My iPad is Just a Toy

There was a time that I worked hard to improve my golf game – as if a steadily declining score would justify the time I was spending.  I found I enjoyed the experience much more when I started thinking of it as a walk with friends through a manicured park interrupted by the occasional swinging of a club.

I have had the chance now to get used to my iPad and to show it to interested onlookers.  Even though no one has yet asked me directly if this is a device for serious work; it does seem to be on the minds of the curious.  So my intro now goes like this:  It is an amazing piece of technology that is a delight to use – but in the end it is a toy.  It is not going to replace any of my other devices and it will travel with me from time to time, but mostly it is a device that lives at home.  This may seem like a denigration, but it is not intended as such.  I think I will be much happier with my purchase when I consider my iPad ancillary to the technology tools I use for work.  I will never be a pro golfer and the iPad will never be a professional work device.

Yes there are the work use cases with the external keyboard and the productivity apps, but I doubt anyone really thinks work can be done on the machine.  Even someone who’s job is just reading the newspaper will find themselves sitting in front of their PC or laptop.  The mind is a nimble thing, and when I pick up the iPad, mine already separates activities into iPad friendly and not – and I don’t even try to do the unfriendly ones anymore.  Here is a list of things I do and don’t do on my iPad:

• Do:  Read the paper:  I read the NY Times and Wall Street Journal on the iPad because I can bring the thing with me to the kitchen and sit with my kids.  I do not use the Apps – the NY Times Editor’s Edition is inferior to the NY Times web page and a big step down from the Times Reader on my PC.  I did not even try the Wall Street Journal app.  Who would pay more for the app than the online version – don’t know what they were thinking there!
• Do:  Check the weather:  I Installed The Weather Channel app TWC Max+.  It is OK, but not as good as the native weather app in my iPod Touch.  Half the time I go to my favorite local weather web page instead. 
• Do:  Check the stock market:  I installed iStockManager but again, it is not as good as the native iPod Touch app.  But if I am on the iPad at the time I use that.
• Do:  Tweet:  I do post from the TweetDeck app, but it is a strain to copy and paste links, and believe it or not while reading tweets on TweetDeck, you cannot click on the links – weird.
• Do:  Maps:  I do look stuff up on the native maps app.  It is pretty cool, but it does not show traffic, so for that – back to Safari.  One amazing thing however is location based services without GPS.  I use both my iPad and my Touch with a Verizon MyFi device.  With that connection, the maps application and pinpoint my location to within about 100 yards – incredible.  I guess we know how the cops find the bad guys these days.
• Do:  Read email.  I think the native email app is good enough for reading and I can reply from time to time, but typing on the Touch is considerably easier than the iPad – and you don’t look so stupid.  Same goes for notes.
• Don’t: Google Reader:  I am a big Google Reader user and the Google App for the iPad is not very good.  The Touch one is better, but not enough.  So I read my RSS feeds at my desk.
• Don’t: Work:  Craft documents, emails, spreadsheets, reference databases…  no point in even trying.  Why spend twice the time and burn cycles on work arounds when you can save up that stuff for later and spend half the time.
• Don’t: Watch Video:  I tried to watch a movie and that was a joke.  I am just glad no one could see me holding the thing awkwardly in my lap.  Home video – which I thought would be the killer app is still something I cannot figure out how to do. 

So I do like the iPad a great deal.  Mostly because I have accepted it’s place in my computing life and I don’t try to make it something it is not.  

100 Blog Posts

When I decided to become a blogger this year I had only a general idea of why I was doing it, a hope that what I had to say would be interesting to others, and no idea at all on how it would impact me.

Last week I made my 100th post so this a good time to take a look back and consider the impact.

A few weeks in I concluded that if I was going to do this I should post something every day.  I have gravitated towards this discipline, and it does not seem like a chore.  I like to write and trying not to spend too much time is a much larger focus for me than trying to get motivated to write.

Along the way I did my best to articulate why I write and posted it on the About Me page.  Those reasons are still valid, but I find I write mostly for myself with the hope that others will find my thoughts interesting.  I do not think I am very interesting when I try to write for the audience.

As you can see in the chart, my readership is growing and it looks like I will have somewhere over 600 unique visitors in April.  I did not have any specific expectations on traffic, so I really don't know if these are good numbers or not.  Only a handful of people have posted comments on the site, which is certainly below what I expected.  The chart does not show subscribers, but I am now up to 10 people that subscribe to the RSS feed -- this number also strikes me as low.

After reviewing my work I have to say that there are only a couple of items that really push forward interesting ideas.  

Do We Want China to Fail?  I think we are locked in a very interesting battle with China and I have written often about how we need to remember that China is a competitor that we need to be worried about.  Even so, I do think we will be worse off if China fails in its effort to raise the living standards of its enormous population.  So we need to watch out for ourselves lest China eat our lunch, but at the same time we should not wish for China to fail.

