Netizen

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Droid Does

I have viscerally stayed away from the iPhone, for all the shaking of the culture that it has done.You could argue this Third World guy simply could not afford it, and that is why. I have admired it but I have not taken the step. My tech startup is to do with the IC - Internet Computer - vision. A key part of it is a laptop like device that competes with both the PC and the smartphone to become the center of gravity in computing. So not going for the iPhone has been to eat one's own dog food, even if that dog food has only existed

Image representing iPhone 3G as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

so far in vision. But a browser-centric life and work style can feel like you are already living it. And if you spend as much time online as I do, when you get offline, you want to be offline. I am not much of a phone person as is. I have preferred digital communication: email, blog, Twitter, Facebook. Even digital phones carry analog baggage. Recently I have found a great use for my prepaid mobile phone. I tweet from my phone once in a while these days. You report on the world when out and about. You get a phone because you need a number for others to have.

But Droid has me excited. Android promises to deliver the smartphone for the masses. Steve Jobs is an icon, and I admire him a lot, but my democratic impulse takes me to the likes of Dell. Go where the masses are.

The iPhone has been a smaller desktop. The Android phones promise to be about web applications. Finally we are about to have smartphones for the masses. And that is not coming from the company that built the computer "for the rest of us."

Image via CrunchBase

A Big Week For The Mobile Web
And this past week was a big one for the mobile web. We got three big things we've needed badly:
1) A real competitor to the iPhone - the Droid
2) A scalable business model for mobile apps - in app transactions in free apps
3) A standard for broadcasting video (and audio) to mobile devices

Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

Image representing Fred Wilson as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBase

I was just busy leaving tens of comments at this particular blog post by Fred Wilson, the VC also known as AVC, and it occurred to me that we treat blog comments as almost illegitimate. There is that near universal no follow command that pulls down comments left at most blogs. I appreciate the logic behind it. Spam commenters would skew the Google PageRank mechanism. Links in the comments sections should not carry the same weights as links in the body of articles and blog posts. But to say they should carry no weight

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

at all is ridiculous. By that logic, email should be banned. Those Nigerian dictators are reason enough. So far the way we have treated blog comments - with hostility - stems out of ignorance. If you don't fathom it, destroy it.

[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments

By that logic, Twitter is out and out ridiculous. (I Get Twitter) 140 characters? Come on.

There is blogging and there is microblogging. Twitter is microblogging, and has more than earned its rightful place. It has all the buzz. Blog posts are content. Blog post comments are microcontent. Microcontent has not been given its rightful place. And I think that has been a mistake. Good to see Disqus at work to remedy that. But it is not growing fast enough for me. There are too many blog posts that I come across that I want

Image via CrunchBase

to comment on but can't because I got there before Disqus did.

I would be curious to know how Disqus deals with the no follow nonsense.

It is Google that is slow. It has yet to deal with tweets. Google and/or Facebook have still to deal with Facebook updates. Google is nowhere close to even wanting to deal with comments at the bottom of blog posts. How social is that? Not at all.

Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

I Must Be Following A Lot Of People On Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

Or people I follow must tweet a lot. I was just on my Twitter main page hoping to click over to my Direct Messages, but right before I clicked on to Direct Messages, I caught eye of a tweet by a woman who said something along the lines of, I love football, men wearing funny clothes, falling over each other. The tweet I thought was funny, very funny actually. Call me a Third World guy enamored by soccer and soccer alone, but I never quite got the hang of football. But by then I had already clicked on to my Direct Messages. I clicked the back button. But that does not do the trick. You are

The striker (wearing the red shirt) is past th...

Image via Wikipedia

still on the same web address when you click on Direct Messages. So I had to click on Home. The tweet was gone, flushed downstream. I kept clicking on More, until I could not do it no more. I guess Twitter allows you to click on More only so many times. The lady and her tweet were gone, nowhere to be found. That is when I realized to follow 27,000 people is to follow a lot of people. A refresh in 10 seconds puts you on another planet.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen
NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12
Tweets And Facebook Updates: The Mumbojumbo

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen

http://twitter.com/jeffjarvis
http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu

NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12
My First Tweet From My Phone
Twitter Top 100 NYC: I Am In
Almost There

Twitter Top 100 NYC

Friday, October 16, 2009

Business Services Buying Made Easy

Vendorcompete.com is true to its name. It gets the vendors competing for your business. The system is free for buyers. Buyers can make referral fees.

The site is "a pioneer in open competitive bidding." That drives the costs down for you, but the cheapest is not always the best. The site also gets buyers to rate the service providers. So you have others like you rating the vendors.

Some of the business services you might be looking for are accounts payable, book keeping, telemarketing, document shredding, medical billing, social media marketing, website design and warehousing.

Register at vendorcompete.com for free

(This is a blog post ad and is not listed on the Contents page.)

Just Click Local

Image via Wikipedia

JustClickLocal is a top 5000 site. It is visited by over a million people every month in the US. It is like the Yellow Pages, only faster. The site gets updated regularly. This site is a great place to list your business, and to look for local vendors you might need services from. Are you looking for roofing work? Accounting sevices? An attorney? A barber? Go to JustClickLocal and do a quick search.

Innovative Web Design Company

PrimeView has had clients like Nissan, National Car Rental and University of Phoenix. One of PrimeView's great projects was turning around a disorganized 800 page medical college website. Now the site is navigable and welcoming.

Creating great, welcoming websites and getting visitors to show up to those sites: that is what PrimeView does. It gets the word out through social media, online marketing and search engine optimization. (Arizona SEO) PrimeView creates sites that rank well in the search engine results.

Google up Arizona web design to end up at PrimeView. Take a look at some of the work at the cool before and after gallery.

A Netflix For Books Needed

Image via CrunchBase

Netflix For Books

Google might have started with public domain books, and Amazon might have taken a step with its Kindle and the $9.99 per downloaded book, but what would really change the game is if you could pay a monthly flat fee and read as many books as you might want online. That would include books old and new. Charging 10 bucks a month for that would make sense. The Netflix business model needs to be replicated for books, or maybe Netflix itself should want to get into the books business. They have already done it for movies, maybe they are well positioned to replicate it for books.

Kindle Or The Browser

Google wants to do over your browser what Amazon wants to do through its Kindle. My prejudice is for the browser. You should not need a different appliance to read books. Your computer should do it.

Image representing Amazon EC2 as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

Hey, you already paid for it.

All Books Need To Go Digital

In The News

Off the Charts: By Some Reliable Measures, Recession Is Over the manufacturing sectors of China, Taiwan, South Korea and India had begun to grow by April, but that the United States did not follow suit until August.
The Tech Sector Trumpets Signs of a Real Rebound for many technology companies, orders are starting to bloom like flowers after a spring rain........ Computer hardware and software are building blocks of the modern economy, as basic as iron ore and coal were to the industrial era. Together, technology products represent about half of all business spending on equipment. ...... “I th

Image via CrunchBase

ink we are entering a period very similar to 1997 to 2004, where you’ll see a decade run of productivity increases”

Paul Krugman: A Hatchet Job So Bad It’s Good
Democrats Address Their Own Rifts on Health Care
Public Option Is Next Big Hurdle in Health Debate
How to Sell a War: First, Start to Win

Image by LA100RRA 3logs via Flickr

Parents Burning to Write It All Down

“The true aim of everyone who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds.”
- Frederick W. Robertson quotes (English Preacher b.1840)

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The Next Big Thing In Social Networking

The social has been all the buzz on the web for a few years now. And it is still going strong, for good reason. You might not remember Friendster, but that came along before MySpace. And MySpace was all

Image via CrunchBase

the rage. Then Facebook took over. Like Sam Walton claimed, you can reinvent retailing "again and again and again."

The social has been the web maturing. It is not about technology, it is about people. That is the message.

The joke at my high school back in the days was trousers narrow at the bottom and then go wide again a few years later. How else could the fashion pendulum swing? The social is the trousers going wide

Image via CrunchBase

at the botttom. But the pendulum will swing.

The next generation of social networking is going to be about the individual. That well defined individual's social interactions online will reflect the ones offline. You are closer to some people than others. You share more with some than others. Everybody on Facebook being your general friend is going to start looking bland.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

But first Facebook has to run its course. Twitter already stole a lot of its buzz. Google Wave will likely steal a lot of buzz from both Twitter and Facebook. But Wave is still the pendulum swinging in the same direction. And Wave might remain a great way to collaborate on projects.

At what point will have the pendulum swung all the way? Perhaps when Facebook hits 600 million people? More?

Five Blind Men And Google Wave
Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Facebook's Ad Space Is Different

In The News

Using Windows 7 to 'Elevate Miami'
Acer overtakes Dell in PC shipments
New Wi-Fi spec challenges Bluetooth
Photos: First glance at Barnes & Noble's e-reader
Chrome Mac beta nearer; Win 7 features recede
Finland: 1Mbps broadband access is a legal right
Bringing tech jobs to Third World refugees
Iron Mountain introduces a cloud storage API
Call it a comeback? Google earnings due
Report: Apple developing radio app for iPhone
The supercollider and a theory about fate
SolarEdge garners $23 million in funding
Gartner eyeing electronics recovery next year
Intel earnings beat Wall Street predictions
Intel CEO remarks on Netbooks, Windows 7
Survey: Do small businesses use social networking?
Acer's 3D-capable Aspire laptop leaks
Pretty Web journal tool Penzu goes pro
Concert Vault: Free live recordings on your iPhone
Intel, AMD file motions in 2005 antitrust case
Want good health in your golden years? Keep working

~ The way of the world is meeting people through other people. ~
Robert Kerrigan

~ It's not what you know but who you know that makes the difference. ~
Annonymous

~ It isn't just what you know, and it isn't just who you know. It's actually who you know, who knows you, and what you do for a living. ~
Bob Burg

~ More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject. ~
Peter Drucker

~ Informal conversation is probably the oldest mechanism by which opinions on products and brands are developed, expressed, and spread. ~
Johan Arndt

~ It's all about people. It's about networking and being nice to people and not burning any bridges. ~
Mike Davidson

~ Position yourself as a center of influence - the one who knows the movers and shakers. People will respond to that, and you'll soon become what you project. ~
Bob Burg

~ In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology. ~
Vinton Cerf

~ Social networking sites like Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook have literally exploded in popularity in just a few short years. ~
Mike Fitzpatrick

Katherine Berry at Pajamas Media discusses social networking: "Having just spent another morning of my life reading the most boring details of other people's mornings, I've realized how very little things like Twitter, FaceBook, or FriendFeed actually contribute to one's life: it's more like sitting in a room full of over-caffeinated narcissistic Tourette's patients with ADHD who are all trying to be the most entertaining. And, really, what's so social about a monologue?"

NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12

Twitter Top 100 NYC: I Am In

Twitter Top 100 NYC

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Sitting Next To David Rose At The NY Tech MeetUp

David Rose is a legend on the New York technology scene. I had known his name for a while. Heck, I got to know him name before I educated myself on Fred Wilson's name (@fredwilson). I had even talked to him over Facebook email once.

Last month I showed up half an hour early and quite liked it. I asked my first question at a NY Tech MeetUp. It was something to do with having spoken to two of the key speakers before they went on stage. So this month I showed up early as well. You go take a seat in the second row in the front, to the right of the stage, and you are in good shape. I did not plan it that way, but when I looked up and around I saw an empty seat between me and David Rose. He was putting some effort into his name tag. He had written his name David in double lines and was furiously coloring between the lines.

October 2009 NY Tech MeetUp

Then he moved one seat closer after Dawn Barber motioned for him to move over. Finally after a few presentations had been made on stage, and Nate (@innonate) said say hello to the people sitting next to

you, I said hello to David. (@davidsrose)

"I am honored to be sitting next to you," I said.

I was impressed as it was. He asked me what I thought of the presentations so far.

"Half the companies presenting today are my portfolio companies," he said. Then he mentioned Singularity. I was to hear that word from four different people over the course of the evening.

After the presentations were over, and it was time to mingle with the presenters beneath the stage, I spotted James far away and waved wildly at him. (@sciencehouse) He walked over. Guess who I was sitting next to, I said. Ends up James and David had been on the same panel at the Singularity event only a few days back.

James and Gabi run this wonderful meetup that is the only other MeetUp I am a regular at now besides the NY Tech MeetUp. (@gabidewit)

When I shared with James and Gabi over email a few days back that I was now part of the Twitter Top 100 NYC, James suggested I give a talk on social media at one of his MeetUps. I said I would love to.

"Demi Moore and I signed up on Twitter the same day. She has over a million and a half followers. I once tweeted her as to how that happened. I did not hear from her." (@mrskutcher)

My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher

I had really been looking forward to Nate's presentation. AnyClip speaks to me. I was not too cool with the question I ended up asking.

"How were you able to cut a deal with the big movie houses?"

The reply. We haven't, not yet.

I think AnyClip will have to become big enough in stealth mode for the movie houses to even consider cutting deals. But I totally see it happening.

Pages

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Droid Does

Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging

I Must Be Following A Lot Of People On Twitter

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen

Friday, October 16, 2009

Business Services Buying Made Easy

Just Click Local

Innovative Web Design Company

A Netflix For Books Needed

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

The Next Big Thing In Social Networking

NYC Twitter Elite: Number 12

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Sitting Next To David Rose At The NY Tech MeetUp

My First Time Seeing Jimmy Fallon In Action

Pete Cashmore