Vista Test Drive

After all the reports that Vista RC1 is stable I decided to give it a test drive.

I swapped out my hard drive in my notebook and put in a spare 30GB drive that I had a previous Vista Beta on. About 40 minutes later I was up and running. First minor problem was my display driver wasn't set right. I am now running at 1400 x 1050 as I can't find a driver for 1600 x 1050..so a bit of empty space. Not the end of the world.

So here's what happened

1) My graphics card isn't good enough. I can't run all the cool Aero stuff. I got a rating of 1.
2) Vista is really snappy. It boots up fast and things just work out of the box
3). I installed Skype, then went after some desktop Gadgets:
Wikipedia search, remote desktop gadget, simple calendar, analogue clock, weather, cpu gauge, USD to NZD convertor and a simple notepad.
4)Next up was Google Desktop. Nothing beats ctrl+ctrl.....well maybe vista does. I can now just press the Windows key and start typing. I'll try both
5)I thought I may as well try the latest version of Open office so downloaded that and installed in lightning time.
6) I installed G Drive...a nifty liitle tool that gives you access to your 2GB space on Gmail...right on your desktop.

Everything is running really sweet.. IE 7 seems to be really snappy on vista.

And I've installed Windows Live Mail...so i can check both work email and gmail on the one screen. Haven't worked out how to check gmail yet...wasn't as easy as I thought :)

First impressions are really good of vista though.

Brat Pack

An interesting post on the 37 signals blog about the business week cover. Apparently the kid that own's a third share of Digg is worth $60M....read on to see how they came to that figure.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_believe_businessweeks_bubblemath.php

Ubuntu gets a billboard

This one spotted near the home of Oracle (thanks O Reilly Radar)
http://wildbill.nulldevice.net/wordpress/?p=177

The cheeky sods won't let me view it in IE7 - must be time to get a life :)

Telco "right" down

When is the NZ government going to realise that the current telco landscape just doesn't work.
For sure something had to happen, but I honestly don't think the measures they've put in place are enough. NZ is too small a country to afford huge investment in telco gear, so what do we do?
Somehow the government needs to be involved. How about they dip into the Cullen Super Fund and make an investment in our future.

NZ will just be another Australia (Telstra) rerun played 3 years after the mistakes happened there .I'd be keen to hear the current thinking on this. Any suggestions ?

Anyway, heres the latest write down for Telecom. The new chairman sounds like a really good guy but my thoughts are that a real technology evangelist needs to be at the helm. www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3754731a13,00.html

War of the workspaces

Now that Intel has won the battle for a while (with AMD) I've started to take a closer look into the war of the workspaces.

A good summary of the whole Bootcamp / Parallels / Crossover storm over at Macworld
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/06/30/crossover/index.php

Now that macs and windows both run on intels, and the fact that Cross over doesn't require a copy of XP like Bootcamp and Parallels does, then the $60US price tag is quite appealing. If you look at the prices of hardware then you can easily see that affordability wise you won't beat a Mac Mini with a Core Duo at the moment..its easily $60US cheaper than an equivalently specs PC....so will the Mini and the MacBook do magic sales like the ipod - probably yes! Very cunning Mr Jobs.

In terms of a mini pc at home, i'm more keen to go with a custom Aopen Mini running Vista Pro(until a decent GUI comes out for Linux). Maybe a core 2 duo 2.6, say 1Gb ram with 2GB booster and a Life Cam - microsoft.com/hardware/digitalcommunication/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=002

Shiny Apples and Cider

Monday is the big day.....WWDC.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=15463&Page=1&pagePos=1

Apple will be all guns blazing...new models using the Core 2 Duo and no doubt lots of other suprises...Apple are so keen to ramp up the notebook war

And have you seen that PC games can now run sweet on Mac's using Cider.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/08/03/cider/index.php

This is so good for the end consumer...cheaper prices and stuff that is practical.

4 Million PS3's hanging on the wall

I confess I haven' t really played games for about 15 years but my interest has been reignited by the launch of the X Box 360 and the arrival of decent 32" LCD + screens. Even a 50" Plasma with relatively low res is great for Test Drive Unlimited - due to hit the shelves in September

Anyway...like any of the current battles Apple vs Microsoft / Intel vs AMD..this one is Microsoft vs Sony

www.playfuls.com/news_03802_Sony_Comes_Out_PS3_Is_Already_in_Production.html

Sony have been quietly busy in July stockpiling their new PS3's and shipping 10,000 of them to developers. I did the quick litmus test amongst our development team at work and I was suprised to hear all the guys were just hanging out for the PS3 - had I missed something.... I thought X Box 360 was just the best thing since sliced bread.

Well I guess time will tell and if a show of faith from our team is a good indication it looks like Microsoft have got a good battle on their hands.... 4 million PS3's will be shipped this year.

I can't wait to see what their strategy is for their equivalent to Microsoft's online 'Marketplace'

The "1920" experience

I have been making a few observations lately. Windows Vista will be a success, I know everyone doubts it ( I even started to doubt it myself after the dismal public beta release that had my centrino 1.6 1GB compaq nx 7010 widescreen blinking and grinding like a late nineties hard drive being defragged. I saw some good things though..unfortunately most of those have been sitting on a Mac for a good 24 months. I know 2 people in the last week that have gone out and bought mac books cause they thought it was game over. I'm hanging in there.

Anyway, there are good reasons for the delay....and Bill Gates needs to be respected....he holds back the release when he knows that he's going to be in the dog box with the CFO (a Kiwi i might add) for missing the holiday season this year.....any CFO would say 'Lets ship mate...our revenues for Q3 will be screwed otherwise, who cares if it isn't perfect, 75% of our fellow americans households have broadband and isn't that what 'Update Tuesday' is all about, "we have made update Tuesday painless now haven't we Bill ?...Bill where have you gone? Bill! Meanwhile Bill had already run off to the XBox team to check up on how Zune is going. Cause thats shipping for the holiday season. Some real interesting articles on that floating around the net. Microsoft is apparently prepared to take losses for 2-3 years on it as it knows it just has to be there - that is so true

Right....Vista...why it will be a success....What all the industry seem to fail to recognise is that Bill "gets" Moores Law...you know how PC's get more powerful by a factor of y every x years....Bill knows that Intel were on to something good....and his arch rival totally realised as well and completed validated by building Darwin OS X in parallel on the x86 architecture (what a well kept secret) then switched to Intel processors overnight...ever wonder why Apple didn't go for AMD instead (mate AMD have slaughtered Intel recently, why didn't Jobs go for them) ...its cause of the Pentium M, Celeron M, Solo, Duo, and now Core 2 Duo range... are FINALLY bloody amazing (the core 2 was the breakthrough) ....and it means faster computers for both desktops and mobiles that can run Windows Vista gracefully.....if you need more Ram (like 4 or 8 GB) , then get the "Booster"...another legendary idea...i blogged about that the other day if you are going WTF - that is old news. And the cool thing is that the CPU prices are going to be as cheap as chips - no price premium - don't you love when there are two heavy weights lugging it out.

So timing...well Intel can now ship 1 million units of the Core 2 duo immediately (thats amazing compared to what they could produce when they launched the Pentium series - i agree times have changed since 92 ).....Bill knows that people are going to be curious about the Zune....but the biggest hit this xmas has to be the Xbox 360. Microsoft know there is so much money in gaming and this Xmas is payback. Poor Sony...well the Japanese can play online by themselves on their PS3's this xmas...we know they are loyal supporters..and we know their cell phones (Sony/Ericsson) are so much cooler and better than anything else on the market...althought Motorolla have made a come back..the newest Razor is so cool.

Anyway....The latest build of Vista is way quicker anyway, alot of the inefficiences have been tidied up apparently since 1 June , combine that with an entry level Core 2 Duo and you have a great experience that will last the good part of 2.5 years. If you are a punter that will probably last 3.5 years cause everything for them now runs in the browser. if it doesn't it runs on your xbox360 or your phone Combine it with the 22" widescreen MS are promoting with their name on it (thanks Samsung) and you have a 1920 wide pixel Vista experience -the absolute minimum for a home pc...1680 may scrape through on a laptop but i suspect we'll start to see some real beefed up laptop displays come out cause its what we all use these days with our 3G/3.5G cards and WIMAX.

