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.