Churbuck.com

The photographs of  Chinese iPad clones running Android are filtering their way west and indeed, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to port the operating system onto anything from a flat screen television to a cheap large screen smartphone.  Android seems destined to become the mass market OS for mobile internet devices, and as hardware manufacturers figure out how to junk it up with their own skins, you can be sure to see a plethora of 10″ screens sometime soon. After a month in the Android world on my HTC EVO smartphone, and several months on the genuine iPad, I have to wonder what the mass market appeal of an Android tablet will be once they start shipping in volume later this year.

The significant application for the tablet — the so-called “content consumption” device (consumption is so tubercular in my mind) — is e-readers in my opinion. Sure, you can watch a nice movie or video courtesy of iTunes on the iPad, and doubtlessly Amazon, Netflix, and Doubletwist will be pushing moving picture content onto Android tablets with ease. But in my experience the big application is reading, be it the Kindle app on the iPad or the new magazine formats such as Flipboard and the traditional magazine publishers. So far the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have the lead in iPad formats, and I tend to make a point of refreshing them before hopping onto a plane. Flipboard is a nice enough user experience, integrating links from my Facebook and Twitter network, and it is a good platform for prolific publishers like AllThingsD and others with a need to push their content.

The point of this post is to wonder outloud how publishers will port from the iPad to Android tablets and if the experience will be as compelling as the early iterations on the Apple platform. If I were leading the platform decision at a Conde Nast or Time Inc. I would be very concerned about the production challenges of supporting the two platforms. While Wired may be declaring the Web to be dead, I have to disagree, seeing Android as an extension of the desktop browser/HTML model we’ve lived with for nearly two decades. iPad as a closed example of “splinternet” — yes, I concede that Apple model is a walled garden for developers and consumers, but a short lived one as Android gathers momentum and steam this summer and into the holiday season.

Prediction: next year the dominant launch-first platform will be Android.

A true test of a consumer electronics brand’s strength and fidelity to the customer and not pure profit is their ability to withstand the siren call of junking up their products with crapware/bloatware. For some devices the bounties paid by second tier software providers is the difference between turning a PC or a phone from a loss leader to a profit engine. Does Apple do that? Or Google? Nope. But HTC and Sprint did with my EVO, junking it up with a foolish NASCAR and NFL widget more pernicious and tenacious than a toenail fungus. It is amazing how any app or widget on the phone associated with the handset maker (HTC) or the network provider (Sprint) is invariably a P.O.S.

“But bloatware isn’t a feature in all smartphones. AT&T hasn’t piled extraneous software onto Apple’s iPhone. Motorola’s Droid phone ships with just the core applications. Google and T-Mobile resisted the bloatware impulse with the Nexus One.”

But not the rest of the gang. Put the user first and at least make this stuff easy to remove. Forever. Please

via Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

In the 1990s (when exactly I cannot say because the their archive has no search function) Suck.com declared that the American cure for depression was the consumption of consumer electronics. Feel blue? Buy a Palm Pilot. Feeling stupid? Buy the folding external keyboard and the wireless data modem for that Palm Pilot. 3D televisions, gaming consoles, the latest Call of Duty, handheld weather stations, binnacle mounted GPS-Nav Chart Plotters with integrated radar and XM Satellite radio …. Then there is the whole Apple addiction, with something from Cupertino to pine for at least every six months. Add in all those iTunes downloads, Kindle books, Netflix, paid apps, online subscriptions to get through costwalls: I need to do a digital audit of my finances. Off the top of my head — from DSL to DirectTV to cell phone subscriptions, the big ticket recurring items, I’m spending $500 a month on digital services and easily $1000 a year family wide on new devices. I guess all those days picking through Garry Ray’s discards in the PC Week lab infected me with the need to try new stuff.

When will it end? I joke that in my retirement there will be no PCs. But what about cell phones? When my eyesight really goes and I start reading large-font books (thank god for the Kindle’s font sizer), will I own a large font cell phone like a Jitterbug? (note to self, burgeoning market in elderly CE devices).

It didn’t end today. I killed the Blackberry after four years of Lotus Notes/RIM BES mediocrity and embraced my inner Google ecosystem and bought my first real App phone, an HTC Evo running on Sprint’s 4G network. Why no iPhone? I get the iPhone experience and know full well the Apple ecosystem of iTunes, AppleTV, iPods, and now my iPad. Great experience, wonderful design …. but:

• Android is going to pull away in terms of share very quickly.
• I am a Google person: Chrome is my browser. Gmail is how I read my churbuck.com email. I use Gmail’s contact manager. I use Google calendar.  Google Docs. Google News ….pretty much everything except Google Talk and Google Voice. Android loves Google and Google loves Andy Ruben. It all works together, and had I lived on a Mac I’d probably a MobileMe person, or whatever it that Apple calls its cloud suite.
• The iPhone 4 is on AT&T and I want to get off AT&T. AT&T’s Android offerings are weak compared to Verizon (Droid X) and Sprint (EVO)
• Sprint’s 4G sounds cool but it will come to Cape Cod after I adopt a unicorn and teach it to fart glitter. For now, it’s an urban phenomenon.
• Kindle for Android
• No Skype. No ooVo. Guess I’ll wait for Adobe’s new “facetime” video call app.

So, to Best Buy for the EVO. I asked the clerk about the memory, and she said 32 GB. Wrong, it has eight. The porting of my number off of AT&T and onto Sprint was the usual Kafka Samsa Cockroach dive into “wait while I transfer you to technical support” but eventually I was out the door and on my way. The phone is nice, more a handheld mobile internet device than a phone really. Portable Wifi (I am retiring my Verizon MiFi) hot spot so I can tether my ThinkPad and iPad off it; decent camera, and a hardware build about what you would expect. Not Apple level, but not too bad either. If one handset maker would try to hit Apple in the build-quality space they could carve a good segment out of the Android market. HTC is no Apple, but they are going great guns after famously being Google’s hardware partner for the first Android phone, the G1 and then the recently discontinued Nexus One. The Taiwanese company’s rise to the forefront (it helps to be a Tour de France fan as HTC is cosponsoring a pro bike team this summer) in handsets is pretty remarkable and due in large part to their position as Google’s favored nation for building reference platforms.

I configured the following apps on the Evo

• Dropbox because Dropbox is still far and away the best “hard drive in the sky” that there is. I save ALL my files to my Dropbox folder and can get them from the iPad, the EVO, and via any browser on any device.
• Doubletwist for music management. First to free my music from the tyranny of iTunes, second because it has the same slick synch integration that iTunes does, but with any device.
• Evernote for being a packrat and saving notes, voice memos, snapshots, and URLs
• Pandora internet radio because everyone raves about it and I didn’t have it on my Blackberry
• MLB.com “At Bat,” now the third time I have paid the only major league sport that  truly understands digital apps another stack for cash  get scores, watch highlights, and read stats
• And several utilities, widgets, etc.

What else to say? In the end, it just something to deliver a little more noise and as the Fake Steve Jobs would say, a “little more shittiness” in our lives. But what am I complaining about? I dig little computers.

So with all of six hours on Android, let me make the comparisons to Apple  – at least the iPad experience which is needless to say a stupid basis to talk a slate form factor versus an app phone. But nevertheless — there is a lot of similarities and differences that have me persuaded that people will focus their online lives on three devices:  app phone, pad, and clamshell notebook/netbook. The three macro use-cases are obvious. Smartphone for rapid response communications and idle-moment-diversions; pad for consumption of film, book, newspaper, blog, and games; clamshell-keyboard notebook for writing long-winded blog posts and the Powerpoint Forced March. Right now Apple has the wide lead on seamlessly integrating all three. Heck, the non-Apple pad market is totally nascent and no Wintel hardware company has brought a successful tablet/pad to market. Yet. There will be a flood of Android tablets leading up to CES, some total clones of the iPad, others laden with proprietary skins and some with a nod to the commercial/enterprise market. The Linux variants and sideplayers like JoliCloud will fall to wayside as Android integration proceed across increasingly bigger screens, culminating with Chrome OS on netbooks.  If Google can control a seamless experience even with the code projects in the open domain, then every hardware manufacturer can dive in and do the “brown bananas” game of competing on price and driving average margins down to a brutal 1%.

Apple has a beautiful interface with rabid attention to detail that Android lacks. There’s something spare and elegant in Apple’s user interface. Android’s is … not as clean. Clean, and the usual gestures of swipe and pinch work well … but still.

Android is very Volkswagen to Apple’s BMW.

So, enough devices, my depression is lifted, my phone number is the same and … farewell Blackberry and onwards into standing astride the dominant mobile internet architectures, slightly schizo but always enlightened.

I’ve gone fully Google — gmail integration of my churbuck.com email, Google docs, Google Calendar — but when Buzz Bruggeman suggested we talk and I use his Tungle account, I decided, hey, what the heck, sign up for another service.

Anyway — I am on Tungle, syncing my Google calendar to it. If you want to talk and get on my sked, check it out.

http://tungle.me/DavidChurbuck

Blodget and Goldman dig a grave for the netbook segment. Cause of death: iPad.

This chart from Morgan Stanley says it all. A year ago the netbook category was the hottest thing in PCs. Today …. I don’t imagine anyone is going to weep tears for Atom based netbooks. They may have been little and cute, but their 3G wireless contracts are a millstone around their necks, and they are, in the end, still Windows PCs.

Only slower. Read through to Blodget’s summary of Goldman’s 5 C’s on why the iPad has gutted netbooks.

Remember a year ago, when netbooks were the fastest growing segment of the PC market?

Not anymore.

And not ever again, as far as Goldman Sachs is concerned.

Because Apple’s iPad is going to wipe the netbook market out, says Goldman.  (Sorry about that, Microsoft. Netbooks were a headache for you, too, because of the lower software price-points and Linux threat, but now even those low price points are going to zero).

via Apple’s iPad Is Going To Destroy The Netbook Market, Says Goldman (Sorry, Microsoft).

Interesting analysis of Yahoo’s potential in the mounting battle for developer mindshare. Yahoo has a strong history of popular APIs for devs, but can they seriously regain the momentum now being consumed by iPhone/Pad, Android, and the plethora of other attractive platforms. This observation strikes a chord:

“Last year Bartz vented to me about Yahoo’s infrastructure problems – the company, she explained, was a compilation of fundamentally disconnected vertical silos, each with its own P&L, codebase, infrastructure, and culture. It was nearly impossible to roll out products that cut across, say, Mail, Homepage, Finance, IM, Search, and Flickr, because each instance required custom integration and coding. Yahoo was literally broken underneath, even as it looked consistent at the UI layer.”

via Yahoo Could Be A Big Winner In The Battle For Developers.

I was an early Kindle customer — ordering one in August 2008 when I returned from Beijing as a form of gadget valium to sooth my soul after the enervation of the whole Olympic experience. I took to it instantly, a perfect customer candidate given my travel habits and obsession with lightening my backpack of multiple five pound hardcover best selling door stops.  I read a lot.  Like two to three books a week on average, and the Kindle was instant gratification. I’d think of a book, read a review, or get a recommendation from a friend and I could flip on the wireless Whispernet switch and I was loaded nearly instantly with new reading material for the long haul to Bangalore or the short trip between Boston and Raleigh.

All was well with the Kindle and me. The eInk screen was perfectly readable, the matte screen easy on the eyes with no back splatter reflection. The books were cheap. My beefs came down to terrible hardware design — the page forward and page back pages simply suck — especially for a left-handed person like myself; and the other main beef was the utter antisocial aspect of not being to share books with family or friends. That remains, to me, to be the biggest crime of a digital book. It can’t be pressed fervently into someone’s hands — you have to read this, trust me – and then there’s the whole bibliophile loss of not having a tangible object in one of my many groaning bookshelves.