Then throw in Vista Media Centre (on a Aopen mini pc or Mac Mini running both Os's - that will be a cool party tricky to show off with your Mini Remote, switching from iTunes to Media Centre at the push of a button), link it up with your Xbox 360 with the Live Marketplace and Kachingo. Lets just hope MS ditches the Spotlight in favour of some new immersive gateway to the TV Internet. You can throw away all your remotes..the MS media centre remote is the easiest to use..no clutter just buttons that actually do stuff.

We live in challenging times people, where information overload is so bad (we are slowly starting to learn to manage it) but now web services are standard and our development shops finally get Web 2.0 (we hope) .They have to deploy on desktop, roaming laptops, hybrid smartphones,TVs, and cars. MS are now playing drs and nurses (have you heard about Microsofts latest aquisition to tidy up the technology solution for hospitals -this is great - get the NZ health system as a beta customer to cut our waiting lists - thats what they've been doing in the US)

Adobe Flex 2 and traditional HTML AJAX is good as well but its just the beginning, with the web community finally pulling up their socks....still way too much bloat.

Microsoft have been in all these games for year and finally will start to see some returns for the seeds they have planted.

The cool thing is that open source model is proven, and is needed to continue to champion innovation. mySQL turned the database world upside down. Apache web servers running Linux made 24x7 web busness a reality. yes our biggest ecommerce site was up for 515 days without a single reboot - thats more dough and cheese than anyone could argue with.

The 1920 experience will be here ready for the US school kids to go back to school in force next Summer. the business community will start to hit it up large next February. and the early adopters will be out next week buying the latest Dell notebook with one of these new COOL core 2 duos, slapping on latest Vista build, Office 2007 for word, ppoint and excel (yes they do rock)...they will use IE 7 with tabbed browsing, and Gmail (even though it is annoying) and google calendar on a second tab (cause outlook doesn't cut it anymore -i know 2007 is cool but it isn't cool enough) , google news on a third, they will have their RSS Atom feeds to keep them in the know, and they'll continue to blog as they try and put it all in perspective. they will tap control twice to use google desktop and find anything instantly on their machine.They still go for a run or bike with their Nano cause it just makes sense or they might use "pPod" on an old IPAQ and get the latest touchscreen clickwheel IPOD experience for free.

And people this is why the "1920 experience" or Microsoft way of doing things will live on.
Visionaries, architects and developers are the real ones that will make it happen though.

slave labour is just a cycle

Last month it was Apple being accussed of slave labour making our ipods now an artcile in the dompost on slave labour making jeans.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3745779a1860,00.html

consider what else you wear today and take for granted.....my solution...if we are so smart why don't we get machines to do all this "manual labour" so the jeans can be sold for $4 and are better quality and the 20 cents profit can go to giving these poor workers a better education hence a better quality of life. a vicious cycle though....would it be slave labour to make those smart machines?

Westerners think they are slaves as well working for big corporations that don't care. But even those that work for an emerging startup also have resentment. Why is this ?

What do we actually want in this world ? Thats thought prevoking for Friday

tips for startups

a great post over at Ben Barrons blog called "Pilthy Insights for Filthy Founders". His blog has been added to my favourites.

Intel is back !

this is so great...mobile as well as desktop processors...vista will now fly...ha no mac book is going to be this good !

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/27/intel_launches_core_2_duo/

i love seeing two heavyweights battle it out

while AMD have been doing mergers (with ATI), Intel have been making damn good next gen processors - i never doubted them - the centrino was just the start of good things to come.

Finally planes that can land on our runway

This is real good stuff....a figure of 8 trip for overseas visitors starting from Wellington instead of cutting us out altogether...nice one Positively Welllngton Tourism...you chaps are thinking smart.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3744841a13,00.html

May i suggest we upgrade our Fog systems before Auckland Airport does to avoid egg on our faces.

The arms race continues

One of my mates has been raving about the "Ready Boost" feature in Vista, that enables you to use a usb memory stick (with fast ram) to give your machine a helping hand.

Samsung, the leaders in cool stuff these days have just announced a 4GB booster. Apparently Vista compresses this so it actually is about 8GB of extra kazoom.

http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C8856/

What does this mean? Apparently it means fast user switching. You know what i want - quick restarts...not hibernates.....so when once every month that Windows forces you to reboot your machine you don't have to wait for 14 minutes for it to restart... I have a centrino 1.6 with 1gb ram...surely XP Pro should boot quicker than that. I suspect the windows indexing in the office beta is not too efficient....it seems to use about 10x as much resources as the google desktop indexing and crawling duo....maybe i just need to upgrade.

Bezos now sells diapers

Amazon has finally taken the plunge into online groceries - non perishables only.
So Peapod have the heavy weight of the online distrubution game to play with now.

If you don't know - Webvan (an online food retailer) went bankrupt in 2001 at the top of the dot com bomb along with other spectacular businesses. check out wikipedia for more info - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan

An interesting observation is this might be quite good for the corporate offices to fill their kitchens as most of the amazon stuff is cheaper in bulk. I'll let the suppliers manager know :)

Looks like Woolworths/Foodtown online in NZ does many similar strategies like Peapod on pricing of deliveries over here. They send me an email every week to encourage me to buy online - i still haven't but have recently realised that Woolworths pricing with One Card can actually match Pak n Slave a lot of the time. The shopping experience is actually really good as well - their revamped stores are so well laid out. A smart cookie there thats for sure.

heres the full deal on the Amazon grocery deal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/technology/24ecom.html

BTW New York Times Tech section is going on my favourites list. Bloody amazing articles.

The Scrum Method & Consistency vs Wow

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/technology/24yahoo.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&adxnnl=0&adxnnlx=1153822204-FD+Cky6XI1vGl3YbXwbSmQ

I'd recommend you read this three page article if you want to be brought up with the overall internet scene in the US (and globally). Will take you 5 min.

A few interesting points for us tech entrepreneurs .

"Like most big companies, it used to develop software by first creating a comprehensive design that defined how features would be written and tested. Instead, it is now trying what is known as a scrum method, where it will plan, build and test parts of a product every 30 days..
“We may not know how everything fits together,” Mr. Patel said. But by creating partly completed products that can be shown to customers, “We can get insights from users and react to that over a three- or four-month period to put it all together,” he said."

What the Flux ?

I was reading over on Rod Drury's blog about delayed LOCAL content, like listening to the 5 oclock news on the radio when you finally get in your car at 510pm. Who goes home at 5pm anyway? maybe an early start or maybe a '9 to 5er' government department worker running for the 513 express to suburbia. I guess if your route home isn't gridlocked you can. if you had one of those voice recognition ipaqs and just yelled "local news" it would go and fetch the recorded local news. Better still you just yell your favourite "tags" and it would go and fetch updated content from your RSS / atom list. It would convert the text to speech and give your own 5 oclock news. i guess this has already been done. doesn't sound too original. is that ananova dot com bomb era site still running ? but what happens if you didn't even have to think. and the news just got assembled from your favourite tags and you just yelled what sort of mood you were in. if you were feeling "worldly" you'd hear about the news in lebanon. if you were feeling like a "wellingtonian" then you'd hear about the latest house to slide off a hill in eastbourne or get the latest on the murder on the south coast.

on the subject of futuristic cool content....

MTV Flux
Check out what MTV is just about to launch in the UK - August 1 is go live.
"MTV Networks will on Monday make its biggest move into the "social networking" area, dominated by websites such as MySpace and Bebo, by unveiling plans for a television channel devoted to content created by its users."- - http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13999779/

I've been doing some thinking about how new news actually is - I heard about "Zune" about 12 days ago from memory. Most people only heard about it on Sunday. My local grocer will hear about it in a few years. So is Apple the only one that can keep a real good secret ? What are they releasing in August. I heard its the Zune killer.

Broadband in the US almost reached saturation point

Ok its official, 72% of websurfers at home have broadband in the US.
They reckon the double digit growth, up from 57% in May 05 will slow down to reach saturation at 85% - you aren't ever going to convince some grandmas to join the online revolution.
And those of us that can't afford to make ends meet with rent, food and power will still be out of reach.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060716-7271.html

So how long will it take NZ to catchup ?
This stat is home usage. I think it is fair to say that workplace use of broadband must be close to 100% in US offices. I wonder what the stats are in NZ?

RFID gone spotty - this is awesome

HP has developed the 'memory spot', similar to RFID but way better.
Try 4mb of storage and 10Mb transfer rate and all in the size of a pencil dot.

Some of the example these guys have thought of are quite amazing. Maybe the cell phone with built in memory spot reader will be all the rage in next to no time.

Imagine going into a store and waving your phone at a 'spotted barcode' on a TV. Not only do you get instant access to a tech review but instant links to "Ferrit" mobile which tells you the shop down the road is selling the same thing for $1000 off today.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/07/17/BUGOMJVQ9H1.DTL&type=business

Promoting Careers in IT

What do we need to do to shake the geek image?

I suggest we get all types of young people networking together.
Mix the young corporates (accountants, analysts, laywers) in the same room as some young IT professionals. Then just leave it to them...cool things will happen - create some businesses with cool technology and common sense $ and cents. Then the next generation will follow in their footsteps.

Shortage in women in IT
www.itgoddess.info/calendar.htm
The aussies are attacking the problem head on -
Apparently the female IT workforce has dropped from 25% to less than 20%
Similar stats are painted in New Zealand but they can't find $10K to do a survey.
Why don't they just create a wufoo form and do the survey online ? Might cost them a couple of hundred bucks to buy a domain and buy some forms.

Shortage of graduates in IT - grads 1/2 since 2002 in NZ
We saw the writing on the wall a few years ago. Professor Hine from Vic with the facts
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3725773a28,00.html

Wufoo Sunday

To stay up with the play on overseas trends I've been doing quite a bit of research lately..

Here's my best bet to stay ahead, I will add these links to my tweaked blog on the right over time.

www.ycombinator.com - what an awesome concept. Check out some the ideas they have given funding to.

radar.oreilly.com - Grab snippets from Tim O'Reilly and co. then you'll know that mash-ups were so last year.

www.australiananthill.com - A great entrepreneurs magazine from across the ditch. Start to learn the differences of our neighbours over the fence (thats if you are a kiwi). Get the hard copy - on kiwi bookshelves

Social Networking

www.myspace.com - the biggest and huge in the US
www.bebo.com - very popular in the UK. some say its better
www.imbee.com - a $6M Canadian startup's attempt at the youth market

that should keep you going for a while :)

Finally the weather has turned good in Wellington. A bike ride around the bays sure increases your energy levels.

intrigued by the title of this post - check out www.wufoo.com - that rocks !

tue 4 july

wow, check out google maps for your mobile, emulator at the following link

http://www.google.com/gmm/tour.html

Thu 29 June 06

Theory on good environments for startups
http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2006/05/how_american_are_startups.shtml

My theory on why wellington is a good place to start a 2.0 business

1. Small city - word gets around quick. e.g. i can ask a startup across town a question and they go and get on their bike and are across the CBD at my office in 10 minutes. where else in the world can you do that ?

2. Relatively cheap living - accomodation is pretty cheap to live on outskirts of town and public transport on the outskirts of the city isn't too shabby - the trolley buses aren't that bad

3. Its full of government department workers or some of the biggest corporates. these make good partners that can support the whole family while we can run our startups on zero income in the early days

4. people are so friendly - lots of people from overseas live here - makes everyday interesting

5. we are stuck at the bottom of the world - we make do with what we've got - we can make something out of nothing.

Mon 26 June

Evidence of another kiwi IT company kicking arse overseas... a scalable retail management system for the cinema industry....Vista Entertainment just scooped a $2m deal in the UK
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3711088a28,00.html

Sat 24th June 06

Got to have a read of this - Dell laptop explodes on dudes lap at Japanese conference
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/2817

Google trying to get on top of Microsoft before Vista launch - apparently microsofts search will be the default in the upcoming release of Vista in January. So Google has stitched deals with both Dell and now Adobe (previously Macromedia had a deal with Yahoo) to bundle the google toolbar.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062200124.html

i personally thing the 'Ctrl + Ctrl' ability of google desktop search is the best thing since sliced bread. I can't remember if vista defaults the text field to the search window when you press the windows key - i think it must do. I've gone back to XP as my 3G vodafone card wouldn't install.

Thought of the day
"Local Search" is where it is at....all will be revealed soon.

mon 19th - motivate me "cold" Monday

Update #2 730am - If you haven't heard of the "My Space" (http://www.myspace.com/ ) buzz...best you check it out..... but wait.....my space is so 'last week' - http://www.imbee.com/ from a startup called www.industriouskid.com - come on innovation nation - what can we do ?

news.com.com/Teaching+kids+to+drive+the+Net/2009-1041_3-6057231.html?tag=nl
"Industrious Kids is privately funded with $6 million, thanks in part to Symons' previous ventures in telecom-Internet networking with Zhone Technologies and Ascend Communications, which was sold to Lucent Technologies in 1999 for $24 billion. Symons said Industrious Kids will eventually charge subscription fees for advanced features so that it is financially sustainable. "

businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2006/tc20060616_682547.htm
MySpace already drives a huge amount of traffic to search engines. It generates 100 million searches a month. In fact, 5% of all searches on the Web and 8% of all searches on Google are originated by people who come directly from MySpace

update # 1 712am- - MS has pulled the plug on vista beta 2- windows no longer just crashes pcs, it is now seriously crashing the internet - "CODE RED" - no more vista - WTF did they not let Bit Torrent distribute the beta or every ISP on the planet to put the clog at the last mile rather than the backbone? Come on ..some common sense..anyway my DVD copy of vista should be here any day.
http://www.playfuls.com/news_03019_Microsoft_stops_Vista_download_from_fear_of_Internet_crash.html
its 620am on Monday and the cold hole we call home has a high of 9 degrees pretty much for the rest of the week - tvnz.co.nz/cda/tvnz/weather_area_skin/WELLINGTON?area=WELLINGTON

daily blog - 623am www.infotech.co.nz
yellow pages releases online maps - 2/10 at first glance - why don't they get it? - there is a slight lag on my 3G card today - not sure if its got something to do with the cold but am sure there are many "mobile warriors" in not so good coverage areas in NZ that need zappy maps.
So yellow pages fails, someone needs to tell this crowd about AJAX
no actually - tell this crowd about flash player 8 and 9.
maps.yahoo.com/beta - ok now if projectx just sold their urls to these guys we'd have the ultimate mapping service.

3G vs ADSL or a combination ?
A hot topic - as you may know i've ditched the ADSL at home in favour/experimentation of trying just a 3G laptop.um...its not working after 18days...although i have only used 399mb of traffic for the money (on the 1GB plan) .i want a pc in my bedroom ( samsung 32 inch lcd and xbox 360 with media center extender ) as well as my laptop so what do i do. i've forfeited the 11G network for a sometimes flakey 3G card. i'm realising i just need both. i guess 40bucks a month for ADSL isn't going to break the bank if it means i'm more productive and don't have to cart my laptop all round the house, after all we live on 3 levels.

www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3703846a28,00.html
Well anyhow - vodafone has realised the same...interesting times if they start using ADSL, NZ might get super fast internet after all - oops i forgot , this country doesn't have enough trained technicians to upgrade our exchanges - can't we all just have 3G routers with 108mb wireless. i don't mind if there is a popsicle stick antenna on a iceream sized box upstairs behind the tv.

thought of the day - slow net squeezes tourism
I think the figures came out the other week that occupancy rates in hotels hadn't really grown in the last 12 months or had slightly dipped. hello? yes this is an effect of NZ not being super connected. if our hotels and tour operators are already feeling the pinch then what have we got to look forward to. www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3701618a28,00.html

We need to pass a new bill to give every household, every tourist operate and every bloody politician mobile broadband in their house by the end of the year. Why is that too hard to achieve? We could then have a daily video blog of the most inspirational motivators telling the 'average kiwi to get off their arse and make things happen'...rant off..its 655am, i've read the infotech, and skimmed google tech news ( news.google.com/?ned=us&topic=t) and i need breakfast. why can't i just order breakfast in bed on my media center extended xbox - theres an idea for a startup.

