Caveats first.

I own a _lot_ of Apple gear — iPhone, iMac, MacBookPro and lots of software — but I definitely have a love/hate relationship with them.

And by fall, I don’t mean collapse and disappear in to the ether.

But I do mean fall from their arguably market leading position, especially in mobile.

So hands up who remembers 1994? More specifically, who remembers the great Intel debacle of 1994?

Let me recap. Back then, like now, Intel owned most of the market. They shipped a shiny new Pentium chip that had a division error. Now to be fair, the error was very small and would only tangibly affect a tiny number of customers, but Intel committed two cardinal sins.

1. They already knew about the error from internal testing but decided to ship the bad chip anyway.
2. When the matter was brought to their attention, they offered to replace a bad Pentium chip only after they had determined you used the chip in an application in which it would cause a problem.

Guess what? Customers didn’t like this very much. Intel’s stock price dropped, IBM halted shipments on systems with the faulty CPU and a media circus ensued.

[You can read a blow by blow summary of the whole thing here]

Compare and contrast this with the Apple iPhone 4 grip of death problem.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the brand new iPhone has a bit of a flaw. If you hold it with your left hand and your hand touches certain parts of the bezel, the signal/reception drops to zero. Gizmodo had some of the first coverage.

For a phone that has a history of poor call reception (thanks in no small part to AT&T), this is a big deal.

Except Steve Jobs disagrees. In one of his many famous replies to a random customer, he quite literally said “It’s not a big deal”. In subsequent emails he simply said “Just avoid holding it in that way”. Seriously??? Read more at Engadget.

What’s more, the official Apple response that followed is a combination of “buy a case for the phone” and “don’t hold it that way”.

What blows my mind is that among the Mac faithful, they are getting away with this.

Now compare this to the Intel case I mentioned earlier. Both products have fundamental flaws that impact basic operation, but there are work arounds so you could argue the flaws aren’t critical. Both companies deny the issue and then confirm it while telling you to suck it up, but the outcomes were quite different…

Intel got slammed. They lost millions in market cap. They spent more millions trying to clean up the mess and had a PR debacle that lasted for years.

Apple got made fun of by non-fanboys, the world shrugged and everyone went on with their business.

Why does Apple get treated so differently? Because the are still perceived as a fringe player. They’re not seen as the market leader. Apple isn’t “The Man”, but Intel definitely was.

The cool kid always gets cut a lot of slack — they’re cool, they earned it. There’s a price to being cool, and sometimes that price is a great looking but not fully functional product.

When “The Man” ships a crummy product, they are ripping you off. They are the epitome of corporate greed squeezing you for every dollar. Never mind Intel, Microsoft Vista, anyone?

But here’s the thing. Like a rebellious college student now twenty years into a career and climbing the corporate ladder, Apple are becoming “The Man” whether they like it or not.

They own the Smartphone market in the US. They own 70% of the downloadable music market. I don’t even know how much of the music player market they own, and they are now one of the biggest single manufacturers of desktops/laptops.

That’s a long way from being a computer supplier with 2-3% of the total market.

Don’t get me wrong, Apple are still cool, but choosing Apple is no more of a niche play than a Soccer Mom choosing to buy a Minivan.

At some point, Apple reaches a tipping point where they cross over from niche to mainstream. I would argue that they’ve already done that, but the market perception has yet to catch up.

And when they are mainstream, they become “The Man”. And when “The Man” ships a broken product, people get pissed off.

Apple don’t know how to play that game. Their approach doesn’t work if they’re not the cool kid. Everything the company stands for, and most of its history, is built on the cool-kid-slack factor, and when that goes away, what will they do?

So yeah, when the world realizes that Apple is, in fact, The Man, I believe the Apple will fall. And who knows what will come next.

Watch this space and let time prove me wrong

For those of you that don’t remember such things, the Jornada was about the size of a Netbook and ran an early version of Windows Mobile. The Rex was the size of a chunky credit card (a PCMCIA card for the old folks that remember such things), one side of which was taken up with a low-res black and white LCD display and four buttons. It was a simple, reliable, more or less read only electronic organizer that ran for 6+ months on a watch battery.

What was magical about all this was that all three components would talk to each other flawlessly. I could sync my Outlook calendar, contacts and inbox with the Jornada before leaving on a trip. The Jornada would run for 12 hours on a single charge, weighed less than 2lbs, and had Office CE and a modem built in — I could get real work done while on the road. Better still, if I didn’t want to carry the Jornada, the Rex card would pop right in to the Jornada’s PCMCIA slot and sync contacts, calendar and tasks with the Jornada.

