Check out http://apprejections.com/
I know it breaks the rule of writing about something that’s all over Digg, but it’s just too funny.
and if that doesn’t make you laugh then go to http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
The second one is kinda crude.
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The wind off Swaner Nature Preserve had a November bite this morning. The dark clouds were vogueing above Square Top like it was a winter day. Just idle posturing, no snow fell, but the threat was real and strange for August in the desert. I stopped at the ski rack in the garage to do a quick gear check. What’s going to the Park City ski swap? What do I need to replace?
Sadly it looks like it’s time for my XXXs to wrap up their career. They were a gift from George at Rossignol. He said, “I’m sending you some new tongue depressors, I think this fat ski thing is going to take off.” Seven years later, hundreds of thousands of vert on their scarred bases, one serious injury, two near avalanches, three jobs, four countries, four A-stars, one Bell JetRanger, three pairs of bindings and countless ski resorts…and some kid is going to take them off my hands for $50. There ought to be a graveyard for skis like these; a solemn resting place for workhorses that have done more than their duty. In these hammered bases I see my ski history, each weld represents a gamble that paid off or a bad decision narrowly won. The TGR sticker on the tail is from the Harvest year when my allegiance to one movie company was strong, but it’s scratched to hell and I think I’m past my sticker days.
But next to the XXXs is a spanking new pair of Atomic ReXs with Naxo alpine touring bindings. I skied them three days in the spring and they grooved like pole dancers through every type of snow. But I have yet to use their super-slick touring functionality.
My wife gave me a pair of Atomic TMeXs with Burnt Mountain TeleBulldog step-in bindings. I whaled and flailed my way down the mountain like a movable yard sale, but I can now say I drop the knee. Riding in my pack they felt as light as a pair of cross country skis and every step in the bootpath was easier. They make the peaks seem a little nearer, a little more accessible.
The final pair in the rack is the absurdly wide Fischer Big Stix 10.6. They wait for the deepest days that are sure to come. I live five minutes from the gondola…fifteen minutes from first tracks. The strange weather of this summer hopefully bodes well for an insane winter. And that’s the heart of the Big Stix—deep in the 60” storms, days when crashed snowboarders bob and flail in the bottomless pow like ocean buoys in a hurricane.
But I’ll need something new to fill the slot left empty by my XXXs. Time to begin my new history.
Thanks George.
–John Bresee
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I tried to grab one more day on my KTM before the snow took over for realzie but unfortunately I was beset with personal mechanical failures.
Y’see I’m not real handy around the house. I replace a light bulb if it isn’t over shoulder high but after that I’m hiring someone who understands things like why smoke detectors beep for years after the battery is removed.*
So I attached the KTM to my new UltimateMX Hauler and within fifty feet it popped a wheelie like a circus freak and looked at best unsecure and even more likely that it would do a full el rollo before cartwheeling down I-15 until some Suburban cleaned it out like a gnat. Of course I didn’t discover that until my first refill.
I didn’t exactly follow the directions. I don’t generally. I think if a product is any damn good it shouldnt’t need a book to tell you how o use it.
I have never heard or seen anyone read the directions on a urinal. It’s designed in such a way that we all figure out how to make it go. So I assumed the MX Hauler would be much the same. But I was wrong and it was past midnight and time to give in. Now I have to figure it out while my neighbore makes comments like, “wow, you put it on all wrong.” Yeah, I got that. That’s why I’m in Ranch Place instead of ripping to the top of Wile E’s favorite Mesa.
*(Handy tech tip when a smoke detector just won’t shut up; detach the offending smoke alarm and remove the nine volt battery (it won’t do anything but makes it lighter.) Take the smoke alarm and put it inside three large freezer Ziploc bags. Then drive the largest car you have over it back and forth at least 20 times. This won’t have stopped the noise but it is now half the volume and has a backbeat that could make it a hit for Bjork on the laughable improbability of man.
Open the bags and fill with pumpkin pie filling, carnation concentrated milk, and beets. These ingredients do little to stifle the noise, maybe 25%, but at least you have used only items from your pantry that you wouldn’t eat unless it was a full-scale thermonuclear war. Put these bags in the freezer. It’ll still beep every once in a while, but muted to such a level that it’s livable. Wrap them at Christmas and send them to your least favorite cousin.
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I borrowed $2,000 from my Mom for a white box 486/66 with four megs of memory and with it I started a newspaper, a journalism career and my first Web site. The white box was the theoretical bottom limit that could run Windows 3.1. And it could, sort of. It was all you could do, if you went to open a big program like notepad the whole system would crash with the screeching of failed temp storage on the itty-bitty hard-drive. Going from four megs to eight remains the greatest upgrade I’ve ever made. Suddenly I could compute…write articles, open up one of the thirty daily AOL or Compuserve disks I’d get. (76762@cserve.com or something like that).
I’m a bit geekier than average but still what I tote in my backpack isn’t wildly out of the ordinary:
Top Ten Items to Maintain Minimum Computing and Connectivity
1. Macbook Pr0 15.4″. Anything smaller is just annoying for spreadsheets and any larger and you can’t use it on an airplane. It’s simply the best laptop made for the hardcore business user. It’s intuitive, has long lasting batteries, huge piles of ram and every few months it just gets cooler. It’s the centerpiece of your geekdom.
2. Mac Air – Why both? Well they’re for totally different purposes. The Air is a beautiful engineering excercise. It starts in a nanosecond, grabs a wireless connection before I can say Linksys and just generally works beautifully for 90% of my computing needs. It’s great to pass around the couch with a must-see You Tube clip and it for some reason is less offensive to bring to bed than than the MacBook Albatross. But it heats up fast in your lap and just doesn’t have enough of a graphic card. I love my Air so much that I’m not sure which one I’d grab in the event of a fire.
3. iPhone- Simply the best phone made today. The day I got my iPhone was as important as the day I got email. And it just keeps getting better. The camera is astonishing and the UI is an entire doctrine on simplicity as the soul of usability. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the product gurus who took us from the Motorola Rokr to the iPhone. That’s like going from the Pinto to the Bugatti Veyron. It simply can’t be done.
4. Kindle DX- I love the Kindle. I love it’s one way-ness. I love that it buries me by Whispernet under an avalanche of content and yet doesn’t really allow me to create a single email response. I am not looking for another computer, I’m looking for a tool that will help me organize and get through some small percentage of the many blogs and books I hope to read. Amazon has give me back the gift of reading.
5. Verizon MiFi 2200 – It’s a cellular modem/wireless hub the size of a credit card. It can support five concurrent connections, be they iPhone’s or laptops. It has a four hour battery built in and the speed is reasonable. It’s perfect in my RV and allows me to get rid of the relatively bad Autonet wireless hub.
6. Apple TV – I don’t know why it doesn’t get better reviews. Since I got this I don’t need cable any longer and with the MiFi it works in the car. No more scratched DVDs.
7. Motorola Droid – I hate that I love this phone. It’s a mishmash of usability errors combined with raw genius. It hints at the Jetson-like future of mobile Internet.
8. Valentine One radar locator– I keep waiting for something better but it’s still the best thing to keep you on the right side of Johnny Law.
9. Oakley Thump sunglasses, V1. They’re so bad they’re good. It’s like the M-frame all over again. When you turn up the thump nobody bothers you. They look away painfully and make mullet jokes and that’s worth big money. Poison sounds especially good on those.
10. Party Blimp– Every remote control airplane I’ve ever flown has died in the first five minutes. The party blimp, filled with helium from WalMart, cruises slowly around the house safely bumping into everything and breaking nothing. It’s a remote controlled vehicle for someone with my limited skills.
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Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.
As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.
The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple‘s App store. But it’s cool.
There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.
The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.
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I’m not sure when it happened but one day after years of making beautiful cars Ferrari suddenly became the province of the gold chain, Members Only jacket, Polo wearing crowd. I think it may have been the day that Magnum P.I. first burned grass and rubber in Hawaii in his 308. Over the years I think it evolved and Robin Masters replaced it with a 328 Quattrovalvole near the end of the shows run. But that seemed to be enough mass market exposure and Ferrari went from being cool to an embarassing thing that one doesn’t want to be seen in…or near. Since then Ferrari has done a beautiful job of fighting out of that hole by making ever more amazing cars and raising the prices to astronomic levels. And it’s helped. But Porsche has helped more.
I always wanted a Porsche. Since I was old enough to read I studied every car magazine, memorizing the specs. I could rattle off the 0-60 numbers of anything with wheels. And I’d read these magazines in the back seats of my Dad’s seemingly endless Volvo wagon’s; always colored the same as some form of human effluent. I can’t imagine how he could go down to a dealership loaded with blue cars and red cars and black cars and come home with some new shade of brown. The 70s were a dark period.
The Porsche Turbo was the coolest thing ever. So much power that many magazines said it wasn’t safe to drive. That sounded perfect for me. But then over the years Porsches became the province of the gold chain set. One day I realized I no longer wanted one. They had become the new Corvette.
And now Ferrari is releasing their new car and I have to say it’s beautiful beyond words. I covet one again.
Ferrari 458 Italia
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The Droid is far more phone than I gave it credit for initially. It’s seems inconceivable but in the two weeks that the Droid has been available the Android OS has suddenly amassed 20% of the mobile internet traffic in the US.
RIM, which is the DOS of mobile Internet, is watching its awkward mobile traffic share swirl down the drain. One could reasonably guess that the market caps of the trailing providers will follow.
Palm, the inventor of the space, will likely be gone in a very short while. It’s sad as it is a once great company that made understandable wrong turns.
Microsoft is so busy competing in a raft of worlds that it perhaps did not determine that only one path mattered; mobile. They can lose the living room and even the server room but mobile was a must win. And in years of OS (CE, Mobile, etc.) releases they never seemed to be able to envision the endless vista that mobile truly represents.
It’s a two horse race now, Android vs. iPhone. It’s important not to understate that apple has created the fastest consumer technology growth ramp the world has ever seen. But Android is much closer than I thought was conceivable.
What matters is that for anyone looking at mobile development the paths will have to be bifurcated. Releasing apps for one world won’t be enough anymore…and we have yet to release even one. To find the world changing so quickly, even before entering the game is a frightening prospect from an enterprise planning point of view. I cling to the hope that where change is fastest is also where opportunity is greatest.
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It’s been a year full of challenge. A year rife with pain and growth. And as I set out hopeful to join my friends Raspberry and Blueberry for dinner I can’t help but reflect for what I am thankful:
The humbling of 2009 never seems to stop but that is as it must be for now. Thanks to all who help me get back up and figure out yet another way to tackle a fresh set of problems. I have more to be thankful for since I turned toward lightness and away from the inexorable darkness that is available to us all. I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.
2010 is already filled with more opportunity than I ever dreamed possible. I hope you all tear off a chunk.
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What I hadn’t realized when I got the Droid is that market economics don’t apply. You don’t have a customer in the Verizon store comparing the heft of the iPhone and the Droid and saying, “hey, nice, if worse comes to worse I could cudgel a would be attacker to death with this five pounds O’Droid.
What I mean is that people are so fooled by their wireless contracts or about the disinformation about network superiority or inferiority that they aren’t doing true comparison shopping. I picture Tina Turner, again from Mad Max saying to people at Verizon stores, “You know the story, Bust the Deal, Face the Wheel!” And those people, white as ghosts from fear and from being relentless geeks with 80 plus hours a week of laptop tans, subsuming their will and instead of walking out the door and going and buying an easily superior product in the iPhone, instead saying, “what do you have that’s iPhone-ish?” I mean we all saw how Clark Griswold ended up with the coveted Family Truckster.
And that I get. After two years of pent up geek demand as they steadfastly didn’t give in to apple the Verizon faithful are going to line up long and deep and keep the factories Wii busy for ages to come. And we will have an actual two horse race for a little while.
And so my believe is that la familia, mi cosa nostra…etc. have a super hit on their hands. The mafia like entities Verizon and Motorola coming together to craft a blood oath under a waxingg moon with the naive Google is laughably funny. If you’re Google. See the old men from Schaumberg will do okay but somehow Verizon got tricked into being a dumb pipe again. Ouch.
If you read the best article on the wireless landscape in years, by Bill Gurley, he espouses a notion of Less Than Free and it’s powerful. When you look at the Droid you see Google taggers hammered the place. You can’t take a morning constitutional without the Droid scouring google for words like loamy or brown. Google is so deeply integrated into the Droid that they have uncorked the largeest champagne bottle of clicks, searches and paid clicks since Bill Gross first invented this little idea at a company known as GoTo.com.
Well played Google. Y’seee Verizon and Motorola…they can dance this dance again with anyone they like. There are lots of hardward vendors. And Verizon your right to dip your toe in the click stream was the play…but you didn’t make it. You made like the record companies not knowing that Apple was using you to sell iPods and create an ecosystem. And now Google has played the telcos in order to lift the cap off of their market cap. Double in 24-36 months. Nice work Sergey, Nice Larry.
Lets see how well you play the trust busters when the game next changes. B-Gates is still ahead of you there.
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Here’s a video about how we used to market at Backcountry.com circa 2007. It’s kind of a B- performance. Sorry. There is some good data in here though:
This is a link that may or may not work to a speech to a BYU entrepreneurship class circa 2007.
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Wow. When Goliath finally decides to step up and kill David you expect some fireworks. I mean Motorola isn’t exactly new at cell phones. They practically invented the Bat phone and those huge things that Crocket and Tubbs lugged around on ‘Vice. So when Google and Verizon and Motorola teamed up for the wireless Malachi Crunch I expected something really cool. Unfortunately the first go round with it suggests that it kinda sucks.
I remember my two year-old son was able to operate my iPhone and unlock it on his own. He was quickly navigating through the interface without any help. I was able to make the iPhone work without resorting to a manual. I was annoyed by the touch screen typing but I got used to it in a few weeks. Already I’m jonesing for my touch screen QWERTY. The Droid is confusing and awkward and lacks, well, UI. As the CTO at my company often says, “soft is hard”. And boy the User Interface just plain stumps someone with my room temperature IQ.
The hardware is okay. The flash on the camera is nice and the speaker is better. There’s a nice use of vibration/haptics in the interface that I like. And it’s got a nice heft to it so when I finally get annoyed enough it’ll go clear through the window as opposed to bouncing off as the iPhone might.
I will say it’s better. The iPhone has forced the rest of the world to raise the level of their game. But all you Verizonites who can’t seem to understand that it’s only about $100 to break your contract will be happier on the Droid than on the DOS like Blackberry. But it’s no iPhone. The droid is the Corvette of phones…which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing.
The game isn’t over.
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I came across this text on one of our sites last night..in the cart:
Sorry the item(s) in your cart are unavailable. The item(s) have been removed from your cart.
Ouch! The previous text is in red for those who are RSS readers. I think red text is as offensive as the blink tag. It actually makes me nostalgic for the blink tag.
Lets just never use it again. And lets stop using plural(s) like this…oy.
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Ten years late mCommerce has arrived. Due to our convoluted quilt of 12 wireless technologies like the laughably bad TDMA (AT&Ts previous technology that could manage only eight calls per cell) we find ourselves arriving a decead after iMode revolutionized Japanese pop culture.
Apple‘s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store. Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.
Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.
What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.
Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.
And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se
e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.
And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.
Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.
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(Full disclosure: I’m long goog and aapl).
Two billion downloads. You can’ t really say that enough. It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude. Most of my life growing up I watched the Mcdonald’s sign change from 10 Million Hamburgers Sold to 100 million and finally a billion. Then one day they gave up and just said, billions of hamburgers sold…but that took me from the 70s to the 90s. And yet Apple served up two billion iPhone apps in less than a year. It can’t be overstated, this is the fastest consumer growth the world has ever seen. It’s amazing.
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