no, really

While we were on the way home, I took us on a little detour off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We stopped at the Flight 93 memorial, which was a very odd experience.

The location is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It’s really breathtaking. It’s very quiet, and you can feel the sorrow of the families who have visited. You can’t get very near the spot, but you can see it at a distance of about 100 yards. You can even see the mound of dirt at the actual spot.

I’m not exactly sure why I went. I’m kind of glad I did, but I still don’t understand why.

I’m back home from a family trip to the old homestead in very rural Indiana. I’ve been there once before, in the winter. In the warmer sunlight of early October, it’s even more beautiful.

I love seeing the parts of the family that you have to go there to see. The whole area is breathtakingly beautiful - the rolling hills and trees and fields and farms. It has the best of the catskills and farm country all in one place, next to a huge man-made reservoir.

My grandfather is there, recovering from surgery, so every day we’d drive the (almost) hour into Ohio to spend a few hours with him. It’s something we enjoyed as much as he did, even though we’d all prefer hanging out at home instead of a hospital room.

I also learned some interesting lessons about spending lots of time with immediate family members who you haven’t lived with for many years.  No matter how old you are, you’ll still be treated like their little boy.  Sometimes it makes you feel nice, sometimes it makes you want to scream.   I experienced both.

Now I’m back to work, which has now presented some challenges of its own.  I’ve now got lots of work to catch up on, and some challenges I’ll elaborate on another time.  Sigh.  When is it going to get even a *little* bit easier?

I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist. I’m a bit more of a realist, on the optimistic end of the spectrum. If you can figure out what that means, good for you!

All good things do come to an end… particularly when they’re named something as finite as Web 2.0. Even moreso when such a term is so buzz-y that whole magazines and conferences and business models are designed around its loosely defined description.

Crunchgear asserts that the end is nigh. Two factors are contributing to this: Laziness and Advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

You read it here first.

dinosaurl: a human relic of the old internet age.

usage:

“Can you believe that guy? ‘VC this’ and ‘development cycle’ that. What a dinosaurl!”

pronunciation:

DAI-nou-sawrl

play on:
di-no-sa-URL

© 2007

TV is slumping. Majorly. Read any business publication that covers media, and they’ll point to TV and newspapers and say something like “it’s like watching the titanic sink… in slow motion.”

TV is suffering a bit more noisily that newspapers. The ‘papers at least have subscription revenue to keep them propped upright as they offload passengers. DVR is tearing a giant gash in the hull of the HMS Boobtube.

Read the rest of this entry »

I attended one of the growing list of tech-centered events in New York this evening. As someone who appreciates the value of these kind of events in New York for a long list of reasons, I have to say… it wasn’t that great.

First off, it’s too large to be intimate. When there’s 20 people in a room, you can expect to meet 2-3 at a time, over the course of two hours, that’s at least 6 minutes per group. Even that might be too much to meet everyone in the room…. This meetup was about 100 people, easy.

Second, with the growing number of these meetings, it’s harder for each one to have high-quality presenters, so each one is less concerned with the quality of the company or the presenter, and more concerned about getting those 3+ spots filled so there’s something to talk about every month. There’s nothing worse than a room full of people expecting to see a show, and having nothing to give them.

It’s also a bit reflective of the industry. It’s good that everyone is excited and getting off the couch and building their dream, but when there are more ideas like “it’ll send you an sms when you leave the refrigerator door open!” and “you can calculate exactly how many steps there are to your office, based on your height!”, it starts to get tedious.

Everyone goes to these meetings hoping to see something revolutionary, or learn something about how to build their own business. Instead, they get a sloppy elevator pitch and a half-working presentation of another me-too idea.

This is why I’m still keen on nextNY. Because there is no one person coming up with the meetings, and there’s no rigid schedule, and most of the activity happens in the online group, it doesn’t get stale. There’s no room for stale. The people in the group are working really hard every day on their dream/career/obsession, and only have time to come out of their caves when it’s really worth it.

This month, nextSports did just that. It was a bit of a Socratic seminar on sports and technology in New York, featuring some key attendees and a group of 50 eager, interested, relevant participants to ask questions and steer the conversation in any way they saw fit. I was the instigator and helped run the first Community Conversation and it was wonderfully successful. I’ve been very interested in contributing more, and realized a great synergistic opportunity:

Troy is launching Tiki. Tiki helps techies. Tiki needs publicity. nextNY is techies. nextNY CC’s need venues. Venues cost money. Troy can publicize Tiki by sponsoring a venue for nextNY. Run, Spot, Run!

I was out to dinner last night with someone who just recently switched from his Treo (which he loved) to an iPhone (which he loves).  He’s not gadget-obsessed, but he’s young enough that technology is just a part of life like cookies or sneakers.

His biggest complaint about the iPhone is that he can’t one-hand type anymore.  He got very used to being able to feel his way around the keyboard on the Treo and type without looking.  This has its upsides and down - typing while driving is bad, no matter how you slice it.  Now with the iPhone, there are no “keys”, so you really have to pay attention to where you’re poking on the screen.  On his way to meet me, I texted him, and he was forced (lol) to call me back and let me know he was 5 mins away.

He said it would be great if there were a functional voice-to-txt function on the phone, or a service like voice dial for texts.  I knew I’d heard of one, and when I got home, I quickly looked it up.  The first one I found, and where I stopped was Jott .

I figured they’d got funding and purchased some xerox-developed voice recognition technology or something that allows them to convert from voice to text.  They don’t.  It says  something like “it’ll take a few minutes, our operators have to transcribe the message to send it.”

Operators??  I thought the advantage of working on the web was to *reduce* human interaction with end users, so as to decrease overhead and increase profit margins.  I’m guessing their operators work from home and stuff, but how can this scale easily?

On top of all this… they still don’t charge for it!

This makes me think a bit about Mahdad and my venture, the people required, and what it’ll take for us to get it done with little-to-no financing and without charging in the initial term.  Sigh.  The first million is indeed the hardest.

I’m desperately seeking an excuse to fly to California these days. I haven’t heard form anyone that has flown Virgin America, but I’m sure it’s quite wonderful… let me count the ways.

• mood lighting that makes me *want* a redeye
• music library (just like I obsessed about with Song)
• chat with other people on the plane… with a keyboard! (mile hi? <3)
• power, usb and ETHERNET(in 2008) jacks at your seat?!?
• program guide for the tv
• interactive flight maps (via google, of course)

This is some real limitless business development that makes Virgin rock. And it’s a “low-fare” airline. What more excuse do you need?

(no I did not get paid to write this… yet )

For the longest time, I didn’t jump on the Cingular bandwagon. I had an old AT&T plan that was amazing, so I kept it all through the Cingular acquisition, and even up to the “new” AT&T. One of the great features of the plan was free incoming text messages.

I really exploited this feature. I set up my gmail to forward my txts to my phone, my gCal notifications… everything, via my

@mmode.com email address. Occasionally it was a pain, like when automated systems sent me a slew of messages at once and it wouldn’t stop beeping at me! But overall, it was like a free blackberry.I since had to change my plan (and made it better for less money… lord knows how), and now I pay for incoming txts. But when you’ve got 1500 a month, you don’t tend to run out.

All the sudden, this week… they stopped. Just….. stopped. And it bugged me a little. I was afraid my txts were broken, or I went over some mysterious limit. I googled a little for an answer, to no avail. I tested out sending from different accounts - no answer. I decided to do some network sleuthing on the @mmode.com address. As it turned out, the domain stopped working altogether! It was still owned by Cingular, but nothing was responding to it.

So I started to dig a little more into att’s text messaging to see if there was an answer. Nothing in the forums. Then I found this page that gave a summary of text messaging, and lo and behold! Waaaay at the bottom: “Send and receive emails using your phone’s email address. Your address is your 10-digit number@txt.att.net.” Brilliant!

I tested, and it works. I set up my gmail to do its thing, and presto! Order is restored. Now att… why couldn’t you do something nice like send everyone a text saying “we’re shutting the @mmode.com address off. please switch to @txt.att.net”? I guess they offer it, but it probably isn’t something they like to advertise. After all… for every email that is sent to a phone’s txt messaging, that’s one fewer text someone had to send.

I think I keep coming back to this post, and I’m not sure why. As anyone who knows me already knows, I’m reasonably satisfied with my phone. It works splendidly, and still gets the “wow that’s thin” comments I enjoy so much. I do wish I had a more functional device, but one that’s *actually* functional, none of this flash-bang stuff that’s all fluff and no substance.

Naturally, the closest thing to what I’m looking for is packaged in schmancy Apple design, but it’s only a reasonably close approximation. The two reasons I stayed away from the iPhone were 1) potential reliability issues in v1.0, and 2) price. I personally know a few people who got the phone the instant it came out, and still maintain the facade of elation.

But, just as I suspected, the honeymoon is over.

After the wow of the slick and prettiness has worn off, and the pixie dust has settled, you gotta ask yourself “does it really do what I want?” Fred says “nope.” I figured as much. When I’ve got a big purchase, I usually delay as long as I can to be absolutely sure it’s what I want and/or need. I was tempted by the iPhone, but the price tag turned me off from day 1. That and hassling with at&t for their contract bs.

Fred has some odd requests, like that it shouldn’t have a phone. He’s clearly approaching this mobile device thing from the other direction. While I’m a huge fan of using things *other* than the telephone to communicate over the course of my day (particularly loving using my bluetooth headset with iChat), when it comes down to it, I believe the phone has its place. Sure, Skype offers phone-like features, but after last week’s mysterious Skype outage, who do you trust more?  Besides, I think Fred’s opinions are colored by the build-your-own-mobile-device thing he’s invested in.
As everyone is, I’m curious to see if and what Google is producing.  I’m guessing it’ll be very g-app centric (which is fine), and there must be some ability for Google to stick their ubiquitous advertising in front of the user (otherwise, why would they waste their time?).  If we haven’t heard anything about it, I wonder - is it carrier neutral?  Is it only wi-fi?

I’m sure it’s going to be at least a year or so before a device really entices me to plop down a few hundred.