Thus Wrote a Desi Amreekan

The Palm Pre's address book criticisms

2009-06-24T01:10:00.000-07:00

No review of the Palm webOS is without a mention of how the address book is very hard to navigate. True to form (and thoroughness), Ars' review of the webOS has this to say:

"Good luck browsing the Pre's address book—as most reviewers have pointed out, it's a mess. The webOS expects contacts to exist as a collection of federated services that you query, not as a structured, browsable repository. So when you add contact services—Google, Exchange, Facebook, AIM—to the Pre, it dumps all of the contacts that it pulls from these services into one impossibly long alphabetical list (mine is about 450 entries)."

In the last year since I have had a Windows mobile phone, I have never once browsed through my Contacts/Address Book. If I want to call or text someone, I start typing their name or number using the keypad - if they are in my address book, their name shows up; if they aren't, o well! What I'm trying to say is "Navigating the Address Book" is a function that was absolutely necessary circa 1999 when phones didn't have an awesome search feature. We're in the 21st century guys - stop mentioning moot points in your reviews.

For my money, the fact that navigating the Pre's address book is so difficult is a definite step forward. Like all new paradigms, this one will take some adjustment but eventually, it is for the best. There are better things to do than navigate a list of 100+ entries... When you launch the Pre's address book, you're supposed to just start typing the name of the contact that you're looking for on the built-in keyboard, and let webOS zero in on the desired record. If you try browsing for the desired contact, then you're wasting your time, because the data is just not structured for this kind of discovery. Pre wants you to query a service, not browse a repository."

Ars reviews the Palm Pre, part 2: the webOS experience - Ars Technica

2009-06-24T00:58:00.000-07:00

"One of the established truths of the past 50 years of computing is that the same basic problems crop up over and over again in different forms, so that technological advances are less of a linear march forward than they are a sort of spiral that turns the same corners again and again, but on a different level with each rotation."

Profound

Coming Soon: Adobe Flash on Android, WinMo, and WebOS

2009-06-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

"Coming Soon: Adobe Flash on Android, WinMo, and WebOS"

<gazes into his crystal-ball>

December 10, 2009

From the Light into the Darkness - The Dark Age of Mobile Web Browsing

It wasn't too long ago that my Palm Pre's browser nimbly navigated the web without draining my battery, over-heating my phone or playing sounds and videos I didn't authorize it to play. No annoying pop-ups, no flash advert telling me that I should call SINGLES-NET today! The downhill ride began right after Adobe's CEO, Shantanu Narayen, announced the general availability of Flash 10 for Palm, Android and Windows Mobile. The only platform that avoided flash, I dare say like the plague, was the iPhone. How I wish I had an iPhone...

Palm Pre Review Roundup

2009-06-19T14:56:00.000-07:00

What's missing:

- App Store
- Some software nitpicks like a button missing here or the address book scrolling being onerous, but nothing that a 1.01 update can't fix
- Minor hardware issues that aren't so much design flaws as they are acclimatizing oneself to a new device after using an iPhone

Bottom Line:

Overall, the UI of the Pre is beautiful and quite functional, although I have my doubts about the wisdom of keeping the vestigial menu bar from classic Palm OS, which is both cumbersome to use and a very small fingertip target to open.

I much prefer the way the Pre (and Android, for that matter) handle out-of-band notifications, such as new email arrival, compared to the iPhone.for a 1.0, they’ve performed a minor miracle. It is a highly respectable competitor to the iPhone and other smartphones. I would rank it above Android, and miles above Windows Mobile.

Browser Installations mandating a reboot!

2009-06-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

In complete violation of the "No Reboot" policy of Unix and Windows, installing Safari on the Mac mandates a reboot. Quicktime requires one as well, but that's fodder for another post. I have come to terms with Apple not having the time to build incremental App-update technology into their products, even though other s/w vendors have figured out how to do this 5 years ago. But this reboot requirement adds insult to injury, big time!

As time goes by, I am seriously contemplating replacing Mac OS with the Windows 7 RC on my Mac Book Pro. Unless of course 10.6 is a total breath of fresh air. Mac, you're on life support until you redeem yourself.

The Long Tail Principle and Monopolies

2009-06-10T01:32:00.000-07:00

To continue a thought that I conveyed in my previous post - we are slowly arriving at the point, if we aren’t there already, where the iPhone is the de facto mobile development platform, in the same way that Windows is the development platform for desktop apps. So what should Android, Palm's webOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian do?

In any space, the established leaders maintain their position because of the “Long Tail principle” - they become something for everyone. The rest of the competition, though pushed to the fringes, can capitalize on 1 or more seams in the leader's coverage, deliver a compelling experience and maintain its relevance. The conventional wisdom is that it’s better to be everything to someone than something to everyone. This is what Bing needs to do if it is to compete with Google, how Apple has carved a niche for itself and stayed relevant despite the Microsoft juggernaut, how squashgear.com competes with Amazon, etc. So the answer is simple - instead of colliding head-on with Apple, the competitor that will truly succeed will be the one that carves a unique niche for itself and becomes everything for a small subset of the population.

Maybe Apple is right in focusing on the iPhone instead of the desktop

2009-06-10T01:12:00.000-07:00

"Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity"

The iPhone OS has become the de facto platform for mobile application development, making it the Windows of the mobile world. My earlier post about Apple losing the script still stands, but for the moment, the iPhone is selling in droves. In this downturn, the key is to ride the cash cow to profit. Maybe iPhone OS 4.0 will be installed on Apple's version of a Netbook.

Excerpts from this article substantiate what is already known in Technology circles - the smartphone market is growing while the overall cell phone market is shrinking. The reason - social expectations, great features, an always-on Internet connection, social cachet, etc.

The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather the downturn. And as is so often true when it comes to adoption of new technology, the smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology asit is about chips, bytes and bandwidth.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail.

And the devices are not cheap. The upfront payment looks small, less than $200. But over the life of the contract, usually two years, the cost of data services adds up to a sizable amount.

Smartphones are not cheap, particularly in tough economic times. The phones, even with routine discounts from wireless carriers, usually cost $100 to $300, while the data and calling service plans are typically $80 to $100 a month.

But recent smartphone converts are often people who count pennies, including many from the growing ranks of job seekers. Helene Rude of Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., was laid off from her job as a business development manager at I.B.M. this year, when her unit, among others, was the target of cuts. When she left, Ms. Rude had to turn in her company notebook computer with its constant wireless connection.

So she got an iPhone instead, allowing her to be online no matter where she was, without having to lug a computer around.

All of this is making the cellular providers salivate.

“Smartphones are seen as essential to be productive in a mobile society,”...

The smartphone wave, industry analysts say, should continue to build. The room for gains is ample because, though rising, smartphone sales will still account for only a quarter of total cellphone shipments in the United States this year. And along with the Palm Pre, a host of new smartphone handset and software offerings are coming this year, from Apple, R.I.M., Nokia, Microsoft, Google and others.

The industry’s goal is to win over more rank-and-file converts

As always, such devices are a mixed bag.

... the key is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It’s about balance and managing things.

Has Apple lost the script?

2009-06-09T14:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a contrarian view to Apple's recent announcements. These views are my own, and in no way endorsed by Apple.

I think Apple is losing its way. Here are my reasons why:

Mac OS is stagnant, and now even Apple knows this to be a fact. There is no way they would drop the upgrade price to $29 if they felt that they were delivering value to the customer via this upgrade. All prior upgrades to the OS have been at $129. Unless Apple comes out with 10.7 within a year, both consumers and the Enterprise will not lap this new OS up.

iPhone S/W 3.0 could only be an awesome release if it overhauled a crappy OS into a whiz-bang darling. The iPhone OS is slowly becoming a victim of its own success/feature-richness. It’s hard to wow an audience once they are used to the spectacular.

Barring minor tweaks, the iPhone design is now almost 2 years old. In light of what the competition has slated for release in the coming year, the form-factor is beginning to show its gray hair. I touched a Palm Pre today, and I let out a quiet yelp of excitement like I did the first time I held my iPhone or the new Zune HD. No such wow-factor associated with the iPhone 3G’S’.

Apple, in its infinite arrogance (and I dare say, ignorance), is not revealing any plans for a Netbook. Call me whatever you want, but the tiny Toshiba tablet I got many years ago is still my favorite machine to browse the web on while traveling. The thing is maybe 3 pounds, runs Windows XP, and let’s me do email, blog, twitter and youtube. What is Apple doing with the PA Semiconductor acquisition if they haven’t been put to work on an iPhone CPU or a Netbook CPU? NetBooks are the way of the future because our expectations from the compute power they provide are almost minimal. Also, with Cloud Computing gaining mainstream traction, my Netbook can become my gateway to my compute resources in the cloud. All cloud computing infrastructure builders are hard at work on creating expressive management interfaces for resources in the cloud. I don’t see why Office 2012 can’t be hosted in the cloud and accessed via a super thin shim/client/browser-plugin; the heavy lifting needed to render objects, etc is done in the cloud while the client does the task of rendering the items for the user.

Video features are big for the current generation of phone adopters and youtube junkies. Did you ever think unlimited texting would become du jour? I didn’t either. With this being said, let’s think about a 1st time iPhone buyer. The baseline is the iPhone 3G that will retail for $99. Is a slight CPU bump - which can’t be considered a feature since all of us know Moore’s Law – a compass, and a new yet ancient 3MP camera with video support enough of a reason to fork out a $100 more for the 3GS? In this economy, I’d be hard pressed to believe the answer to that question is YES. I’d like to see the sales figures for the entry-level 8GB iPhone 3G vs the 16GB model before that belief becomes fact, but I don’t have access to that granular sales data. As hunches go though, the entire world has been wrong with predicting sales of Apple products (and/or the demise of the company for that matter). If cost was the only driver for tech adoption, Apple’s laptops would never be adopted over their PC counterparts, and the top of the line Mac Book Pros would have to be discontinued because of cannibalization by the cheaper Mac Books.

What do I think of Bing.com?

2009-06-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

In the days since Bing launched, I have been asked, on multiple occasions, what I think about Bing? At first, I ventured a guess at my answer, but not content with conjecture, I have spent the last few days using Bing as my primary search engine. Here are my findings:

- Google is still King when it comes to specific searches. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you might find the most relevant result on Bing or Yahoo! On Google, the success rate is very close to 100%.

- Google suggest is superior to Yahoo! suggest, if only marginally, because of their lead in Search relevance.

- The spelling suggestions provided by all 3 search engines are equally good.

- Bing and Yahoo! trounce Google in *vertical* searches like Travel. Actually, if the search query wasn't specific, Google's results were all over the map. In my opinion, this is uncharted territory in the online Search market. By nailing searches for common verticals like Travel, Shopping, Entertainment (movies, restaurants), and Answers, Bing and Yahoo! can really make a dent in Google's lead. Yahoo! Answers is a perfect example of the validity of this theory - too bad Google indexes Yahoo! Answers better than Yahoo! does.

The initial numbers are out; a combination of Microsoft's ad campaign and a better search experience, Bing has leapfrogged Yahoo to become the #2 search engine in the US. These are early days though, so let's wait and watch this unfold.

Bing vs Yahoo vs Google

2009-06-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

Bing is all the news these days. I did an unscientific test today on a topic Bing suggested was its most popular search of the day - Roger Federer. Here are the results I got from the top 3 search engines:

Bing - Roger Federer
Yahoo - Roger Federer
Google - Roger Federer

I think both Yahoo and Google's results are more tailored to my tastes, but that might be because I use the 2 search engines more than I have Bing! Honestly though, for a sports fan like me, Bing still has a ways to go.

