A few months ago I did a piece for FastCompany.com called LinkedIn Meets eBay, about a web startup that allowed salespeople to sell each other their contacts. If the sales world already had its eBay, it now has its iTunes: a place where sales and marketing folks can purchase contacts from a company named Demandbase, which has mined, screened and quality-checked a staggering amount of data to bring you the contact info you need to snag your next big sale.
This is cool. This is very cool, if you consider the way the analogy fits. Demandbase has taken data from all over the place, including data providers like Lexis Nexis and Hoover's, much the way Apple went around making deals with each record company. Then they did what Founder/CEO Chris Golec calls "cleansing, ranking, and scoring" -- basically skimming out the useless or outdated info and ranking data in terms of reliability or currency. They're working with a database of about 6 million business contacts, filtered down from 50 million, which Golec says is the largest of its kind in the country.
Here's where it gets cooler: everything is done via web-based software. You can log on, view the kinds of contacts you need, and purchase them piecemeal, usually for a buck or two. There's no subscription, no added fees, no minimum, no other tomfoolery -- you just buy what you want. The price is forumlated by the system according to a few different metrics: how well the contact fits your needs, the likelihood of a response to your inquiry, and the quality of the information. The software can even dip into your CRM software to make sure you're not buying a duplicate contact, and can add the new contacts you buy automatically.
Smartly, Demandbase is planning integration with LinkedIn and SalesForce, to allow its customers to maintain a fluid and consistent pool of contacts, rather than a fractured bunch of silo-like Rolodexes. It's also allowing users to narrow down contacts by zip code, for people working within certain territories.
It's not lost on the Demandbase folks that no amount of technology is going to make cold calling any easier. To really generate better quality leads, you really need a little help -- something the company thinks it can get you with a widget they're announcing today called Demandbase Stream. The Stream widget runs along the bottom of your PC or Mac like a ticker, telling you which who is visiting your site in real-time. If you're away from your desk, it's still doing its work, logging visitors that fit whatever search parameters you choose (incuding geographical area). You can even set it to display only visitors you might be interested in, making for an effective (if distracting) little tool that can tell you which companies might already be sniffing around your products.
Once you mouse over a visiting company on the ticker, the system gives you basic info on that company and generates the contact information for the most useful person at the company for you to call. Click and purchase, and you can capitalize on their visit by making an oh-so-coincidental call that day.
It's worth mentioning that both the Stream and the site itself work with fantastic fluidity, and the exact kind of Web 3+ graphical beauty you'd expect from any advanced data-heavy site. The site is built with Adobe's Flex interface, a nifty Ajax-looking technology that allows all kinds of graphical changes as well as dragging and dropping, without any refreshes. The Stream is built with another Adobe product called Air, which also acquits itself admirably. In fact, Adobe was so smitten with the deveopment of Demandbase that the company participated in an $8 million joint investment in the company, joining a handful of other VC investors.
Interestingly, Golec says that of the 5000 users using the advanced beta version of Demandbase are about 50/50 sales and marketing, most from mid-sized companies. In the future, he says he plans on positioning Demandbase to better serve high-volume enterprise customers by providing a subscription service with mass-purchasing potential, and even tying in the software with specific campaign pages, if desired.
There are indeed quite a few clever new lead-generation mechanisms being grown on the web frontier -- maybe moreso in sales than in any other field. But by using raw computing power to make a colossal body of data useful, Demandbase might rank as one of the more ingenious ones. With cloud computing on the verge of ubiquity, the mastery of improbably large data sets is the next generation of computing at large. With their two promising products, Golec and his team of 22 at Demandbase are looking especially prescient.
Plenty of companies spend extra money to try to squeeze more productivity out of their employees; FastCompany, for example, keeps their employees stocked with coffee, soda, snacks and comfortable seating areas as amenities. The idea: if you help employees wind down a little, it will encourage them to wind back up and work harder. Comfort, paradoxically, can be an impetus for motivation.
An industrial designer friend of mine told me recently that every ID professional's dream is to design a chair, perfect in form and function. That's because human beings spend a remarkable percentage of our lives sitting -- usually, at work. Which is why I jumped at the opportunity to ditch my regular office chair and try out Allsteel's new Acuity chair for a month, just to see what kind of effect its comfort had on my productivity.
In the name of full disclosure, I am no scientist, and had no objective means to measure with any precision the effects of using the Acuity chair. What I am, however, is someone who spends toilsome stretches of hours in front of a computer, often restless and fidgeting in the fight against that formidable office malady, Numbness of the Ass and Legs (or NAL, as I will call it.) It's hard to work with NAL. It's hard to think with NAL. It makes me want to get up and walk around, which I cannot do while typing. The result: more coffee and bathroom breaks, more peeks out the window, and the almost-irrepressible urge to lay down on the floor. This is often construed as unprofessional in American office culture, so if offered a panacea that could keep me in my chair without frustration, I'd be thrilled.