In April I went for the iPad. I told myself not to do it. It was irresponsible to piss away $500 on a 16GB piece of glass and aluminum, but what the heck, I needed some more gadget valium and I had a professional interest in the device to boot — having come off of the Skylight Smartbook project at Lenovo and being obsessed with all things consumer/content-consumption oriented.

Three months later and I don’t use the Kindle very much any more. And here’s why.

1. The iPad does more stuff than the Kindle and therefore has more utility
2. Amazon wisely released an iPad app which is every bit as good if not better than the Kindle 1.0 software
3. Even though the iPad is a self-regarding narcissist’s dream device — one could spend hours gazing on one’s own reflection — the lack of matte finish doesn’t annoy me
4. The brilliance of the iPad is the same brilliance behind the original Mac. Where as Jobs first had the insight that people rather not type commands, but would prefer to point and click with a mouse; he scored again with the simple insight that a finger is better than a mouse. Besides, it is so much more physically intimate to idly read on the iPad and move a page back and forth with one’s fingers and not curse, curse, curse at the dumbness of the Kindle’s forward and back paddles.

I haven’t tried any other readers. iPad sort of takes the curiosity out of me.  But if I were Amazon I’d zero-price the things and give them away.

This is a very provocative point of view from analyst Rob Enderle. Android, the Google phone and mobile internet device OS is litigation bait. Going back to an Economist article from October, Android seemed to be igniting a massive surge in smartphone adoption given its open source model and compelling price of free. Now Enderle says not the case:

“Google’s been having a tough year with Android. First Apple sues HTC for violations of Apple’s intellectual property, and it becomes clear that Google has no defense against this kind of expensive attack, and then Microsoft convinces HTC to license its technology to cover Android.”

“A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that HTC is paying between US$20 and $40 for this license to Microsoft, and the litigation cost and reasonable risk to Apple is probably twice this, suggesting the real cost of Android may be between $40 and $80 a phone — or the most expensive phone OS currently being sold on the planet. And, if you take into account that Apple doesn’t license, you might conclude that after paying all of this money, HTC might still have to abandon Android.”

via Technology News: Tech Buzz: HP’s Deal of the Century, Android’s Short Life.

There is likely to be a great deal of comment,  disagreeing and agreeing, with Steven Johnson’s opinion piece in the Sunday New York Times. This piece argues that the Apple App Store and its integration with the iPad/iPhone experience, calls into question the old article of faith that closed, proprietary systems were doomed and the path forward for capitalist innovation was open systems.

Most of that gospel was formed in the early 90s when closed online platforms such as CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy were overwhelmed and eventually annihilated by the open forces of HTML and TCP/IP. Lo and behold, that same openness, which drove a 15 year revolution in content creation and management that has utterly gutted the traditional mass media, has also highlighted consumer discomfort with buggy PC platforms, confusing software architectures, and a rapid return of the cycle of discordant, proprietary platforms ranging from smartphones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android) to new PC/netbooks running proprietary (or at least non Windows/Intel) environments from re-skinned Linux distributions (JoliCloud, Joo-Joo) to browser-based stripped operating systems like Google Chromium. Factor in an incompatible slew of e-readers ranging from Kindle to Sony, Barnes & Noble to iPad and the world is setting itself up for a period of non-conformity and consumer confusion not seen since the pre-PC era when there were at least half a dozen pre-PC operating systems to choose from.

Johnson believes the consumer — who seeks simplicity, not noble principles of “openness” — is embracing the Apple-walled garden, where Flash video doesn’t run, and developers must pass through the Apple approval process, in order to get an elegant design and a controlled integration with assurances of no-viruses or malware and a single unified payment system.

Ok. I buy it.  Same held true for AOL when ti came to the pre-Internet online experience. Single sign-on, unified, consistent experience, ubiquity in terms of access and usage and then what? But it was unsustainable, as all technical platform are inevitably replaced by the next better thing, all pushed aside by something less restrictive, more open, and more flexible. So I don’t buy Johnson’s statement that the Gospel of  Open is being shaken or questioned by a lot of acolytes singing the praises of the iPad. I think it’s a dangerous closed system that is appealing to scared publishers and the most affluent but technically challenged segment of the population. It will not make a difference in the lives of the next billion users, most of whom are rushing, in torrents to open handset platforms like Android.

I give Apple a couple more years of relevance, until the next big thing makes it a memory like AOL and CompuServe. Closed always fades.

“But whatever Apple chooses to do with its platform in the coming years, it has made one thing clear: sometimes, if you get the conditions right, a walled garden can turn into a rain forest.”

via Everybody’s Business – How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web – NYTimes.com.

Shopping smarter with Google Shopper on your Android Phone

via Google Shopper for Android.

Okay, I’ve had it. Four years of Blackberry and I really want a true smartphone. iPhone, Droid, Nexus — anything but this godawful enter-your-password Lotus Notes belching, horrible web browser, crippled App Store functionality Blackberry.

I need Global GSM. So that means T-Mobile or AT&T. I may downgrade the Blackberry to an email only device and move my cell number to an Android……

But which? I hate touch screens as I have sausage fingers. Droid is a Verizon product. …..

I stole this camera thanks to Uncle Fester who pointed me at Amazon. Sucker was half-price and arrived in a single day, just in time for my Orient Express Tour which commences Sunday. My old Canon point-and-shoot ISUS (which I bought in the Singapore airport in the spring of 2006 for my first trip to China) is with my daughter capturing a term in Florence.  I hate capturing life’s key moments on a Blackberry Bold smartphone camera — most of which come out looking like smeared crap and are only acceptable for UFO sightings, citizen eyewitness news, and sexting offenses.

No, Nova Roma, Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul deserve 12 megapixels, so I hit the Amex and am now ready to go capture some scenes and clog up my Flickr stream.

Here’s some stuff from today’s walk-in-lieu-of-lunch. Cotuit in January is not scenic — sort of like living in a depressing black and white Swedish movie — but you take what you get.

Oh, and I continue to like GDGT.com‘s blog gadget of gadgets that let’s me list what consumer electronic bling I am packing. For me, any kind of gadget is better than antidepressants.  Feel blue? Buy an iPod. Want some joy in your life? Buy a Slingbox. GDGT let’s you capture that and more. And Ryan and Peter and Barry are good guys who put up with Project Mayhem at CES when our “party” got a little out of control.

Heading into CES two weeks ago I wrote about the Lenovo Skylight, the first so-called “Smartbook” to run Qualcomm’s Snapdragon ARM process, a device explicitly conceived to be a “cloud computer” or social device.

My colleague and Lenovo’s first official blogger, VP of Design David Hill, has written a riveting account of how the Skylight came to be designed by Richard Sapper, the Milan-based wizard of industrial design who designed the first IBM ThinkPad. Skylight began in the early fall of 2008 when a small team was formed to look into a rapid development project to get Lenovo ahead of the commodity netbook market with a strong, differentiated offering that addressed the rapid shifts in online usage. While we focused on alternative operating systems such as Android, our SVP of Notebooks, Peter Hortensius, urged the team to consider the Qualcomm processor because of its unique architecture, amazing power consumption profile, and integrated wireless communications.

Once the principles were established, Hill recommended we turn to the original master for a concept. His blog post details the remarkable birth of the machine, including a chance meeting at a Gloucester, Massachusetts cocktail party where Sapper was introduced to a luthier (stringed instrument craftsman) with a woodworking shop and the capability to produce a wooden model.

I think the tale is the best thing we’ve ever published on a corporate blog. I hope you enjoy it.