The Seattle Summer is here

2009-06-03T01:08:00.000-07:00

My Seattle compatriots and I are finally being treated to a long spell of warm weather; it was over 80 degrees all day today, and the night is warm as well. The story has been the same all over the US this year - the winter has been cold, dreary and long. Unlike the rest of the US though, the winters in Seattle seem unbearable because the Sun rarely rears its head.

Winter in Seattle brings with it many changes. The incessant drizzle and my burgeoning gas bill I can deal with; the sullen atmosphere, the general dourness around me, and my own dramatic mood-swings - those I have a harder time with. Yes, it has been clinically proven that sunlight deprivation has a severe effect on mood, appetite and enthusiasm. It's no surprise then that the Sun's return has brought back the smile on people's faces. The birds are chirping, the grills are cooking, the flowers are blossoming, and strangers are exchanging pleasantries again! Boy O Boy...

A clear blue sky and the balmy seaward breeze greeted me as I walked out of the doors of the Seattle Athletic Club this evening. Instead of walking to my car to head home for dinner, I sat on a park bench overlooking the horizon and watched the drama unfold in the distant horizon. The setting Sun imbued the evening sky with myriad hues of orange, my spirit soaring like the orange rising from the horizon upward into the sky. Mount Rainier to my left, the setting Sun to my right and the Puget Sound right in front of me - I sat around and soaked in the imagery until the lights went out.

Walking back to my car, I overheard a group of people talking about their woes with email organization. Only a few days ago, I stumbled upon the book "Getting Things Done", and some of the ideas I overheard seemed to come directly from it. When I eventually caught up with the girls sharing their thoughts, they noticed the wry smile on my face. What ensued actually took me by surprise - I had a conversation with complete strangers about organizing email. We joked with one another, exchanged stories, talked about the sunshine and a few minutes later said goodbye. The Sun does make us all social, and for that reason, the smile they noticed earlier is still plastered to my face. What can I say, I can't find a reason to frown!

P.S. I think it is pretty dumb that http://www.weather.com/Seattle doesn't automatically get redirected to the page that I have linked to with Seattle's weather forecast.

Whither GM and Chrysler

2009-06-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

Where are GM and Chrysler headed to, and what will they wither into?

"Car giant General Motors is expected to file for bankruptcy protection later on Monday, marking the biggest failure of an industrial company in US history."

"Our correspondent says long-established subsidiaries Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer, as well as Saab, the remaining GM brand in Europe, are under threat as production plants are expected to close across the country."

"Meanwhile, a US bankruptcy court judge in New York has approved the sale of fellow US carmaker Chrysler to a consortium including Italy's Fiat.

The move, which is backed by both the US and Canadian governments, should enable the carmaker to exit bankruptcy protection in the near future."

I wonder when Ford will bite the dust and follow the other Detroit denizens into the arms of bankruptcy protection. It's a great time to be a taxpayer right now! (that was sarcasm)

Why did Nadal lose?

2009-06-01T01:35:00.000-07:00

#1. He hit a lot of extremely short balls
#2. His service returns didn't have bite
#3. He was tired, and tentative on his strokes.

I wrote about Nadal's weaknesses immediately after the Australian Open 2009 semi-finals. That was then and this is now - to say I am shocked wouldn't cover it. I am saddened...

Lawmakers Bill Taxpayers For TVs, Cameras, Lexus

2009-05-30T12:36:00.000-07:00

After the huge scandal that has rocked the UK parliament, reports of US Lawmakers expensing their personal purchases are sure to cause a stir this side of the Atlantic. Obama's presidency has had its fair share of scandals involving lawmakers and members of parliament - first the indiscretions of the governor of Illinois, then the news of senators not paying their taxes, and now this. Mind you, these are the infractions that have surfaced; some government watchers suggest that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

When I first read about scandals of this nature, I couldn't quite fathom the outrage the taxpayers felt at the actions of their elected representatives. In India, I grew up reading about the excesses of ministers, their almost habitual flouting of the laws of the land, and witnessed their life of excess first hand. Truth is, politics corrupts even the best of us because with power comes money. I can't wait for the day when Indian politicians are subjected to the same scrutiny that their counterparts in the rest of the developed world. Until that day, I don't think India will be quite ready to usher in a new era of growth and prosperity.

