Gowalla items are something of a mystery to me, but I just checked in at The Bulldog and am oddly proud to say I dropped all these items last time I was here.
I still don’t really get Gowalla’s game
Reply
Monthly Archives: January 2010
Will pay-by-phone ever arrive?
It’s been more than 10 years since I was told that the ability to buy a snack from a vending machine with a mobile phone is just around the corner. I seem to recall Richard Hart on the old CNet Central show bringing me the news. I’m 24, which means I’ve been waiting nearly half my life for that ability.
For that matter, I can download the PayPal iPhone app and send a pal who paid for dinner $20 for my half, but why can’t we just bump our phones together? I can swipe my debit card at the Target check-out, but why can’t I just touch my phone to a pad? (Then I wouldn’t have to carry my wallet.)
These things are all possible, of course, through a technology called Near Field Communication, but so far the infrastructure is nonexistent, and only a handful of phones have ever implemented NFC.
A number of companies think 2D barcodes are going to be huge, Google and Microsoft among them. In fact, they already are huge in some countries. But barcodes are essentially just retro RFID chips, and NFC allows for rich two-way communication with the things around you. If barcodes are the next big thing, we’re aiming far too low.
I hope it won’t be long before we finally see a mainstream mobile phone with RFID and NFC capabilities. You listening, Apple?
Relampago del Catatumbo
I love lightning storms, so this is absolutely incredible to me. There's a spot in Venezuela where lightning is nearly constant.
For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the "Relampago del Catatumbo," this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.
It was first written about in the 1597 poem "The Dragontea" by Lope de Vega. De Vega tells of Sir Francis Drake's 1595 attempt to take the city of Maracaibo by night, only to have his plans foiled when the lightning storm's flashes gave away his position to the city's defenders.
Someday I will see this.
Back to the Future
Yesterday around the beer cooler some colleagues were expressing disappointment that we’re just five years from the 2015 world shown in Back to the Future II. We still have time to develop hoverboard technology, I say.
Kottke’s apparently been thinking about the same thing and points out that if Back to the Future were made today, Marty would travel back to 1980.
OK Go, just don’t embed video
OK Go, a band that got famous on YouTube, is now restricted from allowing YouTube users to embed the band's videos.
We’ve been flooded with complaints recently because our YouTube videos can't be embedded on websites, and in certain countries can't be seen at all. And we want you to know: we hear you, and we’re sorry. We wish there was something we could do. Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago.
See, here’s the deal. The recordings and the videos we make are owned by a record label, EMI. The label fronts the money for us to make recordings – for this album they paid for us to spend a few months with one of the world’s best producers in a converted barn in Amish country wringing our souls and playing tympani and twiddling knobs – and they put up most of the cash that it takes to distribute and promote our albums, including the costs of pressing CDs, advertising, and making videos. We make our videos ourselves, and we keep them dirt cheap, but still, it all adds up, and it adds up to a great deal more than we have in our bank account, which is why we have a record label in the first place.
Full color reader with 122 hours of battery life? We’ll see
It’s no big secret Apple needs to figure out how to get a long battery life out of any tablet it announces next week. So hopefully Asus’ new reader bodes well. The Asus DR-570 features a 6-inch OLED display and is said to have 122 hours of battery life in real-world usage (that’s more than five days). Of course it’s not a full-fledged computer like anything Apple would come out with, but it does have Flash video playback.
Check out too the DR-950, which has a 9-inch grayscale display, 3G and a web browser. Not bad.
My complaints about Posterous so far
I’ve been using Posterous pretty heavily for less than 24 hours now. Here are my complaints so far:
- No Disqus comments integration.
- Autoposting seems to only work when it wants.
- If you have multiple Posterous blogs, you can’t granularly choose which ones autopost to which services when you e-mail post@blogname.posterous.com.
- No way to upload an image from web editor. (And I’d like to be able to crop images I upload this way.)
- There’s apparently no way to set your time zone, which results in incorrect time stamps.
Aside from those, this is working pretty well as a place to share my thoughts without having to worry about any kind of formal structure.
Why Apple will buy Yahoo!
Apple is going to buy Yahoo! At least that’s what I tweeted earlier this month and tried to convince smart guys Dan Wallace and Tim Elliott Wednesday night after a few glasses of wine. BusinessWeek this week reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. My take is Yahoo! would be a better fit for Apple because it competes with Cupertino on fewer levels than Microsoft.
Add to that all the rumors swirling around next week’s Apple product announcement. Assume for a second Apple releases a tablet and that, technologically, it’s an absolute knock out (that would require at least solving the battery life and user interface questions). In order for the tablet to succeed it also needs content, just as the iPod never succeeded until the iTunes Store was born. Yahoo! is essentially already a content company, one that has contracts with many other content companies. Google recently pulled Associated Press content from Google News. What if Yahoo! (i.e. Apple) became the exclusive online portal to AP content? There are already rumors Apple has worked out a deal with The New York Times, albeit not an exclusive one.
Some people say Apple is a technology company. But that discounts the fact that they’re already the largest music retailer in the country.
And then there’s advertising. Apple’s recent purchase of Quattro Wireless shows the company knows it needs to have a holistic approach to wireless, but it’s going to take more than some herbal healers for Apple to really compete against Google and AdMob. In might just take Apple getting into the search ad business in a big way; buying Yahoo! and it’s ad network would certainly be one way to do that.
Last but not least among the reasons the two companies are a good fit is the cloud. Apple has been struggling in cloud computing for a long time. When it relaunched the stagnant .Mac service as MobileMe it was with many hitches, and a year and a half later MobileMe still underwhelms. Google’s numerous cloud offerings all serve as additional points of advertising presence. Apple’s best bet could be to buy Yahoo!’s data centers and network infrastructure knowhow if it want to compete seriously in the cloud.
Nick Bilton at the Bits blog just put together this great chart showing where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! compete. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Nick?
Why Apple will buy Yahoo!
Apple is going to buy Yahoo! At least that’s what I tweeted earlier this month and tried to convince smart guys Dan Wallace and Tim Elliott Wednesday night after a few glasses of wine. BusinessWeek this week reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. My take is Yahoo! would be a better fit for Apple because it competes with Cupertino on fewer levels than Microsoft.
Add to that all the rumors swirling around next week’s Apple product announcement. Assume for a second Apple releases a tablet and that, technologically, it’s an absolute knock out (that would require at least solving the battery life and user interface questions). In order for the tablet to succeed it also needs content, just as the iPod never succeeded until the iTunes Store was born. Yahoo! is essentially already a content company, one that has contracts with many other content companies. Google recently pulled Associated Press content from Google News. What if Yahoo! (i.e. Apple) became the exclusive online portal to AP content? There are already rumors Apple has worked out a deal with The New York Times, albeit not an exclusive one.
Some people say Apple is a technology company. But that discounts the fact that they’re already the largest music retailer in the country.
And then there’s advertising. Apple’s recent purchase of Quattro Wireless shows the company knows it needs to have a holistic approach to wireless, but it’s going to take more than some herbal healers for Apple to really compete against Google and AdMob. In might just take Apple getting into the search ad business in a big way; buying Yahoo! and it’s ad network would certainly be one way to do that.
Last but not least among the reasons the two companies are a good fit is the cloud. Apple has been struggling in cloud computing for a long time. When it relaunched the stagnant .Mac service as MobileMe it was with many hitches, and a year and a half later MobileMe still underwhelms. Google’s numerous cloud offerings all serve as additional points of advertising presence. Apple’s best bet could be to buy Yahoo!’s data centers and network infrastructure knowhow if it want to compete seriously in the cloud.
Nick Bilton at the Bits blog just put together this great chart showing where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! compete. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Nick?
Hack Leno will speak at White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Jay Leno will speak at the next White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Apparently they wanted someone diametrically opposed to Stephen Colbert’s humor.