Ahh multitasking. The epitome of a smartphone. One of many factors that combine to push mobile handsets ever closer to computer status. As passionate as people are where their handset manufacturer of choice is concerned, the advent of push notifications gave new ammunition to those whose mobile phone allegiance lie elsewhere. Ha ha ha, the iPhone can’t multitask so it uses push notifications as a band aid! Of course those who take the time to do even the smallest amount of investigation know this statement couldn’t be further from the truth.

First, let’s set the record straight. The iPhone can multitask. So can the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS. At any given time, Apple’s handset is running several processes simultaneously… The very definition of multitasking. The accurate statement — and actual complaint people attempt to make — is that the iPhone does not allow third-party applications to run background processes. This is a less than desirable truth no doubt, but the introduction of push notifications doesn’t just provide a band aid for functionality that is lacking. In more instances than you might think, it provides a better solution than background processes offer. That’s right, I said better.

So you’re sitting there holding your awesome Windows Mobile/S60/etc handset thinking to yourself, “Ok this guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about and I’m unsubscribing from his blog this instant.” Fair enough, but try to bear with me for a moment. Think about all of those awesome third party apps you have on your handset right now that are made infinitely more useful by the fact they can run in the background. Twitter apps, IM apps, news apps and so on. Now, imagine you could enjoy all of the ‘awesomeness’ afforded by those background-capable apps but without any of the downsides. No memory occupation. No battery drain. No drain on resources whatsoever until an app is called to the forefront. THAT is the beauty of push notifications.

It was no mistake that push notifications coincided with the release of the iPhone 3GS. Why? Because the 3GS is ridiculously fast. Ridiculously. When an iPhone 3GS user opens a standard application, it’s alive and ready to rock instantly. In fact, said application is open and ready to go faster than if the same app had been running in the background on a Windows Mobile or S60 handset and had been called to the forefront. With that in mind, a great majority of the apps that benefit from the ability to run in the background would benefit even more from having push notifications. You can still get a notification when a new IM arrives. You can still know as soon as that new tweet is posted. You can still know the instant AP News publishes that exciting new article. The difference now however, is you can do all that with zero ramifications where battery life and resources are concerned.

Now with that said, not every app is a candidate for background notifications. Music players for example, need to be able to run in the background. Also, apps that interact with OS elements need to be able to run background processes (profile schedulers, local alarms, call filters, etc). Push notifications are most definitely not an all-encompassing solution. This is where the iPhone still falls short and will continue to fall short until Apple A) allows certain third-party apps to run background processes and B) allows third-party applications to interact with the OS. But imagine if your Windows Mobile or Symbian handset had an implemented system where Twitter apps, IM apps, etc could utilize background notifications while call filters, music players and profile schedulers could continue to run background processes. Mobile bliss.

Yes in a perfect world, third-party background process support and a push notification system would coexist on a single device. Until then however, no platform can have its cake and eat it too.

Categories don’t seem to be working but it’s pretty smooth aside from that.

By now you must have read about the widely-covered TechCrunch / Last.fm fiasco. To recap very, very quickly: TechCrunch posted what turned out to be a completely unsubstantiated rumor that Last.fm had handed sensitive user data over to the RIAA, Last.fm said it was completely false several times, Ars Technica revealed that not even the RIAA knew what TechCrunch was talking about and then Last.fm clarified the situation one last time in a blog post entitled, “Techcrunch are full of shit”. Zoinks.

To be fair, I can definitely empathize with Erick Schonfeld’s situation. I am a tech blogger and I know what kind of pressure bloggers can be under to be the first to cover an exclusive scoop. At the same time, when dealing with a sensitive topic that essentially accuses a company of violating the trust of its users, one must exercise some restraint. Schonfled did the right thing by reaching out for comment and Last.fm did the wrong thing by responding with PResque bullshit: “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA.”

At the same time, Schonfeld was way too accusatory in his post. He received a tip, seemingly from an unknown tipster as he does not refer to said tipster as a trusted source. He then went on to assume the rumor was true and blasted Last.fm with the level of vigor TechCrunch has become known for. Shortly after his post went live, the fallout began. TechCrunch readers took Schonfeld’s word as gospel and began closing their accounts out of sheer disgust that the company would so severely misuse its user data.

When Last.fm finally came around and made its position more clear in the comments section of TechCrunch’s post among other places, Schonfeld did the right thing and posted numerous updates. Hopefully at that point defunct users began to reinstate their accounts. More importantly however, many blogs picked up the story and ultimately gave Last.fm a massive wave of free positive press awesome.

And so we get to the point of my post. I have seen several people sign up for Last.fm as a result of this fiasco and I hope many more do. What started as a direct attack on Last.fm’s credibility ended up presenting the service in a positive light to tens of thousands of people who will hopefully check the service out and encourage others to do so as well. After all, internet radio providers are in the midst of a huge battle to stay afloat and despite recent victories for some, the war is ongoing. Last.fm is a fantastic service that allows users to stream custom artist and genre-based stations to computers and mobile devices, as well as track listening habits to create custom stations even better-catered to a user’s individual tastes. The service is completely free, with a paid option ($36 per year) granting users some great additional features. I have been a paid subscriber for quite some time now.

So if launching an attack on Last.fm and starting some bogus and completely unsubstantiated rumors might ultimately result in growth, I’ve decided to start some rumors of my own…

Last.fm uses illegal steroids, steals purses from old women and eats babies.

Marijuana has dangerous and harmful side effects. Smoke it, children, and you will be throwing your life away. Just look at this picture of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. He had all the potential in the world going into the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. But he smokes weed. With the world watching and the pressure on, only a drug-free, straight and narrow golden boy could rise to the task and crush the competition. Phelps was destined for failure…

Oh wait — he became the greatest Olympic champion of all time.

I’m not a smoker but I most certainly support the legalization of marijuana, especially in this day and age. Economic crisis, a staggering unemployment rate, bailouts, recession – now would be the perfect time. Just think of all the jobs that would be created, businesses spawned and tax revenue collected. The health implications? Please. Lung cancer is the best health-related argument against marijuana and our government clearly does not care if its citizens are dying of it, in droves, as long as there is plenty of tax money flowing back to papa.

With Obama under the microscope it will never happen of course, but it’s a shame. Make marijuana legal, control and monitor it as with cigarettes and alcohol, regulate pricing, charge a 50%, 75% or even 100% tax and then swim in gold a la Scrooge McDuck — or Michael Phelps, as it were.

[Image source: News of the World]

Barack Hussein Obama is your 44th President. The inauguration was fantastic, Obama’s speech was outstanding and now we begin to see if Obama can deliver. I am uncharacteristically optimistic.

“Your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”

A poignent quote and part of a message to leaders of hostile nations. Now, however, it is time to see what Barack Obama can build.

Whatever the case, enough. Stop. Please. I’m a big fan of several of the blogs currently trying to cover their own asses by running several Goldman-bashing stories, sometimes reaching into the double-digits. Please keep me as a fan and get over it.

Back in early September, Ben Cooper announced on his site that he was beginning work on an experimental project I felt compelled to cover now that it has officially launched. Cooper, one of the few current artists I enjoy enough to write about, records under the name Radical Face, is half of the band Electric President and has played a hand in plenty of other projects. The project in question has been dubbed Patients and perhaps what I find most compelling is that it basically sits on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of the direction music distribution has moved in recent history. Oh, and it’s a really cool idea too.

Cooper is constantly writing and recording material and only so much of it can find its way to a standard Morr Music release. Often times, Cooper offers up these homeless tracks for free in the news section of his site but in this instance he decided to have a little fun. Patients, 11 tracks in total, will not be sold in stores or online – in fact, it won’t be sold at all. Instead, the only way to obtain a copy of Patients is by way of the good old barter system.

In order for a Cooper fan to get his or her hands on Patients, (s)he must put together a package containing one or more items to be traded for one of 100 copies. A special PO Box has been opened for the project and offerings must be accompanied by a return address, obviously. Anything can be sent provided it is not poisonous or dangerous, and Cooper will not accept money. Once the 100 copies are spoken for, which I imagine won’t take long, the address will be pulled from the site and a list of all the items received will be posted. Should a few stragglers arrive after all copies have been shipped, Cooper will email senders with a digital copy of the album along with the artwork.

In the end, Patients is a very cool idea and I’m curious to see what Cooper ends up receiving. I sent my package out this morning and tried to include a few fun/weird/interesting/creative items though I wish I had been a bit more prepared. Hopefully Ben enjoys it. As to the concept of the project, I think it’s great. Music distribution has gone from physical to digital over recent years and I think the barter system is a fun and interactive departure. Of course it doesn’t scale well but it gives the artist an interesting way to interface with fans of his/her music.

Want to check Patients out for yourself? Head on over to the project page and get creative.

As an aside, I wish Cooper would offer up an RSS feed for his news updates but in the meantime I’ve been using FeedBeater to keep me up to date on his posts. Unfortunately I haven’t found it to work very well. I’ll be looking for an alternative solution once I find the time – any suggestions?

Sorry to all for the looooooong hiatus but things have just been too busy for me lately to focus on getting good content up on TO. Hopefully that will change soon and in the meantime, I’ve tried to get some interesting reading through to all of my RSS subscribers via Ma.gnolia.com.

As I have a few minutes of downtime right now, I wanted to put a little post together inspired by Papa Arrington. It’s actually a very cool idea – put together a list of products you “can’t live without” at the start of each year and see how that list changes 365 days later. Note that I put can’t live without in quotes because obviously I would be perfectly able to go on without any of the items listed below, but materialism and object-dependency are topics for an entirely different post…

So without further ado, I give you my short list of tech-focused products that I use and enjoy on a regular basis:

Apple MacBook: I currently use the MacBook as my main computer and since my livelihood depends on it for the time being, I had to put it at the top of the list. I have the latest aluminum iteration; the base 13-inch model. I thought briefly about the next model up or even a MacBook Pro but for my usage, this model suits me just fine. It has plenty of kick, it’s light and portable and OS X is simply a joy to use.

MacBook Accessories: I decided to lump these three items into one entry because they combine to perform one basic function. 95% or more of my MacBook usage is at my desk and as such, a 13-inch screen and laptop keyboard are less than desirable. To remedy this, I basically use the MacBook as a desktop accompanied by three main accessories: an LG Flatron W2252TQ LCD display, a Logitech diNovo Edge (Mac edition) Bluetooth keyboard and a Logitch MX Revolution wireless mouse.

Dell Dimension E520: Thankfully, I’m using my PC less and less these days but there are still some functions that just can’t be done without Windows. As such, I have a second display/keyboard/mouse off to the side on my desk connected to my trusty old Dell PC. Sure it’s getting a bit gray up top but a 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium something-or-other and 2GB of DDR2 RAM are more than enough juice to handle the few remaining tasks I rely on my PC to perform.

Music: As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I was (am?) a musician and I’m not sure I could get through a day quite as happily without listening to music one way or another. I keep a relatively small personal library of MP3s that occasionally see the light of day via iTunes, but most of my daily listening happens one of three ways: The Last.fm desktop client, Pandora via a fantastic little Adobe AIR-based app called Dorame and Sirius Satellite Radio via StarLightXM. In terms of how I use these services, Last.fm is great for tracking listening habits and getting recommendation based upon them, as well as creating custom genre-based stations for hours of uninterrupted music. Pandora is phenomenal in terms of song-based recommendations and Sirius is perfect for when I want human-programmed variety without commercial interruption. I am a paying subscriber of each of these three services and nothing I’ve seen from any freebies will be changing that any time soon. Away from my desk I use a Cowon S9 or an Apple iPhone to listen to locally-stored tunes, or the Pandora and Last.fm apps on the iPhone / Mobbler on a Nokia N95 8GB to stream while on the go.

