G1 Likes and Dislikes

Based on the last thing I wrote I thought it would be good to share two more things. First, what I like and dislike about the G1. Second, what applications or interesting things I use on the phone. I will do the second one later. This one will be about likes and dislikes.

Right off the bat a big disclaimer. Most people primarily use their phones to call people and to send text messages. My phone works great for that. These comments are more about the things that phone nerds do with phones.

So let's start with the dislikes and end on a positive note with the likes.

Dislikes

Total Google Buy In - I knew coming in this was going to be the Google phone. It even says so on the back. I use a lot of Google services and have no problem with Google but setting the phone up brought the integration front and center immediately. The key piece that highlighted this was the use of Google contacts. I have somewhere near 1400 contacts in my cell phone and contact database and their is no easy way to get them into the G1. Well, except importing all your contacts to Google Contacts. Given that Google knows what web sites I surf and a bunch of other stuff, I am a bit hesitant to just hand that over. Ultimately I did, but I have to say that it was with a lot of reservations.

Out of the box email - A closely related issue to the first problem is email support. Out of the box mail support was buggy when I first used the phone (my first phone was stolen but that is another story). If you want to use email, users were pushed to use a program called K9, which is ok, but certainly not all that in my opinion, especially when compared to what I had on my old Sony phones. There is one exception. Gmail is wired in hard and has awesome integration. The problem with that for me is that I use Gmail as a spam catcher and I can't really use it as my primary email.

IM - As a devoted Sidekick users, I was pumped to be using a device that is a spiritual descendant of the Sidekick. One real big win with the G1 was the addition of Google Talk along with the standard services, AIM, MSN and Yahoo. The problem with this device though is that Google Talk works in an awesome way and the other ones are lacking. The way the Sidekick would hold IM sessions doesn't seem to be implemented here and it may be because of some proprietary Danger IP. Given they way IM works, with the exception of Google Talk, it really isn't a good always on IM device, at least with the default IM software. I haven't tried some of the other 3rd party services like Meebo but the net net of this was that I felt like in this area the device misses the mark.

Battery - This has been covered widely elsewhere. The battery, at least the first version, drained in no time at all. The firmware upgraded improved things significantly but the underlying power issue remains in my opinion. What I mean by that is that if I am using services other than call standby, for example wifi or gps, I have to keep an eye on the battery. With those services suspended the battery is ok, but the hope of a device like this is that you can take advantage of those advanced services without constantly looking for a power supply. This isn't unique to the G1 but it is something that is hopefully solved over time.

App store - I have a love hate opinion of the initial application store. I love the ratings and comments. I love some of the really cool G1 applications that are unique to the device like Wikitude and Locale. I dislike how hard it is to find useful applications. I think the merchandising job that Apple does is way better although I suspect that over time either Google or some specific operators will make something compelling.

Some problems aren't obvious - When things go bad with the G1, it isn't always clear what is wrong or how to fix it. Two cases in point. First Tmobile hotspot access. On my old phone, I had to reboot the phone to get my phone to login to a hotspot for free wifi surfing. Hack. On my new phone, I can never connect to Tmobile hotspots. Not sure why. Haven't been able to find an answer online. Seems buggy.

The second one was an issue around contacts. My contacts disappeared one day. I synced and they came back but when I tried to do subsequent sync's I got an error message saying sync was down and would come back later. Except it never did. I broke down and searched extensively and while I found multiple suggestions n how to fix this, ultimately I had to go To My Faves, delete all my contacts and re-sync. That worked. Very intuitive, especially since I don't use My Faves. I don't get that linkage.

Camera - I find the camera on the G1 to be slow and cumbersome. It is certainly fine enough but by comparison the Nokia cameras are literally good enough to be a stand alone camera.

Tethering - Can't do that. I could always do that with my other phones on Tmobile's network. Frown.

Likes

Keyboard and Trackball - Bad ass. The keyboard is better than just about every QWERTY device I have used (although I still like the rubber buttons from the Sidekick II). That trackball is AWESOME. So not only do I get touch, which appears to be the interface dujour for a lot of consumers, I get some of the things that are important to me, a keyboard, as well as a trackball, which you may not realize, but is something you will use frequently with this device and certainly long for it on others once you have tried it.

Background Processes - One of the coolest things about the G1 is that applications can run in the background. Examples of this are primarily GPS, but it extends to other things. I will hit the GPS application use cases in my next post but suffice it to say, unlike the iPhone, this phone can do more than one thing at a time. If you are looking to take advantage of advanced features, this is a must.

Best Browser on Mobile - The default browser on the G1 is amazing. It has full Javascript support so while I am booking a flight on Virgin America, I can actually get through the process where Shawn on his iPhone has to pull out the laptop. Again the trackball is a good compliment to the browser especially when the website is involved. I haven't seen any other browser with the same sort of support on mobile.

Google integration - While I cited Google buy in as a dislike, the depth of the integration is amazing, and if you are bought into the various Google services, they are here in spades. Maps, Gmail, Google Talk, etc. All the handoffs are nice and it is an amazing extension of a web software platform to a hardware device.

Compass and Accelerometer - It has both. It is especially cool with apps like Sky Map and wikitude. More on those two later.

Full package - In general, the G1 is the best blend of a computer and a cell phone I have seen. I can do many of the things one can do on a laptop (mountable storage drives via SD, web surf, email, IM) but also have a first class phone experience. I have not commented on the media capabilities which I think are sufficient but I prefer to have my media devices independent of the phone, ergo I have a Touch. I know others feel differently but for me this is a good blend.

So that is it in a nutshell. On balance, I am really pleased with the phone. I think there will be some interesting upgrades in future versions and you can count me as someone who plans on following future updates. Next up, applications I use.

Smartphones - My G1, and how I got there

I have been a smart phone user since 2004. In 2004 I wanted to see where handsets were headed and I believed that while our company was focused on the feature phone/mid range market of handsets, that it was important to see where handsets are going to be in the future. At the time I had been pretty fond of my Sony Ericsson T610 and wanted to see what high end offering Sony had in the smart phone category. Sony had been an early entrant in smart phones with the P800 and P900. I had read a number of positive reviews (as well as a lot of headaches to boot) and thought that the P910 might be the device for me.

The range of other choices for me then included the option to go with a Blackberry, which never had much appeal for me, Windows Mobile, which seemed more like a laptop and less like a phone, and Nokia, which frankly I just wasn't all that familiar with. I think if I had to go back and do it all over again with the knowledge I have now, I would have selected a Nokia device. In any case, I ultimately decided on the Brickish P910 and spent about 4 years using that device as well as the next generation device the P990.

In general, I was always fond of these phones. They both had a vaguely familiar Star Trek Tricorder look that I thought was cool and others thought was gigantic. Unfortunately they were gigantic and never very pocket friendly like the various in vogue Razr-esque devices. I found myself pretty happy with the Symbian UIQ user interface but in retrospect, I think that was more about familiarity than anything else. As the smart phone market started to heat up with the iPhone and the various other devices previous or since then, N95 etc., I was anxiously awaiting the new devices coming out of Sony Ericsson. I skipped on the P1 and heard rumors of the X1. When the X1 was announced a little over a year ago, I saw one at MWC in Spain and while I was really impressed with the industrial design, I was very disappointed that it was a Windows Mobile device. This change of direction made me decide to look at the various options in the market as my device was about to fall apart from age and drops.

So, with a fresh perspective, I decided to take a good long look at what was in the market. As I have a lot of access to the various devices and in fact carry a lot of them to meetings, I figured it would be good to make a thoughtful decision, or at least justify an impulsive one! My first place to look was at my Sidekick. While I wouldn't consider the Sidekick a smart phone, I have carried one forever. It has been an indispensable tool for me to interact with the team while on the road (sometimes quite literally). My initial happiness with the Sidekick in the IM arena was undercut by my disappointment in a continuous upgrade in features over models. Why no Jabber? Why no conforming web browser? Why no a lot of things. All that said, I will always strongly believe that the Sidekick is THE killer device for IM, but it doesn't do much for me in terms of productivity or some of the other things I would expect from a higher end platform. I actually no longer carry a Sidekick after having one forever. Next.

The iPhone is an amazing device. The photos. The brain dead simple UI. The ecosystem of content. There is no question in my mind that this is one hell of a device. The deal killer for me, and I would say there are some other significant issues I won't mention, is the lack of a keyboard. I have large sausage fingers, a history of using QWERTY devices, and no time to fumble around with a touch screen as my only input method. I may be backwards assed, but I have to have the keyboard. I do though have a Touch, and I love it. It is my constant companion on long flights, on runs, and for those times when I want to snack on media. The Touch is great as a media device and I am glad it isn't my phone.

Nokia smart phones. Nokia makes some of the best devices in mobile. They literally have everything and the kitchen sink embedded in the devices. They have a ton of software, services, features and a large ecosystem of applications that can allow me to do things like watch my home TV on my phone, find myself on a map, and browse the web with a quality browser. The problem is for me, it feels like it needs an update. Don't get me wrong, I always have a Nokia demo device with me and I have to say there are many days where I eye it with a lot of affection, especially the N95 replacement I am using the N85. This is one hell of a device. The problem I have with it though is that it seems to be trying to do too much. It is actually very hard to do a lot of things that are simple on some other platforms. I can do whatever I want but I have to really dig at times. That digging can be a real barrier to usage and user friendly interaction. No keyboard. Again, this one is hard for me. I will say though that I would have a Nokia before an iPhone as my personal device.

Blackberry. The Bold and the Storm are really, truly awesome devices, and I also liked the Curve which I carried as a demo phone for a while. I just can't get into the Blackberry mindset. I feel like it is the dark side that wants me to have email attacking me all day and if I would just cross over to the dark side I would never go back. I do like their keyboards and have to honestly say that I haven't given them a good shot at being my personal device. Maybe someday.

So that brings me to my current phone the G1. So truth be told, the number on factor in having this device for me was that I am a long time personal customer of Tmobile. This of course made the G1 an obvious front runner. Second for me though was that this device was essentially created by the folks who brought you the Sidekick, except it has all the stuff the Sidekick is missing (compliant browser, advanced features, etc.). Third was the idea that here is an operating system for phones that could be hacked, i.e. recompiled to do other stuff. Not that I ever would, but at least I knew that I could.

I made the plunge into the G1 world and have to say that I have been pretty happy. I think an overview of what I like, dislike, and actually use would be good fodder for a follow on post sometime later.

Cobwebs

Cough, cough, cough. I remember this. I used to hang out here. I really enjoyed this but somewhere along the way things got either confidential or busy. I think I want to come back and do some more of this. Guess I need to pick things up, dust them off, and give it another go. I am not convinced that the entire world only wants to create 140 character posts but I could certainly be wrong.

My affair with small computers

Around this time last year I participated in the give one get one program of the OLPC foundation. It took a long time to get the laptop but when I received it, I was very impressed. I had attended the EG 2007 conference and had seen both Negroponte and the designer of the device whose name currently escapes me talk about the device and it inspired me to get involved/donate.

The industrial design is/was unlike anything I had seen. The operating system was intriguing. The computing power was disappointing. My now six year old son, who was the recipient in my house, while excited that he had his own technology, didn’t like the delays and waiting and opted instead for the use of our Mac Mini and an old moster sized laptop I designated as his. I on the other hand was digging the form factor and ruggedness of the device. I wondered whether or not the OS was the limiting factor and embarked on a process of trying to install a variety of linux variants on the machine. I had conculded that a device that small would be the ideal vehicle for trips to places like New York where most of my time is spent demoing phones and presenting powerpoints. If I could travel with a pocket full of phones and a computer the size of a book, my life would be very easy. Ultimately the various Flash and USB booting options didn’t work out with my level of technical expertise.

Around the time that I was trying to find ways to USB or Flash drive boot my OLPC, a couple of guys in my office showed up with some small devices. One of the guys on our QA team had his own MSI device running Windows in the office. Another engineer had an ASUS running Xandros I believe. Next door at Michael Robertson’s Linspire company they were doing a number of deals with ASUS around the distribution of their Click and Run Software distribution platform. While I was focused on a travel related convenience use case, I saw other around me looking at a way to use a new device/platform that was portable, personal, and most important cheap. Cheap was both key and compellling. The devices are largely in the $300 - $500 range which makes most of the either cheaper or on par with the half a dozen cell phones I carry.
For my birthday this year, my only desire was to buy one of these low cost lightweight netbooks. While my primary computing platform today is a Mac, I wanted a Linux based netbook and was leaning towards either the ASUS or the Dell entrant which launched with a Microsoft XP version at a higher price point than I wanted. One day prior to a trip to Seattle I went and sourced the cheapest netbook available at the local Fry’s.

While Fry’s has a number of options, the one that was $350 at the time was the Acer Aspire One running Windows XP. I am certainly not a Windows hater as I have used Windows most of the time I have been using computers, which is many years now. In the last two years I have moved to a Mac as I can run Windows, Linux and Mac OS and I have the widest selection of software choices as a result. I selected a nice blue version and have to say that I was amazed out how small, lightweight and powerful the device is. I still was hoping to have a Linux device as I support the libertarian implications of Linux, but have to say that those concerns/ideals have been outweighed by the benefits I have experienced with this device and the manner in which I am using it.

There are a number of issues associated with using a “satellite” computer and a normal beefy laptop. Synchronization of files, management of email and streamlining work are all something worth a separate post. For now I think the important thing to convey is that computing is getting really cheap. And portable. And the performance at this end of the spectrum is certainly nothing to laugh about. There are also drawbacks. The mouse on this device has a learning curve. I also couldn’t use this for a fulltime computer given the overall keyboard size. On the other hand, I wrote this post on my netbook and nothing can beat how easy it is to use on an airplane and the entire discussion that crops up when I pull it out in a meeting to give a presentation. I am not one to predict the future but I do think that some of the prognostications around everyone carrying a device around like this in the not to distant future is certainly something that is not all that far fetched. Bottom line for me, I LOVE IT!

My Current Media

This is for me. If you find it interesting, I am glad I can share. I like to look back on these periodically and I find it is a good way to keep friends up to date. Nuff said.

Television - Yeah, I watch TV sometimes. While in general TV is muy malo, there are some very notable exceptions.

Friday Night Lights - I love this show. It hits me on three levels. 1. It reminds me of my soap opera phase where I was glued to each passing day of Day's of our Lives. 2. Great acting, great directing, great look and feel. 3. High school football. It doesn't get any better than this and a big thanks to Direct TV for keeping the show alive. For those of you not on Directv, you are missing out.

