Mobile Monday San Diego Tonight

I spaced and forgot to post that Mobile Monday is tonight (Wednesday) to coincide with the Brew conference. It's a great lineup of LBS related companies. Debi has the information here.

Orkut Spam

Has anyone else been getting a lot of Orkut messaging lately? I have been getting a resurgence of activity from people in Brazil. As I have never been to Brazil, but really want to go there soon, I chalk it up to spam. Spam for sure but fascinating Spam. I have been ignoring it until tonight. I think everyone I can persuade should become a friend of $16;MonsterMan. The Punisher. I want to party with him. I am now his friend. Sorry I haven't used Orkut in a while. He is my best friend.

DRM Pain

Been going through old to-do emails. I have been playing a little bit with the Sprint Music store on the demo phone they sent me that is powered by Groove Mobile. On the phone it's kind of cool in that I use it as my new transistor radio when I am out with the triplets. They really dig Tears For Fears - Change. I hadn't played with the PC part until tonight. I was going to download the songs I had "bought" from the store. I tried to do the download but I had to do a Windows Media Player upgrade. Not a big deal.

I download the upgrade of the DRM. I start the install and the first thing it tells me to do is to backup my hard drive. Pass.

Is this still the current state of things? I don't mind upgrading your DRM for my players but the .99 or $2.99 dollar songs is worth a whole lot less than my data. I will keep the data. I am behind on backups anyways and will do the backup but I am not installing software that can wreck my stuff. I am less worried about the backup than I am the 3 days I would lose reinstalling stuff. Pass.

I Want Media

A couple of months back I subscribed to the I Want Media newsletter and I have to say that day in and day out this is my new favorite surpassing Moconews, Venture Wire and some others. It's a shame they don't provide RSS feeds but I would definitely recommend checking it out if you are interested in the intersection of media and technology and want to stay up to date.

Quien es mas macho? Max Headroom or Tony Snow

I was walking past a television the other day and noticed that CNN had a smiling picture of Tony Snow talking and I was struck by how similar he looked to Max Headroom. It must have been the goofy smile and the big head. I must say that having a affable press secretary was a stroke of genius for the people who are running the country. For my money though, I have the say that Max Headroom is the better man.

Blogger Comment Filter Improvement

Over the weekend Blogger rolled out word verification for comments. I don't get many comments but I really enjoy getting the ones that I do. Unfortunately I have been getting about 50 Spam comments a day for all kinds of crazy stuff. I turned the filter on this weekend and away the Spam went.

Tivo And Direct TV Confusion

Some days you feel like you are complaining a lot. After the drug store ordeal below and being seriously burned out from the sailing trip, I wanted to sit down and watch a movie with Tate. We pulled up Pay Per View on our DVR and tried to buy a show. We ended up getting a weird customer service error where we had to call some number. Lameness. Why would I want to call someone? Why would the company I am paying want me to talk to someone? That costs money. I call the number and do some weird menu navigation kung fu that ultimately gets me to an apparent human being. Fascinating. You don't find many humans these days and I actually think this guy was located somewhere in the United States.

We spend a longer than I would care time on the phone and early on he tells me that my machine hasn't called back since March. I corrected him and said that no in fact it had called back the previous Thursday at 1:01 AM as I have had this problem before and I went through all the information screens in advance to get the information in advance of this call. He said that it needs to send something back on a special call and it hasn't done that since March. Now mind you, this is the second time I have had this problem and the last time it resulted in me shipping my box back to them and them sending me a new box. I am thinking this is about to happen again.

I don't spend much time with him editorializing as it doesn't really do much to help me but I would point out a couple of things...

My machine does call back every couple of days.

Some kind of data gets sent back to the home base.

When I order a show some kind of authorization process occurs which leads me to believe that they should have some record on their servers independent of my box.

The movie studios want to get paid.

If my box is broken again and I haven't paid for any of the 10 plus movies we bought in the last two months how do the studios get paid?

If Direct TV authorizes the shows in advance from their home servers they should have a record of it.

If they have a record of it then my machine calling them shouldn't matter.

If the above fact pattern is true then they should let me buy whatever I want, whenever I want instead of making me sit on the phone for 20 minutes where they lose money and I lose patience.

