I have to love Obama’s use of internet media (now officially mainstream media according to many). This is really is Change.

Change.gov
Weekly Youtube address
CTO for the White House

Maybe there’s also hope for net neutrality and control over what I believe will be ridiculous price spikes on bandwidth consumption - worse than the overage charges on cell minutes when we first got addicted talking on mobiles.

ShareThis

Here is a video taken by the people who stole my iphone (or the people who purchased it from them). They finally re-activated it and figured out how to use qik to upload videos. I realized this when my facebook status showed I had just uploaded a video to QIK, and I hadn’t. I did change my password on qik after it was stolen, but it looks like that didn’t stop it from posting. I don’t understand why it posted??????

Now that I have the geo-location of where the video was taken, let’s see if the police can find them. You can click on the “map” tab to see where the video was taken. Too bad it was a first gen iphone without real GPS (I would have exact location), but let’s see if the cell tower triangulation of the first gen iphone can get close enough. Will keep u posted Got ya!

ShareThis

original photo via CC Champan - Flickr

Damn it twitter! Such a great tool but sometimes fails miserably when you need it. Much of the advanced functionality (i.e. tracking) seems to never work. Tracking allows you to receive messages based on keywords you are “tracking,” very similar to Google news alerts. This is very useful for many obvious reasons, but unfortunately does not exist anymore?

The reason I decided to do some re-configuring of my twitter settings today was because I was missing @replies (@replies are messages sent in response to one of your messages). The only way you can monitor @replies is in the replies tab in twitter. I don’t check this everyday or even every week because it’s just not on my radar screen. To solve this problem, I wanted to get email alerts or sms of the replies so I could track them better, but….not available yet. Darn! RSS is also a problem because it requires a reader that can authenticate feeds - what? do they even exist? So how did I get around this? I took 10 seconds and signed up at twittermail. Twittermail will send you an email of any @replies you recieve, so simple.

I am now following more people (sorry for the spam blast to your inboxes today)  for one reason, I want the ability to mine my network for keywords in the future. I can turn the device updates on or off based on news I want immediately, vs. stuff I can troll later. Which means I can follow as meany people as I want and filter the real-time “noise” easily.  This alone is a reason everyone should be on twitter. The bells and whistles are coming…it will only get better. Until then though I still have love/hate relationship ;).

BTW you can follow me here http://twitter.com/gtuvell

ShareThis

Yesterday I was robbed on a train by 3 pro’s. It was perfectly timed, and happened in the middle of the day when “all is normal.” I was sitting with my head down scrolling through emails on my iphone and SNATCH. Train doors close, good bye iphone.

So I went to T-mobile and got the new G1 for $179 + a 2 year contract. I was already on an unlimited data and voice plan so the net increase in my bill was only $5. (You have to buy the unlimited voice/data/text plan with a 2 yr deal unless you want to hand over $400.)

I’ve been living with the G1 for about 24hrs and here’s my *limited* initial feedback.

The not so good….

•  Activation was “ok.” You have to sign in with your Google account on activation, before you can even make a phone call (sound familiar, apple/at&t/itunes?) For whatever reason my login wasn’t activating, and so that meant a trip back to T-Mobile and another 30 minutes waiting to fix it. I heard some others were having the same problem, but it must be rare or else we would have read the headlines by now.

• Contacts –> Google wants you to sync with your Google contacts by default. You can sync to your computer with some plug-ins, but out of the box the option is Google. I have a mac, and address book has a built in sync tool for yahoo, google, mobilme and other address books. I had a problem with this also. The Google sync that is built into Address Book didn’t work for me…at all. I cleaned up my contacts and instead used AtoG for a somewhat clean, manual upload. Some fields were still missing, but I have my contacts loaded and functional, and I’ll just do an AtoG periodically as needed to update my contacts in Google going forward.

• The battery has the weakest battery life I have ever used. I woke up this morning for a meeting, and by 1PM I had to do a recharge. I was using Google maps, email, browsing etc… heavily,  but it burnt out pretty fast. Too fast!

• I miss the multi-touch iphone functionality a little bit, but that goes away pretty fast after a few hours.

• Only 1 gig memory (that’s ok because I mostly upload or stream data vs. store it now)

The Good…

•  Usability rocks. I found it very easy to navigate the device, find things, browse the web, make phone calls etc. I really like the “notification” bar at the top that let’s you respond to anything immediately from one place. It’s also nice to have the option of using the trackball or touch screen.

• The keyboard is solid. I can type well and it beats the iphone hands down…missed this!

• Gmail and calendar push are top notch. Gmail is like texting on this device, super fast and you get it right away.

• The speakers are excellent

• Browsing the web is also very fast. It might be the 3g connection, but the browser is also very capable of delivering content quickly.

It’s only been 24 hours and I’m sure I’ll have more feedback, but at first glance this is a killer deal. A great phone for the price and T-mobile is solid worldwide. I’ve used T-mobile now for the past 8 years internationally and they do a great job.

BTW - Jari, my first choice at the T-Mobile store was the Nokia 5800 but they didn’t have it But, I change devices about every 6 months now so maybe soon..

ShareThis

ShareThis

Can’t we do better than the good ole character password system?  Here’s an example I just went through opening a new account (non security related)

The password you entered is not valid. Please note that the password must respect the following rules:

It must contain between 6 and 32 characters. Use only characters from the following set: ! # $ % & ( ) * + , - . / 0123456789 : ; < = > ? @ ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ [ \ ] _ ` abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz { | } ~

It must contain at least 1 letter(s) (ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz).

It must contain at least 1 numeric character(s) (0123456789).

It must not contain more than 2 identical consecutive characters (AAA, iiii, $$$$$ …).

It must not contain your user name.

It must not contain your email address.

Can’t we do a picture combination, or a pattern recognition system we can drag our mouse over ?… something besides these brain challenges? See the new Google Android password requirements. I think they’re going down the right track.

ShareThis

Just learned today that JungleDisk and Slicehost were picked up by Rackspace.

$28M including earn out. Pretty good return for 14 Months

Rackspace now looking very much a Utility Computing player.

hmm..Wonder what Rackspace competitors will do to respond?

Congrats Dave.

ShareThis

Why do we not have a digital business card ?

Why can’t we store our business card/personal contact info in our mobile devices and quickly swap this info with anyone else carrying a mobile device? Is it that difficult to do? I don’t think so. You would just need a bluetooth or wi-fi connection and it’s done. We already have a standard address book format (vcard). Right?

Why does this product not exist or I am unaware of it? BTW - not talking about being able to do this via palm infrared, or nokia to nokia, I mean standard among all devices.

ShareThis

This is Robin, a person I wish everyone could meet. I met her on my flight home from San Francisco. It was the best conversation I’ve ever had on an airplane with a complete stranger, and I got off the plane feeling like I’d just been cured of some disease - 100% REFRESHING.

She manages a business, a family, finds time to do things she enjoys, and most importantly does it all with an amazingly positive attitude that spreads like a fever.  She is accomplished in every since of the word.

But what is most inspiring is that Robin beat cancer. Even through the roughest of times she held onto her optimism and determination and believes that’s why she’s still here today.

I feel guilty for worrying about trivial things in my life that mean nothing. Who cares? Life is short and you go around once. Thanks Robin for the reminder

ShareThis

“Put wax in your ears. People are more afraid of flying than driving because the press does not report car accidents. I never watch the news. Only listen to news you get in a social setting, the things people talk about. Our brains cannot deal with the overload of information. Having a lot of data is not good for anyone trying to make a decision.”

ShareThis