. but this looks like a cool phone.
i understand it will come out in Q1 2007 exclusively on Cingular and that Verizon Wireless is concerned (they should be).
if it will work well then they will most likely meet their internal (very aggressive) projections
i downloaded the gmail mobile app to my blackberry 8700 yesterday
. it is awesome! (does any one still use this word?) really. the best mobile app i played with to date.
it is fast. simple. and delivers the good.
it is just amazing that with all the companies playing with mobile email all these years it took google to come and show how to do it right.
now i have both gtalk and gmail on my blackberry. next should be google reader, so i can read all my RSS feeds easily.
i am going to hear chris anderson talk about the long tail later today, so i pushed myself to finish the book in time.
the long tail is a pretty simple concept that anderson is applying mostly to the business world. wait better let wikipedia define it:
Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include the online retailer Amazon.com and the online video rental service Netflix. The Long Tail is a potential market and, as the examples illustrate, the distribution and sales channel opportunities created by the Internet often enable businesses to tap into that market successfully.
A former Amazon employee described the Long Tail as follows: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday." In the same sense, the user-edited internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has many low popularity articles that, collectively, create a higher quantity of demand than a limited number of mainstream articles found in a conventional encyclopedia such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.
the origin of the book is an article published in wired, which then grew to become a book.
the book got my entrepreneurial cycles going, which not many books do, but overall i think it is a simple concept and phenomenon that does not require 225 pages to explain and analyze. there is A LOT of repetition. at a certain point i thought i am reading "the long tail for dummies".
to anyone who is interested i recommend reading the original article and some of chris's blog entries. …but the book is a good read and it is thought provoking, so maybe you should read the book, too.
i have been discussing a GPS with real-time traffic info with tom and maskit a while back. we all came to the conclusions that:
a. it would be great to have a GPS that could recommend different routes based on traffic
b. that basing it on just the people who use the specific GPS is useless (since there is no critical mass)
today a company called Dash demonstrated their "smart"/internet connected GPS product, Dash Express at the Demo conference. and they list a few cools features.
first and most important is their "Network Traffic" feature. it combines historical traffic flow information with real-time reporting from the Dash Network (i.e. people who are using Dash Express). it's not clear whether they also throw into the mix traffic reports from the internet/radio (i think they should). the Network Traffic feature will suggest the driver 3 possible routes with estimated times based on traffic.
as i mentioned above i believe the real-time data will not be useful until they reach critical mass, which may never happen. a much better approach to solving this problem would be to build on people's mobile phones (and i think i know how to make it work).
the second feature is "Destination Search", which sounds like they are integrating the location information with internet search. that makes perfect sense. my current GPS is very limited in the information it has, and i rarely use it because of it.
the third feature is "Send to Car", which enables users to send destinations via email to their GPS. small but very useful feature in my opinion.
it all sounds very promising. i signed up to 'be the first on the block'.. since my audi does not have a GPS it may very well serve as a good enough excuse to get a Dash once it comes out
so starting tomorrow everyone can register a ".mobi" domain. so what?
i am not sure i understand why it is needed. i believe (know) today's technology can enable device/browser detection, so if a mobile phone is accessing google.com the webpage can be rendered to fit to the mobile device form.
if you look at dotmobi's site and read what they are saying in interviews/pr they mention the main reason for dotmobi is to create a mobile friendly web. users accessing a .mobi site will know it works properly on mobile devices.
this does not sound like a convincing argument to me. for websites to be more mobile friendly they need to care about mobile usage, and create a version of their site that will cater to mobile users. the fact that there is now a .mobi domain will not make a difference.
so why create a .mobi domain given that .info, .biz, .us did not really succeed (nor does .net)? i think that the companies involved just thought there could be money made. thousands of companies will register the .mobi domain just to protect themselves. and if it catches on thousands more will follow, and a business generating millions of dollars will be created.
i don't think .mobi will be a success among end-users. time will tell.
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk
