So I want to use my ATT calling card. The number provided by the operator doesn't work. The url on the back of their calling card leads to a dead page. A search on the term "direct access number" - the language they use on the back of their card - yields a stupid, "tell us more about yourself" page. Web incompetence at its finest. Back to Skype.
Sharepoint is going to be a major force in Corporate blogging and participatory platforms.
Blogging in a SME is very different to blogging in a medium to large Enterprise where, for the most part, IT professionals primary role is PREVENTING employees access to the outside world. Under the guise of security, supportability and a dozen other "abilities" tons of tools that power participatory media don't stand a chance.
Sharepoint could be come a key enabling platform for driving participation on the web. Interesting to see the Newsgator announcement today - and that by Confluence.
NewsGator Social Sites enables easy discovery of the core element of collaboration within a business – seeing what colleagues within an organization are doing and making easy connections between people
iPod bursts into flames in mans pocket. Which means, I guess, he has a hot pocket...
Turns out that Safari on Windows has been engineered to provide a very typical Windows experience. It's buggy, slow, and unusable on some of the systems I've installed it on.
Is this acceptable? Steve seems to think so - it's beta after all. Sorry, that just doesn't cut it for me. If Apple we're to use the same excuse, I'd label is a lame cop-out. I'm wondering if one of the realities that Apple has run into here is the extreme diversity of the Windows world. Diversity breeds complexity.
There is a vast difference between beta and useable software that the mainstream user can test - say, Google docs. Until it gets to that stage, tech companies have a responsibility to not to unleash broken software riddled with security holes onto the unwitting public (or Enterprises for that matter). That's not what Apple's brand or product promise is. I love Apple and have a ton of Apple kit, but this is a really sorry attempt on the Windows platform.
And, frankly, where I could get it to barely work, I.E. 7 appears vastly superior on a number of fronts. In my testing it's just as fast, Livewriter and del.icio.us plug-ins work great, and the interface is as slick. The bad news here is that there are so many cool competitive options I simply choose to uninstall Apple - and they'll have to do something wonderful to get me back to using Apple Safari on Windows.
Steve, business is in perpetual beta mode - we just choose not to make all our customers suffer through it.
I enjoyed this post over at Always On from Ezra Roizen - nice analogy:
The startup game is often one of aerodynamics and drag. The number of factors working against a new company is almost infinite, and most companies are unable to ever really achieve lift-off. Beating “startup drag” takes nearly perfect aerodynamics: a beautifully designed product, brilliant marketing, financial acumen, the whole shebang—all in concert and accompanied by great timing (and a bit of luck). It’s tough to think of a substantial Internet company that didn’t have a pretty sleek and aerodynamic concept at the start. Google (search), eBay (online markets) and Amazon (online shopping) were all elegantly designed and implemented.
To get the aerodynamics right, almost all startups require a combination of time, money, and experience. Normally, getting off the ground takes an excess of at least one of those ingredients. Investment capital for rapid expansion can be a surrogate for time spent slowly building a business through operations—just as experience can be a surrogate for money, allowing the company to skip wasteful steps on the learning curve, and so on.
Our DSL router recently self destructed. You'd think replacing it would be relatively straightforward. A month or so later our new, upgraded, super-duper router is running and close to or below dial-up speeds. Verizon's pathetic effort to resolve this issue is only matched by their bizarre business processes. Here are a few gems:
Here's the rub though - in this age of bountiful choice, it seems the only choice for consumer DSL is to wander into town and use the hyper fast FREE service and our local coffee shop.
... It's everywhere and we can't live without it. Imagine what happened this week when Blackberry service was interupted here in the US (thank god I was on a plane from Melbourne to San Francisco at the time!). As Dean points out, this wasn't the only service interuption of late:
Millions of BlackBerry users lost access to their messages early Wednesday. People filing their taxes electronically at the last minute overloaded Intuit's servers Monday and Tuesday.
We see technology breakdowns in a lot of places. The security communications system wasn't fast enough at Virginia Tech. The White House has lost some e-mails relating to the firings of federal prosecutors. In February, a glitch at Dow Jones made some jittery traders wonder if the stock market was crashing. Even Intel, the tech giant, has had trouble locating the e-mails of top executives for an antitrust trial.
