Ever since Blade Runner, I’ve always found myself a bit spellbound by buildings-as-displays. Boing Boing Gadgets Links to a great gallery showcasing a variety of them, letting vote for your favorites.
The Chanel store in Tokyo is really awesome:
(By the way, I applaud them for completely bypassing the over-the-top Vegas treatment alltogether)
Lots of Brightkite users are eagerly awaiting the native iPhone app that was promised to arrive at the end of July. Recognizing that we’ve all flipped our calendars with no new app on our phones, the folks at Brightkite posted an update on their blog stating that they’re still hard at work on the app and that it’ll be released shortly.
To add some levity to the situation, they included this flash movie enabling frustrated users to pelt them with tomatoes. It’s a minor thing that took little time but it shows a great sense of accountability, humility and openness on their part and users really appreciate that - particularly when you’re starting out. It’s also always great to see the actual people that make the apps you like possible.
Though they weren’t able to deliver on their promise of an app in July, they’re doing a good job turning that shortcoming into an asset when it comes to building a bond with their user base.
Also, let’s hope the extra time allows them to avoid the mobile social fiasco that plagued Loopt’s “launch”.
On Friday, I went to Sports Medicine at Chelsea to get a second opinion on my shoulder. Apart from Dr. Clifford Stark being an excellent, patient and thorough doctor (harder to find these day’s than one would like) who managed to determine what is ailing me (a bad case of tendonitis of my biceps tendon), his office was outfitted with this neat tablet for filling out all of that initial information you need to provide a new doctor upon your first visit.
Compared to the usual poorly-designed forms you’re asked to fill out, this was a breeze and apart from one slightly confusing screen, the usability was great.
Nice to see technology used to improve what is often a painful and inefficient process. NOw to see if he can do something for my crunchy knees…
I just used my local Bank of America ATM and was so delighted by this screen that I felt compelled to take a photo and toss up a post.
The concept of “Fast Cash” is nothing new. That being said, there’s something subtly clever about putting this supercharged Enter button at the first stage in the process, and pairing it with the usually meaningless “enter your pin” checkpoint, that makes this seemingly minor design addItion feel so meaningful.
Take a moment to think about what tiny change would make a normally mundane, everyday process immediately more pleasurable for you.
Anytime I feel that I’m being pulled away from people and things (including this blog) for a while I’m always reminded of Chris Fahey’s tweet about time management. It really must have made an impression on me because this isn’t the first time I’ve referenced it on this blog. For those unfamiliar, here’s another look:
For me, the “juggle list” would probably be: Family, client work, biz dev, work: misc. , sleeping, exercise, friends, blogging, photography, reading, personal projects. Pick 6.
Recently, there’s been a ton of stuff going on at work so I’ve been falling way behind on everything else. I’ll post about some of the more exciting work-related developments very soon.
In the meantime I wanted to put up a quick post with some minor updates + quick thoughts:
I think this makes the site easier to read and frankly, nicer to look at. For those of you kicking it RSS-style, you won’t notice a difference. On that note, let me apologize in advance for those weeks where the links-to-real posts ratio is as out of whack as it has been the past few weeks. On the bright side, I hope that the regular dose of links turns up some valuable things for everyone.
I say this as someone who perhaps obsesses a little too much on efficiency so know that I wouldn’t say this lightly.
On the one hand I’m really happy with the phone but on the other I feel like they probably rushed the the release a bit and we’re all paying for that with a less than optimized firmware. Let’s hope 2.1 addresses some of the bugginess.
It uploads photos wirelessly to your computer and to the web, of course. But, Eye-Fi Explore also automatically adds geographic location labels to your photos and allows you to upload from more than 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation.
For now I think I’ll leave it at that. The next week looks to be really busy but hopefully I can drop in for a quick post or two along the way. Thanks for hanging in there.
How can the same company get some things so right and others so utterly wrong?
Check out this completely unacceptable process of letting me download Firmware 2.0 (+30 mins), install and restore the iPhone (another 15 mins) and then after restart it asks me to connect to iTunes to finalize the process and I get this!
So now I have no phone, no contacts, calendar, etc. and I can’t leave the house until Apple fixes their servers?!
Perhaps a more elegant solution would have been to not let people start the process unless they could guarantee they could handle it?
Btw, the Apple Discussion forums are appropriately ablaze.
Certainly doesn’t make me want to rush down to SoHo and plunk down another $500. Come’on Apple!
