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Author Archives: Jeremy Toeman

Sorry (where's JT??)

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I haven’t blogged in almost a month and I definitely feel a little guilty about it.

It’s not as if there’s no technology news to discuss. And I have a small pile of gadgets I’ve recently tried out (quick highlights: SuperTalent 8GB USB Pico drive is awesome, orbitsound T12 seems pretty impressive so far, Targus Grove combo backpack/messenger bag is my new favorite, i want a new macbook air, my maxtor shared storage plus NAS just crapped out, NHL 09 for xbox 360 is amazing, and my vaio is acting up again – no joke). So I can’t say I have nothing to talk about.

I’ve come to realize that the reading about and discussing both the elections and the financial situation are consuming the time I used to use for blogging. Unlike my “pro blogger” friends, I only have a small amount of time I can dedicate to it each day, and I’m spending that time researching other things right now. Not to mention the fact that hockey’s back in full swing (Go Habs!).

For the few of you who follow me on FriendFeed, you’ve probably seen much of my thoughts on both politics and the economic climate. I’ll take a moment to address both briefly here:

Regarding the economy, my opinion is that it is far too soon to make any kind of judgment call regarding “another Great Depression”. Granted I’m an optimist, but I have yet to see a single financial expert who’s actually been correct through this entire mess, so I see no reason to begin trusting any of them – regardless of their position. I encourage you to read multiple articles on the various topics, and do some reading on other historical “panics” prior to stocking up on canned soup in your bomb shelter.

Regarding politics (yes, I know this isn’t the place you come to read politics, so if you don’t want to hear any politics, just skip this paragraph, it’s that easy), I’ll take a moment to endorse Obama for President. In 2000, I thought McCain was an excellent candidate and got sabotaged by Bush’s extreme negativism and Leninesque attacks. Today I believe McCain has changed, and is no longer the visionary leader I once respected (selecting Palin, distracting the campaign with a focus on “possible terrorist connections” and other shenanigans – elegantly summarized here). While I can’t say Obama’s perfect either, I believe this country will be better off with an idealistic visionary as leader than with more of the same style of “leading” we’ve seen in recent years. Note: if you would like to debate politics with me, please use FriendFeed, Twitter, email, or some other interactive tool for it. Thanks.

I think my blogging will remain fairly erratic in the next few weeks, until at least one of the above topics is settled (though depending on outcome, a sudden relocation to Canada may be necessary).

As your reward for getting all the way through this post, please enjoy the following video:

Thoughts on Building Community and Relationships

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I’ve put together a couple of posts over on the Stage Two blog about the “community manager” role within an organization as well as on building relationships with influencers. Excerpts are here:

Who’s Best for Community Management?

First off, being a community manager is not for everyone. When I used to run the SlingCommunity, I used to tell people the right way to do it was to live with a combination of thick- and thin-skinnedness. I had to remain thinskinned enough where I took every piece of negative feedback openly and honestly. It’s never about user error or someone “not getting it”, it’s about doing it better and better until they do “get it,” regardless of how right I was (or wasn’t). That said, it’s also key to be thickskinned enough where not everything is taken personally, it’s important not to get mired down in negativity… (read on)

Not Everyone Can Build Relationships

I’ve read post after post from bloggers and entrepreneurs on how the best way to market your company is by being the uber-evangelist and making relationships with all the key influencers. It’s great in theory, and for the very lucky few who can pull it off, I say mazel tov. The unfortunate reality with this kind of advice is it just doesn’t apply to most entrepreneurs or CEOs, and is over-the-top idealistic… (read on)

I Have a Bad Case of Gadget Ennui

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That’s “ennui”, not “envy”, and I’m writing about the fairly dull times we are living in. From an awesome new gadget perspective, that is.

