Video from CTIA

I am way behind on posting but expect to catch up soon. Right. In any case here is a video of me rambling on about what we do from bnetTV at CTIA. Link is here.

Russ is blogging again

Actually Russ started blogging around his new startup Mowser a while ago but now he has started his personal blog again which you can view here. I am really pumped to be reading his posts again.

Marc Andreessen Blog & GoMo News

Over this last weekend I was turned on to two new blogs that I want to pass on. First, Marc Andreessen from web browser fame started a blog. It is a great collection of posts about technology, VCs and personal productivity. I'd say it is a definite subscribe given the quality of his first several posts.

The second one is GoMo News which describes itself as Edgy Wireless News. Debi Jones turned me onto it during a conversation where I lamented the shortage of good wireless blogs, or rather new voices. There are in fact a good number of mobile bloggers ala the Mobile Carnival ring, but it seems like there aren't a whole lot of new faces posting these days. Maybe they are working on companies...In any case GoMo looks promising as they are kind of irreverent and we even got singled out as a potential bubble company. Thanks guys!

Mowser - Russ is back

When I first started blogging and reading blogs 3 years ago, the strongest voice in mobile was Russ Beattie. Russ wrote great posts that were very thoughtful and comprehensive. Whether or not you always agreed with him was another story. ;-)

I struck up an online friendship with Russ and have kept in touch with him over the last year or so of blogging silence.

Last week he unveiled his new project Mowser which is a fresh take on mobile browsing, i.e. making websites readable on phones. The even better news is that he is keeping a company blog that you can find here.

It will be great to see what he comes up with in terms of the business and it will be extremely fun to see how he tempers his great editorial now that he is blogging in the context of a business. Best of luck to him, now go subscribe and try his product!

Zannel

Zannel is a new mobile/web user generated content site. I don't usually say much about mobile stuff that is in related areas as us as I have a huge bias about the awesomeness of what we do. ;-)

However, in this case I have to make an exception. Zannel is founded by a bunch of former Infospace and Moviso guys. While checking the site out before they launched I submitted a picture of one of my many kids. It was I have to say an exceptional photo. You can see it from their homepage as it is a featured picture. My kid is the one who is knuckle deep...

CTIA - Mobile Entertainment Live

Orlando? I get Vegas, New Orleans, even Atlanta. Orlando is a place for theme parks. I flew across country yesterday and got in somewhere in the middle of the night. I missed the first part of Greg Clayman's keynote but did catch the second half. I probably won't blog much here as I am mostly in meetings. Hopefully there are some really interesting/products or announcements this week.

Rental Cars, LBS and Cellphones

Sometime last week I received an email from the Sprint Ambassador program soliciting feedback for the Phase 2 timeframe. I have to say that I have really dug the program and it has forced me to evaluate things I wouldn't normally look at in the course of my information ferreting process. After giving my feedback I fired up my phone and did some deck cruising to see some of the things they have that I may not normally look at. Combing through the record crates as it were.

For some reason, that is mostly historical, I usually rent cars from Budget. The primary reason I think is that I really like the guy who runs the Budget franchise at Union Station in Los Angeles and he always takes care of me when I am in LA. Beyond that I really am on the fence about Budget, especially the outfit at the airport in Seattle. those people are a case study in miserable customer service.

So yesterday I headed up to San Francisco and Silicon Valley for a busy day of meetings. While booking a car late at night on Monday, budget was sold out at SJC, which happens more than occasionally. Big sigh. I went over to Hertz and found a bunch of cars and went ahead and booked.

The next morning while picking up the car, I was asked if I need satellite radio or GPS or anything special which I declined but I realized that I had a little bit of all those things in my Sprint phone, which is an LG Fusic.

I have to admit that the thought of GPS navigation on my cell phone for the car seemed really ridiculous. I recalled from my previous digging around that there was an application I had subscribed to called TeleNav Navigator. I fired up the application and set it up for directions to San Francisco. I know how to get to San Francisco but I wanted to see how well it works.

As I exited the Hertz parking lot the phone started barking out directions to the city. Very cool. The speaker could be a bit louder but the experience was as good as what I have seen pre-installed in cars with the exception of the sound volume. While flying up the 280 I pulled out the phone and was blown away by the really cool 3D representation of my car cruising up the coast route.

I spent the better part of the day making the application map my directions and all in all it was really good and surprisingly kind to the battery. At $10 a month for an application like this I have to wonder what sort of threat this poses to the guys charging $2000 to load this stuff directly into cars. If I can do a bluetooth connection to a car speaker system I can get the sound piece worked out and I am good to go. Just a thought. I will come back to some other implications of this shortly as it relates to the mobile relevance of applications or not in a post I am working on assuming I actually finish it.