Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Like a fish out of water.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

My wife has recently become addicted to technology, one might go so far as to call her a TechnoSnob. I just got off the phone with Gina a few minutes ago, she is in Florida for the next few days on vacation with her mom and a few of her cousins. They are all in town for Bubba’s wedding, one of her cousins from Lansing who has since moved to the Florida (somewhere in the Ormond Beach Area).

Well, apparently there is no Wi-Fi in the vicinity of their hotel. Gina told me that she was not able to find any available networks when she booted up her macbook earlier.

NO INTERWEBS!!!!

Whatever is she to do?

Apparently, the correct course of action is to text me and ask for locations that are nearby that have wifi access. I found a couple of places, the one that actually looks pretty neat is 15 miles north. I didn’t bother to send her the link for the BeachHouse Beanery. Maybe if she gets online and reads this post, she might think about heading 15 miles north for some wifi and coffee on the beach.

The only time that I have ever really been without access to hi-speed Internet access was up at the cottage and well I kind of found a way around that as well.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

UPDATE: I was looking over the hotel website and it says “We also offer our guests a lobby business center with complimentary high speed internet access.” I read this as them offering wi-fi in the lobby, it could just mean they offer a computer that is hooked to the Internet. I have yet to hear from Gina as to what form the “complimentary high speed Internet access” comes as.

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Posted in gina, Technology, travel, vacation | No Comments »

The birth of a “Freemium” Service

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

I wish I could claim to have been the one to coin the term Freemium. Per Wikipedia, the phrase is attributed to venture capitalist Fred Wilson.

Freemium is a business model which works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features. The word freemium is a portmanteau created by combining the two aspects of the business model: free and premium. The business model has gained popularity with Web 2.0 companies.

I wanted to write  this post a little while back, closer to when it happened, but cest la vie.

This post is about Kindlefeeder.com.

My wife has been an avid fan of Kindlefeeder for almost as long as she has owned an Amazon Kindle. It is a very cool service that pulls in the RSS feeds from the blogs (or news sites) that you want and packaged them up into one document. It then emails that document to your Kindle’s email address.

There are a few different services out that there that do this type of operation, some of them are web based, some are desktop software packages you install. I think that the web based ones like Kindlefeeder are the better way to go.

The web based ones are representative of a centralized system.  Whereas, the desktop software packages are representative of a distributed system.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both kinds. In my opinion though the centralized way is the better way to distribute such a service, to the masses (particularly when you are doing it as a freemium). The main factor behind this is, desktop software requires a certain level of technical sophistication that you don’t normally find across the vast majority of “the masses”.

With a desktop software model you will need to push changes out via software updates, which HAVE to be installed to work. There is also the factor that your software organization will need to be prepared to support the different operating systems that exist.

The web based system on the other hand means that you can push out changes immediately and all users will see the new graphics or benefit from the bug fixes. While you still have multiple ‘systems’ to support, the browsers are all fairly uniform.

But I am getting off topic here. Let me bring this back to Kindlefeeder.

Kindlefeeder is a service that sends a compiled document of all the RSS feeds that you want to your Kindle email address. You manage your account via the Kindlefeeder.com website. And the behind-the-scenes software processes there go out and get the RSS data and compile the document per the schedule that you choose.

Beautiful!!!

Of course, getting back to the centralized vs distributed comparison. A distributed software service, is typically cheaper to operate. Because the distributed service will use the software of the local machines where it is being run. Also, in the case of the Kindle these software services typically transfer the documents to the Kindle via the USB vs email (which saves the Kindle owner money).

The centralized software service requires that you have servers, bandwidth, disk space and if your service gets really popular you sometimes have to exponentially increase all of those things. At the Web 2.0 conference a few years back, one of the original architects of Digg.com stated that they were adding several servers a day. He also stated that they started with only one server, that in the beginning they optimized the heck out of it.

Kindlefeeder.com was registered in September of 2008, but on March 10th 2009, Kindlefeeder put out a notice stating that there would be a change in their service.

Because of the money and time required to keep Kindlefeeder afloat and improving has grown considerable, I am now asking for a small monthly subscription payment from higher-volume users and voluntary donations from others to help support this website.

So from now on there will be two types of service: free basic and unlimited.

Free basic: just by having a Kindlefeeder user account, you can subscribe to up to 5 feeds and use all the features of the servie for free.

Unlimited: For $5 a month, you can subscribe to an unlimited number of feeds.