The Age of Enlightened Gadgets spanned the first half of this decade, where a virtually continuous stream of new and fascinating toys were built by both large manufacturers and new upstarts. I’d probably look back at the launches for the original PalmPilot and TiVo as the Big Bang moments. The first generation digital cameras also helped kickstart the gadget world.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with Ryan Block, former Editor-in-Chief of Engadget and cofounder of gdgt.com, he was actually the one who first commented to me about the changing gadget world. I asked him why he felt 2001-05 was a more exciting time, he said “It’s the point in which non-geeky people started buying personal technology in droves. Cellphones, digital cameras, laptops — they became tools of mere mortals, not just tools of the trade.”

Today, however, I feel things are a little more… boring. Phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc – they are all fairly well-defined. The netbook category is probably the only really exciting new entrant we’ve seen in recent history. Sure there are oddballs along the way (Slingbox, LiveScribe, USB Humping Dog, etc), but for the most part our categories are almost too well-defined (which is a huge part of why I got involved in working with Bug Labs). I find it hard to get excited about a new, slightly better phone, or higher-resolution camera, flatter screen, etc.

I’ve had the opportunity to build and market consumer electronics products with about a dozen different companies, from the biggest to the smallest manufacturers. They all face the same set of challenges, including a very high failure ratio (for experimental products), a high barrier to entry (engineering, manufacturing, sourcing, support, etc), a rapidly changing technology landscape (wireless standards, codecs, etc), and a lack of sufficient expertise in dealing with all these matters. To clarify: there are tons of experts at these companies, but few of them deal with the sum of all these issues. The guy who was in charge of building AV receivers in the 80s is now dealing with on-screen complicated GUIs, and these are radically different skill sets.

My prediction is we’ll continue through another couple of years of playing the current game. Apple will remain the pioneer in enthralling us (like it or not) with their product evolutions. The majority of other players will continue to attempt to copy Apple, and continue to fall short (the quantity of poorly designed touchscreen phones is amazing to me – here’s a hint: stop trying to clone it, start trying to out-do it). We’ll continue to see the same categories of gadgets, each with minor evolutions occur (adding WiFi to an MP3 player or camera is not a revolutionary enhancement).

And then something interesting will happen. Breakthroughs in material science will create radically new opportunities. Pervasive Internet will change the way we think about storage. Location-based services might actually find a use. Modularity will gain mainstream use and appeal. I don’t know when. I don’t know exactly how. But it’s going to be a fun ride when it starts.

Is Online Gaming Creating Citizens or Monsters?

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There’s an interesting article up on MSNBC right now regarding kids and online gaming.  Some highlights:

Game experiences “can be quite valuable from the standpoint of civic and political engagement.”

Video games can provide hands-on learning opportunities for kids that can be much more meaningful than reading a textbook. For instance, you can play a mayor in “SimCity,” and get a close-up look at what it takes to build and maintain a community.

Helping a newbie get his sea legs in a game simulates the real-world experience of volunteering. And playing games online can expose kids to people with worldviews that differ from their own — in positive and negative ways.

Many of the of the 1,102 teenagers polled said they’d encountered hostility, racism and sexism while playing online — stuff that can certainly happen offline too, says Kahne.  “Just as some playground experiences are enriching and some are unpleasant for young people, one can imagine that that would be true in the game world.”

I’ve played games “online” for two decades (I used to play Populous against people over dial-up back in the 80s).  I’ve played pretty much every category of game online, from real-time strategy (aka RTS, like StarCraft or Command and Conquer) to first-person shooter (aka FPS, like Doom, Quake, or my current fave Call of Duty 4) to casual games (like Hearts, Spades, Scrabulous). And while I can’t claim to be excellent at any of them, it’s certainly clear that I’ve wasted many many hours of my life so far.

After reading the MSNBC article I couldn’t help but wonder how much video game playing the researchers had done.  First, comparing any aspect of SimCity to running real cities is like comparing playing Call of Duty 4 to, say, war. I’d say the most practical skills I’ve gained from video games include my abilities to use a bucket of water to catch rapidly dropped bombs, I’m pretty damn awesome at shooting down evil catpeople in spaceships, and I’ve always been more cautious around @’s, D’s and L’s than I am near o’s and g’s (bonus points to anyone who can name all three games).