True Blood - Currently my hands down favorite from HBO. It carries on the great tradition of Oz, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Big Love, except, it is heavy on white trash and vampires. I LOVE THIS SHOW. Great music, great story line, great creepy swampy vampire vibe and a lot of of social commentary to boot. It may be the best HBO show yet.

Supernatural - CW show. Demons and other freaks. I have to say that I want to hate all shows on the CW but this one keeps sucking me in. Probably has to do with my True Blood fetish.

Entourage - I always want to skip Entourage, which Jessica loves, but I keep watching and have to say that it is a great low engagement show that reminds me of how much fun I had in LA in my 20s.

Mad Men - I am not religious enough in watching but love it when I pull it up on TV. This show nails the period piece on the head and given my age it always hints at things I recall experiencing as a child. Except my dad wasn't an advertising exec.

Football - It is a great year for Football. The Titans undefeated? Tom Brady out on day one? Miami a playoff contender? Outstanding.


Movies - We try to get out every so often and watch some shows. With Oscar season we will step it up but for now it is whatever strikes our mood. The last three are as follows:

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist - This was such a fun movie. It was the indie kid / emo version of Linklater's Before Sunrise ( in my opinion). It had great music, compelling actors and clearly hit the hipster youth coming of age market.

Choke - Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors. Hands down. One night Jess told me that his book Choke had been made into a movie and it was in the theater and she wanted to know if I wanted to watch it. Hell yeah! I forgot to tell her it was about a sex addicted, con artist who intentionally chokes himself on food to obtian sympath and money to support his institutionalized mother. She was disturbed. I was delighted. It was well done and I think Anjelica Huston is going to get an Academy Award nomination as well as Sam Rockwell potentially. I couldn't properly explain why I love his books so much so I just gave up. Hopefully Survivor or Invisible Monsters comes out soon!

W - Josh Brolin knocked it out of the park. Stone has been better and he has been worse. I liked it a lot.

Music - I haven't been listening to a whole lot of new music. It seems like I am stuck in an emo punk (Brand New, Saves The Day, Alkaline Trio ) world on one hand, and an eclectic world music electronica one on the other (Thievery Corporation, Federico Aubele, Azam Ali). I need to branch out. That said, there are a couple of exceptions...

+/- is the name of a band I am really into right now. Their page on Allmusic is here. Really good stuff. People who have heard it compare it to Postal Service. Since I don't listen to Postal Service or Death Cab For Cutie, I can't comment. I just like it.

Faded Paper Figures - So there is this series of commericals on television for Lexus that has some really cool snippets of music. I was so drawn to the music that I had to find out who made this music. Well, there wasn;t really a band, or even a song, just a snippet. It kind of reminded me of a fake memory of a replicant. Or something like that. Fortunately, the guy behind the music has a band and recently released a CD which I love. The commerical didn;t lead to buy a Lexus but I did actually buy a CD...which leads me to the last point.

MP3 Blogs - I am advising a company called Notify.me. They have a cool notification service that subscribes to email addresses or XML feeds or whatever. I initally signed up for some nerd news and after a day or two of seeing headlines pop up in my IM window thought there had to be something better. I subscribed to some Football news feeds for fantasy football. Very cool. I am now getting IM messages as fast or faster than the unemployed guys in my fantasy football league. Progress. Both of these use cases, while interesting, didn't speak to my soul. Then I remembered MP3 Blogs.

When we started up Rabble we reached out to some cool punk/indie and hip hop labels. One of then was Nitro. The head A&R guy at Nitro told me about an MP3 blog he was involved in called 3hive. 3Hive has a number of contributors with some seriously good music sensibility and taste that runs the genre gamut. I went to their site and checked out the sites they linked to. I ultimately subscribe to 3 hive, Aurgasm, Motel De Moka, and Cover Lay Down. Every so often, not to often, a friendly little message pops up in IM and I know that I have some tasty new music to survey. That is how I found out about +/-. And a bunch of other cool bands.

Ok, I was going to do political, tech and mobile blogs but I will do that some other time. I am out.

My Favorite ads

I have two ads right now that just kill me. One is from the eTrade baby series which involves the child talking about renting a clown. It rings so true. Link here.

The second one is the new series of ads for Ask.com. My wife doesn't think this is funny but I start laughing my ass off everytime I see it. Link here.

Tmobile Android G1 Phone

Ordered mine today. Can't wait.

Genius, unless you are Tool!

Not sure how many of you have tried Genius yet on your iTunes/iPod. It rocks! Big time!

When I first installed it I was kind of annoyed by the MASSIVE iTunes upsell that is off on the side. I almost didn't get over it but then I started playing with it and figured it out. You select a song from inside your library and then click the Genius button. iTunes then returns a playlist of songs that are sort of like that song or at least seem to make sense to me.

Picture this, you head out on a run and are listening to Metallica and all of a sudden a mile into the run your ipod set to shuffle starts playing Dashboard Confessional's Screaming Infidelities. Buzzkill right?

Genius pulls together a bunch of songs into an on the fly list. For example I just selected Mastodon's Colony of Birchmen and I get back tracks from A Killswitch Engage, It Dies Today, Metallica and Black Flag. Proper running music. Nothing emo. The part I especially like about this is that I of course can make a playlist of all the songs I know but Genius actually picks a variety of songs including a bunch I have never played or listened to. True music discovery.

That is as long as you are part of the iTunes infrastructure. I have 6 Tool CDs ripped into my library and I was excited to get some playlists based on songs like Eulogy, Pushit and Sober. No dice. Not on this software. I am not sure if this is a technical limitation of not having the tracks in iTunes or a policy retribution but I always find the Tool vs. digital standoff pretty funny. And since I love Tool, I can respect that.

It's the economy stupid!

Earlier this week one of the guys I worked with came into the office and asked me what I thought of the economy. My response was that it is pretty ugly. He asked me if I had seen anything like this. I thought about it for a little bit and then responded that the crash in 1987 was pretty ugly and so was the dot com bubble bursting, but that this felt pretty significant. The previous ones felt like they were investor slaughters and that on a day to day basis there wasn't a big feeling of other issues directly impacting me. That may have had something to do with my age and perspective.

This time around has been more concerning because a number of factors seem to be adding up to longer lasting and structural impacts. To me it started with the post 9/11 war stance which seemed not entirely unreasonable pre-Iraq in my opinion. Moving away from an orientation of balanced budgets to a ramping up the war machine is always a cause for concern. While one can argue the merits of our middle east strategy, more problematic to me is the unbelievable cost. The Libertarian in me finds that hard to swallow.

When you layer on the housing and mortgage collapse, with the devaluation of the US dollar and the spike in oil prices, the pain is obvious. This kind of pain hits normal people as the decrease in personal wealth ala perceived housing value and the personal overhead on day to day expenses around food and putting gas in the car.

While the previous crashes or crises seemed like a paper problem for lots of people, myself included in the dot com instance, this one feels like we just spread the flu from normal people to Wall Street and make no mistake, Wall Street is burning.

I don't pretend to be an economist or any wiser than anyone else on these issues but the conclusion of the discussion I mentioned at the top was that yes this is pretty bad and pretty broad based. The good news is that we are resilient and I have the utmost confidence that we as a country can weather any storm and provided we have some leadership to sort through critical decisions during this critical times we will find ourselves back on an upward trend in the not too distant future. Let's hope so.

