Web 2.0 — Connecting the Dots

Adobe “Hearts” Apple? Like a heart attack maybe…

May 13, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Like many of his fellow Adobe bloggers suddenly free to support Adobe’s new position on why Flash is so “open” and “good for consumers”, John Nack at Adobe had an interesting post which he started off like this:

“Today Adobe ran a full-page ad in various newspapers articulating key company beliefs, and company founders John Warnock & Chuck Geschke–whose PostScript innovations were instrumental in the adoption of the Macintosh & desktop publishing–posted their thoughts on open markets & open competition:

Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.

John continues on in his post talking about why he loves Apple, how he wants to “…build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen” but “who will decide” if he can get them accepted in the Apple App store? He then goes on to pontificate about innovating, the good of competition, and that his reader should care about this debate, “…because these issues affect your choices as a customer & a creative person.“

No they don’t. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Web/Tech Tagged With: Adobe, flash

Locust Swarms Devouring Crops in South Australia

April 27, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

This is scary stuff, especially after seeing videos like this one of a mouse plague.

via sciencenewsblog.com

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Will Success Destroy Toktumi?

April 15, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

In September of last year I tried out the Toktumi (“talk to me”) service with their 30 day free trial and received a phone number. Not ready to pull the trigger and sign up at the end of that trial, I was ready a few weeks ago (and have six clients who could use it too) so decided to signup. Unfortunately, all hell had broken loose because The New York Times published David Pogue‘s review of Toktumi’s Line2 app for the iPhone (an app I’d downloaded back in September and still had on my iPhone) and an untold number of people tried to signup and hackers took the site down with some sort of account signup attack.

Toktumi took signups offline in order to recover and guard against future attacks so I added myself to the list of people being notified. But then the “impossibility gremlins” arrived to make buying their service impossible, mainly because their database still has my mobile number in it from last year’s 30 day trial so I’m unable to get past their “Activate Service” screen and complete the transaction.

Sounds easy to fix, right? A quick assistance from a human should do the trick, don’t ya think?

After several customer service emails, calling their toll-free number (support and sales…both of which aren’t answered and encourage filling out a help ticket) and attempting to receive help by using their live chat (which gives a rough time of engaging in live chat–mine has been 6, 8 or 10 minutes the three times I tried using it–but after 45-60 minutes I’ve given up and closed the chat window), I decided today to leave a voicemail for Peter Sisson, Toktumi’s CEO and describe the infinite loop I find myself in simply trying to buy their service, make him aware of it and see if I can “shake the tree” a bit and get some help.

Since I’m highly motivated I’ll keep trying through tomorrow and then give up permanently. It’s sad since I cover startups (at another site I’m involved in, Minnov8) and I’m well aware of the trials and tribulations entrepreneurs experience, especially when a sudden event blows up their company and they scramble to recover. But the ones that have survived “success” like Toktumi is experiencing have learned one thing and executed on it well: focus on those who want to give you their money and become your customers.

UPDATE: That was quick. 10 minutes after I published this post I emailed Toktumi customer service and they setup an account, told me how to upgrade and so forth so I’m moving forward.

Filed Under: VoIP, Web/Tech

Will NetVibes See The Huge Opportunity on iPad?

April 13, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Techcrunch had this post today about NetVibes launching a new auto-dashboard and tracking service, and it sparked a thought about my new iPad and I had to discover if the NetVibes service I used to know would be an efficient method of having a single spot to aggregate lots of sites and RSS feeds.

Most of the functionality works, but the same latency issues remain and a couple of iPad-centric ones emerge as I’ll explain, but those are trivial to the opportunity the iPad presents for NetVibes.

NetVibes is the best “start page” or “portal creator” engine out there in my opinion. It’s trivial to create tabs (like those you see in the screenshot above) and populate them with widgets that are either standalone ones for news, weather, sports, email, calendar, Twitter, Facebook or other news feeds and hosted applications and you can create your own widgets too. It’s also incredibly attractive and there are hundreds of “skins” to customize the look, feel and color schemes or you can create your own from scratch.

While this isn’t an exhaustive post about the functionality of NetVibes, I was quite delighted to logon just before lunchtime and see that a “dashboard” which I’d created over a year ago functioned perfectly on my iPad, though was a bit crowded with the 22 tabs I had in it (a number of tabs which looked fine on my huge desktop monitor, but a bit cramped on the iPad). [Read more...]

