Wow, I haven't checked Feedburner for a while, but I now have 600+ subscribers to this blog. I remember when I first started playing around with blogging that I could hardly break 100 people, so I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you that currently subscribe and to offer the opportunity to subscribe to all of you that don't by simply clicking the icon above.
Again, I certainly appreciate your readership.
Thanks,
Ross
I recently moved the company that I work for from e-mail being provided for free by our hosting provider to Google Apps Standard Edition -- here's why:
We're not currently using Docs & Spreads, and I'm not sure that we will in the near-short term. There are a number of employees that have actually abandoned Outlook in favor of Gmail, which is compelling as we look at future software upgrade paths.
Rumor has it that Google may be quickly releasing offline access to Gmail through Gears, which will likely speed adoption of Gmail and cause more people to leave Outlook. There are further rumors that Google may develop and extremely low-cost server option that will compete directly with Exchange, which would evaluate.
Finally, it's nice to know that we have the ability to upgrade to Apps Premium at any time. The mailbox sizes and the features offered by Postini as part of the package with an annual recurring cost of only $50 per user are quite compelling.
Here's the bottom line: if you have a business with a domain, go activate Google Apps and start looking more professional; nothing looks worse than someone using an "@yahoo.com" address as their business e-mail address. If you're not comfortable doing this stuff yourself, find someone like me to help you out -- it's a worthwhile investment.
Link -- Google Apps
I frequently receive books to review on my blog and always disclose when they have been provided to me, so here's my disclosure that I received Beyond Booked Solid (in this post I'm going to refer to the book as "BBS" to make the writing easier) from the author's assistant free of charge for my review. Please note that I only will actually review books that I enjoy reading, so maybe 1 out of 10 actually gets any sort of mention.
When I received the book in the mail, I was immediately concerned that I had not read the preceding book, Book Yourself Solid (and this one is going to be "BYS," again for the ease of writing), but once I got in to the first few pages of BBS, I realized that reading BYS was not a requirement and that BBS stands just fine on its own. However, here's some quick background: BYS is about how to market and sell even if you don't like to market and sell, and how to fill up your time with business prospects to increase your revenue; BBS is about moving into building a bigger and better business by focusing on processes, systems, measurement, leadership, and other core functions.
The book is a good read for several reasons, not the least of which is that you get the feeling that Michael Port, the author, writes as he talks -- even though I've never seen his presentations or spoken to him directly, I can as easily envision him speaking in exactly the same way the words are set forth on the page. I like that Port ties in ideas from some of my other favorite authors such as Seth Godin and Timothy Ferriss and shows how those ideas apply to his core ideas (as a side note, if you read The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss right before you read this book, you may tend to see a lot of parallels, which leads me to believe that great minds think alike).
Here's the core theme of the book is simply this: You need to work on your business, while working in your business, while working on yourself. Port not only details how to work through designing effective systems, leadership, project management, and other core business functions, but he also spends an appropriate amount of time reminding the reader that work is not the only thing in life; he provides the framework and the tools to ensure that your business can run effectively and efficiently and profitably, and still leave you time to spend on personal endeavors.
One thing that I truly enjoyed about BBS was the real-life examples spread throughout the book, and specifically the last chapter of the book that profiled several companies that used the techniques throughout the book to build and maintain successful businesses. Too often business writers expouse about theory and technique, but are unable to provide concrete examples of application; Port succeeds in providing very concrete examples of techniques in practice by successful businesses.
Release date for the book is April 18, 2008. To those of you at the 24 Hour Fitness in Centennial that watched me read this early in the morning asked me about borrowing the book, you have my sincerest apologies, but I do hope that you will purchase a copy when it comes out and that my descriptions of the content along with this blog post were enough to whet your appetite.
Link -- BBS website
PS -- as with many of the books that I review, I received a pre-production copy. The copy of BBS I reviewed was actually a simply bound 8.5x11 document . . . it was perfect to be able to read on the treadmill and stair machine at the gym. I thought about 2 things in that regard were I to publish a book:
I was thinking this morning as I was pulling into my office parking lot that the iPod I was listening to in my car should some how be able to automagically tell my computer exactly what song I was listening to, exactly where I stopped in that song, and start playing that song when I walked in the door. Is that realistic?
