Monthly Archives: March 2010

Why my iPad is coming 4/3 not ‘late April’

Posted on March 26, 2010 | 4 Comments

I was reading My friend Steve’s post over at TUAW on the subject and most of his reasons (most of them) resonated with me. Enough so that I wanted to go into more details on my own.

  1. Simple timing. 360|iDev starts 4/11. I think it makes sense to have an iPad and play with one before and during the conference. To not would be like running an iPhone conference and not having an iPhone (or iPod touch). So it just made sense not to wait.
  2. wifi. Before I had my iPhone I had my iPod touch and carried it everywhere. Unlike Steve I travel in places with either no free wifi, or shitty free wifi. BUT, i have an iPhone now. So my iPad doesn’t need that constant connection to the net. It’d be nice, of course, I want every device I own connected to the net. But for what I imagine my main use case to be (reading email on the couch, playing a game, or something else domestic like that) I’ll be at home on my home internet. Plus But when that connection is thru AT&T…. See 3. Then 4.
  3. AT&T. I truly hate AT&T. I’m sure they know it, I’m equally sure I’m not alone. I can’t think of another company that has worked so hard at being teh suck. I mean you have millions of customers essentially gifted to you. You didn’t earn them, or even have to market to them to lure them to you. Steve Jobs handed you millions of new users. And you failed. AT&Ts network is the suck, it’s terrible. I live in Denver, and now that Spring is coming, and the Rockies home opener is only 3 weeks away, I’m planning to have a useless iPhone. Every home game saturates what I assume is the single tower in LoDo, and while I have full bars, I have no network. So why would I want another device on such a craptastic network? Makes no sense.
  4. Sprint MiFi. I love having a 5 user portable hotspot in my pocket (that’s what she said?) that essentially gives me AT&T immunity. I can use my iPhone, soon (I think) I’ll be able to make skype calls if I really need to, etc. So when there’s no wifi for my iPad, and when the Rockies are in town, I’m still able to function like an affluent american in 2010. Fuck you AT&T. (Note to sprint, the connection speeds on my Mifi suck! 3g? at .57 Mbits I don’t agree)
  5. Ok with moo’ing. If you owned a first gen MacBook Pro, you know what I mean. Thankfully mine never moo’ed, and my MacBook AIR’s weird CPU throttling was handled by a hack until Apple released a fix. I know what I’m getting into and am ok with that. iPad V1 will be a vastly different creature than the 3GS equivalent (the model 3 years from now). That’s fine, I can live with that because 6.
  6. I’m gonna jailbreak that bitch! You heard me! The moment the dev team (you guys are gonna work on it right?) release the JB, I’m on it. I love the freedom my iPhone 2G has to be customized, and do what I want it to do (Skype calls now, ha!). The primary reason my 3GS isn’t JB’ed is that it experienced a weird battery drain so I put it back in jail, I can’t have my primary mobile computer/phone be dead batteried in 3 hours. My iPad on the other hand, will never be mission critical, so it’s getting JB’ed ASAP. I think the true awesomeness (as usual) will be experienced by iPad owners who break free of Apple.

So those are my reasons for ordering an iPad. As a consumer, it’s not a very interesting device. I’m not gonna spend whatever Apple asks for iWork, because that’s stupid. I’m not gonna work on spread sheets, or keynotes without a keyboard. Sorry I don’t see that working out well. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it. As 1. an iDevice conference organizer it makes sense I know what my customers are playing with, and 2. as a hacker wannabe, I can’t wait to see what it’s truly capable of.

I don’t think it’s worth waiting an extra month, paying more money (AND then paying $30/month for actual 3G) just to have an always (except that AT&T fails so often it’s more like 80% of the time) connected device.

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Posted in 360|iDev, Conferences, I am a Consumer, iPhone, Mac, Technology, Work

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360Flex San Jose – Recap

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 5 Comments

It’s been a while since our last 360|Flex. Almost a year in fact. Indianapolis in May.

Since getting back from 360|Flex, I’ve been full tilt forward on 360|iDev (rest? Decompress time, weak sauce!!), but wanted to take a few minutes to write down my thoughts on this latest 360|Flex.

For one thing it was a huge success. We made money. Not a metric buttload, and it would have been more if we hadn’t carried a ton of debt with us out of 2009. BUt still, we made money, and that’s a good sign for the event and the company.

We did a few things (as usual) differently.

  1. We had volunteers to help out. We had I think 8 folks, that got a free pass in exchange for helping out. w had them help assemble SWAG bags, work the reg desk (This was THE first 360|Event where the keynote wasn’t delayed, and where I was able to actually hop up on stage, vs have some one go start the keynote.) work our video cameras (more on that), and in general be around to do whatever we needed.
  2. We had Nicole on board officially. As Tom leaves, Nicole joins. It’s pretty cool to be working with my wife to make the events even better!
  3. Video. We’ve wanted to do video since Seattle ’07. In fact we had video in Seattle, but marketed them poorly. We had Video in San Jose ’09, but it was Adobe TV. This time we decided to go lo-fi to start and see how it works. We used 8 SD Flip Cams, and Camtasia Relay. Volunteers swapped cams out for each session, and set up Relay on speaker laptops. Now that hard part. I’ve got 40+ sessions to process into usable video. We’re not sure what to do yet as far as distribution. Attendees will get the video for free, but I’d love to try and sell access to the video (un-DRM’ed of course) files. I think there’s value in the videos, and think it’d be nice if we could support the company between events with video sales.
  4. Panels. Panels are another thing we toyed with for a while, thinking it’d be cool to do, but never really executing. We decided to pull the trigger. 360|Flex had 3 panels, and they all rocked! Panels are here to stay. We also put a panel as the last session on the last day, to bring everyone together at the end of the conference. The panels are a great way to have all attendees in the same place, and get great discussions started! I’m really excited about the Panels, and can’t wait to do more.
  5. Official hotel while using Ebay. Normally when we do the SJ event, we don’t have an official hotel, or if we do it’s just a room block at the Holiday Inn. This time we went downtown San Jose to the Marriott. Who offered a shuttle bus each day. That worked out awesome! Each day the bus brought everyone to Ebay and took them back to the hotel at night. After the evening receptions, folks bussed back to the Marriott, and partied at the bar, out in downtown, etc. it was awesome.

Over all I couldn’t be happier with 360|Flex San Jose. We had an almost sell out crowd, at about 365 registrations, not to mention the “I had to register?” Crowd that we printed badges for on the fly.

I learned on my flight out, that Frontier won’t be servicing SJC after mid-May, which means for the most part, my reasons to fly Frontier at all are drastically diminished. I’ll probably start flying Southwest to test the waters of that airline. Since I never watch the free DirectTV that I get with Ascent level status, I won’t miss that. Everything else I enjoy about my Ascent level status, I can pay for with Southwest.

Sorry frontier, poor service of late, terrible website, and now leaving SJC…

Now on to 360|iDev, San Jose! I can’t wait to see my Apple crew! We’ll all be fresh off iPad euphoria, and ready to talk iPad apps!

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Posted in 360Conferences, 360Flex, 360|iDev, Adobe Flex, Business, community, Conferences, Travel, Work

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