Filed Under: Computing, Technology, Web/Tech

Adobe Flash Roasts My ‘Chestnuts’ w/50% CPU Use

February 17, 2010 By Steve Borsch 5 Comments

All the brouhaha about no-Flash on the Apple iPad, how great Flash is (by the Adobe folks) and how HTML5 will be the savior of us all is not lost on any of us in the tech community. So having experienced the resource needs of the hungry runtime known as Flash, I decided to do a quick-n-dirty experiment to see just how much CPU is used by the Flash runtime to play a video on my 2.33Ghz, Intel Core2 Duo, 4GB RAM, Macbook Pro.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and posted the video today (in Flash, naturally). I thought it would be ironic to test the CPU use of Flash as a layman — a man who frequently has his “chestnuts” roasted from the nearly open fire of heat on the bottom of my Macbook Pro generated by the CPU being driven really, really hard by Flash — by playing his video in Flash and measuring its CPU utilization vs. a video played in HTML5 (on the YouTube beta site for HTML5 videos).

Bottom line? Flash uses on average 50% of my Macbook Pro CPU to play a video and HTML5 uses “in the teens” (15% -- 19%). If you want to see more, watch this VERY rough and quick-n-dirty video (sorry about the cheesy audio) I did to show you why I’m pleased that, either Adobe make Flash awesome, or Apple NOT put it in to the iPad:

UPDATE: If you’d like to read one of the best overviews I’ve seen yet of the controversy — and whether or not the iPad even needs a Flash runtime for video or anything else — see this AppleInsider post entitled, “Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash“. It’s a three page article so be sure to read all the pages.

UPDATE 2: An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash

Filed Under: IPTV, Media Shift, Technology, Web/Tech Tagged With: Adobe, flash, video

Make HD Videos w/Apple’s Keynote

February 7, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Being an effective communicator in today’s more virtual world means you must master the tools to do so whether it’s effectively using your webcam or having noise-free conversations via Skype.

Today we are, as Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Dries Buytaert of Drupal have pointed out, media producers as well as consumers. They have publicly stated that anyone who hopes to be effective online today (both as individuals and as organizations) must recognize that we’re all in the media business and must use the tools available to us (and video is the most obvious way) to deliver higher value communications than we’ve ever done before.

To that end, I love seeking new tools and exploring new uses for the ones I own. I’ve put together some examples in the overview called “How to Use Apple’s Keynote to Make HD Videos” about using Apple’s Keynote (available in their iWork ’09 suite) and it will hopefully help you see how you too can create and deliver HD quality videos that better tell your product story, message or any video communication you need to post online.

Creating HD videos is an especially interesting use of Keynote since most video sites now enable you to upload and deliver HD quality videos (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, VideoPress for WordPress) and HD quality is a great way to deliver product promos, your presentations or even creating intro slides for an HD video you’re creating in some other program.

Before you continue to the page that outlines how to deliver these HD videos using Keynote, take a peek below at one example of a video I did for our business and know that these types of video ads are MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE in selling products than a static product photo or a gallery below a static photo AND RESULTS IN HIGHER SALES (by 15-25% for us). It gives potential purchasers of our products a solid inside look at the $400 report and enables them to do so in 1.5 minutes which is a much better use of our website visitor’s time than expecting them to read dozens of paragraphs.

Here’s one video to start with but again, look at this page to see more videos as well as the “How to Use Apple’s Keynote” section:

Filed Under: IPTV, Media Shift, Social Media, Web/Tech Tagged With: apple keynote, HD video, videopress

FINALLY! Me. Predict. Apple iPad.

January 27, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Making predictions is always a crapshoot and I’m right about 65% of the time (just a bit better than a flip of a coin!) and have had some dismal failures, like when I predicted the Mall of America would fail miserably and it’s been a resounding success.

But FINALLY I kinda, sorta got one big one right. In a post on March of 2008 (Apple iPad: Would you buy a tablet-sized iPhone?) and again in one in April of 2009 (Apple “iPad” (or “MacbookMini”) is it *Finally* Coming?), I guessed rightly that it would be a big iPhone OS device as well as the name “iPad”. My prize for such a great set of predictions? Nothing since I was WAY off on my timing.

Now that Apple’s iPad stuff is up on their website, I can see that holding (fondling?) it will certainly make me crack open my wallet and take one of these puppies home with me when they ship.

Filed Under: Web/Tech

Atari 400 & 800

January 5, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Right out of college I worked for a consumer electronic manufacturer’s representative organization, Continental Merchandisers, Inc. (CMI) in St. Paul, and one of our biggest lines was Atari. My boss, Mike Kronstedt, made bushelfuls of money off of this explosive gaming system but some upstart named Apple had made computers and Atari wanted in on that action.

Above you’ll see the Atari 400 & 800 which were basically game machines. I did, however, do serious work on the 800 since it was the first machine that I ever played a genre known as “adventure games” as well as using “business applications” which were a text editor and a “budgeting program”. This experience with CMI, however, opened new doors for me as my next job was with the Apple Computer rep firm in Eden Prairie and set the course for my career in high tech.

Even I can’t believe how these were nothing but glorified calculators or slightly more elaborate gaming machines and is similar to how a high school kid today might feel using a rotary dial telephone.

Filed Under: Web/Tech