Let me answer that in a few ways:
Are there potential problems with this? Sure, especially if the computer it's trying to notify doesn't have the music on it, but that's a pretty simple test. In thinking more about it, my guess would be that it would probably be easiest to implement this in an iPhone if someone could figure out how to have the iPhone auto-trigger an e-mail that then triggered an automator response once received by the machine. That's kind of kludgy though, and it would be much cooler if iTunes was the black box for this process.
Yup, pretty much just like the iPhone, but a little bit more complex.
Here's how:
A few notes:
Here's the meat of the e-mail I got from United:
As of February 4, 2008, United has a new checked baggage
policy. Non-elite Mileage Plus® members and non-members
traveling on non-refundable Economy tickets within the
United States, Canada and U.S. territories, may check one
bag for free and a second for a $25 fee. The new policy
applies to tickets purchased beginning February 4, 2008 for
travel on or after May 5, 2008.
Wow! I haven't gotten this notice from any other airlines -- is this becoming a new standard or is United hoping to lead the way on this one? I guess you can look at this is an extra benefit to being a premium member, but most will probably look at it as another reason not to fly United. I would be surprised to see Frontier, Jet Blue, or Southwest implement this policy.
If you own a business where people have to wait, don't you think it's worth the $50 to provide free wireless internet? If you own a restaurant with a bar area or a bar, isn't it worth the $50 to differentiate yourself from the competition? On the waiting side of things, time goes faster if you can get some work done or browse the internet; on the revenue side of things, people will spend more time in your establishment if they can work while the eat and drink.
The proposition with Qtrax is that you download their Mozilla-based music browser application, watch a bunch of ads to generate revenue for artists and record companies, and download from a library of 25 million music tracks. Interestingly, the President of Qtrax had this to say about iPod compatibility:
"We've had a technical breakthrough, which enables us to put songs on an iPod without and interference from Fairplay . . . and Apple has nothing to do with it."
Let me make a few assumptions/observations:
The quote that is the title of this post is from Tom Peters. I thought about it when I read this excerpt on Bob Sutton's blog:
My own research has found that people with power tend to behave like
patients who have damaged their brain's orbitofrontal lobes (the region
of the frontal lobes right behind the eye sockets), a condition that
seems to cause overly impulsive and insensitive behavior. Thus the
experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your
skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and
socially-appropriate behavior.
The context of the excerpt is applied to people that are put into powerful positions and is easily applied to those that are placed into management positions with little to no training and/or preparation, no mentoring or leadership, no clear definition of what success actually is.
Is this you?
Link -- Bob Sutton
In my quest to synchronize all of my calendars, I've finally come up with the perfect solution:
Logo love fest diagram:
<=> 
<=> 
<=> 
+ 
Here's how to essentially make Google your OpenID provider if you use Blogger:
* Go to http://draft.blogger.com (this doesn't work through the regualr Dashboard)
* Click "Edit Profile" in the upper right
* Check the box that says "Enable OpenID for Blogs"
* Scroll down and click "Save Profile"
That's it. I tested it using my blog.rosshollman.com to ensure that it worked for custom domains, and it works just fine. Also, you can use any blog associated with your Blogger account as your OpenID.
Presumably Google will role this out at some point to anyone with a Google account, but if you want it now, this is how you get it.
LeopardMOD allows you to easily tweak a bunch of hidden settings in OSX Leopard using a GUI and it's free, which makes it even better.
I'm not a big command line guy if I can avoid it, so I'm always into stuff like this.
My dentist office texted me a few days ago about their ability to send me appointment reminders by text -- I'm sure they thought that was a cool upgrade/feature. Here's the thing: if you don't have a bucket of text messages or some sort of plan, incoming texts (even those that you don't want) cost you around $0.15 per message; currently there is no mechanism in place to charge the text message sender.
A software provider for our company talked about adding similar functionality in a new software service pack and I asked about permission; he didn't understand right away because he was focused on the fact that it was a new/cool/better feature. I asked him to consider being an employee for us that had to pay $0.15 per message that started receiving just 10 messages a month from us: it just cost you $1.50 to be an employee for us, which doesn't seem like a lot unless you're a person that counts every dollar. Once we got through the example, he backpedaled and said that they were just a software maker providing functionality and that it would be up to us to handle permissions, and he suggested that we develop some sort of opt-in form. Still haven't decided if we're going to make use of this functionality, but I can guarantee that we won't be sending text messages to anyone that doesn't opt-in if we do start using it.
So back to my dentist: if they knew that each message that they sent cost me $0.15, would it be worth it to her if the tables were turned and it cost her $0.15 per text message? I'm guessing that they will likely see higher return rates on appointments and less time for the front office staff making outbound calls to remind people of and to confirm appointments. However, I would also guess that she would take pause if she knew that $0.15 went out the door every time the system sent out a text. Figure it this way: each patient has at least 2 appointments for cleanings a year, so the system punches out 4 text messages per year per patient at a cost of $0.60 per year -- for 1000 patients that's $600, which is real money.
Here's another thing I worry about when someone like a dentist opens up a direct line of communication to me for which I have to pay: what happens if she tries to monetize it? What if the software manufacturer sells a client list to Sonicare of dentists that use the text messaging function? Maybe Sonicare reaches out to the dentists and makes a deal whereby the dentist sends out a text about a new Sonicare product and the dentists make a big commission on every Sonicare sale. It's any easy call for the dentists because it doesn't incrementally cost them any money, but it does cost the receiver that essentially just paid $0.15 to receive targeted advertising.
Text message permission marketing/communication will only become a bigger issue in the next couple of years.
PS -- try to get your wireless carrier to turn off text messaging on your phone; it's near impossible because of the way the revenue model is built.
Photo from JaseMan
Requiring me to input a phone number when I book a room at your hotel does not give you permission to market to me on my phone.
Tonight at 8:30PM I got a call from Wyndham Hotels. The person calling referenced a stay I made a few months ago and proceeded to launch into a promotional rate deal for next month. As soon as I could get a word in edgewise, I asked the person what time it was where she was calling from -- she responded that she showed me as being in the mountain time zone (I'm assuming the system generates this information from my area code or billing zip or something). She then informed me that state law allowed her to call up until 9PM at which point I responded with: "I'm going to allow you to stop bugging me now."
Here's the thing: if you require me to input information (i.e., I can't complete a reservation without giving you my phone number) that you are going to to turn around and use to market to me, you have to give me the ability to opt out or, even better, default to assuming that I opt out and allow me to opt in. We're all used to this with entering our e-mail addresses, but are companies so desperate that they are now mining other required information because interruption e-mails aren't working (or are easy to opt out of by unsubscribing or ignoring)? That's a pretty scary trend if true.
If you're a company, you can't force your consumers to engage with you by taking advantage of information that you require them to provide to you. The end result is that you break the consumers' trust: at the least they stop patronizing your business and at most they may try to form class-action lawsuits.
Although I've had a GrandCentral account since they started handing out beta invites and I don't regularly use it. However, if direct contact via phone by companies becomes the norm, you can bet that I will start using more frequently if for no other reason but to prevent those that I don't want to be able to reach me without a filter from reaching me.
Picture from Balakov
You've noticed the name on the AmEx card commercials like have, right? Ever wondered who CF Frost is? The answer is not too exciting, but here it is courtesy of The Straight Dope :
Charles Frost--or Chuck, as we like to call him--is
a real person. He was an account executive for
the advertising firm of Ogilvy & Mather, which put together the
original "Do you know me?" ads for American Express.
I wonder if American Express could have capitalized on this somehow; I bet that they could have. Why is it that the first answer isn't on their site? They could have built a legend, built a story, built a contest around eagle-eyed people that noticed the name on the card.
