Evernote 4

If you haven't done so already, be sure to upgrade your Evernote client to the latest version. Evernote 4 is a much much better version of Evernote than any of the Evernote 3.x clients that were previously available. I've been using it for a couple weeks now and it is a lot faster and smoother than what I was using before. From the Evernote blog:

Starting from scratch
Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.5 (Windows .net and WPF) was incapable of resolving. As a result, we ended up chasing down platform bugs rather than adding the great features our users wanted.

So we decided to start over from scratch, with fast, native C++ that we knew we could rely on. As you’ll see, the results are amazing. This new version will set a foundation for rapid improvement.

On our test hardware, Evernote 4 starts five times faster, and uses half the memory of Evernote 3.5.

The new Evernote is completely written from scratch and it acts just like it. After a somewhat lengthy install process (it has to un-install the old Evernote and replace it entirely, don't worry, you won't lose your old notes), I fired up the new Evernote and was shocked by how fast it loaded. Normally I would fire up the app and have to wait ~1-2 minutes for the clunky Java loader to bring the screen up, but now the Evernote client comes up almost instantaneously! That alone would make this new version a huge improvement in my book, but they've also gone ahead and upgraded the client design with a more streamlined user interface that makes it easier to navigate your notes.


The icing on the cake is an improved web clipper (especially for Internet Explorer) that makes it easier to save and organize notes on the fly. All in all this is a huge improvement for Evernote and I think this release will go a long way to appeasing disgruntled Evernote users who felt that the software was slow and clunky.

Six to Nine Scholar

I mentioned last time that I was writing an article over on Six to Nine Scholar, and lo and behold it's now published! Give it a read and let me know what you think.

WTC Brand Crisis

In the triathlon community, any controversy that arises is eventually discussed heatedly on the forums at Slowtwitch.com, the leading forum for endurance athletes. On the last weekend of October, the forums at Slowtwitch were active with a new scandal revolving around the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC), the owners of the Ironman Triathlon brand. The negative outburst from the community, and the subsequent handling of the event by the WTC reminded me of a framework for managing scandals we learned about in our Marketing courses. I’m not certain if the WTC management used the exact steps we covered at school but the way they responded to the situation certainly fit into the framework provided. Read more.

Blogging activities

Well, I haven't been posting much here but I have been working on other blogging activities around the web:

Tri Blog: My side project is coming along quite nicely and I hope to "launch" it over the next month or so. Nothing too crazy here, just a triathlon blog site. I'll post more about this soon.

Work Blog: I'm trying to revive our internal blog at work and it's not going so well. I've added tons of content to the site and I'm encouraging others to blog but I haven't seen much activity. I even created a blog contest for the month of November which is NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) and offered a $25 gift certificate for the best blog entry, but I still can't get the team to actively engage with the blog. It's a topic I hope to bring up during our year end retro meeting on December 10th.

School Blog: A couple friends from school started up a blog called Six to Nine Scholar and they've invited me to write with them on the site! I'm a little nervous about publishing my first article to the site since they have pretty high quality material over there, but hopefully my article is up to par. Here's a sneak preview of the article (which I'm still revising a bit):

WTC Brand Crisis

In the triathlon community, any controversy that arises is eventually discussed heatedly on the forums at Slowtwitch.com, the leading forum for endurance athletes. On the last weekend of October, the forums at Slowtwitch were active with a new scandal revolving around the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC), the owners of the Ironman Triathlon brand. The negative outburst from the community, and the subsequent handling of the event by the WTC reminded me of a framework for managing scandals we learned about in our Marketing courses. I’m not certain if the WTC management used the exact steps we covered at school but the way they responded to the situation certainly fit into the framework provided.

Design contest

I mentioned my triathlon blog venture a couple posts ago, and my efforts to create something a little bigger around it. As part of that I've commissioned a design contest over on 99designs.com to help me come up with a set of images for use on the site. The sets consist of three images, one for each sport in a triathlon (swim, bike, run). These images will be used as buttons, badges and icons on the site, and I'd also like to use them as a set for the main logo of the site. So far 60 entries have been submitted by 18 designers, which is just incredible. I've been really impressed by the images that have been submitted and by the overall time and efforts put in by the designers.

The contest is nearing an end and now I need help deciding on a winner. I've created a poll over on 99designs and want your input on the 8 'finalists' I've selected. Which ones do you like best and why? You can give 0-5 stars to each entry and provide comments as well. Remember, I'd like to use the trio of images as a logo and also each image independently as an icon.

Here's the link to vote in the contest. Thanks a lot for your help!

What I'm Reading: Bike edition Pt. 2

More bike service & app news! The first one is called Capital Bikeshare and is based around the Washington DC area. The service uses a technology called BIXI that allows riders to access the bikes via a special key card. It seems to be pretty low hassle and affordable. Definitely one to check out this weekend for everyone headed to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity (like our friend Chuck over at Chicago Bike!)

Another bike-sharing system making use of new technology is SoBi, the Social Bicyle System.

SoBi is the first public bike share system to rely entirely on wireless technology for tracking, locating and unlocking bikes. The system is compromised of three elements: the social cyclist, the central server and the social bicycle.

Here’s how it will work: after creating a SoBi account — via web, mobile phone or street kiosk — a cyclist will have unlimited access to bicycles in the bike share system, which will be equipped with GPS, a secure lock and wireless communications. Once the cyclist locates an available bike, he can use a pin code to unlock it. The central server will approve and track the transaction.

Here's a video of SoBi in action.

And last up we have an iPhone app that lets you use your iPhone as a bike computer. This is pretty cool for casual techy bike riders, but as a more advanced bike rider I don't think this little app holds a candle to a standard power meter (although it is a lot cheaper, just a $100 kit).

Chief Marketing Technologist

Oh hello, I think I just found my next job title: Chief Marketing Technologist. I don't think I've ever seen a title description align so closely with what I want to do next, but the CMT description does just that. Scott Brinker, president and CTO of ion interactive, explains the CMT as an executive who is:

“… a hybrid between business and technology, a strong background in engineering and IT, is an early adopter of technology, but someone who also understands the pragmatic realities of scaling technology. But most importantly, someone who brings those skills and combines them with a deep love and passion for the marketing mix. This is a technologist that reports to the CMO, not the CIO.”

The role is for an individual who understands both technology and marketing, who understands how one side impacts the other, and who can seamlessly move between both worlds.

Your company may have seasoned marketers and top-of-the-line technologists, but it takes those who are dually knowledgeable in both marketing and technology to really make the right moves in Internet() marketing, as they are the ones who really understand the way the web works and what’s possible for marketing from a technological point of view.

What are the main goals of the Chief Marketing Technologist? Brinker goes on to list the three key goals for the role:

1. Translating Strategy into Technology

Working with the CMO and the marketing department and translating their needs into technology implementations. Being able to understand the needs of both marketing and technology and bringing everything together into a cohesive plan.

“The idea of a marketing technologist is someone who’s natively versed in both
languages and understands the concepts of what’s in technology and what’s in
marketing, and they can serve as the translator,”

2. Choreographing Technology Across Marketing

Taking all the data that is available to an organization (web analytics, marketing automation, advertising behavioral segmentation) and bringing it together to make sense of it all. Having different systems talk to each other and work together to optimize the larger organizational strategy.

“Choreograph the entire collection of marketing, technology and data that we see
throughout the organization. Find ways to tap the synergy between all of these
different components,”

3. Infusing Tech into the Company’s Marketing DNA

Bringing technology to the forefront of the organization and teaching others to leverage it to achieve their needs. Taking technology into consideration during the larger decision making process.

“Perhaps most importantly, is to infuse technology into the DNA of marketing
itself — our practices, our people, our culture,”

You can learn more about the Chief Marketing Technologist over on Scott Brinker's website (via Mashable)

Active blog work

Although it looks like I haven't been posting too much on this blog, I have in fact been blogging quite a bit lately on another blog venture of mine. This other blog revolves around my other passion, triathlon, and it's something I've been quietly working on over the past year or so. Just recently I've decided to step it up a bit and create something bigger around it. I don't expect it to blow up or be the next big thing, but I do hope it's a fun way for me to combine my favorite activities together. I'll post more details as they develop.

New Evernote features and apps

A bunch of new Evernote features and add-ons have popped up recently that have caught my eye. The first couple items are built into the web browser and the last one is a standalone app from the Evernote Trunk that I'm trying out.



First up is Site Memory, a new feature from the Evernote team that allows website owners to add an Evernote button on their website. The button works just like ReTweet or Share button, except the user shares it right to their Evernote account. I don't see how this is much better than the existing Evernote button I have on my browser's toolbar, but it does give the site owner more control over how their web content is saved. The site owner can customize the data that is saved to add additional content or frame it in a different way. This is a new feature that was just added last month so I haven't seen it in use yet. It should be interesting to see what types of sites take advantage of this new feature, since there's not that much benefit to adding this button just for Evernote users. It's not like a Share button where you're offering your user a chance to share your content with his/her friends, which then brings in more traffic to your site.



Next is a cool Chrome extension called Simultaneous Search that allows you to search Evernote notes as you search on the web. This looks really useful and should allow you to really leverage your saved notes in your everyday routines. Right now to get any value out of my notes I have to actively pull up an Evernote client and search within it, but this new extension allows me to passively incorporate my saved notes into all my searches. Plus it should be a nice little shortcut for quickly searching saved notes. I use Firefox right now as my primary browser but this new Chrome extension might just be the push I need to switch to Chrome full time.

Next up is a note-taking/organizer app called Awesome Note that offers full syncing with your Evernote account. I just started playing around with the app this week (the free Lite version) and so far I like the To-Do list features and the calendar view for tasks. It has a much richer interface than the Evernote mobile app but it syncs with Evernote on the backend so that helps bring all my notes and whatnot together in a single location. I'm always on the lookout for new ways to improve my To-Do list process so I'm giving this app a shot for a couple of weeks to see how it delivers. There's a paid version of this app but for now I'll stick to the Lite version.

Microsoft's $1 Billion spend

Microsoft will reportedly spend $1 billion to launch Windows Phone later this year. That seems like a lot of money to launch a product but I guess Microsoft is showing that's its (finally) serious about mobile. Despite this large spend, it doesn't seem like analysts are too hopeful about Microsoft's chances in the mobile OS game. A mobile OS report out of Gartner has Microsoft's Windows Phone market share dwindling down to 3.9% by 2014, with Android and Symbian battling it out for the top spot. Interestingly enough they have the iPhone OS market share holding steady and not flat out dominating the industry over the next couple of years.

$1 billion seems like a lot of money to be throwing at a potentially losing product... but I guess Microsoft has to do it if they even want a fighting chance in the market. As Paul Thurrott from WinInfo Daily puts it "How much of your own money would you spend if you had to save your own life?" (Love that quote!)

Forecast: Mobile Communications Device Open OS Sales to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

OS	2009	2010	2011	2014
Symbian	80,876.3	107,662.4	141,278.6	264,351.8
Market Share (%)	46.9	40.1	34.2	30.2
Android	6,798.4	47,462.1	91,937.7	259,306.4
Market Share (%)	3.9	17.7	22.2	29.6
Research In Motion	34,346.8	46,922.9	62,198.2	102,579.5
Market Share (%)	19.9	17.5	15.0	11.7
iOS	24,889.8	41,461.8	70,740.0	130,393.0
Market Share (%)	14.4	15.4	17.1	14.9
Windows Phone	15,031.1	12,686.5	21,308.8	34,490.2
Market Share (%)	8.7	4.7	5.2	3.9
Other Operating Systems	10,431.9	12,588.1	26,017.3	84,452.9
Market Share (%)	6.1	4.7	6.3	9.6
Total Market	172,374.3	268,783.7	413,480.5	875,573.8

Source: Gartner (August 2010)

What I'm Reading: Bike edition

After reading about a new bike sharing program starting here in Chicago (B-Cycle) I started reading about other bike sharing networks around the world and how technology is being used to power these movements. There's a top 10 list of bike sharing systems to watch but unfortunately Chicago isn't on the list (yet). Ah well, we'll be on that list soon enough. If you're looking for more homegrown bike sharing options check out this high-tech meets lo-tech service called Social Bicycles that will soon be available in New York. I actually didn't realize New York had such friendly biking-in-the-city options until I read this biking in New York blog post over at Chicago Bike. I guess it's not all crazy taxis and bike messengers on the streets of NYC.

Btw, have you been following the adventures of Precious the Bike as it travels across America? It's a fun little social experiment about a tweeting bike as it rides from coast to coast to raise money for the Livestrong foundation to fight the "biggest douchebag of all", cancer. It looks like Precious is in Colorado right now. You can follow all the tweets at @yesiamprecious.

Evernote Trunk

I don't know about you guys, but my Evernote Trunk is still sitting there unopened. Well, maybe not completely unopened, I've peeked into it a couple of times but so far nothing has really interested me enough for me to pull it out and play with it. Despite the fact that Evernote has hit 4 million users recently I still haven't heard too many people talk about Trunk. For me all of the apps seem very specialized, and really all I want is better general purpose utilities, like a snappier Windows client or a more robust iPhone app.

Take a look at this list from Lifehacker of 5 services worth checking out in Evernote Trunk and let me know what you think. The Doxie scanner is the only one that caught my eye but I'm not really in the market right now for a document scanner.

What I'm Reading: August 10th 2010

Apple Now Stores and Shares Your iPhone’s Location - This kinda creeps me out, it's going to feel like I'm carrying a tracking device at all times now. So much for privacy in this age of technology.

Evernote Launches Trunk, A Showcase Of Evernote-Enabled Products - I haven't had a chance to play around with too many of these Evernote enabled products but it's on my to-do list when I find some time.

How to handle a cyberstalker - Funny article from CNN about dealing with cyberstalking on Facebook and Twitter.

Hey, Newspaper Paywall Fans: News is Not Like HBO or Talk Radio - Unlike subscription TV or radio, consumers simply won't pay for news that's readily available elsewhere.

The reality is that most of what newspapers offer is a commodity product, something that has a relatively short shelf life and therefore is difficult to sell as unique or different. Until newspapers solve that problem, their paywall attempts are likely doomed.

What I'm Reading: August 4th 2010

To kick it off I'm going to link to a couple fun articles that I've had in my Evernote for a while now.

“DC Universe Online”: Be a Superhero with Your Friends [VIDEO] - Oh man, I want to play this game so bad. If I get my hands on this game I can kiss my social life good bye... Back in college I played Doom/Quake for hours on end and then I swore off video games for a while. I still allowed myself to play Street Fighter-esque games every now and then (I love those types of games!) but I can't start playing a campaign based game that could take weeks or months to complete. This game looks like a combination between World of Warcraft and the Marvel Superhero/Street Fighter video games, and I know I wouldn't leave the house until I completed all the missions in it.

Hands-on: D&D on the Microsoft Surface - This just looks pretty cool and is a fun utilization of Microsoft's Surface technology. I can't wait until Surface usage becomes widespread. Hello cool "Minority Report" technology (minus the creepy invasion of privacy).

Summertime Pt. 2

I've kicked up my triathlon training lately and that has really cut down on my blogging time. I've been keeping up with technology news and trends but I just haven't had anything to write about lately. So, keeping inline with my recent trend of not adding much value though my blog, I'm going to start a new segment I like to call, "What I'm Reading", where I will simply link to an article that I found interesting and comment briefly on it. Hopefully this will help me ease back into posting regular blog entries.

Quick updates 7/5

Alright, since I haven't posted in a while, here are some quick updates:

Evernote count: I've cleared the 1,000 note mark on Evernote! That's a lot of notes if you ask me... which means I may have to do a little bit of spring cleaning soon. I have 77 different tags in use right now, so I may have to consolidate that into a more manageable list.

Twitter organizer: Progress on my Twitter organizer has stalled a bit. I thought I was close to creating a nice view of useful tweets from my feed but I can't seem to filter out the "junk" tweets. If only I could have someone curate my Twitter feed for me ... Oooh, new idea, post a job listing on Amazon's Mechanical Turk and pay someone pennies a day to filter my Twitter feed for me.

Tri Toys Wish List: I finally picked up the Garmin Forerunner 310XT! I've been running with it for the past few weeks and I've slowly begun accumulating workout data on it. The 310XT should be the perfect companion to my PowerTap in collecting raw data from my training sessions. I must confess though, I don't think I'm getting the best usage out of this data since I don't analyze it as much as I should to learn stuff from it. Like I've said before, I love collecting data but I don't like analyzing it. I'll scan it for obvious trends and patterns, but I won't necessarily run comparisons between various sessions looking for key drop off points or other problem areas. I should probably start doing that though to get the most 'bang for my buck', both in terms of money spent on these fun toys and in time spent while training.

Summertime

Summer is here and the sun has been shining so brightly outside I'm finding it hard to spend too much time indoors, which explains the lack of blog posts lately. I'll try to post some quick updates here and there to keep my blog alive, but I can't promise too much!

Best of the 90's

I've had to do a bit of clean up lately on my Pandora profile as my top station has started to resemble a "Best of 90's Rock" soundtrack. I guess when you 'thumbs up' a couple Weezer and Smashing Pumpkin songs the Pandora algorithm thinks you'll also like any rock before 1999, even though all the other music on your station is pretty current. If only Pandora had advanced controls or a way to visually map the changes on your stations...

Data Analytics

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with data analytics. On the one hand, I think there's a lot of value to be drawn out of analyzing data and looking for trends and patterns to assist in decision making. On the other hand, I think the process of analyzing the data is tedious and time consuming. I don't like crunching and poring over all the data. I'm all for collecting as many data points as possible but ideally I would have someone that analyzes the data for me and finds all the useful nuggets of knowledge.

I bring all this up because lately I've been doing a lot of data analysis in and out of work, and unfortunately right now I'm not in a position to have others do the analysis for me. So that means I've been crunching a lot of data lately. This actually hasn't been too bad because I've been focused on the results and the payoff that might come out of the data.

At work I have two data analytics tasks on my plate. Now normally I would not be too happy if my boss put me to work crunching data, but both of these tasks have come from my own initiatives and are part of the 'innovations' task force that I'm leading. Unfortunately the innovations budget only covers me right now so I have to provide the hard data to support my initiatives on my own and that means crunching rows of data. One of the tasks is to prepare quoting sales data that our system has been collecting for years and use this to improve our consumer profiling process. The other task is to analyze data from a project tracking system we've been using for the past year and look for opportunities to improve our project portfolio management process. I've found some solid actionable areas of improvement here and I'm now preparing a write-up to present my recommendations to management. (I'm actually using a lot of the ideas and concepts from my Technology Management class for this initiative. This whole MBA thing is paying off already!)

