A new nephew

Although my brother in law Alex was devastated by the crushing defeat of the Republicans in the election yesterday, him and his wife welcomed into this world their first child a boy that was born weighing 7 lbs 11 oz and 20 inches. Pictured here. Name unknown. Developing...

The Moderate Party

I was in San Francisco and Silicon Valley yesterday. Today I am in Los Angeles. I wanted to make sure I voted before I got on the road so I hit the polling spot early. I don't remember if I ever talked about my early experiences with politics but this morning Jessica suggested that we take our son Tate with us to the polling location. Since I was in a rush I wasn't able to go with but I think she is going to take him.

I was introduced to politics at a very early age by my "grapes of wrath" great grandparents. They had grown up around Hanford, California. My great grandmother Henrietta Castillo was born in the US but her family had come over from Mexico just a couple of years before she was born. She spent most of her life in the central valley of California and in San Bernardino.

They were very poor and growing up I spent a ton of time with them. Without a doubt they were the people I most identified with in terms of family. They thought Republicans were evil and said as much. They loved FDR. I would sit with them at a very early age and watch the news and especially watch the election returns. Their influence set me on a course that was left of center.

Over the years I have done campaign work for candidates as well as some party organizing work. Most of that work has been with either moderate left of center candidates but occasionally very left wing causes that were focused on the environment which is a big issue to me.

I generally refrain from discussing politics these days as I find myself disgusted by the lack of civility and the lack of a desire by either side of actually doing something meaningful that normal middle of the road Americans want. I find myself torn between my sense of civic responsibility to try to make this a better place for my children and the desire to tune out these annoying politicians. It is sad to me that I have come to this place.

I hope that sometime in the near future somebody sets on a course to set up The Moderate Party. The Moderate Party would be a party that balances personal liberty, financial responsibility, and a concern for the welfare of future generations. I think that there are a large number of us in the Western and Mountain states that fit that description. Unfortunately there aren't many political parties that embrace those values. When someone starts up that party I'd love to help out. Until then I won't hold my breath and I will hope that the vast middle of the American population decides that their personal annoyance with politicians is something that they can overcome and they will place votes to elect people who fit that mold. One can hope...

Music Stuff

Been a busy week. Rather than talk about tech today I thought I would say a bit about whats in my car/ipod/laptop. First if you get a chance go check out this Music Map application from Dimvision that you can find here. I know there are others out there but this one is pretty hot and I think it integrates with Amazon APIs. I used it to pick up some new tunes. So what's in my audio playback device du jour?

Yerba Buena - Love this. Mexi pop-rock meets electronica. I can't get enough of this. Definitely a bit more down home than say Ozomatli but if you have latin rhythms in your body do check this out.

Nortec Collective - Tim turned me onto this and the Music Map thing recommended this based on my interest in Yerba Buena. More electronic and less Mexi-pop.

Mastodon - Wow. Gus told me to run out and get this and CMJ had a really nice write up so I picked it up. I can't say that this is the next Metallica from a style perspective but these guys rock very hard and sound really good.


The Mars Volta - The new one isn't as good as the last one but it is worth a pickup nonetheless.

Upgrade Day

I had read some posts over the weekend about Firefox vs. IE and so I spent about 15 minutes this AM upgrading to Firefox 2.0, IE 7.0 and Skype 2.5. My computer still appears to be working.

Flash Epilogue

Sometime between 24 and 48 hours I was emailed the binary for the Flash player and was good to go. It was niece to see a couple of readers reach out to people they knew at Adobe but I think that the customer service rep who finally figured it out got it all taken care of. The 2.0 stuff is really cool. I am sure I will have more on that later.

Mobile Social Networking Article

Tomi Ahonen wrote this great piece on mobile social networking as the killer app for 3G. Aside from my bias, it is a well written piece and if the topic is of interest to you it is a must read.

Speaking of Flash

On a lighter note from the previous post, we have been a little busy as you can see here.

Flash Mobile Update - Customer Nightmare

In my previous post about Flash I held out that Adobe is putting unnecessary barriers in the way of developers for charging for the Flash light player. While looking at some application and development options I decided that I needed to get Flash 2.0 on one of the Nokia handsets in the office to look at some things.

I went to the handy dandy Adobe store to by the 2.0 version. $9.99 again. Sigh. Ok. It's not that it's the money, it's the barrier, but I digress. So I buy it and head to the download page. I click on the download link and the javascript/ajax thing pops up and low and behold there is a message. It states that the download store is not available and that I should try back later or call one of two phone numbers if the problem persists.

I wait for a couple of hours and try again. Same thing. I call the first number. It is disconnected and I am instructed to go to the main Adobe number. I call the second number it is disconnected and says to go to the main Adobe number. Clever. I decide that my trip to the Midwest for fun is more important and I will resume this exercise the following week.

Flash forward to yesterday (pardon the pun). I try to download yet again. No pop up thing and no download. No nothing. I try this across Firefox/Safari and I/E across windows/linux and Mac. Nada.

I go to the website. If you want support for your purchase of a Flash product you have to go to another website that only allows customer support for corporate customers. I go back. I try multiple navigations and realize that I just have to call.

I call the main number from the speakerphone at my desk and continue working as I suspect that the call will take a while. I couldn't have imagined what a while meant. I wait in queue forever. I get to talk to a friendly Adobe rep who decides that it is not a problem she can help me with. She transfers me to someone else. After a long delay and a couple of questions this person determines that it is something a download tech has to help me with. I get transferred to the download tech. After another significant hold time he quickly decides that he can't help me and that it is a flash problem. He sends me to some hold queue where I keep the phone on for the next 30 minutes or so before I hang up on my way home. I think I may have burned through that $9.99 in customer service time so I am starting to understand why they charge people.

This morning I had a long meeting scheduled in my office so I thought I would continue where I left off. I call the main number. Long hold. Talk to friendly rep. Explain long sordid story as detailed above. She sends me back to download guy. Slight hold. Download guy. New Download guys says its a flash problem. He proceeds to transfer me to the same disconnected number from the previous week. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Go back to start. I am in tears with laughter.

I continue on. Friendly customer service guy comes on after about a 10 minute hold. I tell him I have a really long story. I detail all the above in a painful recital. This guy is actually better than friendly. He is smart. He says, "How about I try to download it." Great idea. I give him my account information and he tries. He asks me to hold. Disappears for a while. He comes back and asks me if I was able to download 1.1. Yep, no problem. He says he can't download either. Ouch. He tells me that they are going to email me the binary in the next 24-48 hours.

I am sure that there will be some more to come but I hope not. It seems astonishing to me that their site would be down for almost a week like this and they hadn't figured it out but given the march of death customer service circle of hell I could see how they might not be getting to the root cause more quickly. Just a thought.

I want to like Flash, I really really do...

Investing in the Mobile Space

Although I am clearly biased since I work with Shawn, I think that his latest post here is one of his best. Go check it out.

Mylo Review

While I was in San Francisco last week I strolled by the Sony Style store and saw that they had the Mylo on sale. I had read a hypey write up of the Mylo on one of the mailing lists I am on and decided to grab one. So here is my abbreviated review:

Form Factor/Industrial Design - Big points. The Mylo is slightly smaller than the Sidekick 3. Rather than the tricky but cool swivel action of the Sidekick, it has a slider action similar to the Cingular/Windows Mobile 8125 with slicker action more similar to the Helio/Pantek Hero. Both the Hero and the Mylo have kind of a switchblade locking action.

The keyboard on the Mylo isn't as good as the Sidekick 3 and both of them are inferior to the Sidekick 2 although they are all better than a normal phone. The tactile response of the Sidekick 2 with the rubber buttons was just amazing.

The screen size on the Mylo is decent, certainly nothing compared to the PSP but comparable to the video Ipod and some other smallish devices. One of the coolest features of the Mylo is the ambient color action that switches from a soothing blue when Wifi is enabled to a subtle orange when adhoc networking is invoked.

Features - The Mylo supports audio, video, web browsing and a variety of other things. After a couple of hours playing with it I came to the conclusion that it is mostly one thing the most and that is a Wifi communication device. It comes preloaded with Skype, Google Talk, and Yahoo messenger. Sitting in a Starbucks connected to wifi I can scroll through my list and call my buddies with better than cellular sound quality. I was really impressed with this while trying it out.

