mikepk

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I picked up a copy of 1Password a while back when it was on sale. I have to give a brief plug for it, it’s a very nice piece of software. You never realize how many passwords you’re managing in your head and how bad your passwords are until you have something like 1Password managing them.

Gadget geeks love spec sheets. When the iphone was first released, many gadgeteers sneered at the device, no GPS? Insanse! No video? Crippled! No removable battery? Scandalous! 2MP camera? What a piece of crap!

When I first got the iPhone, and being of a technological bent, friends and acquaintances would ask me about the iPhone’s ‘revolutionary innovations’. Surprising many, I would say that there was little technically new or innovative with the iPhone. There were devices with touchscreens, browsers, email, etc… long before the iPhone. Even interface gestures were a very old area of research.

What Apple did that was innovative was approaching the mobile device from a completely different perspective. Instead of a phone that happened to be able to do some computing-like tasks, they came at it from the approach of a pocket computer that also happened to make phone calls. This sounds like a trivial distinction but it makes a big difference.

The touchscreen is not a bullet on a spec sheet. The touchscreen is a an expression of this philosophical approach to the mobile experience. It allows you to ‘paint’ any interface you want onto the device and allows you to iterate that design over time. This is exactly analogous to the development of the GUI, software based buttons and interfaces allows much greater flexibility than anything hardware based.

I’ve seen some of the coverage by tech bloggers, including Scoble, about the Nokia N97 device and I hold to my position that this marks a failure for Nokia. To be fair, the specs and the design of the device are actually quite impressive. I think Nokia has done an excellent engineering job with this device. Looking at videos and its capabilities, it’s quite sexy. The problem is that it reflects the same philosophical approach to product development that the mobile industry has had for years. The touchscreen feels like a tick-mark on a spec sheet and not an embodiment of a different approach.

Both the blackberry storm, and this new Nokia seem to have this same problem. If they can somehow just bolt on a touchscreen onto their existing OS/device, they’ll not only have feature parity with an iPhone but exceed it on every count. Unfortunately, that’s not why the iPhone is great, a touchscreen does not an iPhone make.

Apple: Aluminum MacBook X-Ray Makes Perfect Desktop Background: “”

Technology in x-ray always looks cool to me.

(Via Gizmodo.)

I’ve been using our new product VibeMetrix to read materials on social media tools, and general philosophy of social media marketing. It’s interesting how many slight variations there are on the theme and what people think it means.

I while back I ran across this slideshow by a local Boston social media expert Marta Kagan that I thought was pretty informative and entertaining. Been meaning to share for a while but I’ve been busy writing code.

I know we’re used to thinking of it that way, but I think that image belies the nature of the company or what it’s rapidly evolving into. Google has created some pretty cool technology, have some of the best and brightest working away in the Googleplex, but are they a technology company?

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Chrome, Google’s really interesting new browser, but why are they releasing a browser? I’ve been contemplating Google’s unique position in the tech space, and the fact that they make almost none of their money in that space.

If you take the perspective that they are not a technology company, why would they want to do this? If they’re not a technology company, then what? Google is in the business of advertising. Granted, their approach is very hight tech, but at it’s core, the vast majority of their revenue comes from ads.

Taking that view one possible motivation for creating their own browser comes into focus. What are the most popular browser plugins for Firefox? Ad blockers. If you control the browser, and you’re an advertising company, you can keep people from ignoring your ads.

I’m sure creating the “browser as OS” or possibly just improving the browser experience as a more stable platform for google apps, or possibly a development platform for Android were part of their reasoning for releasing Chrome, but at the moment they make almost no money from those types of efforts. The one thing I haven’t heard anyone talk about, and that I wouldn’t totally discount is the control of the ‘advertising channel’. I wouldn’t be surprised if Chrome either will intentionally lack a plugin architecture, or, at a minimum, will involve a vetting process that “for your safety” conveniently also disallows ad blockers.

It’s interesting to look at their actions in this way. Google is an advertising company and becoming more so each day.

In the embedded summize results I made in this post about politics the rapid fire tweets are counting down the required delegates for Obama to clinch the nomination. It’s kind of odd, you can almost hear a crowd of people counting down, a slow motion times square on new years eve. It’s a really interesting pattern.