Slow Crab Festival 2008 - Disappointing

I went to this year's Slow Crab festival in San Francisco, held by the Slow Food folks, and while expectations were high... for a $100/plate at the "VIP table", it was pretty disappointing.

- pre-dinner appetizers were a few crackers and cheese, quickly finished within a few minutes of the doors opening. Massively poor planning here.

- They had one white, one red, one sparkling wine, and one beer. Nice. So much for lots of interesting local selection.

- Oh, and they started to run out of every wine they had before the dinner had even started. More great planning.

- The meal? Some basic, not-so-yummy salad... and then crab with butter and lemon on the side. Not so interesting unless all you wanted to do was eat pounds of crab dipped in butter/lemon.

- Desert? Run for the coffee and biscotti at the other side of the room as quick as you can if you want some...

- Speakers? Some were interesting... then there were the angry "rebel without a clue" fisherman talking nonsensically about threatening the Governator (Gov. Schwarzenegger)...

All in all? Not expecting to go to 2009, or perhaps another of the smaller Slow Food events. Shame... it sounded a lot more promising.

Silent trains?

The Economist has a brief article about train operator C2C in London offering mobile-free phones by coating the phones in an RF-absorptive material. Basically it prevents cellular signals from getting into or out of a train car, and by doing so guarantees silence in the cab.

It's a little heavy-handed for a few reasons, though. Firstly, blocking RF transmission will just put phones into a wildly-seeking-signal state, meaning that many people will end their journeys into London or on their way home with batteries that have been drained more than they ought to. Also, it prevents people from using otherwise silent data services (eMail, SMS, web, etc.).

What might be a better solution? Well, yes, coat the trains such that they don't let phones connect to external base-stations. Then go ahead an put in picocells inside the train cars themselves, or repeater-like technology that Orange and Virgin have already deployed. Allow these systems to only allow services to work on the data channel, and you're done...

And the revenue model? Whoever owns these picocells can charge the operators for allowing their customers to use them. Not an unreasonable "roaming" charge, of course, but something akin to the charge operators charge for terminating calls on their networks, perhaps.

And what's next? Deploy this in the tube. In fact, wouldn't this be a great project for TfL to own, both on commuter rail and in the tube?

Is RIM falling further behind?

A couple of days ago RIM released a software update to the new Bold. It turns out that the software stack on this device has been the cause of a lot of issues for RIM and it's partners: Some operators (like AT&T) have refused to ship the device with the previous software offering, and others have halted sales of the device until the fixes were ready. All in all a pretty miserable device launch for RIM (especially for a new flagship product).

Because RIM's got access to all of their devices on the network, I happened to get a notice on my BlackBerry telling me that there was an update available, and that I could get it by visiting a certain website. When I got there, I found that (unsurprisingly) I had to download a 93 MB file, launch Windows on my machine (sigh), and go through the update process.



Notwithstanding that having to use only a Windows PC to update my BlackBerry is pretty obnoxious, the entire upgrade process was far from uneventful. See, what happens is that the installer does a backup of your device, wipes it, reloads the new operating system, and then your old data.

Well, mine got half-way through the reloading phase and freaked out. So, I momentarily had a shiny brick instead of a BlackBerry. Great.

I managed to get the new operating system installed on my device... but of course, BlackBerry desktop was too stupid to realise that I'd done this because it had failed in the middle of the update the last time. Yippee.

It turns out that BlackBerry Desktop *does* leave a backup file around that you can use to restore all of your information... or so it seems. After restoring the backup I noticed that I had all my contacts, and settings... but no apps. All those applications I'd downloaded to my BlackBerry, that I *watched* getting saved in the backup process? Gone. Why? Guess RIM thinks it makes sense to store one half of your backup somewhere and the other somewhere else (and hidden). Brilliant thinking, here.

Why is this so upsetting? Well the Bold is supposed to have over-the-air update functionality. Does it? Anyone's guess... but if it does, RIM's sure done a terrible job taking advantage of it. What's worse is that my Kindle... a simple book reader, does OTA updates, and does them beautifully.

I was flipping through the "content manager" on my Kindle recently and realised the menus had a few new (and useful) features there. Where'd they come from? No idea. It seems my Kindle silently upgraded itself, and kept on working splendidly...

Even more a sign that RIM's tech is slipping behind is the fact that Android includes OTA update capabilities, and is actually using them. The first batch of G1 is supposed to get an OTA update, which, considering the device just launched is at once distressing and impressive.

Either way, anything's better than the invasive, time-wasting, multi-step, failure-ridden process that RIM's got going for it today... hopefully they've got some bright folks in Waterloo working on it.

How can Android win developers?

The first production Android device (T-Mobile's G1) will soon hit the market, and the legions of Google faithful will no-doubt snap up many devices in short order.

Will that be enough to allow Android to be a real competitor in the smartphone wars? The G1 isn't a particularly attractive device, doesn't have as good a media player as the iPhone, doesn't have a browser that can best the iPhone, doesn't provide eMail that holds a candle to BlackBerry, and is locked to a network that's widely regarded as having lackluster coverage. It's unlikely that the G1 is going to be a hit with consumers, and it's not going to ship in volumes that will make anyone at Apple or RIM lose sleep.

That feeds a bigger problem, though: getting developers on side. Unlike the iPhone which got great consumer demand without any third-party apps just by having a sexy device, or BlackBerry which has thrived by providing a rock-solid communications "appliance" that nobody's yet rivaled, Android is going to need to differentiate on killer 3rd party apps.

When it comes to developer platforms, iPhone has a beautiful SDK and distribution mechanism that's sparked widespread adoration from developers. Sure, Apple's exerting far more control on the developer community than perhaps they should, bit they're still a whole lot better than the existing carrier / OEM ecosystem. Also, iPhone is a single, consistent platform... a developer can build one app and have it reliably run on the millions of iPhone 2G, 3G and iPod Touch devices in market. A great, powerful developer toolkit, robust operating system, ubiquitous distribution platform, and consistent device hardware? This is a developer's dream.

The BlackBerry developer platform isn't particularly elegant, doesn't have a great development environment (RIM just recently got decent Eclipse integration), and is a generally underpowered OS when it comes to doing anything involving graphics or media. It's also got a pretty significant number of inconsistencies between OS and hardware versions, which has proved to be an irritation for many RIM developers. It's particularly telling that RIM wrote the Facebook app for BlackBerry, whereas Facebook built their own iPhone app.

That said, BlackBerry provides a reasonably reliable and stable operating system, and millions of devices as an addressable install base (with users who have a disproportionately high usage of data and third party apps vs all the other platforms except iPhone). This makes it a no-brainer for many application developers to target.

So a developer just developing a new application will probably build their first app on iPhone, do a re-write in Java to support BlackBerry, and then give very careful consideration to whether they feel like building an app for Symbian or Windows Mobile. In a competitive marketplace, it's safe to say that if you can hit 30-40MM devices by targeting iPhone and BlackBerry, it's unlikely that you're going to spend anywhere near the same resources to target a platform like Android with <1 MM. Those resources are probably better spent on building either for a platform like Symbian (with broad reach), or towards building version 2 of the iPhone/BlackBerry app.

What's Google to do? Well, how about building a porting toolkit? If a developer decides to build a BlackBerry application, they're already going to be creating a Java version of their application. If Google provided tools to help more quickly port the BlackBerry Java app to an Android Java App, that could significantly reduce the time and effort required to get an app on Android, making the business case for doing so much more viable.

Sure, some classes of apps that are really glued to the hardware (e.g. games), aren't good candidates for something like this, but those apps are in the minority. Also, while Android's Java implementation has all sorts of great features like 3D graphics, rich sound libraries, and more, BlackBerry doesn't, so any app that was a straight port from BlackBerry to Android wouldn't really show off the full potential of the Android platform. Not ideal. But if the porting toolkit were extended to quickly and easily add some of these richer capabilities into the resulting applications, it could prove a powerful motivator for developers.

The name of the game is addressable market, and it's clear that as the new kid in town, Google's got an uphill battle. With a far-from-inspiring first device, the battle's just gotten a bit harder. Taking advantage of the current strength of BlackBerry as a platform is one thing that Google can do to more quickly bootstrap their own developer ecosystem... which would be great for the entire industry.

Yet-another-iPhone request: handle the network gracefully

Wireless networks can be crap... they don't work, you can't get a signal, etc. We all know this. So why does iPhone not seem to realize this?

If you're in the middle of writing an email on the subway, you might get interrupted by two or three messages telling you that your phone can't connect to the network, activate EDGE, etc. Why? Why not just have a queue of pending network events, and handle them when the network's available, without bothering the user?

Also, if I've written a few emails while out of coverage that are now waiting to be sent, why doesn't iPhone immediately send them when it sees a network again? What purpose does waiting for the next-scheduled send/receive time serve?

iPhone being built on OS X is great for a tonne of reasons, but mobile just isn't the same, and little things like this are good examples of why BlackBerry's market share is climbing and iPhone's has been dropping for the last little while... it turns out that people care about this stuff.

Fingers crossed for a great new update on Monday at WWDC. :)

Unlimited travel... but not.

Air Canada stupidity, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So Air Canada is offering a flight pass for "unlimited" travel inside Ontario for $1100 for two months. Wow. That's $550/month for all the travel you want in the province. There aren't a whole lot of airports (their email suggests three), but at least you can spend the weekend in Ottawa / Toronto if you feel like it, or commute between the two for those with jobs that require it.

Except not.

The flight pass explicitly forbids travel between Ottawa and Toronto. So... you can go between Ottawa / Toronto and Niagara? Um. All of a sudden this seems like less of a deal.

What a fantastic way to excite and then tremendously disappoint your customers Air Canada. I wonder why ACE Aviation wants rid of you right now...

New York City launches a seed venture fund

New York City, with a number of local partners has launched a $2 million seed fund called NYC Seed that will make investments up to $200,000 in local startup companies. There's been much talk about the gap in funding between angel and venture capital, and being able to get a couple hundred thousand dollars could help a lot of companies fill that gap. In a city that's dominated by financial services, it might be interesting to see some of the hedge funds or investment banks put in small amounts of capital as LP's: conferences like Money:Tech are proving there's a lot of innovation in software in that space. Come to think of it, it's something else that cities like London, Toronto and Paris might want to think about for similar reasons.

Is creating a venture fund the best way for a region to grow it's tech sector? Not sure, but it's a great start. Is $2 MM enough to start a small seed fund? Well, there're a few good examples of small seed funds (Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC being one) that seem to make sense. Personally I'm quite skeptical of the seed-sized convertible-debt instruments that some VCs use to make early stage investments, so for me anything that helps fill that capital gap is an experiment worth playing out.

Ascendance Project in Union Square

IMG_0034.JPG, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

Great performance from Ascendance Dance Project today in Union Square. Basically it's beautifully choreographed dance, on a rock climbing wall... very cool and unique.

There're still doing a few more performances through the weekend, and it's definitely worth seeing if you can make it out.

iphone wifi needs smarts

Note to Apple: just being able to connect to a wifi network isn't the
same as being able to send and receive data across it. iPhone really
ought to intelligently test the wifi connection and switch to cellular
data if wifi isn't working properly. Having to go in to settings
multiple times a day to enable and disable wifi isn't much fun.

Next generation gaming... will iPhone lead the way?

Nintendo's DS has been breaking all sorts of device sales records since launching, and Sony's PSP hasn't done too badly either... but is all that about to change?

Over the next 12-24 months, the chipsets in high-end handsets are going to have graphics processing power roughly equal to or exceeding Sony's PlayStation 2. That's some serious power for a small screen. Devices like HTC's Touch Diamond and Nokia's Tube are all going to ship with high-res touch (multi touch?) screens, as well. So in the not too distant future we're going to have devices with lots of compute and graphics power, memory, connectivity, with beautiful screens and consistent interaction mechanisms (touch and accelerometers, for example).

What's held mobile games back for the last few years? Well, aside from the crapulence of the games themselves (I can't believe that Guitar Hero III Mobile actually wins awards... have you *tried* it on a BlackBerry? Ugh. It's embarrassingly bad.), it's not the easiest thing to go out and find a game. There's all sorts of operator deck nonsense that a user's got to deal with to actually find the game they want. Of course, that assumes that the developer/publisher has actually struck a deal with the operator in question, so that the game's even available for download. Yikes.

Oh, and between the limited storage on devices and the slow network speeds, it's unlikely that you'd be able to download a very large game w/ lots of rich images and sound... at least not unless you feel like receiving one hell of a bill for data transfer.

On the flip side, anyone can walk into a store and pick up whatever game they want for their PSP or DS... and you just pop in the cartridge and away you go.

How might iPhone change this? Well, first of all, the hardware's pretty good so the kinds of games you can develop are pretty impressive. Go ahead and compare something like Tap Tap Revolution (available through Installer.app for jailbroken iPhones) to Guitar Hero III Mobile and I'll bet you'll be impressed just how much better TTR is, even though it was built by one particularly bright 23-year old developer.

Secondly, discovery isn't a problem... just fire up iTunes and browse around the app store for something that catches your fancy, click-to-buy, and it's sucked down at broadband speeds to your computer and quickly sync'd to your iPhone.

Finally, dealing with one company (Apple) is a whole lot easier than dealing with 40 operators, and Apple takes 30% of the sales revenue, compared to 50-60% in some cases with certain operators.

So, the hardware's pretty good, the discovery problem's pretty well solved, and it makes life a whole lot simpler for developers large and small.

If nothing else, Apple's going to put a lot of pressure on the operators, but they're also going to push others like Nokia to execute and innovate on strategies like Ovi.

But how're Nintendo and Sony going to respond? Between Wiiware and the PS3 Online store, both companies understand the importance of game downloads and online purchases. But can they overcome the massive change in phone capabilities? Remember that DS is wildly outselling PSP, and DS has a comparative paucity of compute power: they've innovated (like Wii) on gameplay. Well, with the hardware being equal or better, and in your pocket anyway, are we looking at the end of the portable console market?

Great article on Atari games

Gamasutra's got a great article on the history and design of Atari games. Especially helpful for people like me, who don't know a thing about gaming :)

Getting Things Done with iPhone

So it's been a few days since I swapped out my BlackBerry for an iPhone, and one of the biggest iPhone omissions seems to be the non-existent to-do list. Exactly why such an important feature (and one that's built right into iCal on the Mac) got left out is beyond me... thankfully, though, there're a lot of alternative web apps for iPhone including Ta-da List and Remember the Milk.

Apparently the Omni Group are working on a version of OmniFocus for iPhone, which I'm sure will be fantastic, but since I'm using both a BlackBerry and iPhone, Remember The Milk seems like a better choice (MilkSync lets you synchronize tasks to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device). That said, with all the great things I've heard about OmniFocus, I'm sure I'll give it a whirl when it ships for iPhone.

Experimenting with a different to-do list gave me a great excuse to start fresh with my task list and build a reasonably clean "Getting Things Done" setup. So here's my experience with getting a GTD solution up and working on iPhone.

First I gave Ta-Da List a shot, and while it's a great for managing simple task lists, it's not really up to the task of being at the center of your to-do list management. There's no ability to search tasks, move them from list to list, or use tags or any other mechanism to otherwise label things. If you're looking for a super-simple flat to-do list for your iPhone, though, it's great, and the site works great on iPhone and because it's so light weight things load super quickly, even over the EDGE network.

Next up (and what I'm currently using) is Remember The Milk. I've got to say it's more than a little intimidating at the outset... all these lists, locations, tags, smart searches, etc. It took me a while to decide on the simplest way to work with it.

What I ended up settling on was a set of lists for important projects, and tags for contexts (e.g. @computer, @ping, etc.)



Oh, there's another aside... @ping is my context for calling or writing someone. Since I'm always on a smartphone, I'm pretty much equally able to send an email or call someone, so I don't have @online / @phone as separate contexts to reach out to people.

I also especially like the smart search lists... For example the "High priority" list is just a saved search for any task with a priority of 1-3. This way on my phone I can just tap on that list to see the most important next actions across all my lists and contexts.

The homescreen on the iPhone version is great and shows you tasks that are due soon, which is always helpful.



Tapping on "Lists" shows you all the lists you've got set up, including your smart lists, and tapping on a list shows you all the tasks in a clean and simple view. From this view you can pretty easily complete or modify the tasks you've got. Of course, you can also navigate by tags from the homescreen if you (like myself) use them for setting task contexts.







Launching the browser on iPhone, and waiting for the not-so-fast EDGE network (assuming you've got coverage) isn't the most fun when you want to quickly jot down a note, so RTM also lets you send yourself an eMail that gets converted to a task and put in the "Inbox" list, where you can later re-file it. I often find this to be much easier than waiting for the browser/network/etc.

What's missing? While Remember The Milk seems to really take advantage of AJAX and JavaScript, to make most actions pretty snappy, it's just not the same as having a native app sitting on the phone. If Apple decides to implement HTML 5 offline storage or Gears, I really hope the folks at Remember The Milk take advantage of it. They've already done a great job of supporting Gears on the desktop website, so my fingers are crossed. On the other hand, I'd be first in line to buy a native iPhone version of Remember the Milk if they happened to come out with one.

Ultimately PIM tools are only good if they're easy to use and don't make you wait for them. Right now the mobile web isn't quite there yet, but until an offline/native version of RTM or another app comes out, I'm pretty happy with RTM for Mobile Safari.

iPhone 2.0 wishlist

I've played with iPhone off and on ever since it launched, but this week I finally decided to swap out my BlackBerry and start using iPhone exclusively (more on why later). The brilliant browser, great media support, and gorgeous fonts/display make a huge impact, but there're a lot of things missing from iPhone that makes it a less-than-perfect experience, and leaves me longing for my BlackBerry pretty frequently.

So, as I'll be eagerly awaiting the new iPhone software at WWDC, here's my short wishlist for the next couple revs of iPhone software.

1. Copy and paste. Yes, everyone's mentioned this already... but creating calendar events is a pain when you can't just copy-paste straight from an email.



2. Search in the address book. Scrolling through the address book is probably okay with a couple hundred contacts, but is pretty laborious with a couple thousand.



3. Faster auto-complete in email addresses. iPhone is strangely slow when it comes to being able to search through your address book when you start typing a recipient's name for an email.



4. Faster SMS. Loading the SMS chat screens seems to be quite slow on iPhone.



5. Better eMail UI. I've got three email addresses set up on iPhone. The number of taps to see a message is enormous. Home -> Mail Accounts -> Chosen Account -> Inbox -> Message is annoying and slow. Single inbox like BlackBerry, please.



6. Signatures for each account. So each email address should have it's own signature, instead of the one global email signature. A requirement if you've got corporate and personal mail on the same device.



7. It would be great if iPhone could extract contact and event details straight from an eMail just like Mail.app does on Leopard.



8. Info on the lock-screen. I shouldn't need to slide to unlock and then enter my PIN just to find out if I have any new mail or not. It'd be great if the lockout screen showed missed calls, SMS and eMail.



9. To-do list. A striking omission.



10. A better calendar. Yikes... entering calendar events on iPhone is a chore... can't click the time I want straight on the screen. There's no weekly view (a shame, as it'd look great in landscape view on iPhone). Events don't support time zones.



11. Working push. The Yahoo! Push solution has been (for me) very flaky and far from a reliable push experience. I hope this gets solved for the next rev. Integrating push for GMail would also be lovely :-)

Maybe a hard-button or two on the casing wouldn't be such a bad thing either. I love the minimalist design of iPhone, but a couple extra hard-buttons might make it a whole lot easier to get to your favourite apps, and that can't be a bad thing.

Fingers crossed ... just a couple weeks till WWDC :)

Taking ownership of your product

I'm sitting here on hold with O2, because RIM refuses to take ownership of their product. One of my eMail addresses (hosted by Google and pushed via RIM's BIS product) hasn't been working properly for days. I've sent RIM an email to support... and their response is:

As we indicated previously, your service provider is your first point of contact for support. BlackBerry Technical Support is available 24/7 if your provider needs to escalate the issue.

If you would prefer fee-based support from Research In Motion, please dial the appropriate telephone number below and enter option 3 in the phone menu.

So I call O2 from my BlackBerry... and after ages of voicemail hell finally get someone. Guess what? They can't help me. They need me to call back from another number. I said "well, why don't I give you a number and you can call me back?" Apparently they could take up to 48 hrs (!?!?!?) to call me back. Really.

So, fine... I'll bite... what's the number I should call? Some 0870 number (i.e. a TOLL NUMBER!). O2 has the NERVE to charge me for calling them for support!?

Thankfully SayNoTo0870.com had an alternative free number that I could use to call them back (no thanks to O2).



Once I finally got through the second round of voicemail hell, the first-level O2 support person had the nerve to say "Oh... the problem you think you have, isn't possible." Really?! So I'm just imagining this, huh? Please.

After assuring support that I wasn't patently insane I got pushed to a support engineer... a nice enough guy who spent over a half hour coming to no particular conclusion.



Which circle of Hell did Dante reserve for this?

Is it so hard to believe that a company like RIM should actually provide support to their consumers, especially given their huge consumer marketing push of late?

Is it such a great expectation to think that O2 might not want to charge customers for calling in for support?

Sadly leaving Orange

Looks like I'm making the switch from Orange to O2 (way better BlackBerry data plans - especially for frequent travelers - and they've got EDGE).

I was impressed at how easy they were to deal with. Less than 5 minutes on the phone and they claim to be sending a letter with my porting code.

Almost makes me wish I chose to stay. Too bad about the data plans. :(

The downside of getting to zero

I've been using a mail filter to help me manage my inbox for the last week or so. I'm already wasting way less time each day just handling email... and find myself needing to look to my BlackBerry far less.

The downside? Not nearly as much to churn through in the tube anymore. :).

Back to audiobooks, I guess.

Heating and Cooling ... from the street

Arian de Bondt, an engineer at Ooms, came up with a great idea. Use the heat generated by the sun on the road in summer to heat water that you'll later use in winter to heat a building and melt road-ice... then use the cold water that comes out of this process, store it again, so you can use it in summer for cooling.

Very cool.

Reminds me of the water cooling project in Toronto that uses lake water to air condition buildings... but even smarter. Well, if you've got an aquifer on hand :)

Via The Economist

Great service from an Apple Genius.Great service from an Apple Genius.

The battery life on the 15" MacBook Pro isn't awful, but it certainly isn't fantastic. So like many owners, I've got a spare battery... actually, I ordered it with the computer! Recently, one of the two batteries has been doing something very strange: As the battery gets nearly completely drained, the machine turns off. It doesn't go to sleep. It loses power and turns off. (Like pulling the plug on a desktop computer.) Not very nice. Worse still, there's still some charge left in the battery, so it could have made it to sleep without issue.

I wandered into the Apple Store on Regent St., mentioned this to one of the Geniuses, and a few minutes later he commented that while they couldn't find any similar reports in their tech database (gotta' love being unique, I guess), they were just going to swap out my battery for a new one. So now I have two properly working batteries, and no fear of my machine randomly turning off anymore.

All in all, I'm pretty impressed, not only with the care I received, but that someone in a store was able to make a decision to fix my problem, instead of saying something like "Sorry sir, we haven't heard of this problem before... so we can't really do anything about it," or asking to take my laptop away for a few days of diagnosis.

One more happy Apple customer.

Big brother Blyk

Join – Blyk UK, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So, looking at the Blyk signup page ... they really care about deeply authenticating who their subscribers are. This is actually pretty creepy. First it asks you to put in your name, and address. Nothing surprising here, right?

Well, it turns out if you're not on the electoral record (yes, they check the electoral record !!!) you get to provide either a drivers license or a passport number to prove who you are.

So what's this creepiness about? It's a free, ad-sponsored MVNO for youth (16-24). Is this about authenticating someone's age? Want to make sure they qualify for using Blyk, or so they can provide true demographic info to advertisers?

Isn't there a less disturbing way of doing this than using government databases, or supplying government ID?

Or is there another reason Blyk wants to truly verify who you are?

The idea that there's far more security around this than picking up a prepaid SIM at any highstreet retailer seems a bit odd, so I'm curious what it's all about...

Either way, it gives me the creeps.

Moving to where the money is...

Over on TechCrunch UK, Mike Butcher wrote a post about VCs and geography.

The article centers around an email a TechCrunch reader wrote to Mike...

Hi Mike

I am just dropping you a quick email to help expose what I think is a serious issue with the UK tech industry. As a developer I have been working on a web based product for over a year. There is a huge (untapped) market for this product, it requires minimal overheads and has potential for a massive amount of growth.

So, what’s the problem you may ask?

Unfortunately I am based in XXXXX, which has virtually no VC organisations. Therefore I am having to approach VCs in London. The problem is that they do not have the slightest interest in talking to people such as myself, unless you are refered to them or meet them personally. This is a very big problem from my location! I am taking the time to travel to London in November, but getting VCs to meet you is an even bigger problem.

I’m sure you have lots of other issues and topics to address, but people in this industry exist across the country and its very hard for us to break into the market.

The author of the email certainly sounds like he means well, and who could blame a guy for taking a shot at VCs? :-) ... but in reality, VC's aren't that hard to reach. Their associates are at every event around, for starters... and warm introductions aren't that hard to get: VCs are pretty networked people, so finding a few mutual connections can't be that hard. LinkedIn is a terrific way to connect with VCs as well, if you can't think of anyone who might be a connector.

But even beyond that, a well written pitch email will get you in the door of any VC in the land. Really. Sure, VCs are busy, and you'll hear the bit about getting hundreds of business plans that they can't read. Yup. Business plans. Send anyone a 30-page tome, and you're unlikely to get a lot of responses... but send a well-crafted paragraph or two, and you will get meetings.

The second bit, about only doing local deals... that bit's more difficult. If the company's super early stage, and there's not a lot of experience in the team, then yeah you're going to have people only wanting to do local deals. As the companies get more mature, and the teams more experienced, VCs tend to do deals that are further and further away from home. It's got nothing to do with just wanting to do local deals, and everything to do with wanting to be able to keep an eye on your companies, and help them where you can.

It's the reason Y Combinator gets their startups to move to where they are for a summer.

There're always exceptions to this, but if you're starting a company, and you're committed to it, and you've got a wholly young / inexperienced team, then pack up and move to where the investors (and more importantly the other startups) are... whether that's moving from Memphis to San Francisco, or Leeds to London.

At Web 2.0? Check out Mobile 2.0

Dan Appelquist and friends at hosting a great Mobile 2.0 conference alongside O'Reilly's web 2 conference in SF next week. If you're in town, check it out, and have a look at Dan's about it.

I heart Mozy.

Mozy Backup Status, originally uploaded by Sutha Kamal.

So, these guys got bought by EMC recently (congrats!)...

How cool is it to have your computer securely backed up somewhere off in the cloud, with no effort? I wander off for dinner, get back and ... oh... my machine's backed up. Thanks for letting me know :-)

Now that Mozy's proved reliable backing up my work and mail, maybe I'll just let it back everything up...

Mippin goes live

Prashant and the folks at Refresh Mobile just launched Mippin an in-browser RSS reader (so there's nothing to install) that has all sorts of great features like posting an article straight to Twitter or texting it to a friend.

The media transcoding works pretty well, and lets you read blogs without the crummy experience you'd traditionally expect from a WAP site. It's particularly slick on 3G/HSPA connections with a good browser...

If you've got a decent phone, and kill time reading blogs on your phone, Mippin's definitely something to try.

and I'm not invited?

Oh BlackBerry... I wonder what the snazzy VIP program is all about...

Getting to Zero

So, the empty inbox bit about GTD just feels wrong... plus it doesn't sync well to a Berry or other phone (where you really want all your mail in one place).

Here's my solution:



This way I get to look at one folder that always has the messages I have to "touch" in some way before it's been dealt with.

Blyk's missing the point about mobile apps

Blyk is an ad-supported free MVNO targeted at the 16-24 set. Antti Ohrling, Blyk's founder recently made a few remarks at the MediaGuardian Changing Advertising summit that make me wonder if Blyk's completely misunderstood mobile data and application services.

First he mentions studies that show not many people are using many mobile applications. Yup. Dead on. But why is it that everyone who points to these silly surveys always says "nobody uses mobile services, ergo, nobody wants to use them." Ick. Mistake the first.

Let's set the record straight: people don't use mobile services because, they generally suck!

That's right... name 10 great mobile applications. Hmm... BlackBerry mail... Google Maps... umm... well... er... hmmmm...

I'm exaggerating of course, but my point is that people aren't using mobile because there aren't a lot of great apps for it. We've seen that people pay for a lot of services that they do find value in (the billions of dollars spent on mobile eMail, games, ringtones, and MMS prove this).

Why are applications so bad? Because they're so hard to build. That's a problem that we're going to be solving at planQ, but we'll talk about that another day.

Where else does Blyk seem to miss the point?

Ohrling is quoted as saying "Mobile is a push medium, you call someone they call you, you text someone they text you."

Yup, remember when we used our computers to write documents, and email them to one another? The PCs at our desks weren't used to consume passive applications and content ... but the apps got better, and the web got richer, and we started to do more and more with the PC.

I don't mean to pick on Blyk, but it's strange that so many people seem to suggest that the lack of uptake in mobile apps is tied to some inexplicable and fundamental property of mobile. That's an awfully complicated non-answer.

The easier answer is : mobile apps tend to suck. People will use them... when they're better. Much better.

Verizon changes their minds...

Seems like Verizon's changed their minds on text message censoring. Great to hear they made the right decision... but it still makes it obvious that laws should be changed requiring them to give SMS the same common-carrier treatment as voice. For that matter, all data should be given common carrier treatment... but that's a particularly sensitive topic with operators.

Via New York Times.

Verizon's censoring your txt...

Verizon's apparently declined an abortion pro-choice group's application to run a text messaging campaign across their network. All the other US carriers are (understandably) fine with it.

So what's Verizon's rationale? Well, they disallow certain content with certain themes and abortion is one of them. Even stranger, text campaigns are things that people have to explicitly opt in for ... so this is the same as your ISP not allowing email from a pro-choice group to get delivered to your inbox, even if you've signed up for it.

Anyone else think this seems wrong?

Verizon's got a responsibility to protect their consumers from some degree of unsavory content... but suggesting they have the right to dictate what can and can't be delivered as SMS, just because the outdated common carrier laws don't treat SMS the same as voice is absurd.

Definitely feels like a "write your congressman" sort of moment.

From the New York Times via Reg Braithwaite

Aeroplan Music Store ... great idea ... poor execution.

So I got an eMail from Air Canada about the new Aeroplan Music Store. No link directly to the store, but the link was instead to an "exclusive" Michael Bublé music video. Alright. Fine. I'll click the link.

So what do you get? Instead of using Flash, or QuickTime which would play back without any issue ... there's some QMesh plugin that you've first got to install to view this music video. Strike 1.



Anyway, I start to browse the music store (using miles to pick up music? Not such a bad idea, I guess, if the price is right). It turns out I can't just put in my Aeroplan number/password to start buying music... I've got to go all the way back to the Aeroplan website and redeem my miles for a voucher I can use on the store. Strike 2.



That also means, there's NO price listed anywhere on the site. I.e. it'd really be nice to see how many miles each song/album costs. Maybe as dumb as the Zune "points" thing, but at least it'd give an idea of cost. Strike 3.

Of course, even if I did decide I wanted to pick up a voucher, I'd be out of luck, as the site's down at the moment. Great idea... send out emails announcing a "world premier" and then go down for "routine maintenance."



Strike 4.

To top it all off, only a tiny percentage of music on the site is in MP3 (instead of WMA) format ... and all the MP3 music I saw were from bands I've never heard of. So, for anyone using an iPod ... you're out of luck.

Strike 9, you're done.

Nice try, though, Air Canada... Maybe you should just do a deal with Apple to let us redeem miles for iTunes gift certificates?

iPhone's still far too closed

Apple's created a terrific new device, touting it's fantastic open Internet capabilities, and then have locked it down to an absurd degree.

It's bad enough that the official way of putting ringtones on the phone is to take a subset of your already-purchased iTunes music and pay $0.99 for a ringtone sample to be created.

It's worse that the only developer API that's exposed officially is nothing more than a pretty plain-vanilla browser.

There's OS X buried under that, and all sorts of developers have been figuring out how to write apps that take advantage of all that power ... who are building the ecosystem that makes the phone more valuable, and what's Apple doing? Telling them their apps may stop working at any point.

And what about the consumers who've shelled out $500 for their shiny new iPhone? Well, if they happen to want to use another network, or install native apps (whicn involves hacking the device), they lose their warranty. Actually, they might even end up bricking their phone.

Now, on the one hand, Apple's got a point: They built the phone, and the operating system. If someone wants to hack what it is that they've built, it's certainly not Apple's responsibility to make sure any future update won't conflict with the hack.

On the other hand, going from a world where the carrier controls the complete user experience isn't much worse than a world where your hardware vendor controls the complete user experience.

The iPhone came out quickly, shook the Motorola's and Nokia's of the world pretty fiercely, and excited developers... all of that is good. It's probably fair to guess that they just haven't had the time to open things up for developers cleanly yet. I'd even bet that Apple are going to release extensions to XCode to let developers build rich native iPhone apps in the not-too-distant future...

But at the moment, they're just scaring their customers, and irritating the developers that are the ones that'll really add value to iPhone going forward.