Summary - When I originally bought the device I choked on the $350 price tag. Cough, Cough. $100 more than a PSP? Are you crazy? Well maybe not. What I didn't know at the time was that you get a years free access at any Tmobile Hotspot. That about covers the cost of the device. Also you currently get unlimited Skype Out calling (which also applies to all computer users currently). I had an aha moment when I realized that you can bundle enough services to offset the initial sticker shock although I have to believe that if you could get a wifi device down to about $150 you could get some serious adoption. I am sure that will come. Clearly the necessary connection to the wifi coverage is both a drawback and a bonus. At most times at work or home I now have this really cool looking Skype phone that people can call me on. On the road it is a bit of a pain. For pulling down some web content quickly, the data rates kick butt on anything over my all my current carrier backed devices. For now.

When I was talking to Michael Robertson a couple of weeks ago he made a pretty strong argument for hybrid devices and I think generally I would concur, but it seems that there is a small window of opportunity for a number of players to collaborate to try to get a wifi network and device combination to get a jump on where Wimax plans to be. At the very least it is an interesting customer acqusition strategy for players like Skype, TMobile and Sony.


If you are a gadget freak like me I think it's worth checking out.

Flash for Mobile

About a year ago we were talking about some of the various platforms for mobile and took turns prognosticating on who would win. Windows Mobile with a ton of devices flooding the market? Symbian? In North America? Really? Flash. Now Flash is interesting. You get the filesize optimization. You have an army of graphic artist/developer types that many claim number north of 2 million people. Verizon is aggressively rolling out Flash (or is it Flashcast?).

After going through several different product cycles with disparate platforms that require development to the specific device, I long for the "write once run everywhere" that Java and others have promised. The big concern I raised when we were discussing this was Macromedia's acquisition by Adobe. Although I use and love products from both companies, Adobe's generally proprietary approach to things gave me pause. There is very little free in the Adobe world. When you combine that with the potential for disintermediating hardware OEM's and tripping over carrier sensibilities, it makes their presumed success less than a foregone conclusion.

At any rate I hadn't really spent much time with Flash as the current device support back then was limited. Fortunately since then they have rolled out more handsets and are up to version 2.0. I thought that I would try to take a spin with one of my devices. For Flash 2.0, the usable version, they only support Nokia devices. Bummer. I guess I can go grab one from the vault in the office but that kind of ruins the fun. My P910 is one of the supported devices for 1.1 so I went to download it and found my Adobe comments coming back to haunt me. For the low low price of $9.99 I could download the Flash player. Wait a second. I am a developer. I want to use your platform, albeit one that isn't the most current nor one that supports the handsets in my target audience. Grrr. I paid. I checked out some content and found that the Slot machine simulator was the best so far, which isn't saying much.

All my griping aside, Flash looks really cool on a mobile device and I certainly have really high hopes for Flash as a platform. There is no question that for application developers like us, we will be able to do some really cool things as the platform matures and the handset penetration grows. How Adobe chooses to balance widespread adoption versus unit based economics will certainly be one factor in addition to some of the handset and carrier sensitivities mentioned above.

Twofones - Greg Clayman

Greg Clayman from MTV started a blog recently called Twofones. Greg is a hard core early mobile pioneer going back to his work at UPOC. Shawn has known him for a long time and I first met Greg at CTIA several years ago. Greg has amazing perspective on mobile in general, community in specific, and as a digital media head has great curiosity and commentary around a wide ranging set of topics that are very similar to my interests. Greg writes long form and is a must add to your news aggregator.

The Proliferation of Connectivity Part 3

My two earlier posts on this subject were about spreading my connectivity to other places in an adjacent area (Skype Phone) and also tapping into my content or programming by using connected devices that are at some distance from that content or programming (Location Free and PSP). Both of these examples are extremely profound to me and have implications that are obvious yet powerful for how they will impact consumer behavior in the future.

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone from Sprint as part of their Ambassador program. The phone is an LG Fusic, which is a really nice device. Most of the service offering is similar to what I had with the last phone they sent me, the Samsung A920. One interesting cosmetic thing that has been included is the inclusion of the Qualcomm UI One functionality that allows you to change the themes on your phone in a pretty profound way. I haven't spent enough time with it to say much other than it holds some really great promise for personalization of the most personal device that many of us have.

The feature that I thought was really interesting is the inclusion of an FM transmitter in the phone. While use of transmitters have been around in a lot of other devices including Ipod peripherals and other related devices, the transmitter on the phone got me to thinking a lot about the evolution of devices and consumer experience. To me some of the most important functions of what we call PMD's or personal media devices (the device formerly known as the phone) include messaging/communication, sharing content and viewing others content.

When we started our company one of the ideas that was core to our vision was that we will come to a time when there are a billion broadcast nodes walking around with production studios in our pockets. Although a small FM transmitter is certainly a far cry from that, when you start looking at the ad hoc gaming networks of the PSP or some of the other ad hoc media sharing networks the frameworks is starting to emerge. I don't have any particular insight into how it will unfold but it will certainly change the world in big ways. Without question to me the biggest change will be the change from big M media as the dominant media type to the emergence of small m media as the dominant media type in the coming years.

Blogging Break

I took an unintended blogging break over the last couple of weeks. Since it wasn't an intended break it wasn't as enjoyable as I would have liked. Frankly, I don't recall a busier time at work. That said I have about 6 posts to put up that I have either done or have been thinking about so hopefully I get back on track. Separately, if you or someone you know wants to help do some really amazing things in the mobile world send me a resume or CV ASAP.

Facebook Open To All

It probably doesn't bear repeating but for those of you who haven't received multiple invitations to Facebook yet, they have opened their site to anyone. I haven't signed up yet. I think I was fascinated by the exclusivity of it all. When I check it out I will post comments if there is anything noteworthy in my opinion.

The Hub is Dead

Walmart shut down their social networking site the hub after about 6 weeks.

Usertainment Blog

Lester Craft formerly Chief Editor of Upside just started a new blog called Usertainment Watch that discusses opportunities for content creators to make money from their content in this growing world of user created media. Add it to your readers.

The Proliferation of Connectivity Part 2

In my last post I wrote about how our connectivity that we use can be extended and allow us to free ourselves from the tied to the computer experience. Although my Skype phone gives me the freedom to leave my computer and walk around the room like I am using a normal phone, I am still linked to my device through a USB transmission hub. Hopefully in the next week or two I will pick up the Net Gear Wi Fi phone which disconnects the handset from the device. While I am waiting for this device, I have another device that I have written about that adds a bit more color to this discussion. That device is my PSP.

Several weeks ago our family made the trek out to the desert for a quick get away. On Sunday morning we took all the kids out to the community pool where we were staying. My kids were very hungry right around the time of kick off for football. While the kids were snacking on chicken fingers, I reached into my bag and pulled out my PSP. I fired up the device and started looking for available wifi networks. Immediately, I saw that the bar area had very open, very strong public wifi.

I configured the device to log onto the network and I fired up the Location Free interface. Within a couple of seconds, my PSP was showing the NFL Red Zone Channel from Directv on my device by the side of the pool. Can you beat that?

Conceptually to me this is another example of the intersection of devices and our connectivity and the types of services that become available as more bandwidth surrounds us and our devices can leverage the network. To me it is a very powerful experience when I can take my media experience, that previously has been confined to my house, wherever I go with the aid of a small portable device.

In the last post and this one I have talked a bit about some practical uses and examples of how I can take my connectivity and share it with a detached device ala Skype to a handset, or more broadly how I can take my programming with me anywhere in the world with the use of my PSP and my Location Free server. In the next post I will talk about how the next phase is looking at the device not from a downstream perspective but as an upstream or broadcast style device to extend the experience in the opposite direction.

The Proliferation of Connectivity Part 1

Recently I had lunch with Michael and got to chat a bit about Gizmo and other VOIP stuff. I am also secretly coveting the about to be released Net Gear Wifi Phone. While waiting for it to come out I decided to take a peek at what else is in the market.

Although I use Skype a fair amount, I have a specific issue that I am sure is shared by some others. My laptop has the headphone attachment at the front of the keyboard. If that isn't enough of a deterrent, I also find that if I have headphones on that I am listening to music as a force of habit. What this means is that my ever ringing phone goes unanswered as long as I have the headset on. Because of that, I don't use headphones and also don't really use Skype as much as I would like.

My first look at what was available was USB connected phone devices, you know, kind of like a headset except it is a phone. I am not sure how that was going to help me. I decided to pass on this. I came across the Linksys CIT 200 Skype phone after digging around and thought that this was an interesting idea. This device allows you to connect a USB broadcast node to your PC or laptop that communicates with a wireless phone base station that can be anywhere within 150 feet or so. Although I don't really like the idea of another device connecting out to my laptop as an aftermarket part (it should be baked in) I was immediately attracted to the idea that I could now disembody a phone from my PC and use Skype.

A bit about the phone. It looks like a phone. I can dial numbers and such although I don't plan on doing that in the near term because I have these things called cell phones that I have on me at all times. At the bottom of the dialpad is a button that says Skype. When you pick up the phone and click on the icon, the device connects to your PC and Skype client and your buddy list is populated on your handset. How cool is that? You can then scroll down to the person that you want to call, click on them, and presto, free VOIP calling.

I haven't really taken the phone through a lot of uses so far but within the first day of setting it up, I spent 45 minutes or so talking to a potential hire from London and I have to say it was crystal clear. I wandered the office chatting like I was on a call except it was international and it was free.

I have to say that I am very fascinated by the idea that we are developing combinations of hardware and software platforms that not only allow us to do interesting things because of our connectivity but that we are increasingly able to proliferate or redistribute that connectivity in new ways. Although to say that I am becoming a Skype broadcast node for my office is a slight stretch, it isn't too far from the truth. In fact I have a couple of other examples of this proliferation of connectivity in two follow up posts to this one coming soon.

Speaking at MIT today

I am speaking at a class today at MIT where I am giving a slightly modified version of this presentation that Shawn gave at BREW this past summer.

Sprint Ambassador Program

I got the email today saying they want to send me another phone. I must say that I LOVED the last phone. It is amazing marketing for Sprint to reach out to bloggers and to get us to try out all the things you can on their devices and their service offering. I would recommend that other companies follow this kind of lead and to get outspoken people to try out and use their products.

Myspace Using UIevolution for Mobile

Josh pointed out this press release here that I haven't heard anyone talk about. Seems strange that nobody has covered this given all the noise around Myspace going mobile.

Eventful Raises $7.5 Million

Local friends and partners Eventful raised $7.5 million recently. Press release can be found here.

Rabble on Cellular South

Last week Rabble launched on Cellular South. That brings our current coverage to Verizon, Cingular, Metro PCS, Cricket, Verizon Puerto Rico and now Cellular South.

Rabble Mention in Loopt launch article

I was interviewed last week for a TBD launch of another mobile social community, which turned out to be Loopt. The article is here and it included a nice screen shot of Rabble!

CTIA In LA

I missed the early / pre day at CTIA but am headed up on the train this AM. It should be a busy couple of days of meetings in my old hometown. I can't wait to hear what big announcements come out of this session.

Radiate / Flipt / Loopt launches

The LBS Mobile application formerly known as Radiate, then Flipt, now Loopt launched tonight on Boost's network. Details on the companies now unveiled website can be found here.

Valleywag Publishes Myspace Expose

Check out the story here. I don't think the story is a big surprise for anyone who knew the eUniverse story but the News Corp pursuit to silence the story makes for an interesting angle.

Facebook on Cingular

At the end of last week, I was looking around the deck on Cingular to see where things are categorized. While looking at the Media Net / WAP section I ran across Facebook. Facebook had previously launched their WAP site several months ago but this is fully baked into Cingular's deck. I will have to grab one of the youngsters in the office to login and check it out. I haven't heard any buzz about this which is pretty consistent with Facebook so far. On the mobile side I think Facebook has actually moved the ball forward more than Myspace to date without any of the publicity. It's good to see the category starting to develop. I predict that mobile social activity will be pretty frothy this fall.

Server Log Nuggets - Alexaholic

I had someone ask me the other day how we track our press clippings etc. Our PR firm does most of that and for cyberspaceyosphere stuff I use a combination of technorati, del.icio.us, and Google alert. Strange as it sounds though, it doesn't cover everything. One tried and true way to find some nuggets is to look at your server log for referrals.

While doing so this last week I saw some refers from a Seth Godin Alexaholic chart that you can see here. It is a really cool chart in that you can see all the various companies that are broadly lumped into the Web 2.0 category. We are included somewhere in the 600s. I have a prediction that we will be moving up in the chart shortly and in a big way. Hmmm...

wget Music Goodness

Lifehacker had this great article about a week ago that allows you to use idle computer cycles to do a variety of tasks in the background. One of the suggested background activities was to download music from your favorite MP3 blogs. I spent some time last weekend digging into the mechanics. I installed wget on my PC and checked out one of my favorite MP3 blogs 3hive. I fired up wget and all of a sudden tons of files of music goodness began filling up my hard drive. Yummy.

I modified the site list to include 20 or so really good MP3 blog sites and set my machine off and running for the day. I came back later in the day and found somewhere around 500 tasty MP3 files that had survivied the editorial filter of some of the best music heads out there.

One of my frequent criticisms of most digital music companies was that there was an excessive focus on programming as the key ingredient. In reality, the key ingredient was and always has been content. Getting music is what people want to do, not read editorials. Editorials are for music heads. Sorry.

The beauty of using wget is that I get a ton of content, that I believe is generally legal, as I believe the tracks are almost all promotional tracks, that have passed a level of filtering by some great tastemakers. I haven't spent as much time as I would like with the tracks but I would say that immediately I ran into two amazing tracks. One was Cobrastyle by Teddybears and the other was an amazing mashup of an old track with new Hip Hop beats called Fever by Rhymefest.

Quien es mas macho? Windows Mobile or Symbian

I spent some time last week with the Cingular 8125 Windows mobile device. One of our handset developers has been raving about Windows mobile so I figured I should take it for a spin. I spent the better part of a week with the device and came to a couple of conclusions.

The 8125 is a computer that also has phone capability. It is not a phone that has smartphone capability. To me that is an important distinction as the device I carry around with me is preferably a phone in my case. What do I mean by that? Well the most important thing I do with my phone is call people. I also happen to use it to check email, occasionally surf the web, and sometimes use it as a modem. When I use my Symbian based phone, all the smartphone stuff is subordinate to the phone stuff. I have to dig to get to the power user features. I actually like this because my primary use case is phone.

The Windows mobile device is just like your desktop. The start button and everything is always resident in it's passive state. At first I thought that was really cool. The responsiveness was fairly good and the qwerty keyboard is roomy. I imported my 1500+ contacts into Outlook and set up my email. I was very excited. That was until I had to make a phone call. Aarrghh. No numeric pad. Also navigating in and out of the base OS was fairly clunky. At the end of the week. I reset the device to the factory settings and returned it to the development pile.

To summarize and to be fair, I followed up with Josh and asked him how he could be excited about Windows mobile. He stated that there are two distinct flavors of Windows mobile and that the 2125 smartphone has the operating system flavor that is more phonelike. I may pick one up in the coming weeks to revisit, but until then, I am very happy with my Symbian device and if I has to replace my device today it wouldn't be with the Windows smartphone I used.

Chumby

One of our board members, Steve Tomlin, recently unveiled his new contraption, The Chumby. He has been talking about it for a while and put it together with a merry band of part timers and geeks. They had their debut this last weekend at Foo Camp.

I ran by his office today and grabbed one to play with. Here it is on my desk displaying the latest headlines from Make Magazine (One of my new favorite sites/magazine)

I can't wait to dig in a little and see what we can do with it. Can you say Rabble widget?

It's great to see all the buzz they have gotten since giving out prototypes at Foo camp. It will be fun to say what kind of hacks and other neat things that come from the Chumby. When I walked into the Chumbalow to get one, I immediately saw a plush Tinky Winkie doll with a Chumby screen embedded in his chest. Nice.

Fantasy Football

And so last night another season began. I think I have been playing fantasy football pretty consistently since 1998. Each year it has ramped up a bit more in terms of my engagement. Two years ago I went beyond the normal fantasy league and joined a keeper league. This has been by far the best experience so far as it requires me to always have some kind of background thoughts that are engaged with football all year round.

Last night was a draft for a Dynasty league, which is a league where you keep almost all of the players for good. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I was dicey on keeper and have really enjoyed it. Dynasty will place a big premium on focusing on new incoming players out of college.

The tools that are used for fantasy football have continued to improve as well. The news services, the draft tools and the various communication tools are just amazing. I believe that our choice to use AIM for our draft was directly responsible for 6 new people in their 30s to start using instant messenger. Last year I believe that there were 3 of us using IM. Now it is 12. I wrote back in April of this year, this post, that talks about how the NFL drives technology adoption. I think Sprint is doing some smart things with their various NFL Tie ins.

I frequently cite fantasy football as an example of user created content that is a big driver of consumer entertainment. Although the primary content is the actual sport/game itself, we fantasy football nuts spend a massive chunk of time looking at stats, arguing over rules, making trades with other players, paying for services, and buying every channel that Directv will offer us for pro, college and any other kind of football. As more of us non Gen Y folks take control of our entertainment experience, whether it is through things like fantasy sports or other things, we will continue to see and understand that media is undergoing an unparalleled paradigm shift where the users are in charge.

My.MP3 launch video

Sander sent me this link to a page where the video of the My.MP3 launch is memorialized. Shawn has a couple of appearances in the video.

The Anti-Telemarketing Script

Lifehacker linked to this script to use when telemarketers call you. This is one of the funniest things I have seen in a while.

Regarding Operating Systems

I spend some percentage of my time trying new things in technology. For example right now I am spending some time with the Cingular 8125 Windows Mobile Device. It is always hard to overcome the bias you get from being wedded to a way of doing things. I really like how Symbian works and have to figure out how to not let that bias color my impression of Windows mobile.

Although most of my experimentation has been around mobile devices and related web based technologies, my recent purchase of a Mac Mini for home has given me a recent renewed interest in operating systems. As a bought in Windows user for the last 10+ years, it never occurred to me to spend any time looking at operating systems as new versions rolled out.

My previous experiment with operating systems goes back to around 1994. I had an earlier computer phase back in high school and early college and then took a long break from computers until around 94. In 1994 I decided that I was going to build a computer and try out some different operating systems such as Slackware. My initial impression of Slackware was that it was interesting but I hit some pretty nasty problems trying to configure PPP so I ultimately punted on the experiment.

This time around, the breathtaking look and usability of OS X piqued my interest to see what else is out there. I had installed Windows Vista on my old broken down laptop and it has performed well. It really is a nice improvement from XP but it feels more incremental than an overhaul. I am guessing that when you use it day to day that it might feel a little different but right now it is hard to say.

On my Mac Mini I installed Parallels to run Windows XP in a virtual machine and I have to say that I have only fired it up a couple of times. I have found that most of the things that I do are net related and haven't required invoking my windowness to get things done.

With all the niceness and coolness coming from my Mac, I asked around the office about how far Linux has come. Ben showed me the Linux GUI XGL which, simply put, is insane. Seriously insane. I tried to make a run at using it on my old home computer (1999 Gateway Pentium 3) to no avail. I then tried a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu and also Open SUSE using a wireless network card. Wireless isn't all it's cracked up to be on Linux.

Today I finally gave up and dragged the old beast over to an Ethernet connection. Once there I got Ubuntu up and running and plan on giving it the rounds here and there in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more.

Ancestry.com

Two weeks ago I read a newspaper article about people using the Internet to search for their family tree. In the article they gave much praise to Ancestry.com. I hadn't spent much time looking at my family tree in the past as there were a number of gaps that I hadn't desired or been able to walk through.

My father and my mother divorced when I was two years old. Although they were divorced he was stationed almost always on the west coast which meant he was around a lot. My father's sister had tracked back the Oien family to Norway back to the early 1700s which I thought was really impressive. As of the last time I checked they hadn't done that on his mother's side. Their family name was Venn. I need to give her a call and get some details.

On my mother's side there were two branches, one of which I knew and one which I didn't. The one I knew went back to Mexico fairly quickly and then presumably went to Spain. My great grandmother, who I spent a large amount of time with growing up had the maiden name of Castillo. Other family names were Figueroa and Valdespino. My mother's father was estranged from our side of the family by my mother's choice if I recall.

So I sat down with a trial account of Ancestry and a couple of family names going back. I won't bore you with any more details about my family but I will say that the tools that are available are amazing. ESPECIALLY the census data. I was checking census records back to the 1860s which blew me away.

When I sat down I thought that my family was all Norwegian on one side, and then a mix of Spanish, German, Irish and English on the others. In reality I ended up realizing that I am 1/2 Norwegian, 1/4 Irish, and 1/8th Spanish and 1/8 Swedish. Not what I expected. I managed to track back every side out of the country, with most branches going in the 1880s and one branch going back to the 1850s (Irish potato famine refugee I assume). I did this in 2 hours. I don't plan on going beyond that our getting all the details together but when I do decide to do that I know that there are some amazing tools online today.

Facebook APIs

Marc Canter reports that Facebook has opened up APIs for developers. Woot! You can find the developer information here. Looks like there is some work to be done. As Marc says, expect others like Myspace to open up as well. I am not sure that this will happen quickly given their market position but it will certainly act as a point of differentiation if they don't.

Rabble Integration Manager Revamp - Flickr and Spaces

Last weekend we pushed out significant changes to our integration manager on Rabble. What is the integration manager? Our not so well named integration manager allows Rabble users to publish content between the mobile and web environment in either or both directions. Our first cut, while functional was a bit clunky. The new changes make the process of setting up your accounts a lot more easy than it used to be and it also sets us up for the changes we will be making when we roll out version 2.0 of Rabble mobile and web in the near future.

A really cool part of this rollout for me was the addition of Flickr and MSN/Live Spaces. Flickr had taken us a long time to get permission and now that we have it I can use the 1400+ photos I have on Flickr with Rabble. Here is a screenshot of setup screens.

With these rollouts we currently support - Blogger, Live Journal, Movable Type, Typepad, Webshots, Flickr, Zoto, Eventful, Upcoming.org, Travelpod and MSN/Live Spaces. More to come soon.

Roomba

I have robots on the brain right now. I blame Tate. This weekend we were at Circuit City and I glanced over that the robot section with Tate. Right next to the Robosapien were two different models of the Roomba.

I had heard people talk about the Roomba but had never seen one in person until I was at SXSW at the Lifehacker party. When we walked into the bar where they were having the party I glanced over at the pool table and on top of it were two modified Roombas dueling. It was quite a strange sight, not unlike two giant roaches in a courtship dance. It smacked just a bit of Survival Research Labs.

At any rate I bought the Red Roomba to see how it worked. So far so good.

Robots

I am working on another post about my current fascination with operating systems and old computers that is borne out of my switch to the Mac and my re-provisioning two old computers to run Windows Vista and Ubuntu.

In the process of spending a little time at night tinkering with these things I was inspired to dig out the copy of Make magazine that I received at Gnomedex. What a great magazine! I subscribed.

In the issue I have (#6) there is a good section on robots. I think that the BEAM robot materials are just fascinating and if I can learn to use a soldering iron I may build some to play with my son. While looking around briefly and trying to understand the lay of the land I came across the new Lego Mindstorms NXT system of robotics. Wow. Super cool. I want one of these. I think I need to go get one...

The Zamboni Machine Driver

This morning when I was driving me son Tate to pre-school he called out to me in the front seat.

"Dad"

"Yeah" I said.

"When I grow up, I want to go to an ice skating rink and I want to drive a Zamboni."

"Yeah? That's pretty cool."

"Yeah, when I grow up I want to be a Power Ranger and I want to drive a Zamboni machine"

"Well Tate when you grow up, you can be whatever you want. If you want to drive a Zamboni, I think that's cool."

San Diego MoMeMo

I spaced out the inaugural MoMeMo event in San Diego last month but plan on being at the next one which is on August 21 at 6:30 PM at Estancia. If you are in San Diego and are into mobile come and check it out.

TurnHere

Geekd in our office sent an email out about the site TurnHere that has short films about various neighborhoods and communities for people to watch. I love this idea and it reminds me a bit of what the guys at Videonary are doing. My community of Cardiff is featured here.

The AOL Data Leak and Attention

The Attention Trust Blog reports some of the details of the AOL user data leak in this post here. Imagine if everything you ever searched for on Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL became available to people. Looking up old friends? Searching for some ahem something you shouldn't be? Are you trying to lose weight? (I am). Etc. etc.

What I have discovered since installing the Attention Recorder on my browser is that there are times when I stop myself and hit the pause button before I continue on to the next site. This awareness becomes even more important when you think not only of the personal things you do but also the competitive or business related things you do. I have a badge on the right hand side of this blog that shows a list of the top sites I clicked on and the gainers and losers. VCs? Competitors? Business Partners? It's easy to get a sense of what one is doing with click data. Installing the recorder has allowed me to become more cognizant of the power of that information. It has also made me even more cognizant of all the data the various portals have on my combined surfing history going back a long time. I think at some point a lot of people are going to wake up to this and start becoming more vocal in word and deed about how information about them is collected and how they can take control of that information.

I Went Apple / Mac

I can't believe that I am writing this. If you had told me a year ago that I would buy a Mac I would have told you that you were insane. I frequently referred to Mac's as computers for people who don't like computers. But Saturday morning there I was walking into the Apple store to buy a Mac Mini. What sort of strange series of things had occurred to make this surreal event happen?

