kencasting.com

Back “in the day” my Dad wore Old Spice. It was one of those gifts you gave Dad on Father’s day or at Christmas, the red gift box with the ceramic containers. But, it was more or less all one scent, and a strong scent at that. Probably because nearly everyone smoked back then, and you had to have a scent that could be smelled over stale cigarette smoke.

Then, decades later, Old Spice started doing some fun commercials.I remember one with Bruce Campbell and a really big picture of a sailing ship that was particularly entertaining. But, it harkened back to the “man’s library”, and still made you think of the old, Old Spice. Didn’t get me to want to try it, but did show they had an idea what an entertaining ad looked like.

Now, they’re really hitting paydirt. Shirtless Old Spice Guy (@IsaiahMustafa on Twitter). He’s handsome, has a great speaking voice, and looks amazing without his shirt. And the deadpan, hilarious delivery of rapid fire zings delight everyone I’ve mentioned it to. If having a set of commercials that make you back up your DVR to watch them wasn’t enough, now they’ve started doing personalized video replies to random mentions on the web, and publishing them on their YouTube channel. Now, they’ve got people thinking “maybe this isn’t your Father/Grandfather’s” Old Spice anymore. Maybe I should try it, if Shirtless Old Spice Guy uses it!

This is the best, and most entertaining use of YouTube, Twitter, and scouring the net looking for blog mentions I’ve ever seen from a company. Absolutely brilliant. And unlike so many great advertisements you’ve seen where you can’t remember the product, you know exactly what company you’re dealing with here.

Been watching Ning a while. A pretty common story, really. Great technology, some adoption, but never really found its niche. After taking lots of money from investors, its run out of gas, and runway.

Ning had a difficult job. Provide enough functionality, easily, for people who weren’t web designers. Some of the competition is stiff. If you are slightly technical, you can build a Wordpress site fairly easily, add a theme, and have a blog. You can also use one of many CMSs, Joomla, Drupal, grab some plugins and themes, and get similar functionality running there. If all you’re doing is creating forums, groups and events, this might be a good alternative, but it’s almost certainly more work.

Ning had a really great toolkit, but it was difficult to turn that into a solution or web presence that was significantly better than could be put together in some other way, or with one of a variety of competitors products.

As a hosted blog platform, Ning had very stiff competition. Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr. As a social collaboration platform, got the big gorilla, Facebook, for business collaboration, its got the other big gorilla, Google as well. And, of course, Yahoo!, BigTent, MySpace.

Then Gina Bianchini, the co-founder & CEO left. Jason Rosenthal took the job after being COO for 5 months. Always a bad blow when the founders have abandoned ship. And, renewed proof that creating a winning startup is hard, and not a guarantee even if you were talented and lucky before. What will Ning do now in this fast moving Social Networking space? It announced it will eliminate its free service to focus on paid service, and significantly downsize its staff. JSYK, this is synonymous for “we’re spending the rest of our VC’s money as slowly as possible, as we wind down the operation and hope for a firesale”.

A simple glance at the Wikipedia page outlines Ning’s future. 3 categories – History, Features, and most telling – Controversies. If a major topic on Wikipedia is what you’ve removed from your platform, and your next big move is to remove the free from your social networking platform, well, you do the math. And, you could have done that math last year. Ning needed to do something disruptive and press-worthy, and it needed to do it last year.

I’ve been a corporate exec for years. I’ve started, and closed down startup companies. I’ve been in the boardroom discussing which last-ditch option to choose, when none of the options were good. So, I know Ning has to find a way to generate revenue, and simultaneously do that with a company that feels like it’s dying on the inside, sapping it’s remaining staff enthusiasm. And they don’t see any good options.

Taking a few steps back from the problem, it’s another instance in which, from the outside, this is Ning throwing in the towel. They’ve taken a lot of VC money. They can’t get more, unless they show results and potential for repaying all that money at a high return.

Problem: you already haven’t been able to convert free to paid memberships in enough volume to make the company profitable

Solution #1: Eliminate the free option, slash staff. This saves money month to month, and allows you to “focus” (air quotes allowed) on paid member support. What does this really mean? Try to keep your paying members signed up and paying, hope you can shop this customer base to the competition, and sell it all, so at least some of the investors get a few pennies on the dollar.

Side effect #1: No new paid members. Ever. Given the competition of Facebook and MySpace and BigTent and Yahoo! Groups, all free of charge to network creators, anyone creating a new site will first try another free service. Not one of them will go through that exercise, and then say “that was great, now I want to pay someone to do more or less the same thing, what options do I have to pay for this?”

Side effect #2: It will cause many paid members, especially those generating any revenue from their site, to evaluate all the other options, because they can’t afford to have the revenue generated from their site interrupted. And, that will happen when Ning ceases operation. Given that this is a growing competitive area.

Of course, I may be wrong, and Ning may not be going into firesale mode, but if that’s the case, they need an entirely different move than removing their free accounts. They’d need to create some sort of innovative integration with other sites, or invent something no one else provides, in a way that brings people to their platform.

Sorry to see Ning go, it was a very good attempt, better than much of it’s competition at the time.

Just another rant, really, another wakeup call to take ownership of your own content. It’s fine to share it all in the cloud, I use Gmail and Google Calendar, and Twitter, but I also mirror any important content elsewhere.

With the announcements Twitter, and their acquisition of atebits, the developer who wrote Tweetie, the web is buzzing away at how twitter is destroying app developers, etc. It was a little sad to read about how many millions had been invested in one-off twitter-centric products. With the difficulty companies have in getting funding from VC’s, there’s the other side, where the simplest business rules, like building a product dependent on a platform that can make you irrelevant with a wave of it’s hand, aren’t more strongly considered (or the investment is so small, the investors are just rolling the dice for an acquisition).

So, here are two simple rules for app vendors/investors…

1. Don’t base an entire business (or your one product) on a single companies service/platform (unless that single company is YOU!). Find a way, from the beginning, to support multiple platforms
2. Don’t plan on a platform company to acquire you as your “exit strategy”

If twitter clients had thought of themselves as “blogging clients that support twitter”, they might have been more proactive about mirroring microblog content, they could have some ways to add value not supported by the twitter platform, rather than being the tail to twitter’s dog. Twitter should have been one of several backends. Instead, clients like Tweetie removed ping.fm when building Tweetie2. While this worked out for Tweetie, it didn’t work out for its users who wanted to mirror their own content.

And a suggested rule for everyone else…

1. Don’t put everything you create, be it a microblog of you ate for breakfast, or your photos, or your blog entries solely onto someone elses platform. They could, at any time, change their policies, get acquired, or go out of business.

I’d been advocating using identi.ca for a long time, as a free and open source twitter/microblog mirror. Yes, all of your contacts are on twitter, but twitter owns your tweets, they exist because you create their content. If all the app vendors had supported services like ping.fm and identi.ca so that people could mirror all their content to multiple places, they (and we) wouldn’t be (as) dependent on twitter/facebook to do the right thing.

So, in the vein of “you might be a redneck”, I’ll give you some “you might be over dependent on others” thoughts…

- All your email is hosted by gmail
- All your calendaring is hosted by Google Calendar
- All your personal/business documents are hosted by Google Docs
- All your photos are posted on Facebook
- Any of your content is duplicated on Facebook (they then have rights to it, you know)
- All your microblogging (if you think it has value) is only on twitter
- All your shared links are shortened by bit.ly, etc.

In other posts here, you’ll see I run my own URL shortener now, since I didn’t want to make bit.ly rich by doing something trivial for me to do myself, where I could then own my own statistics. That might be a bit radical, and if all of your content is temporary and you don’t think of any value, it’s certainly overboard. I also keep all my posts I think have any value on my own websites, and share links to them. That’s mostly so I don’t have to worry about a third party service going away, and taking my content with it. It’s really inexpensive, and not really that much harder than setting up a blogger.com account. And, even with that, I mail myself backups daily, just in case my hosting provider for some reason goes away without warning. Again, if the content is valuable to you, you have to take ownership of it yourself.

A great article from Chris Anderson on the next Industrial Revolution.

.

In an age of open source, custom-fabricated, DIY
product design, all you need to conquer the world is
a brilliant idea.
Photo: Dan Winters

I spent 2008/2009 playing a lot with social networking, trying all the new sites that came along, looking at how people benefit, or don’t benefit from all the connection and sharing. I’ve decided to change what/how I share in 2010 based on this. A quote I read this morning from Brian Clark of copyblogger.com that summed it up neatly. "For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent."

First, I’m going to be a lot more choosy about where I share what content. In 2009, I hooked up my kencooking site, this site, as well as my flickr account to Facebook. My reasoning was sound, I don’t have any intention to make money on my hobby cooking site, and certainly didn’t expect to make money on my personal blog, so why not just publish the content widely? After all, I thought, it might bring more readers to my sites, and start some conversations. Also, my family has started getting on Facebook, they’re not online browsing folks, they are far more likely to see what’s going on if I put it in one place.

Interestingly, this route had an expected, but unintentional result. I got conversations and interest, on Facebook. My friends and family didn’t go read any of my blogs, they just responded to things on Facebook. After all, putting a feed in Facebook means your content is copied there. And, unfortunately, only the first revision is copied, so if you update/correct it later, Facebook doesn’t update the content. To keep content current, I now have to manage my blog and manage it’s copy on Facebook.

Earlier this year, I created my own URL shortener . I actually created two, also installing YOURLS. I did this because several companies were getting funding based on their aggregation of MY data! These companies started catching on because of the popularity of Twitter, another site that caught on based on MY data!

By using Other Peoples URL Shorteners, you’re increasing their value, but you’re not getting paid for that, nor are you increasing your value. I suddenly realized I was again helping creating an industry that wanted to track me, my usage of the Internet, and make money from it. That may not bother the majority of folks, but if you are creating something of value, and someone else is going to make a living off what you create, doesn’t that make you think just a little bit about that? Especially if you’re creating something, and want to give it away for free, are you OK with other people making money on what you’re choosing to give away? As Google, and a variety of other companies are amassing huge amounts of data about you, and what you do online, and correlating that to a variety of other information, does that make you want to own any of your data a little bit more?

This data is only valuable in the large aggregation of it. And, it took me 15 minutes to set up my very own shortener. I own the data, I know how many people clicked on my links, and I’m not giving someone else data I generated that they can turn into a statistics stream. I also don’t have to worry about the links disappearing at some point in the future, so I can safely use the shortened links in my own blog entries.

Which brings me back to Facebook. Facebook copies content linked to it. It doesn’t point to it, Facebook doesn’t want you leaving Facebook. There’s a lot of value in that model for Facebook, but not much for anyone who creates content outside of Facebook.The same concept goes for Twitter, although Twitter is more "stream of consciousness". But, with Microsoft and Google making (lucrative) deals to archive all Twitter content, it’s back to other people making money on your contributed and free content.

A small example: I create a recipe on kencooking.com. If you go look at that recipe on kencooking.com, the web site tracks that, I can look at my statistics and find out that pulled pork bbq recipes are the most popular. That tells me that if I wanted to, I could focus on BBQ recipes, because people who visit the site read those more. If I publish that recipe on Facebook, I will only know via comments if anyone has seen it. I get no statistics at all about what people read, unless they comment. As any blogger knows, there are a LOT more readers than commenters!

I also started getting concerned about Facebook late last year, when I began getting "recommendations" for people I might know that weren’t based on any data I’d provided to Facebook. I didn’t give Facebook my address, and I’d only provided a nearby city location for one company, yet I got two recommendations for people who lived on streets I’d lived on in the general area (and not necessarily the same city!). Facebook must have gathered information about places I’ve lived from someplace else to get those very specific recommendations. It always concerns me a little when a company is amassing information about me, using information it’s gathering about me from other public sources. Especially a site like Facebook, which is suppose to be about sharing information!

I’ve decided I want to be a little smarter about how I share my content. I want people to visit my own places on the Internet to get information, not to give it all away for others to make money from. I don’t plan on making any money from the majority of this content, but that doesn’t mean I want other people to make money from this very same content! I’ll track my own statistics, and get more actual information about what people read or don’t read. Of course, that means weaning myself from services I depend on, such as Google Analytics, but there are alternatives that I can run myself. If my content is worth time creating, it’s worth a little more time to manage the statistics gathering and reporting myself.

My "Fabulous Five" dollhead piece was my first arduino project. It’s purpose was learning how to read sensors, then drive motors using an arduino. To that end, it drives DC hobby motors and servos, as well as using input from 4 sensors, an IR distance sensor, a sonar distance sensor, a PIR motion sensor, and a photoresistor light sensor.

For my second project, I wanted to build something a bit more desk-worthy. When I saw this clock on YouTube, I had my initial plan. Using a 3-axis accelerometer to do clock settings instead of buttons. A new sensor, and a novel way to use it, the project was underway.

How to set the clock? Do I find a way to interface a WWV receiver? Put in wireless network connection to sync with an NTP server? Measuring cost/difficulty/convienience I settled on using a DS1307 Real Time Clock board. With a battery backup it’ll keep time for 7-15 years (then just put in a new battery), and at a street price of $20 for a DS1307, battery and crystal on a board, it seemed like the simplest and cheapest way to go. Move the clock anywhere, plug it in, it’ll instantly show the time. A side benefit of the DS1307 is that it has user-settable registers that are also maintained by the on-board battery, so all the clock settings can be stored there with the main power off.

The display was another quandary. Ideally, I wanted to use large LED numbers to make the clock easy to read, but that makes for a larger case, and with only 4 digits/letters, setting anything more than the time and an alarm is hard to read, and I didn’t want multiple displays, or to require hooking the clock to a computer. I opted with a 2×16 character LCD, easy to hook up, easy to read, and it can display a lot of information.

I picked up a 3-axis accelerometer board from Adafruit based on the ADXL335, another easy to connect $20 part.

I wasn’t sure about the alarm. I worked that out after I built the circuit. To keep trying and learning the characteristics of new components, I hooked up a tri-color LCD, and then for sound used a simple peizo.

As I played with the version wired up on a breadboard, I realized it would be handy to be able to shut the alarm off by using a distance sensor, rather than having to physically tilt the clock, so I added an IR sensor to the mix. I also added a backlight timer at this point to shut off the backlight (nice if this sits on your nightstand), which you can now turn on by just putting your hand near the clock.

I was going to build a wooden box to put the clock into. While cleaning out some old boxes, I came across an old box of Legos (actually an original Lego Mindstorm). Wondering if I could make a fun enclosure out of that, I tried, and succeeded. I quite like the clock incased in legos, it’s a whimsical finishing touch.

Parts list:

I got all the parts from my two favorites parts suppliers: Sparkfun electronics, and Adafruit industries

• LCD Display
• 3-axis accelerometer ADXL335
• Real Time Clock DS1307
• IR Distance sensor
• Project board
• tri-color LED
• Piezo buzzer
• Arduino Duemilanove

Source code:

     RealTimeAccelClock.pde

Prototype on the breadboard:

Project board wired up with real time clock:

Board with LCD attached and LED alarm going off:

Side view, put in its lego enclosure:

Lessons learned:

It was the first time I used a peizo. It wasn’t until after I’d soldered everything up and gotten it running that I realized if I had the peizo hooked up to one of the PWM capable pins of the Arduino, I could play notes, instead of just a single loud tone. I’d hooked up the tri-color LCD and the backlight of the LCD to PWM pins so I could run them at different intensities, but I had other pins I could have used. Unfortunately, the project board can’t handle a lot of unsoldering before the copper pads detach, and I didn’t want to risk ruining the entire working clock by moving two wires. Given the LCD is just used to blend the colors, but blink at mostly full intensity, I really didn’t need to hook it up to the limited PWM pins, given how I ended up using it. Oh well. Next my piezo based project (which I’m working on now!) will play music.

As expected, tuning the accelerometer is one of the harder parts of the project, and it changed slightly each stage as the board moved to a different resting position. If you build one, the first things you’ll want to do is to just run a loop displaying the x/y/z values in real time, and then writing down the values to figure out what roll right/left/forward/back correspond to. Also, the output is variable, based on input voltage, so if you don’t have a stable voltage input (for instance, running the board of a 9V battery), it may change over time. I added a calibration routine to set get the values for "centered".

