Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Sep 29
Did Amazon Just Fork The Android Operating System?
Amazon is not the first company to use Android for its devices, only to customize the UI and add its own App Store...
Still, Amazon’s customization of Android goes above and beyond re-theming the interface. Amazon has created its own apps for email, video playback (using Amazon Instant Video), music and books...
Amazon is using Android 2.3 as its base, not the tablet-specific Honeycomb, and we expect that the company has taken the opportunity to optimize 2.3 specifically for the Kindle Fire’s hardware.
Likewise, instead of applying tweaks to the basic Android web browser, Amazon chose to build its own: Amazon Silk...
The tragedy here is that the Amazon Kindle Fire will undoubtedly be a very popular device. At $199, I can see many people picking these devices up.
And it could be a great opportunity to bolster the Android ecosystem.
To encourage and nurture a further competitive marketplace for apps.
But the challenge is stated well in the Mashable piece:
We expect Amazon to start courting Android developers to make customized Kindle Fire-specific versions of their apps.
It's not an Android device... it's an Amazon device. And though it may use Android as a base, it has a highly customized layer on top.
Do we now have effectively yet another application ecosystem?
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Sep 28
Congrats, I think, to Alec Saunders as RIM’s New VP of Developer Relations
Or perhaps condolences are in order... somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.
Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:
Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.
"Lack of support" probably doesn't go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry's rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to the iOS platform and developer ecosystem.
On the Android side, recents stats show twice as many people buying Android devices as iPhones... and today's mega-launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is going to light an even larger flame under the Android ecosystem.
Plus, add in Microsoft and all they are attempting to do with the Windows Phone platform...
And somehow... in the midst of all of this...
Alec is going to try to get developers excited about developing apps for the Blackberry???
Not just for the Playbook, mind you, but for the traditional Blackberry platforms of "BBOS" and the new QNX platform. As he says in an interview posted on RIM's Blackberry Developer Blog today:
Developer evangelism is all about personal contact, listening, responding, and educating. We’re going to work very closely with the developer community, expand on support and programs that make it easy and rewarding for developers to create apps, be in the midst of developers to understand their needs and secure a great developer experience, and identify and remove the barriers developers face in supporting our platforms and doing business with us.
It's a tough task, made even more challenging by RIM's recent earnings report (or lack thereof), but if anyone has a hope of pulling it off, it's Alec. He's an exceptional communicator, marketer and salesman... and brings both a great technical depth and ability to communicate in "regular" language.
I do seriously wish him all the best! I've been a long-time fan of the Blackberry, even though I myself changed mine in for an iPhone back in 2008 or so. RIM has done some pretty amazing things in the mobile market, but as Gizmodo recently noted ("How RIM Could Save Itself"), RIM tied itself to the enterprise so tightly that it missed out on the rise of smartphones in the consumer space - and the corresponding move of those "consumer" smartphones back into the enterprise.
What will their future look like? Can they win back developers? Can they make the Blackberry ecosystem sexy again? Can it claw its way back into being a player in the smartphone market?
Alec's got a challenge before him - and I look forward to seeing what he'll do!
P.S. Up to join in the challenge? As Alec notes at the bottom of his blog post, he's hiring developer evangelists...
Other notes about Alec's new role:
- Jim Courtney at Voice on the Web with a long, thoughtful piece on Alec's past and what this all means for RIM.
- Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch
Image credit: me. Taken at ITEXPO East 2010 in South Beach, Miami :-)
Sep 28
Time Warner Cable Seeking More Volunteers for Residential IPv6 Trials
If your cable company here in the USA is Time Warner Cable and you get your high speed Internet access through them, they are looking for more volunteers for their residential IPv6 trials. This message below went out yesterday to the NANOG mailing list:
Time Warner Cable is expanding our residential IPv6 trials in several markets, and we need more people. If you’re a Time Warner Cable High Speed Internet subscriber, and are interested in participating in our IPv6 trials, please let us know! We have a short form at
http://www.timewarnercable.com/Corporate/support/IPv6_volunteerform.html
that will help us find the right mix of people, equipment, and locations, to get the most out of our trials.
Thanks in advance for participating!
As a Time Warner Cable subscriber, I immediately headed over to complete the form. My whole home office uses IPv6, but it’s through a tunnel out to Tunnelbroker.net and while that works okay, I’d love having native IPv6.