And thrilled I was, with the Acuity: not a trace of NAL after hours and hours of work, a seemingly infinite number of adjustability options (especially in the arm-rests -- this is obviously a chair designed for the keyboard-centric computer age), and a divine recline feature that was about as close to laying down on the floor as a working person can reasonably get. For a chair that starts at $1250 and goes up to a whopping $2525, it should be damn good. And, not surprisingly, it was.
While the Acuity folks would probably prattle on about the chair's details -- the leather accents, the pliant mesh back with removable "jacket" cushion, nearly half-made of recycled materials -- what really makes the Acuity worth your cheeks is something they call Acufit. What's that mean? Two things, essentially: 1) that the chair's mechanism uses the body-weight of the person in the seat to determine recline tension, meaning that you'll never have to push backwards to recline, or flop back like a wet noodle, and 2) that when you do recline, the seat bottom moves subtly in concert with the chair-back, the way real reclining chairs do. The first feature is one of those things that works so well you hardly notice it, but the second feature might be the most salient advantage the chair has. When you lean back, the seat-bottom (which is made of memory foam and a leather enclosure) moves up and forward, taking stress off your lower back. If I'm not mistaken, that is the exact purpose of reclining in the first place, so it's a welcome boon.
The other thing that's ostensibly different about the Acuity chair is the staggering number of controls and adjustments it is capable of (the actual number is 8). At first I was overwhelmed, until I realized that the chair essentially works with the same logic that the driver's seat in a Lexus or Mercedes does, plus a couple of neat tricks. Sure, you can raise and lower the seat bottom, adjust the arm-rest height, blah blah blah -- but you can also move the seat bottom forward or back, independent of the rest of the chair, to help support the backs of your legs. Then there are the ancillary adjustments on the arm-rests: slide them forward and back, or angle them inwards or outwards, or even move the entire things inboard or outboard. The reason this is terrific isn't because most chairs don't offer comfortable typing positions; they do. But it's when you want to change up your posture mid-work (perhaps put feet up on the desk, bring the keyboard in your lap, or type while reclined) that normal arm-rests would fail you. The Acuity's could contort themselves into every conceivable position my elbows could assume, and were unfazed by the freakishly long arms on my 6'1" frame. That is a good feeling.
Granted, all that adjustability doesn't come without the occasional downside: those uber-adjustable arm-rests feel flimsy when you wiggle them, inconsistent with the ball-bearing smooth-and-solid movement of the rest of the chair. Speaking of smooth-and-solid, the Acuity is incredibly heavy, a setback that betrays its terrific construction and use of metal constituent parts. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time lugging my chair around when it has wheels, but if you put this chair in your home office, you may retire and die in that house just so you don't have to move it.
Since this chair is aimed at enterprise customers, though, you'll find a remarkble and tasteful array of colors and finishes available, plus the option to customize for your office's decor. For more information, you can look up an Allsteel dealer on the company's website. If you're reading this and tapping your foot, waiting for the end of the paragraph so you can spring up and jog around the office (or you're watching your employees do that very same NAL dance), the Acuity might be worth a look.
Last night, PepCom held its Digital Experience! event in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, bringing together a few dozen of the tech industry's movers and shakers in a well-catered, safari-themed expo. So what looked good? The salmon kebabs and the mango salad was terrific. Oh, and there were gadgets.
Most of the goodies present last night had already made their debut on the tech blogs, but it was the first time most were available to journalists to putter around with. The first gizmo I got my hands on was Sony Ericsson's new 8-megapixel CyberShot phone, which is every bit as gorgeous as you'd expect. The device felt solid in-hand, navigated its menus fluidly, and converted back and forth between camera mode with little delay. Also on hand was Sony Ericsson's W350a, a tightly-packaged little phone with a superfluous, flip-open keypad cover, but a terrific slim and light form factor and the capacity for almost 500 songs right out of the box.
Over at the Nokia table, things were looking equally promising. The first gizmo I picked up was the touch-screen N83, which sports a little foldable leg on its backside that allows users to prop it up when viewing videos. While I'm not a fan of most stylus-based UIs, the buttons and icons on the N83's screen were big and bright enough that my fingernail served the purpose for most quick navs. I also had the pleasure of fiddling with the new 5310, a music-driven device with three of its music player buttons running up the left-hand side of the screen. A formidable competitor for the likewise-tiny W350a I mentioned above, the 5310 pumps out about 3000 songs and boasts an internal speaker loud enough to seriously annoy anyone else on the subway next to you. Even with the dull din of the PepCom crowd around me, I cranked up a song by the band Panic at the Disco! and got some heads turning.
Next stop was the Lenovo table, where they were showing off two ultra-portable notebooks weighing 2.4lbs and sporting some nifty touch-sensitive, stylized buttons above the keyboard. (I failed miserably at photographing these with my iPhone, but you can almost get the idea.) The company reps couldn't tell me too much about the parts spec -- the device is quite new -- but they could tell me it would retail for around $1800 USD, which suggests a high-end processor (perhaps that tiny 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo premiered in the MacBook Air) and probably a 64GB solid state hard drive. The machine will sport two different color options; one features a red metallic lid with a subtle flame-like design engraved upon it, and the other version is jet black.
