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I recently dusted off my Apple TV to give it another chance whirl and see what goodness the latest system updates might have silently delivered. In summary, while there have been some improvements, overall the experience is still underwhelming, and there are major flaws that could easily be addressed.
Continue reading "Apple TV Review (version 2.3)" »
This is a great blog post linking to some interesting data visualization projects. I particularly like the first example, Wordle, which I found myself spending quite a bit of time playing around with. The BBC videos are awesome too.
This is very cool and perhaps even a little frightening - a visual cacophony of trends and pitfalls for the year 2009 from a consulting firm called Future Exploration Network.
The sheer volume of trends and issues detailed is a masterclass in research. I don't agree with all the ordering but as the authors note, it's an educated guess (albeit clearly heavily debated and researched).
PDF download is here, and here's the blog post where I found it and made a suggestion...
This is the video of a publicity stunt that our friend Jay Nguyen CEO of Sweemo.com did on Wednesday, Jay was looking for a way to promote the launch of his new 'sweet moments' site, a cool ebay-like site for bidding on interesting adventures and outings.
Jay offered an auction for the opportunity to 'slap the CEO in the face with a fish', and fly whomever won from anywhere in the world to do so in Trafalgar Square. In the end a rather large guy from Texas won, and he would appear to have got his moneys worth...
Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has fuelled controversy in typically abrasive fashion with his recent post on press release embargos. He has declared war on PR firms and said his site will flagrantly disobey their embargo requests from now on.
Here's my take as a startup founder doing his own PR and as a former Journalist.
Embargos are of benefit only to journalists. Frankly they are a pain in the behind for startup founders. I actually don't mind sending out press releases under embargo as I realize they help journalists prepare and write a story and manage their workday. Without them a journalist's life would be even more stressful and harried than it already is. They ask me to do it and generally better stories result. But given the choice I far would far rather not give out embargoes under the current model.
Here's my diary of a recent (and typical) news announcement...
Continue reading "The 6 Hour Embargo" »
All the current problems with the Big 3 US automakers and the debate over their short term future has left me wondering about the long term.
For many years as I've watched the developments over at Moller industries I've often that thought that when we do start to have personal flying vehicles, as is completely inevitable, it will be the major car manufacturers of today that are the flying vehicle manufacturers of tomorrow. It's not hard to imagine climbing into a space age looking flying car like that above, with the Ford logo embossed on the front.
I wonder if future plans for flying cars will find their way into the car companies' submissions to the government. Somehow I doubt it.
You can add a profile picture or avatar to just about any form of social interaction online - it can be discussion forums, Twitter, Social networking sites or Skype. In all cases you can set a picture or design to represent yourself, to the people you're communicating with.
It occurred to me tonight... why can't you do the same with e-mail?
It would be cool to see a picture of the person who's emailing me, even if it's someone I've never heard from before. It would be cool to choose a picture or design for myself, to send along with my outgoing e-mails.
I gave it some thought and figured out a possible way this could be implemented very easily. Decide on a standard where a profile picture is sent as a regular e-mail attachment, only with a standardized file name - say propic.jpg.
E-mail client programs like Outlook and webmail services like Gmail or Hotmail could add support for this feature in a future (and very trivial) update. They could display a person's profile picture wherever or however they like, alongside the e-mail.
The whole thing is not disimilar to how a standardized favicon file is used to represent the tiny logos next to web addresses in your browser.
I've not checked to see if anything like this has been proposed before but it seems like a simple idea to me!
Twitter is great for keeping friends and family updated with what you're doing, but it can also be a good business tool too - you can keep customers updated with news, blog posts, feature releases etc.
On WorldTV for example we built an 'in-application alerts box' that disseminates news right within our Flash based Editor, and is powered by Twitter. Effectively we are using Twitter as a simple CMS. Whenever we want to add a new message to our alerts box, we just log into our Twitter account and write something. Since our blog is connected to Twitter those updates get posted automatically to the alerts box too.
Periodically we want to be able to go through our list of registered users' email addresses and add any new ones to our Twitter account as people we 'follow', if for no other reason than it's a good way to let those people know we're on Twitter and they can follow us if they choose.
Twitter has an e-mail address import feature but it only supports specific web based e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL etc. There is no option to upload a text or Excel file.
The workaround is to make use of one of the aforementioned services to do the import for you and then pull that in to Twitter. There's a couple of gotcha's along the way so I'll take you through the process with Gmail.
(I chose Gmail for the task but the same idea could work with Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL etc too. I've just not tried it.)
Sticking with Gmail I suggest you create a new Gmail account for bringing in your e-mail addresses. You could use your existing Gmail account but depending on how many addresses you are bringing in and the circumstances, you might not want to mix the two sets of contacts. For example, Gmail only lets you delete 500 contacts at a time (not very useful if you are importing thousands) and Twitter can't distinguish between your Gmail contacts in any way - it will import them all.
Depending on the number of contacts you are trying to add, I would suggest splitting them into chunks of no more than 15,000 at a time. I don't know what the limit is with Google or with Twitter but this seems to be a workable number. Depending on your audience, those 15,000 e-mails could yield 200-750 Twitter contacts.
To upload / import your contacts into Google you will need a CSV file such as those created by Excel. Google has instructions on this but basically a two column spreadsheet with all your e-mail addresses in the first column and the name of the person in the second will suffice. Make sure the columns have the descriptions 'Email Address' and 'Name' in the first row above each column so Google can figure out which is which. You do need a name column (even though Twitter will ignore this), or else Google won't import it.
Once imported into Gmail, you can then go to the 'Find People' section of Twitter and give Twitter your Gmail account details. It's at this stage you find out how many of the e-mail addresses you had are actually Twitter users. In my experience Twitter frequently gives error messages during the adding contacts process but they still seem to get added anyway.
Once you are all done, I suggest deleting the Gmail account you created if only to play nice and free up the space for others. Enjoy!
The next few weeks are busy as your writer criss-crosses the globe to preach convergence and the general state of the online video market...
Berlin 29th August - IFA
I'll be speaking on the opening day of IFA, a large consumer electronics show also open to the public. The conference is called Connections and is organized by convergence and digital home specialists Parks Associates. I'll be speaking on the subject of 'Visual Networking - The Evolution of Social Networks'.
Seoul 2nd-4th September - BCWW
The Broadcast WorldWide Conference takes place in Korea and attracts media and content professionals from all over Asia. I'll be speaking on the subject of 'Winning Formula in the New Media Ecosystem' and I can't wait. Korea is huge in Citizen Journalism - OhMyNews was the world's first collaboratively written online newspaper.
Amsterdam 13th September - IBC
The International Broadcasting Convention is a big event on the broadcast industry calendar for people on the hardware side of Television.
New York 14th-19th September - Web 2.0 Expo NYC
The Web 2.0 Expo takes place in four cities this year - San Fran, New York, Berlin and Tokyo. I'll be heading to NY as part of a 40 strong party from the UK consisting of 20 UK startups (including WorldTV) for this UK Govt sponsored trade mission.
So I've been on a trip to the West Coast these past few days and it's been fun and productive and all that yoda. Some brilliant back to back meetings, a conference panel session which was great and, well that's enough talk about work.
What I do wanna scribe is some of the more unusual happenings, the peripheral jimjam that rounds out a mission like this, and makes it truly memorable.
I learned that Terminal 3 at Heathrow now has the world's largest outdoor smoking enclosure, flying via Vancouver to San Francisco has its visual eye candy - you seemingly pass right over the top of the world, and... (boring alert), doing so means you have to gather and re-check your luggage in Vancouver, which is of course a freakin' pain in the derriere.
I hooked up with my good friend Digby upon arrival Tuesday night in San Fran. Digby and I go way back and is one of those reliable friends you can always... er, rely on, even if he did once spoil a beautifully planned, cross-atlantic, supersonic visit to surprise my (now) wife. He's never heard the end of it of course and I don't apologise to him for bringing it up again.
Wednesday I found arguably the World's best breakfast eatery - a simply super place called Dottie's in San Francisco. I'd heard some hype about it and just as I was wondering how good one place's pancakes could really be over another, I took a bite and was propelled to pancake pandora. If you ever visit San Francisco, run, not walk, to Dottie's on Jones. Just beware you may have to wait in line. There is literally a queue of people waiting to get in, and you should bring something to read as I did. Not dissimilar then from the seemingly never ending queue all day long outside the Apple store in San Francisco with people lining up for the iPhone, which I can conveniently stalk from my hotel window.
After work I took advantage of my hotel's handy location (nice hotel btw - the Palomar) to venture over to the nearby mall where I learned that escalators can go round corners. Never seen that before. Heading up the escalators in Nordstrom's (a chi-chi department store) I actually got vertigo and I don't even suffer from such affliction. It's a heck of a long way down.
I'd ventured to the mall to deal with a silly mistake which was thinking that California is actually hot in summer. I'd come here without a jacket, and it turns out that while, yes it is true California is hot for the most part. San Francisco is not. You can travel 20 miles south from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, or north even, and the temperature is 20 degrees hotter. Who knew?
Duly kitted out in a new jacket and with some little threads bought for my little boy, I got a craving for a burger 'my way' and plonked myself down in my grease of choice - Kurger Bing. It never ceases to amaze me that they actually have security guards packing heat in a (not so) fast food restaurant, but guns are a way of life here of course, and it's hard to get the cat back in the bag right?
Continue reading "Oh, you're a Tourist? L.A.P.D doesn't like my driving" »