Also, the comments about helping newbies are very domain-specific.  There are some games where this is true, but I’d say the majority of n00bs (as they are actually called) pretty much have to fend for themselves or have a real-life friend come over.  Playing Call of Duty 4, for example, has near-constant mockery of anyone making basically any mistake, or even using certain weapons.  Playing RTS games, on the other hand, you are more likely to get some constructive help/tips, but this generally comes long after being demolished in the first 10 minutes of the game.  I am not a World-of-Warcraft player, but I’d assume that’s an easier place to make friends.

I think it’s also pretty clear that the researchers haven’t spent much time on Xbox Live, which is the den of monsters as far as terrible online behavior is concerned.  I’ve never heard such a quantity of hate-filled kids (and sometimes adults, but mostly kids) in a room, and it’s clearly language they’d never use off-line.  There’s something very wrong about the amazing level of anonymity the Xbox Live experience presents, as I sincerely doubt we have a generation of evil-minded children running around the country.  But I do ponder the particular home scenarios for these kids, and wonder about their unsupervised and more importantly, uneducated time online.

A few years from now my wife and I will have to decide about what we’ll be comfortable with in our home regarding Internet use, which will specifically include gaming.  I think it’ll be important for us to teach responsibility and general codes of conduct.  I’ve never felt the ability nor desire to become a racist arrogant sexist moron while playing video games online.  But maybe that’s because when I was a 14-year-old gamer, I didn’t have 35-year-olds to beat up on all day and all night.

FriendFeed's Real Opportunity: Reassembling the Internet

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I’m a fan of FriendFeed, the Internet service aggregator self-described as:

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

For an example of it in action, you can see my profile here.  Basically the site pulls from a variety of sources, such as Digg, YouTube, Flickr, my blog, etc, and presents all the content in one view.  As you can see to the right of this screen, I use a widget to show my latest content from FriendFeed here on the blog.

While FriendFeed (FF) is a neat way to follow someone, it gets much more interesting when you use it as a new type of discussion forum.  If you click here, you’ll see everything I’ve commented on.  Again, from a “watcher’s” perspective, it’s still only moderately interesting (at best), and if you don’t see the point right now, I totally understand.  Personally, I like the ability to rapidly share content and interact with others in fun (or serious) debate and discussion.  I still believe it’s a niche play right now, but I think they have an interesting opportunity to get much much bigger.

At present, if you comment on one of my blog posts, that comment is stuck, it’s isolated to my blog (though it is retrievable over RSS, for those who really want it).  I could use a service such as Disqus or CoComment, which allow my comments to get aggregated with other blogs’ comments, but I don’t really see how that benefits either me, my reader, or those who leave comments here.  That said, those services are also integrated back into FF, which means a Disqus user’s comment on a blog post ALSO appears as a new content entry in FF.  This is only the beginning of the mess, which compounds as users can comment on a Disqus comment INSIDE FF, but that comment doesn’t make it OUTSIDE back to Disqus.

If I’ve lost you, don’t be alarmed – this doesn’t impact more than a few thousand people (at best) so far.  But when you look across many of the social networking sites (like Facebook, etc) and content sharing sites (like YouTube, Flickr, etc), the common abilities are to comment, favorite, and re-share content you find.  FriendFeed does a great job pulling in all that content, but I think the ability to push the content OUT is where the real opportunity to succeed exists.

I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled.  I have my LinkedIN contacts and my Facebook friends, and some overlap.  I have my photos on Flickr, my lengthy videos on YouTube, and my short videos on 12seconds.tv.  I have people who read my Tweets and follow me on FriendFeed, but don’t subscribe to my blog.  In every single site I just mentioned, users can comment and share content, but what they cannot do is have their experience contributed back to the source material universally.  In other words, if someone comments on my blog here, my FriendFeed followers do not see it, and my blog readers here are unaware of FriendFeed users’ comments.

