Some Monday Morning Thoughts

It struck me again recently when I was reading the latest rumors about the iPhone 5 that Apple gets a lot of credit for being innovative when in fact most of the features you'll find in their products are anything but. There are exceptions of course like the Retina display but that is not the norm. In particular my phone is a year plus old at this point and has an 8 megapixel camera. Rumors are the iPhone 5 will match those specs. It seems likely that the iPhone 5 won't support LTE either. Where Apple wins is in their ability to integrate and create positive user experiences. As much as I love my Motorola Droid X, it does get annoying that I have to pull the battery periodically to hard power cycle it because it has gotten flaky. I have had to power cycle my iPad a few times but it's a fairly rare event.

Sprint employees have been asked to say "No comment" when asked by customers, family and friends about the possibility of the iPhone 5 coming to their network. This strikes me as a semi clever way of getting free advertising. Whether it actually means the iPhone 5 will be available on Sprint is difficult to judge. If it it is we'll see additional pressure on Android in the US. Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T in the beginning gave Google an opportunity to establish a foothold they might not have had otherwise so it makes sense from Apple's perspective to continue to "spread the love".

Dell is apparently the latest company to decide to get into the services side of cloud computing. Given their track record in other areas I'm not very optimistic about their chances. Other companies have been in this space for a lot longer and playing catch up at this point doesn't seem like a winning strategy even if they can execute and I have my doubts that they can.

I recently made my first virtual million on Empire Avenue. This was a cool accomplishment and one I'm kind of proud of. It took a fair amount of effort and a bit of thinking to get their and I've recently hit on a strategy that is giving me very good growth. I don't generally spend a lot of time on games these days but Empire Avenue has turned out to be a good investment in that I've made some great contacts and really stepped up my game on the BLOG and social network interaction front. It's nice to have some motivation to engage and an outlet that both encourages that engagement and gives me tools to help judge my effectiveness.

Speaking of social network engagement, my Klout score has been taking a bit of a hit recently and I'm not entirely sure why. I'm going to guess algorithm changes that aren't favorable to my model of engagement. I'm not going to worry too much about it but it's always disconcerting when a score goes down and I'm not quite sure why.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• Report: iPhone 5 getting metal back, screen staying small (gigaom.com)
• WSJ: Sprint will sell the iPhone 5 in mid-October (tuaw.com)

Venture Progress Report And Other Ramblings

I promised myself I'd post an update on how my start-up exploration is going today. So far, so good. I've written a fair bit of code and am using it to gather data. My idea centers on data analysis so I need to accumulate a decent sample size before I'll be able to draw many conclusions about what is possible. I'm probably a week or so away from having the base I'll need but I'll continue to write code while gathering the data. 

I've been learning a bunch of new technologies which has been mostly fun but a little frustrating. I'd forgotten how lousy most technical documentation is. All I need is a good example with an explanation. Instead I get lousy examples with almost no explanation most of the time. Technical types who are also effective communicators are apparently a very rare breed. When you write documentation you have to imagine you know nothing about the topic you are writing on. Most people don't do this. 

The price range for the 16G HP Touchpad one the grey market seems to be holding steady. Still no word from HP on new stock. I've signed up for the mailing list they've made available for people interested in purchasing one so I should hear something if they ever put more stock up for sale. I doubt I will though.

I made my first virtual million on Empire Avenue. I still have slightly mixed feelings about the platform but it has continued to encourage me to stay engaged and look for ways to make (hopefully) meaningful contributions in the social networking space. 

It's been kind of amusing watching Facebook change themselves into Google+ over the past week or so. OK, I exaggerate but all the changes they've made to their picture service and privacy settings are pretty clearly motivated by Google and their success with G+. The picture quality on Facebook has been lousy from the get go so it's nice they upgraded things but really, why did they need Google to motivate that change?

OK, time to get back to chores/hobbies/coding. 

Have a great weekend.

Image via Wikipedia

The HP Touchpad Finally Finds Love

I'm continuing to lust after the $99 closeout HP touchpad but with the exception of a brief window in time this past Sunday/Monday it's begining to look like they are about as common as a humble politician.