A note of caution, if you look at my code, it’s based on the direction my accelerometer board was put onto the circuit board. Yours will almost certainly be different, and thus you’ll have to calculate your own values. I did make them all variables, so hopefully it’s easy enough to change it around.

I had hoped to run the entire thing using an arduino pro board and a battery. After getting the board, I realized it didn’t have any of the power circuits of a duemilanove, and as a result, the only power available was the same as the input voltage. That was a problem. The battery output was nominally 3.7V, but actually put out about 4.5V fully charged. The ADXL335 is low voltage, and could handle no more than 3.7V, and I didn’t want to burn that out, and the DS1307 needed 5V to go into read/write mode, which the battery would never produce.

I could have built two regulated power supplies for the 3.3V and 5V needed, but that added more complexity than I wanted to put into this first clock project. I could just add a minty boost to get the 5V, but also needed to get a regulated 3.3V. I decided that would be something I’d work on later after I’d spent some time with the clock, and just went with a duemilanove board.

The clock will suck a 9V battery dry in 48 hours or less with the IR sensor turned off, and the LCD backlight off. I believe I can double that by adding more power saving features, shutting off the LCD and the clock and putting the board to sleep. The accelerometer uses hardly any power at all, so keeping it powered, and using it to "wake up" the clock when in power save mode is a reasonable option.

Clocks are cheap, this one, not so much. This was a really fun project to build, and I learned quite about about a variety of things doing it. New sensors, building a prototype board. But, the parts cost was relatively high when you put it all together, a bit over $100, in fact. Adafruit makes a way cooler looking clock, the Ice Tube Clock. A more sane project, if what you really are looking for is a nice looking alarm clock, instead of a learning project. I built one of those too, and it was a lot of fun.

After building some prototypes, got the material sizes, some commercial bearings, and made some working versions. Have ‘em out in the field to see how they work, and how the materials hold up!

Prescript

Livenation gave refunds to this event, no questions asked, and was very prompt at processing the refunds. So, while the organizers have a lot to learn about putting on an event, Livenation understands how to deal with customer service, especially when there was obviously a problem.

Went to this festival over the weekend. Sounded like fun, good food from across the country, Country Store BBQ from Elgin, TX, Katz Pastrami, Anchor Bay Buffalo wings, Pinks Hotdogs. Demonstrations from Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay, music from Little Feat, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Marshall Crenshaw. But, the event was a poorly planned, and even more poorly managed disaster. Very sad, since a lot of people were very excited about the concept.

1:30

When we got there, it was obvious there were problems already. The line to get into the festival was at least 1/2 a mile long. Uh oh. We’d already bought our tickets, and were there with friends, so we weren’t willing to throw in the towel yet.

2:00

We finally get in the gate, The sullen people at the gate give us a food ticket. Weird, we were suppose to get one meal and 4 admissions with the “family pack”. Following the vague instructions on the website, we go to the armband booth. They were going to have electronic cash armbands. Sounds really high-tech huh? Well, it melted down, the paper ticket we got at the gate was for our first meal, then pay cash at the booth. We later find out the system broke almost immediately (after thousands of people had paid money to put on their electronic armbands), and that for the first 90 minutes, no one could buy or sell anything, since the organizers (and I use that word loosely) did not have a backup plan if the high tech cashless system broke down. Sigh. When will people learn to not rely on technology without manual backup plan? Well planned events have contingency plans.

The first line we see, for Pinks, was huge. And it looked more like 5 lines, filling the entire width of the concourse. We think maybe that’s because it’s next to the entrance. We walk up the hill. Burger line. No, that can’t still be the burger line. You have got to be kidding. There are hundreds of people in line for a burger. We tell each other this looks like a bust.

2:15

Decide to just get in line for something, we just tossed out our “we’ll all get different things and sample” plan. We’ll all get one plate of food, and decide if we’re staying after that. We briefly consider all getting in different lines, but that wouldn’t be much fun, when you came to hang with friends, now would it?

