Month: October 2008

Netbooks are trendy

dell inspiron mini What kind of computer do you use? Most of my work is done at a desktop or workstation; a tower attached to three monitors. The rest of the time I’m using either my laptop or tablet. I’ve also got a little Sony UMPC but it doesn’t get used much. It was kinda cool for a while, but it’s not all that fast. And once I got my iPod touch, that pretty much fulfilled my small device needs.

My favorite to use is probably my tablet, even though it’s the slowest of the bunch. I think I like it mostly because of the form factor – it’s pretty small for a laptop (at 12 inches) but large enough that I don’t sacrifice a keyboard or full operating system.

A couple years from now though, my tablet might seem rather large thanks to the netbook trend. What’s a netbook? From Wikipedia:

A netbook is a small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient laptop, generally optimized for internet based services such as web browsing and e-mailing. Netbooks are also sometimes, but rarely referred to as a sub-subnotebook.

The form factor of a netbook is smaller than that of a notebook and they are very light in weight (usually 2 to 3 pounds). Common features include a small screen (usually around 7-inches to 10-inches diagonal), wireless connectivity, but no optical disc drive, and a smaller sized keyboard (usually 80 percent to 95 percent of normal size). There is also a trend of using solid-state drives instead of traditional hard disk drives.

Maybe it’s just me, but every second article on technology these days seems to mention netbooks! The blogosphere made a big deal this week out of the fact that Windows boss Steven Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook. And today, PC World declares that netbooks will soon cost just $99:

Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You’ll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone.

A monthly service fee for mobile broadband doesn’t appeal to me at all, but a $99 netbook certainly does. Heck, I’m already tempted by the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (pictured above) and it’s nearly $500! If the cost of components fell enough so that a netbook was about half that price, I’d have no hesitations about picking one up and I doubt anyone else would either.

Netbooks are definitely trendy, but I think this is one trend that will last. A small device to check email, read and post blogs, and update Twitter is something that appeals to lots of people. Okay maybe not that last part 🙂

Recap: EdmontonTweetup3

edmontontweetup I had a great time tonight at EdmontonTweetup3 – our third meetup for Twitter users in the Edmonton area! We had just over 20 people come out to Devlin’s on Whyte Avenue, with a nice mixture of familiar and new faces! I thought the restaurant did a nice job of accommodating our group, and it was good to hear so many people say they’d never been there before. We might as well experience a bit more of the city at these events!

I only snapped a few simple shots tonight, but @bruceclarke, @tonyratcliffe, and @fusedlogic all took nice sets of photos: here and here and here. Thanks guys!

EdmontonTweetup3

As our community continues to grow, I think there will be increasing demand for these face-to-face meetups. It’s nice to be able to get away from the computer for a few minutes to meet the people you chat with on a daily basis!

Once again I’ve done my best to add all of tonight’s attendees to the wiki page, but please add yourself if I missed you. Feel free to add links to your photos, blog posts, and other bits of social media too.

Thanks again to everyone who came out tonight – see you at EdmontonTweetup4!

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton4

Tonight was without a doubt our best DemoCamp ever here in Edmonton. With six fairly solid demos, nearly 150 people in attendance, and no technical glitches in sight, it’ll be hard to top DemoCampEdmonton4 but we’re certainly going to try! It’s just amazing to see the community grow like this – thanks to everyone who came out.

Tonight we had six demos:

  • Sean from Orange Door Idealab showed us Surveyor, a mobile tool for conducting surveys using the iPhone or iPod touch.
  • Reg showed us Edistorm, a social brainstorming platform.
  • Brady showed us ElectionBuddy, a service that helps you run polls and elections via email.
  • Aaron came all the way from Regina to show us The History Books, a sort of social networking site.
  • Sam showed us PureInbox, an online email management system.
  • Grant Skinner showed us a bunch of Flash projects, including Adobe Kuler.

It wasn’t planned at all, but all of the products that were demoed tonight seemed really polished. The interfaces were all slick and professional looking!

DemoCampEdmonton4

I think my “demo of the night” goes to ODIL’s Surveyor. I really like the interface, and the application itself seems pretty solid for something so early-stage. ElectionBuddy and Edistorm also had great demos, and have lots of potential. I think PureInbox could have been a great demo, but unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the app itself. The History Books was entertaining, but as I said on Twitter, it seemed like something that came out of a few late night domain name purchases. Grant did a wicked presentation, showing us eight different projects that his Flash design firm has been involved with. He was definitely the most captivating presenter.

Tonight was also the first public announcement for Edmonton Code Camp! It’s going to take place on Saturday, November 29th at the MacEwan campus downtown. You can find more information here, and the domain will be http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com (working through some DNS issues currently). We’ll share more details soon.

The venue worked well again this time, and once again I had Free Wifi going (though it could have been a bit more reliable). I live-twittered the demos, which you can find at Twitter Search along with updates from others in attendance.

