The key to the future is power – power on the farm as well as in the factory – power in the country as well as in the city.
Now if we had a politician who had the vision to see that the key to _our_ future is ultra hi-speed broadband to every house in the nation. That would be someone I could vote for.
The Rural Electrification Scheme V2.0
It took Twitter nearly 4 years to get even remotely recognised or understood by normal people. From what I can see, Foursquare is going to do the same in less than 18 months (someone find me a Moore’s law analogy there).
They now have Bravo TV in the US promoting it. And any ad that has Padma Lakshmi in it, is a winner in my book.
The branded badges in Foursquare are genius. A win-win-win. The brands get advertising, Foursquare gets revenue and brand junkies get recognised for their fandom (also see post yesterday about Paul Carr’s Guiltvault).
I had thought all of these LBS guys were dead with the arrival of Buzz. But Google has fucked that launch up so badly, it’s racing towards the magical world of Orkut/Latitude/Dodgeball/Jaiku/Froogle/Base/Notebook.
Instead what someone needs to build is a macropayment service. A way to make a one-off payment to a specific creator to thank them for their entire body of work. If you insist on using a ‘micro’ word, then the correct one is ‘micropatronage’: an affordable version of the age-old practice of wealthy patrons supporting artists in substantive, public ways – ways that stroke the patron’s ego and/or guarantee their place in heaven.
Paul is a bollix. A very snarky, very funny bollix. And like many bollixes, he is also right more times than not.
But with this, I think he has {insert positive American sports metaphor of your choice}.
If Guiltvault existed, I would immediately hand over money to all those creators about whom I feel guilty. And so would a torrent of others (see what I did there? Oh I’m on fire today).
I’ve said it many times before, I want to give media/content creators their due but in many cases I can’t due to idiotic localised 19th century licensing arrangements.
“Guiltvault – So Matthew Smith can finally afford to make Manic Miner II”.
Someone do it now, please.
This only took a few minutes to diagnose and fix; but we were not awake when it became clear that this was a problem. We have a global user-base and need a way for them to get our attention if there are issues. We’re still debating the best ways to do this but will get something into place as soon as possible.
We all (i.e. I) can be quick to condemn on Twitter but not so quick to acknowledge a job well done.
The LastPass experience last night is a lesson for all us start-ups offering a global service.
Glad to have them back.
In part 2 of our MWC interview with Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of Markets at Nokia, there is discussion of how moving Symbian into the Symbian Foundation stops the platform being “fractioned by individual product programs [within Nokia]“. We also touch on whether there is a future for the Nokia N95 form factor smartphone.
How often do you see an EVP in a multinational company like Nokia talk with such clarity, honesty and depth of knowledge? Truly refreshing.
But more importantly, you have to watch the video of him talking about the N97 debacle:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11183_Video_Anssi_Vanjoki_on_the_N97…
With guys like him in charge, Nokia has a bright bright future ahead of it.
It took it quite a long time to put together a “web toolkit” that works well for our business. To save you some of the same hassle, here are the some of important things our site/applications/OpsTeam use:
More as I think of them since I’m sure I’ve forgotten something important. What can’t you live without?
Just had a conversation with our VP of Sales (to be announced soon ) about how people in Ireland working in web-related businesses get their industry business news. So not the latest web-app announcement or gadget but the business side of things. Who is selling what where. Who is doing new marketing campaigns. Who is doing deals with who. But specific to Ireland.
Is it still the business and technology sections of newspapers? Are there niche publications? Or has it all moved online? If you have a sec, can you let me know below? I figure this information is useful to us all.
Hmm, doesn’t look like I can embed a Polldaddy poll here, so a link will have to do.
Today Google released Google Earth on Android and it sounds impressive. But they have made a huge error of judgement in the release. It only runs on one phone, the Google Nexus One.
I have just tried it on a G1 with OpenEclair (a community version of Android 2.1 which runs on the Nexus One). It installs but refuses to run. The only app of 30+ that I have tried which has failed to do so.
Quite apart from compounding the negative message they are sending to other Android phone vendors with the Nexus One launch itself, it looks like they are repeating all the mistakes of J2ME.
Android was supposed to be the realisation of the “write once, run anywhere” promise made by Sun for Java in 1995. Fragmentation of J2ME on mobile turned it into an unmanageable mess with software vendors having to generate potentially hundreds of variations of their apps for different phones. The alternative was to create lowest-common-denominator apps that worked everywhere but were totally hamstrung and ugly as hell.
Now here we are 16 months after the first Android phone and it is happening all over again. Millions of G1, Hero, Galaxy and other Android devices were sold in 2009. All of them run Android v1.x software. None of them can run Earth. None of them can run the mobile browser version of Buzz.
Google will tell you that it’s the handset vendors job to keep the firmware up to date. I’m a punter, I remember what it’s like to wait for the Vodafone branded version of my Nokia N70 software, months after Nokia released it. It was annoying as hell with the operators then, it is just as annoying with handset vendors now.
If I buy an iPhone, my apps just work. Ok, they may not have any smut in them, but they work. If I buy a DVD, it works. If I buy almost any Windows application, it will run on W2K, XP, Vista and Win7. That’s OSes spread over an 12 year period.
If I install Google Earth on a Motorola Droid I bought in December, it won’t run.
Of course OSes have to improve and evolve but Android has both backwards and forwards compatibility breakage. Apps written for v1.5 may not run on v2.0 and apps written for v2.1 won’t run on v1.5.
This is a really really serious problem. Fix it Google or you will hit a brick wall in 6 months time when there are 40 handsets running 400 different firmwares and app developers and punters head back to the stable predictable iPhone platform.
I know I have re-considered my next Android device. Whilst Google might be happy that I would now default to the Nexus One since I know it will get the most support (as the G1 did before it), it does not bode well for other manufacturers supporting Android. With Samsung launching Bada and Sony Ericsson trying to support Android, WiMo and Symbian, it’ll be a brave person who buys their Android phones.
How many man years of my life will I never get back, sitting watching someone read the text off their slides to me in a conference room?
Just had a fab thought. Maybe when someone like that is giving a presentation, the victim should be in control of the clicker? Average meeting time would plummet as you lash through a 60-slide deck in 5 minutes flat.
The bonus features of the Android application is integration of Google Maps layers, such as Places, Wikipedia, Businesses, Panoramic, Roads, Borders and Labels, and Terrain (no buzz yet for you buzz crazy people)
Looks like Google is starting to pull a Nokia on it by not supporting “older” v1.6 phones like, for example, the not-yet-released Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.
Yeah yeah it’s presumably due to HTML5 being needed. So release a v1.6x with HTML5. Oh, @Cyanogen already has. You do understand you have developer community Google, don’t you? I thought that was the point of Android being “open”.
Off to boot into OpenEclair on the G1 so I can check out Earth.
Cross Dominant is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache