Was reading the latest issue of Edge (best videogame magazine in the world), and came across this quote by Don Mattrick who is the senior VP of Microsoft's entertainment division:
A recent study showed that that 18-26-year-olds are roughly spending 75 hours a week with our box [Xbox 360], which is pretty amazing.
I'll grant that this is, in a way, pretty amazing. It's also pretty pathetic. Don't these people have anything else to do? A week has 168 hours and people sleep about 6.5 hours a night on average. So subtract those hours from the total hours in a week and you're left with 47.5 hours. That's 6.8 hours a day in which you're not gaming or sleeping. Don't get me wrong I love me some videogames, but that's just outrageous.
Zenbe is a neat web application for the the web user who wants to keep track of all his stuff. What kind of stuff? For starters it can aggregate your various e-mail accounts and it has calendars and to-do lists. There's also a sidebar which houses the aforementioned lists, your address book, Facebook updates, and the latest tweets from the people you're following. Of course you can update your own status on Facebook and Twitter there as well. Zenbe has file storage so you can backup your important documents and photos, as well as sharing them with friends. I didn't even mention the "Zenpages". You can create these Zenpages to keep all your stuff related to certain projects or subjects and share these with friend or colleagues.
Zenbe does a lot of things and does it well, but its most significant achievement is that it does so in an exquisitely designed package. There may be a lot of clutter in your digital life, but you don't experience it as such when you put it all in Zenbe (Very Zen). Zenbe is free as in beer, so there's really no reason not to try it.
PS: Yes I do know I sound like I work for Zenbe's marketing department, but I really like the app.
PPS: If you have an iPhone or iPod touch with the 2.0 software you might also want to check out their Zenbe Lists app.
Speculation abounds about the possible rebranding of Apple's .Mac (pronounced "dot mac") service as "Mobile Me". Wired's Gadget Lab has an interesting entry up about what this might mean for the iPhone:
Back to My Mac lets you access your home Mac from anywhere on the internet. The routing is all handled by Apple, so you never have to worry about firewalls or IP addresses (when it works, that is). Imagine, though, having full access to your music, movies and files from your iPhone. That would effectively turn it from a 16GB handheld computer into a handheld computer the size of, well, your Mac’s hard drive.
I think this is an idea with a lot of potential. What if you could carry an iPhone, or an iPod for that matter, and use it as a password protected dongle for your virtual identity? Imagine connecting your Mobile Me device to a Mac (any Mac), logging in and being able to use that Mac as if it was your computer. That would be a killer application for any kind of remote work. Of course, it's all speculation for now and we'll likely know more next week after the Jobs keynote at WWDC. WWDC is an event intended for developers, so making an announcement there makes it likely that developers will be able to exploit this funtionality in their own apps. That might lead to some interesting new uses for the .Mac service. I do hope that if they're going to revamp the service they'll also change the rather exorbitant price point.
Energetic live version of one of my fave tracks on Narrow Stairs.