If the above is false then I am going to get a bunch of movies for free when they make me ship this box back to their home office.

Maybe I am missing something. Maybe not.

Give Me Liberty Or Add Me To Your Database

Tonight I was pretty wiped out. The previous night one of the triplets, Brit, had a respiratory thing going on. We didn't get much sleep. We had a day planned to go sailing which we did and had a really awesome time. Pics will be posted shortly. Tonight I needed to head to the drug store to get a ration of Motrin, Pediacare, and some Vaporizer stuff. With 18 month old triplets and a soon to be 4 year old, we go through lots of medication.

Apparently the nationwide epidemic of methamphetamine use has resulted in some restrictions around your ability to purchase large quantities of medication that could be used to make speed from the comfort of your home. Mind you with all the chemicals involved and the number of kids in my house, I don't have any plans to set up a meth lab anytime soon. I can picture a biker in a bandana loading up a shopping cart full of sudafed as being suspicious but several bottles of the above mentioned drugs shouldn't freak anyone out.

When I stepped up to the counter the clerk told me she had to see my drivers license. I pulled out my wallet. She said she needed me to take my license out of my wallet. Huh? I am tired, sure. I took it out and handed it to her. Yes, I am turning 40 this year and the curly headed kid with me is in fact mine and the small quantity of medication on the table is because I have triplets and they generally take 3 times as much medicine as a single child. It's a math thing.

The clerk proceeded to take my license and swipe it on some magnetic card reader. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! I have been added to the database of speed freaks and meth cookers. I asked her what the hell that was. She murmured something about some methamphetamine act and pulled up some government publication in her other hand. Tired and not fully realizing how seriously angry this was going to make me, I blurted out vocally, "Hey nothing like a little invasion of my privacy in the land of liberty." The elder gentleman in line behind me blurted out a vocal "Amen".

I am thinking I need to do some research on this law and see if any civil liberties people have any issue with this kind of stuff. If I wasn't tired and if I had any inkling that I was going to be scanned to buy some medication for my kids I would have told her thanks but no thanks. What is going on with my country?

Rabble and Upcoming.org Integration

This week we rolled out integration with Upcoming.org . Rabble users can adjust their settings and then when they add events to their Upcoming account the event automatically gets published to Rabble. Also when our users create an event in Rabble they can choose to publish it out to Upcoming.org. For example I just added the San Diego date of the Warped Tour to my Upcoming calendar and it is now in Rabble as well.

On the Road / Chicago and LA

Atlanta was hot. I don't do humidity very well. I did ride the MARTA to the airport which was cool although the back story reason I rode the MARTA was kind of fascinating but I won't go into that.

Chicago was perfect. The time of year that the Midwest has great weather. Chicago is a great city that just looks so regal. I think that most of the time I have been there when I was at Vivendi was the middle of winter, which isn't as nice.

The trip was good. Mostly business although I was happy to grab breakfast with Patrick DeMoustier who worked with me at Vivendi. He is currently at EA in Chicago as the COO of their studio there. It was nice getting to catch up.

Leaving Chicago was a nightmare. Apparently some weird tornado stuff came up that delayed our flight like 3 hours before they boarded us and made us sit on the tarmac for another 2-3 hours. Lots of fun. We got home at 2 AM and then ran up to LA for a day of meetings. No rest for the wicked. Currently I am on the train with the EVDO on catching up on stuff hoping to get back in my bed before midnight.

Two big technology things from this trip.

1. I downloaded my first TV show. I know, I know, I am a lame avoider of P2P networks but having lots of friends in the content businesses I just don't download stuff for free. I caught the first half of 24 for $1.99. That was so worth it. I was really excited about being able to not have to wait to go home and see it on the TIVO, although sometime late tonight I will catch the other half of the finale. I am really tired or I would have some commentary on how music is not throw away but television is for me and how I actually want to own a CD but could care less about the DVD of a TV show season but I can't do it now. There is something profound there. Not tonight though.