Headed Home From Seattle, playing with Qik

Intercasting news

Haven't been here in a while. On the company front though I thought it would be good to share that we announced our launches with ATT and Verizon yesterday at CTIA and also the inclusion of Myspace on Anthem. To date we have launched Sprint, Virgin, Boost, 3UK, Tmobile UK, CSL in Hong Kong and now ATT and Verizon. The New York Times has a nice piece here. It has been a ton of work by all of our team and there is much more to come.

Me on Local Radio

On July 11th I was on a local radio show that profiles San Diego based companies. Head to this page and click on the July 11th segment. I am the first person on.

New Habits, New Reading, New Tools

About four weeks ago I came down with some pretty serious headaches that were experienced in conjunction with a general illness I was experiencing that my children gave me. I didn't think much about it and figured I would get over it until I hoped on a Virgin American plane to San Francisco for a day of meetings.

Right after takeoff I had some seriously sharp pain in my neck and head and began to get pretty worked up about how sick I was. At that time I thought that I had a mild infection that was complicated by a dental issue I was experiencing. After a number of calls to doctors and dentists etc. I got on a plan and a series of appointments that put me back on track. One thing that didn't get on track though was the issue with my sinuses that I assumed was just another symptom of being sick.

After a full 3 weeks, I couldn't get the feeling of having a nail driven through my head to go away. After a CAT scan (gasp) I found out that I have a pretty major infection in the deepest part of the sinuses. Armed with that knowledge, I have been on a regimen of antibiotics, mucus reducers and nasal saline baths. Good times. The only positive benefit of this has been a lot of time at the home office which has allowed me to catch up, take a deep breath and focus on the non business development part of work as well as generally reducing the overall stress level of the organism which is me. Aside from the headaches which are coming down, things are actually very good.

So the point of this post that was in the title has yet to be addressed...

New Habits - Over the last several months I have been working on organizing my work. I have read and followed the various GTD and other things out there and am certainly a big fan of sites like Lifehacker. For all my interest in this there really are only three big items that I have found myself doing that I would call new habits that I have focused on over the last six months of this year that I would say are ingrained habits. They are use of Spaces on the Mac, use of outlines to manage my work, and staying current on email.

As far as the last two, those are pretty self explanatory. I process email on a fairly regular basis and aspire to get to zero while knowing that I never will. There is an ebb and flow of around 200 emails that are always in my email box and I keep a range open of about two months. When I am more organized than not I can leverage my outlining to capture the emails and drive the number down. When I travel a lot, I might peak up to around 600 or so. Outlining is critical for me and although I can be engaged or not at times, when I really am trying to juggle a lot of things, the outline is my best friend. We should teach outlining and mind mapping to everyone at a young age.

The Spaces one is certainly more novel for me. A lot of my engineer friends who are Linux nerds use multiple windows. When the new version of the Mac OS came out I gave Spaces a run and slowly over time found it to be a way to organize what I do as I work on my machine. My current configuration is using 9 windows in a 3 by 3 grid with Email in the top left, browser in top center, communication apps in the top right. I use middle center for music and bottom center for calendaring. I use the other winodws for docs or file management or whatever.

New Reading - I haven't been reading any books which bums me out a bit but I have adopted a couple of new blogs over time. My daily reading right now is as follows: Techmeme, Hacker News, Lifehacker, Google News and then checking my news reader. I adopted Hacker News at the recommendation of one of our engineers and have really been enjoying the stories. There is certainly some overlap with my other blogs/sites etc. but there is a pretty strong nerd flavor as well.

New Tools - Not a lot. The biggest one has been a switch for news reading. For around four years now I have been a Bloglines reader. Nothing of any significnce has changed with Bloglines as far as I can tell. While it is adequate for reading stuff, I had cluttered my reading list with the accumulated blogs of those four years and cleaning was less than push button on the interface side. I went back and checked out Google Reader, which didn't blow me away when initially launched. A quick look showed some impressive progress and I made the switch.

The only other thing that I would consider a new tool right now is Google Gears for offline access to Reader and Docs. I have been bummed about how long it has taken to roll this out but it is now here and I am waiting for that next plane flight to give it a run on both accounts. I will let you know how it goes.

Death of the Tech Cell Phone Fetishist MVNO

Silicon Valley Insider has a good piece here about the Virgin takeover of Helio. It is interesting to note that in many ways this marks the death of the second wave of MVNOs (Amp'd, ESPN, Disney, Helio). It will be interesting to see how the market segments over time as the 1st wave players (Virgin, Boost) compete with fast moving low price carriers like Leap and Metro PCS. It seems that some combination of 2 or 3 of those players would make for an interesting opportunity. I think that both Virgin and Boost do a great job of marketing, but the growth that Leap and Metro are having driving low price leadership and all in pricing is certainly attractive to a big segement of the market.

I have posted previously on my thoughts around Helio and I think that the article linked above makes the most compelling point about Helio in my opinion. As I said before, I always expected Helio to be the technology fetishist MVNO with cool devices and advanced technology features. While the phones materialized, and to some extent the services did as well, the focus on marketing to the youth demographic on the one hand, while operating high concept stores on the other hand struck me as misaligned. The bottom line has become that the iPhone has become essentially the technology fetishist MVNO with a very attractive price point and soon a very fast network. I hope Virgin maintains some of the focus on the higher end on the market in a practical way but given overall price competition both from above and below I would expect that best execution is the name of the game for a couple of years ahead.

Socialthing 2.0

One of these days I will blog again. I swear. I did want to share that my buddies at Socialthing rolled out version 2.0 Last week. Check it here.

Apologies for the test post.

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The Ocean

I live in a little town in what is called the North county part of San Diego. Back on April 14th we had a really nasty Santa Ana wind condition that raised our temperatures well into the 90s. I decided that given the heat it would be a great day to take all the kids to the beach and I couldn't help but take my first plunge into the sea. It was cold but awesome.

Having lived in a great surfing area for almost ten years now, I have made it an annual ritual to promise myself to learn how to surf and each year I neglect to follow through on this. Instead I am a big fan of boogie boards. I have some decent boards, a spring wetsuit and flippers than make me look something like a hybrid between a seal and a walrus depending on how my diet is going.

All my life I have lived near the ocean and I have to admit that weird things in the water creep me out. I especially hate seaweed but as I get older it is less of a concern. This last week freaked me out. Let me explain...

The picture above was taken on Christmas day at Seaside beach in Cardiff.


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The map here is a close approximation of where the fatal shark attack happened last week. the picture I took, is about half a mile north of there and it is at the beach we usually go to during the summer. Yikes.

I don't expect this to stop us from a lot of beach trips this summer but I am thinking that I am going to be wearing the wetsuit and end up being mistaken for a tasty little shark snack.

More Socialthing Invites

I just realized I have 10 more socialthing invites. If you want one send me an email to derrick AT doien DOT com.

Google Maps Goodness

I am heading to San Francisco tomorrow for a speaking event at Haas and for some meetings. One of my meetings is with someone I have never met before who happens to live in Santa Cruz. I asked him to meet me in the city and he asked me to suggest a place. There is a place over on Brannan near Bacar that I can't remember the name of for the life of me. It is a place I like to go to when I am meeting with Six Apart or some of the other companies in the area.

I used Google maps to search for Six Apart. After that I did a local business search for restaurant and cafe and bar. None of the results were the place I was looking for. That didn't make any sense to me. I know this place is all three of those things. And it is good. I had a bright idea. How about I use the street view and meander down the street. Having been there many times I knew exactly where it was but that would be of no help to the guy I was meeting. I cruised down Brannan until I saw the familiar place, The Brickhouse cafe and bar. Now that is some useful stuff.

Art

Earlier in the year I attended the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The conference was good but one of the highlights of the conference for me had nothing to do with wireless technology. The flight I took to Spain ended up in Madrid and given that I was going to get in at 7 AM and was in no rush to get to Barcelona, I decided to spend the morning checking out Madrid.

I had never been to Madrid and have always had a strong desire to get there but it had never happened as other places had called us instead. Back in 1997 when my wife passed the bar we had made it to Barcelona and had plans to go to Madrid but it was hot in Spain and we instead opted to head to Italy and then Germany.

In Madrid there are a number of places that I have always wanted to visit and at the top of the list was the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia is home to the National Modern and Contemporary art collections and, of most interest to me, Picasso's Guernica. I have always been fascinated by this painting and it had some particular interest to me based on my Western Civilization class in high school.

In my senior year I took the Western Civilization AP test and the question I answered for my essay was roughly as follows:

Two paintings were shown, Picasso's Guernica and Goya's The 3rd of May 1808. We were then asked to write about the paintings, the artistic movements they represented and the socio-political setting in which the paintings were made. While there might have been easier questions, this one was a no brainer for me as I had studied the military history of Spain both around the time of Napoleon and during the Spanish Civil War and have always been a huge art fan. Needless to say I did well. I bought a small Guernica print and hung it in my room for many years.

Seeing the painting in person was an absolute treat and unfortunately for me my time was short as the entire museum was hosting the Picasso museum of Paris's collection during renovations. I briskly walked through the various rooms and took in the wonderful paintings many of which I had seen in Paris previously. Goya's painting is in the Prado and I had no time to visit but hope to make Madrid the next destination of a European pleasure trip sometime in the coming years.

Email Assasination

Where am I? Haven't been here in a while. I find my blog is an inverse reflection of what is going on in my life. Relatively calm and peaceful? Blogging. Crazy and overworked. No blogging. Today however I was moved to put the hands on the keyboard and share something.

My email was hijacked last night. What do I mean? Well, my personal email that I have been using for around 8 or 9 years had a giant inbox this morning. I keep up with all my stuff all the time although I don't usually respond over the weekend unless it is critical. As of last night, not much. As of this morning, 10 pages. What the hell?

I started combing through the list of emails and all of them were bounces across a variety of domains across the Internet. The senders were various people but all the from email addresses were mine. Ouch.

I have spent a chunk of time today deleting the various bounced emails and other than a nuisance I haven't been too concerned. More important though is that I am certain that I am a very likely to have my personal domain listed on the RBL. That is essentially death of your email account.

While I have often laughed at the stupid amount of spam that I get from all these poor people who I generally assume are hijacked spam zombie computers firing from all over the world, I never expected to see my name as the sender of one of these messages, much less a million or so which is what I am sure happened. In my case, neither my laptop or domain were compromised, but the net effect to me is the very real possibility that my personal email is at risk of becoming a dead useless email address.

It is interesting to read the stories about the death of email and the various attempts to "fix" email. It is less than interesting to be on the other side of the problem and realize that any of us can be easily hijacked by spammers and rendered the unwitting roadkill in their ongoing attempt to get people to buy Viagra.

Socialthing Invites

I am good friends with the founders of Socialthing as a reader of this blog knows from my posts about Techstars last summer. I have 10 invites available on a first come basis. They were featured on Techcrunch today and are getting a lot of good buzz. Don't post a comment here but email me at Derrick AT doien Dot com if you want one.

Hiatus

Busy Startup + A Very Busy Travel Schedule + A Large Young Family = No Blogging.

Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.

Barcelona Redux aka MWC 2008

I returned from Spain last Thursday. I was very impressed by the scale and quality of the conference. It was amazing to see how many people they could get to pay 600 Euro compared to a similar number of CTIA attendees at $50 a pop. There is probably a lesson in there for the CTIA.

I didn't have a whole lot of serious takeaways other than one over arching thing that I couldn't shake. The overarching thing was that the music is playing and everyone is looking for a chair and this is making for some strange bed fellows. Witness Microsoft buying Danger, Sony releasing a Windows Mobile device, etc. I think there is a lot more of that sort of thing to come.

For our part we announced a partnership with Bebo, one of the largest social sites in Europe, that you can see here as well as a with Moko which is a leading mobile only community in the UK which is here.

Travels and Talks

I am in Los Angeles for most of this week for a variety of meetings and am hoping to catch up with some friends. After the LA stop, I will be heading to Spain this weekend for 3GSM. If you want to grab a nice cold cava in Spain let me know.

At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. Details here. Shortly after that we were invited to speak at the Microsoft sponsored Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. Link here. Details pending.

The Industry Standard Lives!

Holy Bubble Batman! The Industry Standard has relaunched. It is now more of a game theory / marketplace of people speculating on Internet happenings. Do check it out. My sense is that this one is gonna last longer than the previous one. Don't get me wrong, I am/was a huge fan of the original.

The Rabble Tribe

Two weeks ago at a conference I spoke about the different consumer archetypes in the Rabble community. Anastasia from Ypulse graciously reposted some excerpts. If you are interested the whole deck I used can be found here.

Travels and Sex::Tech

This week is the first travel week of the year for me. While I have already been to San Francisco and Los Angeles, I don't think of those as travel days since they are short trips. This week includes a trip today to Seattle, down to San Francisco later this evening, an appearance at a conference called Sex:tech and then a journey out to NYC.

The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.

Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.

One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.

While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.

Football

I think I had a little more restraint this year in talking about football than I normally do. So if you don't like football stop reading now. This is more of a mental marker for me than anything else.

This year, like last year, I participated in 3 fantasy football leagues. I know, nerd.

I am in a redraft league, a keeper league and a dynasty league. Without getting to much into it, a redraft league is where everyone starts with nobody and we draft our teams from scratch. In our keeper league you can keep up to 4 players from a previous year according to a scheme where a players draft position is cut in half from the previous year. For example a 10th round pick this year will be a 5th round pick next year.

In our dynasty league, we keep up to 18 players from the previous year and then have our annual draft right after the real NFL draft. The Dynasty league is sick and I predict it will become the primary format for fantasy football nerds in the future.

In terms of performance, I won my redraft league, came in 4th in my keeper league and came in 7th in my dynasty league. In dynasty, which is in our second year, I took a long term view and took a bunch of rookies the first year which insured my last place finish the year before. Next year, I am a contender.

In terms of real football this was a fascinating year. To see a team go undefeated was really impressive. To have 3 of the 4 teams I care most about in the playoffs has been great. To have two of them playing against each other next week, is depressing but unavoidable.

Beyond all of this though, my personal highlight was last week when I was able to assist as a runner for a friend of mine who is a photographer on the sidelines of the Titans Chargers game. The picture here is from the game. I can only say that it was amazing to be that close to the action.

Pedigree Technologies - Update

Back in December of last year my brother in law's company Pedigree Technologies, was selected as a Top 100 company in the M2M space. Link here. It's been fun watching him build his company in an almost parallel time frame as we have been on at Intercasting. I wanted to send him some props for hard work recognized.

Happy New Year

I usually post a retrospective post from the previous year but opted not to out of mostly laziness. 2007 was a great year for me. Family life was hard, especially with the amount of traveling a do, but the kids got a lot easier and a lot more fun. Professionally I couldn't be more excited and I expect 2008 to be a very big year for both home and work. Best of luck in the coming year.

Happy Holidays

We had a wonderful Christmas and are enjoying the time together away from work. I hope to make a couple of posts this week but I am not promising anything. :-)

I posted a ton of pictures on Flickr but here are some of all the kids in case you are lazy.

Triplet's 3rd Birthday

Last Friday our triplets turned 3. It has been an amazing three years and it has gotten more easy and more fun by the day. I will post some new pictures on Flickr later this week.

EG07

As I mentioned in my last post I was given the opportunity to attend The Entertainment Gathering or EG in Los Angeles earlier this week. When asked if I wanted to attend I hesitated because I had a board meeting, a very important business development meeting and was generally way behind at work at the time.

In retrospect, if I had missed it, it would have been a tragedy that I would have never understood.

One of my former colleagues at MP3.com, Brian Dear the current founder of Eventful is a frequent attendee at certain conferences that I never truly understood. Where I understood trade shows or conferences like the CTIA or Digital Hollywood, I wasn't clear on the value of a multidisciplinary gathering of smart people where there isn't an obvious thread or theme. One of my investors, Steve Tomlin, when reflecting on the conference and my obvious enthusiasm at having attended described it as a mental spa, which I think is an apt description.

So before I talk about the amazing speakers, I think one other thing needs to be mentioned, the amazing attendees. In the first session I was seated a row behind Jeff Bezos, who was showing some friends his kindle. Robert Metcalfe the inventor of Ethernet and Metcalfe's law was there along with Steve Wozniak and Matt Groening. Seeing this early on, and realizing that this conference was something that these people were spending three days of their time wading through gave me a strong respect for the expected quality of the event. It certainly didn't disappoint.

There is a blog on the EG2007 website that you can see a good slice of the speakers and the program. My condensed bullet point of the conference follows:

Rob Glaser from Real Networks spoke about his non profit activities around branding Progressive as a positive message to potential voters.

Jim Citrin from Spencer Stuart spoke about his new book and parallels of excellence between people in business and sports and the difference between amateurs and professionals as a function of disciplined practice and time.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of Amateur, railed about the erosion of quality and the tension between the religion of technology and it's impact on media.

Brewster Kahle spoke about the efforts around the Internet Archive and archive.org to create a library of everything on the Internet.

Don Katz spoke about his time as a journalist and as an executive of Audible, the audio book file company. I know Don from a previous life and it was great catching up with him.

Brian Greene gave the audience a 20 minute primer on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

Paul Horowitz spoke about some of the math and timelines involved that underlie some of the assumptions that drive the efforts behind things like Seti which he is involved with.

Keith Schwab hit some of the same highlights as Brian Greene but also talked about the implications of quatum mechanics for code breaking and the development of objects at a larger than quantum scale.

Marvin Minsky spoke about his new book on Artifical intelligence and his position that emotions primarily manifest themselves as a switching of of certain rational components of our mind. (Which was meant to be a positive as I understood it).

Pablos Holman showed some of his amazing hacker techniques and tricks.

Caleb Chung, the inventor of the Furby, showed off his newest toy/robot the Pleo. I can guarantee you will both hear about and want one of these little lifelike robot dinosaurs in the next month or two.

Frnas Lantig, the famous naturalist photographer gave a mind bending presentation of his recent collection of photos from around the world of nature accompanied by a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and a poetic narrative from his partner.

Yves Behar talked about design as a concept and walked through some of the examples created by his firm including the Jawbone headset, The Herman Miller Leaf lamp and the design for the One Laptop Per Child project.

Nicholas Negroponte followed with an overview of the One Laptop Per Child project which I have to say was among my favorites both in terms of what the endeavor to accomplish and in how amazing the device is that they have come up with.

Tim Kring the Executive Producer and Creator of Heros spoke about how the show came to pass which was a compelling personal story.

That was the first day for me and I omitted the segments I unfortunately missed. I will hit my second day in a brief follow up post later.

The Entertainment Gathering

For the next two days I am in Los Angeles for the Entertainment Gathering. I like to take the opportunity at least once a year to step outside my normal point of reference and work the mind. The year before last it was Gnomedex and this year it is this conference. Can't wait to report on some of the fascinating sessions scheduled.

Techstars Revisited

Over the last two months or so I have been at great risk of becoming an occasional blogger. Actually I have also toyed with blogging about cooking which has been something I have been spending a lot of time doing around the holidays. In any event, I miss posting and now that I have finally taken a VACATION, I endeavor to get back on track. One of the items that came up while I have been blog absent involves the company my friends started called Social Thing. I had posted before about Tech Stars, which I can't say enough good about. Link to my previous post here.

While I was busy, Matt, Brian and company raised an angel round! Their blog post here. (It's been a month already!). Congrats to them and I wish them the utmost success.

While revisiting my reminders to make this post, I went back to the Techstars site to see how the other teams have fared so far and I was excited to see that so far 4 of the companies I saw that day had raised money. Link to the most recent funding and list of other companies here. I can't wait to see how things play out for them and am very interested to see what the Tech Stars folks do in 2008.

Cool New iChat Features

Here are some cool background effects and the recording capability.

Another Year

I am 41 today. It seems like I turned 40 just yesterday. Sigh. What a great year last year was and I am sure next year will be as good as the last. A big thanks to my wonderful wife, kids and friends for making each day that much more special.

Digital Hollywood Podcast Interview

While at Digital Hollywood the week after CTIA I was interviewed by website Digital Podcast which can be found here. It is a longer version of what I said on the video interview posted previously. Link can be found here.

Intercasting/Rabble in USA Today

While I was in Rome we had a bunch of news. I will recap links later today as I catch up on email. Here is a link to the USA Today story which mentioned both Rabble and Intercasting.

Rome

This las week I realized a life long dream and got to take a trip to Rome with my wife. As a student of history, Latin and the history of Christianity it was everything I dreamed of. Not much else to say other than it was amazing. Pictures can be seen on my Flickr page which you can reach from here or you can click on the badge on the side.

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.

Fire Epilogue

Thanks to all my friends and associates who inquired about us during the fire. We never were in any danger and in fact were either in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Palm Springs during the whole thing. Cleanup was a pain but were certainly were thankful that we fared as well as we did. Our thoughts go out to all those who lost their homes.

San Diego Fire

Yes I live in San Diego.

This last weekend I took my son Tate out to his first Indian Guide camp out on the beach at Camp Pendelton. It was great. On Sunday my wife Jessica took some time off after having had the little ones solo for a good stretch of time. Sunday afternon she was out running some errands and she called me t ask me what was wrong. I was engrossed in a little football and told her nothing was going on or they would have interrupted the game. About an hour later they did.

Fires are pretty common in Southern California and this fire, or rather fires were out in the eastern portion of the county. At least they were at that point.

That evening I headed to the airport to fly up to San Francisco for CTIA. The smoke was unreal on the drive and was bothering me a ton as I went dowtown to catch the last flight up.

The flight was delayed forever but ultimately I rolled into my hotel at around 2 AM. I passed out.

That morning my wife called me to ask me what was going on and to find out if I knew why the power was out of the house. I said I didn't know but to check the neighbors to see if it was just us or the entire area. Shorly thereafter I started getting a bunch of emails from my staff saying that they werte being evacuated, or were helping their families evacuate etc.

My wife was really anxious when we talked and quickly made the decision to take the kids and go up to Los Angeles to stay with friends. This was around 9 AM. She got out quickly and avoided any big traffic nightmare. I went about my merry way having meetings all day and monitored the progress of the fires by calling friends living near the fire and near my house. By the late afternoon, both Del Mar and Solana Beach had been evacuated. I was shocked. This is the beach!

In any event we are fine. I don't believe we are at significant risk to our home as of last night. I guess I will find out later this AM. Thanks to all our friends and families who reached out to see how we are. Hopefully we get back home later today and tomorrow.

How I Learned To Love The Cult

It has been a long time now that I have been working on the Mac as my main computer. In fact, both my work and home computer have been Mac now. For the longest time the one last item that has really made me nuts is the inability for me to synchronize my laptop with my smartphone. I have found a business card scanner for my Mac and have been adding all my new contacts but until just recently my phone wasn't staying current with my business card collection.

I have been using Location Free again sporadically and one evening I was wondering around the Sony Ericsson site in hopes of finding a new client for my phone. This was a fruitless exercise but what I did find was a new iSync download for my device. Woot!

In order to use the new synch I also had to upgrade the firmware on my phone in addition to installing the library on my Mac. While this is a bit of a pain I have to say that I am generally pleased with the results and I think thus far have done 4 firmware upgrades on my phone, each with better performance after the upgrade. I do like this service and would be disappointed if I had a phone that didn't have periodic upgrades. Now if we could just do it OTA like the iPhone...

So I downloaded the iSync piece for the Mac and updated the firmware. Next step was to do the Sync. The Sync seemed to take a long time and was sort of buggy. Ultimately it barfed before it coordinated my calendar. This kind of sucked but I had my new updated contacts on the phone which was the primary issue I was trying to address.

The next week while traveling I noticed that my Sprint EVDO phone that I use for a modem was barfing and not connecting. I was not happy. It dawned on me that maybe there was some bluetooth weirdness on the Mac as a result of the sync upgrade. I went in and deleted all my devices and restored them. Bam, everything is working stellar now. Contacts, calendar, etc. This reminds me of a post about how I both love and hate bluetooth but for now I am good to go.

Being able to deal with the last productivity hurdle on the Mac has been really powerful for me and I don't think I am going back to Windows anytime soon. it bums me out as that is my heritage but for now I can say I am happy with being in the cult and all things are good.

Anthem named a Top 10 Application

Fierce Wireless named Anthem as a top 10 mobile application for 2007. Blush. Link can be found here.

Best Buy Carphone Warehouse

While in NYC last week I was walking past the Best Buy Mobile store near 45th. I had seen one on my last trip and made a mental note to stop in the next time I got a chance. So this time I did. I was glad I had seen a Car Phone Warehouse when I was in London last which provided me a good understanding of what Best Buy is trying to bring here. The store in NYC (I believe there are 8 pilot stores in Manhattan) was very similar in look and feel to the stores in the UK. The selections were divided into unlocked, carrier specific, prepaid and accessories. Accessories were certainly a huge part.

For someone who wants to shop across carriers I think the store is pretty good. For someone who is looking for unlocked phones the selection was pretty light and certainly that is primarily driven by the subsidy model in the US. In general I hope that they succeed and help bring more selection to the market but if I were a betting man I am guessing that it's going to be a tough haul.

My Friends House - Casa Moderna Take 2

My friend John Diaz and his wife Nancy built the most amazing house in Mar Vista last year. It was featured in the Los Angeles Times in an article I posted about a while ago. This month their house was featured on the cover and in an excellent article in the magazine Azure. Home page pics here. Article here.

Spook Country

This last trip to NYC I finished reading Spook Country by William Gibson. I loved it. It was slightly off from Pattern Recognition but not by much. I hope Gibson keeps writing the contemporary meets the future stuff. While he is the king of cyberpunk, I think there last two books are just remarkable and hopefully inspire more writers to cover similar ground, i.e. when the future collides with the now. No review or spoilers here, you are going to have to read it yourself. :-)

NYC, Urban Daddy and Williamsburg

I was in NYC all this week for meetings. Cross country trips are both good and bad. Good because roughly 12 hours trapped in a plane allows you to catch up on email, write some blog posts, contemplate strategic business stuff and get your Nintendo DS game on. Bad because you go into a time warp and in some cases arrive home beat and sick (this trip especially).

Three non work tidbits from this trip. Scott Wolf, who ran sales for me at Vivendi, was throwing a big agency party on behalf of his new company Waterfront Media at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was great seeing Scott and meeting the founders of that company and swapping some war stories. Scott is doing a bang up job there. At the same time I also saw Ed Koller who is one of the top media recruiters in the country and was the guy who helped me to get Scott.

Two, at the same party I ran into Rob Petrausch, who worked with us at Vivendi under Scott. After my previous post about Urban Daddy, Rob had emailed me to let me know that he was one of the early guys there and he thanked me for the post. Small world.

Three. I got to take my first trip to Brooklyn to visit my friend Tom Ryan in Williamsburg. I had always wanted to visit the home of the New York hipster set and it didn't disappoint. We had a great dinner and got to check out his place. Williamsburg reminded me a lot of Melrose in LA or Haight in SF. I definitely plan on hanging out there with Tom again soon.

Anthem Launches On Boost

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

Urban Daddy

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

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

Strange Interactivities

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

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

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

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

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

Getting caught Red Handed

Hotel Max

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

Return of The Industry Standard

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

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

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

Sirius

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

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

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

Old McDonalds - Truth in Advertising

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

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

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

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

iPhone Goodness

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

William Gibson Deja Vu

This morning I boarded a flight from San Diego to San Francisco. Two weeks ago, recalling one of my New Years resolutions, I realized that I hadn't read a book a month and am certainly in danger of probably only hitting half that number this year. In fact to be technical I think I resolved that the works be fiction and my last one was Paul Graham's Artists and Hackers. Certainly not fiction but definitely enjoyable particularly because one of our young rising star engineers kept citing passages from it I felt compelled to read it.

I had recently been chatting with Russ Beattie about the various Nokia Internet tablets and he mentioned off handedly that the N770 had a great ebook application and that he had found a full text copy of the Neuromancer he was reading and that led to a discussion about the new book from William Gibson, Spook Country. What? How the hell did I miss that! I have read every one of his books.

I immediately ordered the book and looked forward to the opportunity to read the book. This morning I cracked open the book and with the music of The Mortal Coil floating through my iPod began the read. It became an immediate Deja Vu on so many levels.

My mother died suddenly but not altogether unexpectedly back in 1985. That set into motion for me a journey I would characterize as the low point of my life in terms of where I was mentally and emotionally. The end of that approximately year journey sort of came to an end up in Seattle when I ended up bunking with one of my fraternity brothers for a week or so north of downtown. It was during that time that I picked up a copy of the Neuromancer and I spent the better part of a couple of days wandering around downtown Seattle reading the book on park benches and while riding the buses and taking in the rainy, misty Seattle days. The memory of that time has always been with me and the cyber future that Gibson portrayed would be a big part of my re-entering the digital world in the years to come.

The opening chapter of Spook Country is set up on the Sunset Strip with mentions of The Mondrian and the Standard Hotel and many of the clubs I frequented in my early 90s industrial/punk phase as well as during the last ten years of digital media wireless startup city hoping staying in the Ian Schrager, Tablet Hotel land hotels. It made me smile and put a wrapper on how funny life can be. I can't wait to see where this book goes.

