Month: May 2014

Apple and Beats; I am Not Sure Why, But I Will Voice An Option Like Everyone Else

At the Store With Child Apple Beats
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At first I was a Microsoft user. I built my own machines. I used DOS back in the day and WordPerfect. My first laptop was an IBM Lug-able. It was so heavy that you had to use a luggage cart. I switched to Apple in 2008. I admit it, I bought it because it was pretty. Now a days my main driver is the MacBook Air with max memory and max SSD. So when I heard about the Apple purchasing Beats I ask myself why.

I ride the subway almost every day. I love it. It is very convenient and I think it is (when it is not crowded) fun. When I am riding I see three kinds of headphones consistently. I count them. One are the distinctive white Apple headphones. Two are the Beats headphones. Third are the noticeably bad copies of the Apple and Beats headphones. Oh and some bluetooth headsets. From the standpoint of popularity I can see why Apple bought Beats.

As for quality…I have no idea. I am not an audiophile. I don’t care about converting all my songs to high bit rate. So when I hear that the Beats headphones are not great. I was like, to whom? How many audiophiles are there? CNET says that it is only one percent. So that means to me that only one percent of the population won’t buy Beats. A minor number. Everyone else is fair game.

I guess I might be getting older, but I may not buy beats either. The style is not me. Maybe I am in my Microsoft phase of headphones. The prettiness of Beats headphones may entice me later. I can’t say.
Photo credit: Alejandro Castro / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Let It Roll, Let It Roll or Not

Calm Beach Ahhhh
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We have been there before. You know that situation when you see people repeating the same mistakes you have made yourself and you think if you advise them that will change their current path. It makes me want to say “Ugh, What the f*@k are you doing?” Most of my colleagues have been there too. However when you are working with startups and people who have their own first business…sometimes you want to tear your hair out. Do you standby and let it roll?

In some situations I will voice my opinion, but there are some situations where you know if you say something it will not work. I have heard it before; “Oh you don’t know our situation” or the best one “That will not happen to us”. History always repeats itself said some very wise man and it is so true.

What do I do in those situations? I let it roll.  Sometimes the best lesson is the one you learn yourself. I watch and see people learn for themselves. It works great. You can sense when someone is not responsive to advice. You can see it in their face when you start talking with them. Sometimes I do give it anyway just to see the reaction.

Not to say I am sadistic by any means, but it is sometimes is funny to watch. It is like a sitcom played out for everyone to see. A show. A well written show. Well written because it happened so many times before that there must have been time to make the writing perfect. Sometimes the endings are difference. Most of the time they are the same. Most of the time it is history repeating itself over and over again.

When I do let it roll good things happen. People learn. They comeback and say oh yeah it did happen…”Oh crap!!!!”. Then the “Oh crap” turns to action and action turns to expected results. Other times you just see it in them. A light goes off and then the path changes. A right turn or left (Doctor Who reference). It is rewarding to see.

It is hard to give advice and it is hard to take advice, but how it evolves is fun to watch. Oh startups, a crazy business and oh so exciting. I am glad to be a part of it.

Photo credit: A Guy Taking Pictures / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Net Neutrality And The Cable Companies

Net Neutrality
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You know I don’t want this to be a rant…be aware it could be. Recently the FCC has release a broad document outlining some of the rule making for  They are seeking comments on their proposal over the next four months. Here is a quote:

The FCC has previously concluded that broadband providers have the incentive and ability to act in ways that threaten Internet openness. But today, there are no rules that stop broadband providers from trying to limit Internet openness. That is why the Notice adopted by the FCC todays starts with a fundamental question: “What is the right public policy to ensure that the Internet remains open?”

What is an open internet? To me at least it has to do with the basic concept of equality of data transmission. All bytes treated the same, whether I am watching a video that is from YouTube or a video from Vimeo. The bytes come through the same with no degradation in performance. Some ISP’s have their own content. That some content should have special treatment. The same goes for blogs and news sites. CNN should not have special treatment versus any blog.

There are many issues that relate to this. Much to say one of them is on going performance deterioration. I have noticed that over the years my cable internet service has degraded. Even though I suppose to get fast speeds (mine is suppose to be 20Mbps) I rarely get that speed. And if i get the speed things download slowly. I did a comparison with my ATT smartphone and my internet. The video on my phone played great while the cable internet service stuttered and stopped to buffer.

The issue of quality of service is important. I am not talking about bandwidth shaping. I am just talking about the service in general. Why am I getting better service via my cellular wireless than my wired cable internet? The wired service should be better. It is not.

So I pose this question; How do we keep the connectivity innovating and keep the bits & bytes free?

I like this photo, but it is missing Time Warner Cable. Photo credit: Free Press Pics / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Amazon’s Audacious Photography Patent – The Colbert Report – Video Clip | Comedy Central

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I saw this last night and I had to post. I love how Colbert describes the Amazon patent and the patent process. I hope Colbert’s patent goes through. The Amazon patent is just nuts.

Amazon’s Audacious Photography Patent – The Colbert Report – Video Clip | Comedy Central.