At rival notebook-maker Toshiba's table, several people were messing around with that company's new Qosimo notebooks, the largest of which features a massive screen, two 250GB hard drives, and a motion-sensitive camera that allows users to manipulate the interface using hand gestures. When this was announced, quite a few tech blogs trounced it as impractical and silly -- after all, wouldn't this system tire out your arms? -- but in practice, it worked better than I expected. The Toshiba reps seemed to have gotten it down-pat with only a couple weeks of toying, and were happy to demonstrate photo slideshows and other such multimedia tasks being peformed with nothing more than a fist and thumb. Of course, these aren't tasks that couldn't be done just as easily with a remote control; then again, unless you have a trackball remote, you're not going to get the flexibility the gesture system affords.
Blackberry was on hand with their range of currently available devices (snore) as well as the somewhat cooler Bold, which should be coming out on AT&T this summer. The Bold's screen is ultra-high resolution, though not terribly big, and watching a movie trailer on it was something of an exercise in frustration. For such a bright, densely-saturated screen, it begged to be bigger. This isn't quite a multimedia phone, but the RIM folks are headed in the right direction. After getting a demo of the Bold, which will not feature UMA (the ability to make WiFi calls, as on some T-Mobile Blackberrys) I asked the company reps why they hadn't brought their forthcoming flip phone, the Kickstart. One of them grinned knowingly, and assured me he had no idea what device I was referring to.
One outstanding device making its debut at the event was the ZoomBak, a perversely clever little tracking device that uses assisted GPS (also known as A-GPS) to draw data from satellites and nearby cell networks to locate itself within thirty feet. It's simply a locator: strap it to anything you want to locate (dog, kid, husband, car) and it will keep you apprised of its target's location for days without charging. It's light, sturdy -- I threw it at the ground a few times, to no avail -- and water-resistant. The device's website lets you set up perimeter "zones" that, when breached by the device, will prompt an email and a text message telling you of the breach. Naturally, this could save a lot of lost pets and severely undercuts the automotive locator system, LoJack, in price -- the device is set to be less than $200 with a subscription rate of $10 a month -- but could also result in a considerable breach of family privacy. Cheating spouses, truent kids, and liars of all stripes should watch out.
For the gamers in the crowd, there was the Novint Falcon, a funky-looking gaming-specific input device that lets users control their games with semi-realistic gestures. The device has two attachments: a gun and an all-purpose orb with buttons. I played a little Tiger Woods Golf with it, and if I were a gamer, $189 would be worth it for something like this. Company reps say the library of compatible games is growing steadily, with big game-makers like EA committed already.
Also on hand was Vizio, the out-of-nowhere star of the flatscreen television market. They were debuting several 120Hz HDTVs, which offer a higher refresh-rate (and therefore more consistent picture) than standard HDTVs. The company was also showing off a rare 32-inch Plasma TV; most Plasmas start above 42 inches. In addition, it seems that Vizio has jumped on the green bandwagon, offering an "eco" TV in signature white and silver, and uses half the power of a normal set (the company rep on hand couldn't give me hard numbers on wattage, as the eco model is brand new, but we made a collaborative educated guess at around 70 or 80 watts).
All in all, some terrific gear for summer, most of which will be available just in time for air-conditioning season in July and August.
I don't normally consider myself a road warrior, but when my 92-year-old grandmother suggested I get an air miles card, I began to reevaluate. She's right -- I've been out of town almost every week for the last several months, scuttling around on too-expensive flights and sleeping on trains. It's no wonder that two little mobile phone accessories have established permanent seats in my laptop bag, minimalist though I am. Those two gizmos: ARC Wireless's Freedom Blade, and Spracht's Aura Mobile BT.
The Freedom Blade is a delightfully simple, switch-less, button-less little mobile antenna that weighs practically nothing, attaches to my mobile phone, and gives me enough confidence to conduct phone interviews while cruising up the DC-New York corridor on Amtrak. The Freedom Blade connects to most phones, PDAs and mobile broadband cards by way of a litany of adaptors; I used mine with a Verizon Razr. There's not much to say about the Freedom Blade except that it does what it purports to do: gives you better reception in places you don't usually have it. I didn't have occasion to use it in its mobile broadband context, as my mobile 'net needs are filled by an OQO, which has lacks an external antenna port. However, in voice context, I noticed fewer dropped calls, better voice clarity -- which on the crappy Razr is a boon -- and generally better coverage, without any discernible change in battery life. The Freedom Blade works with all carriers, and even clips onto things (like laptop screens or car vents) for convenience. It's priced pretty well at $25, but the adaptors can cost up to $15; if reception is a consistent thorn in your side, it's worth it.
The second device that has become a frequent fixture in my hotel-hopping is the Aura Mobile BT, made by Spracht. It's a little ovate pod that serves as a Bluetooth-enabled, multi-purpose speakerphone device that can pair with your mobile phone, PC/Mac for VoIP calls, or cordless home phone. Spracht claims the Aura Mobile BT is small enough to fit "in your shirt pocket," but that's like saying you can fit an entire sandwich in your mouth at once. Can you? Yeah, probably. Would you? Likely not. The device is, however, quite light, so I was happy to toss it in my bag without feeling bogged down by yet another gadget. The best part: it has rechargeable batteries that last almost 4 hours per charge, so on shorter trips I could leave the power adaptor at home.