I think lots of people like DemoCamp just for the networking opportunity afterward, and again we had a full house at The Windsor Pub. Was great to see a bunch of new faces in the crowd too! Thanks to Smibs for sponsoring tonight’s event.

If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton5!

Windows 7 Revealed

Today at PDC, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 7. They’ve been pretty tight-lipped about the new OS until now (with the one exception being the Engineering 7 blog), in stark contrast to the way Vista was announced. I read some of today’s reaction, and I’ve been reading the news over the last couple of weeks too. Here are a few of the things we know about Windows 7:

  • The final name will be simply Windows 7.
  • The version number will be 6.1, which indicates that the codebase is based on Vista.
  • There won’t be a major interface overhaul – just refinements and improvements to Vista’s attractive UI.
  • User Account Control (UAC) isn’t going away, but it has been refined.
  • The sidebar has been killed – gadgets now live on the desktop.
  • Windows 7 will run on netbooks on the small end, and will support up to 256 CPUs on the large end.
  • Built-in apps like Mail and Calendar are gone, with Windows Live Essentials left to fill the void.
  • The final release will likely come in the latter half of 2009.

For a simple overview of what was demonstrated today, check out The Windows Blog. If you want something a little more in-depth, check out Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite or ActiveWin. If you’re just looking for screenshots, see this post.

As you can see, it looks a lot like Vista! I’m definitely looking forward to playing with the revamped taskbar. Even ignoring the new functionality, the clear look is a welcome improvement.

Looking good so far Microsoft!

Microsoft Announcement Day 2008

windows logo Today was the first day of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, but they may as well have called it official announcement day! For anyone who uses Microsoft technologies on a day-to-day basis, today is a day to remember. Definitely one for the history books of technology.

The big announcement was Windows Azure:

Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing.

That’s a lot of marketing speak, but as usual Mary Jo Foley has a great post breaking Azure down. I’d suggest you read that to get a better idea of what exactly Azure is all about.

A few other interesting announcements:

That’s a lot of stuff for one day! As a developer, I’m a bit overwhelmed with the Azure announcement. It’s going to take a while to process. Very exciting though!

UPDATE: Colinizer has another great summary of today’s announcements on his blog. Check it out!

Edmonton Organizations on Twitter

edmontontweetup I’m not the only one who has noticed it – the number of Edmontonians using Twitter is steadily increasing. The EdmontonTweetup account is following just over 450 people, but I know there are probably many more. The vast majority of these accounts are individuals, but there are some businesses and other organizations also.

Here’s a list of organizations with official Twitter accounts (in no particular order):

A few of these are placeholders and aren’t very active. You might think that the Edmonton Oilers should be on that list too, but the Oilers don’t run the Twitter account – I do. A couple of others I’m sitting on include edmonton and ualberta.

Of course, there are also a number of organizations that don’t have an official account which are represented by their owners and/or employees. Some of these have the same name as the organization, but are used more like personal accounts so I am including them here instead of above (again, in no particular order):

Not surprisingly, most of these organizations are in tech, photography, or design. All very creative endeavors.

The problem with a list like this is that it’s easy to miss people (apologies if I missed you), and it’ll soon be out of date. That’s why I’ve created a page on the EdmontonTweetup wiki for it. I’m not sure how much value there is in having such a list, but it’s there anyway. Feel free to add your organization to it, or to ignore it completely! I’ll try to update it when I can.

Don’t forget – the third EdmontonTweetup is taking place this Thursday (October 30th) at 6pm at Devlin’s on Whyte Avenue. You can find all the details here. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: Added MatrikonOPC, 350 Designs, and Urban Jungle.

Notes for 10/26/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • Everyone seems to be down on Yahoo lately, but Fortune has five reasons to buy Yahoo stock. I’d be wary.
  • Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine, received a write-up in the latest issue of MIT’s Technology Review. I can’t decide if that says something about her, or something about the publication.
  • Google launched a US Voter Information site this week. We need something like this in Canada! I wonder what kind of impact it will have on voter turnout.
  • Check out these incredible pictures and drawings of Dubai. Not sure if it’s all true or not, but I suspect it is.
  • Lots of speculation in the last few days that Windows 7 will be released in the latter half of 2009. We should learn a lot more from Microsoft’s PDC, which starts tomorrow.
  • Amazon’s Web Services division had a big week – EC2 is no longer in beta, there’s an SLA, and Windows/SQL Server support is now in beta. Keep it up AWS!
  • I installed the latest “Windows Live” beta this weekend, and I like the look. Not so impressed with the performance thus far.

Edmonton Notes for 10/25/2008

It’s really quite amazing how the Edmonton Twitter community has taken to the #yeg hashtag recently. When I started writing these notes posts, which wasn’t very long ago at all, I could look at a week’s worth of updates on two or three pages. Now I’ve got to go back about seventeen pages! Very cool stuff, I’m really happy to see this growth. Keep it up Edmonton!

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

  • CKUA’s fall fundraising campaign is underway! Their goal is to have 1000 new donors and raise $525,000 in total. They’re about half way there currently. The drive continues until November 2nd.
  • I think the excessive idling bylaw is a waste of good intentions. I can’t imagine how it’ll ever be properly enforced. You can share your thoughts at the final public meeting, taking place on Monday night.
  • The Capital City Clean Up could be turned into a year-round, city-wide program for $3.5 million. No word yet on what councillors decided to do.
  • The 45-year-old Sportex building was demolished on Monday morning in order to make room for 200,000 square feet of new exhibition space.
  • Edmonton Police expect to take in $15 million from photo radar tickets next year. The Journal points out that the amount is roughly equal to $20 for every man, woman, and child in the city. On Tuesday, the police wrote about 1700 speeding tickets during the second Operation 24 Hours. One man was clocked at 203 km/h on the Henday.
  • The city is going to make a bid to host Expo 2017. Hosting the fair could cost as much as $2.3 billion, but would draw more than 1 million tourists to the city. The event would be a “recognized exposition” – you can learn more at Wikipedia.
  • Edmonton ranked second among major Canadian cities with 3.28 homicides per 100,000 people. Winnipeg was first, Calgary third.
  • Epcor has replaced nearly six kilometers of lights and decorations along Jasper Avenue with new LED lights. Also – they’re called “winter lights”, not “Christmas lights”. On November 15th, a 25-metre plus tree will be unveiled in Churchill Square.
  • Finally, I’ve got to mention the manure smell and the AT Plastics explosion/fire. Both events caused quite a stir on Twitter, a topic I’ll be writing more about next week.

Podcast Spot: What would I have done differently?

podcast spot Last night I presented in the VenturePrize Seminar Series with James Matsuba of IdleTime. The seminars are meant as a primer for this year’s competitors on business plans, building a company, and pitching ideas to investors (and judges). When I attended the seminars back in 2006, I found the most useful part was getting to hear the experiences of other entrepreneurs.

For that reason, I have been more than happy to go back and share my own experiences from the competition and beyond. Last night I talked about the VenturePrize process and making it to the finals, and James talked about his experience last year in the student competition and gave his presentation from the finals too.

As a presenter, I think the most enjoyable part is the question and answer period. Both James and I answered a ton of questions last night, but one stuck with me. After I had explained that we were shutting Podcast Spot down, someone asked what I would have done differently.

I didn’t have to think about it for very long, probably because Dickson and I have talked through this a number of times. There’s a ton of things I might have done differently, but two things in particular:

  1. I would have avoided using the word “podcast” in the name of our service.
  2. I would have focused on sharing audio and video for a specific niche.

I personally have nothing against the word podcast. I don’t think we hitched our wagon to the wrong horse or anything, because the underlying technology is sound and in use by millions of people around the world. The word itself has always been confusing and misleading, however. I’ve written many times that podcasting is just a word, but unfortunately most people don’t see it that way.

I also think it would have been a good idea to target our service to a specific group of people. As a service for anyone and everyone to share audio and video, we were a little too much like a YouTube clone (even though our feature set was quite a bit different). I think we could have executed more effectively with a smaller target customer base.

The follow-up question is, of course, why didn’t we do those two things? That question is much more difficult to answer!

Blogging killed by Twitter? I don’t think so

I’ll give Paul Boutin credit for writing some seriously good link bait, but that’s all his recent essay for Wired is worth. Paul argues that we don’t need blogs anymore thanks to Twitter (and for good measure he mentions Facebook and Flickr too). He advises anyone thinking about starting a blog to think twice, and anyone who already writes one to pull the plug:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

I guess Paul is a “glass-half-empty” kind of guy.

Of course it’s difficult to get noticed in the blogosphere – there are so many blogs out there! Of course something you write is going to attract comment trolls – you can’t please everyone! Of course blogging takes more time and effort than Twitter – but that’s because you’re writing so much more!

But none of that is reason enough to give up on blogging.

Obviously I’m a big fan of Twitter, and I do spend quite a lot of time posting there, but I don’t think I could replace my blog with it. I find the two are complementary – quick comments and updates go on Twitter, longer thoughts go on my blog. That system seems to work well for me.

Same goes for the consumption side of things. Tweets are searchable instantly, true, but good luck following a thread. Short conversations between a couple of people are okay, but anything more and you’ve got problems. Blogs don’t have this problem of course, thanks to comments and trackbacks. And let’s be honest, Google indexes blogs fairly quickly anyway.

Paul says:

Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.

I’d agree with that. Twitter has lots of buzz right now, that’s undeniable. Just as the election in 2004 helped blogs increase in popularity, the current election is giving a boost to Twitter. What I don’t agree with is the notion that Twitter’s success sounds the death knell for blogs.

I think blogs remain incredibly valuable and will be with us for a long time to come.