You pay people in India $2 per hour to do it for you. Maybe you've heard of Ticketmaster's lawsuit against RMG Technologies, a company that sold special software to scalpers to allow them to bypass Ticketmaster security, including the "captcha" visual barrier? Well, the President of RMG let it spill that they're simply paying people in India $2 per hour to enter the information.
It'll be interesting to see if this turns out to be fully true as RMG has had to turn over source code, but if it is, I wonder if Ticketmaster really has a case.
This will be interesting to watch.
Captcha picture from Gea-Suan Lin
Big Head Todd partnered with Crocs to provide their new CD to everyone as a free download. If you want an actual CD, you can get one for $5 or free with a $15 merchandise purchase.
Does this change the game? Sure it does. A company that makes shoes that many people love to hate just became a record company. Further, they find a correlation (presumably worth paying for) between their customers and the band's fans.
I had to (and you'll have to) give your name, city, zip code, and e-mail to get access to the free digital download. I'm not sure what the current acquisition cost for Crocs customers is, but I'm guessing that what they're paying the band is less than what they spend on the average piece of advertising acquisition.
My best guess is that there will be a lot more of this happening. Not only for music distribution, but just in general: there's no good way to ban cellphone cameras, so why not give Nike a piece of the action and make sure that every cellphone camera picture of an artist carries the brand logo?
Anyway, follow the link below to give up some of your personal data in exchange for the digital version of the new CD.
Corey Smith is a musician that you've probably never heard of. He sells out about 1/2 the shows that he plays and he plays north of 200 shows per year. Oh, and the tickets to his shows, if you buy them in advance, are $12-$20 with no fees; they're only around $30 if you buy them the day of the event -- he does his best to not play Ticketmaster buildings if they can be avoided simply to save his fans from paying the fees.
You can buy all of his CDs (there are 4) for $36, meaning that you're paying $9 a CD, or you can get a CD and a t-shirt for $30. He's also worked with Amazon to make downloads available for $8.99 and $7.99 on iTunes; his newest release is available on Amazon for the holidays for $6.99.
Smith lets you try before you buy -- you can download a number of tracks as MP3s directly from his site; pretty good sample across the albums.
It's refreshing to see a musician that's focused on just playing his music and makin sure that his fans can enjoy it. I love seeing an artist that is organically growing his listener base, just like bands in the sixties and seventies used to -- this isn't the "new music business," this is the business getting back to its roots, one artist at a time. Perhaps instead of suing their customers, the record companies should spend some of that lawsuit money on finding and supporting artists like Corey.
Oh, and he sounds really good -- sort of a mix between Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Chesney, and James Taylor.
Check him out -- pretty low cost of entry even if you don't like him.
P.S. -- Corey if you have people looking for stuff like this and you happen to read it, I'll go out on the road with you in a heartbeat because I believe that you'll be great.
The title of the post accurately describes it, but if you go to http://m.google.com/sync on your BlackBerry, you can download a client that allows you sync your BlackBerry calendar with your GCal. The only portion that's missing now is an over-the-air contact sync and Google will basically be providing all of the over-the-air DirectPush features. If they really wanted to make it cooler, they would partner with BlackBerry to provide this functionality directly through a BIS server so that there was nothing to download on a client device.
You can actually play with cell phone interfaces before buying at TryPhone. If you're like me, just spending a few minutes in the store playing with a cell phone isn't enough time to see how all of the features work -- TryPhone puts up interactive images on their site of cell phones and their operating systems so that you can play around with features. The number of phones currently listed is pretty slim, but they promise to be adding more phones shortly.
The site is also social, allowing users to post reviews and their experiences with the phones listed. Quite frankly, I could see the features in this site being very useful as an add-in to Amazon or even a carrier sales site.
So I took the plunge and set up an account on Mint to try out the single-source money management site. The process to get the data into Mint is as straightforward as your credit card company or bank allows it to be: ING Direct was probably the hardest, but all of those levels of security make me feel pretty good vs. simply entering a username and password for other banks.
