Daily Movement

in searching for SuperCrunchables 2.0, aka supercrunching in the web 2.0 space, …

This is interesting — two search engines that focus just on twitter output. I suppose you could get some kind of collective immediate intelligence just by searching.

e.g. whether you should watch a particular movie opening night, such as “Gone Baby Gone” which apparently did much worse in the box office at $6MM compared to “30 days and 30 nights” at $16MM, but also apparently liked by people who did watch it (below):

• buzztter results for “Gone Baby Gone”
• terraminds results for “Gone Baby Gone”

I also did a check on Rendition and didn’t see much buzz about it other than one person who said it confused them. i suppose that is also reflective of the even lower box office turnout of $4.2MM, seen at MovieWeb 10/19/07 weekend results

As I sit in the Starbucks in Mountain View, with 19% signal strength of Google’s Wi-Fi compared to 65% signal strength of T-Mobile, it’s clear you get what you pay for. I doubt they’re serious about actually getting wide coverage - rather just enough coverage to be useful some fraction of time and to get press interest. They are not yet at the level of Verizon (”can you hear me now?”) or any other hotspot service provider.

Soon Starbucks will be offering Wi-Fi for free, so what me worry? Looks like the actual cost of Wi-Fi is actually going to approach the marginal cost of Wi-Fi. Maybe the next phone I get will run VoIP to take advantage of the Starbucks internet.

After a long time, Albertson’s is finally Lucky’s again. But neither is really the original Lucky’s , instead it’s a cloaked version of Save Mart. Well, here’s the history according to Wikipedia, if you’re interested.

Myself, I still find myself drawn to Safeway — although Safeway has a sordid past too. Just goes to show, when it comes to business and sausage, don’t ask how it all works or is made.

What’s next on Google’s buyout radar? Lots of people discuss this stuff. I don’t follow the discussions at all, but one idea stands out as a an interesting proposition.

Wikipedia

There’s some discussion here in particular (that supports my argument):

“Google’s offered before, and Wikipedia has refused, and will continue to.” [blog.outer-court.com]

Read the rest of this entry »

In a previous post, wrote about a common camera repair horror story.

I just received the Sony DSC-T9 back from repair. It is still broken in exact same way as when I sent it in. Power off, power on, and it asks to set date and time again. Since it’s the fourth time in 90 days the unit has been in repair w/o success, the customer service rep. suggested that they request their Sony liason to get a replacement from Sony. No guarantee that that it would be approved by Sony, but I guess a case could be made. Read the rest of this entry »

Ideas want to be free. Good ideas want to be implemented.

In order to promote goodness, I shall be following this philosophy of Venture creative commons.

Other people refer to something similar as the LazyWeb[1], [2] , [3]

regarding Windows-based Treo coming, this kind of pisses me off cause i just spent $ on a now obsolete platform, but then again, wince made economic sense back in 1998/1999 since who wants to learn another API once you’ve invested in windows. WinCE just wasn’t ready back then which is why I was a palm loyalist even though I asserted that WinCE would win. It’s funny that PalmOne and PalmSource went through so much spin-off, buy-back, spin-off, until now. 3com must have made out well avoiding all that hassle and just getting the money from the spin off.

I did wind up trying to write some cellphone aware code for the Treo 650, but the cobalt environment they were pushing didn’t exist on the Treo 650 and the Treo 600 cell support in garnet wasn’t on the Treo 650 either, so I wound up having to get the Treo specific SDK for garnet which had a lot of handspring headers. And then when I did finally build against these headers and run on the actual hardware (not an emulator – which doesn’t exist for the Treo 650 anyway, only cobalt), it wouldn’t even open up the phone library correctly.

Such a waste.

and looking at the e-mail traffic on the palm dev forumsbluetooth [RSS], emulator [RSS], palm-dev [RSS]these folks are just hating life on bluetooth, on the emulator, and i’d guess pretty much everything else Treo.

I’m glad they’ve made this first step. I’ll probably make my first step too soon which will be to get a WinCE based Treo once they figure out which cellular provider they’re going to cut the sweet deal with.

But once I’ve been forced to think about a WinCE phone device, I may as well shop the whole market to see if there’s anything better than the Palm… watch out.

Is it any wonder that albertsons will be – i am assuming that they can’t fight the market reality – selling itself off?

According to the article here, they have a lot of competition, and suffered from a 20 week strike last year.

But more importantly, I think, since then they haven’t improved what matters to customers, so they won’t gain or even retain any customers. I found myself shopping at albertson’s yesterday because of its familiar location, and then reminded myself, “Why did I come here again? I usually choose go to Safeway”

The local albertson’s has a total of two checkers at peak hours and usually only one most of the other times of day. The store itself still has 8 or 9 fully equipped checkstands. It also has 4 self-service check-out terminals where there’s a line due to the software locking up waiting for a checker to come over and reset it, and due to shoppers just being entertained by the animated graphics.

I’m sure they could sell a lot more food if they could get customers out of the store faster.

I think what happened after the strike is that they put in automated terminals to protect against future labor disputes, while also laying off workers to control costs. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of a downward spiral, since with less workers to help customers, the customers get fed up and go elsewhere, causing revenues to drop again.

It seems I get at least 2 or 3 faked messages a day from Paypal and eBay which are – ironically for reasons i will soon explain – are the same company. The claims are that my account will be suspended or has been accessed illegally or might have been compromised and that I need to provide my login info again to avoid being deactivated.

It seems these problems persist and aren’t being addressed by eBay or PayPal because:

• eBay/PayPal isn’t communicating to users what legitimate communication should look like
• eBay/PayPal uses HTML to communicate making it easier for impostors to hide fake addresses behind a legitimate looking link.
• eBay/PayPal has in the past (and maybe still does) allowed their official graphics to be included in email making it easier for impostors to fake a legitimate looking email.

What are some fixes:

• only communicate via telephone, postal mail, or by an indirect mechanism such as notifying user to go to a well known, constant address such as www.paypal.com or www.ebay.com, logging in and retrieving the communications.
• actually tell users how they are addressing the problem of faked email communication.

Well, this has only been going on for about a year now (as of march 2005). I suspect nothing will be done about it. Ironically, the three phishing scams I know about: eBay, PayPal, and washington mutual, two of them are attacking the same company and that same company is not doing anything about either of them.

Other people talking about this:

• http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2005/01/25/1742.aspx#FeedBack
• http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20050314/113209.shtml
• http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/445
• http://nimrods.blogspot.com/200501_01nimrods_archive.html#110719917292796355
• http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/07/business/ebay.html
• http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=222
• http://cleverhack.com/archives/2004/08/stupid-ebay-phishing-scam/
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59347-2004Nov18.html
• http://www.filteringcraig.com/sidebar/archives/000973.html

Update for 2005-Jul-20:

It appears that ebay is communicating as of June, 2005 via its ‘my ebay’ portal, but the existence of those messages aren’t communicated via email and they expire, so if you don’t log in for a month, your messages will have disappeared. But it is a good step taken that’s a long time coming.

“Total revenue increased 12.2% to $21.2 million in the three months ended August 31, 2002 from $18.9 million in the three months ended August 31, 2001.”

— RedHat 10-Q 10/15/02

To think someone can make money for packaging — RedHat is doing it to the tune of $20M/quarter. This would be an interesting case study since they cannot have IP in the silicon valley sense of proprietary software or patents. Their value is brand name reputation, and relationships that allow them to effectively solve problems. They probably appear closer to a consulting house than a software company.