Tuesday December 20, 2005

Motorola RAZR I liked my Sony Ericsson T616 for its Bluetooth connectivity, software design in general. Especially loved using Salling Clicker to flip slides. But the mechanical design was rickety, call quality and call handoff quality were poor, and there were times when I couldn't get the phone to turn on. The day finally came when it just wouldn't turn on at all

I scrambled to the Cingular store to get a RAZR phone for an upcoming trip.

My review of RAZR:

Awesome mechanical work. It is very robust without the creaking and groaning of the Sony. Has Bluetooth (I care about) and VGA camera (I don't care about). The software is poorly designed though. The Java stack is not standards-based so I can't run Clicker. The menu navigation is fast, but extremely nonintuitive and innefficient. Some examples:

• The nice display has enough room for 9 menu items, but only shows 4
• Address book doesn't support addresses, emails, or IMs.
• Calendar will not show notes about meetings
• There's no "profiles" feature to change ring behavior. To silence the phone you have to (noisily) reduce volume a step at a time till it's off.

So the first day I was convinced that I'd be returning the RAZR, but someone coached me through the undocumented ability to modify menu ordering and phonebook display. So now I'll probably keep it. I wish they'd support a standard Java stack so I can run Clicker. Pleeeeeeeeeease???

I work with 10 people here, any of whom could each solve all the above problems in a weekend's work. Is it really that hard for Motorola to figure that out?

Monday May 23, 2005

Deterioration of America's filmstock FILM HISTORIANS FIGURE THAT 90% OF ALL THE SILENT MOVIES EVER MADE AND HALF OF THE SOUND PICTURES MADE BEFORE 1950 NO LONGER EXIST IN COMPLETE FORM.

Ken Weissman, Head of film preservation, Library of Congress...
"The thing that disappoints me the most and the thing I'm most concerned about is the fact that star wars needed to be restored. This is a film that I saw when it first came out in 1977, ok and 20 years later it had to be restored because of the fact that it hadn't been properly maintained, in that 20 year interim. What exists now is star wars a new hope, which is a different movie. It has different effects in it, it has different footage, because some of the original scenes were lost, as far as the quality and they couldn't maintain them, couldn't bring them back, so alternate cuts were used. Thankfully, george lucas had those in his own private collection, and those were better maintained than what the studio had maintained on those, so, you could legitimately make the argument that star wars no longer exists." ( May 23 2005, 03:43:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday May 11, 2005

Thoughts on "The Participation Age" The 1990's democratization of technology and the democratization of information (otherwise referred to as the Internet Age), leveled the playing field worldwide for global cultural, economic, political, and social transparency. Now we are seeing a transition to a new model that we will be referring to as The Participation Age. I'm not sure if we know what that means yet, but we are clearly at another inflection point in the globalization of society.

If the Internet Age was about connectivity and communications, pipes and routers, The Participation Age is about leveraging that connectivity for empowerment, employment, and efficiency. It's about security, access, scalability, accountability, and new models for leveraging the potential value of enterprise data.

I firmly believe that Sun is right to move us beyond the "Internet Age" to the "Participation age". It reflects that the digital divide is no longer a challenge of merely providing worldwide connectivity to individuals. Although plenty geographic, political, and economic barriers exist (Asia has 34% of the world's Internet users with only 8% penetration), the technology is there. In the participation age, we shift focus from the connectivity of individuals (the data demand side), to governments, service providers, and vendors of goods that provide their services to the world (the data supply side). The global intertwining of these traditional businesses with the globally connected society is the new "digital divide".

There is tremendous inertia around legacy business models, technology models, and cultural models that makes it difficult to adapt these systems to the new globally intertwined society. Limitations around perceived and actual security, scalability, and accountability of today's systems is also a barrier to widespread participation by the enterprise and content owners in this promising global system.

What does "participation" mean in the context of participation age?
- Better and easier-to-access information in the hands of individuals
- Vastly higher participation in politics, and robust e-voting systems for free (and non-free) countries
- New markets and opportunities for micro-lending
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust global sales channels
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust supply chains
- Globally homogenous economic communities with that recognize the need to preserve local culture and community
- Virtual corporations
- Increased organizational arbitrage: Outsourcing corporate or government functions to lower-cost labor pools
- Utility computing: plugging into the wall for your computing resources
- Content owners and rights holders aggressively working to overcome the sticky distribution barriers of license and copyright.
- Recognition by data owners that Internet's breadth can assure a profitable distribution mechanism, even for marginally valuable data.
- All data is available, forever, all the time.
- Increasing recognition that "the data is the business". Wal-Mart's core operational differentiation gets recognized as data management.
( May 11 2005, 11:50:12 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday March 17, 2005

"The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get," Gary Player
I thought this was a great story from Frank, who is helps companies figure out how to validate and ramp up new products...

Concrete Technology Corporation in Santa Barbara, CA was a development stage company with what seemed a crazy idea: use concrete to make biodegradable fast food containers.

Frank Robinson
Product & Market Development, Inc.
Frank@ProductDevelopment.com 
805-969-3835

Friday February 11, 2005

OOO Well I have no hair left. OpenOffice paragraph numbering is completely frustrating. I have one document where no combination of numbering features will provide a basic nested numbered outline (1., 1.1., 1.1.1., etc). In fact there are 3 different ways to set numbering (format an outline, change a paragraph style, format paragraph) and they all seem completely disconnected.

I have a second document where everything behaves *perfectly*; even the paragraph styles change appropriately as things are promoted/demoted. But for this second document, all of the numbering features in all 3 places are completely turned *off*. I have no idea how they got this all to work. Grrrrrrr. Then there's the whole issue of a mysterious numbering toolbar that clearly exists, but can't be displayed. nice. ( Feb 11 2005, 09:06:41 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday February 07, 2005

In the beginning So here we go with our first shot at blogging....Hmmm I don't feel any different. ( Feb 07 2005, 08:56:31 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]