 

 

The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations – YouTube

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The Vendor Client relationship – in real world situations – YouTube. A friend forwarded this video about the negotiation experience. Negotiating in these situations is very funny. You should watch it. However there is a lot of truth to the way people negotiate. At a point people need to get paid and you need to better plan your budget before you ask for services. I have been a consultant and business owner and have heard all the excuses.

Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger.

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But Wall Street—along with everyone else who’s down on Twitter because it has “a growth problem”—is making a mistake by comparing it to Facebook. Twitter is not a social network. Not primarily, anyway. It’s better described as a social media platform, with the emphasis on “media platform.” And media platforms should not be judged by the same metrics as social networks.

Dying…no. How many people are consumers versus makers of content? What would happen if everyone would make content? I asked my self these questions and looked around for more information because for some reason to me this did not seem right.

I did not know this before, but only 1% of people create content on the web. It’s called the “1% Rule of Internet Culture”. So why is it disturbing that 44% of people that have signed up for Twitter have not tweeted. Sounds like to me that is not bad at all. Twitter has become the hub for a lot of people as their news source. So these people engage by reading. I would think that would be great for advertisers. Why should we have more people post? Do we want all that extra content out there? I don’t.

via Twitter is not dying. It’s on the cusp of getting much bigger..

Where Do Crowdfunding Platforms Fit in Venture Capital? – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ

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Crowdfunding is a term that has hit the mainstream, with sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo becoming well-known for offering rewards, such as free merchandise, for providing financial backing. Adding to the mix are sites like AngelList that allow investors to connect with startups and take equity stakes.

This video tells the correct story when it comes to crowdfunding. It is not as simple as creating a campaign and they will come. Take a look at this video. The guys on the video tell the real story.

via Where Do Crowdfunding Platforms Fit in Venture Capital? – Venture Capital Dispatch – WSJ.

What Is Happening To The iPad. It Is Not About The iPad.

This old computer is so large it takes up a room
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Apple released their earnings report last week and everyone was abuzz about the slowdown of iPad sales and the slowdown of tablet sales in general. Here, here and here. They are missing the point. The market is not going down it is shifting. Something else is happening.

What does this really mean? When we look at the tablet market we need to step back. We should take this as a whole instead of individual categories of products. Everyone wants to characterize each product as being a wearable, tablet, smartphone or computer. They are all computers. Plain and simple. Thinking about it that way it becomes clear what is happening. As the cost of processors goes down and the performance increases. Moore’s law and automation in action.

The result of this is more powerful computers at a cheap cheap price. I thought about this the other day when I got in the mail a coupon. Yep a coupon. It was for a tablet for just $19. The coupon was from Micro Center. They just opened a location near me in Brooklyn on 31st in Industry City. My first thought was that this machine will be crap. Oh yes crap, because what kind of machine can you get for 20$. I investigated further via the web. Like you do when you don’t believe something. I found out that the offer was real and the machine is good. I read the specs and saw dualcore with plenty of memory.

I took the walk to Micro Center. A huge geekie store with everything you possibly would need in tech with very friendly staff. When I got the machine I booted it up and it come up quick. The screen was eh, but it was ok for reading. I connected it to my wifi and when surfing the web it was fine. More than fine. It was fast. I was surprised. I thought the experience was going to be very much like an old Windows 95 machine as it struggles to open word. That did not happen. This is very usable.

I researched this machine further and found out that you can get it on Amazon for 50 bucks. Still not bad. So for $50 you get a machine that is small and has enough power to do email, surf the web and read ebooks on. Just $50. I am struggling with how cheap those capabilities are now.

So soon people will be giving away these machines like they give away USB Thumb Drives. Imagine you are at a conference and instead of getting a USB Thumb Drive from a vender you get a table. Or instead of you getting a program as a booklet you get a tablet that has the program. At this point you could use a tablet like it is paper. I imagine that there would be some disposal and recycling issues if that was to happen. People would then consider them like paper and throw them out. I can see them piling up like folders and papers on people’s desks.

The prices of the laptops are down too and are going to go down even further. The microcontrioller performance is increasing, so why call them a microcontroller any more. They are computers. What we are seeing here is that soon we will have incredible powerful devices with tons of memory that will be very very small. Imagine the uses for technology. Computers are not going to be limited by application and price. Gets me excited.

The small powerful computers are going to be everywhere and why not. It will cheap to collect information and cheap to store it.

I am not sure if we are just seeing a category disappear or shrink, but a category that is spread among other categories. Computers everywhere and at a cheap cheap price.

Photo credit: Stuck in Customs / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Why Do We Love R2-D2 and Not C-3PO? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

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The concept was first posed in 1970 by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. He’d noticed that as robots grow more realistic, people’s attitudes toward them change. When a robot is toylike and capable of only simple, humanlike gestures, we find it cute. If it starts looking and acting a bit more human, we find it even more endearing. But if it gets too human—as with, say, a rubbery prosthetic hand—we suddenly shift allegiance. We find it creepy. Our emotional response plunges into what Mori called the uncanny valley.

Now I know why I am such a big R2D2 Fan.

via Why Do We Love R2-D2 and Not C-3PO? | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian.