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