Spracht is quick to point out that this thing will pair with almost anything you've got without any software installation, and that's pretty much true. Even my finicky iPhone played nice with the Aura Mobile, although it wasn't smart enough to turn off its own microphone in favor of the Aura's, creating an echo effect that usually led me to toss the iPhone into the folds of my couch after dialing. Since the iPhone's speakerphone is absolutely horrible, I was content to do this, and the Bluetooth connection stayed solid up to 20 or so feet from the phone.
Pairing is easy enough, though not quite instruction-free, and the Aura Mobile BT seems like it would be equally at home in a car -- with its clever, visor-compatible rear clip -- as on a desk. Being a New York City resident, I didn't have occasion to try it out against any road noise, but with my apartment windows open at rush hour, callers on the other end still reported my voice to be loud and clear (and theirs, likewise.) That's thanks to dual speakers and a pretty beefy little 2-watt amplifier (which is definitely way more substantial than the driver in most other Bluetooth devices you'll find on the market) as well as noise-canceling technology. It's also worth mentioning that this thing comes with pretty much any attachment you could ever need, including a wired mic, a stereo mini-jack for connecting to your computer's mic and speakers, a cordless phone connector, a car power adaptor, and a good ole wall power adaptor.
The only hitch in the Aura Mobile BT's strategy to make my life easier was its price-tag: at $130, I'm not sure I would have been convinced of its necessity enough to buy before trying. I suppose the price is not unreasonable, seeing as there are a number of Bluetooth headsets that cost nearly the same, but Spracht has a bit of convincing to do before consumers will buy into the aftermarket speakerphone concept -- at least when it's not embedded into their car's stereo. Of course, that battle will be made easier by the fact that the device works exceedingly well, has great battery life, and is nice and portable -- not to mention that it has an array of great uses, from conference calling with a mobile phone to serving as a beefed-up speaker for my MacBook while I watch DVDs away from home. Now that it's worked its way into my arsenal of road gear, however, I'd have a tough time doing without it. In fact, it's the first device I've used in a while that has changed my lifestyle: I'm now accustomed to calling home whilst shaving, talking to my sister abroad while cleaning my desk, and calling to my girlfriend what she'd like for dinner even as I preemptively pour pasta into a pot.
As any "road warrior" knows, the key to traveling light is usually eliminating devices, not expanding a collection of them. But ultimately, the point of any business trip is to accomplish an objective -- get an interview, check out a story -- and whatever helps that end is fine by me. These are two devices that certainly qualify.
At the front of the room, one of the panelists is speaking: an asian man in a long fake beard, baggy hawaiian shirt and aviator sunglasses. He's shown up in disguise, even though his name is printed in the conference pamphlet. The rest of the panel consists of one online humorist, one bubbly blonde vlogger, one ACLU representative, and one 80s-coiffed lady who achieved online fame for making dance videos in kitschy sequined sweaters. Amongst this bunch, I'm finding the guy wearing a disguise to be almost sage, which leaves me wondering: what kind of conference is this?
It's the first-annual ROFLCon, and even its title doesn't take a stab at defining it (ROFL is web-speak for “rolling on the floor laughing”). Some of the promotional materials say it's a conference on “Internet culture,” which seems either vague or contradictory, depending on your viewpoint. I overhear people on cell phones telling friends they're at an event about “internet humor,” but that's no quite it either (witness the ACLU guy.) After two days, it becomes clear that this Harvard-organized conference is not about the Internet at all; it's about the people at the conference themselves. People who live and breathe online, who speak in its jargon, who gain Web celebrity, and who worship it. They're the hosts that breed viral videos, the dogged bloggers, the red-eyed coders; the people that read web comics, patrol Wikipedia, and have heard of every popular website at least two months before you. In the 80s, they were called poindexters, and in the 90s, they were called chat-room nerds. Now, they're the demographic that every marketing company on earth would kill to understand, because they are the online tastemakers, and they are hipper and funnier than you.
The guy in disguise is named Ji Lee, and he's an artist at a New York advertising firm. He's apparently in disguise because he moonlights as a vandal, getting his kicks applying large speech-bubble stickers (ala comic books) to street-level advertisements across New York City (which is, of course, illegal.) He places them next to the subject of the ad – say, a model sporting fashionable jeans – and waits for passers-by fill in the bubble with their own scrawl. Then he photographs the modified ads, and puts them online for the world to see.
If what Lee is doing with the Bubble Project, as he calls it, seems at variance with his job in advertising, well, then, welcome to ROFLCon. It's sort of like showing up at a gathering of environmentalists, only to find that no one's carpooled; a sort of grassroots World Wide Web, courtesy of the makers of Big Internet. There are vloggers who've made it big on YouTube, animators who've done projects for Xbox or Wii, bloggers hosted on Google's Blogger, web-comic authors with banner ads galore and a whole lot of viewers and contributors who keep this giant whirring Internet underbelly in motion by using massive swaths of bandwidth bought from TimeWarner or Verizon. I'm not saying these people are hypocrites, not in the least. But being at ROFLCon, you can't help but sniff the irony of a cultural movement that literally has no platform without the kind corporations that cultural movements usually undermine. You'd think that would make for some conflict, right?
Well, sort of. At this same panel where Lee is speaking – the title of which is so jargony I won't even mention it here – there is a certain redundancy of praise for an open, sharable Internet that shuns corporate manipulation. The format of the panel, in which audience comments and questions are taken with the same deference as the statements of the panelists, suggests egalitarianism. “The Internet is in a weird middle stage where no one seems to own it,” lauds Dino Ignacio, who founded the now-defunct humor site called Bert Is Evil (it is mirrored here.) He pauses, and goes on ominously: “But Hollywood might eventually gain control.” Justine Ezarik, the blonde vlogger, pipes in a few minutes later. “When you're doing this to make money, we all see right through that,” she observes, talking about the many offers she's had from marketing companies looking to harness her popularity and reproduce it for the benefit of a product -- only to learn that the Web doesn't really work that way. The panel seems to agree. Audience members pipe in with comments lamenting the temptation to “sell out,” but it doesn't seem to bother them that the Burt Is Evil guy now works for EA Games, Lee for a major advertising agency, or that iJustine, as she calls herself, wears an Apple pendant around her neck. Somehow, they still have cred -- even though the Internet, by the libertarian definition it's given in this room, is anathema to a business world that plays by rules of copyright, banner advertising, sponsorship and other total bummers.
Being at ROFLCon, you get a real sense that the pride of the “Internet community,” if you could call it that, is its knack for the stuff that is least profitable and nearly impossible for marketers to replicate: funny user-made videos and cartoons. That pride doubles when something sneaks out of the internet realm and goes mainstream, without the mainstream audience ever knowing its origin (such is the case with Chuck Norris Facts, the concept of which was coopted by a jocular Mike Huckabee ad during his campaign.) That's the duality of this Internet culture: it operates in spite of big business, but can't operate without it; eschews mainstream media, but revels in its attention. This is the face of a new kind of cultural underbelly, reared in an age when large corporations treat their twenty-something employees like kings and pledge to “do no evil.” The subculture that can cohabitate with corporations.
At one point in the panel discussion, one audience member hints at that very irony. Isn't it kind of stupid, he says, that we celebrate all this online self-expression, when a lot it is simply tripe that multiplies traffic, and makes money for big ISPs, Microsoft, Yahoo, News Corp and Google? The room goes quiet; it's as if he's stood up during a Disney ride and shouted that the scenery's fake. People glare at him. Shut up, man. We know.
The discussion moves on quickly, bypassing the dichotomy of a grassroots movement that benefits corporate America. I think it's because they're largely at peace with it. In no other market are the relationships between advertising, marketing, humor, art, expression, distribution and accessibility so vitally and obviously intertwined as they are online. Amidst this group of Web culture devotees, that's pretty much okay. So it makes sense that no one in the audience declaims the advertising artist/vandal Ji Lee for hypocrisy; he's sort of a human metaphor for the duality of the “Internet culture” that ROFLCon has brought into focus.
A contradiction, however, isn't necessarily a fault. In this case, it's a feature of a live-and-let-live community that celebrates the clever stuff and is constantly hungry for more, more, more. Such is this new breed of subculture, which is accepting, ingenious, lighthearted, and at peace with itself. Pretty incredible for a community that exists in one of the fastest-moving, most profitable markets on earth. Maybe that deserves a conference – or is it a celebration?
There are plenty of ultra-mobile computers on the market, and most of them are beleaguered little gizmos: half the size of a laptop, but also half the speed, half the storage, half a keyboard, and in short, half-assed. In that light, it's nice to spend some time with a little machine that is full of real PC capability -- even if it comes at full PC price.
It's called the Model 02, and it's made by San Fransisco-based company called OQO. The company's mission: shrink a full-scale Windows PC down to pocket size, without sacraficing usability. I'll save you the suspense: they've done it right.
The Model 02 is a full-blown Vista Business Edition PC that comes in a variety of hardware configurations. My test model was the top of the line: a power-sipping 1.6GHz VIA processor, 64GB solid state hard drive, 1GB of RAM, and a whole array of pretty terrific accessories. The best extra is definitely the discrete, black docking station, which has the potential to make the OQO a complete desktop replacement with its built-in DVD burner, HDMI and VGA interfaces, USB 2.0, ethernet and audio out. Models start at $1300, but the pricetag on my model rung in at almost $3200 without the $600 accessory pack. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The 1-pound device itself is housed in a sturdy magnesium frame and sports a 5-inch screen, a 3- or 6-hour battery, and a pretty extensive little backlit keyboard with one of those little pencil-eraser tracksticks for mouse navigation. That might sound old-fashioned, but the OQO trackstick is actually a wonder of precision; the pencil-eraser has come a long way since its ubiquity a decade ago. Precision is also a hallmark of the keyboard, which has a solid feel and well-spaced keys. And while I was nerdily overjoyed to find a number pad and nice, big "enter" and "delete" keys, some of the keys are overburdened with two or three different functions that are somewhat dizzyingly associated with the shift, function, and control keys. (Witness the poor question mark, which shares a key with the forward slash and the wireless dashboard shortcut, oddly displaced to left of the spacebar.) You can also use a Wacom tablet pen for touch-screen input, though I was content with the trackstick and keyboard for most applications.
You might have chortled a bit when I mentioned this thing runs Vista Business Edition -- I did too. But after speaking with Bob Rosin, SVP of Marketing at OQO, I can understand their rationale: Vista has much quicker wake-up time from its standby mode than does XP, and it has pretty advanced power management abilities to boot. With Aero and a lot of other superfluous junk turned off, it runs admirably on the Model 02 and rarely lags. Of course, OQO has baked in a lot of custom functionality to make Vista useful on such a particular device; the most salient example is their Wireless Dashboard, which allows you to quickly switch between WiFi, Bluetooth and integrated mobile broadband (which is an option, and works with Sprint or Verizon service plans). There are also zoom keys on the keyboard that allow you to, well, zoom in or out on whatever you're viewing on the OQO's screen, and a "rotate" function that turns the screen to display in vertical portrait mode. In such a high-end device, I would have expected a built-in accelerometer that could do this without neccessitating a button-press, but I was quickly placated by the touch-sensitive scrollers on the sides of the screen. They had a tendency to be jerky at times, but it was nice to be able to manipulate the screen even a little bit without rummaging for a stylus.
So, granted, it's a cool gizmo. But after the inital oohs and aahs subsided, the Model 02 didn't immediately find its niche on my desk. There it sat, between my desktop PC, my laptop, and my iPhone, its role unclear. I stared at it. Not as handy for email as a smartphone, and more frustrating for word processing than a laptop. Where did the little guy fit?
As it turns out, it's not worth trying to wedge the Model 02 between your existing suite of gadgets, because it really works better as a replacement for all of them. It took me a week to figure this out, detaching my monitor from its tower, putting the laptop away and using the docking station to make the OQO both my desktop and on-the-road PC. When on the road, the iPhone still handled quick internet excursions, but when it came time to book a hotel room on the train, or write a long-winded email to my sister in Europe, out came the Model 02. Back in its docking station, the Model 02 left little to be desired from my other PCs; only when it came time to do some work in Adobe CS did I retreat to my Core 2 Duo laptop.
It's worth mentioning that the more specialized the application, the more useful the Model 02 has the potential to be. For the average person, who travels only occasionally and does most of their work from a desk, it's hard to justify a device like the Model 02 -- especially considering its potentially astronomical cost. But for someone like, say, a journalist -- typing up notes from the field or examining digital photos to make sure you got the shot before you head home -- it can be invaluable. This isn't lost on OQO, which offers several accessory packs tailor-made for different professional applications. Logistics coordinators, technicians, field scientists and a littany of other workers will likely find the Model 02 a terrific little companion for their endeavors, especially considering its tablet interface and its ability to run any Vista-compatible software without caveats. Hopefully they'll work for organizations with deep pockets, because the OQO, in all its glory, ain't cheap. But when you compare it to other UMPCs that sport severely limited hardware and software functionality for only slightly less money, it's pretty clear that you get what you pay for.
Under-caffeinated readers of the Wall Street Journal might almost have been duped this morning by an interloper at newsstands nationwide. A parody of the monolothic paper, entitled My Wall Street Journal -- a pun on NewsCorp's other media property, MySpace -- took aim at the Journal's new ownership in an effort to undermine the paper's credibility and mock its (presumed) partisanship under Rupert Murdoch. (250,000 of the papers have been distributed nationwide, and are the product of an independent group of comedy writers who've done this same prank before, in 1982. Here is a photo of the front page, courtesy of the Times.)
Most of the jokes aren't much in the way of nuanced satire: the paper's lede news-analysis is a ho-hum "Bush Abolishes Death, Taxes / Move to Benefit McCain." But look closer, below the headline, and there are two small words that really turn NewsCorp on its ear: caveat emptor. Buyer beware.
But wait a second: the jokes are all goofy lay-ups, like the
Bush/McCain headline. Do we really need to be told caveat emptor?
Of course not. The maxim is more like a little punchline to the entire conceit, because it does something that seems anathema NewsCorp and the other media conglomerates: it demands your skepticism.
Everywhere we look, we see news sources referring themselves balanced and objective, with NewsCorp properties like Fox News leading the charge. I'm not insinuating that these networks and newspapers don't try to be such -- and perhaps that's why we're seeing a rise in sensationalism.
(After all, covering Britney's latest breakdown lets one eschew the politlcal minefield of, say, deeper reporting on the latest goings-on in the powder-keg Middle East.) Whether it's Fox, CNN, the WSJ or the Times, newspapers and networks are embarrisingly self-conscious of their
facade of objectivity, and they have almost an elephant-in-the-room denial of what everyone knows to be true: that any piece of reporting produced by a human being usually contains some kind of bias, intentional or not. You only have to read foreign newspapers to see that every reporter, no matter how ethical, just plain sees things differently.
In that light, caveat emptor is a punch line, sure, but it's also a surprisingly refreshing bit of candor from a newspaper -- even a jocular one. Somehow, our news sources have come to a point where their honesty and objectivity can be trumped by spoof newspaper that is simply, and valiantly, objective about itself. It knows it's a rag, and it wants to make sure you know, too.
In 1922, an author named Walter Lippman wrote a treatise on journalism called "Public Opinion." In it, he argued that traditional news sources were essentially useless tools for much of the country, who he deemed uneducated and uninterested in the nuance of world affairs. “As for example," he wrote, "in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people—that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced evidence," traditional news reporting "causes no end of derangement,
misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.” My Wall Street Journal may be chock full of stupid "gimme" jokes and obvious buffonery, but its real indictment of the news media, and Murdoch and NewsCorp especially, is its insinuation that they have a Lippman-esque contempt for their readers and for real objectivity, and that they opt for spin or sensationalism cloaked as reportage. (A good example of this kind of behabior might be CNN's controversial April 7th airing, in which a polite question from an audience member at a McCain rally was reported as "heckling" by an on-air news personality.)
It's worth noting, of course, that My Wall Street Journal is operating on the same principle as Fox News when it makes entertainment out of a serious issue (media bias) to rustle up the attention of an audience. Cable news has proven that this formula can draw the widespread public interest, but this group of humorists is hoping it can also peak widespread public inquiry. That's a tricky bet, however, when the medium seems to skewer the readers of the Journal as much as its ownership -- the MySpace pun that replaces "The" with "My" can be taken as an oblique criticism of a self-centered, anti-intellectual culture that is more concerned with opinions and gut feelings than actual facts and analysis. (That issue is discussed in this recent book released in February.) Whether the public is inflamed, and for the reasons the group of humorists intended, remains to be seen.
As someone who writes about technology, I'd like to think that I'm technically literate; I'm conversant in a few programming languages, I can ramble about future microprocessor features (like IBM's incredible optical switches), and I secretly hate Facebook. That makes me part of the technorati, right? Well, I've got a secret. I can't build a Wiki.
Or, more accurately: I won't build a Wiki. If you haven't tried starting one, I'll save you the trouble. It's a colossal pain in the ass. First you have to find the right Wiki engine for your purposes and your server technology. Then you have to decide whether you want to pay for licensing it, or find a version that does what you need for free (here's an explanation of some different types of Wikis, appropriately on Wikipedia; here's a full list of Wiki engines you can choose from.) Then you actually have to build it. By that point you're wondering: isn't there an easier way to do this in a Web 2.Whatever world?
Well, of course there is. But it just came out this week, so I feel like less of an idiot for having not found it sooner. It's called Nuospace, and it's a fully web-based, no-coding-required Wiki platform that aims to be a one-stop home base for documents and content that require group collaboration and editing. It's not project management software or a CMS, but it borrows some features from those genres; all changes are trackable, and there are several social-network features that make collaboration a little easier. Right now it handles Office documents and comments, but according to the founders, with whom I spoke last week, Nuospace should be able to handle all kinds of editable content before too long.
While Nuospace calls itself a web-based Wiki, it's really more of a replacement for unwieldy corporate shared drives and intranets. Because it's brainlessly easy to setup, it's conceivable that a group of employees could fire up a Nuospace Wiki for any given project with minimal approval from above -- there's a free version, or a higher-storage version for only $50 a month.
Granted, this isn't going to be a fully-integrated or branded solution -- your Wiki will live at an address ____.nuospace.com, for example -- but for quick projects, it could be a considerable time saver. You can try it out at demo.nuospace.com, but if you're on a Mac, avoid using Firefox; so far, only Safari is supported.
The growing success of a little web startup called Radar.net begs an interesting question: are we getting tired of lifecasting?
Think about how many blogs are started every hour, and how many are soon after abandoned. Blogs -- like Twitter and MySpace -- fulfill a fundamental need for expression and sharing, but can also be tremendously unrewarding. By nature, all three are declarative, not conversational; even with comments and wall posts, whatever communication is had is disjointed, public and brief. It's a little like talking into the wind; you know your words are traveling, but you're largely clueless about who's hearing them.
Here's what Radar does: once you sign up for free, you can use your mobile phone to capture pictures of your daily life, and upload them to the site. Only your group of friends can see the pictures, and they serve as prompts for communication between you and your pals, not as free-standing photos that beg for commentary (as on Flickr). It's sort of like instant messaging with a group of friends, except there are little pictures involved that help prompt a new string of conversation or inject a spark into an existing one.
Last week I sat down with the CEO of Radar.net, a sharp, unassuming guy named John Poisson. While Radar.net is based in San Francisco, it sounds as if much of his philosophy about communication -- and it's extensive -- was shaped by his experience working for Sony's mobile phone division in Japan (that's right, Japan: the real deal.)