So, if you don't have a back-up plan, you'd better get one...
THe Reg takes Forrester to task for wimping out on some terrific research into Apple's iTunes' sales growth:
Forrester says it wants the spin today to focus on other aspects of its research other than the 65 per cent drop. It can't quite agree on the spin - "growth has slowed" says researcher Remy Fiorentino while Josh Bernoff says sales have "levelled".
Bernoff is correct when he urges caution: we reported his warning not to extrapolate from a few quarters in our reporting - and put the 'collapse' in inverted commas. A 'collapse' it is indeed - few businesses can afford to ignore a 65 per cent in sales - but when married to the Neilsen data, we suggested that this brief era in the history of digital music may be drawing to a close - and the next one beginning.
It's a pity today that beseiged by parties who have vested interests, and their own agendas, Forrester wants to downplay the implications of its valuable work - and instead it finds itself doing crisis management on behalf of Apple.
Source: Forrester can't stand up for falling down over iTunes | The Register
It's been interesting watching Kiwi's get all excited about the arrival of iTunes. Much like I was when it first arrived. Today though. it's a different story. iTunes still does the syncing and I love using it to get at all those podcasts. But that's it. Seems I'm not the only one as iTunes remain flat in the US market:
“IPods are not sitting around generating dozens and dozens of transactions every quarter,” said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst for Forrester Research. “People buy a certain number of songs, and then they stop.”
I'm also one of the few people that watch video on their iPod - the downloading is just painful but on planes or treadmills, nothing beats watching TED speeches or Blade...
Why? Maybe they get frustrated with the DRM as I did. OK, buying songs one at a time seems cool until you realize how many you've bought and how unportable, limited in use and incompatible (e.g. with Sonos) they are.
Then you get a Sonos with Raphsody at home and it's pretty much game over inside the house as I simply pay a small monthly fee for all the music we can eat. Just love it. I use Raphsody for sampling and then buy CDs on Amazon.
iTunes has become a terrific music storage and management platform for me. But its no longer a place I shop.
As Microsoft looks to force everyone onto Internet Explorer 7 - which is stunning BTW - let me share a couple of experiences.
First, it is a terrific browser. Arguably the best out there. With integrated RSS and apps like Onfolio it is a big leap forward over past Microsoft browsers and rivals anything on the market. I've got my delicious plug-ins installed and Google notebook.
As Steve suggests, it ushers in a new world for RSS. With a hook. I'm also running the new version of Office (beta). So, I collect all my feeds in Explorer - so far so good. Then it syncs those feeds with Outlook. Good at first. Then my Outlook inbox fills with feeds and bingo, my mailbox exceeds its limit. I've got feeds but no mail. Not good. And no clear way to stop the feeds syncing other that to manually delete them in Outlook. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this in the next betas of Office. Also, the feeds in Onfolio seemed not to sync with the feeds in Explorer or Outlook.
So, Microsoft is 100% of the way there in terms of competing with other browsers but 30% of the way there in terms of its own product suite when it comes to RSS. Maybe. I'm sure I'm missing something.
Either way, it's a great browser.
I'm back dabbling with my Powerbook after a catastrophic hard disk failure. Having been stuck in the world of I.E. 7 and Firefox it is really apparent now how far Safari has fallen behind. Can't seem to find delicious plug-ins or an imbeded blog posting tool. No bookmark syncing to other browsers on other OSs. And so much more.
But that isn't my big problem. I built our family's site and photo album using iWeb. It seems though that should your instance of iWeb get nuked you can't import your existing site and keep going. The site is sitting there on my iDisk but how do you get it back into iWeb and keep using it? So, if anyone can tell me how to restore my .Mac hosted site created in iWeb back into iWeb I will send you some stunning wine.
iWeb was Ok to begin with but without an import feature that enables you to import and edit your existing iWeb sites it is really a bit of a joke. Am I missing something here?
From the Philips Simplicity Event...
Some stunning stats on Apple's retail stores:
Everytime I go into a store I'm stunned at how alive they are. For a contrast, visit a Sony store. Each Apple store is in effect one of the community epicenters. A place to learn, meet, swap ideas and get support. They really are remarkable.
An aside: expect the next version of Office for Mac mid 2007...
I am having a play with Microsoft's new LiveWriter. Looks interesting. If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed, might be worth a dabble. Nice interface but I can't see any compelling reason to move off Zoundry or Ecto at this stage.
Apple is enjoying a little first mover PR advantage with its pricing comparisons to Dell. First mover advantage is something that has been both promoted and discounted, but in the PR wars it's worth lots - especially when your foe doesn't move quickly (real-time) to counter the noise.
What I think people are missing here is that Dell's model is geared to moving prices in a competitive way. I'm not sure Apple's is as aggressively geared. They're a smart bunch down in Austin - watch what happens next with Dell Pricing... If there is one things I have learned - competing with Dell on price is a fools errand.
I've been watching Apple's announcements of the past week with keen interest (esp as I just installed a mini mac at home with Sonos). As someone who lives on both the Mac and Windows I care less and less about the operating system. Apple's is lovely and reliable - I would argue better. Windows is annoying and ugly - but fast and supports a plethora of software that I have no choice but to need (Internet Explorer) and some that I prefer (Outlook, Office, Powerpoint). Pogue does a better job than me on all of this.
So long as Microsoft and Dell have that advantage I'll keep buying their products - first mover advantage or no first mover advantage. So long as Apple has its advantage, I'll keep buying theirs. And so long as my employer keeps buying at least one of these systems, I'm stuck with that as well.
Which leads me - very circuitously - to my main point. The future won't be about who is better but rather who can tie it all together - and from that standpoint Apple is off to a good start... I'm going to want the best of both worlds on one system.
And oh, those Dell guys, they'll be in the middle of this as well, you wait and see.
Here is a big list of things to enhance your delicious experience which points to another great resource.
I'm into Week One of using my new Sony. I've got Zoundry running for blog posting and am using Outlook and IE.7 for my feeds. Couple of things I've discovered.
No issue importing my OPML file from NetNewsWire (running on my Mac) into IE - and it automatically synced with Outlook. The folders didn't carry over, so I have a massive list of feeds now.
Not sure how Microsoft will do it, but they need to get delicious fully integrated into IE7. I really miss it and it is the one thing that keeps me coming back to Firefox.
I like Zoundry as much as Ecto. Good engine for posting to blogs.
Just got my new Sony notebook. Love the form factor. Keyboard is a little weird to get used to - a tad squishy after the PowerBook. For some reason they shipped me a high-capacity battery - weird.
Anyway - was looking for a list of RSS readers. This one seemed pretty comprehensive. I'll test a few and let you know. One thing I do suggest looking at is Internet Explorer 7. Has some good capabilities for capturing feeds, storing them in folders and regular updates. The interface is pleasant and it offers tabbed browsing.
Looks like NZ is finally on the Google map... Here is one of the first mashups...
Great quote (thanks for the pointer Ross!) on the power of community - not just to build momentum but also lower operating costs and improve customer experience. Shai is talking about their Software Developer Network:
"...500,000 visitors per month. Aggregation of knowledge that is second to none. slashdot for SAP. SIs in India are hiring them 500 people at a time and saying for their first three months they are supposed to participate in SDN. Aggregation and knowledge and self-categorization has created an environment where you know the guy who is giving advice may have a point ranking that shows they don't have a life, but a lot of knowledge. We are contributing perhaps 20% of the content. Average time from Q&A is less than 30 minutes, I wish our support channels were that effective."
My commitments in Tokyo meant I couldn't make it to Fleishman's Beyond Blogging event in Washington this morning. Both embarrassing and a real disappointment as David, Shel and the the team had assembled a great crew of panelists. My apologies to all.
It's great to see another major agency weighing-in on the space.
Tokyo is Tokyo - marvelously efficient, incredibly clean and welcoming. The Keio Plaza has been through a big upgrade with W styled rooms and great hi-speed. My only advice, avoid the rainy season!
This is wicked cool... A naked Audi...
