Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Wanderport, the worst WiFi Network on earth
Sitting in my hotel lobby in NYC (room's not ready... sigh)... and
they're using Wanderport to provide WiFi access.
So I connect, give them my credit card details, and it starts off
well enough. Until now. Each page load seems to cause this stupid
"Nomadix" thing to pop up, and try UNSUCCESSFULLY to redirect my
pages through it before it hits the Internet. Grand.
Oh, and since I registered with Safari, I don't think Firefox is even
being allowed to browse the web at all. Even better. Way to go
Wanderport!
Between this and my equally crappy wired internet experience in
Boston earlier this week, I'm thinking an HSDPA card is the way to
go. So, Rogers... wanna' set some price plans that won't hurt the
wallet too much and ship an ExpressCard card? Or... Hmm... maybe I'll
just sign up for the Cingular card when it's available. It's GOT to
be better than this!
Sand grooming at the museum of modern art
Sand grooming at the museum of modern art
Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Sunday, October 15, 2006
More Pearson hotspot wireless
In the Terminal 2 Air Canada lounge at Pearson. Finally my MacBook
Pro is able to SEE the Bell "datavalet" network... but it never
manages to get itself an IP address and actually WORK... argh.
Anyone got any suggestions on what might be wrong?
I thought I was running a Mac to avoid weirdness like this.l
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
That whole YouTube of Mobile sounds a lot better today...
For some time, we’ve been telling people that our real focus with Nakama isn’t just to help people take pictures and videos and share them with the Flickr’s and Blogger’s of the world. Sure, helping you take and publish pictures is important to us: but we want you to do it on your phone. :)
Moreover, we’ve been talking about the phone as an entertainment device. One of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about recently has been the inflection point.
The premise is simple: either the network is fast enough, or it’s not. There’s no in-between. Either you can watch a video smoothly, and browse easily, or you can’t. Well, the networks that companies like Cingular and Verizon (and yes, Rogers, Bell and Telus) have deployed (or are deploying) are finally good enough for multimedia.
What does that mean? Well, it means the experience of sharing or watching pictures or videos on your phone doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly slow. All of a sudden, when you’ve got a few minutes to kill, and you want to be entertained, your phone’s gorgeous new colour screen and wicked-fast network connection give you what you want: entertainment.
Well. Almost. Before YouTube, your home broadband connection probably wasn’t all that useful when it came to finding random, interesting video clips. Well, we think it’s the same for your phone: Now that the underlying technology’s good enough, we want to help you publish, share and watch cool stuff right on your phone using Nakama.
So there you go… we’re all about helping you express yourself, and be entertained on your phone… and that’s why there’re similarities. As far as the obvious followup questions about competing with YouToogle? Well, we can’t share everything, can we? :)
Monday, October 09, 2006
Taking a page out of Ellison's book
... and the project begins. :)
(Yes, that was meant to be as cryptic as it sounds.)
Friday, October 06, 2006
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Rocking machine sculpture at magic pony on Queen.
Rocking machine sculpture at magic pony on Queen.
Posted straight from my phone with Nakama. Click to see more.
The initial Nakama response...
We hit the homepage of Digg and it didn’t even make our system break a sweat… actually, in hindsight, given the amount of traffic we served up, Mike mentioned it was actually kind of uneventful.
To top it all off, we’re doing pretty well on the most important metrics: lots of people are signing up, using, and coming back to Nakama (of course disclosing our numbers would get me fired… but they’re way beyond what we expected, so we’re thrilled).
Lots more work to do, and hopefully you’ll be hearing about us in a few more places in the next couple of weeks… there’s a whole lot more to the story that we’re hoping to tell real soon.
Missing CrackBerry & admitting I was wrong
So, whoever’s got my old BlackBerry wasn’t too bright… they decided not to return it, not realizing I’d have gladly paid more for it than they can sell it for. Great. Anyway, it took me all of about 1 day to hit eBay and find a replacement quick and cheap (hey, we ARE a startup!). So, briefly, to any of those to whom I’d previously said I’d rather have a Treo than a Berry: I was wrong. I apologize. Man is this thing a great device.
Actually, I was having a chat with a fellow-geek last night, and we both realized that two of the companies we admire for their attention to detail, and excellent user experience design are Apple and RIM. Hopefully it’s more than just admiration… we’re doing our best around here at Ambient to keep our user experience terrific. So far the feedback on it’s been great, so we’re hoping we’re doing something right.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Monday, October 02, 2006
Digg that Mobilecrunch story, would-ya? :-)
MobileCrunch takes a look at Nakama
Head on over to check it out!