From the first moment that Gina pointed the Kindlefeeder service out to me, I wondered when the shoe would drop. When would Kindlefeeder reach that critical mass point of either such severe popularity that the owner would NEED to start charging for the service because of the costs associated to supporting the service or because they felt that they could start to charging because of the fact that it was just such a useful utility.

This means that it took approx 6 months to reach the point where Daneil Choi, owner of KindleFeeder.com felt the NEED to start charging.

To me this transformation from a simple free service to a freemium service means that there is a potential market. That there might be room for two or three different paid kindle oriented feed services.

In terms of a looking at a free service and trying to apply what one might call traditional market logic, the ‘URL Abstraction’ market is one that is a bit saturated, particularly with free services. And yet there appears to be room out there for at least one freemium provider. Budurl.com turned up their freemium version a while ago.

From what I have heard, their ‘analytics’ package was drawing quite a crowd. I have also heard that once they started their freemium offerings, they lost some of their following.

In a related note, an article about what I am calling ‘URL Abstraction’ hit on TechCruch hit my radar recently. The article lists five different companies that ‘shrink urls’ or what I would call ‘URL Abstraction’. The reason for the article is that apparently Bit.Ly recently received $2M in funding.

To that the article speculates that TinyURL, should be worth approx $46M. The interesting bit though, is that TinyURL doesn’t charge any money, they do not appear to have any direct monetization in their business model. Bit.ly does not have a direct monetization strategy either, yet. That begs the question, how did they get $2M of investment? Will we see them pump out a monetization strategy similar to BudUrl or will they take that money and produce some other kind of service.

Only time will tell.

Laterz

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Posted in business, kindle, newTechnology, Technology | No Comments »

30 minutes of darkness

Friday, March 6, 2009

It might be closer to 40, but regardless.

My beloved little server “Jules” who sits on a shelf in a colo in Dallas, had a hiccup today.

I still don’t know exactly what happened, but something caused him to go ‘dark’.

Thankfully the folks over at SprocketNetworks are fantastic, specifically Josh.

THANKS JOSH!

I have not had a problem with Jules in quite, quite a long time. If memory served and I should have gotten a snapshot of this. Jules had been online for over a year.

Things seems to be back to normal. Replacing Jules has come to mind. I am torn between something completely virtual, like Amazon’s EC2 or replacing him with a new box.

I am going to crunch the numbers and see what the best solution is.

Laterz, time to eat.

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Posted in amazon, Technology | 1 Comment »

The Power of Vision

Thursday, March 5, 2009

I do not follow many blogs, nor do I repost or comment on others blogs here much. I guess I am a bit anti-social even on the web. I am endevouring to change this, but that is not the topic of this post.

One of the few blogs I follow, Anil Dash, had a really good post yesterday, the title was ‘re:Vision’.

“…is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off? My sense is that we’re more likely to get positive answers to that question if the teams that are making these products are led by an appropriately ambitious vision.”

Those closing lines of Anil’s re:Vision post, are what made me feel compelled to comment on his latest article. I have been paying more and more attention to product design over the last couple of years and I don’t just mean the style of the design, i.e. how cool something looks.

I have started asking myself whenever I come across a new product (or service), “What problem does that solve?” Because, a great product should solve problems (or at least more problems than it creates).

Rarely, have I thought about “is it a good thing for the world if this thing takes off?”

I think to looks a product/service and be able to really answer that question, you do need to look at the vision, move beyond what is quite frankly just the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem”.

“When launching the new version of Amazon’s book device the Kindle, Jeff Bezos offered up the vision that the company has for the device: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.” It’s a message that Amazon has been consistently advocating since the device’s initial rollout, and meshes nicely with the early Amazon vision of being the world’s biggest bookstore. “

The opening paragraph of Anil’s article. He quotes Jeff Bezos, who states the vision for the Kindle(2). I mean, in terms of solving a problem, if there is someone out there that truly needs access to every book ever printed and they need it in less than 60 seconds, then Amazon’s Kindle devices are going to likely be their best bet.

But, as I said, moving beyond the utilitarian aspect of “solving a problem” the idea of being able to access any book in the world in less than 60 seconds (for a nominal fee of course) is amazing. It would seem like the stuff of the future just a couple of decades ago, only the futuristic worlds of the Jetsons or Star Trek would allow you to have that sort of information at your fingertips.

But thanks in part to many of the other companies, some of which were mentioned in Anil’s article, like Microsoft and Apple that dream of instant gratification has become a reality. After reading books like “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, “What the Dormouse Said”, “Accidental Empires” and lastly “Dealers of Lightning”, I would have to add companies like Xerox, IBM, Bolt Beranek and Newman, government agencies such as ARPA (later known as DARPA).