There were a number of things over the last year that happened that made me make the commitment involved in learning a new OS and all the things associated with it. To recap, the following things occurred:

1. Video Conferencing - My father in law has been pinging me for many years now about setting up web cams for him to talk to our son Tate. I have constantly been telling him that the quality just isn't there. Earlier this year, we installed a Mac Mini in our office to video conference in our Seattle and Montana based employees. When I was told that we were going to conference people in via video, I thought it would be a big waste of time. What it has been though is simply amazing. At any given time I can stroll over to the Mac mini in our office and plop down and start a conversation with one of our remote employees. And it is REALLY REALLY good.

2. Intel Core - Our home computer has been a real workhorse and I am embarrassed to say that Jessica bought the top of the line home PC in early 1999 and we are still using it today. I mean, as of yesterday. When I spoke with our Systems guy, who is a Mac fan, he walked me through how I can use both the Mac OS and Windows XP on the Mac Mini. I have been charged with getting a new home computer but one of the key requirements was that Jessica wouldn't have to learn a new OS. No computer had really gotten me excited until now. With the new machine I set up last night, we can easily switch between the Mac and Windows world.

3. iTunes Buy In - I took the leap and digitized all my CD collection over the last six months as I have been using the Shuffle when I run.

4. Geek Buy In - All the geeks in my office are big fans of the Mac as it supports UNIX. If they can be into the Mac then I know my time to look at it is here.

So it's still early for me, but I can tell you that I m really excited and look forward to the new computing experience in the months ahead. I am sure there will be some god stories as I settle in.

MP3.com liquidation photos

It's funny that people just resurrected the photos from the MP3.com liquidation sale that can be found here. His editorial reflects a lack of understanding of the context of the business but I think it's hilarious.

Michael Goldhaber Presentation

Earlier today I spent a little time walking through the presentation that Michael Goldhaber gave at a recent conference that you can find linked to from his most recent post here. I continue to find his materials compelling and certainly a different perspective on what we have been thinking for a while in the development of our company. If you have any interest in the Attention Economy this is a must read.

VMix in USA Today

Local pals and former MP3.com alums Vmix were mentioned in this piece here in the USA Today.

PSP 2.8 Upgrade

Last night I noticed that PSP firmware 2.8 became available. There are a number of minor features but the biggest one is adding RSS support for video. I was unable to get Rocketboom or Ze Frank working but figure it must be user error.

The Mo List - Mobilista.net

Shawn and I share an office. It's kind of small and we have this really junkie table piled high with junk and mail on it where we set our laptops and do work when we aren't traveling. The other day Shawn remarked how there isn't anything in the mobile industry like the Pho list. We talked about it for a while and agreed that a Pho list in mobile would be something that would be fun to participate in.

The Pho list, for those of you who don't know was/is a digital music mailing list that was ground zero for digital music discussion during the late 90s through today. I still subscribe although I haven't posted in probably a year. When something ground breaking or controversial was happening in digital music, the discussion happened on Pho. It wasn't always pretty, and there certainly were a variety of characters who either participated or lurked. I recall posting something once and then getting an email from a label executive who told me I should be careful about what I posted because everyone reads the Pho list. I thought that was hilarious but it really spoke to what Jim Griffin and John Parres did in gathering the various tribes that make up digital music.

When we started Intercasting in 2004 the only thing that resembled Pho was the Unwired list that John Parres and Hal Bingham set up. The Unwired list, and I believe the Pho list currently, is a closed list. Although having to read the random postings of everybody and their brother on the Pho list was occasionally annoying, it really created a meeting place for everyone. The Rabble if you will. If you didn't like it you could leave. I personally have been reading the Pho list for I believe 7 years now. Annoying or not. To me it doesn't have the value it once had, but it still has a lot of the people I find interesting and the topics are important to a variety of media types and digital music heads.

I am not sure why but for whatever reason the Unwired list isn't anything like Pho. I suppose that one could argue that the conversations have migrated out to the various mobile blogs and other gathering places but the problem with that is that there isn't a place for a community conversation per se where everyone can speak up etc.

So with great nods to John, Jim and Hal we bought a domain and set up a list server at lists.mobilista.net. You can go to that URL and sign up and get yourself added to the mailing list. Alternatively you can send an email to mo-subscribe@mobilista.net .

It is our hope that we can get some of the various characters, players and geniuses of the mobile world to get together and have some open conversations. And maybe there will be some good heated discussions. And maybe we can get Russell Beattie to sign up so he may occasionally opine on all things mobile since he isn't blogging anymore. At any rate, come on in and check it out. You can always unsubscribe.

US Cyworld is live

I didn't see or hear anything about it until a friend mentioned it today. Sign up at us.cyworld.com.

I haven't spent anytime with it yet so I don't have any feedback.

12th Anniversary

Yesterday my wife Jessica and I celebrated our 12th anniversary. I owe my success to her love and support especially over the last two plus years while we have been getting the company off the ground and juggling the things in life that come when you unexpectedly end up with triplets.

Message from a Rabbler...

While taking a peek at some posts on Rabble earlier today, I ran into the following post that had me laughing really hard. Kind of.

this is a test transmission from the year 3018AD, it is intended to be a warning transmission, due to the intricacies of electronic space time travel, this is a reproduction of 1 trillion messages, and it is hoped that a member of the human population is now reading this,you may see this message elsewhere and in another time, infer only the aforementioned in this case. this message is intended for the whole of the human population, for it is the whole of the human populations existence that is in jeopardy, this messages point of origin is extraterrestrial in nature, we have detected the self inflicted nuclear destruction of your planet, physical laws of the universe bar the possibility of ever being able to transfer mass through time, and as such we will be unable to save you from destruction. it is sincerely hoped that you will receive this transmission, and be able to avert what ever accident has lead to your destruction, with that hope, we look forward to greeting you in the future.

Helio Review

I read a pretty good Helio review in the Washington Post today that you can see here. On whole it appeared pretty balanced but I think he missed the UI of the handset which I think is a big plus.

Quien es mas macho? SMS.ac or Microsoft

Over the weekend when I was reading my del.icio.us clips, I saw a link to this Business Week article that you can read here. While scanning the article I came upon this quote from Greg Wilfahrt (Our former PR guy at MP3.com until after the Vivendi acquisition):

"Besides, these social networks, typically catering to 18- to 35-year-olds, could make additional money off the ringtones, games, and music downloads this demographic favors. "We could be bigger than Microsoft," contends Greg Wilfahrt, co-founder of SMS.ac. Clearly, that's a bit of an overstatement, even if SMS.ac's sales have been growing 50% a quarter for the past two years."

I am betting that Microsoft isn't too concerned about SMS.ac just yet. :-)

NCAA 2007 - OMG

This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen on my PSP. I haven't played with it much but I got some time on the plane. My gaming interests are pretty specific. FPS, football and occasionally some other sports games, and strategy. I haven't had anything yet that blew me away on the PSP. NCAA 2007 does that. I am not sure if Madden 2006 was a bad port of the PS2 to the PSP but it was not a good experience in general. It had lagginess and had that notorious bug that wrecked all your presets. Occasionally I had Japanese characters pop up. How cool. Not.

NCAA 2007 is a stand alone kick ass football game. Hands down. If you haven't had the reason to get a PSP yet, and you have any interest whatsoever in sports gaming, you now have a reason. As a side note, that game registration site still isn't letting me in. Frown.

Google WiFi

Been traveling and have been meaning to post but have been too busy. One quick thing though. I was in SF for a couple of days this week and stayed at a hotel overlooking Union Square. Before I fork over my $14 to Starwood for Ethernet, I like to browse the local wi-fi networks. Once in a while you get lucky. This time what to my surprise on the top but Google Wifi. Nice. It had a great signal but for some reason I couldn't connect and Starwood took my money anyways. It got me thinking a lot about how different things will be when there is broad based availability of free wifi to everyone. Lots of implications and opportunities.

EA - A Little Help With QA on NCAA 2007 Please!

I love EA. I think they are the best publisher of games in the world. Larry Probst was on our board at Mp3.com and I thought he was a great board member. I know a couple of other people there who are super high quality people. Demanding. Winners.

I am so addicted to their football franchise that I went out tonight and grabbed the inaugural version of NCAA 2007 Football for the PSP. I must add that the NCAA Football franchise is without question the BEST football gaming platform ever. Madden may be more well known but NCAA takes the cake hands down.

The packaging for the PSP was great and while flipping through the document I came to the registration page on the back where I was prompted to register and get cheat codes and other stuff. Tired, but eager to make sure that I maximize my game playing experience, I go to the website and run into the screen above. At step 1, I can't register my game. Done. End of story. The game not listed here link is of no help and basically tells me that I might have made a mistake on platform or game name. Or your QA staff or website production staff didn't make the necessary updates. So please fix that, I need some cheats, fast.

I can't wait to see how this year's version plays out!

The Hub - Walmart's Myspace Alike Site

Walmart rolled out The Hub recently, which is a Myspace alike site. Given all the uproar over public safety and profanity, Walmart is uniquely positioned to create a kinder safer Myspace alike given their reach into the pockets of so many Americans. The question is, will the cool kids hang out there?

Sidekick III - Review

Actually review is probably the wrong title for this post. It's really more impressions and thoughts.

So my new Sidekick...

Let me start by saying that I think the Sidekick/Hiptop is one of the ultimate devices. I carry around 7 devices in my bag at all times and there are two that I use all day long, the P910 and the Sidekick. The p910 is my primary communication device as well as email. The Sidekick is my mobile web browser and IM client. It may be unique, but that's how I am configured. I say this to illustrate that I am not a typical Sidekick owner and that there are a number of features on the Sidekick III that don't hit my radar. With that in mind let me give the following good/bad and summary.

The Good.

-1.3 Megapixel camera.

-The overall general industrial design is clean and has some wow gadget feel. The previous version looked a bit Fisher Price (Although I admit that I liked it personally).

-Integrated Instant Messaging. All of the Instant Messaging platforms supported are accessed through one place on the device.

-Edge. I have noticed quicker speeds but I have also been having some intermittent connecivity issues that are probably network related.

-Migration. I moved the SIM from one device to the next and everything was there. Email etc. This was very impressive. I have never had a smoother move.

The Bad.

-The keyboard. I have big sausage sized fingers that worked really well with the old device. I haven't had too many problems with the new keyboard but it certainly is not my preference between the two.

-Swivel action. My old device seemed to have a slightly smoother open action. The new device seems like I am going to break something with the "clack"noise it makes when it opens now.

Summary.

In general the move from the II to the III felt like an incremental upgrade for me. Keep in mind that I am not using it as a phone so Blue Tooth doesn't help me. I am not playing music on it and haven't tried that out yet.

If you are new to the Sidekick I think you are going to dig it. If you are upgrading I think that in general you will be pleased but you will probably have some nits depending on what you do with the device. After waiting a long time for this device I can only say that still it is one of my most favorite devices and I can't wait to see what Danger comes up with next.

Windows Vista Beta 2

At Gnomedex, attendees were given a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2. I generally stay away from Beta versions of Microsoft software but having an old laptop lying around (That has really sound technical specs) I decided to give it a go.

The laptop in question had a bunch of old family stuff on it including pics, music, and most importantly several years worth of emails. The laptop had a power issue that caused the computer to die if you hit the power cord. It didn't happen often, but enough to put some pretty good hurt on the OS. After some massive slowdowns and some OS not found errors (That eventually recovered) I decided to move onto my current laptop.

I did all the usual backup things and somewhere on a hard drive I have pretty much all of the stuff that was there in the past. With that in mind I felt it was safe to proceed. Note I didn't have everything but let's just say 90%.

I started on the upgrade path for Vista. I will spare you the details but will give some highlights:

-Lots of drivers don't work (This wasn't a surprise)

-The UI is beautiful and it seems like in general the OS is more responsive than XP

-I lost everything (As I said before I had it backed up but I would occasionally pull the beast out to find an old email address. That won't be happening ever again)

-The OS diagnoses problems and in fact claims that there is a bunch wrong with my current installation that includes both driver issues as well as OS issues. That's kind of funny, sort of like Windows telling on itself. I like that concept.

As I did with XP, I won't install Vista on any device that doesn't come pre-installed. I will probably upgrade devices sometime within 6 months after Vista goes live though. It looks like there are a lot of cool new features especially around collaboration that I look forward to using. I am trying to get my head around the Windows Live stuff but have to admit that I am a bit put off by the credit card requirement no matter what version you are using. I may break down and give them one this week but in general find that a more intimate relationship than I would care to have with a software vendor.

PSP Software Upgrade 2.71

I just noticed that PSP software Upgrade 2.71 became available. The two main features are Game Demo downloads and improved video display on Location Free. NCAA 2007 is coming out for the PSP in 5 days. I can't wait! Football season must be on the way.

Twttr launches, wither Odeo?

A couple of days ago Twttr launched. I have been playing with it a bunch. There are some similar services out there but this one is pretty cool because of their use of shortcodes and there is a public area where you can see the overall flow of posts through SMS that is broadcast out to others. People who are your friends essentially subscribe to your messages and whenever you update them, all your friends get the update. It's very bloglike in my opinion in that it is subscription based pull messaging. I like how they have put the pieces together but wonder how you avoid it becoming spammy.

The bigger question to me is how this fits in with Odeo. It appears that a number of the Odeo team are working on this which makes one wonder what's going on with Odeo?

Media, Users and Attention

As I have mentioned or hinted at in previous posts over the last week or two, I walked away from the Gnomedex conference with one idea that has stuck in my head since I encountered it. That idea is centered around what Steve Gilmor unveiled as the Attention Trust or what can more broadly be described as the Attention Economy. This idea was certainly not new as I believe that Michael Goldhaber has been writing about it for a number of years and the topic has been given new prominence recently by Tim O'reilly and others. The presentation that Steve laid out was brief and it had the taste of an academic topic but I wanted to share some of my thoughts as it relates to my personal journey around media and user created content and why I think this is an extremely big and powerful idea. Hopefully I can do that in a way that is accessible. I find myself grappling with how to portray this to people I discuss the topic with without sounding confused.

By way of background, my time prior to MP3.com's acquisition by Vivendi and during my tenure as President of their Internet Music Group, we spent a lot of effort trying to find meaning in the data that was generated by our detailed user tracking. The main byproduct of that was described in this blog post here where we identified up and coming bands and held out the theory that a quantitative approach can be applied to identify likely content producers that would be of interest to major record labels. In retrospect we were harvesting the attention of our users to identify trends in content consumption or consumer taste with respect to music.

For me, I walked way with the intention to focus my professional efforts on opportunities that platformed what I would describe as edge of the network media. Some of the background that builds on the previous post can be found in this post from earlier this year. My general theory was that there are a number of trends that are creating a fundamental shift in what we think of as media. In this presentation I gave to some SDSU students back in early 2004, pages 16-18 highlight what I thought were the important pieces/trends that related to this shift in media.

One of the important trends on that slide was the decrease in cost for people to create content. This is seen in many areas such as blogging, podcasting, fantasy sports, and mobile devices. Some of this thinking contributed to what we have done so far with Rabble. One of the key ideas that was present at both MP3.com and with Rabble was the use of stats for users. Stats to us are a proxy for fame or in the language of Goldhaber attention. People wanting to capture other people's attention.

My personal belief based on my experiences over the last 7 years or so with media produced outside the center of the network has been that there is a fundamental shift away from centralized media and a passive entertainment experience to an interactive content creator model that is embraced by the youth culture in specific, but also is broadly beginning to disseminate out to a broader audience. This idea is described in a large number of places including most famously by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail.

So what was the big deal for me in hearing Steve Gilmor talk about Attention Trust? A couple of things. The idea that your attention is something that you can control, although on some level an obvious statement, isn't that powerful if you can't actually document what you are paying attention to. I can see what people are paying attention to on this blog by looking at my Sitemeter reports or by looking at my reports on Urchin. What I see in that case is maybe a navigation flow, or a referral track from a search engine. In general though I don't have much insight into who the person is viewing my pages, or why they are here or what they are hoping to gain.

The use of the Attention Recorder plugin or Firefox allows us to keep track of all the places we go to the Internet. This combined with the various devices like the Root vault allows us to create a record of our activity and share it with others. So who cares where I surf on the web? Well Google and Yahoo certainly do. They use this data to determine what sort of ads to serve us. What if based on what I am paying attention to there was someone or some company out there that has a product that I am looking for? Would I mind being told that there are a number of books that I am waiting to buy that I just haven't gotten around to ordering at a great discount? Certainly.

In general I am still trying to get myself up to speed with the concepts. The piece I am currently digesting that you can find here is from Michael Godhaber in the First Monday journal. It is really good stuff.

There are two specific things that are of interest to me that I am still trying to crystallize in my mind. The first one is that this sort of infrastructure or platform can really drive expressive behavior down to a really low level that makes sharing your thoughts/ideas/activities very easy. If you don't want to blog or create a podcast, how about sharing with others the clikstream of the sites you are visiting. Certainly there are a lot of my friends whose clicktream I would find fascinating. It would be a way to keep up with what they are doing when I don't have the time or ability to reach out. Knowing what they are surfing would give me some insight into what they are up to.