Net result: effective road warrior status. At a time when my colleagues were lugging around 15lb laptops and developing shoulder problems, I was jaunting around with a ~1lb netbook, a mobile phone and a Rex card that fit in my pocket.

It all just worked. And it was fabulous.

A few years later, I tried numerous PDA’s and some mobile phones that could sync to Outlook, but nothing ever came close to the Desktop/Jornada/Rex combo in overall reliability and ease of use.

Why bring all this up now? I’m starting to see the light… again.

This weekend, I took the plunge and force-updated my Nexus One to Android 2.2.

Updating OS’s on a mobile phone is usually a scary endeavor not for the technically faint of heart. In this case, I downloaded a file, renamed it, hit a few buttons and was done. Less than 10 minutes all in. Impressive.

Amazing Thing #1: Everything just works. Nothing is broken, no sloppy loose ends and lots of hidden new goodies that kick ass. I believe that is the first time I have ever upgraded an OS without a hitch, on any platform.

Amazing Thing #2: Almost everything is noticeably faster, in some cases shockingly so.

Amazing Thing #3: Built in tethering via USB and Wi-Fi. Next time I’m in an airport, I just click a button and instantly become my own little hotspot. The laptop connects to the phone, the phone connects to the net. No more airport/hotel wi-fi fees!

Amazing Thing #4: Flash support that really works (even though it’s still in beta). With normal browsing to flash-enabled sites, I see none of the issues Mr. Jobs swears will kill your iPhone (not that I really believe that cr*p anyway, we all know the flash-hate stems from the potential to undermine the absolute control of iTunes in terms of what you run on your iPhone/iPad/iAppleSlave).

Okay. So I still haven’t mentioned the cloud and I’ve already typed a lot. So it’s cloud time.

Android devices are pretty cloudy and connected. If you use Gmail, they automatically sync with all your contacts, email, calendar etc and it works very well. I have issues with Google Contacts (it’s by far the most lame product they have right now), so I store my contacts in Outlook and push them to Google when they need to be updated. But that works for me.

It also easily connects to Facebook and Twitter and matches up all the contacts. So yes, I see your goofy Facebook profile picture when you call…

If I do a (google) search on my Android phone, it will automatically search the phone, contacts, notes, the web etc in one go (bite me again, iPhone).

I can even store all my settings in the cloud and restore them to a new device if mine gets lost.

But now with Android 2.2, Google are really starting to show how this cloud stuff should really work. A couple of weeks ago, I finally ditched Firefox for GMail and switched to Chrome. With a couple of extensions, I get rock solid performance and many of the features of a desktop mail client with some nifty extra stuff to boot.

For example, I just installed ChrometoPhone. It’s a two part app that uses the new “Cloud to Device” messaging that’s built in to Android 2.2. The messaging stuff allows instructions to be sent directly to a phone without the phone being connected to any kind of desktop/laptop.

In the case of ChrometoPhone, there’s a Chrome browser extension and a small Android app. Once both are installed you’re in the land of magic. Browse to any page on your desktop, click the ChrometoPhone icon and that page will automatically open on your phone. Better still, if you’re looking up an address in Google Maps on the web, just click the icon and that will automatically open the Maps app on your phone, with the address you just looked up.

Running out to a meeting and need the directions? Now it’s easy. And it’s smart.

There’s no real reason why Apple or Microsoft couldn’t have done this. Both companies own a desktop browser (and an OS), both own Mobile OS’s and have similar or stronger control over the phone hardware running that OS. But the fact of the matter is, neither of them have done this. iPhone is about to be on OS 4 and Microsoft on Phone 7. Android is on 2.2 and is arguably more sophisticated/flexible than either.

Fundamentally, I think the key difference is that Google is wired differently. For all their “Think Different” approach, Apple was born in the same era as Microsoft and clings to many of the same ideals. Google grew up in the cloud and it’s starting to show.

I’m no rabid Google fanboy by any means, but they are seriously starting to win me over. I’ll be curious to see what the newly announced Google TV can deliver. If the cloud, desktop and mobile devices can all integrate with it in the way I’m starting to see, technology may actually get fun again.

Welcome back 1997! I’ve missed you!

P.s. If you’re running Android 2.2, you can download ChrometoPhone here:
http://code.google.com/p/chrometophone/

If you get a Server Error when you try and run it, see comment #2 here for a very easy solution:
http://code.google.com/p/chrometophone/issues/detail?id=9

Enjoy!

Let me be clear upfront. I’m not a citizen, so I can’t vote. By rights, I should be a Republican, but I have no patience for all of the nothing-to-do-with-being-a-republican bullshit that the party now stands for. Having grown up in Europe, I don’t have a whole lot of patience for socialism and nanny states either. My point is, I’m relatively neutral in the big scheme of things.

So what pisses me off? The way America treats small business. And by America, I mean the House, the Senate, all of the hangers on, but sadly also much of the American public.

The Dodd financial bill is a prime example of shit being shoveled into the wrong mouths. But more on that in a moment…

The US Census Bureau tracks businesses by size and they routinely publish their data. I’m not spinning anything here, this is the raw data straight from their site. Do the math yourself.

There are 5,885,784 “employer firms” in the USA. i.e. 5,885,784 businesses. Together, they employ 115,074,924 people. Yes, 115 MILLION people. Quite a few by anyone’s count (well anyone except China).

What companies do we mostly hear about? Large ones. Who gets government bailouts and huge porky incentives (under any regime, not just Obama)? Large business. Surely there’s a good reason?

I don’t think so. In fact, support for big business from automakers to banks to anyone else who qualifies is, in my opinion, one of the poorest investments any government can make.

Let me back that up with some reasons why…

Let’s start with what counts as a large business? How about one that employes 2500 or more people. That sounds quite big. Almost husky. Care to guess what percentage of the US employers count as large businesses? Zero point zero six percent. Yes, 0.06 PERCENT. As in less than one tenth of one percent.

So what about small businesses? Compared to the big guys, 500 employees or less seems quite dainty in size. And companies of that size represent 86.08% of all US companies. Yes, EIGHTY SIX percent. Or if you prefer there are one thousand four hundred and thirty four times as many small companies as large companies.

Ahh, but I can hear you mumbling about big companies employing more people. Well, those teeny tiny good for nothing companies with less than 500 employees actually employ 50.92% of the American workforce. Yes, more than half. All of the big companies combined employ just 37.24%.

Okay. But aren’t big businesses a safe haven of stability and job security? Hell no. Ask anyone in RTP that worked for Bayer, Cisco, Glaxo, IBM, Lenovo, Nortel, Sony Ericsson or any of the other big companies that have shed thousands of employees over the past two years.

Big companies, with few exceptions, are driven by quarterly goals and people are an expendable resource that can be “edited” to help reach those goals. Ask anyone with big company experience that spans more than 5 years and they will tell you it is getting worse, not better. The good old days of spending 30 years with one company are dead and gone.

When I attended Defrag last year, I ended up sitting opposite Brad Feld over dinner. Brad’s quite a smart chap by any measure. I asked him how Boulder was faring in the economic downturn, and his answer was interesting. He said it was ugly, but not awful. The insightful part was the reason why… Boulder/Denver didn’t have that many large corporations doing massive layoffs, and the people being let go from smaller companies were having an easier time finding other small companies that were hiring.

Small companies are, by their nature, far more dynamic. Yes, individually they are riskier endeavors, but as a class of employer, I’d be willing to bet that employment with small companies is far more secure overall.

And yet no one really represents small business in politics. Worse still, the proverbial man (or lady) on the street is far more likely to be impressed by a job with Big Assholes Inc. than Small Company X.

So now back to the Dodd financial bill, which was the impetus for writing this.

As we all now know, the entire financial crisis was caused by risky investments made in small businesses by poorly informed investors.

Oh, wait. That wasn’t what happened.

Actually a large group of trained professionals got carried away with Vegas style gambling under the guise of clever mathematics and a nice investment banking title.

So why does the Dodd bill target small companies? I have no f*cking clue.

And what do I mean by target? Well there are plenty of folks that have done a better job of examining the bill than me. Check out this VentureBeat article for a good overview and lots of links.

Here’s the summary (more or less lifted from VentureBeat):

1. The bill requires startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
2. Startups will have to wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing.
3. The wealth requirements for an “accredited investor” who can invest in startups will be raised. They would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000).
4. The bill eliminates federal pre-emption which means that every state will get to define and enforce its own rules for both Angel and Venture investing.

So #1 means attorneys will make money off clients who cannot afford to pay. #2 means many early stage companies will die on the vine waiting for bureaucratic approval. #3 just makes it even harder to find investors. And #4 is the icing on the cake — certain states will get smart and make it easy, and many many others will do the opposite. The net result will be the death of most Angel investing in all but a few states. Great way to create a whole new kind of decaying rust belt in America.

Think I’m being overly dramatic? Let me give you a real life example from personal experience trying to raise $100,000. That’s not big money. It’s certainly not the kind of price tag that destroys an economy. But for an early stage company, $100k is tough to find and it takes a long time. You’ll need at least six months, maybe more.

Under Dodd’s proposal, you’ll need to first register with the SEC. That’s going to take a few hours of legal advice and a bunch of paperwork. Time to welcome $1000 – $2500 of new expenses. Think of it as an extra 2.5% tax on the money you raise. Now wait an extra 120 days, holding your breath and not talking to investors. Good luck with that — it’s always fun to add 50% to the turnaround time on financing.

Okay, ready to go. But wait. More than half of the Angel investors in your state no longer qualify as accredited investors. So (a) the number of targets just got way smaller and (b) the remaining Angels are now looking at twice as many deals.

More competition and less supply. That sounds like fun.

Oh but wait. Almost forgot about no Federal pre-emption. Now you are at the whim of the state you live in. Think they’re friendly to small business? Think again. Expect stupid hoops to jump through, complete lack of understanding and yet more legal fees. Not to mention yet more reasons for your local Angels to hang up their investor badge and get out of the game.

Let me give you two examples of just how well States handle small business.

In North Carolina, we had a great program called One North Carolina. It’s primarily a grant program for small businesses. If you compete for, and win, a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the federal government, you can apply for matching funds from the One NC program. The program has been shown to help launch companies, create jobs, drive investment and generally be a great return on investment. The NC legislature, in its infinite wisdom gutted the program this year. I believe the budget was cut by more than 70%. Less than one month afterwards, our illustrious governor convened a panel to discuss what could be done to help early stage businesses in North Carolina. <sigh>.

In Connecticut, there’s a great group called Connecticut Innovations. They provide seed stage investment and mentoring for early stage companies in Connecticut. They were created by the CT legislature in 1989 and since 1995 they have supported themselves with the returns from their own investments. Impressive.

Some other stats:

Over the years, CI has helped over 100 emerging companies research, develop, and market new products and services. This activity has attracted over $1 billion dollars in additional investments from private equity providers. CI has brought the State of Connecticut over $510 million in Gross State Profit and over 5,000 additional job-years.

So all in all, they are doing a good job. What’s their reward?

“Early Saturday morning, the State Senate passed S.B. 492 AAC Deficit Mitigation for the Biennium Ending June 30, 2011. The bill contained the following language:

Sec. 89. (Effective from passage) On or before July 1, 2010, Connecticut Innovations, Incorporated, the Connecticut Development Authority and the Department of Economic and Community Development shall be consolidated into one agency. Such consolidation shall eliminate at least three executive level positions from the Department of Economic and Community Development and shall achieve savings by aligning functions and services.”

Sounds like a good thing, no? Except that if this becomes law, Connecticut Innovations can no longer make or hold equity investments. Yeah. It kills their primary reason for existing and their source of revenue while destroying any future work they could do. Well done Connecticut!

So let me recap. Small business drives more than half the employment in the US. Our beloved politicians choose to ignore that fact. Support goes to big companies that can afford contributions and lobbyists while small companies get the finger. Worse, we get the kind of restrictions only big companies can afford to pay for put in place by the kind of cretinous individuals that will happily kill job creating programs.

Every small company needs money to get started, whether it’s a loan, credit card debt, friends & family, Angel investment or Venture Capital. That money is now officially under threat. That means small businesses and their employees are under threat too.

If someone threatens 50.92% of the American workforce, shouldn’t we at least be a little angry?

Read the VentureBeat article and please sign up for the petition.

Look at it this way: if a mentally challenged child was playing with knives, someone would step in to protect them from themselves. It’s time to do the same for our clueless politicians.

</end rant>

Actually, I’ve not written anything this decade.

Hmm. Maybe that will guilt my subconscious blog writing ego into action. Stay tuned…

And every manufacturer you can name has contributed steaming product dung to the sh*tpile.

Yes, I’m annoyed.

For as long as I’ve had wi-fi, I’ve found that a typical router will crap out after 6-18 months of use.  I’ve tried every brand available and talked to many a sys-admin in search of recommendations.  It makes no difference.  The products are, almost universally, crap.

The last time I moved, I found myself in an area with a lot of competing wi-fi signals.  Since the POS I had was giving up the ghost anyway, I decided to buy a new setup.  For various reasons I went with a pair of Netgear WPN824 (version 3 if you care).  It’s cheap and cheerful and gets good reviews. More importantly, you can set them up as repeaters so the two routers combined should give a nice broad area of coverage with a strong signal.

The setup was slow, painful and not as described.  I ended up calling Netgear support, who eventually solved the problem by switching off all of the advanced features of the router, like speed.  Nice.

