Category Archives: Technology

Google Productivity Suite

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Google has tipped it’s hand regarding it’s Office competitor.  This post on the Gmail Blog announces that:

Contacts now works more like the rest of Gmail, so if you know how to use Gmail, now you should automatically feel comfortable in Contacts too

It’s all good stuff, but improving the look and feel of Contacts (as well as Gmail itself) has brought even more light to the disparity that exists between mail, contacts and the Task functionality Google provides.  Keyboard shortcuts, configurable with tags on a full screen  – both GMail and Contacts look really good.  Tasks are still a little pop up with a beyond skinny interface and feature set.  It looks really bad in comparison.

In fact it looks so bad, I don’t believe for a moment that anyone at Google is happy with the red headed step child that pops up in the lower right corner.  When you consider the promise available with a tight integration with the other Google tools, the Task implementation is the biggest untapped opportunity they have.

I’ve said it before, I would love to have a tight GTD oriented task management tool built in to Google that would compare favorably with OmniFocus.  They have everything in hand to produce a killer application.  I’m guessing it already sits on a desktop somewhere waiting for the blessing to be rolled out to the public.

First Impressions of Gist

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Earlier this year I started casually using an online product called Gist.  My first impressions led me to put it in to the same category as Plaxo – but my recent experience has broadened my perspective:

Yesterday, I added a friend to my contacts.  My friend, “Chris”, works as a building inspector for a nearby city.  The GMail account I was using is set up in Gist to receive updates – so a contact record for Chris was created.  One of the nagging problems with the Gist import is that it assumes that the domain name of the contact is the employer of the contact.  That’s not commonly the case for my friends – I’m using their personal mail account rather than their business account.  I went in to Gist and removed Time Warner (Road Runner) as the employer and entered the name of the local city.  Today, I realized that Gist had automatically created a company and had figured out the contact information for the city – automagically.

You can see where they are trying to go with the product.  The application aggregates mail and calendar events with content from a variety of social media sources.  Theoretically, you could use it to plan your day so that you are up to date on a contact’s correspondence across the broad spectrum of outlets available to people today.  It’s definitely a beta product – and one which will someday cost money to use – but I can see it carving a a unique position for itself in the marketplace.

Broader Audience Less Satisfied with Kindle DX

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Amazon's Corporate Headquarters

Having spent some time recently praising Seth Godin’s writing, I’ll take a moment to jump on the other side of the fence.  Today, he takes a moment to hold accountable Nick Bilton for a New York Times blog post about the Kindle.  Seth rightly points out several issues with the author’s charts and underlying assumptions.

Bilton’s point is that through time, the number of customers who express dissatisfaction with the newer Kindles sold by Amazon is growing larger.  Seth’s perspective is that the market served by each Kindle has changed through time, progressing from technology early adopters to a more general market consumer.

I would argue that Bilton’s point is valid.  As Amazon attempts to grow the market served by the Kindle, they are struggling to maintain the customer satisfaction ratings they received with the early models (and original market).  Put another way, there is a mismatch between the Kindle DX and the market it is serving.

I’m speculating, but I would guess that Apple’s products do not receive a similarly large number of negative customer satisfaction responses.  Their products are well designed for the target market and the disconnect between what is delivered and what is expected is smaller than what we see with the Kindle DX.  Apple is the common exception to many rules, but it is possible to design a mass market product that appeals to both the technologists and the mass market.

Shortlink

gReader Care and Feeding

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I am a big fan of the Google Feed Reader.  I continue to fine tune how I use the tool as I learn more about it.

For example, The Trends page lists how I consume feeds – and how I do not.  The smart feed reader should include this page in their weekly review.  You can keep yourself productive by following these simple steps:

1.  Unsubscribe from feeds that have not been updated in x months.  I am settling on nine months.  After that point, it’s safe to say the author has moved on.

2.  Unsubscribe from feeds I can’t keep up with.  The New York Times is a fire hose that I can not keep up with.  There are many news outlets that can filter that to the news items I value and I should focus my attention there.

3.  Investigate the obscure.  This is the real long tail.  If I want to present a unique perspective on the world then I should find the niche no one else serves (or subscribes to).

Is Satellite Radio Dying?

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Howard Stern Displayed on a Sirius XM RadioA story entitled Satellite Radio Still Reaches for the Payday published on December 26th, 2008 describes the challenges facing Sirius XM.  There are several interesting insights shared in the article.  If you’ve read some of my other material here, you know this is a subject I care about.

Before the merger, I did not pay that much attention to Sirius.  I enjoyed the service XM provided and wasn’t really concerned with the business decisions being made by its competitor.  Not that it would have mattered – but I should have paid more attention.  Some of the significant numbers:

  1. In 2005, Sirius secured the exclusive services of Howard Stern for 500 million dollars.
  2. It costs between 250 and 300 million dollars to put a satellite in space.
  3. The company earned 613 million dollars in the third quarter of 2008
  4. The company has 1 billion dollars in debt due in 2009

That’s alot of large numbers.  But to balance the equation, the stock price of the company currently sits at 16 cents per share.  InfoWorld believes satellite radio will not survive the recession.  Add on that the combined company has let go approximately 25% of the company’s associates and you are left with few options.  The company’s chief assets appear to be its satellites and Howard Stern (based on the value they placed on his contract).

I like the service – but it looks like some banks are going to hold some more useless paper here pretty soon.

Cloud Services Fail, but Infrequently

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Don't panic about cloud based application failures

“Gmail isn’t working – OMG.  Call out the National Guard”

The recent discussion around the failure of some notable cloud based web services has reminded me of a comparable discussion in the transportation industry.  The number of fatalities associated with automobiles greatly exceeds those associated with air travel.  Why is that people assume otherwise?  Because when a plane crashes to the ground the loss of life is sudden and dramatic.  When an individual dies in an auto accident we are conditioned to view it as less significant.

What’s the point?  Gmail failed last week.  Amazon S3 failed the week before.  Twitter fails weekly (or so it seems).  These are large public outages which drive a lot of media coverage.  On the other hand, the daily (or more likely hourly) outages individuals encounter with their own tool set receive little or no media coverage. There is no way to measure them.  There is no way to report on the collective impact on productivitity associated with thousands of individual mail servers being crushed under the weight of spam.

Large scale service delivery firms that focus on service excellence will eventually drive down these failures.  You and I will continue to build things that break.  Oh well.

The End of a Good Thing – XM and Sirius Merge

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My favorite service disappeared today.  XM and Sirius have merged creating Sirius XM.  The Justice Department has indicated that the merger would not harm competition, er the consumer.  We effectively no longer have competition so we’ll have to cross our fingers on this statement. Engadget has the full announcement.

I am concerned.  My cable provider provides an almost weekly lesson in how the lack of competition creates a poor service provider.  This statement on Washington Business Journal is supposed to help me feel better.  It accomplishes the exact opposite:

Subscribers will also now have the option to pick from different packages of channels, known as a la carte programming.

My belief is that in a year’s time I will have the privilige of spending more to get less.  A la carte pricing = nickel and diming.

Update:
I ran across a few more quotes I’d like to add to my bonfire of disgruntlement…

He said the review showed that, because XM and Sirius equipment was not compatible, subscribers rarely shifted from one system to the other in their homes or cars; a switch could be expensive and time-consuming.

“Historically, once you choose one or the other of the audio services, you’re not going to switch,” he said. “A price switch is not going to cause you to jump to the other services.”

That rationale could be used to support a merger of any two competing yet dissimilar technologies. Do you suppose we’ll be asked to accept a merger of DSL and cable providers any time soon. It’s about the same exercise switching a satellite receiver and a modem. Right?

E-Mail is not the Problem

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E-mail is top of mind for many people now.  The New York Times and other mainstream media sites have jumped on the bandwagon bemoaning the flood of e-mails burying us all.

“It is a poor craftsman who blames his tool” – or so it’s been said.  With so many of us abusing the same tool you’d think we would have figured it out by now.  But it’s not just tool abuse that is burying us.  We need some new disciplines– and at least one new tool.

Disciplines

The cure to our collective problem starts with each of us.  Just because we can send an e-mail doesn’t mean we should.  Spam not withstanding, we each are inflecting a small wound on each other when we send an e-mail that does not accomplish a purpose.  Be purposeful in what you say.  Be purposeful in what you send.  Are you informing/influencing, entertaining or collaborating?

Informing/Influencing:  Who needs to know?  If everyone needs to know then e-mail is not the right answer.  Post it on a web site, or a bathroom wall.  Whatever works.  How do you know who needs to know?  That’s a post in itself, but until then give some critical thought to each person you copy on each e-mail.

Entertaining:  Please don’t.  The world is full of people sending humorous and inspirational messages.  You can not improve the world order one bit by forwarding the latest collection of jokes.  Believe me – someone already beat you to the punch.

Collaborating:  This is our greatest opportunity for improvement.  There is a genuine need in this space – but we have not decided to use the right tool.  In my role, work is measured in issues, risks and action items.  None of these units of work are best accomplished through e-mail.  A group collaborating on an issue should have a central discussion – open to all stakeholders – of the decision criteria.  Risks likewise should have consequences, likelihood and other characteristics described in one place.  Finally, action items are done, being worked, or not really in action.  Communicate status – done or not done – and any associated issues and risks.  Do it in one place.

GTD advocates (and I’m one) describe a discipline for (mostly) reacting to what the world throws at you.  We need just a little more scaffolding around what we should do when communicating with others.  If enough of the GTD’ers take up the cause, the volume of non-UBE (ham) will be reduced.

Tool

We have the tools in front of us.  Any of the threaded discussion boards meet the need.  The biggest problem with these kinds of tools is they are either too public – or too unstructured.  Imagine a hybrid tool which documents community understanding once – in a central place.  All we need is some enterprising individual to take a basic discussion board and add some ‘smarts’ so that leaders (anyone who has an issue, task or risk) can pin an item to the board and others can link items and add depth.  Now add a nicer user interface and I think you’ll have a winning enterprise application.

Swedish video on Linux

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I have arrived a little late on the open source scene so I tend to take things for granted. The expression “free as in beer” has always struck me as odd.

Based on tests I’ve taken, I am a libertarian politically. The Open Source movement is really a Socialist movement based on the comments shared in this video. It’s interesting that something this liberal could have such far reaching implications on the world economy. I mean really, where would we all be without Linux, WordPress, and all of the other GNU licensed packages in the world?

Those of you who are English speaking will have trouble at times, but this background video on Linux produced in Sweden provides a really interesting background on the Linux movement.