Anthem Launches On Boost

We issued a press release this morning announcing our launch on Anthem on Boost. The release is here. We have been working with the folks at Boost for a long time and are extremely excited to launch with them. They are one of the most successful MVNOs and are some of the most savvy marketing people in wireless. More announcements coming soon.

Urban Daddy

I ended up on some nightclub mailing list over the last couple of years. I don't remember how or why. It is published by a guy in Manhattan and I don't unsubscribe because I find it fascinating. In the off chance I am in NYC and I am bored to tears, not...maybe I will go to some hopping club. Right.

A couple of weeks ago the guy who runs the list David Jaffe, sent an invitation to people on his list to sign up for a new email newsletter called Urban Daddy. I of course signed up. It rocks! They have city issues like LA and NYC and the newsletters remind me of a Daily Candy for urban hipsters. Check out the site here and subscribe. If you need an invite let me know. Right.

Strange Interactivities

If I were to be blogging more frequently now it would be about the mobile social networking space and mobile advertising and other things I don't think I should comment on given what I do. Because I am busy, the usual 5-10% of time of information harvesting I reserve has been very specifically work focused and that doesn't lend itself to blogging. Until five minutes ago.

I met Corey Denis at the first Portable Media Expo in Ontario in 2005. I was going out for drinks with Chris McDonald of IndieFeed and Brian Dewitt (currently at socialthing! ) at some cool bar near Pomona College. Corey came along and was working with IODA at the time (I think she still might be doing something with them) and we were all talking about podcasting and indie artist music and such.

Since then we have kept in touch periodically because we have been to some of the same events (Gnomedex) and we explored doing some stuff with IODA (I love IODA by the way). In any case like many people with the new social linkages, you find people in your various chat/communication/reader thingies these days. While I am not a Twitter person very often, I do occasionally turn on Twitterific to have some droning activity going on in the background. You know, where friends are flying to, what games they are playing, where they are eating.

Today Corey said she was doing some live realtime video feed stuff ala Ustream. She is currently consulting with a company out of Boulder called Me.dium and they are doing some live interactive rock show called Rock Me that you can find at the link. Corey said she was preping some live video feed at Dude of Music. She told people to come check it out on Twitter.

I fired up the website and saw her setting things up. Pretty cool. Kind of Justin TV but you know her. I pinged her on AIM. She answered. We spoke about a mutual friend Dick Huey who she had been hanging out with at the Future of Music conference. In any case, the live interactive video and glued to Twitter and AIM/Skype whatever goodness is just really freaky. Convergence isn't coming from a device or a piece of software. It's going to be the various little bits and pieces you can string together with your various pals and buddies wherever whenever. The future is definitely going to be cool. Or rather is the future now? Back to work.

Getting caught Red Handed

Hotel Max

I have not been blogging. The kids have been sick, work has been busy and I have been traveling. Lots of fun. Last week I had to bow out of the Silicon Valley Mobile Monday due to a very scary emergency room trip, which was a bummer(on both counts). Late in the week I was in Seattle speaking at a smaller conference on mobile commerce and doing some meetings and stayed at the Hotel Max. I have raved before about Tablet and thought I was done but this hotel was awesome and I of course found it on Tablet. First, it was cheap. Cheaper than any Starwood hotel and more importantly, the entire place is LOADED with art. The rooms, the doors to the rooms, the public areas. When you go to Seattle, put this on the list of places to stay.

Return of The Industry Standard

One of my daily email newsletters is reporting that The Industry Standard is coming back online. Well probably only online. As a pre-bubble dot-comer, The Industry Standard was THE place for all the dot com news. I really loved to read it as it had a faint hint of the scent of Valleywag and was pretty comprehensive in its coverage. In my opinion it was the best of the Biz 2.0 and Red Herring competitors. As nostalgic as I am, one has to wonder if this is a sign of impending doom. :-)

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

I will be speaking about some of our lessons learned on Monday night at Silicon Valley's Mobile Monday meeting. Details here. It's a great collection of speakers including Jordy from Bebo and Sam from Loopt. Both are great guys. Can't say that I know the Nokia guy. It will be my 3rd Mobile Monday (San Diego, Austin) and it should be a lot of fun.

Sirius

This is the year I took the satellite plunge. I have posted before how certain things can really drive technology adoption. For me it has been the NFL. Thanks to the NFL I made the switch to Directv. In fact I think they kick ass over my former digital cable provider.

Last year I came really close to getting Sirius. The big sticking point for me was that there weren't any portable models except on XM, and XM doesn't have the NFL. This year while looking through the selections offered I discovered the Stilleto which is a portable unit that can be played on the go, in your car with a dock, or in your home. Nifty. Well, mostly nifty. I had no desire to do an install in my car so I thought I would walk around and listen on runs or while killing time. Two problems with this. First, the only way to remotely pull that off is to wear some industrial strength antenna headphones and pray that you get more then one bar. Second, you better be outside with an unobstructed view of the southern skies with said contraption on your head. I don't mind looking stupid but the headphones actually hurt.

So I broke down and did the car install. Since then I have been really digging Sirius. I expected to get NFL and college football. What I didn't expect was that I would get into listening to music. Sirius has some great genre formatted stations that I am getting into. Right now the three music oriented channels I listen to are Elvis, Punk and Faction. Elvis is, well, Elvis. 24/7. Punk is mostly real hard core old school punk. Think Dead Kennedys. Faction is for lack of a better word skater music. The play punk, hardcore, reggae and hip hop. You know skater music. In any case I am excited about the football season and getting to spend some time discovering some new bands I wouldn't normally listen to.

Old McDonalds - Truth in Advertising

One day several weeks ago while watching The Power Rangers with my oldest son, he suddenly asked me why Old McDonald keeps interrupting his show. A little background is needed. You see for some reason my son has confused Ronald McDonald and Old McDonald from the nursery rhyme. He seems to think they are the same even though one runs a farm and the other is a clown.

I explained that Old McDonald was trying to get him interested in visiting their store to get hamburgers and fries. He asked why? I told him that it was called advertising and the idea was that if they kept reminding him that he would ask us to go there the next time he got a choice. I wasn't convinced he understood it but the line of questioning dropped.

A week or so later we had been at an Aztecs Football practice and I was looking for a fish and chips place by request. I was n a part of town where I couldn't seem to find one and suggested that we go to In and Out burger instead as there was one nearby. Just then my son saw the golden arches and commented to his friend, "I don't know why Old McDonald keeps trying to get me to eat their unhealthy food but I don't want to go there."

I laughed out loud realizing that he had synthesized conversations from my wife saying that he can't always go to McDonalds with the conversation above. Too funny.

iPhone Goodness

I have been playing with an iPhone for a couple of weeks. I was about to write a lumbering post about how it is a great media device and a not so great productivity tool. Especially with respect to email. But then Lifehacker turned me on to AppTap and I did the easy 1 click firmware upgrade that allowed me to install a whole host of software including the mobile Chat software that supports IM. Specifically AIM right now. Fricking cool. Ok, so I will probably still do an iPhone post but may change the focus.