I also want to also mention Vannevar Bush for his idea of the Memex (proposed in 1945) having influenced J.C.R. Licklider who is considered one of the most important figures in computer science. Lick, as he was known to friends, wrote a fairly famous paper Man-Computer Symbiosis.

My point of all of that is that, the idea of being able to access man’s collective knowledge is something that has been around what seems like forever (in Internet time). And I applaud Amazon as taking up the vision where others have left off.

I am glad to see that there are companies out there that are doing more than just solving problems, they are trying to change the world. I know that the made for TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley comes to mind, in regards to a young Steve Jobs talking about how they are “changing the world, overthrowing dead culture” (paraphrased).

And of course, it just also happens to fit nicely into Amazon’s business plan to be able to give you access to any book in the world, with no physical delivery to deal with (or a warehouse, or physical returns, etc).

Latez

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Posted in amazon, apple, blogs, kindle, Technology | No Comments »

New Look

Monday, March 2, 2009

I still really want to do a custom theme, but just have not had the time to figure out what I want, let alone build it.

I took a look around and I liked this one, it was a very simple install. I of course, will definitely need to find a theme for Gina.

Back to the grind.

Laterz

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Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Why does one climb the mountain?

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Accepted answers:

“Because it was there.”

“It was in the way.”

“Because I could.”

Unacceptable answers:

“Mountain, what mountain?”

“It was a hill when I went up there.”

“The guru ordered a pizza.”

Ok, I don’t really have a good reason for the bad mountain climbing philosophy bit. I brought up the philosophy like question, due to something I have been working on in my spare time. I really want to need to write a better post about this and I will.

In the meantime, please take a look at the program I have been working on.

First off, let me apologize about it being in VB.NET. I haven’t worked in a client-side language in well about 10 years. VB.NET was easy enough for me to pick-up where I left off with VB6 so many  hears ago and yet was incredibly frustrating.

Not knowing the specific syntax for what you want to do in a given computer programming language, is like having the words right on the tip of your tongue and yet everything you say comes out sounding like gibberish.

My VB client for HashServer.

As I said earlier in this post, I need to write a much longer one to explain exactly why I was working on this, the short answer is I got the idea from reading Eric Sink on the Business of Software and of course because I could.

I have to shutdown and get to bed, I need to get into the office extra early tomorrow.

Laterz

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Posted in Technology | No Comments »

It came home

Monday, February 16, 2009

My 360 has been home for a couple of days now.

When I originally shipped it off for repair, I did not think to list my shipping address as the office. Which is unusual, I normally have packages sent to the office, since more often than not they require a signature, which does not happen when I am not home, obviously.

Microsoft replaced my busted 360 with a completely different one. Gina asked me why they did this, I can only surmise that it is because it is easier for the “repair facility” to put all the busted ones in a crate to ship back to China for “repair” and just pick a “refurbed” one from the pile and ship back to me.

They gave me a nice letter stating that they apologize for causing me any inconvenience, which was nice of them.

Even nicer was the Xbox:LIVE Gold card they sent me, good for one extra month of service. Because a day after having my 360 home and getting my daily fix of Fallout3, my LIVE Gold membership expired.

So, I guess I want to say two things.

1. Microsoft you suck! I mean there was probably some executive out there that weighed the costs of repair vs the time and cost for delaying the launch. So they shipped a buggy product. Which, when you ship softwar can be forgiven, just a little bit more so. You know, because a software patch is not as much of a problem as sending in a physical unit.

2. Thank You for acknowledging that you suck. You guys have endoured the “slings and arrows” of many rabid users, competitors and pundits and in my opinion have provided what has to be deemed GREAT customer service. You extended the warranty on all 360 units by 2 additional years for the RRD issue, you have taken to replacing the units with refurbs, speeding up the return time, and most of all you give the consumer something for their troubles.

Those are all things that you did NOT have to do. Those are things that I believe help make up for the fact that you guys shipped buggy hardware.

So definitely keep up the good customer service, but possibly, please possibly try to not ship hardware with such a fatal design flaw in the future.

Laterz

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Posted in Technology, video games, XBox360 | No Comments »

“Ohhhh, Shiny. [Click]“

Monday, February 16, 2009

These were the sounds heard the other day as my wife made the purchase of her Kindle2.

Gina has had her current Kindle since October of 2008, during this time period she has raved about the marvels of this ingenious little electronic device. I don’t know this for a complete fact, but I am pretty sure she has convinced a few people to buy one of those buggers.

