You’d think Google of all people could get an iPhone SDK
by Ted on July 3rd, 2008
So, “Google Talk for the iPhone” came out yesterday. I excitedly did my homework and came away disappointed.
It’s a hosted, web-based app (strike one) that disallows non-Safari mobile browsers by discriminating against certain user agents (strike two) and STILL doesn’t have voice chat (strike three).
What a let-down. Google, go get an iPhone SDK and get busy writing a real GTalk client.
Jazinga: Putting the AUTO in Auto-provisioning
by Ted on July 3rd, 2008
Jazinga, a startup from Toronto that offers a new breed of Asterisk/Freeswitch-based IP-PBX, has put a lot of muscle into the automatic phone provisioning features. The idea is, if you have an IP phone on your Jazinga-powered LAN, you should literally have to “do nothing” to get it working. So I decided to put this claim to the test with a pair of Jazinga-supplied Linksys SIP phones.
And, I was going to videotape the whole process so I could share the ups and downs with folks on YouTube. I plugged the Linksys phone into the LAN and went to get my camcorder. But, by the time I got back with it, which was about 2 minutes, the phone was ALREADY RUNNING on the Jazinga system. So it went from out the factory box to being a working SIP peer on the Jazinga system, firmware config and all, in under two minutes, and the best part–I did NOTHING, just as Jazinga claimed. Heck, I didn’t even have to key the MAC address of the phone into the Jazinga box.
Those clever Canadians are pretty good at this VoIP stuff–they should keep it up!
iPhone: the first truly mainstream handheld entertainment device?
by Ted on July 1st, 2008
With Bioware recently stating they’re looking into iPhone development, EA all but confirming so, and a former EA designer big-wig leaving to start an iPhone game startup, one has to wonder: is the iPhone going to accomplish what the PSP, DS, and their predecessors have thusfar failed to accomplish?
That is, to put handheld entertainment in the pockets of adults, not just kids and guys who still live with mom at age 35.
I’d say it’s a reasonable bet, especially if Apple can find a way out of that creepy deal it has with AT&T. This deal is stifling to the consumer at large, keeping the iPhone out of many needful hands (including my own, and I’m an AT&T customer–contract-free and loving life, baby).
With the PSP having shipped close to 28 million units, it has a big head start on the iPhone, which will only ship 10 million by the end of the year, according to estimates. The DS, meanwhile, has shipped somewhere around 31 million units, easily three times Apple’s take.
Nevertheless, the iPhone has a larger screen and more storage than either device, meaning it’s better for movie-watching, and the Internet surfing experience on the iPhone is priceless. If you’ve ever used the YouTube app on the iPhone, you know what I’m talking about.
Let’s talk games, though. Early attempts at iPhone games were online, web-based tripe. DHTML stuff. Not that compelling. But more recently, Pangea was able to port some of their flagship 3D game products over to the iPhone–products like Cro-Mag rally, a caveman racing game (think Flintstones meets Mario Kart). Apparently the conversion was done in “a matter of hours” with a “decent framerate”.
So there’s 3D API on the iPhone, the development environment, Xcode, is Cocoa-based, the operating system is OS X, and the availability of cross-platform game frameworks for OS X is excellent. The drawback, if you consider it one, is that the iPhone doesn’t (and can’t) have a true gamepad-type control system, since it’s a 100% touch-screen device.
But with Apple’s influence and a steadily decreasing price point, the iPhone has a change to be the next big game platform, minus the AT&T stick-to-head contract, of course.
The single biggest MS blunder: product activation
by Ted on June 28th, 2008
Engadget nails it when they say:
Depending on who you talk to, Windows Product Activation is a serious privacy violation, a headache, minimal protection against piracy, or all of the above. Lucky for us, Microsoft is finally seeing (some of) the folly of its overbearing ways, and has gone with a more permissive nagware method with Vista SP1. This as opposed to the regular method of routinely locking users out of their systems, which, wouldn’t you know it, tended to hurt legitimate users more than pirates.
This is the understatement of the century. Almost any emmigration from the Office/Windows empire can be attributed directly to Microsoft’s pigheadedness, and WPA is the most visible expression of it. Software activation is something that came out of the realm of shareware, and Bill Gates attitude about shareware and freeware (especially in the nineties) is well-document and decidedly sour.
Yet product activation takes shareware’s secret weapon and puts it in Bill’s products: “Pay for a code and activate me or I will stop working.” I’m glad my car doesn’t treat me like that.
Old School Media Blows a Little Hot Air
by Ted on June 25th, 2008
In a post at Business Week, Peter Burrows talks about the spat that occured last week when the AP went all USSR Ministry of Deception on bloggers, demanding they remove exclusive content purportedly owned and copyrighted by the AP. This got me thinking–does this mean bloggers who work for newspapers (who own the AP) aren’t allowed to use AP material? I have a client with several blog products that IS a newspaper. So what does this mean for them?
Check out what Burrows writes:
In a demonstration for BusinessWeek earlier this year, Attributor executives showed how many times scenes from The Sopranos had appeared on 20 leading video sites since they first aired on TV. In all, 1,500 scenes from 52 episodes had been viewed 32 million times. For Time Warner’s HBO, those viewings might have brought in more than $1 million, said Attributor Chief Executive Officer Jim Brock.
ERRNTT. Wrong. Those viewings would not have happened if they weren’t free. Setting a price for this otherwise freely-viewable content would be the same as telling people not to view it at all. See, it’s the value perception of old media that’s in question in the consumer’s mind. Empower the consumer and he sees more value. When the thing he wants is free (the Sopranos episode, say), then the consumer is empowered. Now–go monetize that concept. Empower the consumer and you make money–just not by charging him for something there are 5 other ways to obtain for little to nothing (BitTorrent, the public library, Blockbuster Video, NetFlix, etc.).
When is old media going to realize that the world of charging $$ for proprietary content isn’t the only model that works any more? Traditional pubs and especially the recording industry need to stop fighting the notion that there are other ways to monetize content than to charge for it. The basic precept of the copyright is at odds with content monetization anyway. So the struggle between licensing of content and free exchange of information is only made worse when NOBODY is allowed to use content without PAYING for it.
If I had 32 million video views on MY web site, I would find a way to make money, and I would never once charge somebody to view the videos. MPAA, HBO, you guys basically want to do what porn sites do when you should, instead, find a way to work in the framework of consumer demands–things like democratization and social networking. There’s a way to make money there, but you’ve got to take off the blinders in order to see it.
Head-to-head: Jazinga vs. Asterisk Appliance, Part 2
by Ted on June 25th, 2008
(Here’s part one in case you missed it.)
Yesterday I had a great talk on the phone with Randy Busch, CEO of Jazinga, the Toronto-based technology company behind the Jazinga VoIP PBX system. I learned several positive things during this conversation:
- Jazinga isn’t required to be a NAT firewall in order to support IAX trunks, as it is in order to support SIP trunks.
- Jazinga is based on Asterisk and Freeswitch.
- Its web user interface is mainly Flash-driven.
- It has an onboard hard disk and is basically a single-board PC type appliance.
Autoprovisioning: Here’s How it Works
One of the things I really like about the Jazinga is autoprovisioning. If you enter a phone’s MAC address into the admin interface and then boot the phone up from a factory state, it obtains all it needs configuration-wise directly from the DHCP and TFTP servers onboard the Jazinga unit. So, very easy for non-technical folks trying to get set up. Right now, Jazinga supports automatic provisioning of Polycom, Linksys, Aastra, and SNOM phones. Randy tells me that Cisco 79XX support is in the works.
Having this simple endpoint setup is awesome, and the reduction in steps required handily downs many Asterisk solutions, becuase all the phone provisioning components (DHCP, TFTP, generation of firmware configs, etc.) are already done for you.
Softphone and Hold Music: No Sweat
Running Bria with the Jazinga was as easy as it was with the Asterisk Appliance. I uploaded an MP3 of Runaround by Blues Traveler to test the hold music feature, and it worked great.
Groups and Call Distribution
Ring groups are a snap, though the only option for ring patterns is simultaneous. Given the size of customer Jazinga is going for here, I don’t think that’s a drawback. Note that Asterisk Appliance allows different ring-around patterns, but only if you know the Asterisk keywords necessary to make them work. The keyword with call distribution on Jazinga is “simple”, which I believe appeals to the SOHO customer.
Jazinga SIP Trunk Service
The Cleveland-local number the Jazinga folks set up for me worked like a champ, though I did have to reboot the Jazinga unit in order to get incoming calls to work. There seem to be no options for tweaking caller ID on the Jazinga-operated PRI, but I’ve got to assume that it’s coming. Sound quality was acceptible. I called my mother, who was camping in central Ohio at the time.
So what’s the verdict? We’ll discuss it in a few days after I’ve run Jazinga through its paces with a few auto-provisioned IP phones. Stay tuned.
Where does Symbian move leave Android and iPhone?
by Ted on June 25th, 2008
In an article today at the Register, Andrew Orlowski posts (my comments interspersed):
The smartphone wars once devoured a great deal of attention and energy, particularly during the long PR war that took place in the first four barren years - from the birth of the venture exactly ten years ago, to the first mass market consumer handset appearing in 2002. Today, apart from a few gadget fans, nobody really cares any more.
(In my best Luke Skywalker voice: “I care”.) Seriously, anybody in business today is using a smartphone. And people who aren’t in business don’t use them, almost without deviation. The reason the first four years sucked was because smartphones sucked during the first four years. Today, we’ve got better ones (though doing personal info management on a 2-inch screen still blows).
[...]
Even five years ago, it was apparent this was a war in which there would be no winner.
The winner is clearly Apple, as Andrew later points out. Nokia’s lack of consistency and scattershot approach to applications and platforms is what kills Symbian devices. Microsoft is better about this with Windows Mobile, and Blackerry and Apple are better than both Nokia and Microsoft. Plus, where Blackberry has ‘quiet librarian’ excited, Apple has sex appeal and sheen. So I think, for now, it’s pretty obvious who the winner of this war is.
How did “smart” phones lose their luster? While they were bigger, slower and harder to use than phones based on older closed platforms, they didn’t offer the value that persuaded most people to put up with the pain and use the extra “smartness”. For example, Google Maps runs on any midrange phone today very capably - and like Google itself, it does the job well enough.
Disagree. Who do you know that actually runs Google maps on a non-smartphone? Right, I didn’t think so. Just because a device CAN do a thing does not mean a device SHOULD do that thing.
But even then it’s doubtful that Nokia and Symbian executives would have opted for Exile in Freetard Street, had it not been for two competitive factors. One is the diminishing cost of smartphone OS licenses, which reflects their market value. Google is giving away its smartphone OS, Android. As Bill Ray correctly pointed out today, that makes Android utterly pointless.
Disagreed. Google is trying to carve out a platform ecosystem by becoming a technology provider as opposed to an application provider. It’s the next logical step for any serious software company to become a tech licensor instead of an appmaker, which is what they’ve traditionally always been. Android gives Google a vehicle to accelerate its control into areas where the competition is either stagnant or too wet to know what hit it: like the wireless industry.
Lack of 2.0-style innovation and consumer accessibility has pissed on the explosive growth we all want in this sector, and Android seeks to address this. Really, aren’t consumers sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed by Bell for every little feature they want to use? No wonder people don’t adopt new stuff. The cost and claustrophobia of the licensing experience shun people from adopting. So, it’s not pointless to Google to give away seat licenses for free (it may’ve been for old school Symbian). It eliminates one barrier to access: cost, while working on the solution to the other barrier: outdated telco business models. Increased demand for the open platform, Android, puts pressure on the network operators to stop banging consumers over the head with micro-fees and contract hoops.
There’s another factor, too. Symbian’s founding CEO, Colly Myers, the father of the OS formerly known as Epoc, used to talk of the “enchantment” factor. Tech wizardry wasn’t enough, he said, but the devices had to charm.
It’s largely Nokia that must be blamed for failing to make Symbian phones remotely “enchanting”. Nokia’s UI is cumbersome (Symbian doesn’t do UIs); the hardware was for years underclocked, making it slow. And Nokia’s legendary marketing has appealed to nerds, outcasts and social freaks - and been guaranteed to confuse everyone.
Today it’s the iPhone which has the enchantment factor. How could it not - it comes straight from the Dream Factory. And Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance.
Symbian has done everything its original designers asked of it - a twenty year lifespan is not bad at all. But it’s now Apple’s business to lose
Absolutely agreed. Apple is driving now. The problem is, they’ve got to get out of the creepy deal they have with AT&T. That’s their #1 barrier to entry for business adoption in the United States. Solve that problem, and I think Apple may just run away with the business Android was designed to capture.
Bill Gates’ secret frustrations picked apart by yours truly
by Ted on June 24th, 2008
TOO TOO good. I LOVE it. Here’s an “epic” e-mail Bill Gates sent to some of his top people a couple of years ago, complaining about the decrepitude of Windows. No surprise there. We’ve all been fighting with Windows for years, and yet it seems that Uncle Bill had only just realized his flagship product is Crap 7.0 as late as 2003. Take a look (comments interspersed), and while you do–imagine this e-mail was sent just yesterday. Not much has changed since Bill sent this email.
—- Original Message —-
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flameI am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.
Let me give you my experience from yesterday.
I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.
The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.
This site is so slow it is unusable.
It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.
These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.
They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.
I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.
Dude, Bill, this is why Google creamed you in the search war. Seriously, ever searched Live for something and then searched Google for it? The FIRST thing I do when installing a fresh Windows load is to change the default search provider in IE7 to Google.
In fact, I often find links to Microsoft downloads and patches FASTER USING GOOGLE than using Microsoft.com.
So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. [...]
Sorry, that just sounds like Bill Clinton. Is Amir his distant cousin?
In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.
This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?
Agreed. Take your cues from Apple, Billy Boy. Smooth, easy, and QA’d like crazy.
This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.
Two words: Trustworthy Computing. ‘member that?
So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.
What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.
Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?
Bill Gates reboots his computer every night. LAWL. Sorry to sound like such a Mac fanboy, but I seriously CAN’T REMEMBER the last time I rebooted my Powerbook. (I do reboot Parallels almost daily, though.)
So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.
So I got back up and running and went to Windows Updale again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.
So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.
Oof, Bill, you’re the man. I mean you are the MICROSOFT MAN! Why aren’t you running Vista yet, you bad boy you? (I said pretend the email was from yesterday, calm down people.)
[...]
But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.
What an absolute mess.
Welcome to my world. Microsoft has made many consultants like myself a lot of money because we know how to decode all those KB cross-references. Bill–maybe you should start an I.T. consulting firm like I did! Figure out how to find the “right patch” and you might just make a good employee here at Best Technology Strategy. OK, enough cocky. Back to the email.
[...]I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.
I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.
He sounds like one of my (elderly) clients with a bad case of discount web shopping-site spyware. Bill, what sites have you been visiting that have been taking advantage of your client-side script host? Come on, hang in there buddy.
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.
The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)
Yeah, Microsoft.com is a terrible web site. So is Live Search. So was MSN. It’s a pattern. For two examples of search done right, see Google and (ahem) Spotlight. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Sharepoint, see Wordpress. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Office Communications Server, see Trixbox. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Windows Mobile, check out the iPhone. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Vista, see Leopard. Oh and not to mention Movie Maker versus iMovie. The list goes on.
Yes, Bill, I’m glad you realize that usability matters. Let’s hope your successors share your attitude.
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