Once Mint has connected and downloaded your account data, it presents interesting transaction histories and trends. The system is not perfect, however, and requires some user intervention to tweak things. For example, it downloaded payment data from my checking account that were actually electronic payments to my credit card, but came through with "Ross" as the description, which Mint classified as the department store and put into my retail purchase history.
Although it's not 100% perfect, it is a very useful tool and I'm definitely going to continue to use it. I would like to see the ability to add in 401K, IRA, college savings, and mortgage accounts to get an overall picture of assets and liabilities, but my guess is that those items will be coming.
I did check out some of the offers that would either save me money and/or produce more revenue in terms of interest payments, but I'm not sure that I am going to make any changes before the first of the year. It is interesting to know that there are online banks that are giving higher interest rates than ING and I will likely investigate switching to chase the higher rates.
It's official: CompUSA is closing all 103 of its stores. Like most, I've got some CompUSA horror stories, but I also have found some insane deals over the years -- I guess I'm a little sorry to see them go as the BestBuys and Circuit Citys of the world to not have the depth of equipment inventory that CompUSA carries. At least there's a MicroCenter close to me in South Denver that can take care of my needs for more technical, less consumer-oriented items at the last minute.
Link -- CNN article
It's not as seamless as chatting with AIM contacts through Google Chat, but I've verified that the ability to sign into AIM through Gmail is, indeed, live. I wonder what I'm going to use Meebo for now.
By the way: if you're like me and you've had Gmail open all day, just referesh the screen in your browser, click the "Options" button under "Chat", and you'll see the AIM sign-in option.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I WAS PROVIDED THE UV SANITIZER FREE OF CHARGE FROM BZZAGENT
So Bzzagent sent me the Sonicare UV Sanitizer to talk about and it's kind of an interesting little device. Let me say that I've used a Sonicare toothbrush for years and have never been anything but happy with the the way the results feel and the feedback from my dentist (not just the feedback, but the lessening of scraping, etc. over the time I've used it).
The UV sanitizer uses and ultraviolet light to kill any bacteria that might be on your brush head. Although it fits some other manufacturers' brush heads, the Sonicare head that I use fit inside it perfectly without the use of any adapters and there's a magnet on the bottom to hold the brush in place.
After having used the sanitizer for the last few days, I can't tell anything different than just let my brush air-dry. Sure, I go through the routine of putting the brush int he container, hitting the button, and seeing the light come on, but there's nothing that's changed in my brushing experience that I am aware of. However, my dentist charges $25 for a little laser treatment that supposedly kills bacteria in my mouth prior to a cleaning and I pay it every time, so investing $50 in a brush head sanitizer that does the same thing to a brush I put in my mouth every day doesn't seem too far out of line.
I probably wouldn't rush out and but the sanitizer, but if it came included with an upgraded Sonicare brush, I would use it. Similarly, if there was a deal where I could purchase a number of brush heads and get the sanitizer as part of a package deal, I'd probably buy it and use it. With the amount of travel that I do, I guess it is nice to have my brush stored inside an enclosed space rather than leaving it out in the air to attract dust, etc.
End result: I'll keep using it and would use it if it were another bell and whistle as part of some sort of kitted sales piece, but I'm not sure I would run out an buy it.
Link (Amazon)
The first thing I do when I get into a rental car is put my bags in the back seat, which is usually where they stay until I get to my hotel; many people that I know do the same thing. A couple of Sundays one of my friends was in town, driving a rental car, and we met in downtown Denver (LoDo) for dinner. He parked his car under a streetlight, across the street from a well-lit bank, on the corner of a fairly major intersection, and while we were at dinner, someone smashed his back window and took off with his suitcase and laptop bag.
2 big lessons to be learned here:
Travel smart.
Thanks to r3v || cls for the image.
Someone sent this to me -- this would have saved a lot of black binder clips over the years (and a lot of stale chips, for that matter):
Go read Om's post -- he's got some unique insights into the way that he sees things. Opening up their network makes Verizon look a little bit more like companies that use the GSM standard, though they've taken it a step further by providing a testing bed to certify non-traditional equipment to run on their network.
I would think this move would be pretty easy to emulate; I assume that most of the carriers have testing facilities similar to Verizon's and could open them up to test all kinds of devices.
The first thing I thought about when I heard this news was the Amazon Kindle -- everything you download direct on the Kindle downloads over Sprint's EVDO network and Amazon presumably has some sort of per bit pricing on network usage. What will be interesting is if Verizon introduces different pricing plans to allow people to really leverage their creativity to use the network.
Now I"m waiting for Shawn Conahan to blog about this: he always has interesting insights based on his relationship with the wireless market.
. . . and different ways to pose the questions to get the answer without violating the law.
Good stuff.
I post about this every time it happens, but I still think it's just a cool promotion.
Follow the link below:
Sportbrain makes pedometers -- not very interesting. However, Sportbrain makes pedometers that link to their website to allow you to track the number of steps you make and do other cool things like join groups and participate in challenges to win prizes -- more interesting.
Enter Virgin Life Care that has rebranded the Sportbrain web portal and put their branding on the pedometers. Virgin Life Care re-packages the product for large companies that can start a wellness program that encourages employees to get active and provides rewards for staying active. I have to imagine, though I don't know for sure, that there are tangible benefits in the way of discounts from health insurance carriers for opting in (and paying in) to a wellness program for all of your employees. Even if there aren't active discounts, healthier employees generally have lower health care costs than those that are not active and healthy, so I would assume that there is some quantifying that can be done.
I contacted Virgin Life Care to provide some information to the company that I work for a couple of months ago, but have yet to hear back from them, so I can't really quote any of their projected savings figures back to you -- if I ever get contacted, I'll be happy to share. One way to get involved with Virgin Life Care without being part of an affiliated company is to be a member of Spectrum Athletic Clubs -- they've re-branded the Virgin Life Care product (I think that's 3rd degree branding) as an up-sell to their membership program, which is unique in the health club world, though pretty easily duplicated if someone were to set their mind to it.
Due to the lack of response from Virgin, I decided to try out the Sportbrain myself. One of the things that initially attracted me to the Virgin program and therefore the Sportbrain was the form factor of the pedometer itself.
What's nice about this pedometer as opposed to others is that it is designed to be worn on the belt/waistband and has a large display that is easy to read without detaching the pedometer. Further, the pedometer can be comfortably worn inside the edge of a shoe and the display is big enough to view by looking down at the shoe.
While Sportbrain provides some social features on its site in the form of discussion boards, groups, etc. it would be nice to see them work on something like a Facebook widget; granted that wouldn't directly generate revenue for Sportbrain, but would likely result in additional hardware sales as friends wanted to engage in social competition with the number of steps. For that matter, Sportbrain could even create a Facebook edition of the pedometer that automatically enables the widget data. Just a thought.
Shit! I ran the installer and the machine hung on a blue screen for hours. Although some sites said to wait for 2-3 hours for it to resolve itself, I tried that and it totally didn't work.
I finally had to dig out the original install discs for the PowerBook and reinstall Panther. Doing some more searching, I found a command line hack that is supposed to resolve this issue, so I guess I'll try it tonight and see if that makes it work or not. I've held off on upgrading my G4 Mini as I'm a little gun-shy about upgrading the non-Core chipsets.
Stay tuned -- I'll update with full instructions if this works tonight.
<-- I can see them on my MacBook Pro, but not yet on my Powerbook.
UPDATE: Ok, so I fixed this and here's how:
I realized today that I've been using CallWave as a visual voicemail service for the past few months and haven't even looked back to switching to normal cellphone voicemail; the reason I relaized this was I observed one of my colleagues attempting to check his voicemail int he traditional manner of hitting a speed dial, entering his password, and navigating the voicemail tree.
You can liken the use of visual/e-mail-based voicemail to the paradigm change that people experience when they first use TiV: it entirely changes how you interact with a traditional service. CallWave's voicemail translation service isn't great, but for the most part I can get the gist of the message without ever having to listen to it. In addition, I like the fact that the caller ID data included with the e-mail from CallWave is more detailed; I only have a few people that actually block their caller ID when they call me, so it's nice to see the caller location (i.e., my dad in San Francisco blocks the caller ID on his cell phone, but CallWave tells me that "An Unknown Caller in San Francisco, CA" called, so I know it is him).
The OSX visual voicemail widget is pretty useful, though I try to be away from my computer enough that I really use the e-mail functionality a lot more than the widget. I have CallWave send the e-mail with the WAV attachment to my Gmail account, which immediately gets pushed via IMAP to my Blackberry; the internal audio player on my Pearl handles the WAV file attachments with no problems.
CallWave is free during beta and I think that the visual voicemail and e-mail portion will remain free as I can only really see them trying to charge for the voicemail to text translation service (if they can make it much more accurate). I recommend any sort of visual voicemail solution to anyone that uses an e-mail enabled cell phone with the capability to play WAV files.
Look at this:
She used to be a brand by showing up in advertising and pictures -- you saw Britney and you bought into the Britney brand and way of life; it was worth a fortune. Now she looks horrendous and she's just launched a new album, which I hope does not feature this picture on the cover.
Picture from The Superficial .
Facebook is number 1 in the social market, at least for now, and is the glaring missing social networking service from those that have joined Google's OpenSocial network. Here's what I wonder: do all of the folks combined that now support OpenSocial, MySpace, Plaxo, etc. combined come close to being as big as Facebook? My guess is that all of the OpenSocial participants combined still wind up being a very far second to number 1 -- this isn't based on anything except for my general experience about competition. I would state that OpenSocial is evolutionary and reactionary based on competing with number 1 rather than being fully revolutionary; after all, isn't this exactly what Facebook did that was considered so revolutionary when they did it and no one else had?
Maybe I'm wrong, but then, why are you still interacting with me on Facebook in their walled garden?
. . . well, Gracenote.
In January, I was wondering who the Gracenote of video/DVDs would be and it turns out that Gracenote will be powering what will be called "VideoID-DVD." This service will not only be available on the software side (ala iTunes), but also will be integrated into DVD and video players to provide comprehensive DVD video information.
This new system, built on the existing Gracenote platform should roll out some time in 2008.
So I was born in June during the "Spring Forward" portion of daylight savings time, which means that I do actually gain an hour of my "life time" every time the clocks get set back. Strange to think about, I suppose, and perhaps balanced out by various moves along timezones that I've made throughout my life that may actually have a net effect of reducing my "life time". Of course, this only makes sense if you actually keep track of your life by the time on the closest clock to you and not by the total number of hours (or minutes or seconds) that you are alive.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but if you take nothing else away: be sure to set your clocks back this evening so that you're well-prepared tomorrow (assuming that you live somewhere that this applies to you, of course)
Sundial picture from MaestroBen
So I finally created my Facebook profile and added some friends. What's interesting is that everyone pays attention to Facebook in near-real-time; I got friend additions within minutes of sending the requests . . . from the same people that took days to respond to LinkedIn requests and have never responded to Plaxo requests.
Here's my take-away: if Facebook is important enough to important people (think C-Level executives) that they prioritize communications from Facebook to be important enough to instantaneously respond and react to, then I totally understand why Microsoft spent so much money to invest in it and why BlackBerry released an integrated Facebook app and why everyone is developing for Facebook.
Follow the link below -- if you're a reader, I'll be your friend.
Facebook logo graphic from AJC1
If you use a BlackBerry and want to access your Gmail via IMAP, I found the instructions. Follow the link below to the full instructions direct from Google (note that right now BIS will not auto-configure for IMAP access, so you have to follow the instructions until RIM upgrades BIS).
Ok, so I lied -- I logged into my Google Apps Free account and IMAP is not active. Total bummer as I've been waiting for this to happen so that I could turn my Google Apps account into my master e-mail account; I have to assume that they'll be turning on IMAP pretty quickly for Google Apps as it is definitely an enterprise-class feature that will increase their competitiveness with Exchange.
It's official: here's a screen capture from my settings this morning:
This makes Gmail and Google Apps so much more useful and is especially important for Google Apps Premiere as far as becoming a more robust enterprise client.
The link below is the Google Help page for IMAP configuration.
Tripit is a service that aggregates all of your travel data and creates itineraries for you. The service is quite simple: you forward any travel-related confirmation e-mails to Tripit and it extracts the data to create your detailed itinerary. You can add mulitple source e-mail addresses to your account to allow you to forward from anywhere -- for example, all of my United confirmations go to my personal e-mail while most of my hotel confirmations go to my business e-mail.
There are some other cool features that Tripit utilizes that I find pretty cool:
This is too funny -- here's an excerpt:
Here I am on the balcony saying, “Let them eat cake for the low price
of $299,” and what happens? A fucking blogospheric revolt of customers
who were perfectly happy with their elitist touchscreen device they
were smugly using just a week before to demonstrate their consumer
electronic buying power and hipness. And all of a sudden I'm the
asshole? What gives? So then I offered a store credit so these bitches
could buy a bluetooth headset or some other sort of white plastic
accessory or whatever. That sort of shut them up, but I still had the
other lawsuit to deal with. This time, I was named personally along
with my company and AT&T for “price discrimination, underselling,
discrimination in rebates, deceptive actions, and other wrongdoings”
all because I lowered the price because I was trying to be a nice guy.
“Other wrongdoings”? Can you really sue someone for that? WTF? “Yeah,
so, I am suing Bob for just generally being an asshole. Gretchen in the
cube next to him totally agrees, so I think we have a strong case.”
Seriously. They might as well add "mischief and buggery" to their list
of asinine claims. Welcome to my world.
Go read the whole thing.
Picture from acaben.
Went to Big Lou's Pizza in San Antonio and have to say that it's pretty good. As you can see in the picture to the left, they are holding the 37 inch; pizza, which, when I saw it last night, had to be carried by the waiter with both hands and be balanced on top of the guy's head; apparently it takes 2 people to actually make the thing. Furthermore, there isn't a pizza box big enough to fit the 37 inch; pie, so it has to be eaten in-house as opposed to the popular 16 inch; and 20 inch; pies, which are available for take-out.
The dining area is very mom and pop with lots of old signs on the wall and the bar serves the traditional Texas-size 32oz draft beers if you're in the mood for that -- the bar area is actually rather small; most of the restaurant is a family-friendly seating area.
I had a 14" pizza with a couple of folks and it provided plenty of food for all of us at the reasonable price of around $13.00. The main crust is good, has a little butter on it, and I believe that I detected a hint of garlic salt as well; the end crust is substantial and chewy with good flavor.
Big Lou's is certainly not on the main drag and you may even get a little hesitant about the area if you cruise up Ww White Road to get there, but take my word for it: it's worth the trip.
Link -- Big Lou's Pizza via Google Maps
So I recently got my anual flu shot -- I've gotten it a few times at the immediate care clinic up the road from my house and a couple of times at Costco, but regardless of the location, I don't like the shot for a few reasons:
With the amount of travel that I do, the detractors above do far outwiegh the benefit -- I've done high volume travel without getting the shot and have been far more ill than the years that I have received it.
One thing to think about when deciding on a flu shot is the fact that the shots use a mercury-based preservative called thiomersal. If you're getting the shot, or, perhaps more importantly, if you have a child getting a shot, you may want to read up on potential affects of thiomersal. Some doctors have tied thiomersal to incidences of autism and one of my very good friends was able to actually reduce and nearly eliminate autism symptoms from his son through the culling of heavy metals from his bloodstream. Check out the Wikipedia link below to get started. Note that many vaccines, flu shots included, are available by request in thiomersal-free versions.
Link -- thimerosal on Wikipedia
From the official Nine Inch Nails blog and posted by Trent Reznor:
Hello everyone. I've waited a LONG time to be able to make the
following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally
free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have
been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the
business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very
different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a
direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate.
Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008.
Exciting times, indeed.
Tick tock . . .
