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.