Anthem Goes Live on Virgin

We announced here that we have launched Anthem on Virgin Mobile with Black Planet, Asian Avenue, Mi Gente, Glee, Faith Base, Xanga, Vox, Live Journal and Rabble. We technically Rabble has been there a while but we have switched the underlying client architecture to a single client that interfaces with the above mentioned communities. More to come.

Helio Ocean Video Post Via Youtube

Boulder

Last week I traveled to Boulder, Colorado to see the presentations from the techstars group. It was a great event and I will do a detailed write up today or tomorrow (hopefully) of the different teams products I saw.

An unintended benefit was my first visit to Boulder. What an amazing town! I have a number of friends who attended the University of Colorado and who raved about the city and the school. The setting of the school, adjacent to an amazing rock formation and surrounded by mountains can hardly be described. The town had a great feel as well as one would expect from a college town.

I think that beyond the content and the teams and products presented last week, it was quite a smart move by the folks at techstars to bring talent into Boulder through this vehicle. I believe over half of the teams that presented were from outside of Colorado and they now intend to set up their companies there. Beyond Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York, I think that the fight for talent can be tough, even in a city as big as San Diego. I think that a techstars type enterprise in San Diego and other cities would be a great thing to invigorate the local technology industries and give the entrepreneurs something to galvanize around.

Skateboarding Video Test from P990

Hotspot@home

As a follow up to the rambling wifi device post I made previously, I picked up one of the Tmobile Hotspot at home devices. Actually, that would be a phone and a router. For information check out their website here. The name is "The only phone you need." Hmmm.

The phone that comes as part of the kit is either a lower end Nokia or Samsung phone. The phones are both fine but aren't blowing anyone away with fancy features. THE fancy feature is a UMA chip. UMA stands for Unlicensed Mobile Access and what it essentially means is that you can use WIFI, at least in this implementation.

I am a long time Tmobile user for my personal primary phone. One of the bad things about Tmobile at my house is that there really is only one place in my house that gets good reception. I tend to overlook that because I try not to talk on the phone at home. With the new Hotspot@home phone, this issue disappears. What the phone allows you to do is to make phone calls using your wifi as the origination point. An added bonus of this is that for calls that originate on wifi, they don't count against your plan. Essentially they are free. An added bonus to this is that whenever you walk into a Tmobile hotspot, your phone also automatically routes itself to the hotspot for call origination/termination.

Ok, Derrick, so that's fine except I talk when I am driving in my car and last time I checked there isn't any wifi on the road. True and in this case the handset seamlessly transitions to the Tmobile network. Pretty nifty stuff. As an added bonus, if you start your call on wifi, and jump in the car and transition to their network, the call is still free. I have to say that I was really skeptical of the handoffs but upon multiple trials, I found that it is excellent. There are occasional issues, for example, when I walk out my house the Tmobile connectivity is bad and the handoff either gets mangled and sounds like hell or actually drops. In general though, that is the rare exception.

So I like it. Now what? Well when I thought it through, to me the benefits of this service are mainly two. First, this kills those companies that are trying to magnify the cell signal in your home. If carriers adopt UMA configurations like this and consumers happen to have broadband, then this is a great way to ensure that you have good cell coverage at home. I guess that's why they call it The only phone you need, which I assume is a reference to the need to have a landline at home when your cell doesn't work.

The second benefit is the extension of free minutes for consumers. In my case that doesn't do much since I have a 5000 minute plan, but I get the value for people who have broadband, which I think is an important distinction. The reason I point that out is because the phones they deployed in this package are pretty underwhelming and given my perceived demographic skew of users who have broadband, they are probably not phones that more affluent customers would want.

What I anticipate though are future devices that are similar to my smartphone. The benefit of the UMA access would be great to use as a web surfing device, for file transfers within a local area and some of the other things you see with the Apple Phone. The questions this raises though are around cannibalization of existing business models and possible breaks in the closed or controlled nature of the networks. My bet is that several of the carriers will approach this in a thoughtful way that will ultimately result in a wow kind of consumer offering. I am not entirely sure what that is yet but I think that one can see some of the elements beginning to form and how they could possibly be joined.

Arcata

I am kind of on summer blog vacation. Not entirely by choice, but the combination of a really busy work schedule coupled with a couple of long weekends with the family has made me disappear for the last week.

Last Thursday night I drove up to Los Angeles and then flew out the following morning to Arcata, CA. The last time I had been in Arcata was in 1984 at a debate tournament in college. I remembered that it was a nice place although slightly rustic, but that was about all.

I have to say that I was totally blown away by the trip. We spent a bit of time around Redwood National Park north of Arcata. We did a little hike through the Lady Bird Johnson grove which was beautiful and timely given her recent death. The highlight of that part included sighting a pretty good sized Black Bear that ran across the road just in front of our car.

After a small lunch we went up a bit further and visited Fern Canyon which was the setting for some of the scenes from Jurrasic Park 2. It was really unbelievable. While there we saw a really Big Elf buck that was grazing near the canyon entrance.

On the way back towards Arcata, we ran into a whole herd of Elk that was grazing in a field. There must have been 40 or so.

The day before I left there was an editorial article talking about how eco tourism hasn't taken off the way people expected so far. I blurted out that the reason I saw was that there really aren't a whole lot of accommodations and getting there is still a pain. Hopefully that changes with time as I think that the north west corner of California is up there with Yellowstone and some of the other beautiful national parks. Ok, now I will get back to technology. I will have some pictures of the above on my Flickr page if you are interested.

13 years

Monday was my 13th anniversary. Jessica and I had planned to go to Switzerland this summer for a week but we got caught in the passport nightmare and decided to punt. Before we had done that we planned on spending our anniversary hiking in the mountains around San Bernardino. Even though Switzerland was out we decided to do the hike anyways as hiking was something we did a lot of when we were dating and during the first chunk of years of our marriage.

Our target for the hike was Mt. San Jacinto, which is the second highest peak in Southern California. I had forgotten that it was also the first real big hike I had taken her on. Back then she wore tennis shoes. Not a good idea.

As a hiker who hasn't hiked in a while I forgot all the important things. Things like packing enough water. Packing moleskin for the inevitable blisters. Not entirely freezing your water bottles. All the good stuff.

The hike we chose was via the Palm Springs Aerial tramway to Long Valley, Round Valley and then up to the peak. About two miles in, I realized that 1, I hadn't worn the right socks and 2, I didn't have moleskin. We thought long and hard about turning around but ultimately ran into a guy who graciously gave me some moleskin.

After that it was steady going towards the top although I have to say I was sucking wind pretty hard. I can maintain a consistent pace without much stopping but the altitude and the relative shortage of water took a bit of a toll. About 3/4 of the way up we stopped and had a lunch i made that was homemade pesto from the garden on ciabatta with brie and heirloom tomatoes grilled on a panini grill and wrapped tightly to keep it from drying. It rocked. The basil has been exceptional this year in the garden.

We eventually made it to the top where some other hikers snapped this photo for us. Coming down Jessica realized that there was a tear down my pants about 18 inches long that left my "full seat" exposed. I told her it was simply a equipment malfunction and that it was a good idea to create an a$$ vent for hikers. I am sure I looked very foolish.

Before leaving the top we signed the book and then headed back down. The entire day was a great flashback of the foundational years of our marriage and it was an awesome day spent away from kids, startups, and outside distractions. Each step reminded me how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful woman, mother, life partner and friend. I can't wait to head back up there with her in another 13 years or so.