July 26th, 2011, No Comments »
My old friend Rob is behind the launch of Moby, a private location sharing app focused on personal safety and families. It’s a handy alternative to services like FourSquare if you want to share your location with a small group, or for a short time. Here’s the spiel:
Moby is a private location sharing service for you, and the people that matter to you. Unlike other location sharing services, Moby only shares your location with the people you choose and for the length of time you want. With Moby, you are in complete control of your privacy. With Moby you can also request help at the touch of a button, instantly notifying your chosen contacts where you are.
There is, it must be said, no relation to a certain tiny, vegan pop star.
One avid market for Moby is real estate agents. These are people (mostly women?) who spend a lot of time with strangers in private locations, so Moby is a natural fit.
Moby is available for free (as in beer) on iPhone, Blackberry and Android. Check it out.
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November 25th, 2010, 2 Comments »
A reader sent along this follow-up to the Rogers billboards I mentioned last week. As you may recall, the Rogers sub-brand chatr was running, to my mind, some perplexing ads.
It turns out those billboards weren’t only perplexing, but potentially unlawful:
The Competition Bureau is seeking a penalty of $10 million against Rogers Communications Inc. for ads claiming that its discount cellphone and text service, Chatr, has fewer dropped calls than its new competitors.
The bureau announced Friday that it has begun legal proceedings against Rogers in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice under the misleading advertising provisions of the Competition Act. In addition to the penalty, the bureau is asking the court to rule that Rogers must immediately stop its advertising campaign and pay restitution to affected customers.
I gather the upstart Wind Mobile filed the complaint.
UPDATE: I got a note from somebody at Rogers with a response:
“We’re surprised by the actions of the Competition Bureau,” said Ken Engelhart, Senior Vice President of Regulatory, Rogers Communications. “We have extensive, independent third party testing to validate our claims and we stand by our advertising. We will vigorously defend this action in court.â€Â
“We’ve completed extensive testing in coverage areas across the country and there’s no question that the testing validates the advertising in market,†said Todd Stone, President & CEO, Score Technologies.
Score Technologies is an independent third party organization that specializes in network testing for leading wireless carriers across North America.
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April 23rd, 2008, 2 Comments »
The following are my somewhat random notes from Bill Tim (heh) O’Reilly’s talk at Web 2.0 Expo:
- We’ve been whipsawed by negative economic news.
- What are the deep trends that are driving Web 2.0?
- The internet is becoming a global platform, a tool for harnessing collective intelligence. “We are building a platform to make the world smarter…an amazing revolution in human augmentation”.
- Software has climbed above the level of a single device.
- Areas of opportunity: Web 2.0 and the enterprise, web as platform in cloud computing, web has become ubiquitous thanks to mobile devices and sensors.
- Collective intelligence – applications that get better, the more people that use them.
- Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data. Google PageRank was the beginning of the Web 2.0 era–a link was a vote.
- Similarly there’s hidden meaning in enterprise data. O’Reilly cites Wesabe as an example–aggregating the collective intelligence from bank account data.
- A personal computer is really just a device connected to the global computer–the cloud computer that is the web. “The computer is every computer”. Where’d I put that red pill…
- See also Amazon, Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
- Facebook radically outvalues WordPress. Why? The marketing values centralization. Fear a return to the monopoly that was Microsoft.
- Open networks and interoperability thus matter more and more.
- Mobility matters. Also think about new types of display surfaces and new interaction paradigms. Check out The Dash, an internet-connected GPS.
- Ambient computing – “We’re in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 will be all around us”.
- The web is built on “big, hairy audacious goals”.
- Big projects that need more attention: Change Congress, EveryBlock and InSTEDD.
- Finishes with a lovely poem by Rilke and a painting by Delacroix. O’Reilly offers a terrific reading. Here’s an excerpt:
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
UPDATE: Here’s another set of notes from the talk.
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August 17th, 2007, 18 Comments »
As I’ve been whinging about, I’ve had a ton of meetings this week. Colleagues have been late for or cancelled a couple of those meetings. They notified me about this via email, 15 minutes or half-an-hour before the meeting, apparently assuming that I had a Blackberry or similar device that supports email.
Given that it’s 2007 and I’m in the tech industry, that’s a fair assumption. I’ve resisted getting such a device because I wanted to avoid being constantly tethered to my email. I’m just not that important, if you get my meaning.
Anyway, apparently the practice has become so ubiquitous that I need to climb on board the caboose of the mobile email train. Plus, I could obviously use a new camera phone.
Aside from the iPhone, what fancy phone thing would you recommend I get?
While looking for a photo for this entry, I was surprised and pleased to discover that Flickr users find blackberries more interesting than the Blackberry.
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April 9th, 2007, 6 Comments »
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how much the current pricing structure for Canadian mobile data access blows. I managed to spend CAN $112 for 3 MB of data. Both James and Boris link to Thomas Purves’s chart that shows how absurd current Canadian mobile data pricing is (click for larger image):
I was mostly writing this post to encourage you, my dear readers, to Digg this story. However, in the time I took to write this entry, it made it to the front page of Digg. So, mission accomplished without our help.
UPDATE: You know one thing that bugs me about the Digg community? Their apparent lack of a sense of humour. They seem to take vicious delight in digging down (or burying, if you like) any humorous comments. It seems to reinforce the stereotype of geeks as overly-serious poindexters.
At least Slashdot has the ‘funny’ category for such comments. Comparatively, Digg has simplified the user moderation on comments, but they’ve lost some important diversity along the way.
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