The second one is the one I touched on previously, which is the marketplace idea that Root and some others like Meople are working on. Mathcing your attention with the creators of products or services you are looking for.

There are certainly challenges for the widespread adoption of these ideas and principles but the ideas are extremely powerful when one considers the shift from passive consumer of content/media to an engaged creator or arbitrator of our own attention. The implications are profound. I am sure that I will be spending some of my free waking hours noodling on this for a long time.

Rabble Launches on Verizon Puerto Rico and Cricket

While I was on the road we added a couple of new carriers. Rabble launched several weeks ago on Verizon Puerto Rico. Last week Rabble rolled out on Cricket as well.

Gnomedex Revisited - Themes

I want to distill some of my general observations about Gnomedex down to a couple of themes that upon reflection were the main takeaways for me.

Geek Social Networking - The attendees at Gnomedex were very high on the geek quotient. By geek I mean less Dungeons and Dragons than I mean really smart people. Although certainly there was a D&D feel without the chain mail. The first night party felt like there was a club of power geeks and some other tribes in attendance although they felt smaller. There were certainly a handful of media tribe types, most of whom I know from previous functions and interactions.

Although I felt that the first night was going to be a pre-cursor to an us and them conference dominated by the geeks, it was very open and cool and ultimately I think that anybody present was having a good time and enjoyed the interactions. I know I did. The only thing that I would add is that I think more diversity is better. There was a mortgage business person who made some comments on the last day that showed a big disconnect between the super brains in the conference and real/normal/smart people who aren't developers. I think bringing those two groups to the table would be a good thing.

What I find when I hear some of the great ideas presented, and when I see the products that rollout (Share Your OPML, People Aggregator) is that the ideas are extremely powerful but that the products aren't broadly adoptable by normal people. At least in my opinion. It's like that Myspace thing. What an ugly site that 10s of millions of people use. :-)

Open Everything and Users in Control - This was a big theme across many areas. Canter talked about the ability to move your data between social networking and other community sites. Making it easy for users to move things around as a benefit and not some artificial lock in. I though that his comments to Jeremy Zawodny were spot on as I have said in previous posts here.

Steve Gilmor talked about the Attention trust and taking control of our click data and using that to our own benefit. I think this was the most powerful idea presented although some people made some snarky comments about the discussion. I hope to do a long post about this shortly.

Kaliya/Identity Woman did a session on Open Spaces which as a discussion made sense but I didn't understand or was familiar with the overall meme. The idea of empowering non-corporate users with social tools is a good idea and it's good to see people focused on mainstream users.

Orthodoxy - There was an overall feeling that there had to be orthodoxy around certain ideas or points of view. It is probably because the audience was homogeneous in general. Examples to me were that it was assumed that nobody has a contrary position on network neutrality. Certainly there were no wireless carriers or telco people in the room, or at least none that spoke up.

It was generally assumed that everyone was on the progressive side of the political spectrum. In chats at the table there was some Republican grumbling regarding the Edwards non-political appearance and it has to be said that I think that it is very rare that you will find a politician who in a public setting would conduct themselves as anything other than a politician. I don't think that is necessarily bad, but it is the way they are wired in my opinion.

There was a heated exchange between Winer and Blake Ross that was resolved later offline but I was struck by one particular comment that Dave made that really embodied the orthodoxy and made me think of this as a big item. Dave commented that back in March he had blogged about his concerns about how Firefox would avoid becoming evil. There was an exchange in the session and Dave said that Blake should have commented on his post or sent him an email. There is an underlying assumption that Blake does/should read Dave's blog. This may or may not be the case, but the assumption that anyone should have to respond to something other than a direct conversation with that person was very surprising to me and felt like something that normal people would find fascinating.

Media - I won't say much about this but media was certainly a big and recurring theme as evidence by the session by Dave Dederer and Ethan Kaplan. Both very good sessions that covered territory that us media whores know well. The only comment that I will make though is that I find it really funny who people demonize the large content companies for exercising their rights with respect to copyright would be enraged if people took their blogs and other related IP and did what they wanted with it. There, I said it yet again. The good news is that as people learn more I think the anger has gone down from a boil to a simmer.

Good times - The balance of sessions and breaks combined with evening functions made this an excellent experience. On the one hand I would encourage any of the non-geeks I know to make the trip next year as I think it would be very rewarding, although on the other hand, I would be worried that a conference of this type has to by it's nature remain as small as possible. I am certainly going again next year provided it doesn't occur over a holiday weekend.

Gnomedex Revisited - Applications

There were a number of applications/products that were announced or demo'd at Gnomedex. The most noteworthy ones to me were the following:

Mindjet Mindmanager - This was a tool used to document the sessions. I really liked being able to go back to their blog which you can find here to look at the outline of the session and discussion. It would be great if tools like this were used at all conferences. It really was a nice way to review what was said.

Farecast - When should I book one of my many flights? Farecast allows you to do predictive modeling for airfare rates between cities to determine the right time to buy the best priced ticket. Only in Boston and Seattle but coming to you soon.

People Aggregator - Marc Canter unveiled his new meta social networking platform. I played around with it a bit but don't have much real feedback. Conceptually I totally get it and would argue that we embrace the same vision but ultimately it comes down to execution. Is this it? It's not obvious to me right now but it definitely warrants some more time.

What Day Is It? What City Am I In?

The last week has been a blur. I spent a bunch of time in Seattle for business and then Gnomedex. I did the holiday thing at home and hand a really nice time with the whole family. Somewhere along the way I forgot what day it was and then before I knew it, I was on a plane to NYC where I am now. I have a backlog of posts that I am going to rip through today in between meetings.

Chris Pirillo - Strike a Pose

Chris Pirillo - Strike a Pose,
originally uploaded by JoshB.

The host of Gnomedex, while trying to strike a Michael Jackson pose, was unaware of the headline projected onto the back of the auditorium that was for the next presentation. It really was a perfect storm that Chris will be living for many years to come. There were calls for Tshirts. I am sure that they will be coming out quickly.

Sidekick III In My Office

My new Sidekick arrived in the office yesterday. The bad news is I am in Seattle...until tonight. I can't wait to get my hands on it. A detailed review will certainly follow.

Rabble In PC Magazine

Josh just pointed out that Rabble was mentioned in a PC Magazine article here about Mobile Social Networking sites.

Rabble Mentioned In Reuters Article

Reuters wrote about social networks and mobile devices in this article here. One of our activity community members, Amazonian was quoted towards the end of the story.

Gnomedex Day 1 Wrap

The afternoon sessions were really good for me and several things were of particular interest.

Steve Rubel lead a session on marketing and PR that was definitely enjoyable. The highlight to me was a discussion on blogging about toilet paper which Steve made light of but the audience came back at him on the topic including Werner Vogels who said there are tons of reviews on Amazon of products. Ok. Toilet paper? I think the point was good though.

Marc Canter talked about open source and our right to take our data where we want when we go from one site to the next. We totally buy into that as we have extended our support of a ton of different APIs. We need to get our API out there for anyone to develop against...

Marc is a nut. It's been fun seeing him in action.

Susan Mernit, whose blog I enjoy, led a session around sex and real life blogging. Although the topic is certainly worth a good discussion, I would venture that the audience lacked the diversity to really do the topic justice. As some other people posted elsewhere, it just felt out of place. Nevertheless, Susan did a great job with a difficult topic.

I skipped the Bloglines commercial piece although I am a devoted Bloglines user. That one wasn't working for me.

Steve Gilmor was amazing. His discussion of Attention Trust was profound. I want to post something about that later today hopefully.

The dinner and party were nice with lots of socializing opportunities but ultimately the long day had me back at the hotel kind of early. I am looking forward to several things today but may try to get home a little earlier than planned.

Gnomedex and Network Neutrality

Werner Vogels led a session about Network Neutrality. It's clearly an important topic but I have to say that at a conference with an audience like this, it would be like having a discussion on whether or not we are all in favor of computers. Maybe it's just me.

Also as an aside at lunch it was pretty obvious that there were a chunck of people clearly not happy about a stump speech for Edwards. I thought that when you have a politician speak at a conference it was a forgone conclusion that it would be a stump speech.

Gnomedex Day 1 - Morning Session

Mike Arrington from Tech Crunch led a lively session that I don't recall what I was supposed to take away. It was pretty heated at points and funny.

Dave Dederer, one of the founding members of The Presidents Of The United States of America led a good session on intellectual property of creative content and pondering what the impact is as we move to an increasingly digital world.

John Edwards did a keynote conversation with the crowd. Good response from the crowd and Edwards. He is clearly trying to court the technology intelligentsia. I donÂ’t think there is any doubt he is running for President.