Anyway, that was 6 months ago, and now the things are failing 4-6 times a day.  I actually switched back to a wired connection because I was so tired of futzing with them.  Having finally lost patience, I did a bit of superficial digging and decided on the Linksys WRT160N.  There were a couple of warnings about not being able to install custom firmware, but I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway.  Reviews were generally good.

I checked online and the local TigerDirect seemed to have a decent price, so I drove over there and bought two.  Tiger have decided (who knows why) to resurrect the CompUSA name.  That should have been omen enough.

I got the routers home and plugged them in.  First of all, no repeater mode.  Suck.  Will have to get creative to work around that.  But an initial run on a wired connection with Speedtest.net showed about 3x faster downloads that I was getting with a wired connection on the Netgear. Yay!

Then I try a wi-fi connection.  My trusty Android Wi-Fi Analyzer suggests a good channel and off I go. Sitting NEXT to the router, and connected by 802.11n, I get less than 1/3 of the throughput of a wired connection.  10 feet away IN AN OPEN ROOM I get no usable signal.  I reach for Google, and crappy N support is a “feature” of the router.  The official response is that this is a known issue and you need to downgrade to firmware from 2008 because the latest firmware is shite.  It’s been shite since February 2009 and as far as I can tell, Linksys/Cisco don’t give a damn.  They certainly aren’t releasing any updates.  See this post for a typical example.

So back to Google.  I finally found a review site that seems to be worth a damn —  www.SmallNetBuilder.com.  Here’s an example of their rankings.  They also seem to follow up on products after a few months to see if they stand the test of time, unlike the “proper” review sites like cNet and PC World who apparently would give a thumbs up to a router with the brainpower of Sarah Palin if it’s little lights blinked okay.

After much debate, and considerable reluctance after my prior experience, I decided on the Netgear RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router (WNDR3700).  Not cheap, but actually threatened to do what I needed.

One of the nice things about the WNDR3700 is that it contains two radios, so you can set it up as a repeater without killing your bandwidth i.e. set one radio up as a repeater connecting to another WNDR3700 and set the other radio up as a standard access point.

So I returned the Linksys WTF160Ns to Tiger, argued with the guy that wanted to charge a restocking fee for a defective product and picked up a couple of WNDRs from BestBuy and Staples (no-one nearby had two in stock)

It took a good 4 hours to get the damn things set up.  A prime example of “why is this not easier”.

Here are the issues I ran in to:

1.  I could not get the repeater function to work.

When you set up repeater mode, you need the MAC address of the base station and the repeater unit.  Netgear very helpfully includes a sticker on the bottom of the router that has the MAC address of the router.  But guess what?  Since it has two radios, it has MULTIPLE MAC ADDRESSES.  Found that nugget buried deep in a Netgear forum. The MAC address on the sticker was, of course, not for the radio I had assigned to the repeater function.

2.  Using the repeater mode disables any security option except WEP

<sigh>

3.  ”Draft N” is a lying SOB of a label

It took a long time for 802.11n to get formalized.  But what isn’t clear until you try to use it is just how cluster-f*cked most of the draft implementations are.  I have 2 macs and a netbook that are all nominally 802.11n devices.  One of the perks of “n” is that it can run on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies.  This is good because cordless phones, baby monitors, regular wi-fi, bluetooth, Microwaves and Old Man Cranky’s viagra prescription can all run at 2.4GHz, so it’s a little noisy.  5GHz is, by comparison, a charmingly desolate chunk of frequency.  Yeehah.

Except not every 802.11n device supports 5GHz.  Back to the drawing board.  Stopping only to revisit issues around item #1 on this list.

4.  WEP sucks

I’m not as paranoid about the security aspect of WEP.  My principal concern is that on many routers it apparently reduces throughput by 50%.  Yay.

So after yet more googling, I went with WPA2.  I was very proud of myself until…

5. WPA2 Implementations Suck Too

One of the devices I wanted to connect is a Nintendo Wii.  Wii doesn’t like WPA2.  Specifically, Wii doesn’t like long keys because Nintendo were alledgedly too lazy to implement WPA2 fully.  Now if I hadn’t already set up a bunch of devices with the nice long key, I would just have changed it.  But there is a workaround.  Apparently the passphrase you use with WPA2 gets converted to 256 bit key.  But sometimes that doesn’t happen correctly, so this chap has a web app that will generate a 64 digit hexadecimal version of the key.  It looks something like “b2334781c5b2c1d8628ed47b5699e76d15a9ecd1092c911b5830bf37a8c56294″.  It’s really fun typing that in with the wiimote.  But at least it worked.

In conclusion

So after multiple days of messing about, I seem to have more or less everything working.  My download speed is about 2x what it was and I’m not fishing for the router reset every time I want to get online.  I’ve yet to win my battle with WPA2 and the iPhone 3GS, but I suspect the Nintendo workaround will bear fruit.

The big question is: how many months will I get out of this setup and will it actually be any better in the long run than what wasn’t working before?

More importantly, I am left asking why on earth it takes this much time and energy to solve what should be a well understood problem.  Instead of routinely squeezing new products out of their collective corporate behinds, you’d think Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, Cisco and all the others would take a minute to make stuff that (a) actually works and (b) doesn’t require a day of Googlewhacking to debug.

<sigh>

Update: I forgot to mention one other thing — I also got a performance boost from replacing Time Warner Cable’s default DNS servers with OpenDNS server IP’s.  You can sign up for a free account here, or just use their IP addresses instead of whatever DNS servers your ISP provides — OpenDNS nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.

But aside from that, I increasingly believe they are sucktastic for the simple reason that they are very very poor journalists. Their fact checking is atrocious and getting worse.

I was reading an article published today by GMA News that Google Alerts sent my way. Not sure I’d ever heard of the site before, but the article is riddled with inaccuracies. But lo and behold, it’s not a GMA article at all, it’s regurgitated newsy goodness from our charmingly journalistic friends at AP.

Let me give you some examples:

“As 2010 draws nearer, techies can expect a key year for communication technology with Apple set to launch a new iPhone, Microsoft to launch its Microsoft Mobile 7, and there’s the Google Android 2 on the way.”

Hmm.  Could have sworn there was a tiny, almost unpublicized launch of a new phone from Motorola that may (and I say “may” because I don’t have the army of fact checkers and proper journalists at the AP’s disposal) have been running Android 2.0.

But that’s just the beginning (literally, it’s the opening line).

Launched in China in October 2009, the Apple iPhone 3GS is now conquering the world’s most populous mobile phone market and is set for a great start to 2010.

Conquering?  Not really.  It’s starting to tick up but many folks agreed that the launch was pretty disappointing (see this article for an example).  But hey, we’re only on the second paragraph…

Let’s press on (I hope you enjoyed that pun)…

The iPhone is not without market rivals. Most notably, Google Android is now offering a competitive operating system, with key applications and gadgets. This will be expanded in 2010, with the launch of Android 2.0, also known as Eclair.

As well as being Bluetooth-capable, the new version will include the option to have multiple accounts on one device, a search function for saved text messages and multi-touch support for the virtual keyboard.

Hmm.  I have a first gen G1 running Android.  Certainly has a Bluetooth setting — maybe it’s virtual bluetooth?

And one of my favorite lines:

Microsoft Mobile, which will launch its Mobile 7 platform next year is another growing contender.

Wow.  Maybe they live in a bunker where the original PalmOS is still the bees knees and Windows 95 is a rock solid 32-bit OS.  If you know anything about the mobile market, you know that sentence is missing the words “for a rapid death”.  According to Gartner, Windows Mobile lost 28 percent marketshare between Q3 2008 and Q3 2009 (or so say these guys).

Luke Peters, deputy editor of T3 Magazine says that lots of phone companies will be aiming for increased processing speed in 2010.

I know nothing about Luke Peters, and wish him no ill-will, but I hope he is smarter than this quote makes him sound.

A very popular application is Google Maps, which users can easily access on their mobile phones to find out their exact location. But it goes further than that, with the latest applications offering extra information which is directly linked to where you are.

Luke Peters refers to this concept as augmented reality.

Hmm.  Okay, maybe he’s not.

“Augmented reality is an idea that came around really in the start of 2009 and allows, now that you can track wherever your phone is, whether it’s an iPhone 3G or a Google Android phone, it means that companies can layer information over realtime video to show you exactly what’s happening in your surroundings,” Peters says.

Oh sweet Jesus help me.  Phones with GPS’s — crazy idea.  Not as though they’ve been around for a while.  RIM, Sony Ericsson, Nokia and a few hundred million shipped products might disagree, but what would they know.  And for the love…  could we not spend just a moment in Wikipedia or some other fact source??? AR new in 2009?  “The term augmented reality is believed to have been coined in 1990 by Thomas Caudell, an employee of Boeing at the time” .  Oh, and the iPhone 3G that this guy is so in love with won’t run AR applications, you need a 3Gs.

Matthew Bath confirms that the emphasis is really on software next year. “Again 2010 is a story of software,” Bath says. “You’re going to see a big rise in downloadable stores that enable you to download software to totally customize your mobile phone, whether that’s finding out where you’ve parked your car to scanning barcodes in your local supermarket.”

Hmm.  I’ve heard of this.  It’s called an application something or other.  App Store?  Sounds wacky.  Although Bath reckons the store is downloadable, so maybe it’s an augmented reality Walmart to go in your pocket?

<sigh>

Now this article happens to be on a topic I know something about, so it’s easy for me to poke holes. And perhaps the AP has some good reasons to quote people that don’t understand the topic they are talking about.  But part of the reason the AP is so incensed by all these damn bloggers and their pesky blogosphere is that they claim to be “real journalists” where as we are all just factless parasites who don’t do our jobs properly.

The fact checking is so craptastically far off, it makes me wonder about all the AP stuff I read that I don’t know much about.  Is it all as craply checked as this?

Just wondering…

I was having dinner with a good friend earlier this week. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call him M. M is someone I used to work with and have a great deal of respect for. We have over 12 years of history together and have, on separate occasions, both asked the other to come and work on a new startup. Since he lives out of state, we don’t catch up as often as I’d like.

For a significant period of time M was a high level VP with a Fortune 500 company. He was heading up a big initiative that was very important to the company’s future.

In typical big company fashion, they told him to go do it, held him accountable and then enabled every conceivable roadblock to prevent success while personally putting him and his team through the wringer.

A classically clear example of set up to fail while betting on success.

In 2001 M’s ever growing desire to quit dovetailed neatly with some corporate downsizing and he took a layoff package. After a few months off, he started his own business, effectively doing what he was supposed to be doing at the company he used to work for.

Eight years on, M has had some ups and downs, but things are generally good. He will never again work as an employee of a big company.

During dinner we discussed what he called his “recovery” from working in a big company. The short version is that you get very used to the salary, the bonus, the perks and perceived position and it takes a massive slap in the face to get real. It took him at least six of the last eight years to realize that the big company lure was a shitty deal. He downsized his life and has been much happier ever since.

Less money, but zero inflicted bullshit. He still deals with BS, but it’s on his own terms and not mandated by some idiotic HR lackey (or other empty suit) with more papers than brains.

Big company “benefits” are a highly effective drug. They dull your mind to other possibilities while chaining your feet to your desk.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my six figure salary back in the day. It doesn’t suck to buy a bigger house, nicer car, take a swanky vacation to Hawaii, join a healthclub, get a big home theater system etc etc. And no matter what you make, it’s always easy to spend it.

But the further you get down this road, the more your reality gets distorted. You just get used to spending $60 or $100 on dinner, instead of the $30 or $40 you used to spend. Or buying the $50,000 car instead of the $20,000 import.

And when that happens, you’re stuck. Even if you are entrepreneurially inclined, it’s hard to take a startup seriously. You

can’t

drop from $200k a year to $80k with lots of prospects. The budget just doesn’t work. Not without some serious life changes. And that goes double if you have a family.

And so your tolerance for bullshit goes up. Way up. In the case of M, I believe the company he worked for broke almost every promise they made to him and yet he still stayed and tried to do the job he was tasked with.

Another friend of mine, we’ll call him K, is also at a Fortune 500. K is somewhat senior, but not on the management team. He’s paid very well. K gets to work by 7am, leaves by 8pm and usually works weekends. He’s been there for over 3 years and his schedule has always been like that. It’s not officially expected, but it’s certainly not discouraged.

K’s employer went through a re-org and his group now reports to a different, less relevant part of the organization. That got K started on getting back to a startup or small company. He got two different interesting offers, one full time and one on a moonlighting basis. But when it came down to making a decision, he froze. He just couldn’t imagine leaving the mothership, the salary and the perceived safety.

Two other recent run ins were with guys that work for a company that has treated them abysmally. They’re paid well, but the place has been in constant re-org and their office keeps getting the shitty end of the deal. Despite repeated assurances that the worst was over, they were recently told that their location will be closed entirely. Their jobs will end unless they are willing to relocate, but the relocation doesn’t really fit with either of their personal lives. If they aren’t chosen for relocation or don’t agree to uproot their entire life, they’ll get some kind of severance, but they don’t know what. They are in absolute corporate limbo.

These guys have valuable experience in a hot area. They are very capable and have a demonstrable track record. You would think they might be willing to jump, or at least put some feelers out. But no. Both are waiting to “see what happens”.

And I know plenty of other folks that fall in to the same boat. They are paid well and treated poorly. They’re tasked with big hairy audacious goals, only to have the rug pulled out from under them at ever turn. They are promised support, promotion and flexibility and receive nothing. And they run fast and work hard, often moving mountains to achieve their goals only to be screwed by a large, autonomously stupid machine that cannot understand or reward individual value.

I believe it’s a shitty and truly faustian bargain. You are selling yourself, your conscience and your abilities… to a buyer that is incapable of sticking to the terms of the deal.

And compounding that shitty deal is the fact that no matter how high you rank, you can still get tossed out at a moments notice. In the current economic climate, the corporate safety net is an illusion. When even Don Dodge isn’t safe, it should be a wake up call that big companies are often fundamentally broken.

I know not everyone is wired like me, and I often think having the entrepreneurial gene is the embodiment of the chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. But if you’re a cog in a big company, even an important one, take the time to step back and examine the deal you’re being given.

Take out the shitometer and get a proper reading. How much are you putting up with just to support a lifestyle that doesn’t really make you happy? Does the company really keep its promises? If not, hold them accountable. You can bet your hiney that if you missed your goals, you would be held accountable, just ask them for the same deal.

p.s. if you have a big company job, are treated well and generally happy, feel free to ignore all of the above…

It’s mostly simple things:

1. Their prices are usually good.
   These days they’re not always the cheapest, but their prices are always towards the bottom end of the range.
2. They don’t charge if you check a bag
   Every other airline I’ve flown lately charges $20-$30 per checked bag.  If you travel with a lot of gear, or family, that adds up.
3. They actually have some idea of customer service and generally operate from the view of keeping customers happy, rather than the “customers are a nuisance” approach of American, United and others.

The best example of #3 was my experience earlier today.  What was a 3 leg trip (from A to B to C to A) got revised to a standard round trip.  With other airlines, there would be cancellation fees (up to $150 last time I went through this) and a complicated process to get whatever credit remained. That credit can also only be used when buying a ticket by phone, not through the website, which means it can only be used to purchase more expensive tickets than are advertised on the airline’s site.  A nice end to end scam that ensures you get almost no refund from a canceled/changed trip.

With Southwest, I simply called, gave them my confirmation number and they canceled the legs I no longer needed.  The full price paid for each leg was instantly available as a credit against future travel (and good for 1 year).  What’s more, when I booked the new leg through the website, there was a link (as the agent told me) to “apply travel funds”.  I clicked it, typed in the confirmation number for the original (now canceled) leg and the credit was applied.  What’s more, I was able to apply credits from multiple canceled flights to a single new purchase.  And it all took less than 10 mins.

It’s always refreshing to see a company in a competitive business that builds customer service into its roots to such a degree that it permeates every aspect of their thinking…  And that’s why they’ll keep getting my business.

In fact, the pulsating satanic blob monster is nothing more than a colony of tubifex worms. Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, explained to News 14 Carolina that the creatures frequent “sewage and pond sediment”, and elaborated: “They seem to respond to the light from the camera. That light is pretty hot.”

Buchan did, though, admit: “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them. We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

Not sure if that’s better or worse…  Thanks to my big brother for the link (The Register)

After I arrived here, I was shocked to find out that in the great state of NC, you can’t order a medium rare hamburger at most restaurants. The state mandates that unless the restaurant grinds their own beef, you can only order medium.

Why the legislature wasted time on such silliness is beyond me. But allegedly it’s for my own protection.

It’s nice to know they care.

Oh, except while it’s fine to jump in on irrelevant details of my health and well-being, they’re sure as heck not going to mess with any established monopolies that might like to rip money from my wallet without so much as a thank you.

For example, much of the area is exclusively serviced by Time Warner Cable. I pay more here than I ever did in Phoenix for service that is generally slower and definitely less reliable. But I can live with that…

A far worse example is the monopoly held by Progress Energy, our non-friendly local power company who are the sole provider for the area.

I’m currently in the process of applying LCLSMF to my life (less complications, less stress, more fun), as a result of which I’m moving. The new place will be half the size of my current one.

Progress will not connect the power at the new place without a $350 deposit, paid in full upfront. The deposit is regardless of credit history. They claim it’s based on 2 months of utils at the new property, but as I said, it’s half the size of my current place and I’ve pretty much never paid more than $170 for a month of electricity in my current home.

If I don’t pay, I don’t get electricity. If I don’t pay before I move in, they hit me with a reconnect fee too. There’s no assistance, no terms, nothing whatsoever in the way of help. They also won’t connect on a weekend, so I have to pay for extra days before I actually move in. And they hold the deposit for TWO YEARS.

Unbelievable.

Thanks NC. Great to know you’re looking out for the consumer in these difficult times.

P.s. Slow blogging lately as there’s been a lot going on. I have a bunch of things to talk about that hopefully I’ll get to in the coming weeks…