BlackBerry Bold: I’ve been using a BlackBerry Bold smartphone since July or August and at this point I simply can’t be without it. It really is the perfect mix between business and pleasure – BES can’t be topped as far as email and PIM are concerned, the QWERTY keypad is fantastic and the display is beautiful and crisp; perfect for streaming from my Slingbox. The UI is attractive and responsive, 3G reception is the best I’ve experienced and the battery lasts forever. I’ve used it as my daily carrier since the day I got it and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Email: As much as Web-tech bloggers have tried to hype alternatives, email isn’t going anywhere. Simply put, email is still the best way to communicate in writing on the internet. It’s fast, generally reliable and everyone uses it. As much as some people seem to want to live in a world where 140-character snippets lacking any substance can get the job done, it’s not going to happen. Services like Twitter are great for wasting time, engaging in idle banter and trying to get your brand out there but it will never replace email. Ever. As far as specific products I use: Exchange/BES for work and PIM, Gmail for personal email and hosted Exchange for everything in between.

Tech News: My main job at this point in time requires that I know pretty much everything going on in the world of tech / gadgets and as such, I need reliable tools that deliver information quickly and efficiently. My main resource is Google Reader, a Web-based RSS reader, and beyond that I rely mostly on Techmeme (again, now that it has improved a bit) and Hacker News to provide me with consistently good content from sites I don’t monitor via RSS. I’ve tried a few other services such as Regator and TechFuga but I always end up coming back to where I started.

eBay: As much as people seem to enjoy bashing eBay lately, I still use and love the service. Have I been burned? Yes. Will I be burned again in the future? Maybe. eBay is still the best and most organized way to sell used items as an individual, and there are still plenty of businesses making a killing as well. I buy from eBay as well from time to time, and I’ve had nothing but positive experiences by sticking to my policy of purchasing from sellers with a feedback rating of at least 95% (with a minimum of 100 feedback entries).

Flip MinoHD: The MinoHD is new to me – in fact I just received it as a Christmukkah gift from my fiancee. I was never big on video recording as I don’t enjoy being recorded myself, but this thing is just too cool for words. It’s compact size and surprisingly good quality make it the perfect gadget for casual video recording. I have planned for quite some time to make an effort to capture memories more often and the MinoHD is just the incentive I needed to make it happen.

Dropbox: I’ve discovered countless new SaaS solutions over the past year that I use regularly and it would take entirely too long to list them all here. A few highlights never hurt however, and the first is an awesome remote storage solution from Y Combinator-backed Dropbox. Built on top of Amazon’s S3 storage service, Dropbox provides a GUI-free solution for remote storage and file sharing. The service essentially allows users to save files in a directory and have them mirrored locally and on the network (S3 in this case). It’s seemless, it’s fast, it’s easy and it works – what more could you ask for? There are a few added bonuses of course, such as the ability to instantly restore historical file versions and two-step directory sharing. I’ve turned tons of people on to the service and if you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend you do so. Use the free version to start out, which affords 2 GB of remote storage, and then upgrade to the 50GB subscription when you realize how great the service is.

Adobe Buzzword: Part of the Acrobat online suite, Buzzword is far and away the best Web-based word processor I’ve used. In fact, it is currently the only word processor I will use at all. The UI is amazing, the speed and usability are top notch and collaboration is literally a breeze. So long, Word.

Basecamp: Beyond my work at BGR, I also do some freelance copywriting, marcom consulting and a bit of other contract work and these projects require constant organized communication. While I do use a variety of tools to accomplish this, I always use Basecamp by 37signals as my core project management solution. Odds are good that if you require such a service you already know about Basecamp, so I won’t get into the specifics. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the best out there.

DVD Player: That’s right folks, the last item on my list is a good old fashioned DVD player. Not a Blu-ray player, not a set top box but a standard old school $50 DVD player. Covering tech, I’m well aware of the various home entertainment options out there and eventually I’ll update my set up but for the time being I simply don’t feel that there’s anything out there worth my time and money. Blu-ray looks great but I honestly couldn’t care less about seeing each blade of grass on a lawn as I watch a movie. Set top boxes are great but there’s yet to be a proven model with longevity, a subscription price plan and the features I’m looking for. The Netflix-ready Roku box is nice, but when I watch movies I’m looking for new releases and the Netflix streaming service simply doesn’t deliver in that department. Vudu has what is by far the best UI and viewing experience I’ve seen among boxes, but the lack of a subscription option and the financial uncertainty within the company take it off the table. At some point, there will be a viable option for me but I highly doubt it will come any time soon. In the meantime, Blockbuster Total Access and my trusty old DVD player suit me just fine.