Now, whether or not little old Keene, NH, qualifies as one of the “several markets” to which they are expanding their trials remains to be seen…
Sep 27
Video: Using an iPad to Create Tropo Applications
Stuck somewhere without a computer but with an iPad? My former colleague Chris Matthieu just posted this amusing video today of how he used only his iPad to create and deploy an application using the Tropo cloud communication service. I don't know what amused me more - that he wrote the app using his iPad... or that he filmed himself using his iPhone! Quite a deft bit of handling to make it all work:
You can, of course, register for a free Tropo.com account and start creating your own voice/SMS/IM/Twitter apps using languages like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and Ruby...
Sep 27
WordTwit Pro Gives You Excellent Controls for Auto-Tweeting of Posts
I've long been a fan of the WordTwit plugin from BraveNewCode and used it on both Voxeo's blogs as well as my own to auto-tweet out new blog posts. Given that I write 99% of my blog posts offline (using MarsEdit) and send them to the blog site for posting, the fact that I couldn't configure the resulting auto-tweet in WordTwit was never really a big deal to me. Some of my Voxeo colleagues who used the WordPress editor, though, really wanted to be able to modify the auto-tweet.
Primarily they wanted to add hashtags, although sometimes they wanted to change the tweet to be different from the title of the post.
The BraveNewCode folks came out with WordTwit Pro back in June and with my chaotic summer I'd never really taken a look at it... but now that I have I admit to being quite impressed! This video gives a great tour:
I admit that what I personally find most interesting is the ability to automatically schedule multiple tweets. I know from my own reading of my Twitter stream that there is no way I can even remotely keep up with the stream... and so I only see things that happen to come by at any given time. I've often thought about auto-tweeting a blog post... and then tweeting it again maybe 8 or 12 hours later when a different group of people may be monitoring Twitter. This plugin now helps automate that.
I haven't installed it yet on my own site... but I'm definitely thinking of doing so...
Sep 26
Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPad
Per Mitel's news release, the app allows users to:
- Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
- View missed, dialed, and received calls.
- Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
- Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.
Given enterprise users' desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.
Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.
Sep 26
The Frustration of Breast Cancer: Dealing With Hypotheticals And Going On Faith
No question perhaps highlights the frustration of breast cancer than the one I am frequently asked:
So how is Lori doing?
You see... physically she is doing perfectly fine.
At least... she has been doing perfectly fine up until today when they will inject her with various noxious, toxic chemicals to make her worse so that in the end she will theoretically be better.
This is the conundrum of early stage breast cancer.
There are no physical signs.
You are not "sick" in any noticeable way.
You feel perfectly fine.
In fact, my wife is probably in the best physical shape she's ever been in. She's walking 5-6 miles a day and just in great shape all around.
Physically.
You would have no clue that inside her MAY lurk a few random cells that can morph and evolve in such a way that they can cause other problems and even death.
It would be much easier in so many ways if she was sick in some way. With some other forms of cancer, the pain and sickness are very apparent.
You are sick... therefore you need drugs and other treatments to make you better.
Simple. Easy.
But with early stage breast cancer you have no signs.
You are dealing entirely with hypothetical situations.
The studies say that you have a 60% chance of not having cancer after 10 years if you do this.
The studies say that you have a 70% chance of not having cancer after 10 years if you do this.
The studies say that you have a 90% chance of not having cancer after 10 years if you do this.
With again the reality that
you might not have any cancer in you today...
... if only we had some way to know.
But we don't.
And so, as a friend said to me this morning, we are "going on faith".
Faith in the medical system. Faith in the doctors and nurses who have been treating her - and all the research and analysis they have done. Faith in the scientists who have performed all these studies and spent the long hours in their research. Faith in the accuracy of the very human people who have been administering all these fancy tests - and in the designers behind all the software and systems.
Faith in the fact that this course of treatment that will make her very sick in the short term will give her better chances in the long-term.
Going on faith.
It's insanely frustrating, but in the end it's all we have...
Sep 25
And So The Waiting Ends – With Chemo…
Well, at least we have an answer. We are no longer stuck in limbo.
The results of the testing I mentioned in my last post on my wife's tumor came back... and unfortunately not with the results we'd hoped for. It turned out that her tumor was slightly more on the aggressive side... and that they best they could estimate was that if she did nothing more there is only a 60% chance she'll be cancer-free in 10 years.