The line is near Anne Burrell’s demonstration. We can’t hear her, because the sound system is turned down so low. I note that there are 28 chairs set up in the field for the hundreds of people watching the demonstration. Really? Why did you put out any chairs at all?

2:30

We joke with the nice people around us in line that at this rate, we’ll at least get to see Guy Fieri at 3:00. No lines for drinks. Perhaps that’s because beer is $12 and wine is $8. Yeah, that’s probably it.

3:00

We get to see Guy Fieri. His entire 45 minute demonstration. He was great, a lot of fun, the field was packed with people, but we got to see him from the line snaking all the way around the field. Oh, and we also hear that Katz ran out of Pastrami from disgruntled people who’d waited in that line for hours, we saw the sandwiches get smaller and smaller as we waited for our BBQ. I read they made more later.

3:45

Guy ends, one of our crew heads off to get in line for something else, since it’s clear we’re not spending the day here, or standing in another line for another 2 hours. Keep in mind everyone was getting exactly the same thing. There was no choice. A sausage and some brisket on white bread (with a slice of processed American cheese, which was new to me). They were obviously just not set up to produce food for this many people quickly. Did the organizers forget to tell everyone how many tickets they sold?

4:30

We finally get our food. Over 2 hours in line. We head off to find a place to sit, bring our other friend food. He’s been in a very short line for Bacon. However, the people in the booth were simply not set up to crank out this much food, the lines aren’t moving.

I should add, as we get to the front, we notice a second (sort of 3rd) line off to the left, much shorter than the one we were in. So, not everyone had to wait 2 hours, but with absolutely no organization or communication, how would anyone know?

Giving credit where it’s due, the BBQ was very good. Way better than we expected. The bacon was good, too, if you’d just walked up to the booth, but not if you waited 45 minutes. The BLT, not so good, Too much mayo, not enough bacon, more like a British tea sandwich. For $7.

4:45

We’re done. No way we’re standing in line several hours for more food, the line for Pinks is as long as when we arrived. As we leave, there’s a long line of people asking for refunds. As they should be. This is after the time Ed Levine says everything got better. Sorry Ed, it didn’t.

Epilogue:

I call the venue, they tell me to just send my tickets back for a refund. Live Nation says they’re sorry the event was unpleasant. More kudos to them (of course, I haven’t gotten my refund yet, may take up to 2 weeks).

Ed Levine at Seriouseats.com finally published an apology of sorts. Unfortunately showing a lack of understanding the extent of the problems. Ed makes the claim that it was only the first 4 hours that were bad, and then lays implied blame on people showing up “early”. The comments to the post tell it all. It did not get better, it was entirely the organizers fault, and the organizers should pro-actively tell customers refunds will be given. Unfortunate I see no mention of offering refunds in the apology. Ed can’t be the sole person responsible, so I do give him kudos for being the lighting rod, however, if Ed and the other organizers ever want to put on event without people actively lobbying against it, they’ll need to fully apologize. It was the organizers, not the attendees, who caused the event to fail, and it did not get better, or live up the promise. Not at 2pm, not at 8pm.

Years ago, Shoreline had an event called New Orleans, by the Bay. It was very well organized, there was food and music everywhere, and people had a good time, year after year. It can be done at this very venue.

This event was littered with signs of poor management of a large event: lack of line organization lack of information, lack of food portion/price control, insufficient eating areas, poor use of the facilities. Small Band and demo areas were co-located, so you got some music, or a hard to hear demo. Scattered smaller music pavilions with local musicians, in addition to the “big names” would have been a better use of space than selling Comcast and Verizon booths in the concourse, even that would have been for the benefit of the customers, not revenue generators for the festival.

Heck, even the whole “first plate of food is free” concept, where that first plate could be a tiny Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, or a plate of BBQ ($6 or $12 respectively) shows a lack of understanding on how a good food festival operates. People shouldn’t have to research, compare and plan to enjoy a casual festival.

The best thing Ed and the organizers could do to garner any further support, after they fully take blame for the failure, and advertise easy to obtain refunds, is to actually hire someone who’s run successful food festivals before they even consider doing this again.

Powered by Qumana

Going to toss in my $0.02. With Apple pulling out of future MacWorld’s, the annual WWDC is their one opportunity to tell you what they’re doing that’s cool.

Snow Leopard looks like a great evolution of MacOS. Still don’t get the name, there were plenty of other cats to choose from, rather than one with the same basic name as the existing OS. Everything’s faster, that’s what they touted, perhaps "Cheetah" would have been a good choice. But, naming in software is a very silly thing. I advocate giving your development releases pointless names like "red, green, yellow". Engineers are usually bad at naming, using the analytic part of the brain doesn’t give the coolest names, the artistic part does. Thus, you should have the artistic people in your organizations name your products. Nuff said…

New laptops. All nice upgrades, with the exception of removing the ExpressCard slot. Nice they added an SD slot, but removing the ExpressCard? When you can’t tether the iPhone? So, no cellular data modems that work in the ExpressCard slot. No built-in card, like some of the Dell models. And I’m not a fan of non user removable batteries. Their claimed 7 hours means hopefully 5 hours of real-world time use. Apple’s batteries have long been less impressive than they’ve touted. I’m currently using my 2 year old MacBook Pro, 15". My battery now has 40% of it’s original capacity, and with 386 load cycles, lasts maybe an hour off charge, if I’m lucky.

The best news on the laptops, besides the evolutionary changes, is the across the board price reductions. They’re still pricey, but it’s good to see the price points drop, rather than stay stable as features are added.

iPhone news? Another evolutionary change. Nice upgrades, a faster phone will be good. The 3.0 software will finally bring the iPhone software to a point where it isn’t embarrassing in comparison to 5 year old phones. Well, with the exception of video. The exhibiting iPhone can do video, 3rd parties have apps running well on jailbroken iPhones, but Apple wouldn’t approve any video-capable apps for the existing iPhones. Why? So they’d have a "must have" feature in their next evolution. Since the next iPhone wasn’t going to have a must-have feature, they’re arbitrarily making it video, and saying you need a new phone to support it. But, if you bought a 3G iPhone, you’re still under contract with AT&T, and don’t qualify for subsidized pricing, so a new phone will cost more than a new Netbook. Might be time to look into jailbreaking if you want Video, but have a 3G phone and don’t want to pay $500 for a new, marginally improved phone.

Bad news? AT&T won’t be supporting basic functionality like MMS and tethering. They’ll support it "later". Both features I had on my Nokia E61 4 or more years ago, via AT&T. What the heck? And with the subsidy limits carriers are imposing, a basic 16Gig 3G(S) will cost an existing iPhone 3G customer $417, plus tax, and I think at least one other $18 AT&T fee. $399, plus $18 upgrade fee, according to http://buyiphone.apple.com.

My complaints with AT&T are numerous. The last two gatherings I went to, SXSW and the Maker Faire, AT&T data became unusable. At SXSW, even voice wouldn’t work, nor SMS. 3G was totally overloaded, but non-3G was also overloaded. So, at a conference where you need to keep in touch via a mobile phone, and there is cool software rolled out just to enable it, you couldn’t even use voice to keep in touch, much less applications that required data.

At the Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, data simply stopped working most of the day, 3G or not. Voice and SMS continued to work, thank goodness. Add to that my ongoing issue that I can’t use AT&T hotspots, even though I’m an AT&T highspeed customer, because I can’t remember my email password for AT&T, and they refuse to reset it unless I fax some random 800 number copies of personal documents, and I’m on a mission to have no AT&T services as soon as possible.

I understand AT&T is doing what it can to hold on to it’s customers, but it’s not doing so by providing them what they want in an easy way, it’s trying to do so via making it expensive to leave, and by doing what it can to indenture you to them. That’s sure way to not only loose customers, but to loose them in a way that you won’t get them back. Ever.

I do understand Sprint and Verizon also have their problems that they are equal to or greater than AT&T’s issues. Someday, we’ll have ubiquitous wireless, and the mobile carriers will go the way of the dinosaurs (or newspapers or cable TV).

My takeaway from all the announcements is compromise. That’s neither a good nor bad thing, and might be exactly the right place to be now. So now, I’ll digress into a diatribe of compromise and trying to control your customers in a desperate attempt to keep them, rather than providing them what they want, and changing your business models to make that happen. Quickly.

With the laptops, Apple’s making a reasonable bet that customers will be fine with non-exchangeable batteries. I know when I did a lot of international travel, that this would be a deal-breaker. They’re going back to more closed laptops, hoping that the capabilities they make available at purchase will be sufficient, and maybe that will work for them.

The iPhone is much more of a compromise, especially with the relationship with AT&T. Apple really needs a second carrier for the iPhone now that it’s got enough influence in the market.

Compromise is what the mobile market is about, rather than exploiting wireless technology for everything it can do. Like it or not, carriers are just that, carriers of data. They’re desperately looking for ways to lock in customers, hoping to keep them loyal to that carriers radio towers, but you can only get loyalty from having great products people want (see, for example, Apple .

AT&T is doing all they can with making offers you can’t refuse on mobile/home phone + TV + home internet. So is Comcast, but they don’t own any cellular bandwidth. Today, Verizon started blocking Google maps on some mobile devices, so you’d be forced to use bing or their inferior mapping products. Coercion is not a reasonable long-term strategy to keep loyal customers.

Again, since it appears we all have to keep saying it: carriers, music/media labels, movie companies, cable companies, satellite TV companies, give customers what they want, when they want it, or you will loose your place as the middlemen between the talented people that make stuff, and the people who consume what those talented entertainers produce

And in case you’re still confused, your customers want connectivity, using the services and accessing the media they choose Anytime, and Anywhere.

Powered by Qumana

Every Memorial Day weekend for the last 43 years, my wife’s family has gone camping. It started as a Sportsmen’s club event with her Dad, and became a family tradition. At some point, the location her family settled on was Burney Falls State Park. A lovely park with hiking and tons of stocked fishing nearby, perfect since her whole family love to fish. Mostly catch and release, but a few trout are eaten as well. Also some lovely countryside with farms and small towns to visit, hiking, ice caves, and nearly always snow if you drive up Mount Burney.

The weather is a big part of the weekend. It can be cold, torrential rain, very hot and dry, lovely, and often a combination. I’ve never been there for one of the legendary "it poured all weekend" trips, this year, the weather was perfect. High 70’s/low 80’s during the day, lower humidity, cooler, but not cold, nights.

I’m not a very good fisherman, and haven’t been steeped in the tradition as long as everyone else, but it’s still the big family event of the year. Friends of various family members also attend, so it’s a great annual reunion with 20 and sometimes more family and friends.

For me, it’s often a love+hate experience. I love camping, but my ideal camping is taking a 4wd to a backcountry camp. Quiet, on your own, no crowds. More roughing it involved, in theory, carting a solar shower and following proper backcountry restroom etiquette. State park camping, especially on a holiday weekend, means a ton of people camped close to each other and the associated noise, and some truly amazing displays of lack of basic bathroom hygiene Also, something you need with this many people, lots of rules, and tickets await if you break them. Feels more restrictive than being at home! It’s a tradeoff. But, the basic outdoor kitchen, sitting around the fire, sleeping (nearly) outdoors is great.

This year, I’m sure another victim of the recession, the town of Burney is falling on very hard times. There was now only one place in town that sold Propane, and they were closed on Sunday or Monday (very odd for a rural town), the urgent care we’ve occasionally had to visit for cuts and other slight accidents was gone, having to drive nearly 20 miles to Fall River Mills, the next town up the road.

The family-oriented upside, and what overshadows my personal pet peeves, is hanging with the family for multiple days, cribbage tournaments, group dinners every night. It’s a bigger tradition than normal holidays, since there are three nightly dinner gatherings, Mexican night (handmade chili rellenos)/margaritas, Italian night (spaghetti and garlic bread)/wine, and American night (hamburgers and hotdogs)/gin & tonic. Then there’s the pinata on Mexican night for the kids (who are now all over 20), the graveyard walk the same young folks now take on their own, music night where folks play, sing and tell stories.

Another Burney has come and gone, this year one of the best ever. Wonderful weather, probably the best camping crowd ever, and as always, fun times with the family. Good times, just had to write a  recap.

Powered by Qumana