Sunday 18th June 2006

I have just seen the X Box 360 for the first time in real life.
It looks great on a 32 inch samsung LCD.This is quite amazing. I can't wait to check out the ability to combine this with windows media center for e-commerce food ordering.
The UI is quite simply amazing, every thing is eye candy. Just the simple things make it so easy - the x box 360 remote is like the default remote for media center (which i think is the best remote ever developed) extendibility looks amazing with usb ports, wifi. I wonder how much microsoft has lost per unit on the hardware.

If you haven't seen the GUI - check it out - www.betanews.com/slideshow/Xbox_360_User_Interface/6/3

I'd better go and hire one - wonder if you can you hire them from the local blockbuster in kilbirnie?

My bro thinks XBOX 360 will have too much of a lead on the he PS3 by the time it comes out in Nov. Sony have tried to cram too much new cons into it like Blu Ray DVD which the average gamer won't even appreciate or use. What do you think ?

http://www.shopify.com/ - E-commerce for all the ma and pa retailers
I was just checking out Tim Haines' blog ( ims.co.nz/blog/ ) and came across this from a canadian startup. This will fuel e-commerece even more.


Thought of the day - I think i am being slowly convinced Ajax and HTML can do a job similar to Flash. Although gmail is a bit clunky with screen refreshes. I wonder if they have an API for gmail so someone can fix all the annoying things in a way like how zopto have done for google maps. theres an idea! I said 'similar job' - wait to you see what we have cooking with Flash Player 9.

17 June 2006

The ProjectX guys have been in San Jose at Where 2.0 showing off Zopto. - www.zopto.com. Those simplistic urls for street addresses are so cool - would take a Wellington based startup to think of it. Anyway John, Ben and the team deserve a huge pat on the back I reckon - leading the world in every respect - how long till they get bought out ?

blog.projectxtech.com/articles/2006/06/14/project-annouces-the-preview-release-of-zopto-com

I have been closely following the beta 2 of Vista which went public last week- a glitch in singapore caused my card to be zapped 9 times. full credit to Microsoft - they are shipping it free within 7 days and will reverse all charges - all before i even noticed. thats what i call that great service. i will run it in tandem with office 07 - word is really good. although the best feature - save to PDF is out of the final release. and yes - i have traded in outlook email for gmail - but still use outlook calendar. - office is well worth a look though -download it now - be warned excel crashses can corrupt your companys cashflow sheet - just happened to me - www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

ever wonder why vista is so late? 2000 monkeys at something for years is quite something. am sure the final product will be ok. here's a good insight into it. All is not bad. The broken window in the warehouse syndrome blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx

so why didn't i download it? i have rebelled against ADSL and gone 3G - a bit of a social experient to see if i can truly go mobile with my buckled war torn 15.4 inch compaq warrior www.vodafone.co.nz/promos/1gbfor49/1gbfor49.jsp . so far so good other than looks...The things you never learn until your flattie poses with her T3G card whose aerial is about the length of half my nose. my aerial is a national disgrace, the size of a full hand span. don't need the aerial most of the time though so all is good.

check this out - domain kiting - the newest internet scam - no wonder i can never buy the domains i want = http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html - thats insane. Maybe Susan Paul is using this technique to become NZ's richest woman again?

Thought of the day - I honestly think that of late Bill Gates is like the little boy that is always running late to catch the bus to work .Guess who drives the bus? - his mate Steve Jobs. Jobs has been driving Bill to work since OS X came out in 01 ?- but Bill has just told the world he is gettng off the bus for the last time - A man can only take so much of a hiding. But what a legend - he paved the way for the internet generation to take over the world. Thanks Bill. The blue screen will no doubt live on in your memory. We won't forget the START you gave us all.