My belief is there is a big opportunity to fix this problem of content fragmentation.  FriendFeed (or virtually anyone else, but they’ve built a good chunk of it already) can take their platform, and create an API that allows for bidirectional content delivery.  At present, they are great at pulling in content, just don’t share it out well (and RSS isn’t good enough), and as we all know, anyone can take reservations, you gotta hold the reservation!  If FriendFeed could build the de facto content aggregation and distribution platform that integrated across all content sharing and social networking services, it would become an instant acquisition target.

Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge.  As people continue to sign up for more new services, our content and experiences become harder to share and find.  The silos of content and, more importantly, content discussion, are frustrating and annoying to all but the earliest of tech adopters and “a-listers” (who seem quite willing to put up with anything just to try new stuff).  For the majority of people out there, a certain degree of “registration fatigue” is setting in, and whether it’s FriendFeed or Facebook, or someone else entirely, there’s a big opportunity sitting out there, waiting for someone to jump in.

The Universe Didn't End Last Night. Which is nice.

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With all of the Internet incessantly consumed by Steve Jobs’ health (none of your business), the startups at DEMO/TC50 (can’t remember a single one of them yet), and the audacity of politicians who lie (what a surprise), it seems like not many people were paying attention to some other fairly important news last night. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was turned on last night, and the reports so far – it works. Or, well, we aren’t quite sure about the results, other than not destroying the universe as we know it.

I’ll be honest, I’m quite unaware of the actual technology here, and I don’t really understand the actual risk level. But if you weren’t aware either it works a little something like this. The humongous machine took 20 years to build, was extremely expensive, but could teach us how the universe actually works. Keeping the science talk out of it (from what I’m learning, this is how one becomes a successful politician – ignore things like scientific details and economics, those are just for them elite folks), basically this is like a nuclear reactor on Barry Bonds quality steroids.

When operational, the machine takes two atoms, and smashes them together really hard. Then they use a bunch of meters and instruments to see what happened (they also stream live video). Ideally they replicate the Big Bang (or, as creationists like to call it, Sunday at about 8am) and learn how it happened.

The only glitch, as some point out, is that if they really pull it off, recreating the Big Bang could be, well, in a word, catastrophic. Now some may recall the Y2K panic, which was a bunch of technically illiterate bizness-folks overreacting to a near-non-issue (and I’ll be honest, I was avoiding elevators that day). This time, however, it’s those science folks who were concerned, and fairly legitimately so. But, regardless of caution, the Swiss engineers at LHC decided to flip the switch of the machine designed 20 years ago (you know, before cell phones, laptops, TiVo) to see what would happen.

Again, I don’t know how real the threat was. Could’ve been nothing at all. But something does kinda bother me about the notion of a small group of people having enough power at their disposal that has no form of international oversight whatsoever. Call me crazy.

For more fun reading on the way science can end the world, read on. If you’re getting a little panicky right now, click here instead for a soothing lullaby.

The 20 Commandments of Social Media

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  1. Thou Shalt Avoidest Using the Term Social Media, Except When Specifically Discussing Social Media
  2. Thou Shalt Not Use Thine Blog or Twitter Purely to Show Off About all the Cool People Thou Know, nor the Secrets Thou Art Entrusted With
  3. Thou Shalt Not Use Twitter in Conjunction With a Service Which Updates Itself Automatically and Frequently
  4. Thou Shalt Not Complain When Thine Family Professes Ignorance of the Contents of Thine Blog
  5. Thou Shalt Not Put Embarrassing Photos of Thine Self on Thine Facebook Page, for They Shalt Be Easily Found in the Future
  6. Thou Shalt Not Be a Bad Commentor, Nor Shalt Thou Be a Sycophantic Fool
  7. Thou Shalt Not Exclaim With False Surprise at Quantity of Thine Followers
  8. Thou Shalt Not Assume That all Humans use FriendFeed
  9. Thou Shalt Not Poke, Bite, Nor Throweth Sheep, Yet Thou Mayest Be a Pirate
  10. Thou Shalt Not Forward Urban Myths. Ever
  11. Thou Shalt Not Create Video Podcasts of Thineself With a Duration Countable in Minutes
  12. Thou Shalt Not Befriend all People Thou Hast Ever Encountered, No Matter How Briefly
  13. Thou Shalt Not Describe New Startups as the Blank of Blank, Nor the Killer of Blank, Nor the Social Blank, nor the Blank 2.0
  14. Thou Shalt Not Spend Thine Day Reading Blogs, Leaving Comments, Writing Tweets, Updating Facebook Statuses, and then Complain About Thine Busy Schedule
  15. Thou Shalt Not Assume That All Content Received in Email or Read on Web Pages is Factually Accurate
  16. Thou Shalt Not Asketh a Question on Twitter When a Simple Google Search Wouldst Suffice
  17. Thou Shalt Not Confuse Transparency With Invasion of Privacy
  18. Thou Shalt Not Transform Bloggers’ Names Into Verbs, Such as Scoble-ized or Louis Gray-ed
  19. Thou Shalt Enjoy Thine Internet Fame (if Bestowed), for it is Surely Fleeting
  20. Thou Must Never, Ever, Whine About the Sacred TechMeme. It is All-Seeing and All-Powerful and Must Not Be Questioned

Internal Memo Leaked: Apple to Close Business on Tuesday

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In an incredibly rare “scoop” I received an email from an anonymous Apple employee who shared an internal memo with me. Here are the contents (name withheld by request):

To All Apple Employees:

After 12 great years back at Apple, I’ve come to make an important decision about the future of the business. With great analysis of the current and future markets, I’ve decided it’s time for us to close shop. While this may surprise some of you, I think if you truly consider the situation I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion yourself.

Since I rejoined Apple, we’ve rebuilt the image of the company in its entirety. Our flagship product, OS X, represents the pinnacle in operating systems. Normally we’d pursue improvements, but after playing with the latest version of a Vista PC, it seems like there’s just no point in working on making ours any better.

Since the launch of the first generation iPod we’ve utterly dominated the portable MP3 player landscape. In fact we’re outselling our competition by such a ridiculous margin it often feels like we’re playing the Washington Generals!

In 2007 we built the best phone ever made. In 2008 we followed it up with the best phone ever made. This process is likely to repeat itself far into the future.

It’s great to win, but something changed after we launched the MacBook Air, the lightest, thinnest, fastest, shortest, longest, cleanest, tallest, and softest laptop ever built or ever will be built.

So I sat down with Jonathan Ive and we brainstormed other industries to go conquer. We debated products such as microwaves, vacuum cleaners, dish soap, and even breakfast cereal. We just couldn’t find anything else that would be really exciting to go monopolize.

Therefore, I’ve decided it’s time for us all to move on. It’s been a really fun time, we have the best team in the world. I believe the best thing we can possibly do is quit while we’re way ahead. Additionally, think of all the amazingly talented resources out there to join the workforce at other technology companies that could use some help (I’m thinking of you, Jerry!). Trust me, it’s a good thing.

Please remove all personal effects from your offices by 5pm, as all campus buildings will be demolished immediately thereafter. Apple Store employees will all have job offers from the new tenants of their current locations, as they are being converted into Red Lobster franchises.

And one more thing.

I’ll be showing up at the Chicago White Sox training camp next Spring. If that doesn’t work out, my back-up is seeing if the Jets need any extra QB’s next year.

Steve Jobs
Apple CEO

There it is, unaltered, and unverifiable. Until Tuesday morning, that is. Should be a keynote to remember it seems!

ps – just in case, can all stockbrokers think twice before making trading decisions because of something you read on this blog?  thanks. on a related note, I am an Apple shareholder.

Samsung Adds Final Nail to Blu-ray's Coffin

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One of the greatest challenges of building consumer electronics devices is dealing with that awkward timeframe between announcing new/next-generation products and ending the lifecycle of current ones.  Sales tend to plummet and huge price incentives are thrown at customers to try to get the units off the shelves instead of in the dumpster.  Naturally as a CE manufacturer you typically want to keep that window as short as possible, as it is otherwise harmful to pretty much in the foodchain, often including consumers.