Online life, Poisson theorizes, isn't about plastering up a static facade ala Facebook or talking to everyone (and no one) on Twitter. Instead, he prefers to think as the web as a tool for chronicling the smaller moments in life, and doing so within a forum of your friends. The natural medium for doing this, he believes, is photographs -- especially since the tool you're using to do your chronicling, your cell phone, isn't great for long-form writing. Meals, tickets, traffic; photos of almost anything can serve as useful, heartfelt and unique prompts for conversation. That's what Radar's banking on.
According to Poisson, most people end up with a group of friends between 60-80, far less than the several hundreds you see users racking up on Facebook or MySpace. If Poisson is right, that's because it's only really valuable to have ongoing online relationships with very close friends, and few people rack up 364 best buds. But that doesn't mean that every picture you post on Radar has to be seen by every friend. Instead, users have groups of friends (i.e., "College Friends," "Work Friends") to whom they can post pertinent pictures. Within each of those groups, there is even more privacy; if you'd like to make a picture available to only a few people, you can. Or, if you'd like to make a private comment on one of the photos, you can do that too. "We don't go head to head with Facebook; they're about face-making," Poisson says. "The world is getting over the notion of everything being public. Things like Twitter have a limited lifespan. We're enabling people to converse."
People getting over Twitter? Those sound like fightin' words.
If they are, they're rational ones. Poisson believes that Web 2.0 is growing up, and I'm inclined to agree. Once fascinated by the power of the internet for self-expression over thousands of miles and billions of eyes, users are becoming less intoxicated with quantity and more interested in quality. If I write a blog, who cares if some random guy in India reads it? I'd much rather know my friends are reading. Using Radar, I would know that -- and they'd have a chance to talk back.
Of course, there are problems with this model. Social network fatigue is the most salient; most of my friends would be loath to sign up for yet another account at yet another website. That said, if these are my real friends -- which they would need to be, for Radar to be fun -- they'll do it if I ask nicely. And maybe buy them beer.
As far as the mobile usage goes, Poisson claims that Radar's software will work easily on pretty much any modern phone, and in my limited testing, it does. Not everyone has the multimedia messaging service required to send pictures to Radar (the option is an extra on most carriers' plans), but mobile users can also email their photo to a special address at Radar that will also do the trick. As an iPhone user, I took this tack, but there is an iPhone application in the works as well.
Though it's easy to use and easy to install on almost any phone, I initially had trouble deciding what Radar's role in my daily routine would be. Would I do most of my commenting on my phone or PC? Most of my photo uploading from home or the road? How quick is too quick to respond to a photo? (I'm thinking of the requisite lag time considered to be polite when responding to Facebook messages.)
In the end, I fell into a routine that became damn fun, and not a little addictive. Not since my early Facebooking days have I been so enthralled with the minutiae of my friends' lives and thoughts. The difference is that comments and photos on Radar aren't premeditated or crafted the way profiles are, so you get to see more of your friends' quiddities. And that's cool.
Undoubtedly, some of you -- Blackberry users -- are screaming that this already exists. And it almost does, in the form of Blackberry Messenger, a kind of BB-only photo-capable IM software baked into all new Blackberrys. The difference here is that the conversation is quite usefully expanded by online use, and it's also archived so you can go back and see what kind of silliness was going on between you and your friends a few months ago. Can't do that with BB Messenger.
I'm not entirely convinced that the world will tire of lifecasting soon -- or in my opinion, soon enough. But when they do, Radar will be ready and waiting.
The Web, though I love it so, abounds with services I never knew I
needed -- and probably don't. For that reason, it's refreshing when a
site comes along that does something that actually makes daily life
easier. It may not be glorious, it may not be groundbreaking, but
YouSendIt.com actually made my job more efficient today.
The site offers a solution to that woeful problem: how do I send a
large file to someone? Even if they sit two desks down from me, am I
going to waste a CD? Give them my flashdrive and risk not getting it
back? Plow through the company network and find their dropbox? None of
those sounds fun. I would gladly, however, upload it to a third-party
site and let them download it from there without having to set up my
own FTP server.
That's essentially what YouSendIt does; you upload a file, it emails
the recipient a link, and they download the file. You can send things
up to 2GB, and if the recipient's download gets interrupted, they can
resume it just like any old peer-to-peer download. Individuals can do
this for free, but the company's bread and butter is enterprise
usage:for $30 a month, your business can get branded services with
delivery confirmation, sending receipts and other fancy-pants features
that make YouSendIt feel like a virtual FedEx.
They're not the only company to do this -- there are competitors
such as SendThisFile.com and Pownce.com -- but they definitely do it
with the most professional cachet and have more capabilities at every
level of service. That's evidenced by the handful of big companies that
have jumped aboard: Levi's, Ritz Camera, Novelis, and Kelly Moore
Paints, to name a few.
Like Pownce, which aims to bring big-file-sending services to
personal users, YouSendIt has developed a handy, light desktop app that
allows users to browse their hard drive, select their file and ship it
off without touching their browser. Ideally, that kind of functionality
could be shoved into Apple Mail or MS Entourage, so that my brain
wouldn't have to take the extra step in determining if every attachment
is best suited for email or YouSendIt. But hey -- the world of sending
big stuff digitally may not be perfect yet, but YouSendIt definitely
makes it more pleasant than it's ever been.
