Summer Conferences

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

Radio Interview Regarding Rabble

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

Linkedin, Zero Degrees & Plaxo

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

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

Pitbull and Rabble Promotion

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

Location Free and The World Cup

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

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

Catching My Breath

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

Something Up With Snocap

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

Vox launches

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

Webshots and Rabble

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

CA-50 Election

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

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

Heading to Boston

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

Intercasting Presentation at BREW

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

Rabble In Business Week Article

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

Mobile Monday San Diego Tonight

I spaced and forgot to post that Mobile Monday is tonight (Wednesday) to coincide with the Brew conference. It's a great lineup of LBS related companies. Debi has the information here.

Orkut Spam

Has anyone else been getting a lot of Orkut messaging lately? I have been getting a resurgence of activity from people in Brazil. As I have never been to Brazil, but really want to go there soon, I chalk it up to spam. Spam for sure but fascinating Spam. I have been ignoring it until tonight. I think everyone I can persuade should become a friend of $16;MonsterMan. The Punisher. I want to party with him. I am now his friend. Sorry I haven't used Orkut in a while. He is my best friend.

DRM Pain

Been going through old to-do emails. I have been playing a little bit with the Sprint Music store on the demo phone they sent me that is powered by Groove Mobile. On the phone it's kind of cool in that I use it as my new transistor radio when I am out with the triplets. They really dig Tears For Fears - Change. I hadn't played with the PC part until tonight. I was going to download the songs I had "bought" from the store. I tried to do the download but I had to do a Windows Media Player upgrade. Not a big deal.

I download the upgrade of the DRM. I start the install and the first thing it tells me to do is to backup my hard drive. Pass.

Is this still the current state of things? I don't mind upgrading your DRM for my players but the .99 or $2.99 dollar songs is worth a whole lot less than my data. I will keep the data. I am behind on backups anyways and will do the backup but I am not installing software that can wreck my stuff. I am less worried about the backup than I am the 3 days I would lose reinstalling stuff. Pass.

I Want Media

A couple of months back I subscribed to the I Want Media newsletter and I have to say that day in and day out this is my new favorite surpassing Moconews, Venture Wire and some others. It's a shame they don't provide RSS feeds but I would definitely recommend checking it out if you are interested in the intersection of media and technology and want to stay up to date.

Quien es mas macho? Max Headroom or Tony Snow

I was walking past a television the other day and noticed that CNN had a smiling picture of Tony Snow talking and I was struck by how similar he looked to Max Headroom. It must have been the goofy smile and the big head. I must say that having a affable press secretary was a stroke of genius for the people who are running the country. For my money though, I have the say that Max Headroom is the better man.

Blogger Comment Filter Improvement

Over the weekend Blogger rolled out word verification for comments. I don't get many comments but I really enjoy getting the ones that I do. Unfortunately I have been getting about 50 Spam comments a day for all kinds of crazy stuff. I turned the filter on this weekend and away the Spam went.

Tivo And Direct TV Confusion

Some days you feel like you are complaining a lot. After the drug store ordeal below and being seriously burned out from the sailing trip, I wanted to sit down and watch a movie with Tate. We pulled up Pay Per View on our DVR and tried to buy a show. We ended up getting a weird customer service error where we had to call some number. Lameness. Why would I want to call someone? Why would the company I am paying want me to talk to someone? That costs money. I call the number and do some weird menu navigation kung fu that ultimately gets me to an apparent human being. Fascinating. You don't find many humans these days and I actually think this guy was located somewhere in the United States.

We spend a longer than I would care time on the phone and early on he tells me that my machine hasn't called back since March. I corrected him and said that no in fact it had called back the previous Thursday at 1:01 AM as I have had this problem before and I went through all the information screens in advance to get the information in advance of this call. He said that it needs to send something back on a special call and it hasn't done that since March. Now mind you, this is the second time I have had this problem and the last time it resulted in me shipping my box back to them and them sending me a new box. I am thinking this is about to happen again.

I don't spend much time with him editorializing as it doesn't really do much to help me but I would point out a couple of things...

My machine does call back every couple of days.

Some kind of data gets sent back to the home base.

When I order a show some kind of authorization process occurs which leads me to believe that they should have some record on their servers independent of my box.

The movie studios want to get paid.

If my box is broken again and I haven't paid for any of the 10 plus movies we bought in the last two months how do the studios get paid?

If Direct TV authorizes the shows in advance from their home servers they should have a record of it.

If they have a record of it then my machine calling them shouldn't matter.

If the above fact pattern is true then they should let me buy whatever I want, whenever I want instead of making me sit on the phone for 20 minutes where they lose money and I lose patience.

If the above is false then I am going to get a bunch of movies for free when they make me ship this box back to their home office.

Maybe I am missing something. Maybe not.

Give Me Liberty Or Add Me To Your Database

Tonight I was pretty wiped out. The previous night one of the triplets, Brit, had a respiratory thing going on. We didn't get much sleep. We had a day planned to go sailing which we did and had a really awesome time. Pics will be posted shortly. Tonight I needed to head to the drug store to get a ration of Motrin, Pediacare, and some Vaporizer stuff. With 18 month old triplets and a soon to be 4 year old, we go through lots of medication.

Apparently the nationwide epidemic of methamphetamine use has resulted in some restrictions around your ability to purchase large quantities of medication that could be used to make speed from the comfort of your home. Mind you with all the chemicals involved and the number of kids in my house, I don't have any plans to set up a meth lab anytime soon. I can picture a biker in a bandana loading up a shopping cart full of sudafed as being suspicious but several bottles of the above mentioned drugs shouldn't freak anyone out.

When I stepped up to the counter the clerk told me she had to see my drivers license. I pulled out my wallet. She said she needed me to take my license out of my wallet. Huh? I am tired, sure. I took it out and handed it to her. Yes, I am turning 40 this year and the curly headed kid with me is in fact mine and the small quantity of medication on the table is because I have triplets and they generally take 3 times as much medicine as a single child. It's a math thing.

The clerk proceeded to take my license and swipe it on some magnetic card reader. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! I have been added to the database of speed freaks and meth cookers. I asked her what the hell that was. She murmured something about some methamphetamine act and pulled up some government publication in her other hand. Tired and not fully realizing how seriously angry this was going to make me, I blurted out vocally, "Hey nothing like a little invasion of my privacy in the land of liberty." The elder gentleman in line behind me blurted out a vocal "Amen".

I am thinking I need to do some research on this law and see if any civil liberties people have any issue with this kind of stuff. If I wasn't tired and if I had any inkling that I was going to be scanned to buy some medication for my kids I would have told her thanks but no thanks. What is going on with my country?

Rabble and Upcoming.org Integration

This week we rolled out integration with Upcoming.org . Rabble users can adjust their settings and then when they add events to their Upcoming account the event automatically gets published to Rabble. Also when our users create an event in Rabble they can choose to publish it out to Upcoming.org. For example I just added the San Diego date of the Warped Tour to my Upcoming calendar and it is now in Rabble as well.

On the Road / Chicago and LA

Atlanta was hot. I don't do humidity very well. I did ride the MARTA to the airport which was cool although the back story reason I rode the MARTA was kind of fascinating but I won't go into that.

Chicago was perfect. The time of year that the Midwest has great weather. Chicago is a great city that just looks so regal. I think that most of the time I have been there when I was at Vivendi was the middle of winter, which isn't as nice.

The trip was good. Mostly business although I was happy to grab breakfast with Patrick DeMoustier who worked with me at Vivendi. He is currently at EA in Chicago as the COO of their studio there. It was nice getting to catch up.

Leaving Chicago was a nightmare. Apparently some weird tornado stuff came up that delayed our flight like 3 hours before they boarded us and made us sit on the tarmac for another 2-3 hours. Lots of fun. We got home at 2 AM and then ran up to LA for a day of meetings. No rest for the wicked. Currently I am on the train with the EVDO on catching up on stuff hoping to get back in my bed before midnight.

Two big technology things from this trip.

1. I downloaded my first TV show. I know, I know, I am a lame avoider of P2P networks but having lots of friends in the content businesses I just don't download stuff for free. I caught the first half of 24 for $1.99. That was so worth it. I was really excited about being able to not have to wait to go home and see it on the TIVO, although sometime late tonight I will catch the other half of the finale. I am really tired or I would have some commentary on how music is not throw away but television is for me and how I actually want to own a CD but could care less about the DVD of a TV show season but I can't do it now. There is something profound there. Not tonight though.

2. More TV on my phone. During those 2-3 hours on the tarmac, in a small seat, in a plane that was hot, with no food or beer, I found that pulling up live feeds of the Weather Channel on my Sprint phone and looking at the weather radar made me realize that when the airlines push you out onto the tarmac with no intention of letting you fly, it isn't really a magic fairy storm that spontaneously comes into existence. They actually know it is coming because they have satellites and other technology that lets them know full well what they are doing. Wow, stupid me. So with that fact in hand it begs the question of why it is better for me to sit confined to the seat of a plane for hours than to sit comfortably or semi comfortably back in the airport. I can't imagine I would like the answer so I am going to continue to pretend it's the weather fairy and gremlins that make my traveling miserable.

On The Road From Atlanta

I am out traveling a bit this week. I got to Atlanta last night and will be here for the day for meetings before I head to Chicago tonight for more and then on to Los Angeles. A couple of observations from the road. First, I forgot my noise reducing headphones that I received as a gift earlier this year. I can't tell you how much I miss them. Bad mistake. Those things have changed my travel quality of life. Second, the EVDO phone I am using is awesome as a modem. As we checked into the hotel last night I saw the sign for $16 for unlimited connectivity. Whatever that means. It's kind of funny how we have gotten to the point where almost all of the hotels are now wired for connectivity but we are now starting to use high speed phones instead of their wi-fi. Third, the podcasts that are available for download are amazing these days. I listened to Nightline, Jim Lehrer and All Things Considered on my PSP. In some respects travel has certainly gotten easier. More later.

Movable Type / Typepad on Rabble

Last week we rolled out integration with Rabble and Movable Type and Typepad. We publish the Intercasting Blog using Movable Type so this afternoon I set up a channel Intercasting on Rabble and brought over all the posts we have made in the last year. We can now update the corporate Blog from Rabble while on the road as well.

Virb

One of the sites that took the mantle of indie and up and coming music when the first incarnation of MP3.com went dark was PureVolume. I have admired what they have done from afar over the last several years and in my opinion they have really captured the pulse and lifeline of indie music today. Where you go from there in a world of changing tastes with kids is hard to say but an indication of where they are going can be found at the soon to be launched Virb. It appears to be their take on social networking and given the smarts that they have it will be interesting to see what their take is when they go live.

New Yahoo Homepage

I just hit a new, updated and stylish Yahoo homepage. My cohorts can't seem to get it to appear. I like it a lot. Wonder when it really rolls.

All Beta'd Out

This has been a tough week for trying new stuff in my ample free time. The things this week that drove me insane:

Helio. I should have waited for a little while. I don't think that you can do an evaluation of the service right now. The software to connect to the PC isn't available yet and I don't think they intend to lock the handset down as much as it currently is locked down. Please let me put Opera Mini on the phone. Cool? Again, love the phone, love the UI. Not much else to say at this point.

Aimpages. I heard they went beta earlier this week and signed up. I tried to edit my template but it was really screwed up. Painfully screwed up. I tried it on Firefox, IE, Safari and Camino. Each time I couldn't get it to work. I sat down with one of our developers and watched him go through the process and realized that when I had signed up my base template had been improperly initialized and there was no framework to add the Ajax widgets. Grrr. I deleted my page and started over and it was working. Well sort of. But its a start. Pretty wacky. Here is a start for my page.

YouTube Mobile Video Upload. I deserve what I get on this one. Video off the phone, over the air to a web service is a leap of faith. Is my file to big? Will the MMS gateway on my side barf? Will their handler work on the other end? Will the specific flavor of encoding on my phone work? I knew better going into this. I tried to send a big file from my P910 through the MMSC for Tmobile. Nope. Too Big. I sent it over the Internet Gateway. No Problem. YouTube barfed on it. I sent a smaller file over MMSC. No Dice. Smaller file over Internet. YouTube barfed. I sent a smaller file over MMS from Helio. No error message and no video. I can't even figure out what happened to that one. I am going to try some other carrier gateways like Verizon or Sprint MMS which I believe will actually work. User Created Video is going to be big. But there is a long way to go before it is a good consumer experience.

All in all it was a bit of a frustrating week but on the plus side, the amount of innovation that is happening everywhere right now is breathtaking. I expect the three above mentioned services will all get their kinks out and I suspect that each of them will be successful in the long run. I am going to take a break from trying new things out next week. One thing that occurred to me though is that it would be really cool to see a side by side comparison of Helio and Ampd. Of Myspace, Aimpages, and Pages.google.com. Of all the video hosting sites and how they handle mobile video upload. Someone? I am off next week.

COPA? How about DOPA?

Cnet reports that Congress is considering passing legislation called Deleting Online Predator Act or DOPA. This legislation would basically shut down access by minors to websites at all schools and libraries for social networking and blogging sites. This Myspace as scapegoat inspired legislation would be broad enough to nail all the sites kids use like Myspace, Facebook, Live Journal, Xanga etc. as well as sites like Blogger.

I expect that there will be a concerted effort by the fledgling industry that 10s of millions of kids are using to temper this a bit or at least make it reasonable. It smells a bit like election year over-reaching to me.

2 Years of Blogging

Today marks my "blogging birthday". Two years and 657 posts later I am still enjoying it immensely.

Narchive Music Wiki

I must have missed the rollout of Narchive. Or N-archive as in Napster archive. Think Wikipedia meets Allmusic. It looks pretty cool. I of course went to look at Tool because they are my soundtrack of choice this week. Me and 500,000 others last week. There isn't much there yet except what I think is a big chunk of Muse bio information. I will have to check out some of the other more popular bands to see what is there. Has anyone else tried the Wiki music approach yet? I think this is a first.

OPML Madness

This is my week for OPML. The Social Software Weblog (which I need to re-add to my blogroll) had an article about Grazr here. Earlier this week I decided to start hacking my blog up to clean things up and to try some new stuff. I started by creating an OPML file of my newly condensed reads to try out Winer's new Share Your OPML, which I have to say has been fascinating. Mostly to see what other people read stuff like you. There are a number of views into the information that I have been stewing on and interestingly found someone I know at Warner Bros. who was near the top of my list and I was also near the top of his.

Today I installed the Grazr Javascript on the side and I have to say that it is a super cool little add on that makes updating the blogroll a snap. It also lets people quickly and easily read the same stuff I am reading instantly.

YouTube Rolls Out Mobile Video Upload

Cnet reports that YouTube has rolled out a new feature that allows users to upload videos to their site from their mobile devices. Nifty. I imagine that most users will have to send videos through their carriers MMS gateway which will have a size limitation. My account allows me to bypass MMS and go direct to email. I just sent a fairly sizable video that hasn't gone live yet. I will post a link when it does.

Share Your OPML Site Down?

I can't get in. Anyone else? I get a Wordpress database error.

Share Your OPML

I had been putting off trying to grok OPML for over a year. There are the obvious things but after spending time with the opml.org outliner. (Painful and non-intuitive) I managed to get together an OPML file of what I am really reading right now. I went down to 24 feeds. I will begrudingly add more as the days pass. I am thinking of quitting using bloglines and start with a new newsreader as well to make sure I don't go and red the several hundred I have in Bloglines and Sharp Reader.

I pointed a link from Share Your OPML to my file and voila! There are some cool things about this site that is a different slice from the other services like Bloglines and Feedburner.

I am really interested in the shared updating of outlines ala Basecamp (no OPML isn't Basecamp but the shared space thing) and I think I got a glimmer of the power of synchronized information in a format like OPML.

Helio First Impressions

I wanted to clarify something that I hadn't said before. Our company is an application developer and it's our goal to get the widest distribution possible. From that perspective, all carriers are good. I am not writing about Helio as it relates to that at all. I am writing about Helio because I think I am in their target demographic. Ok, maybe at the high end of the target demographic in terms of age, but nonetheless, when I heard the original Helio announcement, I thought, "Here is an MVNO for me, high end phones, 3G networks, etc." This should be my carrier.

So whether or not that assumption was flawed, I have proceeded to get a phone and have gone through some of the processes that I described earlier that I will describe as opening week jitters. That sort of stuff happens and it was neither my intent or desire to say, "hey I keep having problems." I will say that there was one other thing that popped up that I wont go into but I want to say that their VP of Operations called me to give me a hand with some of the issues I had been experiencing. I was impressed with the outreach.

My requirements for a carrier are pretty straightforward. I want a lot of minutes for talking. I average 2000-3000 a month. I have a 5000 minute plan with T-Mobile to cover that. I want to have a feature rich phone or at least flexibility to bring my own phone if I don't see anything that excites me. My current phone is the Sony Ericsson P910. I love it and have gushed about it frequently. It is a slight bit big and slightly underpowered in the media department and lack of hi-speed network capability. I also want to be able to use my phone to read my email, surf the web and act as a modem for my laptop in a pinch. This means unlimited data or cheap data. At it's core I want a cool phone without a lot of restrictions.

The Hero phone is amazing. All of the specs are great. The sound is great. The gameplay is stunning. The UI is out of this world, truly a big improvement over most phones. As an FYI, my phone UI bias is Sony Ericsson and Samsung. I am not a Nokia convert. I think that the Hero UI is close to what I am used to.

The EVDO network is solid. Actually, let me say, that I expect it to be solid as the Sprint Ambassador Samsung A920 phone that just kicks ass in terms of speed. I haven't really been able to properly put the phone through it's steps to see how it performs under some serious load, but the Samsung has been a champ and I expect that when I get the chance to work the Hero, it will be similar.

I plan to spend more time with the phone later but there were several things that made me pause or scratch my head. First off, the HOT or Helio On Top application. It is a nifty feature that sends alerts to the screen of my phone. Like Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo etc. It also has Myspace news and IGN news. Great. Let me go in and customize this for the stuff that I use or the blogs that I read. Not so much. Or at least not now. I imagine they will change that but for now my ability to customize or personalize the experience is fairly constrained. I guess Bloglines on my Sidekick II is staying for a bit longer. The HOT application also made my phone occasionally non-responsive. Again, I am sure this will get fixed.

The next issue, that to me is currently the biggest issue is the open/walled garden setup of the phone browser. This certainly has to be an oversight. The ability to go to the WAP sites of choice or even to view non WAP sites is pretty limited. I think this is probably a network configuration issue. I am not sure if it is intentional or not. After realizing that the installed browser is not HTML friendly, or doesn't come installed with a real browser like Opera was on my Sony. I cruise through the Opera site and get to the download and then get a permissions error from the phone. Sorry bucko, no can do. Ok, this has got to be wrong. I haven't had the chance to install any software yet and maybe that is by design. I am loading the software for my PC in the next day or two when my actual phone gets here and will see how the PC integrates with the phone and see if I can do some software installs that way.

The other big glaring thing for me, and it's not something I would expect to be there, but the Sprint Ambassador phone has actually gotten me fascinated more than I expected, was the lack of a music store to load tracks onto my sweet new phone. The only music available are music videos. Huh? This might be a user error issue but I am not sure.

Anyway, like I said these are first impressions. I certainly hope the phone/network are a bit more open than I see at first glance. If that is the case I would say I am heading down the path to really liking where they are taking this. If it's more locked down then it's probably not for me.

I am not going to comment on the Myspace integration for obvious reasons but will say that I have used it a lot and would like to see someone else review that functionality soon.

My Helio Saga Part 3

An hour after my last call, I called back because it still wasn't working. We did a 20-30 minute phone call. We walked through lots of phone geek stuff. At the conclusion they said wait for an hour and it will work. I waited an hour. It didn't work. I called back. I did another 30-40 minute call. Actually I am still on the call. They said that the device is defective. I guess that's possible but it seems strange. Sigh. I get a new one tomorrow. Stay tuned. Grumble grumble. Early Adopter.

Dodgeball Newsletter

I just saw a Dodgeball newsletter in my SPAM catcher. It looks like they are providing stats to users as it relates to check ins etc. I love stats and think that's pretty cool. None of my friends use Dodgeball so I haven't been using it. Some of the people I know in SF are into it, I guess I need to add them as friends, I just don't who is. I certainly missed out on the Dodgeball connections at SXSW.

My Helio Saga Part 2

The title of this post shouldn't be saga but unfortunately it is the right description. As readers may recall I uncovered a broken javascript piece in the shopping process that prevented me from completing a purchase of my new Helio phone. After calling them and alerting them to the problem, the fixed it. Opening day bugs, not a problem. It's to be expected. As an early adopter of things, this doesn't come as a surprise.

Yesterday my phone, a Hero, arrived. I was extremely impressed by all the packaging and presentation. Very Apple if you ask me but cooler in my opinion. A great start. I had also seen the phones before and wasn't very impressed. It reminded me of so many other sliders I have used. I think it was mostly because I wasn't really trying to focus on the phone. Last night I have to admit that I thought the phone was extremely nice and the UI, which I had been impressed with before is extremely beautiful and gives such a great first impression.

I charged the phone overnight and rushed downstairs to activate it so I could start putting it through some drills on the morning coffee run. No dice. I went through the activation process and the phone doesn't work. I called back and it baffled the tech guy. All the settings were right and it should be fine but it wont call out, accept calls, or do anything with data. Huge bummer. The tech support guy said he had to escalate this or send me a new phone. I am waiting for a call back now.

Ok, so this is a saga right? I hope it gets sorted out today. If I weren't a phone geek, I wouldn't have bothered with the website problem and this activation problem, assuming I had gotten past the previous problem, would probably be the deal killer. But not me, nope I am an early adopter. Maybe they should send me some test phones. That would be a good idea. :-)

Google Translate Take 2

John came in this morning chuckling at me. He asked if I had ever noticed the translate this page next to results if you search for something like Munchen. Well actually, I hadn't but I do now. Needless to say I am not always as quick on some things as I am on others.

Google Translate

I was looking through our server logs and saw a referral from translate.google.com . I didn't recall hearing or seeing this but a quick technorati search shows some activity around this URL. The reason that this is important to me is that it spells the death of my use of Altavista. Actually that isn't entirely correct, it spells the death of my navigation to Altavista to get to that Babelfish link whenever I need to translate a website or an email. Does anyone use Altavista anymore? I am done. I am curious why the translate stuff isn't obvious anywhere on the Google directories, or at least not where I could find it.

Helio Shopping Cart Fixed

I called them to fix the shopping cart. They did so hopefully tomorrow I should have a new phone.

I can't Buy a Helio Phone

I decided this morning to get a Helio phone to check it out. I went through the sign up process on Firefox and right after I was upsold a Flash card, the website is broke. I thought it was just Firefox but I had the same experience with IE and it broke at the same point. That isn't good. Fix your website! I guess I have to call them on the phone. Did anyone else get through to buy one?

Rabble on TV

A local TV network in North Carolina RTPTV did an interview with Amanda Krantz who was working with us in North Carolina earlier this year. Here is a link to the video. If you have ever wondered what Rabble looks like, there are some good live screen shots in the interview.

Helio Launched - Korean Retail Angle

I try not to post about things that are broad news where I don't really have anything to add. Yesterday Helio launched. I am interested to see what their Myspace integration is like. As of this morning I haven't seen any reviews. I guess in the next day or two things might start to appear. I was dying to get my hands on a phone yesterday and since they are actually going to do some retail distribution I went to their site to find a store near me. Although my expectations were that in fact there are no stores, I was surprised to see a number near me. They happened to be in an area that is very Korean in terms of businesses and residents. There were three stores. I called them all. None of the people answered the phone in English. They did in fact speak English when prompted and after a couple of questions I realized that they didn't have the phones yet but should have them in the next several weeks. More important to my quest though was that these phones that they would be carrying would be with a Korean language version so no dice for me.

I think the biggest issue that I saw with their launch was the price point. When I originally heard about Helio I expected that they were targeting a more affluent post college kind of crowd which would be able to handle a relatively expensive price plan and handset purchase cost. I think their rollout suggests that this is still the case. With that in mind it seems sort of counter intuitive to me that they are marketing to the Myspace crowd which strikes me as a younger more price sensitive group. I am certain that similar to the other recently launched MVNOs there will be several course corrections over time. All in all though I am really excited about what they are trying to do in the MVNO space and I hope they gets traction quickly.

Radiate / Flipt Series A and Staff Addition

Yesterday in Venture Wire and Moconews it was reported that LBS start up Radiate / Flipt raised $5 million from Sequioa and NEA. As Shawn pointed out here although they are a "stealth" company some details are emerging through some astute blogospheric observations. Yesterday when I saw the names of the founders I tried to find some more news. I wasn't that successful but then thought that any good Silicon Valley backed startup probably uses Linked In. As a result I found the CEO Sam Altman and a link to Radiate on his resume that revealed Mark Jacobstein, The President and COO of Digital Chocolate is their EVP of Corporate Development and Marketing. Interesting that neither his departure from Digital Chocolate or his role at Flipt had been reported previously.

PSP Software Upgrade to Version 2.7

I just realized that version 2.7 of the PSP firmware is available. Here is a list of features I found. The big improvement here to me is support of Flash. I can't wait to see it!

Eyespot Mobile Video Contest

Eyespot, (full disclosure - I am an advisor to them) is having a 72 hour mobile video mix up contest. Check here for details. I am pulling some fun triplet clips together to give it a go as well.

Tool is not on Napster or iTunes

While wondering through the Napster site, I saw a really cool banner for the Coachella concert which is in our neck of the woods this weekend. If I didn't have the enormous young family I would either be at Jazzfest in New Orleans or at that concert this weekend. I was even more depressed when I realized that Tool is headlining the show one night. I can't say enough how much I love Tool. I don't know if their new album (the first in like 5 years) is out yet but if not it will be soon. Allmusic had links to samples that I didn't play but a search of both the two above mentioned services not only didn't have the new CD which I would buy right this second, but none of their previous works. That bums me out. Its that sort of thing that keeps a lot of people, certainly not me though, out on the fringes on the illegal services. Come to think of it I think I recall the band not wanting to do the digital thing so at the end of the day that is their right. I as an avid fan have all the CDs, the collection of videos on DVD and I see them each tour. They aren't losing any cash with me.

Free Napster

Tonight Napster rolled out their new advertising supported free portal. For my money it's the last newish thing I can remember in digital music in a while and Napster seems to be the first to launch this. I keep waiting for Mashbox or one of the legal P2P swappers to launch but I suspect that publishing has this locked up tight for now. I hope I am wrong on that.

You can see the details of the Napster free portal service here.

So is it really free? Well, sort of. You can play any song you want five times before you get locked out unless you want to buy the individual track or sign up as a Napster to go member. The five play limitation probably won't be a big consumer earthshaker but if you think about the flexibility to create playlists and add them to your blog and social networking site etc. it is pushing things a bit further than Last.fm or Pandora.

From a label perspective it is a push for more experimentation. I have to play with it a bit to see what I think of it but it is encouraging to see the labels trying to dip their toe in the water a bit more with each passing day. If the widget style stuff is good then this could be a big deal for them. If those pieces are lacking then this is a marketing advertisement disguised as a portal, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but not a needle mover.

Spam Your Phone

I was catching up on email. I categorize into do immediately which I do, deal with later, or file. The first and last are fine. Its the middle ones that are bad. They are either things I should take some action on or are left over emails that came in while traveling. Tonight I closed that window down to everything acted on or filed up to the last 30 days. Not too bad in terms of lag. As soon as I hit that milestone I was looking at some sites and the "send alerts to your phone" tag on one site made me laugh really hard. Right, with all the interupts from email and IM the last thing I need is to have my phone going off all night. I will pass and save the SMS messgaes for Jessica and co-workers. I think the jury is still out on what the right kind of messaging we need on our phone in terms of SMS. My early interactions on automated alerting have been short lived before I cancelled them quickly.

Bloglines Communities

I was cleaning up my Bloglines subscriptions today. Deleting a few and adding a couple. It's funny how I have grown to appreciate people who blog a moderate amount or a little amount and how seeing Boing Boing at 200 everyday drives me nuts. Sigh. Unsubscribe. In the process I saw a new tab called communities. I clicked on it and saw that Bloglines has added support for Blogger, Buzznet, Flickr, Myspace, Live Journal, Spaces, Tribe and Xanga. Wow. Thats cool. I need to try it out to see how it works. I know a number of these sites are very protective of their advertising revenue so I am curious to see how they will view having their sites viewed through an aggregator.

Drivers of Adoption

The NFL Draft is this weekend. For those of you who aren't crazy addicted fantasy football players, it is the weekend where all the great college football players find their new home in professional football. For me in particular, it marks the official starting point in my keeper fantasy football league(see I am extra sick) were we can begin trading people and draft positions in advance of our draft the weekend prior to the start of the football season in September. Does this sound crazy yet? It should.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because this is the sort of thing that drives the adoption of technology. Let me explain.

I have been playing fantasy football since 1998 or 1999. I was working for CSC at Sun in Silicon Valley and I had a lot of time on my hands as my wife was back in Los Angeles. Over the years my addiction to fantasy football has grown as my expertise (or so I say) has developed. With each year the level of engagement and involvement has increased to what I would say was probably a saturation point two years ago. Last year I was certainly on my game but I had developed the right balance to stay competitive and still remain married.

So fantasy football leads to technology adoption. Several years ago, I decided that I needed to be able to watch more than one game at a time. In fact, it became necessary for me to watch all the games. Especially since I had players on just about every team in football. At the time I had Cox digital cable, which is a fine service, but not one that had the NFL Sunday ticket package that was only on Directv. What is an addict to do? Get Direct TV.

I didn't want to get rid of Cox as there were some particular things I liked about Cox and most importantly they provide me with my cable modem at home. So I got both. I kept both for a number of months until I realized that Directv had just about everything I wanted except for the broadband connectivity. Goodbye Cox Digital Cable. Hello Directv. I kept the cable modem though. Cox lost me because of the NFL.

Last year I bought a PSP. A lot of the purchase was about my personal ongoing market research but quickly, given all the stuff going on in my life, I put the device in my bag and forgot about it. Until Location Free became available. Location Free was some gee whiz technology that was fun to show people but as I am not really a TV watcher it too sort of wore off quickly. Except on Sunday. Suddenly I could be watching my TV with split screens in my house with two games on and then use the PSP to watch a 3rd game. Nice huh? I wish this was a joke.

Recently I recently received a Sprint demo phone which has been really impressive for a number of reasons but most importantly to me because I can use it as an EVDO modem for my laptop. The TV on my phone stuff? Not so interesting. That was until Sprint announced the NFL draft coverage on my phone. Um, ok, that's kind of cool. Especially since we are busy this weekend and I can't stay glued to the television. Well, maybe TV on your phone is kind of cool...I will certainly be taking period looks to see who got who over the weekend.

Yesterday Shawn and I were up in SF and Silicon Valley for meetings and I was driving around in a car that had Sirius radio. Shawn commented that it was kind of pointless for Hertz to spend all that money deploying that. I suggested that it might be Sirius putting it in for marketing purposes. I am not sure what the actual answer is, but I told Shawn that I thought it was brilliant. I told him that last football season I was going to buy a Sirius radio but couldn't get entirely over the hump because I was worried about using it after the football season. Having rented two cars now with Sirius I am ready to make the jump as I think there is certainly enough other content to rationalize my football purchase. That is, I will buy it when football season actually starts.

Although this story is a sad indication of the sickness present in sports fanatics it highlights the marketing challenges to me of any new technology. What is the best way to drive adoption? What are the must have things that makes a consumer feel compelled to adopt a new technology? In my case the technologies association with the NFL will warrant an investigation into whether or not it is something I should acquire. There are certainly many other analogues to this for other subcultures or affinity groups. It will be interesting to see which levers work most successfully in mobile.

Myspace Banned from Texas Community College

This article details that Myspace use was 40% of the Internet traffic at this school. That was until they turned it off.

