line of site

theyrule.net

this was pointed to me by a colleage who has no blog (isn't it funny how weblogs are how you refer to people now? ) - but it's absolutely great: a flash app that maps out relationships between boards of directors of some of the bigger companies in the US. even with all the SEC regulations, you would be surprised how many director positions are the result of phone calls from fat white guys recommending other fat white guys. in fact the graphical depictions of the directors might be the best thing about this. check it out:

theyrule.net

konfabulator and apple

i'm not sure what to make of the whole mess of konfabulator, a really cool applet environment for OS X with a great open developer API, and apple themselves, who seem to have announced this exact idea in the next version of OSX, codenamed Tiger.

we've all seen this done before by both microsoft and apple, putting small independent developers (as well as big ones like netscape) out of business by putting the same identical features into the OS. when the features become free, consumers no longer lay down the $30 for the pay app, and pretty soon the independent developers spend a ton of time on the support tail of software with no future revenue, and thus either wither or move on to the next idea.

on one hand, if confabulator thought they really had something, they should have protected their IP in some manner. but patents are expensive and time consuming, and copyright doesn't always make sense for software. certainly, their API should have been copyrighted (and maybe still can be), as well as their example code and such - but even if they did patent konfabulator, are two independent developers going to have the money and time to sue apple? probably not. also, i never heard of konfabulator until today - i bet they had more downloads today than any other day.

on the other hand, apple doing this is just plain wrong, and crossing the line...but it's their decision, and if it causes ill will and prevents future developers from developing something on their platform, well, i'm sure they know that. (here's what russ thinks. )

so konfabulator's public stance takes the high road... they have a great API, more developer support beyond any other product i've seen, and just a better implementation than what it looks like apple will release - however, whether that's a $25 difference is another story. sounds like they have 9 months to innovate beyond what apple can do or figure out another way that makes people have to have confabulator over the apple dashboard.

it's a fine line. the same will happen for the slews of RSS/Atom readers out there. apple has already announced rss/atom support in safari, and surley longhorn/outlook will also have this feature as well. client developers will need to innovate or provide features that tie their users in. anil dash said the other day that an RSS reader has become the new "hello world" and he's right...it's that easy to parse XML in any modern computer language...but just because some independent developers have some great RSS tools, should the OS companies stay away from this? no way. the OS companies compete against each other. perhaps apple is putting this feature in to Tiger as a response to a feature that will be in longhorn (of which i have no idea).

always remember - make hay while the sun shines, build a better mousetrap, and don't get caught in a land war in asia...and of course, "never go in against a Sicilian, when *death* is on the line."

maritime glass floor

while the rest of the syndication/blogging community was in santa clara tonight at some supernova dinner, i decided to go to enjoy the best san francisco has to offer...the the bottom of the hill where ironically, tonight a band was playing a show to promote the next disc i was planning to review, maritme glass floor.

maritime, if you don't know, and since there was only me an seventeen other people there tonight (i could count), you don't know, is composed of two founding members of the promise ring (davey von bohlen [guitar/vocals] and dan didier [drums]) and one member of the dismemberment plan (eric alexelson [bass]) - who collectively recorded two of the best emo albums of all time: nothing feels good and emergency & i, respectively. oh the sadness of it all that dashboard confessional can get radio airplay and an MTV unplugged album and these guys can't even get their recording distributed at amazon. (you can buy it at stinkweeds)

and if you at all want to show some props for these emo legends, you should.

glass floor nowhere approaches the perfection of nothing feels good but is more of a logical extension of where the promise ring left off with emergency! emergency! with a little bit of their swan song, wood/water. these guys have no trouble hiring good producers, this time hiring j. robbins of dino jr. fame to do the dirty deeds, apparently, done dirt cheap.

you can say von bohlen can't sing, and you might be right, but his songwriting is strong enough to pull this disc off. and cut him some slack, the guy had a metal plate put in his head a few years ago, as a result of complications of a brain tumor and the surgery to remove it.

the highlights are "adios" and "someone has to die", and the rest of the disc is at a level close to those. i mean, on every song you have the same somewhat dissonant telecaster sound, with the light percussion of didier keeping the songs moving. the bass is a little buried - something that was even more apparent after hearing this band live.

bottom line is, if you lament the demise of TPR, this is the best you are going to get right now...otherwise, this might be a bit out on the edge for you, but still worth checking out if you are looking for some straightforward, mellow rock.

iPod your BMW

iPod your BMW. i don't own a BMW but i know a few people who do...and this must be pretty tempting for them. i'm amazed at the deals apple is striking and what they are doing with their products - there is just no one close i can think of as far as innovative procduct design.

review: nokia 6230

i carried around a nokia 7250 for quite a few months, and i always thought, "the only thing this is missing is bluetooth." as it turned out, the camera to the 7250 was soon proven to be weak, but that phone was otherwise eclipsed by the appearance of the sony ericsson T610.

now, the 6230 comes along and is pretty much the answer to what i was looking for - a compact profile phone with the power of a brick smartphone. it's all here: a great phone, with bluetooth, a decent browser, a normal keypad, EDGE and GPRS, and decent camera to boot. in addition the 6230 packs a video recorder, and an MP3/ AAC player to complement the FM radio we've come to expect in nokia series 40 phones. this is also the only phone this size i know of with an external storage card. in short, there is a lot to like.

the phone
the phone itself sounds great and seems to have a great antenna compared to other phones this size. also included is a speakerphone, called "loudspeaker" which works especially well for normal conversations where the phone is sitting on the table, and you are speaking to it from a normal distance. the speaker is quite loud, and distortion is minimal. you can also record your call, and access the phone's menu during a call, which is actually useful on models with speakerphone. overall, nothing out of the ordinary, but nothing missing. it even seems to get along fine with most bluetooth headsets or both the headset and handsfree profiles, and even is one of the few models to work well with bluetooth enabled cars.

the size of this phone is perfect. it fits in your pants pocket, it fits in your shirt pocket, and just about anywhere else you might want to fit a phone. below is a picture of the 6230. that's our girl, second from the left, along with her older cousin, the 7250, her fatter cousin, the 6600, and an older competitor, the sony ericsson T610.

the keypad takes some getting used to as it has a square joypad where it seems a joystick might do better. the directional support is okay, but pushing straight in and "selecting" is tough and takes some practice to get right.

the camera/camcorder
let's face it, the phone is nice, but a good reason to buy the 6230 is the camera and the camcorder, both which i think are above average, but not necessarily the best on the market. however, for this form factor, the 6230 is the best choice on the market, especially since it has external, albeit the obsolete MMC format.

Here's a sample movie from 6230, taken at night at a carnival (requires quicktime):

and another during the day.

yes, that's right, i am a carnie in my spare time.

how about the stills? pretty good. the pictures look great, even in full sunlight, which some cameraphones won't even do. 640x480 is the maximum size however. Click for full size images.

Nokia 6230	Toshiba VM4050

Really, mp3's on that phone?
yes, and AAC as well. they can be played either through the Nokia specific headset, via the loudspeaker, or via a bluetooth headset. mp3's are pretty easy to copy over to the MMC is you have a PCMCI adaptor, otherwise pretty slow via bluetooth.

AAC is a little more challenging, unless you keep AAC files laying around. even if you use iTunes - you don't get AAC natively anymore. you get .m4p files wrapped in a DRM envelope. then you have to use something like hymn to strip the DRM envelope into a .m4a file, which can then be converted by iTunes into an AAC. that's way too much work if you ask me. it's kind of a bummer since this is all fair use of the tunes you have purchased - it would be nice for apple and nokia to work on this together, but i guess that doesn't sell iPods.

messaging
SMS is pretty standard on the 6230, and a standard 3x3 keyboard helps.

MMS is a little better than some of the other series 40 phones. finally, SMIL slideshows are kind of rendered, but a slideshow still can't play automatically.

The 6230 UAProf says that it allows a 100K MMS, and a picture size of up to 352x288 - not quite as good as the nokia 6600, but acceptable.

Finally, the series 40 comes with an email client, that allows you to get email off of a POP3 server of your choosing. the app is a java MIDP 2.0 midlet that can only display text and the smaller of your messages. it's a bit difficult to setup, as both the send and receive require their own GPRS settings, but works well enough once you get through that exercise. this client still isn't as good as the one that ships out of the box on the sony ericsson T610, or even the T68, but it DOES allow for authenticated SMTP, which even the latest revs of series 60 do not support. in summary, the email capabilities are good enough to see if anything big is going on in the office, but not good enough to fire off a decent response. follow up requires using the phone.

games and MIDP2.0
the 6230 comes with a cool bluetooth enabled java games, Beach Rally II and a respectable Golf game that is a good time killer. the 6230 is MIDP2.0 capable so it supports the latest and greatest java downloads.

other MIDP2.0 apps seemed to run alright without modification, although platformRequest() doesn't work on this phone either.

other features
the 6230 also supports syncML and some other features that aren't supported by any carrier here, so i couldn't try them out. i've been using the phone as a modem with my powerbook G4 everyday on the train, and found it to be the most reliable in that area as well.

the net-net
in summary, this is proabably the best camera/videophone in this profile on the market. if you want to carry a bigger phone around, you can do better, but otherwise this is a great phone. it's the one i've been using exclusively for the last month or so, which tells me something. i think it's the functionality that has kept me coming back for more. it just works with everything so smoothly, i never need to change my SIM to another phone anymore.

nokia licenses NTP patents to secure RIMlike email services

i had previously reported that the biggest reason nokia and sony ericsson hadn't gone forward with their deals with Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry, was that RIM wouldn't indemnify the other manufacturers against their patent lawsuit issued against them by NTP.

so this story in the National Post, Research In Motion adversary NTP Inc. licences patents to Nokia is good news for RIM because now Nokia can launch these services on the Nokia 6800 without worrying about getting sued from NTP.

We'll see if SE does the same thing. The pictures of the P900 with a RIM keyboard look pretty cool. The P900 combined with RIM push email technology would be pretty much near perfect.

franz ferdinand

more scottish rock, this time in the post-modern revival vein, franz ferdinand (is that the austrian dude that was killed that started dub-ya dub-ya one?). older comparisons are easy here - a bit of blur, with the homo-ambiguity of the smiths (well you know, that ambiguity that was there in 1984, it's pretty obvious now morrissey wasn't so "celibate") ...newer comparisons are easier - the strokes with the vox-distortion box turned down three notches, interpol, sure.

those comparisons aside, franz ferdinand is a lot of fun to listen to, and generally catchy. it's a good consistent album - you either keep it all or throw it all away. i'd keep it. the bass lines are infectous. you've heard "take me out" whether or not you realize it, and i'm guessing you're going to hear a lot more of this disc. this is one of those albums that will remind college kids today of when they were in college for the rest of their lives.

i recommend also getting the iTunes exclusive single "all for you sophia" as a bonus track to accompany the rest of the conventional release.

my only real complaint is the engineering - it's a little too compressed for my tastes, and the high bands are too tuned down, but that's what an equalizer is for.

[buy at amazon]

transcoding proxies getting popular again

today opera announced the availability of a proxy service which they say can accelerate mobile browsing by 2.5 times, and reduce the amount of data transferred for those browsing with their version 6.31 browser. they offer this as a subscription service for EUR 4 an lower with longer terms, and the "value proposition" is that this will lower your mobile data bill by more than the subscription price.

this was the same value proposition behind WAP, and it's interesting that it's being translated to HTML/XHTML as well. Opera is already hands down the best mobile browsing experience on Sybian UIQ and Series 60 alike, so i'll be interested to see how this makes things better, as the browsing experience with opera is already pretty damn good with optimization on the client only.

i also find it interesting that transcoding proxies are gaining popularity again. 3-4 years ago, these were all the rage in taming the "mobile internet" and were sold mostly by openwave to every operator around, and then to enterprises. it's popped up again in enterprises in nokia's Nokia One Business Server and of course there is the google proxy (read down) which comes in WML, cHTML, and XHTML flavors (i don't know whose they have installed, if not home grown). the same technology has been at the heart of RIM Blackberry forever as well. doing heavy lifting on the server makes sense, except that of course you are funneled through a single point of potential failure.

we're also doing this with FeedBurner SmartFeed, which essentially is a transcoding proxy for Atom to RSS Clients, and will soon combine the functionality of our MobileFilter, which optimizes RSS/Atom for mobile devices, as well as do many other "Smart" things.

All ideas that have been around for quite awhile, now being put to good use as these emerging technologies finally are moving up the take-up curve.

more on the feed:// protocol

it seems this convention has jumped over to the windows world as well. the new version of FeedDemon 1.1, which we have co-branded with FeedBurner also supports automatically adding feeds with "feed://" urls. this is going to make adoption of rss accelerate greatly, in my opinion.

apple airport express

i really hope the apple AirPort Express is as good as it looks. i've already ordered mine. what's so amazing about this product is the many problems it solves at once. makes your printer a node on the wireless network, allows you to jukebox your tunes to anywhere in the house quickly and easily, and acts as a Wi-fi repeater? holy crap. yeah, there's a lot of fine print at the bottom of that page, the most disappointing which is "irPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network."

yeah sure, d-link and linksys have had such things for a while now, but this looks like apple just did it right.

velvet revolver contraband

i was totally prepared to hate this album - being another supergroup composed of scott weiland of stone temple pilots fame, and slash, duff mckagan, and matt sorum of G 'N F 'N R (that's guns 'n fuckin' roses for the rest of you) - i expected it to be another mediocre rock album with a decent single and not much else. i guess having low expectations was the correct strategy here, because i really really like this album.

i like it because their single "slither" is the eleventh song, but i really like the obvious guitar chemistry between duff and slash that we haven't heard since the first two guns and roses albums. this might be the guitar album of the year, and the songs ain't bad either. in fact, they are quite good. there's not a bad track here. you can definitely hear influences of all the bands in velvet revolver's family tree, and scott weiland on top of this backing band just "works."

first audioslave, and now velvet revolver. hail to the return of the supergroup.

more comment spam

i've managed to eliminate email spam by using mailblocks, which incidentally seems to have some capacity problems of late, but today i got 14 weblog comment spam posts, all from different domains, all missed by mt-blacklist. ug, there's gotta be a better solution. i know people are working on it, but this is just a signpost to let them know, the current efforts aren't working.

sorry for all the seemingly new items...

...i've been trying to get to bottom of a little problem: my traffic and readership is clearly going up, but my ad revenues are clearly going down. the ad revenues aren't significant, but as an experiment, similar to how CNET has temporarily done away with descriptions in feeds to see the effects, i've changed from full content, back to summarized content, as well as a few other formats a couple times...so most of the feed readers out there are seeing these items as new.

i haven't yet solved this, but there's no evidence that the presence of full content vs partial content in my SmartFeed has any effect on my ad revenues. if that's indeed the case, i'll definitely go back to full content in the feeds.

i'll also be trying out our new context-sensitive Ad placement in feed capabilities (coming soon) in Posted by Steve at 10:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack