This image is just brilliant.
It is from Fred Wilson’s Web 2.0 Expo talk. Created by Gyroxide.
Having lived in Silicon Valley, I concur wholeheartedly. We need a better term. One of the greatest cities in the world is not an “alley” – not in the context of the tech world or in any other dimension.
It is now my desktop background.
I caved and got an iPhone. No, I didn’t get AT&T and lock myself into their egregious pricing and business policies. A very kind friend upgraded to the 3G and donated his 1G 8MB phone to me! It is unlocked and worked on T-Mobile (and will work with any SIM card I so choose).
The form factor is great. Sleek and elegant. I miss the keyboard, but not terribly since the predictive typing is excellent. What makes the phone is the software.
My smartphone journey started with the Blackberry in 2002. It was an incredible email device and everything synced with my work needs – contacts, calendar etc. In 2005, searching for more functionality, I switched to the Treo. What was great about it was the Palm OS and the plethora of apps available. I had a very customized alarm clock, the NYC subway map in the palm of my hands and a whole load of little games to keep me occupied.
But the Treo’s form factor was terrible – it was just too huge. And it handled media relatively poorly. Especially music.
The iPhone is like the Treo on steroids. The form factor is great, the integrated music, videos and photos are excellent and most importantly, the apps make the phone.
Right now, I have a whole bunch of apps on it that I could not imagine living without – organizational apps, to-do apps, location-based recommendation apps, games, the much loved NYC subway map… I basically walk around with almost all the critical data that I need while mobile.
But… while the apps are great, the basic OS is merely acceptable. It is slow – when I hit the SMS icon, it takes a while to load up the messages, same with address book and other apps. It doesn’t offer basic functionality – like the much talked about cut and paste, and most importantly, it is locked to AT&T and Apple continues to spend valuable resources ensuring the lock stays is place.
What this means is that if Google does a halfway decent job with Android1, there is a market that is ready to switch over. Give me a solid OS, an app store that is truly open and multiple carriers and I would switch. Now, the device has to be sleek, but I’ll even live with a slightly bigger form factor if I don’t have to constantly worry about bricking my phone.
Treo started the trend, but dropped the ball. It will be interesting to see who fulfills the promise in the long term.
Image courtesy this Wired article. Wired and Leander Kahney own all rights.
No, Windows Mobile will not cut it. I’ve tried it and it is potentially the worst mobile OS in history! ↩
Everyone is talking about her. Everything that’s needed to be said has been said. So, I will just point you to the the best article I’ve read on the woman.
It is by one of my favorite reviewers, Roger Ebert. I didn’t know Ebert wrote on politics. One could ask – why is he qualified to do so? Why are any of us qualified? Have you seen all the bloggers pontificating on the topic?! 😉
It is brilliant. So brilliant that I am reproducing it in its entirety below – the bold emphasis is mine.
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The American Idol candidate1
By Roger Ebert
I think I might be able to explain some of Sara Palin’s appeal. She’s the “American Idol” candidate. Consider. What defines an “American Idol” finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented, why, they’re darned near the real thing. There’s a reason “American Idol” gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, Hey, that could almost be me up there on that show!
My feeling is, I don’t want to be up there. I want a vice president who is better than me, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn’t repeat bald-faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere. Someone who doesn’t appoint Alaskan politicians to “study” global warming, because, hello! It has been studied. The returns are convincing enough that John McCain and Barack Obama are darned near in agreement.
I would also want someone who didn’t make a teeny little sneer when referring to “people who go to the Ivy League.” When I was a teen I dreamed of going to Harvard, but my dad, an electrician, told me, “Boy, we don’t have the money. Thank your lucky stars you were born in Urbana and can go to the University of Illinois right here in town.”
So I did, very happily. Although Palin gets laughs when she mentions the “elite” Ivy League, she sure did attend the heck out of college. Five schools in six years. What was that about?
And how can you be her age and never have gone to Europe? My dad had died, my mom was working as a book-keeper and I had a job at the local newspaper when, at 19, I scraped together $240 for a charter flight to Europe. I had Arthur Frommer’s $5 a Day under my arm, started in London, even rented a Vespa and drove in the traffic of Rome. A few years later, I was able to send my mom, along with the $15 a Day book.
You don’t need to be a pointy-headed elitist to travel abroad. You need curiosity and a hunger to see the world. What kind of a person (who has the money) arrives at the age of 44 and has only been out of the country once, on an official tour to Iraq? Sarah Palin’s travel record is that of a hopeless provincial.
But some people like that. She’s never traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or Down Under? That makes her like them. She didn’t go to Harvard? Good for her! There a lot of hockey moms who haven’t seen London, but most of them would probably love to, if they had the dough. And they’d be proud if their kids won a scholarship to Harvard.
Palin is a shallow, chirpy person with those vaguely alarming eyeglasses. Now her fans all want a pair. Remember back when women wore glasses that departed their ears in plastic swoops and swirls? My theory is, anyone who wears glasses that look weird is telling me something I don’t want to know.
I trust the American people will see through Palin’s facade, and save the Republic in November. The most damning indictment against her is that she considered herself a good choice to be a heartbeat away. That shows bad judgment.
—
Please, please don’t talk about how other candidates who have run have had less experience. There is, in fact, no person who has run for office who has had less experience. Even Quayle had more!
All copyright owned by Roger Ebert and the Chicago Sun Times ↩
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the MoMA design store in midtown Manhattan. I love that store since they have such innovative product designs across a spectrum of products.
I happened on this contact lens case and immediately fell in love. As someone who will likely have to wear contact lenses forever, the case is something I interact with every day. And contact lens cases are extraordinarily dull.
This case was so cute – bright, cheerful and shaped like eyes. Seeing it would brighten up my day for sure, so I bought it. Seven bucks. Fine. Most contact lens cases come free with solution or you get them from your doctor – seven dollars is therefore somewhat expensive for a case (even if it is not an expensive purchase in general – 1.5 Starbucks coffee!)
I went home and started using it. So cute… I did notice that since the base is colored, it is hard to see the lens floating in it, but I could live with that.
Then, last week, I needed to get my eyes examined. Knowing the doc would want to see me with my lenses on, I grabbed the case, planning to throw it in my bag. As soon as I picked it up and walked out of the bathroom, the fluid was sloshing over my palm. Huh. Weird. I grabbed a tissue and ran out of the door. Must have been an accident, right? No. Definitely not. By the time I got to the doc, the tissue was soaked and the lenses were in microscopic levels of liquid.
What is the purpose of a lens case? To keep the contacts in the solution. One presumes that the case should be movable while still fulfilling its goal for existence. This was a stunning failure. Thank god I found this out in a non-critical situation. What if I had traveled with these cases on a trip? It would have been a disaster.
I’m more than surprised that MoMA has these cases. Cute? Definitely. Filling the basic function? Absolutely not. And something that doesn’t work doesn’t deserve to be in the store.
Good design is where the form is exquisite while also meeting all the function requirements of the product. Incredible form with terrible function does not work for me1.
The same principle holds true in online design. Interaction design is the most critical aspect a website. If your site is super-pretty but a user can’t figure out how to get through the flow without falling out, there’s no point to it.
It always makes sense to start the question “What does the product need to accomplish”? In this case, it is to keep the contact lenses safe in the solution. In the case of an ecommerce site, it is to enable a frictionless transaction. Whatever the goal is, figure it out and make sure that there are no distractions along the way. Even if the site is ugly, if it enables the customer to fulfill her goal, it is infinitely better than having an pretty site that is hard to use.
The ideal solution, of course, is to have a product that can do both. Those are the products that deserve to be in MoMA’s design store.
UPDATE: Apparently I had a defective one. The new one I have has a seal that works. So, apologies to the MoMA and the designer. That said, the underlying point of the post holds – great design is when a product is exceptional at what it does with great design.
For example, super-high heels are a completely failure in this regard and I refuse to wear them and suffer just because it makes me look better ↩
I’m spring fall cleaning my digital life. It is truly incredible how much digital junk one can collect and how many digital chores exist. And just like the offline world where every new acquisition of an item leads to extra work (cleaning the item, taking care of it, insuring it if appropriate etc.), every user account, every digital image and every blog needs work.
The volume of data is just ridiculous. Let’s start with email – I started sending email in 1993 (CompuServe baby!) and while I don’t have those emails, I have email dating back to 1995! Maybe it is because I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to email, but sorting through, categorizing, importing, archiving and ensuring the email is in the right format (making all the Windows emails Mac compatible) has been quite a task.
Then there’s the music. A few years ago, R and I combined our music. We have over a 100 gigs of it… figuring out a solution where we can both share the music but keep it in sync has been a huge challenge. It still doesn’t work all the time, but at now, we set up a Mac Mini as a shared server and plug the music drive in to share it. Works most of the time…
Photos have exploded this year. And again, it’s something we want both people to have access to. So, you need to tag them, sort them and ensure the memory cards are downloaded. Oh, the tags have go cross platform (windows and mac). And if you shoot in RAW, you need to convert them to JPGs to store them on your computer and the “negatives” can remain on a hard drive. Damn, the work flow is complex!
Online passwords have to be maintained. I have no idea the number of sites where I have passwords, much less which email I used with it and what on earth the password even is.
Oh, and le blogs… is it so hard to pop open a tab and update it? Not really, but given all the other digital cleaning I’m doing, I’ve felt overwhelmed and reluctant to post…
And given all this digital organizing, the real world organizing has taken a back seat. So for a few weeks, I’ll have to focus on that and while I do, my digital stuff will get messy again. So I will focus on the digital for a bit again and while I do that… the cycle of life… argh!
Picture from the Apple store
For a whole bunch of reasons, I couldn’t be near a TV when Michael Phelps was swimming the 100M Butterfly for his seventh gold of the Olympics. But I really wanted him to win and, eager to know what happened, I called someone who gave me the play-by-play as it happened.
Once I got near a TV/computer, I watched the fantastic race and continued to stay amazed that the guy won.
It all comes down to the fact that Cavic took a long final stroke and “coasted” to the wall while Phelps took an extra stroke to hit the wall first. But if you want to be totally convinced, these pictures (from Sports Illustrated, where there are more images) will quench your thirst.
Phelps is on the left, bare chested; Cavic is on the right in the suit
As an aside, I find that being an American citizen for the first time during an Olympics has a marked bearing on my rooting for American atheletes.
When the iPhone first came out, I desperately wanted one, but refused to switch my carrier to AT&T (which has incredibly bad service in Manhattan). Plus, I needed a phone I could unlock so I could use a local SIM while I traveled out of the country.
And by the time the first gen iPhone was unlocked, the 2nd gen one was looming large. So I waited.
Now the second gen iPhone, the 3G one is out. But… it is not yet unlocked. It will most certainly be jailbroken1, but unlocked 2? Not sure.
So I am spending some time this weekend following the incredible hackers from the iPhone Dev Team. Here’s hoping they can unlock the 3G baseband. Then I can *finally* have the phone without having to live with terrible service.
The March 2008 edition of the HBS Bulletin had a little piece about the first women MBA students.
“A ‘Daring Exper-iment’: Harvard and Busi-ness Education for Women, 1937–1970,†tells the story of how coeducation at HBS evolved from an eleven-month certificate program in “personnel administration†at Radcliffe College (1937–1945), to the Management Training Program (1946–1955), to the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration (1956–1963) — the last step before complete integration took place with the admission of eight women into the MBA Class of 1965.
But what’s even more interesting is a letter to the editor that showed up in the current issue (June 2008) –
Your March article “A History of Women at HBS†omitted an important category — women in the early sixties who were not admitted to the firstyear at HBS. Instead, their only option was to attend a separate and unequal first-year class at the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration, a nondegree program. The women were then allowed to apply for the second year at HBS, and fewer than ten were accepted. In the second-year program, they were given no housing or section designation, and a professor could deny entrance to his course.
When job interviews started on campus, women’s names were scratched from the interview list. Recruiters refused to interview them because it was a “waste of time.†I know, because this happened to me. I was part of this forgotten class.
Joan Oxman Rothberg
(HRPBA 1962, MBA ’63)
Summit, NJ
Wow – scratched off the interview list! Incredible how far we’ve come. And that’s an excellent thing.
Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.
In a clear, friendly font, the screen might say: “Nabisco Reduced Fat Ritz Crackers 14.5 Oz.,” for example. Now you can toss the box, content that its replacement has been added to your shopping list.
After a few days of this, you can review the list online at Ikan.net — and if everything looks good, click once to have everything delivered to your house at a time you specify.
Maybe it’s not exactly a Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle. But at least it’s the Netflix of groceries.
State of the Art – Grocery Shopping Made Easy – NYTimes.com
The next revision of this will be a smaller, lighter scanner. When that happens AND when (if?) they integrate with Fresh Direct or Whole Foods, I am SO there.