Movie Critics have forgotten the script

2009-05-22T11:31:00.001-07:00

I am beginning to think that movie critics are becoming more and more distanced from what people consider pulp entertainment. A movie like Terminator:Salvation is not designed to stimulate the neurons; its purpose is to visually stimulate, and help people get away from their mundane existence. Almost every movie recommended by critics has been a waste of my time, primarily because I don’t want to watch a director’s take on my miserable life; I’m living it already!

For what it's worth, Terminator will suck, but the thrills will make it worth the $1 I pay to see it when it arrives at my neighborhood Red Box.

Microsoft’s Ads Are Hurting Apple

2009-05-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

The article summarizes the changes in the general public's perceptions of both Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has and still leads on: Quality (although MS has closed the gap) and Reputation.
MS has recently overtaken Apple on: Satisfaction and Value
MS has recently caught up to (i.e., virtually tied) on: General Impression, Willingness to Recommend"

With Windows 7 around the corner, Apple needs to reinvent itself or brace itself for a reversing of its growth spurt in the computer industry. I installed Windows 7 a few days ago, and even though the build is just an RC, there is very little to choose between a Mac and a PC now in terms of operating system. The build quality of Macs warranted the premium price tag, but those days are long gone. HP and Dell, in particular, have really stepped up to the plate and are building geek eye-candy. HP has the coolest people endorsing its products as well; the next year is going to be great for a laptop buyer.

It's a lazy Sunday morning

2009-05-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

My fortunes this past week have mirrored the swings in weather. Its fitting then that the week has ended on a sunny note. I woke up this morning, bid adieu to an old school friend who is on a whirlwind tour of the US, and before doing anything further, I sat out in the sun and meditated - some Manoj time was for the asking!

As my blog updates become less frequent and my use of twitter increases, I think any day I get a chance to sit down and pen my thoughts is a day I am blessed. Of late, I have onboarded new responsibilities and have let myself get caught up in situations that I could easily avoid. A quick note to the fledglings fantasizing about their grown-up days - being an adult sucks! Unless you make a concerted effort to keep up with your interests, something inevitably gets dropped off your list; sad thing is, most times this happens, you don't even realize what you've given up. In my case, that almost lost interest is music. Part of the reason for the diminished interest in music is ennui; the remainder is the lack of good stuff being released these days. I'll rephrase that - with my priorities shifting to work and my house, I haven't had a chance to explore my favourite genres for new music. Chalk up another consequence of quitting Microsoft - my Zune days exposed me to new artists, new music and to DJ Miss E's recommendations. Maybe it's time to reconnect with her, if only for her awesome taste in music! :)

Cricket has made a roaring comeback into my life, partly due to the IPL T20 tournament. I restored my connection with the ARCL and now play for a team comprised of Microsofties and Amazonians. My batting is rusty but my ability to track balls down (and hold on to catches) is undiminished; some batting practice and time at the crease will surely clear the cobwebs. Bowlers everywhere, watch out! Back to the IPL - I was thinking today that if the tournament is going to be held every year, cities that play host to each of the 7 teams can really profit from their respective franchises. With some creativity and updates to the existing infrastructure, the IPL can make a city a tourist haven, if only for the home games. Establish a home ground which will create a loyal fan base; upgrade the flight routes connecting each of the 7 cities to accommodate IPL fans and provide incentives to fly for a team's away games; hotels and guest services will mushroom around the grounds; voila, the city has a fresh crop of tourists that aren't visiting from a foreign country. The revenues from sales taxes alone will amount to a sizable sum of money...

Time to head out into the sun and smile through the rest of this gorgeous day!