Coming out of the 2008 Summer Olympics I joined a small team within Lenovo consisting of the company’s best engineers and designers to re-invent the netbook category — those small (sub 11″ screen) PCs that have taken the market by storm since their introduction two years ago.

The netbook category has flourished for a couple reasons best explored by a serious PC analyst — my opinion is that sub $400 PCs in a super-portable form factor were the perfect option for consumers slammed by economic concerns in this Great Recession and who are gradually migrating to a “disposable” device model brought on by a constant upgrade cycle in their phone and other consumer electronics.  Alas, the netbook is still the same operating system, the same computing model, just in a smaller, cheaper package.

Consider the smartphone.  Small. Thin. Long battery life. No patches or updates or viruses. No waiting to boot. It’s always connected (almost always). Highly designed. It just works. But it is too small to watch a movie on and is a major pain to compose anything on — aside from simple SMS or email “grunts.”

What happens if you combine the two models — the connected simplicity of a smartphone with the physical ergonomics of a netbook? Well, you get a “smartbook.”

Today Lenovo announced the first smartbook — called Skylight —  in partnership with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based leader in phone chipsets. Using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, the Lenovo Skylight is designed with cloud computing and social networking in mind.  It is not a phone per se, but it leverages a 3G or Wifi network connection to present the user with a high definition browser experience that assumes most, if not all of the user’s content and activities are up there, in the cloud.

There is no harddrive, just a lot of flash memory.  Productivity applications? Google Docs. Music? Amazon.  This is a device designed for messaging and media.

So what makes it social? The user interface is a proprietary design built around an “app” paradigm. Those apps contain the user’s primary accounts — email, instant messaging, SMS, Facebook, etc. — and are extensible and customizable.  The device is meant to be constantly on and connected, permitting the user to interact with it on an ad hoc basis, not a formal session where the user needs to power on, connect, then log in.

The design of the system is amazing, delivered by Richard Sapper, the genius behind the original ThinkPad.   The user interface is internally developed on top of a Linux kernel and is pretty intuitive and very browser centric. The software implementation was remarkable, particularly given the challenges of porting a large screen user experience to an ARM platform. The engineering teams lead by Mike Vanover, Jim Hunt, and others pulled off a significant development miracle in building the operating environment.

The name — Skylight — is indicative of the device’s mission as a hardware portal into the cloud. With persistent and constant 3G and wifi, the device should have no issues living up to its name.

I presented a prototype to some resellers in London last summer and over the course of a few days was able to play with the machine on a wifi only basis. Given the early, pre-pre-beta condition of the build, it was surprisingly stable and provided a great glimpse into what a cloud device would behave like.  My earlier thoughts on stripped down operating systems and cloud centric computing models all emanated from my week with the Skylight prototype. It also was a device that seemed to sell itself. Thin is definitely in and the Skylight is astonishingly thin for a clamshell form factor. Watching the development process and the way the project leader Peter Gaucher was able to keep the device as thin as its initial prototype was remarkable: essentially thinness comes at a price, but Gaucher was able to defend the machine against the forces of thickness and economics.

As soon as we have seed units I hope to get some Skylights into the hands of the Lenovo Blogger Advisory Council for their insights into how they use the device and ways to improve it as it evolves. This represents a very interesting exercise in innovation, one I was honored to have witnessed. It represents and embodies a lot of what makes Lenovo such an interesting place to be: a place where risks are taken and old paradigms are challenged. Is this the be-all, end-all social device? No, but it is a start that marks a radical departure from old familiar models to a new one altogether.

I discussed this category at length with my former Forbes.com buddy Om Malik last week in San Francisco. He had tablet fever to some extent, and was more focused on operating systems issues such as the convergence of Android and Chrome or the presence of Jolicloud. The issue, as I see it, is one that Lenovo SVP Peter Hortensius has called the “wasteland” — the “tweener” space between a smartphone and a netbook — the space where we all are seeking some device about the size of an airplane ticket. The place where the Apple Newton once lived. And the Sony Vaio P series, and even our own prototype Pocket Yoga. We need a big screen to stream our movies and our YouTubes, yet we want to hold it to our ears so we can talk. We need a device that is persistent, that doesn’t need an outlet to survive more than couple hours of constant use, something that we can show off (consumer electronics are fashion statements).

