Informal Brain

For all the Dad’s out there, Happy Father’s Day!

Designed for urban or suburban commutes, this Light Electric Vehicle offers lightweight aluminum construction with full suspension. Add in its comfortable,oversized seat and you have a powerful ride that’s easy to handle. When you don’t feel like pedaling, the A2B offers unassisted power on demand for up to 20 miles at a cruising speed of 20mph.

[From Welcome to Ultra Motor]

Could this be my new commuter bike? Hello, 0 trips to the gas station!

We heard today that 50% of people said the iPhone was too expensive!

The strategy? $199, but wait!!!

Don’t miss that extra $10 bucks a month you will pay AT&T for the 3G data contract. That adds on $120 a year.

And, don’t forget that $120 is yearly for a NEW contract for 2 years. So you will be paying $240 more.

That is, wait for it, $439!

Is that cheaper??

Steve Jobs presented a list of features demanded by the enterprise for iPhone 2.0.

I was surprised to still see data encryption missing from the list. Especially with beta testers like the military and healthcare / pharmaceutical companies.

Remote wipe may solve some of these concerns, but I would still worry about my device and the stored data (like email) if it ended up in the wrong hands.

HTC has released two stunning new phones with some very interesting new features. Many of the features look like they were ripped straight from the iPhone but with an accelerated GPU it looks like HTC has built some custom applications for contacts, weather, etc which look very nice.

The competition is heating up in the market. I still think Apple had some innovation with iPhone 2.0 up its sleeve.

A new competitor to twitter has arrived. Plurk.com offers a few new features and a unique timeline view for your “plurks?!” The big questions are: Will loyal twitter fans jump ship to plurk during twitter’s moment of service failure. Can plurk keep their service snappy and highly available under an onslaught of twitter immigrants.

Upsides: timeline view, commenting, threading, AJAX, mobile client is very nice.

Downsides: hard to find friends, follow vs friend is confusing, no plurk search (only email and IM), lack of SMS

If you want to add me as a friend on plurk.com click here.

If you are like most business users today you start your day here:

Then you typically head into your inbox and dig through a pile of email from the previous night filtering out the ones which are really important to your projects and tasks at the top of your queue.

IBM is experimenting with new social networking software for enterprises called Connections. Connections makes the assumption that the starting point each day is an activity feed from your trusted contacts and projects letting you know exactly what has been updated or changed. Think friend feed or Facebook newsfeed for the enterprise.

I recently saw a demo of the entire IBM collaboration stack and was impressed that they really do get it. Unfortunately the person demoing the solution started with the inbox, worked their way into instant messaging / communication and then finished with collaboration and connections. I was impressed when one of the younger members of the management team asked quite seriously: “When does the order of the demo change?” The IBM rep though for a minute and then said: “You’re right! Once we see the current Facebook generation enter the enterprise the order will change.” Ah I thought, IBM gets it!

The workforce is changing. Social networking will be the killer application for the enterprise and IBM has already made a significant investment to build out a workflow that starts with a social network, escalates to instant communication and falls back to email if necessary. That folks, is, the game changer.

There has been significant noise lately about Microsoft looking to buy Facebook. In my mind a smart Microsoft executive would see Facebook as the technology to round out their enterprise offering. Unfortunately it is not compatible with the Microsoft software stack and that is a problem. Microsoft is still sticking to their position that desktop productivity applications are the driver for knowledge workers. Anymore, the next generation will shun Outlook and will be far more comfortable interacting in IM clients and web based networking tools. Microsoft has not made significant investment in this space, and Sharepoint (MOSS) feels more like a 90s portal product and less like a game changing social networking tool. Even their experiment with Knowledge Network for MOSS has gone dormant since last summer and not re-emerged.

Today’s enterprises need more then collaboration, they need social experiences. People need to feel more connected to their peers then through document sharing. They want tools like twitter, and Facebook for the enterprise. With Connections, IBM is close.

IBM fell behind significantly with Notes. They lost focus on the user experience, but in some ways that might have helped them. It allowed them to re-focus on what is important to the upcoming workforce and not get stuck in the previous email client driven rut, and that folks changes where you start your day…

1. Open about:config in Firefox Location bar, agree that you won’t mess anything up.
2. Search for “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML”
3. Double click it to enable it (Or right click it and hit toggle)
4. Restart Firefox & Quicksilver…
5. “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML” makes firefox generate a new bookmarks.html at a certain point (don’t know when).

Snap, refresh the Quicksilver Firefox catalog item and voila, it works, FTW!

Molly

Originally uploaded by chezsmithy

Sweet Girls. Here is my oldest at 3.5 years. She was so much fun this weekend. We took both the girls to the water park in Willsonville on Saturday and they had an absolute blast.

Here is the problem I see with the Android platform.

The OS + the carrier’s customization = mess.

Which carriers will offer up a phone you can customize with your own OS build or application software downloads? The real power of android is separating the software from the hardware. Let the phone maker offer a brilliant, user friendly piece of hardware with GPS, touch screen, accelerometers, etc. and then let Google provide the ultimate OS. As soon as the carriers get into the mix they will want to mess with the Android Software stack providing a load of needless carrier tie-in services. This is where Apple gets it right. They made a deal with AT&T but didn’t allow any carrier customization. This lets the user end up with a clean user experience on the phone.

Will Google attempt to provide the same kind of lobby with the carriers and the mobile phone makers. In my mind to deliver a clean user experience Google will somehow need to control certain aspects of the user experience on the device.

Next the carriers will destroy the application update experience. Traditionally, the carriers have not wanted to loose control of the device software stack. Will they really allow end users to download and install applications from a Google Application store? Will they want to provide their own stores, with applications they have vetted? Will the carriers feel like they are on the hook to provide tech support when the end user downloads an application and breaks the device? Complex questions. In my mind this is why Apple is maintaining tight control over the application store.

The tight end user experience we saw in the Google I/O demos may never reach us as consumers. With the iPhone we can be assured that Apple controls the user experience. With Android Google is encouraging the Carriers to customize. A model which is broken in my mind.