$999 MacBook Air deal FTW

2009-05-02T12:40:00.000-07:00

AppleInsider | Apple lands Xbox boss, Mac OS X 10.5.7, $999 MacBook Air deal: "$999 MacBook Air and MacBook coupons

MacMall, one of AppleInsider's sponsors, dropped us a note earlier this week about a deal it's running on first-generation MacBook Airs. It's offering the original $1799 1.6GHz model with Intel graphics for $999 after instant discounts and a $200 mail-in-rebate. The deal may be a compelling option for anyone in the market for an ultra-portable Mac for basic email, internet and business use, and who isn't concerned with the NVIDIA graphics boost delivered by the latest models."

So what if the Yankees are blowing chunks at playing ball?

2009-04-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

... you can at least eat healthfully at the new Yankees stadium.

When I entered the park I stopped at the produce stand—the produce stand!—and bought a couple of fresh pears. Later I went to the Noodle Bowl stand, where for $8.50 I got a bowl of noodles, veggies and tofu. Tofu at the ballpark...

All the food choices have calorie counts posted now, so you can avoid, or still indulge in, the almost 1,100 calorie Moe’s Homewrecker Burrito at La Esquina Latina...

Ummm Yummy!

Every few yards you find a trio of disposal cans. For regular trash, plastic and compost. Which you may actually have items for, with a produce stand on site.

Is this enough of a silver lining for the Yankees?

Wall Street Journal iPhone App Sets Content Free

2009-04-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

"The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet's oldest pay walls."

Now for the fine print:

There is free, and then there is free, apparently. A Dow Jones spokeswoman wrote to wired.com Thursday to say that the company does intend to charge for some content consumed on smartphones "so we have a consistent experience across multiple platforms," though the company is "still exploring its options" and isn't saying when that might happen.

Thoughts on Pot vs. Alcohol from a Former Police Chief

2009-04-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

"Over the past four years I've asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I'm talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When's the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches."

I don't fight with anyone when I am drunk; I just throw up. My friends can vouch for this just based on my behavior in Vegas this past weekend.

A Roundup of Thoughts - 13 April 2009

2009-04-14T00:55:00.001-07:00

In the "Real Life is imitating Reel Life" series, the planned demilitarization of America seems to draw inspiration from the current series of 24. If real life follows the script of the show, some disgruntled arms dealing "Patriot" is going to collude with one of America's opponents. Only bad things can come out of something like that.

I read Tony Greig's comments about the rising number of 6s in the limited overs game being a bad thing for cricket. He used the argument that a 6 is so entertaining because it is a rarity; the air of anticipation is what makes the outcome so viscerally pleasing. From where I sit, this is utter hockum - this is like saying home-runs are destroying the game of baseball; that the incessant slam dunking by NBA players has made the act of dunking passe and pedestrian. Too bad Tony's words aren't going to stop the players from "Taking it to the Maximum".

Senator John McCain was a guest on The Tonight Show, and he came across as genuine, entertaining, witty and humble. I hope he is re-elected to his seat as governor of Arizona.

Australia has officially been displaced by South Africa as the #1 team in the World One Day Cricket standings. Go Springboks! I hope my colleague Ben, who is currently vacationing in South Africa, gets a chance to see a game live.

I wanted to post about something else but it has totally escaped my mind. Another fallout of getting older. Oh now I remember - I signed my tax forms today. If you're looking to get your taxes done, you should contact Jana Banks at 206-270-0281. She has been doing taxes for years, is approachable, thorough, and very organized. Unorganized and disheveled tax accountants don't do too well, I suppose. There is a subconscious correlation we make between thorough and organized; there is no comfort in handing your earnings statements (and the like) to a seemingly unorganized person!

Should Colleges Continue to Host Email for Their Students?