Outside of work I've been playing around with Twitter data and digging into the area of content curation. I've tested a lot of the Twitter clients out there and I haven't really found anything I like that presents my Twitter feed to me in a way that is manageable and still enables discovery of timely and relevant content. So I've been making my own Twitter curator that tries to organize my Twitter feed and shows me exactly what I want to see based on several different data points. Some of the points include friend quality, follower quality, post frequency, list memberships and link quality. It's not production ready by a long shot (and it may never be), but I'll try to post screens of my Twitter curator sometime in the near future.

Music moods

Just last week I wrote about a new feature I'd like Pandora to add (music maps) and this week I've read about some new music sites that have this and other cool features included. I stumbled upon these sites through an article in Mashable called "5 great ways to find music that suits your mood".

A couple sites, like Musicovery, have the music map feature, but more interestingly all the sites listed try to match the music to your current mood. I think this is a great idea that would suit me really well. I have my 'Rock' station, and my 'Hip-Hop' station, but sometimes I want my Rock & Hip-Hop to match the mood I'm in right now. Am I in a mellow rocky mood, or a hard party rock mood? Do I want Hip-Hop that I can nod my head to, or do I want Hip-Hop to get me pumped and ready for the night? Sure, I could make Pandora stations for each mood, but overall I think the artists (and even albums) would overlap. It's really the individual songs and the feelings they invoke that would be driven by the "mood" settings.

I'll probably give one or two of these sites a spin and see how well they categorize "mood" at the song level. I wonder how their music catalog selection holds up against Pandora and the other bigger online players. Really I just want Pandora to add this feature so I don't have to keep track of multiple music sites and can keep all my musical preferences in one spot.

Evernote users, let's hear from you

"Evernote" and "slow" continue to be the top Google search keywords leading to my blog. My site is actually one of the first ones that come up when you Google "Evernote slow". I find this a little funny considering I've only written about Evernote 3-4 times, but I guess I've struck a chord near and dear to frustrated Evernote users.

I say 'frustrated' because overall I love Evernote, I just wish it was a bit more responsive at times. The Windows client continues to frustrate me with its constant hanging and memory hogging; so much so that I avoid opening it unless I really need to do extensive organizing or browsing of my notes. If I want to do a quick search of my notes I find it faster to jump onto the website and avoid the slow load times of the Windows client.

Also, whenever I want to clip web content to my notes I always try to use Firefox and the Evernote plug-in because it's 10x better than the Internet Explorer version. Why is that? Well, for one, the Firefox client doesn't load up the Evernote client, instead it provides with you with a quick and easy interface to add in the content to your journal. The IE plug-in sends the content to your Evernote client, which then takes a couple of seconds to respond, and then takes a couple more seconds to load up the Evernote client so you can annotate the web content. Big FAIL for the IE Evernote plug-in.

Alright, so those are my frustrations with Evernote and slow. What about everyone else? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below. Who knows, if an Evernote rep Googles "Evernote slow" and stumbles upon my little blog hopefully we can provide this person with detailed experiences and suggestions that they can use to improve their product.

Pandora music map

I've been fiddling around with my Pandora stations a bit lately, marking songs that I like and dislike as I listen throughout the day at work. Unfortunately this caused my favorite stations to destabilize a bit and I started to hear a lot of music that I didn't want to hear or that didn't belong in that particular station. I finally had to resort to going into the Pandora control panel and 'rolling back' all of the likes and dislikes I've given recently to get my stations back in order.

This mini fiasco led me to wonder about Pandora's algorithm again. I'm not quite sure what action I took that caused some of the 'wrong' music to leak into my stations but I really wish I had visibility to the whole process behind Pandora. I've said before that I like the simple thumbs up/down model but I wish we had more advanced features available to us. I understand Pandora probably doesn't want to reveal its algorithm to the public but I think there are certain features it can add that would make Pandora better and easier to use.

One idea I like is adding a 'music map' view in Pandora. It would be pretty cool to see the music map representation of your stations and to see what sort of artists are at the core and fringe of your musical preferences. Maybe you want to hear a little bit more from a fringe artist, or a little bit less from a core artist? You could just drag the nodes of each artist in/out and have your station reflect that change. It would essentially be a visual representation of your music stations.



Another cool thing you could do with the music map feature is to see what effect an action you take will have on your station's feed. For example, when you're about to like or dislike a song, it would be pretty interesting to see on the music map what new nodes appear or what existing nodes move around. That way you can get a better feel for the composition of your station and what influence your actions are taking on it. This feature sure would have saved me a lot of hassle lately!

This new feature would also be really cool on the Pandora iPad app. The iPad's large interactive touch screen makes it ideal for playing around with a music map, and the feature would keep Pandora users more actively engaged while they're listening to their music. I think it would be a great addition to the "ultimate lean-in Pandora experience".

Facebook in my Pandora

As part of Facebook's new OpenGraph initiative the site has selected a couple key partners to share information with regarding user's preferences. One of those partners is Pandora, and this weekend while I was listening to my music stations I started noticing the following pop-ups show up on various artists & songs:

Whenever one of my Facebook friends likes the song or artist currently playing on my station, Pandora lets me know with a little image like the one above. Also, I can see a list of stations that my Facebook friends listen to, and I imagine they can see the stations I listen to.

All of this is pretty cool except for one thing: Pandora and Facebook never asked me if it was OK to do this! I don't remember ever telling Pandora to share my music preferences with everyone I know on Facebook. What if I secretly listened to Britney Spears or Miley Cirus and never told my friends about this shameful secret? All of a sudden everyone knows!

This is somewhat of a silly example, but I think it illustrates the privacy concerns around Facebook's OpenGraph initiative and the amount of data that can be shared. Right now you have to actively opt-out of the sharing service instead of having to explicitly opt-in, which is a bit concerning. I wonder if there will be a huge backlash against Facebook just like with the Beacon debacle. Anyways, I'm off to review my Facebook privacy settings to tighten up the information they can share about me with others.

Back!

I've been getting rocked all this month at work and haven't had time to post anything lately. Without getting into too much detail I've been working on a big product launch at work that just went live this Friday night, but now that it's over I should be able to start posting a bit more frequently.

Windows Phone 7: Better late than never?

From everything I've read so far, it sounds like Microsoft has done a great job with the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. A complete reboot from the Windows Mobile series, the Windows Phone platform has rich system features and technical specs that rival iPhone and Android devices. Microsoft has even done a good job of building up excitement in the ever important app developer community. If Microsoft released this platform today it would give Apple and Google a good run for their money in the smartphone market.

Too bad we won't see Windows Phone 7 available on devices until much later in the year. Apple and Google aren't going to stand still until then with their own products. This year several new Android devices will roll out to the market and Google is finally starting to take steps to address its Android fragmentation issue. Apple is set to release a new iPhone model and OS this year (and possibly even on a new network, Verizon). Add on top of all this the entry of the new mobile tablet PCs that could steal away market share from high-end smartphones. All of these new mobile products entering the market in 2010 will steal away Microsoft's thunder and dampen sales of its devices. The Windows Phone 7 platform looks really strong, but as Palm's WebOS system has shown us lately sometimes that's just not enough to gain traction in the marketplace.

API fun

Fun times playing around with the Twitter and Foursquare APIs. I've been brushing up on my javascript skills and putting my home server back into action in order to cook up 'proof of concepts' on a couple areas I'm exploring. I'm not one to start from scratch so I always look for samples first before I start.

On the Foursquare front, someone cooked up this nice little site (Checkin Mania) that I've dug into for sample javascript & 4SQ API code. The site is a really slick mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare/Gowalla data. You can see popular checkin venues on the map and view how many people checked into each venue and other basic information. I think if you want more detailed information you need to use OAuth data to log in, but that's not incorporated into the site just yet. Still, I have to tip my hat to Rakshith and Init Labs, they've put together a pretty robust site with limited resources here. The site was "written using notepad :), hosted on Google App Engine". Nice!

There's no shortage of Twitter API samples on the web so I'm up and running on this platform already. Here I'm digging into the issues of content curation and social discovery. How do I keep up with all the tweets of the people I'm following? Better yet, how do I keep up with all the 'good' tweets of the people I'm following, and let the noise fall by the wayside. Also, how do I find new people to follow? Based on my interests and the data that I've made publicly available, is there a way to find people who share my same interests and can add their 'good' tweets to my Twitter feed?

Content Curation

One of the areas I'm digging into right now is content curation, specifically on the Twitter platform. With the millions of tweets every day on Twitter I can't imagine how anyone can keep up with it all, or if they would even want to keep up with it all. Right now I have around 80+ people I follow on Twitter and I stopped trying to keep up with them months ago. I can't even imagine how people who "follow" hundreds of people derive any value from these folks.

For several weeks I tried to keep up with the tweets of the people I follow using lists and everything else Twitter (and Twitter clients) have to offer, but ultimately it was just too much. The things is, I do want to read the more interesting tweets and stay up to date with the people I'm following. I don't just follow anyone on my Twitter account, I try to hand pick most of the people I follow so that my Twitter stream is useful. But it's just too much... I'm down to a small list of a dozen people who I check regularly and everyone else just gets lost in the stream.

Anyways, not sure how much I can figure out, but I'm just toying around with the Twitter API and my personal feed to see what sort of information I can bubble to the top. I'm not trying to make a Twitter client or a Twitter service here, but I just want to get a handle for all the information out there and see what I can do with it.

APIs

I'm playing around with several different APIs during my spare time lately. I have a couple of concepts and ideas I want to explore and I just want to see what's available to me if I want to prototype and experiment. Some of the API's I'm playing with are: Twitter, Foursquare, Evernote, TweetMeme, Bitly and Facebook. The general areas I'm exploring revolve around content curation and social discovery.

40 hours of Pandora

Hmmm, I didn't realize that Pandora had a limit of 40 hours of listening per month:

I guess I could just pay the $0.99 they're asking for, but instead I think I'm going to take this time to play around with Last.fm and Slacker radio. I've heard good things about these services so I'm going to give them a spin and see how they stack up against Pandora.

Evernote: It's not just me

I guess I'm not the only one experiencing the "slow and clunky" side of Evernote. The top 10 search terms driving traffic to my blog:

1) evernote is slow
2) evernote windows 7 so slow
3) "you're so slow..."
4) android fragmentation
5) evernote clunky
6) evernote site very slow
7) evernote slow at startup android
8) evernote slow to open
9) evernote slow windows
10) iphone android simplicity

The latest Evernote client I downloaded (3.5.2.1764) is a bit faster than the version before it, but there's still a lot of room for improvement in terms of speed and responsiveness. Hopefully we'll get a snappier version soon.

Quick update 1: Just a bit under 600 notes to date. I've lost track of how many megs of data I have stored, but I'm still well under my monthly allowance.

Quick update 2: My Evernote iPhone app stopped working all of a sudden last week. Whenever I try to synch I see the following error: "Synchronization failed" (see below). Is anyone else having this issue? Update: I had to re-install the Evernote app to fix this issue.

Interactive TV Ads

I saw this ad last week on my DVR:



Have these been around for a while? Is this a Comcast thing or an industry wide change? This is the first time I saw an ad like this, so I stopped to interact with it. It actually wasn't that interactive, all I could really do was hit the 'OK' button to move through the inline ad. I haven't seen any other ads like this since then, but I think I like the concept. It was pretty unobtrusive, which I like, and if I wanted to receive more information about the product I could do so easily from my couch. If I didn't I could just ignore the whole ad and fast forward through it like any other ad. One thing I would suggest to Comcast in this case would be to change the delivery method of the coupon from snail mail to email. I'm pretty certain they have my email on file so they can just as easily email me the coupon so I can print it out immediately at home instead of waiting for it in the mail.

Google Buzz is not trending

One thing I've noticed about Google Buzz is that it's not being used that much to share stories from popular sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. If you run through the archives of these sites and look at the share counts, you'll see that Twitter is king, Facebook is a distant second, and Buzz is an even further third. Sites like Mashable tend to have stories that are shared a lot on social networks, and seeing the low number of people using Buzz can give you an idea of how Google is faring against Twitter and Facebook in the social arena.

Getting tired of location

Location, location, location. That's all I read about these days on the internet. With the SXSW festival going on this week and every tech company under the sun launching new location features it's all starting to get a bit tiresome. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz. Everyone is really banking on location being the next big step in social. Here's the thing though, right now 'checking in' seems so frivolous and silly. If I want people to know I'm going to be somewhere I'll tell them beforehand via email, text message or Facebook. I started using Foursquare this year and was checking in left and right at first, but now I hardly ever check in anywhere anymore except at Kellogg and Vision Quest (and that's just to defend my mayorships, which I know sounds dumb). Anyways, I know location will be the breakthrough product of this year's SXSW, but I wonder if that craze will really carry over into the general mainstream. Will 2010 be the year of location?

Creating solutions, finding problems

"Instead of looking at a solution first and trying to find a problem for it, look for
a problem first and try to find a solution for it."

These simple words of wisdom were imparted to me by my computer science professors back in college. At the time I was working on an independent study course with some CS friends that involved the iPaq PDA's. We had picked the iPaq for our independent study project, mostly because it meant we would be given the device to play around with for most of the quarter. When asked what we were going to do with the iPaq's, we didn't really have an answer. We knew we just wanted to play around with these cool toys. We had no real idea what we were going to do but we knew we could find a problem that could be solved by this new portable solution. (We ended up cobbling together some "PDA in the classroom environment" type project that was eventually picked up by other students and converted into Pocket Classmate.)

Sadly enough I still fall into this trap sometimes. For example, I really want to do something with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. I have a 'solution' in mind, the power of the crowd, but I don't have a real problem to address. I also like the idea of tying virtual goods to real world goods, but I can't really figure where this 'solution' would fix a real problem. Oh, did I mention there's a $750 3D printer that I really want to buy, for no reason other than wanting to play around with a cool new toy? Luckily I know enough these days not to move forward with these random ideas, but instead I file them away in my head as options to consider when I find real problems to attack.

Buzz buzz

So is the buzz over Google Buzz done already? Wow, that was pretty fast. Looking at my own Buzz feed, I see a lot of activity from my friends during that first week and now nothing at all. I guess everyone was eager to try it out but then lost interest in the service.

During the first couple of days a bunch of my friends started a couple fun random threads, mostly revolving around the "what the heck is this?" topic. I even used it for some real purpose during a group meeting at school. Our group was interviewing a senior executive via phone conference, and since we weren't all in the same location we needed a way to 'chat' with each other during the phone call to coordinate the follow-up questions. We decided to try out Google Buzz for chatting and to store interview notes. It actually worked out pretty well and helped the two hour event go by pretty quickly (the interview subject was a little dry).

I'm personally not a huge fan of Buzz. I like the technology and the features built into it, but I don't really like the fact that it's hooked up into my Gmail contact list. I shoot out emails to a lot of different people for different reasons and I don't necessarily want to build a 'social network' around some of those people. That's what my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are for.

There are tons of articles about Google Buzz out right now, but here are some of my favorites:

Pete Cashmore asks: What is Buzz good for? If Facebook is the local bar, and Twitter is the town square, where does that leave Buzz?

Erick Schonfeld talks about the privacy risks of Buzz: "The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear."

And easily my favorite article about Buzz: "Google and Social: Like Nerds at the Dance" by Matthew Ingram, detailing out some of the design flaws behind Buzz and the perils of asking engineers to architect social networking.

Pandora stations

I'm really digging my Pandora stations lately. I have my stations pretty much right where I want them in terms of moods and musical styling. I have my "Damien Rice" station for studying, my "Radiohead" station for mellowing out and my "MGMT" station for rocking out. Over the past couple of months I've been actively tweaking the songs on each station via the basic 'thumbs up/down' functionality and now I finally have them in a good place where I don't have to 'thumbs down' too many songs.

I like the simple 'thumbs up/down' feature of Pandora, but at the same time I wish they had an advanced user mode for filtering songs. Sometimes I like a song but don't love it enough to give it a 'thumbs up'. Sometimes I really dislike a particular song from an artist I like but don't want to give it a 'thumbs down' because I'm afraid it might negatively impact the other songs from that artist. Sometimes I like an artist's older material but not their newer material, sometimes it’s the other way around. In each of those cases I feel that the basic 'thumbs up/down' feature just isn't enough. I wouldn't mind a 1-5 scale for ranking songs, or maybe an advanced filter to block out certain albums & songs from an artist. My geeky side actually just wants direct access to the Pandora algorithm, but I know that would probably be way too overwhelming for everyday use. Still, I wouldn't mind a 'smarter' Pandora. I might even be willing to pay extra for such features.

Random tidbits:
- MGMT Radio: I thought I liked Modest Mouse, but it turns out I don't. I've had to give a 'thumbs down' to a bunch of their songs lately.

- Damien Rice Radio: I really don't like Jack Johnson. I'm sorry, but all of his songs sound alike to me, and I really don't care for them. Pandora fed me a lot of Jack Johnson early on, but I think the algorithm has finally purged all of his songs from my station. I wish there was an "I don't like this Artist" button somewhere on Pandora for these types of situations.

- Damien Rice Radio: I was surprised to find out that I really like Ray LaMontagne. I had heard some of his songs before but I guess never in the right context. Ray's music is great for studying and relaxing.

Ideation

The creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be either visual, concrete, or abstract.
-B. Jonson

I've been doing a bit of brainstorming lately on some new ideas and initiatives I want to explore. Some of them are really random and out there (heads-up glasses display for sports electronics) and some are a bit more common and practical (Twitter widgets, Facebook apps). Some of these ideas have been floating around in my head for a while and some have just sprung up recently. Regardless, I'm trying to actually write down some of the details from my head onto paper and flesh them out a bit. A lot of them won't go anywhere, but some of them might actually find a spark of life in the real world.

Evernote, you're so slow and clunky

I'm really starting to dislike my Evernote desktop client. It's so slow to start up and it hangs all the time that it makes me not want to have it open sometimes. Don't get me wrong, I love the service, but Evernote really needs to improve their desktop client. They rolled out an update last month that promised to be faster but so far I haven't seen much improvement.

While my normal monthly usage is still well below the 40MB limit, I did come dangerously close to that last month when I decided to add a year's worth of PDFs from Trendwatching's monthly briefings to my Evernote archive. To date I have 371 notes and ~60 MB of data.

I think I might also be dangerously close to becoming a Level IV digital hoarder. :)

Snippets

I have just been having the hardest time putting together an entire blog post lately so I think I'm going to adjust my blogging style to fit my swamped lifestyle. Instead of writing long entries, I think I'm switching to quick snippet entries, like this one. Longer than a tweet, but shorter than a page-long blog entry. When I have more free time I'll try to write full entries but for now I'm going to try out this snippet approach.

Swamped

I've been so swamped lately with work and school that I haven't had a chance to update my blog or do much else. School has actually been going well this quarter, but its work that has been killing me lately with crazy long hours and weekend work. I've set aside this weekend to try to get back on track with all my non-work activities, and on my list of things to do is update my blog. Here's the update:

The classes I'm taking this quarter have been a lot of fun so far. I'm taking a Leadership (MORS-430) class and a Statistics (DECS-433) class and I'm really enjoying both. In my leadership class I'm learning a lot of great things about leadership techniques, persuasion, negotiations, and creating effective work groups. These are skills I've actually been able to use the very next day at work, so this whole part-time business school idea is finally starting to pay off. As for my statistics class, well... it turns out I'm good at stats and actually enjoy it. What more can I say there?

Work has been crazy since late December. We have a big project release coming up in April and unfortunately the team I'm on has fallen a bit behind schedule. To catch up we've had to work long hours and weekends. There have been some days this past month when I've put in 8 hours at work, gone to school for 3 hours, and then logged back on when I got home to put in some more work time. Not an ideal scenario to say the least. My school work hasn't suffered too much, but anything else with a lower priority than school and work have taken a hit. I'm pretty much tired all the time these days and feel like I've been at about 75% of my max output all this year. Hopefully once this project wraps up I'll be able to slow things down a bit and get a better handle on things. Until then, I just have to keep charging along.

Now we wait for netbook prices to drop

This week saw the release of the much hyped iPad tablet from Apple, and while it wowed some it left others pretty disappointed. The iPad received very mixed reviews, with some calling it a revolutionary device while others called it an oversized iTouch. For me the iPad was what I thought it would be: a very cool toy but not a 'game changer'.

Of course, I still want one, because like I said it's a very cool toy, and I like shiny new toys. My plan for a while had been to buy a netbook, but then I decided that I would wait to see what the iPad would look like and then make my decision, just in case Apple delivered a product I simply couldn't resist. The iPad is pretty sweet, but at $499 without 3G and $629 with 3G and a $29.99 a month data plan I don't think I can justify buying this shiny new toy any time soon.

So now the new plan is to wait a bit and see how long it will take for netbook prices to drop $100 or so before I buy one. I think they'll have to in order to survive against the iPad. Right now you can buy a netbook for around $300-$600. At the higher end of that range you can get an iPad, and there will definitely be consumers who will prefer the sleeker design of the iPad and opt for it over a netbook. Netbook manufacturers will have to drop their prices a bit so they're not competing directly with the iPad. I think we'll also see e-Readers like Amazon's Kindle drop their prices over the next couple of weeks (or disappear entirely, according to some analysts).

I'm hoping netbook prices drop sooner rather than later, because I'm really itching to buy a new device. I'll probably buy a mid-range model and use it as a toy that I keep in my work bag all the time. I've heard about iPhone tethering for netbooks, so I'll probably try that out for a while. We'll see how long I can stick with this no-tablet plan. I know as soon I start seeing iPads out in the real world I'll want one really bad. Knowing Apple as soon as I buy one they'll drop the price by $200. Actually, once all the other manufacturers start releasing their own tablets Apple might have to drop the iPad price down a notch. With all the new product launches planned for this year, mobile devices could be getting real cheap real soon.

Microsoft's Project Pink

Slowly but surely the buzz around Microsoft's mobile strategy has been building up these past couple of weeks. It started out small and unassuming, with little snippets here and there about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7, but this week Microsoft's Project "Pink" is making a big splash.

For the past couple of months any article you read about Windows Mobile tended to be pretty down on Microsoft. I wrote a couple here and there but Colin Gibbs from GigaOm really went to town on Microsoft in his articles 'Microsoft + Mobile Consumers = FAIL' and 'Has the Window Closed for Windows Mobile'. The articles are a bit harsh on Microsoft, but Gibbs makes great points about Microsoft's shortcomings in the mobile consumer space.

A couple weeks ago I started hearing a bit more about Windows Mobile 7. A co-worker forwarded me this article from Windows IT Pro, 'Microsoft's plan to save Windows Mobile'. The article talks about Windows Mobile 6.5 and the fact that it was a rushed product that was not a true reflection of Microsoft's mobile vision. The next generation of Windows Mobile would uproot the archaic layers underneath 6.5 and would deliver a smoother experience to the user. I didn't read too much into the article at the time, as anyone who has played around with Windows Mobile 6.5 can tell you that Microsoft really needed to revamp its UI if it wants to keep up with the iPhones of today.

Then earlier this week we heard that Windows Mobile 7 would (finally) be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in February. The big news was that this new version of WinMo would be a whole new platform, completely different than previous versions. In fact it wouldn't even be compatible with older version of the mobile OS. It would essentially be a copy of the Zune HD's kernel, and the UI would look and feel like a Zune HD interface. This got me thinking 'Alright, now we're getting somewhere with this.' It seemed that Microsoft had finally heard the cry of its (small) legion of Zune users who felt the device was ready for the big show. However, even with this news I felt that Microsoft would still have to integrate into the phone hardware if it wanted to have a real chance in the mobile market. WinMo7 would get Microsoft part of the way there, but it would still need to take one more big step after that.

Well, now AllThingsD is reporting that Project "Pink" (aka the Zune Phone) is back in play. Not only will Microsoft unveil WinMo7 (or just 'Seven' as it may be known) at the MWC, but it may also debut a Zune-like phone at the event. The device is rumored to be a combination phone, Zune player, and XBox mobile gaming device. It is Microsoft's direct response to the iPhone and Nexus One. The phone may not be in production until 2011 though, which still leaves a lot of time for Apple and Google to make further advances against Microsoft.

We'll see if Project "Pink" can turn around Microsoft's mobile fortunes. I personally have a bit of a soft spot for Windows Mobile, since my first smartphone was an HTC Wizard loaded with Windows Mobile 6. Looking back at it now and comparing it against my iPhone, the thing was a slow clunky beast, but I loved it. It's kind of like your first car... sure it may have been a bucket of bolts but you'll never forget how it felt the first time you fired it up and took it out for a spin. Microsoft still has a long way to go in the mobile market but I'll continue to quietly root for WinMo and wait for the Zune phone to come out.

Checking in

Last Friday Yelp released an updated version of their iPhone app that could spell trouble for Foursquare and Gowalla. The biggest new feature for Yelp users: the ability to check-in.

I've been playing around with a bunch of geolocation apps recently, including Yelp and Foursquare, and so far each of them has felt like it was lacking one thing or another. I was actually compiling a set of notes for a future article about the features I would like to see in an ideal geolocation app. Here are some of those notes:

Ability to check in at venues (like Foursquare). At each venue you should be able to pull up information (like Yelp or Wikitude). You should also be able to see relevant tweets about the venue, and then be able to expand that out to see relevant tweets about the area. Friends list should come from an established social networking site like Facebook or Twitter.

The new Yelp app has a lot of my desired features rolled into it, so in my book its emerging as one of the top contenders. The check-in and gaming features were some of the cool things about Foursquare and Gowalla, but that's not too hard to copy since Yelp and MyTown now have something similar built in. I think the success of these services lies in the the size of the user base, and right now Yelp has a lot more users than Foursquare and Gowalla. (Yelp has 1.25 million users, MyTown has 500,000 users and Foursquare has 150,000 users.) On top of that Yelp also has a large database of user generated content and reviews about locations. No wonder Google just recently tried to buy them out. Of course, the real question is when will Facebook enter this space. With its massive installed user base Facebook could quickly crush the competition if it wanted to.

Pete Cashmore said 2010 would be the year of Foursquare, and Time just featured Foursquare in its magazine, but if Foursquare doesn't step it up soon it could quickly be surpassed by its rivals. Location will be big in 2010, that's for certain, I'm just not sure if Foursquare will be the one leading the charge.

Do I really need a tablet?

Tablets garnered a lot of buzz last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It seemed like every electronics company out there is launching a tablet product, including Apple, HTC, Microsoft, HP, Nokia, Dell and Lenovo. Reading all the reviews and technical specs behind these devices I can't help but want one. They look pretty slick and powerful and I know I'll want to play around with one as soon as they come out.

But really, do I NEED a tablet? Does anyone really need a tablet? Some folks are calling tablets "game changers" but quite honestly I can't see the void that this product is going to fill in a consumer's life. The tablet is supposed to fit in between a smartphone and a laptop... but technically a netbook can fill that space for 1/2 the price of a tablet, and provide you with more functionality. Anything you would really do on a tablet like surfing the web, watching a video or reading an ebook can be done just as well (if not better) by other devices. Do you want to surf the web on the go? Use your smartphone. Do you want to watch video on the go? You can use a tablet, but you're not going to be walking around and watching video at the same time, you're going to be sitting down to watch your video At that point you might as well use a netbook. Do you want to read an ebook? Well, they have specialized reader devices just for that, and they seem to do the job pretty well. Overall, at an estimated cost of $600-$1000 I'm not sure if anyone can really justify the cost of buying a tablet.

Also, you have to think about all these data plans that they're touting for the tablet. Do we really need another monthly data plan? Right now I already pay around $30 a month for my iPhone data plan, so do I really need another $9.99-19.99 a month data plan on top of that? I don't know if my pocketbook can handle another subscription on top of my current data plan. I wonder if AT&T would allow me to group both my phone and tablet data plans together. Considering that AT&T is already having a hard time handling the data usage just for iPhone users I doubt they'll go along with that approach.

Back to this year's CES. The tablet that generated the most buzz despite not being scheduled to be revealed in Vegas? Apple's iSlate of course. The iSlate is scheduled for a big 'reveal' at the end of the month, and will go on sale in March. I might head over to the Apple store and play around with it a bit, but will I buy one? Probably not. I really just can't justify it right now. I know I'll want the iSlate, but I really don't need it for anything just yet. There will certainly be people out there who will buy a tablet as a "cool toy" rather than as a device that will serve a real purpose, but overall I think Apple and other manufacturers will have a hard time convincing folks to fork over so much cash for another computer/toy.

Evernote update

I've been using Evernote for a month now and so far I've gathered 163 notes totaling 17 megs of data. I have 43 different labels in my notebook ranging from 'Apple' to Zune' and '2010 Predictions' to 'Social Media Case Studies'.

So far I'm happy with the Evernote organization structure and have found it easy to keep track of my notes and search my data. I run the Evernote Windows client on my home machine and have loaded various browser plug-ins at other computer terminals I use. As I research different topics on the web it's been relatively easy for me to add content to my Evernote notebook. I've also used the iPhone app a couple of times to search for information in my notebook while I'm away from a computer.

Anything I find online that I think I'll want to reference later I clip into my notebook. I'm a pack rat in real life, so Evernote is really suiting my need to gather anything and everything and collect it in some fashion. Right now I'm well under the 40 meg per month data limit, so it looks like I shouldn't have bandwidth issues anytime soon that will require me to upgrade to Evernote Premium.

My only real issue is with the Windows client. The application runs a little slow and is very resource intense at times. Evernote 3.5 is still in Beta and hopefully they'll release an updated version soon that has better performance.

Microsoft in 2010: Make or break year for mobile

2009 was a stumbling block for Microsoft in the mobile phone market. The continued growth of the iPhone and the introduction of Google's Android platform (and upcoming Nexus One device) stole significant market share away from Microsoft's Windows Mobile system. Microsoft so far has failed to respond to these smartphone threats and some industry analysts have gone so far as to call for Microsoft to exit the consumer phone game.

For 2010 it looks like tablet PCs will join smartphones as the next hot mobile battleground. This year's Consumer Electronics Show will showcase a lot of the new products set to be released in this latest category. Apple is scheduled to release an 'iSlate' tablet by the end of the month, and Google is rumored to be working with HTC to create a Google tablet running the Android platform. Microsoft also has its own dual-screen tablet in the works called Courier. There aren't too many specs out yet for the Courier device, so a lot remains unknown. Will Microsoft be able to keep up with Apple and Google in this new tablet market?

On the Zune HD front Microsoft looks like it's pushing to get Xbox Live games on Windows Mobile platforms, which will be a good step towards making WinMo phones relevant again. There's also speculation that Microsoft may announce some big Windows Mobile news soon during upcoming conferences. Maybe we'll see details on a full fledged Windows/Zune Phone? The Windows Mobile 7 OS was delayed until the second half of 2010, so Microsoft really needs something big here if it hopes to shake up the order of the current market leaders.

There's a lot at stake with mobile platforms like the smartphone and tablet as we move towards consuming more and more data on the go. 2010 will be an exciting year for innovative mobile products, and I expect to see great things from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others.

World map of URL shorteners

I found this cool map of URL shorteners over on Wired. It covers most of the popular country domains in use today by URL shorteners such as Bit.ly, Goo.gl, FB.me (Facebook), Youtu.be and GOP.am (Republican party). Read the full article here.