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?