2009-04-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Should Colleges Continue to Host Email for Their Students? - ReadWriteWeb

All webmail providers should be excited by this story published by the ReadWriteWeb for two reasons:

1. There is a never ending stream of new students going to college every year
2. Most students keep an email address they started using in college well after they have graduated

Email is like a gateway drug - the providers can peddle advertisements, related web properties, and new services to their new (and hopefully loyal) users. College students possess an uncanny knack to influence not only their friends but also their less-web-savvy family, and this halo effect can only bring more subscribers to the fold. All in all, this change sounds like a great opportunity for Yahoo! and Google, the 2 webmail services best equipped to provide colleges with specialized email services. I can't imagine them charging colleges more than a nominal fee for this service, an amount that colleges won't begrudge. As the article states, college students use external email providers already and college email services are way behind the curve:

Schools, for the most part, aren't able to keep up with the speed of innovation on the web anyway, and the fact that many college-run email systems have fallen far behind the innovation curve has driven a lot of students to just forward their school email to a commercial account anyway.
...
the days when colleges provided the most important on-ramp to email and the Internet for their students are long over.

Is this the future of tech journalism?

2009-04-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

With the 4th Estate going the way of the dodo, we are faced with the prospect of reading blogs to get our daily dose of news. This might be a future event for most forms of journalism, but Tech journalism has already made the move to the web with mixed results. Take this story from the Daring Fireball today:

VirtualBox is: “a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).”

I need to use this for a certain project I’m working on. Admittedly, I’m not using it in any “enterprise” sense, whatever that means. I’m just using it as a desktop virtualization system. But from that perspective it strikes me as inferior to VMware Fusion in every way. An inferior product given away for free — is it any wonder that Sun is in trouble?

Without providing specifics about what was inferior (everything can't be), or any details about how the product was used, this post, in my opinion, is more slander than journalism. Turns out, Daring Fireball is a blog read by thousands, so this post will prevent its readers from even giving VirtualBox a fair chance. Maybe I am old school; when writing about a product, I try to accurately represent the pros and cons of using it. Unfortunately, I don't have the power to strike a product down with my keystrokes (a single flick of the pen doesn't seem apt any more). I believe that people whose fingers do wield that power should use it wisely.

The Future of Books & the Kindle

2009-03-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

The hottest tech gadget today is the Kindle. Before the Apple fanbois get on my case, I haven't discounted the iPhone. How I see it, the iPhone isn't just a gadget any more; that device has transcended from the realm of catchet to that of abject necessity. The Kindle hasn't reached that stratosphere yet, but the v2 release of the device has many punters predicting the demise of newsprint and paperbacks as we know them. Stop the press...

The realist in me thinks that there is still a ways to go before we stop devoting real estate to books. The first reason for my stance is nostalgia - many of us have a story that involves leafing through a publication, torchlight in hand, bedsheet failing to hide what you are truly doing; what about the comicbook hidden in a tome for a textbook? The second reason is that the Kindle, though a huge improvement over v1, is still a ways away from being the ideal reading device. No backlight, no color, no go; not for now. And last but not least, the demise of the paperback has been predicted before, but the medium hasn't gone away.

To the Kindle's credit, the device+service show what the future has in "store", and the little time I spent with the Kindle yesterday has made me a believer in the service model devised by Amazon. Others have waxed eloquent about the device and the service already, so there is no point in repeating their words here. What no one has touched upon is how the Kindle can make further inroads into the market; that's where I can add some value (props to Karan for the brainstorm):

- Kindle in Education
Let's face it, kids hate lugging textbooks around. The prohibitive cost of textbooks is the reason they are the most popular torrents on thepiratebay. The Kindle could be the final piece that helps broker a deal between educational institutions and textbook publishers that allows students to receive all their textbooks on a Kindle for a flat rate < total price of physical textbooks. This becomes an especially lucrative deal for publishers catering to University level courses where piracy and 2nd hand book sales are rampant - currently, publishers don't profit from either channel.

- Newspapers and Magazines
I think a good swath of the population would opt for a 2yr online-only subscription if a Kindle came bundled with the purchase. This saves on paper (environmentalists of the world rejoice), helps finance a publication's online endeavors, and peddles more Kindles.

- Kindle & Kaplan
'Nuff said.

Thoughts?