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.

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 »

for the longest time, the 250GB drive was the cheapest per gigabyte at 25 or 26 cents per gigabyte, but in the last week, the 500GB SATA drives dropped to the lowest cost place at 23 cents per gigabyte. I’m still going with the 750GB drives (not shown) at 43 cents per gigabyte for my needs though.

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.

These are current thoughts and comparisons of various social/URL networking sites.

Reference Material:

• Google Directory: Bookmark Managers
• Alexa: Bookmark Managers rankings

furl.net discussions:

• 10 cool things to do with furl
• 9/23/04 Looksmart acquires furl

• About furl, file sharing and copyright

  When you save an item with Furl, you save a copy of the document, but that copy is only visible to you. When other users view an item in your public archive, they are directed to the publishers site and if it requires membership, they must sign up to see the content.

  ref [1]: Alexa: del.icio.us site info

  ref [2]: Alexa: furl.net site info

  ref [3]: Alexa: spurl.net site info

I think the tipping point has been reached today. The web has been successfully spammed. – google returns 90% or more useless information when searching.

I’m trying to find a keyboard tray that can be attached to a glass table top – i.e. not using screws. I was able to find one by Fellowes, but most of the rest of google results were just spam, i.e. product listings from commerce sites.

To end on a positive note, social tagging, such as http://del.icio.us has a high signal to noise ratio, but it doesn’t have everything under the sun. This is where it’s at.

Addendum 2005-Jul-20:

I wound up purchasing a swing arm keyboard tray from Amazon, but it is really meant to be drilled into the under-the-desk surface. If mounted on glass surface with the double-sided tape, it eventually slides off due to the torquing of the keyboard. I wound up drilling holes in the metal side supports of the glass table, so i was able to use it after all.

Takeaway advice from this is it is more practical to have a wooden desktop.

I’ve become addicted to Tapioca Express faster than Starbucks. Their slogan, which is also emblazened on their cup, “Suddenly, I want more” is forboding of what will happen to you after a couple of weeks. Their FAQ can’t really explain why I would want more.

I cannot explain the reason for my repeated cravings other than it is something new and different than cafe mocha, caramel apple cider, or chai latte. At least, I have some variety in my addictions now.

One big issue which limits me to 5 drinks a week (one after work) instead of 10 (one before work and one after) is the lack of stores in San Francisco downtown SOMA/financial district area.

So much for the bill of rights.

The US treasury online site requires the treasury direct account number and recipients social security number to transfer bonds as a gift. This is fine if it is between family members, but what about as a gift from relatives and friends? Imagine telling relatives and friends your treasury account and social security number just so they can send a gift to your child?

One more piece of personal information has fallen into common use.

So, here’s a list of personal information that is pretty much handed out as public knowledge nowdays:

• Name (of course)
• birthday
• social security number

This information is still somewhat private (or at least hard to find – until ChoicePoint starts selling the information to anyone and everyone with a credit card):

• mother’s maiden name
• city of birth
• driver’s license number
• Passport #

And information that is less commonly asked for and may actually not be well known:

• favorite color
• pet’s name
• first model of car

It’s funny that online sites ask these information as additional authenticators and very well be more secure than those that rely just on social security number and mother’s maiden name.

From http://www.everybodyiscrazy.com/index.php?p=17:

Most users have no desire to be the system administrators of their machines, and would gladly turn that task over to someone else for a nominal fee. As bandwidth increases, telcos, cable companies, and others will be in the perfect position to become application service providers for the average home user, and said average home user will gladly accept this, as long as the price isn’t too high. I see this as almost inevitable. …

In a world of unlimited bandwidth and remote applications, the operating system doesn’t matter, and there’s no lock-in. In such a world, Microsoft loses its monopoly, and the consumer wins. This is why bandwidth should scare Microsoft more than any other foe out there right now – for once bandwidth increases beyond a certain level, remote application provision is inevitable, and then Microsoft is on very shaky ground, indeed. …

It’s not for everyone, but for the 80% of users who do little more than surf, check their e-mail, and check the odd stock quote, the ASP model makes a great deal of sense, and it’s time is coming.

Maybe with introduction of the walmart $300 PCs, you can get a cheap web browser. But I think the buyer psychology is if they are spending even a couple hundred dollars on a box that takes up space on the desktop, it has to do more than just show web pages and send and receive email. It has to play video games or do word processing and printing for the kids’ homework. Pretty soon you’ll need an operating system and locally running applications. As for the ASP model, imagine the backlash if users realize that their computer loses all its state and applications if they were to switch between SBC and Comcast. Likely use of ASP apps would be bundled with access fees so SBC and Comcast would have their own (separate) app servers.