Update: Now I get hung up with a -4 error. Since the error descriptions are so helpful I just have to hope we’re working or way back to zero, Apple.
Update: Come join our 9838 Flickr Group!
Last week I shipped off for a whirlwind, 24-hour, trip to San Francisco. The meeting I went out for went well and I got to see my good friend Manlio for a burger and some beers.
I spent the night there at the Hyatt Regency in the Embarcadero - a neighborhood I much preferred to the one near the Tenderloin I’ve stayed near in the past, where you’re more likely to get shiv’ed with a rusty screwdriver than you are to find a taxi. All in all it was a good (albeit very brief) jaunt to the West Coast.
Anyway, the Hyatt Regency had this great morning coffee set-up in m y room. Nice to see them finding an approach that works for the stationary guest but also pleasantly surprises the folks that heading out on the town for business/pleasure/etc.
Of course it will be months (more likely years) until we see if the internal integration issues can be navigated such that this acquisition is deemed a success but now that everyone has the perspective of a whole day behind them, people have had the chance to take a long(er) look (rather than a quick pass) at yesterday’s announcement and start to figure out how it’s going to affect the other major players in the space.
Nat Torkington of O’Reilly has a thoughtful piece on < a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/nokia-to-buy-and-open-source-s.html">the state of mobile open source. He even throws a shoutout to dodgeball using a new word to describe the whole affair:
Nokia has hired some absolute geniuses from the ubiquitous computing world to bring network services into people’s lives through the mobile phone, whereas Google’s social acquisition, Dodgeball, was a catastrophe.
Strong words. At least the word “geniuses” also appears somewhere in the sentence, right?
Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity has a really great article breaking down exactly what happened, to whom, and who’s better off because of it. If you read one article about the acquisition, I’d read this one. Here’s a quick glimpse at how he sees it affecting the other major players:
What does it mean to Apple? I think it’s probably good news. Although the Symbian partners could theoretically bleed Apple by sharing investments that Apple has to fund for itself, Apple competes on speed and elegance, not cost control. Nokia and Symbian will now spend the next six months sorting out how they’ll integrate and rationalize their organizations. No matter how much they try to avoid it, this will slip schedules and force people to revisit plans. And the other Symbian licensees have to wait two years for the new OS. That gives Apple a long, long time to build up its iPhone business. The Register put it very bluntly in its commentary on the Symbian announcement (link):
“Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance…it’s now Apple’s business to lose.”
Wow, from new entrant to industry leader in just a year. That sort of stuff must drive Nokia nuts.
Is Google happy or upset tonight? My first reaction is to say that Google should be worried because there’s now another very credible operating system being given away for free in competition with Android (or there will be in two years). What’s more, the leading mobile handset companies all participated in the Symbian Foundation announcement. That makes it harder for Android to get licensees. But the new open Symbian OS is two years away from shipment, giving Google lots of runway to get established (that’s what I meant about execution determining the real impact of the announcement). Also, the governance system for Android is a lot simpler than Symbian’s. While the Symbian committees must debate and agree on product plans, Google can just decide whatever features it wants to add, and toss them out there. In theory, Google should be able to move much faster.
Besides, there is the question of why Google really created Android. One school of thought says that Android was just a tool to bleed Microsoft and force openness in the mobile ecosystem. If that’s the goal, then the opening up of Symbian is a kind of a triumph for Google. Nokia is, in many ways, doing Google’s work for it.
If one were to look at their actions over the past two days in a vacuum, you might think Nokia is really concerned about how things are lining up for them with Apple and Google entering a space they’ve dominated for years.
Yesterday they made a move to acquire their way into the LBS space with their Plazes acquisition and today, in what is a clear attack on the market Google is going after with Android, Nokia has acquired the remaining part of Symbian they didn’t already own with plans to take it all open source in the next two years (with certain components coming sooner).
This is potentially really big, particularly on the heels of the recent issues for Google/Android.
I certainly don’t think Android is going to be a non-factor by any means but Nokia’s doing a decent job “battening down the hatches” (something they had to do in my opinion) in preparation for Google’s inevitable launch (we hope) and Apple’s new presence. That being said, acquisitions aren’t always the easiest thing to work into a seamless consumer offering so a lot still remains to be seen but in case there was any doubt, it’s now officially on.
Om Malik has an excellent piece on how the landscape shakes out after Nokia’s recent move.
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