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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 [...]

I thought I’d hate Four Square

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!

Amazon sides with publishers, hurts future

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?

Calling Mobile developers

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.

Did Sony beat Amazon to the desktop?

A while back I wrote that the killing stroke in the eBook reader marketshare war wouldn’t be the reader device any more than the iPod was in the eMusic war. It’ll be the desktop software that powers such devices. I won’t re-hash my thoughts on that, read them here. but according to Mobilereads, Sony might [...]

Again, we need a law to enforce “Don’t be a dick”

Airports are like movies and concerts in that they encourage asshole behavior hand “It’s all about me” thinking. I don’t know why, and not everyone does it, but it seems easier to get to that point when flying.

I typically check my bags. Either I’m meeting Tom and my flight is first anyway so I have time, or I’m traveling long enough that I need my big bag. 9 out of 10 times, even when I’m flying with my smaller luggage (that can fit overhead) I check it.

I understand a lot of people are in a hurry (whether they really are or just think they are) and don’t want to wait for luggage, that’s ok. But those same people seem to usually be the ones who can’t or won’t grasp the “must fit in overhead, and only 1 allowed” rule. I’ve seen people with 2 rolly bags, 1 rolly bag, and a huge duffel, etc. there’s many variations.

Jailbreaking your iPhone, the joys

You can argue stability, blah blah blah. but I’ve never found the exisitng iPhone OS 100% stable either, so that’s a fairly spurious argument. It’s surely a matter of personal taste, but having been re-introduced to the possibilities a jailbroken iPhone possesses, I’m finding that it’s very tempting to make that leap on my main phone.

Overall I think the jailbreaking community is definitely on to something and seems to be really becoming mainstream. It was pretty cool to load up Cydia and see the store that was announced at 360|iDev in March. Saurik and crew have done an awesome job. They’re bringing a level of choice and control to the iPhone that Apple has taken away from us. As a consumer I can’t fault with that at all.

Why I bought an iPhone 3GS

I’ve got my 3GS (so space any more in the name) now. It’s great.

I just got it, literally, a few days ago. No I didn’t rush out to order one at WWDC after the keynote. I didn’t go wait in line at an Apple store, or any other variation on fan boy-dom. Oh and I could have, because I nver bought a 3G and bought my 2G on ebay, so I’ve been contract free for a while.

No longer.

I wasn’t sold on the 3GS. for one thing, it’s still aesthetically ugly IMO. It’s plastic, which I don’t like. I don’t like it because plastic feels crappy. I don’t like it because when the 2G came out, Apple made a big deal about plastic sucking and the aluminium body being so nice. I agree.

My Friend wrote a book, buy it.

Last week I was at a book reading/signing for a new friend in Denver, Ron Lewis.

His book ‘Stick it to the Man: How to Skirt the Law, Scam Your Enemies , and Screw Big, Fat, Stupid, Lazy Corporations…for Fun and Profit!’ launched last week, and the party was at a the Barnes & Noble downtown.

Ron is a great guy, truly interested in meeting people and doing what he can to help them succeed. When I first met Ron, I was blown away by his genuineness, he proposed we meet for coffee and was not just looking for one more person to talk about his book to. We talked about 360|Conferences, my Kindle (which I brought with him and showed him).