The Audi A8 is one of the most beautiful motors on the planet for many reasons, amongst them its aluminium body, so German automotive technicians mtm decided to highlight this by removing the paint, polishing the entire body and then using clear varnish to minimise oxidation and other environmental impact. - GizMag
Apple is perhaps the first consumer electronics company to attach a price tag to color. The new white iBook will cost you $1299, while the black goes for $1499. The only difference in specs between the two is that the black model has an 80GB hard drive whereas the white has a 60GB. An upgrade to white's drive to 80GB is $50. That means Black is worth a $150 more than White. Classic!
Ok, so Kiwis are a slow moving nocturnal bird.... Not this Kiwi though:
Ian Wright has a car that blows away a Ferrari 360 Spider and a Porsche Carrera GT in drag races, and whose 0-to-60 acceleration time ranks it among the fastest production autos in the world. In fact, it's second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.
The key difference? The Bugatti gets eight miles per gallon. Wright's car? It runs off an electric battery.
Wright, a 50-year-old entrepreneur from New Zealand, thinks his electric car, the X1, can soon be made into a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 - a quarter ton of batteries included. He has even launched a startup, called Wrightspeed, to custom-make and sell the cars.
Ian, if you need a test driver, I'm in Silicon Valley as well... :-)
There is a new version out of my fave blog posting tool for Windows - Zoundry.
I got a Sony PSP for my birthday last year. It is a stunning device. As gorgeous as the iPod and does some things much better. Many things hamper the PSP though - lousy content, incredibly punitive pricing, expensive storage.
It's a little rich though reading studio execs pointing the finger at Sony. The pricing for a movie ($20 bucks and upwards) is a joke when it really only works on a PSP - same for games. The PSP should be packed with mountains of cheap storage and I should be able to download movies to watch (I can here, but still at crazy prices). It should be a combination of Tivo and NetFlix to go.
Studio execs probably have better market research than I do, but here is a fact - three of us on a recent international flight were watching movies on our PSP. My Powerbook's battery life sucks that much. I want to watch more movies on my PSP - and TV - so, rather than telling us what you think we're doing, enable us to do what we want to do.
What hampers the Sony PSP is old thinking and proprietary ecosystems. I think Sony is just starting to get the PSP's potential as a network device. iPod's success comes from its inherent simplicity as a network device - and bear in mind it has no network functionality but the PSP does. Without iTunes, it's pretty much useless. Ironically I can connect my PSP via WiFi and other means directly to the network but the lack of cheap masses of storage and the complexity of downloading and ripping stuff is a serious drawback.
Apple commoditized content and built a community around that content - it then made buying and storing it incredibly compelling. Until Sony does the same, PSP can't succeed on the same scale - and success is nothing to do with UMD.
If you are using Microsoft Entourage (Outlook for the Mac) take a look at the latest update. Quite a few upgrades but most importantly "with the new 11.2.3 Update installed, you can now use Apple’s Spotlight feature to execute searches against your Entourage database contents. Spotlight can find any item inside your Entourage database; it does not matter, where that item is."
Interestingly, I didn't find out about this from any official source - rather from bouncing around blogs after two weeks of abstinence.
Looking at the new Wintel Origami device - one I was looking forward to looking at... I can't help but get straight to "butt ugly" as a description. It looks like one of those remotes I needed to operate my home audio jalopy. If this is somehow meant to resemble origami, somebody in Redmond is doing origami with concrete.
Some great photos from downunder as the Silicon Valley Aftershocks (Segway Polo!) visit New Zealand to play the Pole Blacks. Hey, the NZ Polo gang let the Segway riding maniacs onto their grounds! Steve Wozniak turned-up, much to the delight of my mate Rod - one of NZ's hottest tech entrepreneurs.
Call me crazy but I decided my one new years resolution would be no more subscriptions to services or magazines.
Not a week goes by without someone asking me to "Join" of "Beta" the next better, faster, sleeker service. None ever seem to integrate. The mantra seems to be "upgrade" - read: "leave your existing service, come to mine". So, no more subscriptions for a year...
Which means, not subscribing to Google's new hosted domain service. Interesting idea but I am not sure what value it really adds over the already pretty sleek offering from Network Solutions.
Subscription creep = complexity.
Both Steve and Stowe speak to this story on Yahoo in which they say it's not their goal to be #1 in search:
"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."
No surprise there. Yahoo's "life engine" brand positioning gets more to where they are going. Arguably, they've done a better job than Google of integrating the entire web 2.0 suite. And that's how I use them. My customized portal is of as much value to me as the utility of Google. Frankly, none of Google's products other than search have wowed me. Google Earth was like fun for a day. But I've found the reverse to be true for Yahoo!
I'm not about to make any declarative statements about giving up on Yahoo!. What is telling is the relationship between the CMO and Google vs. Yahoo - at least the CMO of a start-up. I look at Adsense every couple of days. They suck my marketing budget up like an out-of-control Dyson vacuum cleaner. And of all the marketing vendors they are the only one to demonstrate a very real, automated correlation between investment and results. Yahoo simply isn't there with them.
What is catching my attention as a CMO are all the other search options coming my way - companies like SLI Systems and Eurekster for instance. We tend to always view the battle as being between giants. More than often innovation happens at the edges of the market - that's how Google snuck-up on Yahoo and I have no doubt that Google will inevitably be challenged by upstarts.
So, even if my thesis holds true, it will be interesting to see how they monetize the life-engine position in the future. Google's competitive weapon isn't just the utility of search, but all so the utility of their advertising engine.
Disclosure: Yahoo! is a customer of LogLogic where I am CMO.
The power of the media coupled with the power of participatory communications can be a wicked thing.
I've been waiting eagerly to see the first reviews on the new Windows Treo and if there is one review to wait for, it is Walt Mossberg's. His brutal, but polite, honesty is to be admired. The cascade effect of his review can be witnessed over at BuzzMachine. Today, rather than the echo of a negative review being solely restricted to word of mouth - or a "did you see that" - it is a case of "did you read, see, hear that" as well. The echo isn't just louder, it has more depth.
I wonder what effect this will have over time on the theory of "Chasm Crossing" (a theory I passionately beleive in). In the past the power of PC Magazine and Walt were absolute. They made and killed product in a couple of pages. Now I can triangulate news quicker - not just listening to the reviewer but also the early adopter. This has definitely changed the mechanics of "Chasm Crossing" - it might have even altered the concept.
One thing that many of these reviews fail to focus on is the ecosystem that surrounds a device of this kind. I recently bought one of the new Blackberry's. The device itself is nice, although the lack of camera and WiFi is annoying. What isn't nice is the absolutely archaic email service that a consumer has to use to collect and forward emails. The automated deletion of emails on the server once they are deleted on the device rarely works and so you pretty quickly are unable to recieve emails until getting to a PC and browser.
To make things work, Blackberry's world is a Windows world. The mail interface works inconsistently across platforms, only working well on Internet Explorer.
And, Cingular is still stumped as to why the International roaming capability works OK in some places and not at all in others (I know this will result in a conversation about replacing my SIM card - meaning the problem is unique to my device).
Finally, the lack of applications for the Blackberry is really apparent. I got used to all kinds of useful apps on my Treo and Sony phone. There are very few for the Blackberry and those that are there aren't priced to move.
I was ready to give the new Treo a shot but I'm going to wait. Triangulating the news has convinced me again not to be an early adopter.
David was glad to see Dave Winer say that, in his opinion, the problems people were having with their iPods and iTunes are DRM-related. I was glad to see David get into the issue of what the "R" in DRM really means. It means restrictions.
Until CDs vanish, I continue to buy my albumns via amazon or BN. If I ever want a single track, I'll maybe use iTunes. The reason is simple - I want to own the music. Really own the music. David raises some fair questions related to this:
Something to think about as you drool all over that iPod Nano.
... and you are wondering how it all works. Especially how can I tell if all the stuff on my PC is on my iPod... Well, Dave Winer takes the iPod to task. It's for the most part pretty fair from a user perspective.
When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something? Is it really gone? Why does it wipe out the contents of the iPod when I don't say it's okay to?
Although I quite like the interface I did run into most of these scenarios trying to get my Aunt's iPod up and running on her PC yesterday. Paul flags one of the more friendly responses, which is pretty useful in answering these questions.
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Rupert Thomson: Divided Kingdom (*****)
Daniel Pink: A Whole New Mind (*****)
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