Jesus Phone vs. the Cylon, with a guest appearance by the Nexus

I had a chance to play with a Motorola Droid for a bit a couple of weeks ago, and think about how it compares to my iPhone.

On the positive side, the network is much better.....better signal and faster than the iPhone. No surprise there, but an NYT article yesterday blames that on the iPhone's radio rather than AT&T.

For me, the Android killer app was not the nav (which was very cool), but the Dave Chappelle Soundboard. "I'm Rick James, bitch!" as a ringtone is hard to top. The nav was accurate....I have been using the Maps app on my iPhone as a simple nav for a while, and the Android version just makes this a lot better.

Size-wise, the Droid is not much thicker than the iPhone, but it squareness makes it feel a lot larger in a pocket than the iPhone. The physical keyboard is garbage and a waste of space.

App-wise, the iPhone OS is still way ahead, but I think there will be parity, at least of the useful apps I use, within 6 months.

A big issue for me is iTunes. I have a lot of music, videos and photos which are managed from iTunes/iPhoto and dumped into my phone. There is not an easy equivalent for Android yet, though I have seen a couple of beta products (eg. DoubleTwist) that may do the trick, without being quite as simple.

So, I figured I would wait until a Droid sans keyboard came out, and the Andriod ecosystem evolved a bit, before considering whether to jump. And l0! The Google Nexus appears!

I had my hands on one last night at an event. It looks sexy, it even feels sexy with its satiny rubbery plastic. It is thin, with a great screen. It only works on the T-Mobile network for now, but that is rumoured to change sometime next year. T-Mobile's network is a big unknown. They only recently even started turning on 3G.

This does make things interesting in the smartphone market. Having just set up a Blackberry for my mom, RIM seems to be in deep trouble. They will keep the corporate market for a while, but their OS is very clunky by comparison, and there are so few apps.

Android devices are already practically free on a contract, so they are going to really drive smartphone penetration. Some more apps and a media solution will bring Android up to parity for most users.

At that point, the iPhone may become a premium niche product the way Macs were a few years ago. Of course, Steve Jobs figured out how to conquer that problem, and he probably has a few tricks up his sleeve for the iPhone.

The closed environment of the app store is a pinch for developers, but a few are starting to go around native apps and use HTML5 in mobile safari instead.

It will be fun for phone geeks to watch.

Sustainable Financial Models--broadcast TV and the Internet

There is an interesting article in today's NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/business/media/21network.html?ref=media) on the slow death of broadcast tv as a business model, in favour of cable tv, where a combination of ad revenue supplemented by subscriber fees provide greater stability and much higher operating margins.

I can't help but think of the analogue of the Internet, where many companies that have found success over the last 4 years did so with an advertising based model that is now under pressure.

The Internet equivalent of cable is the freemium service. An advertising supported free, basic offering is supplemented with subscription offerings. Many of the hot young companies gaining traction are using the freemium model.

The advertising only model is in such disarray that NBC is probably being sold to Comcast. Given the famous discipline of GE, NBC's corporate parent, that is a vote that the broadcast, advertising dependent model is mortally wounded.

There are still areas where advertising dependent models work on the Net, such as blogs, where the costs of production are sufficiently low. But for applications that have to support expensive development teams, you need something more.

My thoughts on modern art

I have never really understood most modern art. Basically, if it looks like my 4 year old made it, then it might be art, but it is not worth more than $10. Of course, I would pay more for it if it were actually made by my 4 year old instead of some coked out "artist".

With that in mind, I give you the following post from the Chronicle.....

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/parenting/detail?entry_id=49433#commentform

From the random but oddly fascinating stats department....

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/10/13/another-upside-to-e-zpass-healthier-babies/

• October 13, 2009, 5:00 AM ET

Another Upside to E-ZPass: Healthier Babies

Not only has E-ZPass shortened commutes, it might be making babies healthier too.
Mothers who lived near a toll plaza with an E-ZPass had fewer instances of premature births and low birth-weight babies, according to a new study.

AFP/Getty Images

Babies born near toll plazas were more likely to be healthy after E-ZPass lanes were installed and helped reduce traffic congestion.

Janet Currie and Reed Walker of Columbia University’s Department of Economics compared mothers that lived within three kilometers of a toll plaza with those that lived within three kilometers of a major highway (but not near a toll plaza) in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
By reducing congestion and emissions through the E-ZPass system, premature births dropped 10.8% and instances of low birth weight declined 11.8% for mothers within two kilometers of the toll plaza.
For those who lived three kilometers from the plaza, prematurity and low birth weight fell 7.3% and 8.4%, respectively.
The conclusions are of particular interest, the researchers say, because low birth weight has been linked to health problems in the future and lower educational attainment. But it also shows the effects of a system like E-ZPass that has an inherent value to consumers – reduced travel time – as well as peripheral benefits, such as reduced emissions and health benefits.
Previous estimates showed that E-ZPass, an electronic toll system that reads a tag mounted on the windshield without forcing the vehicle to stop, reduced traffic congestion by more than 85% in some plazas within its first year. Other studies revealed it may have cut harmful emissions by up to 50%.
But the E-ZPass study took that research a step further by trying to determine traffic congestion’s health effects.
The researchers used Vital Statistics Natality records, which cover all births in a state, from Pennsylvania for 1997 to 2002 and for New Jersey from 1994 to 2003. They then compared the change in the number of premature and low birth weight babies born to mothers near toll plazas with those born to mothers who were not near toll plazas before and after the E-ZPass.
With roughly 26% of homes located near congested areas, Currie and Walker concluded that “…nationwide reductions in prenatal exposure to traffic congestion could reduce preterm births by as many as 10,800 annually, a reduction that can be valued at $557 million per year,” the study states. “Since we have focused on only one of the possible health effects of traffic congestion, albeit an important one, the total health benefits of reducing pollution due to traffic congestion are likely to be much greater.”

Cavendish pulls a Zoolander

Mark Cavendish, the amazing sprinter for the Columbia HTC team who has been dominating the sprints this year, showed up at the podium yesterday to collect another green jersey. Except, whoops, he lost it during the stage to Thor Hushovd without realizing it, because Thor made it back after the climb to sprint with the main bunch for points, and Cav did not.

Do you think they had a walk-off afterwards?

Dangers of the real-time stream

I spent Friday at a TechCrunch conference examining the real time web, which today is really Twitter and services based on Twitter. There are clearly real opportunities around the real time stream of information, and perhaps the most interesting part of the conference was Ron Conway's list of 10 ways Twitter could monetize, which totaled up to a $5bn market opportunity.

I wonder about the dangers of brief rapidfire "interactions". We have already become a soundbite culture that does not like to analyze or think too hard. Getting information 140 characters at a time exacerbates the trend. The Michael Jackson coverage is a great example of the power of the stream, and the danger. His death was all over Twitter long before traditional media outlets were reporting it. But at the time it was spreading, it now appears that it was impossible to confirm his death, so it was really just rumour.

Real time can be great, but usually what you get is data, not information, and in the deluge of noise, you may not pick up what is important. Sometimes it is good to slow down a little and think.

Interestingly, a report out this morning from a 15 yr old working for Morgan Stanley as an intern says that the next generation does not really use Twitter. I used to find it sort of useless as well, but now I see value in it as a micro-blogging platform.

Lightlane....a cool solution for the wrong problem

This seems like a neat product.....



until one realizes that the problem is not that the motorist cannot see you....it is that they are an idiot and just not paying attention.

If you are going to put a frickin' laser beam on the frickin' bike, do it properly, like so...



Driver chatting on the cell phone and doesn't see you? No problem. When you pump 200 gigawatts into them, they will notice you in the split second before they vaporize.

Where this product is quite useful is in maintaining the moral high ground when caught riding drunk. "Sure I was weaving, officer, but I was staying in my lane."