HP's web site did claim more would be coming up until sometime between Tuesday evening and the wee hours of Wednesday morning but now they just say "Out of Stock". Online reports indicate that even people who work for HP aren't sure if or when more stock will show up.
There seems to be a lot of supply in the grey market with EBay and Amazon's marketplace showing several sources willing to sell for around $230 to $260 as I write this. Actually some people are asking a lot more than that but I doubt they are getting many bites with lower prices being available.
It's kind of odd that HP has been sending mixed signals this week. They should know their supply chain well enough to understand what they have in the pipe. They seemed ot think they were going to have more, now they are saying the opposite. I have a couple of different theories about where the remaining supply has gone.

My first theory is that they realize they low balled their clearance price a bit and are trying to figure out how to extract a few extra dollars from their remaining stock gracefully. Maybe a big shareholder called up and read them the riot act.
My second theory is that HP is going to sell all of their remaining units through channel partners, possibly to help assuage some of the frustration those partners likely have thanks to HP abandoning the tablet market suddenly. Heck, it was only a couple of weeks back that they were talking about being comfortable with the number two spot in the tablet market. A lot of people have gotten whiplash on that one.

Actually a third theory just occurred to me. Based on the frenzy around the $99 clearance HP has decided they really do have a future in the tablet market and is regrouping to announce they've changed their mind. I don't have an opinion on whether they should or shouldn't have abandoned the tablet market but if this one is true they need to take a reality check. The only thing the recent feeding frenzy proved is that even flawed products can be attractive if the price is low enough. We Americans love a sale more than just about anything else.

A lot of these bargain basement HP touchpads are going to end up with Android installed. That is my plan if I get my hands on one. I'll give WebOS a brief test drive but I have zero desire to learn a third platform, particularly one that is apparently dead.

Image via Wikipedia

Related Articles:

• Everything you want to know about the HP TouchPad: news, reviews (zdnet.com)
• Blog - The Great HP Fire Sale of 2011 (technologyreview.com)

Steve Jobs (Short Take)

It's not hard to figure out what the obvious topic for today is. It's been interesting and occasionally encouraging to read the various news accounts about Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple. One I just read claims he worked a full day yesterday at Apple. That would be great if true because it would at the very least argue that he's not on deaths door as most people seem to be assuming after yesterdays announcement.

Still, most signs point to the fact that he is in fact human and that his health is not improving. I've admired his company and his effectiveness as a business leader for many years now. He's not perfect but he's done more than pretty much anyone else and he's managed to accomplish all that while doing less harm than most people who have amassed large sums of money have managed.

He hasn't always had the Midas touch though, at least over the short term. The NeXT computer was a brilliant product that never actually gained the kind of market share it needed for long term viability. The original units were shipped with a very cool but slow R/W optical drive only, no hard drive. This combination was revolutionary given the time but did not make a good impression from a performance or reliability perspective and that didn't help the viability of NeXT. Other than the original AppleTV it's hard for me to think of any other even partial failures since then though. Of course NeXT was eventually absorbed into Apple and a lot of that technical DNA survives today. The MacOS X OS was at its start a port of Next's operating system.

A lot of people have been writing eulogies to Jobs. I'm going to choose to believe that his story isn't done yet. He's apparently still heavily involved with Apple and he's still on the board at the Disney company. He may just surprise everyone and stick around long enough to add substantially to his legacy.

Image by Phil Bradley via Flickr

HP Tablet Hunting And Garrison Keillor

My quest for a cheap HP tablet may yet bear fruit as HP may have more available later this week. I have my fingers crossed. I'm a total junkie when it comes to tech toys and even spectacular failures have a bit of appeal if the price is right. I'm periodically hitting refresh on the HP page hoping to get lucky.

As I write this my wife and I are on our way to see Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegone fame. I've been a casual fan of Keillor's for many years now so I've been looking forward to this for awhile. We almost missed the show though as it was originally on our calendar for tomorrow night. Thankfully through an unlikely series of coincidences we found out around lunch time that it's tonight. It's nice when stuff like that works out in your favor as tickets for a show that has already occurred are even less useful than expired milk as there is always a chance the milk might turn into cottage cheese or something else marginally useful.

I've decided I need to put a lot more effort into my blog entry titles. Apparently "foo/bar/whatever" isn't a very enticing labeling based on the number of page impressions I get on those kinds of posts versus ones where I use something that looks like a question or statement. If any aspiring bloggers are reading this, please learn from my mistake. It only took me a year and a half to figure out.

Of course following this advice is easier said than done. It's not like I don't want to come up with pithy titles. If I were good at that I'd probably be in marketing or advertising or maybe comedy rather than technology.

My favorite new social networking site is FourSquare. Any company that can get me to tell them where I'm at voluntarily has to be doing something right. Apparently I'm a sucker for virtual badges and points. Particularly when I get to compete against my friends.

It's after the show now. Keillor was by turns hilarious, thoughtful, serious and always entertaining. The Mountain Winery, the venue for the show was excellent as well. It's high up on a mountain side in Saratoga California which is southwest of San Jose and overlooks the silicon valley.

My plan for the morning of the 24th is going to be to work on the programming portion of my business idea. I should be able to finish up the initial data gathering portion of my coding with a bit of luck. At that point I'll be able to start working on other aspects of the project.

A minor rant before I go. The Google+ mobile client for iOS has a lot to recommend it. Two things I don't like though are the lack of an HD/iPad version and the fact that it only works in portrait mode. It's the second decade of the 21st century. There is no excuse for a mobile application not to work properly when the device is rotated.

Image by gelund via Flickr

HP/Cisco/Good Morning

I'm still kind of regretting not getting one of those $99 HP clearance tablets. When I did a brief survey on EBay they were selling for twice that yesterday. I like my iPad well enough but having a very inexpensive alternative to compare it to would have been nice.

If HP had gone this route earlier they might not have failed in the tablet space. Of course they are losing a ton of money on each unit sold but it might have been worth it if they could have established WebOS as a viable alternative to Android and iOS. There has already been a port of Android announced for the platform; no surprise there given the capabilities of the hardware and the closeout price.

HP's fire sale can't be making other vendors happy though as they are no doubt cannibalizing at least some of the tablet market. Apple probably won't see much of a blip but the Android tablets are going to see a short term reduction in sales and given how poorly most of them have been doing to date that isn't a good thing.

It will be interesting to see how much of an impact, if any this has on people's price expectations, particularly for Android. Apple might just make out like bandits on this one as they have high margins and a differentiated product. The Android tablets are much more commoditized and don't have a lot of room for price cuts if they want to stay profitable.

On a different note, my halfhearted aspirations to be a Cisco CCNP are continuing to lead where most halfhearted aspirations do. I managed to fail the switch exam again. Oddly I know I was much better prepared than the first time and my score was actually lower.

One of my early jobs was working as a programmer in a department that created both computerized and paper and pencil tests. I’ll never claim to be a trained in the art of psychometrics but I do have a pretty good layman’s grasp of the concepts and this kind of variance in the face on increased knowledge doesn’t bode well for the testing methodology in use by Cisco.

I’m done for now on the Cisco front. I just don’t have the motivation I need right now to be successful and I’d rather be spending the time learning technologies and skills that are directly applicable to my current hobbies and side projects.

Image via Wikipedia

Related articles

• Race is On to Port HP TouchPad to Android from webOS (linearfix.wordpress.com)
• Hey Amazon: Now You Know How To Beat Apple In The Tablet Space (AMZN, HPQ, AAPL, GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

It's All About... (Short Take)

Image via WikipediaMe this time. I'll get back to my prognosticating in a few days. Right now I'm a little obsessed/distracted with other things.

The weekend is about done and results are mixed. For my nascent business idea I made good progress. I'm not done with the initial project I'd scoped out in my head but I'm not far off and I've worked my way through a number of problems so the remaining sections should go faster.  Two hundred and fifty lines of working code plus an initial database schema isn't bad given how rusty I am.

I had two other projects I needed to make progress on. One I'll talk about in my other BLOG. The third was studying for my Cisco CCNP switch exam. I think I'm going to be OK there. I just need to get an early start tomorrow and go over my notes one more time before heading to the testing center. This will be my second attempt. I barely missed passing the first time so in theory I should be OK this time but I've been letting myself get a bit too fragmented recently. I'll know soon enough I guess.

I'm going to keep this short so I can get to sleep and get an early start.

Happy Monday everyone.