Sales vs. Engineering:  In this post I take a look at a few companies and try to evaluate their thinking between the relative value of R&D spending and Sales and Marketing spending.  If you could hire one more person, would it be an engineer or a salesperson?

How Much to Pay the Guy Driving:  This turns out to be one of my favorite posts because it takes an idea I have been thinking about for a long time and puts it into a context that is relevant in today's debate.  I try to tell myself every day that "there must be a better way" and searching for those improvements is the best part of my job.  

 The Timid Need Not Apply:  I probably had more fun writing this post than any other.  We were getting our minds prepped for a family trip to New York City and watched Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit's amazing high wire performance between the twin towers in 1974.  The confluence of daring, creativity, and passion seemed so relevant to our business.

I hope my next 100 posts will be more like these few nuggets.  

Moore's Law Gets A Bonus Game

I am not sure how many extra games Moore's law has already used up, but if the latest press release by HP is to be believed - the law that explains the endless growth in the technology industry just hit double bonus and the end is once again beyond our perception.

The funny thing is that if you search for nano technology and chips the results are all HP -- announcing every year or two that the whole world is going to change from their inventions.  I suppose it is possible that these predictions have all come true and the PR machine at HP has just not capitalized on the follow up press.  The alternate truth may be that HP announces all kinds of cool science -- that just cannot find its way into real applications.

This time it is "memristors" and a published article in the journal Nature which outlines the latest advancement by HP scientists.  It is a good thing too because a consensus was building that the we had extracted just about all of the miniaturization and optimization that we could.  Memristors however look to be at least a 10X improvement -- so if this comes to be things will be faster, smaller, lower power, and even cheaper.  

Way to go HP.

Changing the Game

Years ago I met a guy who was in economic development.  Every town, city, state, region, and country has someone working to make sure they get the biggest possible slice of the economic pie.  He was that guy for one town in Texas.

Everyone in this business is working the same levers. They highlight their low costs, high quality of life, great workforce, cooperative government, and cap it off with some tax breaks or plain old cash -- all to get companies to move to their town.

This guy was different though.  He decided that all of these factors were insignificant when compared to the motivations of CEOs that wanted to make big changes in their companies.  He had found a study that showed how changing a corporate culture took seven years -- and the only way to speed it up was to replace at least half of the employees.

He also learned that if you move your company far enough, less than half of the employees will move with you.  So he decided that he was not going to pull the same levers as everyone else.  He decided he was in the business of helping CEOs make dramatic changes to their businesses.  He decided to change the game -- and his town won big.

Accelerating Innovation in the Land of the Telephone

In March of 1876, 134 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the master patent on the electric telephone.  There have been many advancements since then but in the age of the web, interesting and telephone have not really gone together lately. Interesting and mobile phone maybe -- but not your plain old landline phone. With the wide adoption of VOIP, however all of this is changing.  Here is just a sampling of new and innovative telephone stuff out there:

Skype:  Skype has been around for what seems like forever (7 years) and has just emerged from four years of ownership by eBay.  Here is a formula for success:  create free internet telephone company, sell to ebay for $2.6B ($1.9B in cash), go on vacation for a while, buy it back for $400M.  Hats off to founders Zennström and Friis for pulling this off and not only is Skype going to live on, but we should expect them to retake the leadership position in the industry.   

Google Voice: Still invitation only, and I have not been invited.  From what I gather is is pretty cool.  One phone number, take it with you anywhere, read your voicemails, view a list of your voicemails, and other features that make your telephone and voicemail as much like email as you can imagine.  If you can get over letting Google into another area of your personal data -- then it could be a great service.

Phone.com:  All the features you can imagine, conference calls, chat sessions, international, text voicemail, and more.  It is not free, but it is cheap.

Ring Revenue:  Described with a pretty good tag line: "Track Calls Like Clicks", this inbound call tracking service is innovative and a powerful tool for marketing departments.  Call by call reporting has been around in the call center industry for a while, but only a few people do a good job with it.  The founders of Ring Revenue came from web conferencing to mobile serivce provider CallWave.

Twilio: Want to turn your web site or web ap into a phone?  The Twilio API delivers all of the functionality you need with simple code in HTML.  This could be a turning point in the industry where anyone capable of writing a simple line of HTML can now have Click to Call functionality.

Vodburner: Be careful what you say on that conference call -- it could be on You Tube in 5 minutes if the person on the other end is using Vodburner.  That is right, you can easily record both the audio and video of a video Skype call with Vodburner.  Good for people like me who can't remember what I had for breakfast.

Jajah:  Make phone calls on Twitter!  Who would have thunk?  (in Beta only right now). This service also let's you build a directory of local numbers for your international calls (essentially custom call forwarding to international) which is an interesting twist on long distance billing.

Stay tuned for many new interesting developments in an area some have written off as old and stuffy.