She's only 43 years old... 10 years is not a long time.
... and 60% is not really a great percentage.
So after much discussion and research she begins a four-month round of chemotherapy tomorrow, which will then be followed by five years of a hormone therapy once the chemo is done in December.
In theory, the hell we are about to endure for the next few months plus the five years of daily Tamoxifen will together raise the chance of her remaining cancer-free to over 90% at the end of ten years.
90% vs 60% ... not hard to argue with those stats.
But of course the irony continues to be that she could be cancer-free right now... and won't need the hellacious drugs, fatigue, sickness, hair loss and other horrible side effects.
But we have no way of knowing...
And so it begins...
Image credit: M.Markus on Flickr
Sep 23
The Uncomfortable Awkwardness of Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote
I cringed a lot yesterday. It was a bit painful at times to watch Mark Zuckerberg's keynote presentation at Facebook's F8 conference yesterday.
Regarding the keynote, much is being written now about Facebook's new (and very cool) Timeline feature and about how the OpenGraph API encourages further sharing.
All that is very cool... but for me I found Zuckerberg's keynote interesting more in the human side.
In how it didn't work.
Zuckerberg made attempts at jokes... and at least on the live stream there was often no response - or at best a small smattering of applause.
More attempts. More crickets.
Awkward pauses at times when perhaps he thought there might be some reaction.
Over-repetition of key phrases perhaps because someone had coached him that he needed to say those phrases again.
It was all very... human.
Mark Zuckerberg has never pretended to be an amazing public speaker. He's an engineer... a techie... a geek. MUCH more comfortable talking about the details of some of the features than in making the jokes and surrounding contextual conversation ... or trying to connect with the audience.
And he's 27 years old.
And he was speaking to an audience of over 100,000 viewers of the live stream, X-thousand people at the F8 conference and through news and replays out to the millions of people who care about Facebook.
Just a wee bit of pressure. :-)
As a public speaker, I unfortunately can't usually sit back and just listen to a presentation... it's an inherent part of what I do that I'm always watching other speakers - listening to how they speak, watching how they move, listening to the words they use, looking at how they interact with the audience... just watching with a critical eye because that is how you become a better speaker.
And so I watched... and cringed when things didn't go the way he perhaps hoped.
We've all been there... sometimes presentations don't work the way you think they will. Jokes fall flat. Pictures don't resonate. Audiences don't interact. And it's all very well for me to sit here and comment... but I wasn't on the stage where he was... under the pressure he was...
In the end, the people watching were there to hear how Facebook was going to dramatically change the way people can interact with the site... and they got that info. Zuckerberg gave the demos, introduced the new features... all went well on that front.
And if Zuckerberg's stage presence seemed strained or awkward at times, it is perhaps a sign of his newness to this global stage upon which he finds himself. I respect him for getting out there and being that very public face of his company (as if he really had any choice). We're obviously only seeing the beginning of what Mark Zuckerberg will do in our communications industry... it will continue to be interesting to see where he goes - and indeed how he grows into presenting over the years ahead.
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Sep 22
Why Klout Gets a FAIL For Their Notification Emails
These email notifications from Klout get a big, fat FAIL in my book:
I should NEVER be REQUIRED to go back to your website to get notifications about your service.
You have already interrupted my life by sending me an email. Now you want me to further interrupt my life to go to your website to see whatever brilliant piece of information you want to share with me?
FAIL
This is a classic mistake by new services. They want to get people to come back to their website. Once users go to their website, the service can then track the users' usage and also try to entice them to go into other areas of the service.
It may work for some services... but for many others it just services to piss off users. They may just ignore your email messages and your services... they may mark your email as "spam"... or they may write cranky blog posts like this one.
Here is a request to all the zillion new social services out there:
RESPECT MY TIME!
If you want me to use your service... and more importantly, if you want me to be a happy user of your service and promote it to other people, then follow this one simple step:
RESPECT MY TIME!
Send me a notification email WITH THE MESSAGE INCLUDED.
Facebook does this.
Twitter does this.
Google+ does this.
LinkedIn does this. (although I seem to recall they didn't at first, but that was years ago)
Every service should do this.
Don't make me go back to your website.
Respect my time.
Maybe I'll use your service more.... maybe I'll click back to your web site and respond or take other action. And yes, it might be a little less trackable... but you'll have happier users. (And people like me won't write cranky blog posts like this one. :-) )