I was, therefore, quite surprised to read an interview with a Samsung exec predicting the demise of the Blu-ray format within the next 5 years.  I can’t see any possibly upside to this statement for Samsung, content makers, other device manufacturers, etc.  As I’ve blogged about before, I’m still far from being sold on Blu-ray as a “winner”, but I guess that needs more context.

The NPD Group puts home DVD players at having penetrated 85% of US homes.  That’s a win, unquestionably.  It seems highly unlikely that Blu-ray will ever get to the same level.  I’ve yet to hear/see any real positive word-of-mouth happening for the format, and the reasons seem similar as when I blogged about it last time.  Here are my biggest reasons against mass-adoption of Blu-ray as a format:

  • Without extremely big, high-quality screens, it’s challenging to see the “ooh, ahh” factor of 1080p over even an upconverted standard DVD.
  • Upconverting DVD players are pretty much the standard already, and are available at extremely reasonable price points.
  • Consumers are still enjoying their 720p (the current HD standard) content, so seeing something “marginally better” doesn’t make too much of an impact.
  • Small content selection at a high price point.

Finally, I also believe we’re going to see an “iPodification” of video.  In the 90s we were well on our way to replacing the CD as format, with SACD and DVD-Audio as possible follow-ups.  Both offered vast improvements in sound quality that were pretty apparent with a decent stereo.  Today, however, the average person is listening to music at worse-than-CD quality, on their iPods/iPhones, home stereos, Sonoses (or is that Sonii?), etc.

It seems fairly likely that the same pattern will occur with video, based on the combination of iPods, mobile video (cell phones), YouTube, Hulu, Amazon’s new service, and anything else that brings low-to-medium quality video to our eyes on a recurring basis.  Don’t get me wrong, the big flat panels will still make it to the common living rooms, with glorious 5, 7, 11, or 2834-channel surround sound systems.  But the time invested in these playback experiences is already in a questionable state (some say its on the decline, though there’s little real-world evidence as of yet), and all things being equal, seems unlikely to grow.

My hunch is the DVD as we know it today will be around for a long, long time, and the replacement format for it won’t involve physical media.  TVs with built-in streaming capabilities are coming to store shelves (I’d probably avoid the first generation if I were you), and we’ll see a new generation of set-tops and gaming consoles with higher quality video when the time is right.  Blu-ray definitely beat HD-DVD, but I still don’t believe it’ll ever be a dominant format for the masses.

Little Known Facts about Sarah Palin: a fun day of Tweeting

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I’ve spent a good part of the last 6 hours chuckling following the “Little Known Facts” meme about Sarah Palin. It appears to have started by a Twitter user named Michael Turk who Tweeted:

Little known fact: Sarah Palin used to wrestle kodiak bears in Alaskan bare knuckles fight clubs.

Since then, over 1000 (1092 at the time of writing) other entries have appeared. In fact, 60 more were written while I write this blog post.

Some are LOL funny. Some are not. But it’s just made my day, and if you want to read more, enjoy them here (including mine). There’s even palinfacts.com already in place with some highlights.

Thank you Internet (and especially Michael Turk), for making today an especially fun one.

How Verizon Could Improve Their Mobile Gaming

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As a long-time Verizon Wireless customer (originally back with GE!), I must say I’m generally quite happy with my service. My bill is a tad high, but then again we have 2 phones with lots of minutes, a Family plan and full access in the US and Canada, thus offsetting our home phone bill (~$10/mo for a landline). During my daily busride, I like to play games on my phone (Samsung SCH-U740 – awesome). I think Verizon may have created one of the best platform potentials but laden it with one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever seen.

In my phone menu, going to Games, then Get New App gives me a fairly easy set of options. I can instantly buy one of their top 2 games/promotions, or browse through categories to find what I want. The categories are pretty self-explanatory, and that’s about where the usability ends.

Picking a game brings you to a screen with three options: Subscription price, Unlimited price, and Info. On a rare occasion there’s also the option for a Free Trial, but we’ll ignore that for now. Let’s presume that I pick an interestingly named title, for example “Stranded: A Game of Survival” ($2.99 Sub, $7.99 Unl). Clicking “info” shows me the following text:

You awake Stranded on a mysterious island with other survivors. You discover that not everyone can be trusted. Will you escape? Without a price plan that includes an unlimited data feature, you will incur either (depending on your plan) airtime charges at applicable overage rates if you exceed your minutes bundle or megabyte (“MB”) charges of $1.99/MB for downloading the application. Some applications may result in additional charges for sending/receiving data during use. [Size:479KB]

First of all, I don’t know anything about the game! This category (strategy games) includes things ranging from Command and Conquer to Triple Scoop Twist, so there’s no information about gameplay. Is it a RTS? An RPG? A puzzle? Etc. Interestingly the website has nice screenshots and much more text describing the game itself. Why isn’t this available in the game page on the phone when I’m considering a purchase?  Even the website descriptions are lacking the specifics I’d want to know to make a decision.

Second, the data usage warning is terrible. I get that they want to warn me about a potential charge, but how is the text they use going to help? I don’t know if the app actually uses airtime/minutes to play, or if that’s just for the download itself! I understand it is a lot of extra work to figure out a user’s plan in real-time (well, no, I don’t *really* understand it, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt), but a simple clarification of the English would be swell.

Finally, I think a lot more free trials would sell me a lot more applications. I’ve downloaded several of the ones that give me a free level to play, or a few minutes of playtime, and have actually purchased one game as a result. I am a big believer in putting some bait on the hook, as opposed to just throwing a hook in the water and saying “here fishie fishie fishie!”  Especially considering Verizon’s Get-It-Now system is a complete walled garden, I don’t think there’s a way to “steal” a game even if I wanted to!

For the record, I’ve purchased the following games: Sudoku (good version too), Diner Dash (fun, but a bit repetitive), Call of Duty 4 (I’m such a sucker, though it was simple and fun), Transformers (not much more than meets the eye), and Townsmen 3 (meh).  I’d really like to have a very simple Ultima-style RPG (think Ultima 2 or 4) that can be played in short, bite-sized amounts of time.  It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to figure it out even if I find one, but one can always hope…

Fun Weekend at #Gnomedex

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JT at gnomedexAll I knew about Gnomedex in the past was that it had something to do with new media, open source/tech, and if you are invited to get on stage and speak about your company there is a chance that doing so will cause uproar in the audience. When I was invited to speak on behalf of Bug Labs, I decided to hold off on creating a presentation until I was a few hours into watching others do the same.

Some of the presentations were eye-opening, such as Danny Sullivan demonstrating the power of search and the challenges of privacy. I learned a lot of useful camera tips from Vancouver photographer Kris Krug (go Canada!). I was inspired by the power of the crowd when the attendees + audience raised over $3000 during Beth Kanter‘s presentation. I also paid a lot of attention to the backlash on Twitter during the Magnolia presentation and the debate over Sarah Lacy’s keynote (which was unquestionably NOT the focal point of the show for those who only read CNET’s coverage).

After watching a few and following the feedback on the live video stream as well as on Twitter, I started making my deck (a.k.a. powerpoint presentation). I decided to (1) keep the “Bug Labs company/products pitch” extremely short (2/53 slides), (2) keep the “Bug Labs vision pitch” as the centerpoint of the show, (3) keep it moving fast, (4) inject humor, and (5) make a point.

All was well until the guy before me gets up and starts showing off stuff I couldn’t possibly “compete” with. Robots and spaceships. Yep, it was Scott Maxwell from JPL, the guy who drives the Mars Rover! Come on! Seriously though, fascinating content, with a highlight of a picture showing the planet Earth from the surface of Mars – the first such picture ever taken. Scott received a standing ovation for his show. Next up, JT…

Video streaming by Ustream

I had a great time making the slides as well as during the presentation itself (few more thoughts here). Thanks to the audience for your support and positive energy, it was a lot of fun. To those of you who couldn’t be there, just do a twitter search for #gnomedex, you’ll see a lot of action.