Did I mention that she is a bit of a Kindle fanatic?

At lunch we listen to the Kindle Chronicles, a weekly podcast debuting every Friday. The man’s voice that narrates the Chronicles has got this weird soothing aspect to it. Maybe that is what got Gina to make the purchase of the Kindle2.

Gina was not originally planning to buy the new model. She had, like many Kindle fanatics been reading all of the gossip possibly available. Reading about how it would no longer have a SD card slot or how the battery would no longer be replaceable.

But after reading all the hype and the transcriptions of the Amazon press conference, she decided that she had to have it!

Hence…

“Ohhhh, Shiny. [Click]“

The new Kindle is due to arrive  on the 26th. That is unless she changes her mind and pops for the overnight shipping. She is sitting here next to me, waffling on whether or not to spend the extra $20.

I won’t even get into the planning she has been doing on what to do for a new Kindle cover, given that her old cover (which is not really even that old) does not fit the Kindle2.

Of course, I have yet to mention the most important fact of all this hub-bub.

Gina gets a new Kindle on the 26th. This means that I should have my very own Kindle on the 27th. I figure it will take her about 24 hours to settle into the new unit.

I have had the opportunity read probably 30 pages worth of various books on it. I am honestly looking forward to having this cool piece of technology for myself, the ability to carry hundreds of books in something that is small and relatively light.

Gina is looking forward to us being able to read the same books, namely the books that she reads, as she finds my books boring. I am looking forward to reading some of the fiction that she loves.

I do need to note that this is one of the few, if not possibly first time that I have been gifted technology. In the past I have normally been the one to pass along technology.

Laterz

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Posted in newTechnology, Technology | 3 Comments »

Pirates of my silicon living room

Sunday, December 7, 2008

It has been said “It is better to be a pirate than join the navy.”

Notably, it was said during the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, which Gina, John and I watched yesterday in the living room. Normally, this wouldn’t be remotely blog worthy.

This however was not a normal viewing. We watched it on YouTube.com, on the living room TV, via the S-Video cable on my laptop. The reason we had to watch it on YouTube, is because I apparently left the DVD disc in my old HP laptop, which is back at the office. (We had watched it a few weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon at the office.)

But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I was able to pipe the YouTube version out to the TV. The sound aspect was a slightly different story, I had to steal the sound system from my office computer. There were a few downsides to this setup.

The first downside, was that the 95 minute film was broken into about 10 parts, each being just a little bit less than 10 minutes each. This meant that after each part ended, soemone would have to click on the next segment, which was usually me.

The second downside, is that for some reason part #7 was missing, not sure why it was missing, the “video had been removed”. All the others were perfectly good.

The last downside was more of a minor, minor annoyance. Not sure that John or Gina noticed (or cared), but the dubbing looked to be a bit off. I am not sure if this was a combination of the s-video output or the videoes themselves. But the audio appeared to be about a half second ahead of the video.

The, next marvel of technology was that we all wanted to watch Hackers, a cheesy, yet classic techie movie. I love it because of the cameo appearances of Jolt Cola. Now, I still swear that we own the DVD of Hackers, but it could have been a VHS tape. Either way, we searched our DVD collection and could not for the life of us find it.

So we turned to the U-Verse’s video on-demand service. Low and behold, there it was for a mere $2.00, we could rent it. The movie started up almost instantly (not suffering from any of your usual “buffering lag” that you get when watching movies over the Internet.

I mean, the idea of a video on-demand isn’t anything new, cable companies have had the technology for quite some time. But overall the number of movies available have usually been limited and therefore only your current titles. The U-Verse video library has a wide variety of movies available, Hackers was made in 1995.

While, I am talking about this type of tech, I have to mention the recent addition of a marvelous feature to the XBOX-Live experience, Netflix Video On-Demand. Meaning that I can watch streaming Netflix videos through my XBOX-360. I have used the service to watch some silly TV shows (“Battlestar Galactica 1980″) and some funny movies (“War Inc”, and “Cash Back”). The quality was quite good, DVD level and I experienced no lag.

Earlier today we went and saw a fabulously funny film, “Four Christmases”. We went to see it with Jeremy and Nichole. I had been a little apprehensive about it recently, as I was afraid that having seen numerous trailers for the movie that I had already seen all of the funny parts. Nope, not in the least. If you haven’t seen the movie and think that from any trailers you have seen that you might be interested in seeing it, please definitely go and see it

Tonight we watch “Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day” via the U-Verse video on-demand. It was one that Gina and I had wanted to see in the theatres but had missed out catching down at the Great Hills Regal (which tends to show more of the art-house style flicks).

We closed out the evening with “Sweet Home Alabama”, which we have on DVD. It is one of Gina’s favorites and I have to admit I like it too.

Well, it is definitely time for bed.

Laterz

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Posted in movies, Technology, XBox360 | 1 Comment »

The iPod Conspiracy

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Now anyone who followed the early days of Apple’s iPod, should remember the criticism they faced about the fact that the battery is not replaceable, and that initially they did not even offer you the option to pay them money to replace the battery. Initially you were screwed.

Because of the fact that the batteries are good for about 16 months or so (depending upon how much you use it), the story didn’t break for a while. The fact that you cannot simply replace the battery means that there is a built-in upgrade cycle. For some folks they will want to retain their cherished iPod and simply pay the $69 dollars to get a fresh battery in what is likely not their original iPod.

While I am talking about the non-replaceable battery and how Apple has a built-in replacement cycle, guaranteeing that a chunk of their consumer-base is going to buy a new iPod ever 16 months (or at least shell out another $69). What I am really wanting to write about here tonight is how, Apple, god I can’t believe that I have to write this.

Apple stole my iPod Nano.

Yup, I am relatively certain it was an agent of Apple who stole my iPod Nano from me, whilst I was getting off American Airlines flight 502 from San Jose and landing in Austin around 10:50pm (central). It was there one minute and I could swear that I put it into my laptop bag, but when I looked for it the next day at the office (because it was time to blast my eardrums with some loud and abusive tunes), it was gone.

No where to be found. I thought that maybe I had removed it from my laptop bag and had left it (or dropped it) somewhere in my home office. I even searched the trunk of my car, but to no avail, it has vanished.

In discussing the disappearance of my iPod Nano with Jeremy, he reminded me that Apple had just released a new iPod Nano.

And that is when it hit me. An agent of Apple must have filched my beloved silver iPod Nano (3rd Gen) to ensure that I am forced to buy a new one (4th Gen).

Apple iPod Nano 4th Gen

But before, I get a cease-and-desist notice about this blog post. Let me say that, I in no way am accusing Apple or Mr Jobs of stealing my iPod Nano.

For the record I do not think that there is any sort of master list of all the folks out there that have iPods  and Mr Jobs is arranging for them to be, hmmmm, what would be the best term, let’s just say ‘retired from service’. I am sure he has a VP for that. (just kidding)

I was an idiot and left it on the plane. I had been listening to it on the way back an reading More Joel on Software. And I had been using the seat next to me, well as an open seat next to me to store my various ‘carry-on items that I had taken out during the flight’. I remember telling myself to put everything from within the seat into my bag. And I managed to put everything in there, except the black timbuk2 accessory (velcro) pouch that held my Nano.

MORON!!!

It just happens to be a (lucky) coincidence that Apple releases the 4th Gen iPod Nano at the same time I was a moron and left my Nano on the plane.

I had been wanting to write a blog post about how ‘I am an iPod Junkie’, because of the fact that I own(ed) a Nano, a Touch and a Shuffle. Well, if I do end up getting the 4th Gen Nano, maybe I will finally do that post.

The wife has told me that I should use my iPod touch more. I do use it, but usually to surf the web, read email (quickly) and watch movies. It however lacks that scroll wheel, which provides the tactile interface allowing for quick changes in volume and the ability to quickly scroll through your entire music collection.

The topic of how I should just use my Touch while waiting to see if American Airlines happens to find it (or a good Samaritan happens to turn it in), I told him that it didn’t make sense to me that the Touch doesn’t have a speaker in it, so that I can listen to music or movies without headphones or the ability to change the volume without having to ‘wake it up’. I also think it would be better if it had a camera built-in, given the fact that there is a ‘photos’ ‘button’ so prominently placed on the main screen of the Touch.

Guess what else Apple has released, as 2nd Generation iPod touch.

Apple iPod Touch

YUP! It has a speaker and external volume controls, maybe the 3rd Generation will have that camera built-in.

Well, I need to get to bed. Maybe Santa will bring me the 4th Gen Nano for X-mas, course my b-day is literally right around the corner.

Laterz

Please note this post is an expressive piece of FICTION, the only real truth in here is that I lost my iPod Nano and that Apple recently launched the 4th Gen iPod Nano and 2nd Gen iPod Touch.

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Posted in newTechnology, Technology | 4 Comments »

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