My Personal Infocloud
So
A double-blind test conducted in Norway reveals no evidence that mobile phones cause headaches and other complaints. It fact, it seems to indicate that people complained more about the devices that did not emit RF than the ones that did. Withdrawal perhaps?
So
I am not an economist or a CIO, but I called this one 5 years ago. It seemed pretty obvious that wage inflation (even then) would quickly make India less of a bargain. At that point your choice is to find 'the next cheap place to develop' or pull your operations back to the US. This is exactly the sort of thing that happened with Ireland before India was all the rage.
The other lesson that people have learned in outsourcing to India is that while the upfront cost appears attractive, the fact that you are going to have 5x or 10x the amount of re-work means the overall cost is much higher that doing the work in house. So that enticing $30 a hour work done offshore (versus $100 onshore) becomes more like $150 to $300 once you factor in the extra cycles to fix all of the low quality code you receive and the delays to your project by having work done 12 time zones away.
Technorati Tags: india, outsourcing, ideas
So
Great, so now people are watching and dissecting iPhone commercials as if they were the freakin Zapruder Film...
It's going to be tough to sustain this level of froth around the iPhone without some people being disappointed.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, commercials, wasteoftime
So
Sporkk is a fantastic 'Web 2.0' spoof site that brings together all the tired elements of these sites: reflected logos, smiling-faces stock photos, even a list of quotes from industry 'pundits'. As an added bonus, click on the 'glossy submit button' and it proudly proclaims that it is doing some AJAXy stuff behind the scenes. Brilliant.
And if you become inspired by sporkk, you can use sites like my cool button or Web 2.0 Logo Generator, to cobble together your own 'me too' design.
So
Amp'd files for Chapter 11; I am really not surprised. In fact, called it even before they went live, back in 2005 around the same time that everyone else was raving about how amp'd were going to take over the world.
Technorati Tags: ampd, deadpool, suckage, predictions
So
If you buy this unit, you had better hope that you never need support for it from Magellan. Their phone support direct-dial number merely dumps you with a 'call cannot be completed' message every time you call. If you actually do get to a human, they really don't care much about customer support.
My unit shipped with a defective mounting bracket. After numerous calls to support I finally talked to someone in support who promised to send replacement parts. Several calls later I find that the parts are suddenly on back order and won't arrive on the promised date. The support supervisor told me 'I am under no obligation to do anything further about it'. When I asked the 'supervisor' his name, he made up some Anglicized name through his heavy accent.
Hello, Magellan, be careful who you outsource your support to — how hard is it to find people who actually understand support? Or does it count against them to actually provide support versus doing the classing dump and run. Immediately after this phone conversation, I returned this defective unit and will buy a Garmin. I have owned several Garmin products in the past and I have never had support issues with. Ever.
I took a chance on Magellan because of price and learned once again that you get what you pay for. And, yes, Magellan, I have related my poor experience to others who also bought Garmin. Not that I expect any positive response from Magellan. Buyer Beware — Magellan support sucks.
Technorati Tags: magellan, gps, suckage, defective, crapsupport, buygarmin
So
Last night I (manually) downloaded iTunes 7.2 aka iTunes Plus as it was not showing up in Software Update. Not much to see, other than the 'new' DRM-free music being on offer.
What I did notice was that 90% of the music that I searched for came back as 'not found' in the store — including stuff that I had purchased from iTunes in the past. Granted, the majority of the music was not mainstream/pop, but, still, it appears to expose a huge gap in iTunes offerings. Perhaps it was just a search engine malfunction. Time will tell.
Technorati Tags: apple, itunes, itunesplus, music
So
Interesting visualization of national flags by color. It is somewhat remarkable the consistency in choice of colors across the various cultures and aesthetics.
Technorati Tags: flags, color, visualization, ideas
So
Google's Erik Schmidt has recently made some comments that have recently gotten a load of tongues wagging, but really is anyone surprised?
I have often thought that development within Google has been aimed precisely at gathering as much info about individuals as possible. I would imagine that the evolution was something like this:
_Hey, we have all of these people that we are showing advertisements to, wouldn't it be cool if we could individually identify them. Setting a cookie won't work, because that can turn off cookies or use different systems. Let's get them to login by requiring a login to enable certain parts of search. Check. Now we can associate everything that they search for with an identity.
Hmm, not that many people are finding that compelling enough to login to Google. Let's do what Yahoo did and offer them email. We'll use the gimmick of providing loads of storage, more than anyone else is currently offering to encourage them to dump as much of their email in there as possible. As a cool side effect, we now have access to all of their email contacts and can scan, parse and dissect their email contents as well. And now that they are using mail, they will tend to stay logged into Google all the time, so we can track searches, etc more consistently.
Great now let's see if we can find out what they like to do. Yeah, we'll give 'em a calendar so that we can track their activities, too. And look, we now get access to more contact information. Let's provide notifications of events via SMS, now we have their mobile phone numbers, too. Maps will help us know what kinds of places they like to shop, visit or hangout at. Good, good, good.
Let's not stop there, because we really want to know more private/confidential information that they have. That Writely thing looks pretty interesting, let's buy that and Google brand it along with a spreadsheet. Now we can scan, parse and mine their resumes, budgets and whatever other highly personal stuff they are willing (or stupid enough) to put in our online offerings._
As so it goes with the youtube and feedburner acquisitions (what do they like to watch?, what feeds do they read). It would not surprise me if at some point in the future that they acquire Joost to get even more targeted information on viewing habits as well as another easy avenue for advertising.
It sort of reminds me of the short essay Brian Eno wrote in A Year With Swollen Appendixes that was a sort of futuristic look at the lengths that advertisers would go to try to personalize their message. The tactics used, included customizing radio broadcasts, news reports and even people to try to entice a buy or garner attention for a message.
Technorati Tags: google, data, privacy, advertising