2. More TV on my phone. During those 2-3 hours on the tarmac, in a small seat, in a plane that was hot, with no food or beer, I found that pulling up live feeds of the Weather Channel on my Sprint phone and looking at the weather radar made me realize that when the airlines push you out onto the tarmac with no intention of letting you fly, it isn't really a magic fairy storm that spontaneously comes into existence. They actually know it is coming because they have satellites and other technology that lets them know full well what they are doing. Wow, stupid me. So with that fact in hand it begs the question of why it is better for me to sit confined to the seat of a plane for hours than to sit comfortably or semi comfortably back in the airport. I can't imagine I would like the answer so I am going to continue to pretend it's the weather fairy and gremlins that make my traveling miserable.

On The Road From Atlanta

I am out traveling a bit this week. I got to Atlanta last night and will be here for the day for meetings before I head to Chicago tonight for more and then on to Los Angeles. A couple of observations from the road. First, I forgot my noise reducing headphones that I received as a gift earlier this year. I can't tell you how much I miss them. Bad mistake. Those things have changed my travel quality of life. Second, the EVDO phone I am using is awesome as a modem. As we checked into the hotel last night I saw the sign for $16 for unlimited connectivity. Whatever that means. It's kind of funny how we have gotten to the point where almost all of the hotels are now wired for connectivity but we are now starting to use high speed phones instead of their wi-fi. Third, the podcasts that are available for download are amazing these days. I listened to Nightline, Jim Lehrer and All Things Considered on my PSP. In some respects travel has certainly gotten easier. More later.

Movable Type / Typepad on Rabble

Last week we rolled out integration with Rabble and Movable Type and Typepad. We publish the Intercasting Blog using Movable Type so this afternoon I set up a channel Intercasting on Rabble and brought over all the posts we have made in the last year. We can now update the corporate Blog from Rabble while on the road as well.

Virb

One of the sites that took the mantle of indie and up and coming music when the first incarnation of MP3.com went dark was PureVolume. I have admired what they have done from afar over the last several years and in my opinion they have really captured the pulse and lifeline of indie music today. Where you go from there in a world of changing tastes with kids is hard to say but an indication of where they are going can be found at the soon to be launched Virb. It appears to be their take on social networking and given the smarts that they have it will be interesting to see what their take is when they go live.

New Yahoo Homepage

I just hit a new, updated and stylish Yahoo homepage. My cohorts can't seem to get it to appear. I like it a lot. Wonder when it really rolls.

All Beta'd Out

This has been a tough week for trying new stuff in my ample free time. The things this week that drove me insane:

Helio. I should have waited for a little while. I don't think that you can do an evaluation of the service right now. The software to connect to the PC isn't available yet and I don't think they intend to lock the handset down as much as it currently is locked down. Please let me put Opera Mini on the phone. Cool? Again, love the phone, love the UI. Not much else to say at this point.

Aimpages. I heard they went beta earlier this week and signed up. I tried to edit my template but it was really screwed up. Painfully screwed up. I tried it on Firefox, IE, Safari and Camino. Each time I couldn't get it to work. I sat down with one of our developers and watched him go through the process and realized that when I had signed up my base template had been improperly initialized and there was no framework to add the Ajax widgets. Grrr. I deleted my page and started over and it was working. Well sort of. But its a start. Pretty wacky. Here is a start for my page.

YouTube Mobile Video Upload. I deserve what I get on this one. Video off the phone, over the air to a web service is a leap of faith. Is my file to big? Will the MMS gateway on my side barf? Will their handler work on the other end? Will the specific flavor of encoding on my phone work? I knew better going into this. I tried to send a big file from my P910 through the MMSC for Tmobile. Nope. Too Big. I sent it over the Internet Gateway. No Problem. YouTube barfed on it. I sent a smaller file over MMSC. No Dice. Smaller file over Internet. YouTube barfed. I sent a smaller file over MMS from Helio. No error message and no video. I can't even figure out what happened to that one. I am going to try some other carrier gateways like Verizon or Sprint MMS which I believe will actually work. User Created Video is going to be big. But there is a long way to go before it is a good consumer experience.

All in all it was a bit of a frustrating week but on the plus side, the amount of innovation that is happening everywhere right now is breathtaking. I expect the three above mentioned services will all get their kinks out and I suspect that each of them will be successful in the long run. I am going to take a break from trying new things out next week. One thing that occurred to me though is that it would be really cool to see a side by side comparison of Helio and Ampd. Of Myspace, Aimpages, and Pages.google.com. Of all the video hosting sites and how they handle mobile video upload. Someone? I am off next week.

COPA? How about DOPA?

Cnet reports that Congress is considering passing legislation called Deleting Online Predator Act or DOPA. This legislation would basically shut down access by minors to websites at all schools and libraries for social networking and blogging sites. This Myspace as scapegoat inspired legislation would be broad enough to nail all the sites kids use like Myspace, Facebook, Live Journal, Xanga etc. as well as sites like Blogger.

I expect that there will be a concerted effort by the fledgling industry that 10s of millions of kids are using to temper this a bit or at least make it reasonable. It smells a bit like election year over-reaching to me.

2 Years of Blogging

Today marks my "blogging birthday". Two years and 657 posts later I am still enjoying it immensely.

Narchive Music Wiki

I must have missed the rollout of Narchive. Or N-archive as in Napster archive. Think Wikipedia meets Allmusic. It looks pretty cool. I of course went to look at Tool because they are my soundtrack of choice this week. Me and 500,000 others last week. There isn't much there yet except what I think is a big chunk of Muse bio information. I will have to check out some of the other more popular bands to see what is there. Has anyone else tried the Wiki music approach yet? I think this is a first.

OPML Madness

This is my week for OPML. The Social Software Weblog (which I need to re-add to my blogroll) had an article about Grazr here. Earlier this week I decided to start hacking my blog up to clean things up and to try some new stuff. I started by creating an OPML file of my newly condensed reads to try out Winer's new Share Your OPML, which I have to say has been fascinating. Mostly to see what other people read stuff like you. There are a number of views into the information that I have been stewing on and interestingly found someone I know at Warner Bros. who was near the top of my list and I was also near the top of his.

Today I installed the Grazr Javascript on the side and I have to say that it is a super cool little add on that makes updating the blogroll a snap. It also lets people quickly and easily read the same stuff I am reading instantly.

YouTube Rolls Out Mobile Video Upload

Cnet reports that YouTube has rolled out a new feature that allows users to upload videos to their site from their mobile devices. Nifty. I imagine that most users will have to send videos through their carriers MMS gateway which will have a size limitation. My account allows me to bypass MMS and go direct to email. I just sent a fairly sizable video that hasn't gone live yet. I will post a link when it does.

Share Your OPML Site Down?

I can't get in. Anyone else? I get a Wordpress database error.

Share Your OPML

I had been putting off trying to grok OPML for over a year. There are the obvious things but after spending time with the opml.org outliner. (Painful and non-intuitive) I managed to get together an OPML file of what I am really reading right now. I went down to 24 feeds. I will begrudingly add more as the days pass. I am thinking of quitting using bloglines and start with a new newsreader as well to make sure I don't go and red the several hundred I have in Bloglines and Sharp Reader.

I pointed a link from Share Your OPML to my file and voila! There are some cool things about this site that is a different slice from the other services like Bloglines and Feedburner.

I am really interested in the shared updating of outlines ala Basecamp (no OPML isn't Basecamp but the shared space thing) and I think I got a glimmer of the power of synchronized information in a format like OPML.

Helio First Impressions

I wanted to clarify something that I hadn't said before. Our company is an application developer and it's our goal to get the widest distribution possible. From that perspective, all carriers are good. I am not writing about Helio as it relates to that at all. I am writing about Helio because I think I am in their target demographic. Ok, maybe at the high end of the target demographic in terms of age, but nonetheless, when I heard the original Helio announcement, I thought, "Here is an MVNO for me, high end phones, 3G networks, etc." This should be my carrier.

So whether or not that assumption was flawed, I have proceeded to get a phone and have gone through some of the processes that I described earlier that I will describe as opening week jitters. That sort of stuff happens and it was neither my intent or desire to say, "hey I keep having problems." I will say that there was one other thing that popped up that I wont go into but I want to say that their VP of Operations called me to give me a hand with some of the issues I had been experiencing. I was impressed with the outreach.

My requirements for a carrier are pretty straightforward. I want a lot of minutes for talking. I average 2000-3000 a month. I have a 5000 minute plan with T-Mobile to cover that. I want to have a feature rich phone or at least flexibility to bring my own phone if I don't see anything that excites me. My current phone is the Sony Ericsson P910. I love it and have gushed about it frequently. It is a slight bit big and slightly underpowered in the media department and lack of hi-speed network capability. I also want to be able to use my phone to read my email, surf the web and act as a modem for my laptop in a pinch. This means unlimited data or cheap data. At it's core I want a cool phone without a lot of restrictions.

The Hero phone is amazing. All of the specs are great. The sound is great. The gameplay is stunning. The UI is out of this world, truly a big improvement over most phones. As an FYI, my phone UI bias is Sony Ericsson and Samsung. I am not a Nokia convert. I think that the Hero UI is close to what I am used to.

The EVDO network is solid. Actually, let me say, that I expect it to be solid as the Sprint Ambassador Samsung A920 phone that just kicks ass in terms of speed. I haven't really been able to properly put the phone through it's steps to see how it performs under some serious load, but the Samsung has been a champ and I expect that when I get the chance to work the Hero, it will be similar.

I plan to spend more time with the phone later but there were several things that made me pause or scratch my head. First off, the HOT or Helio On Top application. It is a nifty feature that sends alerts to the screen of my phone. Like Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo etc. It also has Myspace news and IGN news. Great. Let me go in and customize this for the stuff that I use or the blogs that I read. Not so much. Or at least not now. I imagine they will change that but for now my ability to customize or personalize the experience is fairly constrained. I guess Bloglines on my Sidekick II is staying for a bit longer. The HOT application also made my phone occasionally non-responsive. Again, I am sure this will get fixed.

The next issue, that to me is currently the biggest issue is the open/walled garden setup of the phone browser. This certainly has to be an oversight. The ability to go to the WAP sites of choice or even to view non WAP sites is pretty limited. I think this is probably a network configuration issue. I am not sure if it is intentional or not. After realizing that the installed browser is not HTML friendly, or doesn't come installed with a real browser like Opera was on my Sony. I cruise through the Opera site and get to the download and then get a permissions error from the phone. Sorry bucko, no can do. Ok, this has got to be wrong. I haven't had the chance to install any software yet and maybe that is by design. I am loading the software for my PC in the next day or two when my actual phone gets here and will see how the PC integrates with the phone and see if I can do some software installs that way.

The other big glaring thing for me, and it's not something I would expect to be there, but the Sprint Ambassador phone has actually gotten me fascinated more than I expected, was the lack of a music store to load tracks onto my sweet new phone. The only music available are music videos. Huh? This might be a user error issue but I am not sure.

Anyway, like I said these are first impressions. I certainly hope the phone/network are a bit more open than I see at first glance. If that is the case I would say I am heading down the path to really liking where they are taking this. If it's more locked down then it's probably not for me.

I am not going to comment on the Myspace integration for obvious reasons but will say that I have used it a lot and would like to see someone else review that functionality soon.

My Helio Saga Part 3

An hour after my last call, I called back because it still wasn't working. We did a 20-30 minute phone call. We walked through lots of phone geek stuff. At the conclusion they said wait for an hour and it will work. I waited an hour. It didn't work. I called back. I did another 30-40 minute call. Actually I am still on the call. They said that the device is defective. I guess that's possible but it seems strange. Sigh. I get a new one tomorrow. Stay tuned. Grumble grumble. Early Adopter.

Dodgeball Newsletter

I just saw a Dodgeball newsletter in my SPAM catcher. It looks like they are providing stats to users as it relates to check ins etc. I love stats and think that's pretty cool. None of my friends use Dodgeball so I haven't been using it. Some of the people I know in SF are into it, I guess I need to add them as friends, I just don't who is. I certainly missed out on the Dodgeball connections at SXSW.

My Helio Saga Part 2

The title of this post shouldn't be saga but unfortunately it is the right description. As readers may recall I uncovered a broken javascript piece in the shopping process that prevented me from completing a purchase of my new Helio phone. After calling them and alerting them to the problem, the fixed it. Opening day bugs, not a problem. It's to be expected. As an early adopter of things, this doesn't come as a surprise.

Yesterday my phone, a Hero, arrived. I was extremely impressed by all the packaging and presentation. Very Apple if you ask me but cooler in my opinion. A great start. I had also seen the phones before and wasn't very impressed. It reminded me of so many other sliders I have used. I think it was mostly because I wasn't really trying to focus on the phone. Last night I have to admit that I thought the phone was extremely nice and the UI, which I had been impressed with before is extremely beautiful and gives such a great first impression.

I charged the phone overnight and rushed downstairs to activate it so I could start putting it through some drills on the morning coffee run. No dice. I went through the activation process and the phone doesn't work. I called back and it baffled the tech guy. All the settings were right and it should be fine but it wont call out, accept calls, or do anything with data. Huge bummer. The tech support guy said he had to escalate this or send me a new phone. I am waiting for a call back now.

Ok, so this is a saga right? I hope it gets sorted out today. If I weren't a phone geek, I wouldn't have bothered with the website problem and this activation problem, assuming I had gotten past the previous problem, would probably be the deal killer. But not me, nope I am an early adopter. Maybe they should send me some test phones. That would be a good idea. :-)

Google Translate Take 2

John came in this morning chuckling at me. He asked if I had ever noticed the translate this page next to results if you search for something like Munchen. Well actually, I hadn't but I do now. Needless to say I am not always as quick on some things as I am on others.

Google Translate

I was looking through our server logs and saw a referral from translate.google.com . I didn't recall hearing or seeing this but a quick technorati search shows some activity around this URL. The reason that this is important to me is that it spells the death of my use of Altavista. Actually that isn't entirely correct, it spells the death of my navigation to Altavista to get to that Babelfish link whenever I need to translate a website or an email. Does anyone use Altavista anymore? I am done. I am curious why the translate stuff isn't obvious anywhere on the Google directories, or at least not where I could find it.

Helio Shopping Cart Fixed

I called them to fix the shopping cart. They did so hopefully tomorrow I should have a new phone.

I can't Buy a Helio Phone

I decided this morning to get a Helio phone to check it out. I went through the sign up process on Firefox and right after I was upsold a Flash card, the website is broke. I thought it was just Firefox but I had the same experience with IE and it broke at the same point. That isn't good. Fix your website! I guess I have to call them on the phone. Did anyone else get through to buy one?

Rabble on TV

A local TV network in North Carolina RTPTV did an interview with Amanda Krantz who was working with us in North Carolina earlier this year. Here is a link to the video. If you have ever wondered what Rabble looks like, there are some good live screen shots in the interview.

Helio Launched - Korean Retail Angle

I try not to post about things that are broad news where I don't really have anything to add. Yesterday Helio launched. I am interested to see what their Myspace integration is like. As of this morning I haven't seen any reviews. I guess in the next day or two things might start to appear. I was dying to get my hands on a phone yesterday and since they are actually going to do some retail distribution I went to their site to find a store near me. Although my expectations were that in fact there are no stores, I was surprised to see a number near me. They happened to be in an area that is very Korean in terms of businesses and residents. There were three stores. I called them all. None of the people answered the phone in English. They did in fact speak English when prompted and after a couple of questions I realized that they didn't have the phones yet but should have them in the next several weeks. More important to my quest though was that these phones that they would be carrying would be with a Korean language version so no dice for me.

I think the biggest issue that I saw with their launch was the price point. When I originally heard about Helio I expected that they were targeting a more affluent post college kind of crowd which would be able to handle a relatively expensive price plan and handset purchase cost. I think their rollout suggests that this is still the case. With that in mind it seems sort of counter intuitive to me that they are marketing to the Myspace crowd which strikes me as a younger more price sensitive group. I am certain that similar to the other recently launched MVNOs there will be several course corrections over time. All in all though I am really excited about what they are trying to do in the MVNO space and I hope they gets traction quickly.

Radiate / Flipt Series A and Staff Addition

Yesterday in Venture Wire and Moconews it was reported that LBS start up Radiate / Flipt raised $5 million from Sequioa and NEA. As Shawn pointed out here although they are a "stealth" company some details are emerging through some astute blogospheric observations. Yesterday when I saw the names of the founders I tried to find some more news. I wasn't that successful but then thought that any good Silicon Valley backed startup probably uses Linked In. As a result I found the CEO Sam Altman and a link to Radiate on his resume that revealed Mark Jacobstein, The President and COO of Digital Chocolate is their EVP of Corporate Development and Marketing. Interesting that neither his departure from Digital Chocolate or his role at Flipt had been reported previously.