Om Malik points us to a pretty interesting startup company based in the Bay Area, Tello. The premise behind Tello’s technology is to provide us a sense of where a particular contact is available. In other words “Presence”, as Om notes. He points to several interesting articles, one from the Wall Street Journal and another from BusinessWeek, that describe the technology in greater detail. After sifting through these articles, I think I came to the same conclusion as Om did; this is great stuff, but I’m not sure how many people will adopt it….and the key to success in this type of technology is blanket adoption.
Guy Kawasaki points us to a collection of charts that Karl Hartig has generated over time using all kinds of interesting data. Not only are some of these charts visually stunning, but they provide a way to show trending data in a more dramatic fashion. In other words, the data comes alive on these graphics. Definitely worth a look.
Robert Scoble is in town for a few days, and I had a chance to meet up with him at the Pittsburgh Bloggers gathering last night. Since it was his birthday the group had a cake and very special gift for him (see the picture).
It was nice to finally meet the man behind the blog. True to geek form, the moment I mentioned that I was a Tablet PC user, he produced the tablet enabled OQO from his jacket! I gave it a whirl for a few minutes; pretty nice product. Scoble and I both agreed, however, that it was out of our price range to purchase.
This was also the first meeting I attended that was put together by the Pittsburgh Bloggers group. A small community, but they all seemed pretty energized about blogging. I met bunch of new folks there, and will probably add their group onto my growing list of affiliations.
The best part of this event, however, was the post that Robert made about his Pittsburgh experience. He pretty much nailed the challenge this town has, and the legacy it must not betray.
Nick Bradbury has been dropping hints about the latest iteration of FeedDemon for quite some time now. Well, yesterday he unleashed a beta of FeedDemon (2.0 Beta 1) on us. I can affirm what others are saying about the beta by declaring it a winner myself. The big wins for FeedDemon users include both small and large usability overhauls of the interface. A new filter drop down adds the capability to read all unread feeds across channels. The surfer view finally works the way I’d want it to. If you haven’t test driven FeedDemon to manage your RSS feeds in a while, maybe the time has come to revisit it now. I’ll be following up this post with a more detailed review of the new standard for RSS feed management shortly.
Just like he says here, January 2006 has been a great month for fellow GTD’er, TabletPC’er, Weblogs Inc colleague, and pal Marc Orchant. The most recent buzz that Marc has generated is around an article that was published in American Airlines’ in-flight magazine American Way. Time Bandits does an excellent job of describing the power, simplicity, and effectiveness of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to time management. Marc is a featured expert in the article. Unfortunately, I don’t fly American that often (although I recently took their non-stop service from Chicago to New Delhi — great service by the way), so I would have missed out on this piece. Anyway, check out the article when you get a moment. Again, congratulations Marc!
Riya, a very interesting startup company that is building a picture tagging technology, just closed a huge $15MM round of funding. Riya’s face recognition technology auto tags your photos with the names of those people that you’ve trained it to know based on facial characteristics. Like something out of the FBI, or hollywood, this would make finding pictures of people from your vast library of digital pics so much easier. Cool stuff….
Apple’s strong run with the iPod has lifted the company’s market capitalization to $72bn, or just slightly higher than Dell. Engadget has a snippet from an internal email that Steve Jobs sent out marking the moment:
“Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.”
Kind of funny. Here’s the Engadget link: Jobs calls out Dell, challenges to pistols at dawn .
ThinkGeek is taking orders for a WiFi and Flickr enabled photo frame. Definitely worth a look.
The Student Tablet PC weblog is one of the best Tablet focused sites out there. While my college days are a distant memory, the site’s productive approach to using a Tablet enabled PC makes it a must read. For example, their latest post details a great method of scanning textbooks onto your Tablet. Beside for reducing the weight you have to lug around, the ability to annotate searchable textbooks is a huge advancement from the old days of highlighters and dog-eared pages. While I’ve yet to scan an entire book myself, the approach is very useful for storing and annotating all kinds of documents that you accumulate in business.
Toni Schneider, who was the executive in charge of Yahoo’s developer network is leaving to join Automattic, the company that Matt Mullenweg started to build Wordpress, Wordpress.com, and other cool software. Link to Om Malik’s scoop: Yahoo Exec Exits For Automattic CEO Gig.