As much as I wish this was some sick joke, it is not. There are in fact people this disgusting here in our country, with such little regard for others. My sympathies go out to the victim’s family. I am not an avid supporter of capital punishment but my sincere hope is that as many as possible of those directly responsible are identified on security tapes, apprehended swiftly and put to death after a trial. I’m not talking about lethal injection here either – these filthy fucking pigs should be drawn and quartered. The kind of person so careless and reckless as to disregard another man’s life in an effort to save money while shopping, in my opinion, does not deserve to remain alive.

Read the report from the Daily News.

Quite some time ago, I was chatting with a group of people about Nokia’s effort to break into the US market with its high-end smartphone lines. Among those in the group were two well-positioned higher ups from Nokia, two bloggers and a handful of people I hadn’t been introduced to.

At one point during the conversation, we began talking about advertising and marketing. Being a marcom guy, I jumped right in. Nokia had hardly been aggressive up to that point in time (not that it is aggressive now) and I began talking about what might help the company position its devices a bit better in the US. Directly addressing the Nokians, I talked about apps.

There are only a handful of factors that separate one phone from the next in the eyes of the typical US consumer. Styling and form factor are among those factors; camera quality and dedicated multimedia keys are not. Why not focus on some of the amazing applications that have been developed for Nokia handsets? Why not bring some of this functionality – that is entirely unheard of where the typical US consumer is concerned, mind you – before the consumer and wow him/her? Show him that his handset can automatically switch profiles to silent or vibrate when he arrives at the movie theater to catch a flick. Show her that she can snap a picture and upload it instantly, without pressing a single button, to her Facebook page. Show them that they can actually speak to their handset and it will convert that speech into text to be emailed/posted/texted and so on.

They looked at me like I had an arm growing out of my forehead.

Nokia’s advertising plan stresses the strengths of each device and outlines the areas where our devices are superior to the competition. Right on guys, right on.

And now we have the App Store.

Apps have taken center stage in the onslaught of Apple’s advertising and rightfully so. The Shazaam commercial has played twice on the TV behind me as I typed out this post in fact. How fascinating that I can hold my iPhone up to a speaker and have it identify the song for me! How amazing that I can see where my friends are and even view status updates right on my iPhone! And so on, and so forth. These things aren’t overly impressive to a power user; hell, any S60 handset can do those things and do them well. The problem? No one in the US outside of S60 enthusiasts and gadget fiends is aware that Nokia’s handsets can perform these functions.

Nokia attempted to highlight apps, sort of, with its Open to Anything campaign but it was too little, too late. WAY too little and FAR too late. It was also an attempt at a viral campaign which is hardly where Nokia should be focusing its efforts, in the US at least.

It seems like Nokia simply won’t ever get it when it comes to selling smartphones in the US. The question becomes, does it care? Even as I type this, the homepage of Nokia’s US website is open in another browser tab and a welcome video is repeating front and center. Here is a screen capture:

And another:

Should you click through, the N96 product page is headed with, “Designed for video and TV entertainment.” Did I miss something? Did DVB-H become widely available in the US while I was sleeping last night? Why would a company put so much focus on a feature that is essentially unusable in the market being addressed?

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

It is fantastic news for Nokia that the E71x will be coming to AT&T at some point, hopefully soon. The E71 is a terrific handset and it should sell quite well as long as a carrier is doing the heavy lifting. Nokia simply can’t handle this market on its own. It seems almost uncomfortably incapable here in the US, almost to the point of being morbidly fascinating. The shame in all this is that Nokia has A LOT to offer the US market. The US market however, will probably never learn of 95% of it.

Then there’s Apple; a company with the prowess and supporting talent to make an iAnything a success. Low and behold, this marcom powerhouse is now focusing on apps. Is it working? I don’t see any signs of iPhone 3G sales slowing down, that’s for sure. Fantastic idea, Apple… I wish I had thought of it (wink wink).