Russ hangs it up

One of the earliest people I started reading when I started blogging almost two years ago was Russ Beattie. Russ would sometimes iritate but always engage. His passion and understanding of mobile is something that I enjoy consuming and over time have struck up a casual relationship with him that I hope continues beyond the death of his blog (for now I am sure).

In one of his last posts which was an open letter to MobHappy, he beseeches them to have fun with mobile and show that they really enjoy mobile (which they certainly do). While there are certainly a lot of great mobile bloggers around today, Russ will certainly be missed as one of the most enthusiastic and a thoughtful booster for the differences between mobile and the Internets. I wish him well in his private endeavors and hope he comes back soon.

Quien es mas macho? Odeo or Podshow

I am an errant podcaster. I haven't done a show in months even though I have a lot of tracks lined up. I just haven't been able to get it together with all the work stuff going on. Today for some bizzaro reason I was doing some Alexa searches on podcasting companies that I believe started with some non-sequitur about traffic on Garageband. I couldn't recall their podcasting initiative and after digging recalled it was Gcast.

I then recalled that I hadn't been paying attention to the two big players in podcasting who raised approximately $9 million each in August or so of last year, Odeo and Podshow. I am a big fan of Odeo but hadn't heard much lately but was very excited to see this Alexa chart showing that in the face of all the satellite radio and Madison avenue style hype, that the Odeo guys are actually moving along quite nicely and quietly and at least according to the oft maligned Alexa, they are in the lead. Good stuff.

Track Your Kids from Sprint

Sprint announced earlier this week the introduction of the Sprint family locator here. I believe this is one of the first commercial deployments of LBS technologies in North America that isn't fleet management. Very cool. Wavemarket, the same company that offers Streethive is powering the product.

Based on the lack of understanding of phone applications by the over 30 set (What's a ringtone?) I am curious how many kids will help their parents set up an application that allows their parents to track them. There are interesting privacy and security issues in the discussion of LBS and this too will be a hot topic in the coming year or so as more consumer offerings begin to rollout.

Rabble Addiction

I don't like to talk much about the goings on inside the Rabble community itself although I do post about the various technical things and content things we are doing. If you want to see what is going on download Rabble and see for yourself. This post today had me in tears though:

"Im addicted to rabble. i quit and remove the application every day but just buy it again. so i am trading in my cell phone razr for one without get it now or mobil web. i am neglecting my job my friends my studies my body. i learned a lot about myself. goodbye forever shalom"

I am not sure if that is a good thing or not but we must be doing something right.

Just Because

Ok, now I go back to work.

Vacation Epilogue

A good time was had by all. It took me until Thursday but by Thursday, I was really on vacation. I didn't finish my book. I didn't listen to any more music. I didn't blog. I didn't read blogs. I scanned email headlines but didn't respond. It was awesome.

There was swimming, and more swimming. There was a lot of time with grandma and grandpa.

One day I had to drive someone to the train station in downtown San Bernardino. It was kind of bizarre because my great grandmother lived there and I spent a great deal of time at her house and my uncle's house when I was a kid and in my teenage years. Seeing the blight of the area was kind of shocking actually. The area around the train station and the neighborhoods where I had played looked like a neutron bomb had hit and all the business were gone. Pretty weird.

It inspired me to visit my childhood house in Rialto which is five minutes away. I hadn't seen the house in 6 years or so. It looked pretty run down although the neighborhood has changed demographically and I am fascinated by what the future holds for some of these blighted or in transition areas over the next 5-10 years. When I was a kid Rialto tripled population in 10 years resulting in the elimination of all the citrus groves where we played as a kid and their replacement with cheap housing. The area has some really amazing natural beauty in terms of setting with these beautiful mountains as a backdrop but is plagued with scorching heat in the summer and terrible smog.

We had an egg hunt. We took the aerial tramway up to the snow. And then as an added treat we swung by my sisters house and got to spend time with all my family and all the cousins which made it a complete sweep of relatives as Jessica's whole family was with in Palm Springs.

Now I am back but the calm and peace of La Quinta is in my soul.

Road Trip - Music and Books

I had to head up to work for a meeting and then drive back this evening. Not much time for commentary but the soundtrack today was:

The Bravery - The Bravery: This 80s revival band sound has a CD that has been sitting on my stack of to be listened to CDs for a long while. I had seen it on a number of best of the year lists from last year and have to admit that after a good listen I am kind of bummed that it had taken me that long to get around to it. A definite add to my itunes list.

Sleater Kinney - The Woods: I love this band. I was turned on to them on their last CD One Beat. This new one continues their unique, awesome punk sound.

Rogue Wave - Descended Like Vultures: I just started listening to this. Very cool sound but a bit more mellow than my usual taste. More after I finish the full thing.

Books. I am currently reading the The Lost Gospel. When CNN did all this promotion of the discovery of the Lost Gospel of Judas I thought it was news. What I didn't realize was that it was a big PR push for a series of books. Very nice. At any rate this is a fascinating book so far. It chronicles the discovery and the long 25 year trek of the only known copy of this document into the hands of people who actually knew what it was.

Last year with all the Pope mania and my previous reading of the Da Vinci Code I decided that I would read From Jesus to Christianity which was an awesome book. That book gave an interesting history of how the New Testament was written and over what time period that really is worth a read if you are a history buff. It talks about what books made it in and which books didn't. It also gave me a number of laughs when I think about people taking a literal view of the language in theology. Especially as many of the gospels came out of an oral tradition.

Vacation

This is the week we ritualistically take our clan out to Palm Springs to recharge. I am doing some work but not much.

Getting to Palm Springs involves a trek through the desert to our retreat. On this year's trek I was driving solo in the supplies vehicle and had a lot of time to just listen to music and unwind. For the trip this year my outward journey was highlighted by the following:

The Very Best of the Grateful Dead. A great compilation of Dead hits that reminded me yet again how great they are as a band and how glad I am that I saw them play several times back in the day. The great revelation for me was a quote from Touch of Grey where the lyrics say "It' even worse than it appears" and I had an aha moment when I connected the dots and realized that the header line from Dave Winer's blog Scripting News is that quote. It's funny when you realize things and they color your view. I thought that the headline before was kind of snarky and now realize that its kind of playful.

The Matchbook Romance - Voices. I am still early in my listening of this. I like it but don't have my head around it enough to give a good description.

Scarlet Symphony - Vulture. This is such an amazing CD. I believe they broke up. Such a bummer, I could have sworn they would have been huge. I need to find out what happened. Go find this hard to get CD and be prepared to be BLOWN away.

Mae - The Everglow. I love this CD. It took me just a bit but now I am completely sold. It takes the heart and soul of Dashboard Confessionals combined with Ben Folds Five and creates an instant masterpiece. See them this summer on the Virgin Megatour opening for Yellowcard.

Yahoo API Update

I always hate when people grouse and then don't give an update if something changes. So here is an update. I hadn't really spent enough time with the Yahoo Developer documentation. Once I did I realized that although I had been talking to a specific group, it probably made sense to go through the formal process of the overarching business group to make sure that things were tracked.

So I sent in my initial request to the Yahoo developer group and received both a form response and a direct response from Eleanor who is in the group. So we are going through the things companies have to go through to make sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed and we will see what comes out of it. We are certainly chomping at the bit but having been at a big company in past lives I understand that there are processes. I still am not aware of any companies doing anything commercial with the Yahoo APIs but no doubt there are others that are further along in the process than we are currently.

More as things develop.

You Can't Get There From Here or Planes, Trains and EVDO

CTIA wrapped up for us this morning. There were some meeting glitches today that were fine considering most of the heavy lifting had been done earlier in the conference. I have to say that I never really got to spend much time on the floor but had some great meetings, conversations, and saw a couple of cool new things.

We decided to try to catch an earlier flight out of Vegas back to San Diego. Shawn had a 4 something and I had a 7 something. Being that we were at the airport around 1 ish getting on a new flight was key to avoiding a long stay in the Vegas airport. We signed up for the first flight and we were something like number 35 on the standby list. Ouch. The next two flights were delayed. Hmmm. Not looking good. Shawn says, "Want to fly to LA?" I say, "Good idea"

We scramble over to the LA gate which is just about to close and manage to get on the flight. Sweet. We get to LA around 2:30 and then catch the 4 PM train to San Diego. We get a couple of hours to work in peace on the train. Wait a minute. We go out onto the runway and wait for around 30 minutes. The train is looking bad now. Eventually we get off the ground and get into LA about 3:10PM. This isn't too bad but it means we have to cab across town to Union Station in Friday rush hour traffic which isn't impossible but the over and under is close. We make it with a couple of minutes to spare. Then the train breaks before we leave. We get a 30 minute delay and they bring a new train.

Net net I am getting home earlier than my original flights departure, which I think makes it all worth while but what a journey. The point of all this though is that this is the first time I get to try out the Sprint EVDO network on the Samsung A920 they sent me a month or two ago. So far, I am WAY impressed with Sprint's EVDO implementation. Shawn is using Verizon's EVDO Laptop card and at some point we will do a data race to see which network is truly faster.

Edge of the Network Media Instead of User Generated Content?

A couple of days ago I saw this post from a different Derrick, er Derek. Stowe made a post about it here. Susan Mernit did here. Debi Jones here.

I don't recall where I first heard the term but I think it was sometime around 2001 or so. While I agree it may not be the most elegant term it seems very descriptive to me. In this post back in January I explained my use of the word as descriptive of an area of business interest/platform approach to me and as a bit of a joke on myself.

I don't have much to add beyond that post other than to say that the other word I was using when I was describing MP3.com, and our Low Def TV project and now Rabble, was Edge of the Network Media in addition to user generated content.

I think this term actually captures the concept that there is a decentralization of media production that is benefiting from cheap technology tools that allows people to create and consume media that isn't traditionally coming from the center of the media network ala Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC (depending on your flavor of media).

So if you want to kill the phrase User Generated Content, feel free to use Edge of the Network Media or whatever other phrase you desire. To Debi's point, this user plans on continuing to generate my content at this blog for the foreseeable future.

At CTIA - Day One

I flew into CTIA a day earlier than planned. A couple of meetings got moved around so today made sense. I came in midday and the coming storm left behind in San Diego seemed a bit off. I took care of some business and then got to catch up with a good friend Jim Rondinelli who previously worked with me at MP3.com but is now working at Warner Music Group (WMG) in publishing. We grabbed an early bite and a margarita and got to catch up since I hadn't seen him much since he moved to NYC recently.

Tonight is a bit of chilling at the Palms and then maybe one of the parties du jour. The next couple of days will be back to back.

We had a mention today in a WSJ article that I need to find a link to.

Eventful Part 2

Thanks to Brian and the crew at Eventful for pushing out the second part of the Rabble/Eventful integration. What do you mean part two? Well here are a couple of examples:

I am at work getting ready for CTIA. I go to Eventful to find out if they have an entry for CTIA. They do, it is here. On the description on the upper right hand side there is a drop down button that says Add to /Remove from a group or Calendar. You press the link. There is an Export this Event to: Rabble. Nice. If you are set up, then this event is published to your Rabble Channel. Other users of Rabble can see this event on your channel but more importantly, other users will now be able to see that event if they happen to be in the Las Vegas area.

Two weeks from now I am in NYC. I am sure one night will be free to I check out concerts in NYC. A quick scan shows that The Matchbook Romance is playing on the 20th here. Click add to Rabble. I need to remember to grab some tickets.

Eric's Podshow Flame

Eric sends up a post that captures what many I know think of Podshow here. I too know a number of great people involved and hope for only the best things for them personally. For a long time now it seems that these guys view podcasting as a necessary evil to sling advertising. How unfortunate.

Google Dating Launches

Big news. The front page of Google has a link to their new dating service, Google Romance. So Hot or Not? Is this a dating landscape game changer or something like their RSS reader (yawn)? Or is it April 1?

Rabble Email

We sent out our first newsletter today to people who signed up on our web and wap site. You can take a look here.

Cyworld US Launching Next Week?

I have been receiving a number of hits to my blog with people searching for Cyworld US. A quick review of the site I mentioned before reveals the following on the about us page. If this is right Cyworld US is coming on April 2. This is terribly close to April fools day so I could be wrong, but I didn't make the site, they did. :-)

Second Life Thoughts

Since SXSW, I have spent a decent chunk of time trying to grok Second Life. If it weren't for Eric, I am not sure I would have spent the time I have so far and therefore wouldn't have come to the understanding that I now have.

When I first signed up for Second Life my initial reactions were as follows:

1. The registration was way too long and detailed.
2. They want my cell phone number? What are you kidding? Why would I want to give you that?
3. It's a downloadable? No, I don't trust downloadable's anymore. Is Wild Tangent hidden in there like AIM or any of the other scary things that people like to payload in their software these days.
4. This is so UNBELIEVABLY laggy.

I was underwhelmed until I caught up with Eric at SXSW. After hearing him go on at length about how cool it was I was committed to giving it another try. I also sat in on the Linden Labs panel at SXSW that was interesting but very un-attended from my perspective given the current hype quotient.

After SXSW Eric gave me some guidance, showed me his island, etc. and I began to have the Aha moments that I was missing. I quickly found myself very excited by the potential of what is contained within the platform and structure of Second Life. I think I was/am most impressed by the blending of reality and virtual world. I found myself watching video clips of things that I could easily see on the web but had never bothered to but because it was in Second Life I was glued to it. You could quickly see the inter-relation of RSS, podcasting, videoblogging etc.

Simply put, I am blown away by Second Life. It is an amazing framework for the blending of cyber and real that was contained within Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It is the Metaverse. There is an amazing kernel of something profound and powerful that clearly has big impact potential. I am not sure that a wandering user will just happen in and get in the groove without the mentorship of a more seasoned user like Eric. But if someone is willing to take the time and come up to speed, it is something that you become a disciple of. I found myself talking excitedly about it to some of the super geeks who work with me/hang out with us.

The down side is that it is a time sink, which is something that I don't have much of currently. Back in my high school days of Dungeon Masterdom, I would have dropped everything and would have become a Second Life addict. Alas that is not in the cards for me. Maybe one of these nights when everyone else is asleep I can start to put the pieces in place to begin building my underwater house. Maybe. I signed up for a year so there will certainly be at the minimum some very fascinated lurking for months to come. It will be interesting to watch it unfold.

Rabble on MetroPCS

Today we announced the availability of Rabble on MetroPCS in a press release here.

Quien es mas macho? Om Malik or Brad Fitzpatrick?

The week before last I received a Plaxo email about John Chaffee that led to this post that was picked up by a number of people, most prominently at first by Om Malik. Being the C-list blogger that I am, I saw an incredible surge in traffic which is illustrated on the graphic on the left. I don't recall the exact number but I think I must have made at least $.50 in Google Ad Words that day.

In addition to pick up by Om, there were links from Moconews and a number of other sites. It really was quite impressive for me to watch given that my normal daily traffic is 50-100 visitors a day.

What I didn't expect was the second spike you see on this chart. Sometime on Monday Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of Live Journal linked to the post and up went the traffic again. If I were to factor out the extra pick up from Moco and others, Brad stood toe to toe with Om Malik. I personally have to say that this was not really a surprise to me, but when you think about it a bit, it is sort of amazing. These two subgroups of readers have very little overlap from what I can tell but have relatively comparable audiences in terms of size. The difference to me is that Brad's audience is spread throughout the country where Om's is more concentrated in urban areas that have strong technology links.

This all sort of takes me back to a post I wrote here about the lack of mobile coverage by the Web 2.0 press. A lot of my sentiment is less about the fact that mobile is a ghetto because 30+ years olds don't get texting but that the youth market isn't taken seriously by the technology crowd in general.

Fortunately there are some signs of increased awareness of what's going on. Robert Scoble posted this article about the secrets behind Myspace's success after chatting with the CTO of Myspace. Also Danah Boyd continues to churn out insightful pieces regarding the youth market and social networking in pieces like this one from earlier this week.

It seems to me that the awareness of the scope and size of what the "kids" are doing is starting to sink in. I have heard derisive comments about Live Journal and Xanga not being serious blogging but I think what John and Brad have built are extremely amazing and are truly a cultural phenomena not unlike what we hear that is beyond the Myspace hype and in my opinion is as much or more important than how cool the new version of Word Press is.

So Om, nothing personal, but I'd take a Brad link over yours just about any day. :-)

ajaxWrite

It's kind of funny that I am going to hang out with Michael today. He happens to work across the street from us but for whatever reeason we dont get to hang out as often as I would like. Prolly that whole startup thing. Anyways he pinged me over the weekend to swing by today to talk about music and stuff so I am looking forward to catching up. I wake up this morning and what do I see but some posts about ajaxWrite. Finally. Back in October I was hanging out with Michael and he showed me the prototype of this. I was blown away. I told him that I thought the other stuff he was working on was cool, but that this was the super revolutionary idea. At least in my opinion. I would recommend that you check it out. I wrote this post using ajaxWrite and it really is super cool.

Scraping, APIs and the monetization of Web 2.0

I realize that this title broke a previous oath not to say Web 2.0 but I couldn't help myself as I think that one of the issues that not enough people have focused on is the light discussion of monetizing Web 2.0 thus far.

Over the weekend, while crawling through my various feeds and readings I came across a couple of things that brought me back to a topic I have been thinking a lot about. First Debi posted an article about people re-purposing the feeds of other bloggers into their own product without their knowledge. Second I came across these guys who claim that they have integration with Myspace. How did I miss THAT story? :-) Both of these things made me think a bit about how content and information flows from web to mobile, web to web, and mobile to mobile.

I don't have much to say about the issue that Debi raises other than I think that the content creators should have a say in what happens to their content. Enough said. By the way the same goes from record labels and artists. :-)

On the second one I had to check out the Myspace integration to understand what was meant by integration. I signed up. During the registration process I was prompted by the opportunity to sign in with my Myspace account (complete with logo etc.) which I didn’t do, but I am left to assume that this then allows me to import my account profile settings into the new application. Ok, that’s what they meant by integration. When we refer to integration we mean that we have a deal with a company or we use open APIs or some other method. I know that in the past there have been questions regarding the legality of screen scraping and technically it is the least effective way to accomplish what you are trying to do. I would suspect that there are certainly some business issues associated with taking that approach (use of logos, how you represent the relationship with said company, copyright etc.) Frankly it’s not my concern as it is not how we choose to integrate with 3^rd parties.

So aside from scraping, what is a company to do if they want to cross the mobile to web or web to web divide? Generally you can use the API’s that are open to developers, like the Blogger API in Google’s case or you have to structure some kind of commercial arrangement with a company. As a company you need to be aware of what the policies are that different companies have with respect to APIs. In general, most of the companies that we interact with don’t allow public access to their APIs. This is a good thing in that there is no ambiguity for the path we have to follow. We have to initiate contact and make a convincing business case for why we should be able to establish a bi-directional relationship with those companies. We usually try to do that by sharing money that our subscribers pay to access our community.

On the open API front, you have to realize that whatever you do from an API perspective, that the other party has disclaimed any support and can do whatever they want with respect to changing their API’s etc. We originally implemented our Live Journal integration using XML-RPC and after a brief conversation migrated our implementation over to Atom. Supporting open APIs is a choice that we hope to enable with Rabble as we move down the road and our APIs become more mature. Making our APIs available to 3^rd parties and also allowing people to monetize that integration is something that we think is important in the future of mobile.

The problem category I have observed is when you allow access to API’s but preclude commercial use. The most obvious example of that is Flickr. Flickr will let you mash up, mix, create clients and go crazy for non-commercial purposes. Given what I have seen with Shozu and many other companies, I take non-commercial to mean that they aren’t charging customers. We actually do charge customers. All of our customers pay for Rabble. Because of that we went directly to Flickr and have been trying for many months now to get something in place that ranges from simply letting our users use Rabble to post to Flickr, to actually being one of the drop down options on the Flickr website (you have to ask right?).

I will continue to bug the business development guy at Flickr but I think an important question that should be asked is, what are the plans for the Yahoo API business? I am not aware of any commercial deals with any of their companies with respect to commercial use of their APIs. I hope I am wrong but if I am not, we are witnessing the aggregation of a number of businesses that have been touting the “small pieces loosely joined” concept on the one hand while not really fostering the development of businesses that have revenue on the other. Can anyone point me to some deals that exist? Stewart?

Miscellaneous Rabble Stuff

Did I mention that SXSW was fun? Eric wrote a nice piece on us in his blog here. Debi wrote up a roundup of Mobile Social Media that overviews some of the things going on and included a mention of us here. Finally, Carlo from Mobhappy asks the question of whether or not people who are used to social networking being free will be up for paying on mobile here. Be sure to read the comments as Shawn had a good response. I always find it surprising to hear people who are from mobile who should know better raise the question of free versus paid when discussing the internet vs. mobile. Internet music = free. Music on mobile ala ringtones, a giant business. Wireless infrastructure, unlike all the serious connectivity of the Internet is at least for now a scarce resource when you contemplate what would happen if we were all sharing videos and music on our cell phones. For now at least things passing over carrier/operator networks will come at some cost.

'LE' Naming Trends for Tech Companies

Ben points to a post by Red Eye VC that suggests that the 'ster' trend in company names seems to have been surpassed by the use of the ending 'le' in company names which is sneakily like Google. Rabble of course ends in 'le'. Although I'd like to say we were way ahead of the curve on this new naming trend, the dirty little secret is that our first choice (which in retrospect was an inferior choice to Rabble) was Rover. I had actually arranged for the purchase of the Rover.com domain from the owner. After a complete scouring of trademarks we determined that the Rover trademark was going to be a sinkhole of money to establish/defend/create. Several weeks later Shawn had the flash of inspiration that took us down the path of Rabble.

More Danah Boyd Goodness

I want to meet Danah. How do I make that happen? Here is her recent presentation link from Etech. Is anyone else convering communities like this right now?

Two Days In Texas

I woke up this morning in the Driskill slightly dehydrated. I was off schedule a bit yesterday and didn't drink enough water. I have a mellow day today and then I head back to San Diego on an evening flight.

It has been a great conference. I promised Jessica that next year we would come to SXSW and make a vacation out of it.

Our panel yesterday was opposite the Craig Newmark keynote but we still managed to get a pretty decent size audience. I really enjoyed meeting my fellow panelists and got to spend some time with Marc Brown from Buzznet. Surprisingly David Snyder from Opera told me that they had moved their US operations to San Diego, which I think is very cool. San Diego is quietly amassing a lot of great companies big and small.

In the early evening I headed up to north Austin to speak at the Mobile Monday meeting of the Austin chapter. There were a lot of presenters all around LBS. I was especially impressed by what the Bones in Motion guys have done/are doing. The highlight for me though was to get to chat at length with the founder of Mobile Monday who's name currently escapes me. I swore I had his business card. We got to chat earlier in the day a bit and then after the meeting I drove him and a guy from Motricity back to the main part of town.

I caught up with Dave and Dave from Eyespot and Damian from Vmix. We went over to the Lifehacker party and hung out for the duration. I spent a lot of time chatting with Eric Rice about Rabble, who, after lampooning me about having a locked down website, downloaded Rabble and had an aha moment I think. I then spent time lampooning Second Life which thus far has completely escaped me but after a pretty long conversation I think I will give it another go. Eric how do I get to your island?

Somewhere out there is a picture of me in a Rabble shirt with a Mexican wrestling mask on. I love Mexican wrestling. Also the Eyespot link has some videos of me. Gulp.

Dave and I then headed off with the guys from That Petrol Emotion to the party where Charlie Sexton was playing. I lasted about 15 minutes before it was time to crash. A good time was had by all.

Hanging with Eyespot

Got into Austin a little late in the day. Dave Todd and Dave Dudas from Eyespot are here unveiling their product at SXSW. We hit a couple of parties last night before wrapping up an early evening. Check out Eyespot, its pretty cool. Dave Todd is a former co-conspirator on Low Def with me and a number of guys from MP3.com are involved.