At Gnomedex

I was in Seattle for business Wed/Thursday so I was in town early for Gnomedex. I hit the pre-conference reception last night and got to hang with Brian Dear, Pete Mauro, Corey Denis, Eric Rice, and a bunch of others.

I woke up a little early this morning because I forgot to close the shades on the hotel window.

I went out for a quick jog in the crisp morning air. Seattle has been down right gorgeous. The days are warm and sunny and the mornings are nice and slightly cool but certainly not chilly.

On the shuffle for the jog:

Taking Back Sunday - Liar
A Perfect Circle - Judith
Peal Jam - Given to Fly (Had to have some Pearl Jam, Right?)
Black Sabbath - Fairies Wear Boots
REM - Man on the Moon
The Mars Volta - Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore
System of a Down - Shimmy

I am looking forward to a day of interesting discussions and geek socializing.

Rabble RSS

A day or two ago we rolled out RSS feeds for all Rabble Channels. If you are a Rabbler who also uses an RSS reader point it at www.rabble.com/rss/Channel-Name. All updates will publish there to see in a reader. An example would be the Intercasting channel here.

Kent State Hates Facebook

Kent State is banning student athletes from using Facebook. Details here. Sounds like a free speech issue to me.

Moviso Launches

Shawn and I sit in the same crowded office and earlier today he looks up and says, Moviso just launched. I shrugged and went back to what I was doing. Then at lunch I went, duh! Shawn writes about it here. The Moviso and Mobizzo saga is certainly interesting.

Rabble Wap

Earlier today we rolled out a beta version or our Rabble Wap site that you can see at wap.rabble.com . Point your phone browser there and see behind the scenes into the Rabble community This is a first step and doesn't have near the feature set of our client application but it is a taste of some upcoming things we are working on.

Softness in Social Networking Advertising?

The Deal reports here that Viacom is very bearish on the prospects for advertising on social networking sites. That may or may not be true but it would be interesting to hear advertiser feedback on advertising performance. (I have some opinion based on some limited campaigns thus far) Clearly Viacom is going a different direction with Xfire but given the amount of media that Viacom buys this could be the start of a bad trend.

173 You Tube Clones

CNN Money reports that there are currently 173 You Tube like services in this article. Look for a shakeout.

Sidekick III is coming!!!

I can't wait. Rather, I will have to wait until June 28th which is when I can pick up my new one. See the details here.

The Sound of Silence

Back at the end of May, one of the guys who works at Digital Chocolate wrote this piece about the dilema's of corporate blogging. In it he cited me as one of the people at a company who blogs about the industry and I assume he also meant that I manage to keep some balance between trade secrets etc.

While to some extent that is true there are certainly a lot of things that I would like to write about that I can't. In fact increasingly that is the case. Although I have a broad range of interests that hopefully is interesting for people to read periodically, the most interesting, insightful things that I can discuss or say are things I can't really talk about. The biggest problem with that is that I would like at least remember times like I am having now. There are lots of interesting things going on that I would like to memorialize that I wont be able to do. That's too bad.

I think that as more of the corporate bloggers like Scoble and others go into startups or innovative technology, that they will find that what they can talk about constantly decreases.

Ah to be a pundit without a company to run. That is something I will aspire to in between this and the next company. Although I don't suspect that this will occur anytime soon.

Fathers Day

I had a great Father's day. My gift was a Giant Le Creuset oven for slow cooking large slabs of inexpensive meats. I spent the better part of the weekend making my first Beef Bourguignon. It was a lot of work but the results were definitely worth the effort. Jessica made the whole weekend very nice and relaxing. Tate gave me an especially touching card he made at school.

Summer Conferences

I don't go to a lot of conferences. We go to the wireless ones. Like CTIA twice a year. I like to go to certain ones that I am interested in like Bloggercon. Unfortunately not this year. Dave scheduled it after a bunch of other conferences were set up and I can't afford too much time away from the home office. I am bummed to miss Bloggercon as I found the last one very rewarding. Most important to me Gnomedex. I have watched over the last several years how everyone gushes about going to Gnomedex so this year I registered immediately sometime back in January. I am very pumped to go and ran into some people yesterday who were talking about it and asked me if I was going. So the answer is yes. I am looking very forward to it. So if you are some of the few people who aren't my friends or family who read this blog and you happen to be going to Gnomedex, drop me an email and lets grab a beer.

Radio Interview Regarding Rabble

A couple of weeks back I did a radio interview with a guy named Craig Peterson who does a show called Tech Talk in the Northeast. Here is a link to the show.

Linkedin, Zero Degrees & Plaxo

I hadn't had my coffee the other day and I received an email from Linkedin saying they had a new Outlook 2.0 plugin available. Possessed by something I can't explain I took a flyer and downloaded the plugin. I hit the install button and panicked, realizing that I may have just unleashed some spam monster to the 1500+ people in my contact list ala Zero Degrees. By the way what happened to them? I digress...

The plugin is actually pretty cool. I don't intend to do a review but I realized that Linkedin was taking a decidedly different approach than Plaxo, which is an application I am not fond of. Where Plaxo takes the approach of periodically pinging your contacts with a request for them to stop what they are doing and update their information, Linkedin has the opportunity to essentially create an RSS style subscription where those who happen to subscribe to my Linkedin account get an update when I change it. An added bonus is that I can see other users who may not be in my Linkedin network who also use Linkedin. Its a much softer approach than Plaxo which I think has done a great deal of damage to their reputation with those of us who resent the interruption in a mechanical way.

Pitbull and Rabble Promotion

A couple of weeks ago we rolled out our promotion with Pitbull that you can see here. Fans are sending in pictures that others can see on Rabble and also on our bands wap site at bands.rabble.com . Make sure you check it out on a WAP browser.

Location Free and The World Cup

I have to confess. I am not a soccer fan. (Football is something the NFL plays. Sorry, I am an ugly American on that point). I do enjoy it once in a while and I am pretty sure that living in southern California there is a high probability that more than one of my children will probably really get into soccer. Because of that and all the crazy fans I saw in Vegas I decided to try to pay at least some attention to the World Cup.

To that end I broke out the PSP and hooked up my Location Free. Yesterday streaming away on my desk in the background was the defeat of the blessed American soccer team at the hands of the Czech Republic. That alone would not warrant a post but later in the day we cruised over to Whole Foods during lunch and on a hunch I assumed they had free wi-fi. Good guess. I whipped out the PSP and fired up the Italy game. Shawn looked at me and shook his head.

Catching My Breath

Last week I had a board meeting in Boston and then Jessica and I took our first vacation without kids since our triplets were born. It was a couple of days in Vegas but it felt like a long time. I came back to work this week refreshed and under a pile of emails. I have some random tech observations and Rabble updates later today before I head up to SF and Silicon Valley for a quick trip.

Something Up With Snocap

I don't know what is going to happen, but Sean pointed me to this link that seems to indicate something is going to happen with Snocap in 9 days. I will post more when I know. My first guess when asked was that Mashboxx or something else is going to launch.

Vox launches

Six Apart rolled out Vox over the last day or two. As I am traveling I haven't been able to check it out in detail. It looks a lot cooler than some of the other personal pages that have rolled out recently. Let me know if you want an invite.

Webshots and Rabble

I am out of pocket this week for a break. There was one thing we rolled out earlier this week that I wanted to share which is integration between Rabble and Webshots. Our users can bring their Webshots pictures into Rabble to make posts and they can also use Rabble to send pictures to their Webshots account. Thanks to Webshots for letting us be one of their API users. More to come.

CA-50 Election

For the first time in my life I am living in a congressional district that has a highly charged campaign. As you may recall, my former Congressman, Randy Duke Cunningham, is now serving an 8 year term in jail for taking over $2 million in bribes. Nice.

As a result there is an election today to replace him for the next several months before the November election. The disgusting and misleading commercials by both sides is an extremely ugly commentary on the state of politics. I think there are commercials from both sides running during every commercial break. I am not sure who is going to win today as the safe Republican district is in serious play resulting from Cunningham's disgrace. The voters on the other hand are certainly the losers on all counts.

Heading to Boston

I am off to Boston for a board meeting this week so I don't anticipate much posting. I did get the new Helio software for my PC and will write that up later. I do have to say that the speakers on the Hero are extremely impressive for a phone.

Intercasting Presentation at BREW

Shawn gave an hour long talk on User-Generated Content at BREW 2006 yesterday. There is a link to the presentation he gave on our blog you can find here.

Rabble In Business Week Article

There is an article in Business Week this week regarding the move of social networking sites to mobile devices that you can find here where we received a mention.