Monthly Archives: July 2009

Posted on July 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

AT&T — iPhone Hell

I gotta admit, I had no complaints with my Edge iPhone 2G, and few with my new 3GS, until the other week, when I happened to have 3 business conference calls in a day, and had to take them all on my home phone. ATTFAIL for sure. More bars where don’t need them, it would seem.

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Posted in community

I thought I’d hate Four Square

Posted on July 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

I clearly remember when I heard about Four Square (FS). My reaction was ‘meh’

I figured I’d wait it out until the fad wore off. That is until I went to WWDC. I imagine it was much the same at SXSW, the right mix of people to initiate a chain reaction. We were out at one of the too many competing parties, every one had it. I figured I’d join in.

Screen shot 2009-07-21 at 4.07.32 PMI racked up some serious points and badges thanks to the nightlife of WWDC, and as you can see, I’m still mayor of the Intercontinental… guess they don’t get many developer/social media types.

Then I came home, where I work out of my home office… my Four Square awesomeness quickly declined except at my gym and my house (Yeah cheating, but screw you, cubie, going to lunch every day, blah blah) where I reign supreme.

What really keeps me interested in Four Square, and even brightkite is the awesome outside the phone potential. I want my starbucks to give the mayor a free coffee (Frapaccino please). I want my neighborhood bar (where Dave and I are in a cold war for mayorship) half off drinks, or a free drink, something.In the brighkite world, I want to check in and see that where I am is running a Brightkite special, or maybe not where I am, but the place next door.

Where FS excels is that it identifies the losers (cough) people who frequent a place. Rewards them for doing so with points and meaningless badges, that can’t even be printed out! What if they got a burger instead!

This techcrunch article is exactly what I’m talking about. Ideally Brightkite will get there first, sorry FS, I gotta go with the home team. I definitely think whoever can start cementing these relationships first, will be hard to unseat, and FS already has a model. There’s no need to discount to all users, though that’s awesome, just give the mayor something great! Everyone will see, and want to be mayor, and guess how you do that? Be the one to visit a place the most. Win Win.

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Posted in Business, community, I am a Consumer, iPhone, Social Media, Technology

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Amazon sides with publishers, hurts future

Posted on July 20, 2009 | 3 Comments

Much like Jake, I’m not overly surprised by Amazon’s (my words) Bonehead move. We all knew the Kindle was DRM’ed up the ass.

I mean they already reached out and started disabling text to speach, so is reaching out and removing content that big a stretch of the imagination? Not really, sadly.

I am however sad that Amazon has sided with Publishers. This will definitely cost them a lot of goodwill capital they might have had. Where as simply telling the publisher they’d no longer sell the book, but that sold copies were out in the wild, would have won them uncountable good will. Publishers are expecting unrealistic things in eBooks. If a book is pulled from the shelves (A real dead tree book) the publisher has no expectation of getting copies back that are sold. How could they? Send book retrieval ninjas out to scour the globe?

Unfortunately Amazon has given them unreasonable power over consumers, so now books I’ve legally purchased, can be taken away from me. I wonder, what happens to my notes and markup? I mean i might have a great many valuable thoughts captured in the annotations of a book. If Amazon/the publisher decide I can no longer have that book, do they also get to take my annotations?

When I got my iPod i began stripping the DRM off my music. I left the identification markers on, because I believe that piracy is bad juju and since I knew I wouldn’t be doing it, I left the “This song was bought by Apple ID j_wilker” tag on all my music. I did remove the restrictions on what I can do with the songs though.

Apple finally came around and convinced the music industry to take their heads out of their asses and released iTunes Plus. I no longer have to fuss with stupid music DRM that restricts me unreasonably.

It appears I’ll be doing the same with my Kindle content. Amazon is welcome to sue me, I’d love for them to sue some one who’s not contributing to piracy, but simply doesn’t want their rights as a consumer violated.

I have no problem with eContent I purchase being tagged as purchased by me, so if it shows up in China  being mass marketed and sold, I can answer for that. but I really think Amazon has crossed the line, by allowing publishers to recall works, and modify existing works post sale.

John Birmingham lost a reader that way, and apparently many more will too. Maybe I’ll get back into the classics at Project Gutenburg.

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Posted in Business, eBooks, I am a Consumer, Kindle, Technology

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Calling Mobile developers

Posted on July 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

For those that might not have heard, Tom and I are organizing InsideMobile, the end of this month.

InsideMobile is a 2 day event, starting Sunday July 26th with a full day of hands on training in Palm Pre/Mojo SDK, PhoneGap, and even mobile app design.

Monday is 4 rooms with 18 sessions total talking mobile development from metrics gathering, to business opportunities to Augmented Reality (I really can’t wait for this! We’ve got two sessions back to back)

I can’t wait! San Jose is fun! Our speaker line up is folks I know and love to see, and abunch of new folks I’ve never met and can’t wait to have a beer with!

If you know Tom and I at all, you know this event is going to be big, not  to be all ego, but we try our best, to make sure even events with less turn out are fun and engaging, this will be no different,

Go check it out, it’s gonna be a great event! If you need any incentive, ‘johnismyfriend’ will save you 40% on registration, which of course being a Tom and I event, is already pretty damn reasonable!

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Posted in 360Conferences, community, Conferences, InsideMobile, Travel

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