Flying to Texas

Off to SXSW today. Should be a good time. I am carrying a handful of Rabble Tshirts. If you want one drop me an email and we can hang out.

Six Apart Acquires SplashBlog?

I got an email earlier today via Plaxo telling me that John Chaffe from SplashData makers of Splash Blog was the new director of mobile at Six Apart. I thought, hmm, that's curious, I don't recall any news about Splash Blog recently. So I cruised over the the About Us page on Splash Data and noticed that John, who I believe was the CEO isn't on the list. I then clicked on the Splash Blog page and saw this and the mysterious Six Apart logo on the right side. Must be a recent unannounced acquisition by Six Apart.

Rabble On Reuters

Reuters followed up our press release with this article here.

Rabble On Cingular Press Release

We publicly announced the availability of Rabble on Cingular Wireless on this press release here.

Cyworld Glimpse

A little bird today told me that you can get to the US version of Cyworld at us.cyworld.com . That page didn't work. It didn't even let me sign up for the beta. Talk about building suspense. That seemed kind of strange so I looked up the page source and discovered that if you click on this link that you get at least a small glimpse. Hey how do I get a beta account? Somebody?

Rabble in an MSNBC story

Rabble and Shawn were mentioned in an MSNBC story about the growth of moblogs here.

Strange Myspace Link from School Districts

My referals over the last several months have included the following link :

0_arkg1kpdkj:www.myspace.com/

All the sites where they are coming from happen to be school districts. I wonder if it is some kind of filtering mechanism. Anyone else seeing this?

Myspace on the Daily Show

I am a loser because I don't watch the Daily Show. Debi sent me a link to the Myspace Parody on the Daily Show that you can see here. It is hilarious. And I am slightly embarrased to say that I am actually a fan of Emo rock.

My Congressman is going to jail

I happen to live in the district previously represented by Randy "Duke" Cunningham. On Friday he was sentenced to over 8 years in jail. I want to print up a t-shirt that reads:

"My congressman took $2.5 million in bribes, and all he got was 8 1/2 years."

Scoble and Debi on Myspace

There is an interesting conversation between Scoble from Microsoft and Debi/Mobile Jones that you can find here. I would recommend that you take a peek at the comments, which made me chuckle. Myspace has become a marketplace for a big chunk of kids. It's certainly not about the traffic (although they do serve something like 12% of the ads on the Internet.) it's more about it becoming a place where the youth of today hang out. See Dana Boyd.

The conversation in general reminded me of an encounter I had last summer. I walked into the office of the head of a hot indie label that has had a lot of past and current success. He looked up over a stack of CDs and papers and asked me "What's Up?"

I held up my phone and said, "Want to see my toy?"

He said sure. I walked through a quick demo of Rabble and showed him some of the other labels that are live. At then end he said, "I am not really into technology, but that's f'ing cool. Let's do it."

No Powerpoint. No khaki pants and blue shirt. Just an appreciation of what each of us do. I think that the discussion above is saying a lot of the same thing but in a less direct way. Technology is hard and technologists do amazing things to solve technical problems. Convincing a base of youth consumers to adopt your product, that's extremely hard to do as well. The key point with consumers though is to make sure that you are listening. As I said before in this post, I don't think that many in Silicon Valley are listening.

".0"

Yesterday someone sent me an email with a business overview and asked me for some feedback. I don't want to say anything about them or their idea as I don't really think I have any valuable perspective on what they are doing. Suffice to say they did one thing that I cringed at. I cant say the word they used but for examples sake lets just say they said that it's like Cat 2.0. Cringe. I know that I have used Mobile 2.0. I know in our company we talk about Phone Call 2.0 and it really means something to us. You can't sneeze without reading, hearing or saying Web 2.0. I think people mean the Read/Write web when they use that phrase, or at least that's what I think about. Mobile 2.0 to us means going beyond the first wave of mobile applications (SMS, MMS, Ringtones etc.)

At any rate, I am going on a 30 day fast from the use of 2.0 in anything I write, say, read or do, unless it is in a sales pitch.

Pandora & Last.fm

I have had several people ping me about Pandora and Last.fm . CNN just did a feature on the Next Net 25 or something like that. In there they included Last.fm and I just don't get it. Pandora is pretty damn cool. I have been using it on and off for the last month and have to say that I have been impressed. I have been creating channels based on some obscure bands, hardcore bands, and bands I am into right now while I am trying to find similar ones. Examples would include Swans, Let's Active, Guadacanal Diary, Wall of Voodoo, Circle Jerks and The Mars Volta. I have heard some complaints that the sample size is fairly small so some more mainstream requests have been a mixed bag for some friends. On some of this more obscure stuff I have to say I have been really pleased.

So far they don't have a bunch of that ".0" stuff but I am sure they will do some cool things with it later. It will be interesting to see where they go with this when they try to make money.

Last.fm is going to require some more time for me because it isn't as easy as Pandora and I am still not sure what I am supposed to do.

TVT Records on Rabble

TVT Records, home of the Ying Yang Twins, Lil John and the Eastside Boyz, and Pitbull, rolled out on Rabble last week. Rabble users can see up coming show dates, venues and news and pictures from all their bands. Check it out.

Intercasting in Billboard

I haven't subscribed to Billboard for a while. (Sorry)

Anthony Bruno today in the Music and Money section in an article entitled "INTERNET INVESTMENTS ON THE RISE . . . AGAIN" mentioned our company Intercasting. Research analyst Rajeev Chand referenced us as a company with great potential in the mobile blogging space. The quote was,"There is a next wave of applications that are emerging," he says. "We continue to see strong interest in the mobile industry."


That sounds kind of nice. Sorry for the lack of a link. If you are a Billboard subscriber you can pull it up though.

Rabble at SXSW

I am going to be at SXSW doing a panel called Content Distribution: The Mobile Web. I just confirmed yesterday so I am not sure who else is doing this with me but Marc Brown from Buzznet, a very cool guy also based in So Cal, is moderating. Come by and check it out. I am planning on hanging in Austin from Sunday through Tuesday night and will be doing a podcast session with Ewan Spence, one of my brethren from AMP. For the record, Ewan Rulez. And he is also the guy behind All About Symbian. And I am not saying that because he wears a mean kilt. If you are in Tex Ass and want to hang out or grab a beer or whatever, drop me a line. And I swear no more posts today.

C-List Blogger Part 2

Dave Blood who works with me saw my post earlier today and laughed his ass off. And then he sent me this link to a cartoon about C-List Bloggers. Nice. I need to send something out to Scoble. "Hey we do this cool mobile social networking thing called Rabble. Can you link to me?" Very Beavis and Butthead.

The Web 2.0 Graphic

Stabillo Boss has been accumulating the graphics of the various Web 2.0 companies and it has become a picture circulating the web with much fanfare. We didn't get into the first one, but the second one which you can find here has the little Rabble guy peeking out on the right hand side of the image. Think Kilroy was here. Are we a Web 2.0 company? I didn't think so but I guess the API thing kind of applies.

Google Pages = MySpace Slayer?

I have to admit, when I first saw the Google Pages rollout, I thought, "Wow, Geocities. Nice. Haha." I read a couple of articles wondering why they didn't make this part of Blogger or why would they try to make Geocites again.

I also thought for a second that when Google base rolled out, that I didn't see a need for having a web database set up. Or at least it wasn't obvious to me. Then it transformed into a Ebay/Craigslist assault. Nice Kung Fu. Your technique is very impressive.

So today in a meeting with John Hardin, we chatted about it for a second or two and he said something to the effect of, "Well there is no reason it couldn't be a first step in a strategy to create a MySpace competitor." Aha. Maybe.

A lot of the press I have seen has said that it is far inferior to Blogger and why do we need to reinvent Geocities, etc. etc. And frankly I agree. That is until I look at it in terms of what people are doing with MySpace. They aren't blogging. They are creating, their space, and customizing it and adding a ton of shit to it. And then we roll out video, cough cough, google video. And we wrap in cough cough Blogger. And we wrap in Orkut, well maybe not orkut because Eu não falo o português. But you get my point. Call me paranoid or weird, but when John said this today I thought it was pure genius. It's hard to say, but I'd love to hear other's take on this.