Does Skylight achieve that? We shall see. I know I am ready to move to the category and expect it will, overtime, morph as carrier 3G/4G wireless models change, the cloud becomes more mainstream, and the  category achives ubiquity.

Reviews

Notebookreview.com

Engadget

Gizmodo

Smartbooks, netbooks, ultrathins, MIDs …. XP, Win7, Ubuntu, Android, Chrome …. 2010 is going to be very confusing for consumers seeking a cheap, stylish, and smart way to connect to their cloud.  CES next week ought to be very interesting in terms of devices and operating systems and category blur. From the NYT:

“Computer makers, however, find themselves in a tough spot these days when it comes to experimentation.

“There are lower margins and more form factors to go around,” said Patrick Moorhead, a vice president at Advanced Micro Devices. “These guys have to balance smartphones, MIDs, smartbooks, netbooks, value ultrathins, expensive ultrathins, full-size laptops and new form factors in desktops.” (A MID is, of course, a mobile Internet device.)”

via Have You Zeen What H.P. Is Up To? – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

This is a very slick little device — think of a portable wireless WiFI router but instead of plugging into your cable or DSL it uses a 3G cell phone connection to provide wireless connectivity to up to five devices.

I am sitting at Logan Airport using the sucker — but can’t tunnel into the corporate VPN with it. Once I solve that snag I am flying and won’t need to commit every new thinkpad to a Verizon or AT&T WWAN/EVDO wireless WAN account.

The actual unit is smaller than this picture

So, now to cancel my X200′s AT&T account and live in the cloud while sticking it to the airport paid WiFi gods. Whoops, airport wifi is free right now thanks to Google.

You could buy one of these and equip a stack of Wifi enabled netbooks with one paid account …. the economics are very interesting and very disruptive provided I don’t bump over the 5 gigabytes of monthly bandwidth.

Waiting for a flight home to Boston, I lit up my wireless connection and tuned into MLB.com’s post season baseball feed. Having paid for two years in a row for a fairly weak service full of irrational blackouts and lots of calls to MLB.com’s customer service line to get permission to watch the paid stream, I expected to be able to follow TBS’ post season coverage through the MLB.com subscription.

Well, the good news is that I can — through a pretty slick video viewer that permits to select between eight camera angles and stack them together in a single, PIP, split, or two by two configuration. The problem of this “pick your angle” model is there is no editor/producer selecting camera angles and the overall experience is somewhat shitty. I want someone to decide what I need to see and not click like a fiend to get the camera to track a frozen-rope liner out to the 6-4-3 doubleplay.

The Twitter integration … well is interesting in that the peanut gallery is now officially blessed as contributors to the spectacle.

But overall, the most interesting thing about the MLB/TBS “HotCorner” application is checking out the behavior of the camera operators during commercial breaks when they zoom way in and like creeps perv the faces of the VIPs in the expensive seats to see if there are any celebrities worth calling out during the play-by-play.  Being the LA Dodgers one would expect some movie star to be fanning themselves with a program. The funny part is it is obvious the way the camera lingers that some producer is scanning faces and telling the cameraman to stick to faces wearing big “Jackie Onassis”  sunglasses or who look important by dint of their jawlines and silver hair.

Go Sox.

oh, yeah, Yankee Suck

What my world view is
Testing the Wicked Blogging App from Screaming Toaster. Seems to have a nice interface. I had been hitting my blog through the Blackberry browser but that was a long walk off the short dock. Wonder if there is a way to embed photos in process. Anyway: two day freebie then I need to decide on a $10 subscription.

This post was created at this location.

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google blogged yesterday about Google’s operating system direction. This is very significant as it signals a continuation of Google’s web-centric, cloud-focused view of the world, putting Chrome at the center of the experience.

This will be extremely significant over the next three years as the PC industry continues to evolve rapidly from a Wintel x86 legacy to a lighter, Smartphone type of model where connectivity is the enabler. This piece of news deserves the level of alerts it is kicking off. Add in the other piece of significant Google news this week — the symbolic dropping of the beta designation from GMail and Docs, and the future becomes a lot more clear.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

via Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS.

This has to be the oldest need in the world, but I would love to put my contacts into the cloud and keep them there, free from the incompatibilities of Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Blackberry, and whatever piece of crap device or software lies over the horizon.

1980s – newspaper reporter – I had a true rolodex. Stapling business cards onto the notched tabs.

1984 – PC Week. I move my contacts into AskSam, a flat file database. I start to print out huge snakes of sheetfeed dot matrix printer paper and pin to the wall of my cube.

1987 – I get sucked into a period of contact manager shiny-objectitis — GoldMine, ACT!, Lotus Agenda, Borland Sidekick ….. all fail

1988-1994: the email era commences. Starting with enterprise mail, external on MCI Mail, then CompuServe, The WELL. My personal contacts are all over the place by this point. I begin to lose portions of my “network” to entropy.

1995: Outlook. I start to declare MS Outlook is it. Despite the fact that the IT goons use some dumbass Novell email client as a follow on to CC:Mail. Opensource does not exist.

1995-2000: I rely on Outlook synching to a Palm Pilot. Forget synching to a Motorola cell phone. Not going to happen. Synch tools become a big buzz in the business.

2000: Lotus Notes enters my life at McKinsey. I give up on contact management. The Notes contact manager feels like something Franz Kakfa would write about.

2002-2004: back to Outlook, synching to a Windows Mobile device, a little HP thing ala the Palm.

2005: Back to Notes at IDG. I give up and refuse to manage contacts in Notes.

2006: Lenovo. Still on Notes. Not entering any contacts into Notes. Putting business cards into a binder with plastic sleeves.

2009: About to declare contact bankruptcy. My contacts are scattered to the winds.  I have IM contacts, internal Lenovo directories, backed up ancient CSV, PST and comma delimited Outlook files — gmail accounts, Thunderbird as my desktop email client pulling down pop3 mail for churbuck.com and my david.churbuck@gmail mail ……

Going forward: I want to stick this all in the cloud. How do I do this and balance my personal network with my professional? Suggestions please.

Chambers, the CEO of Cisco opines on GigaOM about the necessity of provisioning true broadband as part of the Obama economic stimulus package. Just as I am in favor of a big investment in high speed rail, I am definitely in favor of a high speed data highway for the country.

Chambers writes:

“If 100 Mbps at home seems ambitious, consider this: Japan and South Korea are already reaching that level. According to a forthcoming research paper by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, South Korea — a country with 1/6th the population of the United States — has almost as much Internet traffic. That’s because they’re already operating at average speeds of 49 Mbps.

In the U.S., ITIF projects that high-speed connections to the home would increase the number of telecommuters to 19 million by 2012. That would save 1.5 billion hours of commute time — and reduce gasoline consumption by 5 percent. It is a green technology, one that can help us kick our oil habit.”

I have telecommuted since 1988 when I started the New England bureau of a national magazine in my Boston bedroom. From 9600 bps Hayes Compatibility to my present DSL connection courtesy of Verizon (and as the first residential ISDN account on Cape Cod way back in the early early 90s), I would dearly love a surfeit of bits flowing my way. Would faster connections mean an economic boon for an economically challenged hinterland like Cape Cod? To some extent — and it certainly would change the nature of the upper Cape from arduous commuter bedroom community to a more normal residential cast with white collar types working from home for Fidelity rather than clogging Route 3 with their Camry’s.

Chambers doesn’t cite the set-aside in the stimulus plan for broadband. I need to go dig that out.

via John Chambers: Broadband Speeds Our Economy.