Surfed the internet abit today. Not much of interest. Too bad too. It seems like fall is typically the time when you see alot of new gadgets and poducts etc? But not this year it seems.

The only thing recently that has peaked my gadget interest is the Looksee head mount camera. Neat looking gadget, but so far it's most interesting social network/upload features are only integrated with newer Android phones. Maybe $50 less and it would be worth it on it's own. But at the Looksee's current $199 price, I'll probably hold off on it until I get an Android phone. And if Palm comes out with a nice successor to the Pre next June I might still stick with them as I really like the better refined gesture interface and the hardware keyboard (Im typing on right now)

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I want to hear your

Marketing

Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in goods or services. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business development.[1] It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.[1]

Marketing is used to identify the customer, to keep the customer, and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. Marketing evolved to meet the stasis in developing new markets caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries.[citation needed] The adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from production to the perceived needs and wants of their customers as the means of staying profitable.[citation needed]

The term marketing concept holds that achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions.[2] It proposes that in order to satisfy its organizational objectives, an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of consumers and satisfy these more effectively than competitors.[2]

A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange items. Competition is essential in markets, and separates market from trade. Two persons may trade, but it takes at least three persons to have a market, so that there is competition on at least one of its two sides.[1] Markets vary in size, range, geographic scale, location, types and variety of human communities, as well as the types of goods and services traded.

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Apple Store

I visited the Apple Store at woodland mall yesterday. Played around briefly hands on with the iPod touch. Nice looking/feeling device.

I played with the video camera feature, I really like how well the trimming feature works. There is the same trimming feature on the Palm Pre, but you can really see the extra horsepower of the iPod Touch put to good use when trimming the video. Other that that though, it's a very, been there, seen that kindof device, and the crowd at the Apple store bares that out, as there were only 1 to 2 people at a time playing with the Touches on display while the iPad had a person at every station.

I also played around briefly with the new iPod Nano. My first impression in person, It looks like you should be able to plant it in the gound and grow a full sized iPad out of it. The multi-touch works well, but the screen is so tiny there really isn't much to do on it besides swipe or poke one of the 4 corners. And while I found the device to be very entertaining, I'm not sure what I'd do with such a device. Certainly no need to replace my existing 5th gen Nano, whose larger screen and video camcorder and video playback makes itself much more useful that the new nano which is basically dedicated to music playback only.

The new Nano, has a picture slideshow app, but the screen is so small that it's useless for anything except headshots, due to the fact that the subjects heads of any full body or group shots would be too small to be identifiable. Looking at photos on the new nano is like browsing the icons of twitter followers.

There is a neat looking watch band available for the new nano, but there really aren't any apps that would make it worthwhile to carry this device around on your wrist. (your wrist is an awkward place to have headphones plugged into.) If they reconfigured the new nano to add video or a camera back in, and if they made it display notifications from the iphone via bluetooth or something similar, they might have an interesting addon to the iPhone experience though.

- Aviator Chair at Restoration Hardware
source: Super Punch

Very Badass chair.

- GPS Pen the teeny tiny GPS tracker
source: The Red Ferret Journal - gadgets, cool sites, freeware and tech trivia

This seems very interesting, but I'm not sure I can think of many uses for a device to look back at wherever I've been. If you did a lot of driving and wanted to study routes and travel times perhaps

- World's First HDR Video Makes Me Weep At Its Beauty [Photography]
source: Gizmodo

Video is interesting. It's like Autotune for your eyes.

- Watching DivX Movies With VLC Video Player for iPad [Ipad]
source: Gizmodo

Nice.

- 1TB hard drive thrown into a toy TARDIS, gives us a proper Time Machine
source: Engadget

neat

- First Windows Phone 7 Ad Hits The Waves
source: Pocket PC Thoughts

You have to give them points for trying desert imagery and Arabic music and fonts in the current political climate. Plus you have to acknowledge their audacity for using the word, Revolution which is basically an Apple word. Still, it's apparent that Microsoft has no voice of their own at all, and still has no idea how to appeal to mainstream consumers.

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Ramblings

I'm going to ramble a bit below. Statements will be left unfully-formed. Grammar will not be fully baked, but hey it's a blog, feel free to skip to the pictures. If all this is too much for you, you can listen to an MP3 of the below rambling.

I watched the full Steve Jobs interview from June 2010 All things Digital Convention. At the time of this posting the full 90 min video is at the top of the far right collumn, just under an ad.

It's an interesting conversation, with lots of interesting points. With Steve jobs there is always a certain level of top spin going on, but overall if you look just below the surface I thought he was putting out more than a usual amount of direct commentary.

The above interview was just before the new iPhone, but after the iPhone leak story, so there was a little bit of that freshly mixed in too.

One topic I found interesting was Jobs take on innovating in the TV space and why the Apple TV is just a hobby. Looks to be summed up with: People won't buy a box because they get one from cable company for "free". And since the cable companies are all regional, there's no national deal to be made to get involved on the cable side. And the cable companies themselves seem perfectly happy with the current state of affairs, so even regionally you can't do much.

Another interesting talking point was that iPhone is open to 3rd party apps, at least from a browser standpoint. The app store is closed, but Jobs does make a good point that anyone who wants to write an iPhone app for Safari is free to do so. Granted there are plently of things you can't do well in the browser, but there's alot that you can do too. Jobs also defended the walled garden App store strongly. Basically his point seemed to come down to, that part of the phone is theirs, and if you don't like it, develop for the browser or develop fro another phone and until the market forces them to do otherwise, that's the way it's going to be.

In the interview they talked a little about iAds. And there's a pretty good case made for building the ad process into the OS so that you're not removed from the app experience when you interact with an ad. What is a little disturbing is that ads are still seen as the holy grail of paying for content. In that way, it seems little has changed in the last 60 years. If you read between the lines, it seems that Jobs is resigned to the fact that for the most part the apps need to be low or no cost and that money needs to be made off of ads.

Looked at that way, the iPhone and iOS starts to look less like a platform for delivering content and more like a platform for holding people's attention. The goal under that direction would be to maximize how much time you keep a customer looking at an Apple Screen and then sell off as much of that attention as possible (or maybe just as much as necesssary) to continue to be a profitable ongoing concern.

Google does this. Gmail, Maps, and reader, hold peoples attention, and allow Google to target their ads there and accross the web tailored to what they learn by your putting your private info into those apps.

Apple seems to be going a different route. But I'm not sure exactly what it is yet. They still like to sell the hardware, they still like to control the software. But when you look at iAds and Ping, you can see that they are branching into the attention direction.

Apple rearranged the entire music industry distribution model just to sell hardware. But they don't seem eager to go up against the Movie/TV and the Gaming industries with that same tactic. (They tried a little with TV, but with Hulu and Netflix etc, the media companies built a firewall against Apple.)

People do stare at their Apple screens though. Apple has that attention. Whether or not they can make anything of it, will be interesting to see.

After watching the Jobs interview above, I see the new iPod touch differently. It really is an iPhone, without the phone now. Jobs in the above interview talks about at the dawn of MP3s that the music industry didn't understand what business they were in. He talks about the fact that the music companies saw themselves selling CDs to Walmart, Best Buy and Tower Records. The iPod Touch makes me think that Jobs realizes that the cellphone companies don't know what business they're in either. the cellphone companies talk about their physical network and seem to think they are selling access to their network. Jobs with the iPod Touch however, just put out a phone that works over wi-fi. Facetime will let any Apple iOS user call another Apple iOS user over wi-fi. It's not about the physical network, Apple is abstracting the network one level away from the physical network. Jobs says it in his presentation, the iPod touch is an iPhone for people who don't want a contract.

Do people want to pay their cellphone bills? It seems with the iPod touch, Apple is betting that a percentage of people will choose to forgo them. Maybe not a majority, but a minority in a market this size is still a good sized business. Isn't Apple still only 6 or 7% of desktop/laptop OS market? Yet it seems to be doing very well even with just that portion of their business.

Alot of things probably can. Open Office is a great software office suite. Even if they stop developing it today, you could probably happily edit your documents and spreadsheets in them for years to come. It's a mature market. Innovation would be great, but what are they really going to change about the experience? Same thing with image editing, same thing with video editing, same thing with web browsers. There's alot of mature software out there with open source free options, that even if development were to stop, hardly anyone would notice. So there's a certain ammount of freeness, built into the system.

How many people do you need in your social network before most of your questions could be reasonably answered, or at least someone could point you in the right direction? With the right social network, information is free, even if Google stopped indexing the web tomorrow.

The tools are free, the information is free. The hardware still costs, a little bit but for most people, not much. The hardware could probably cost alot less than even it does today. You can get a netbook for $199, but they sell you a box you plug into your TV for $49 or even less. (Isn't India making tablets for $35?)

People only have 24 hours in a day. How much of that time can be spent watching ads? And watching ads can't be enough can it? At somepoint people need to take action directed by the ads, otherwise, what would be the point of the ads. If you advertise and noone buys more, why advertise? So how much can you be expected to buy? How do you divy that up? What percentage to rent, what percentage to car, what percentage to iTunes TV show rentals?

If the point of commerce becomes getting people to act on ads, where does the money for a person to act on the ads come from? There's still alot of physical jobs to do. Construction, Dentists, Farmers, Automakers, Computer hardware builders. In theory a person only needs one house. Maybe needs to visit a dentist a couple hours a year. Cars wear out, but if you just rented a car on occasion, maybe you'd need to use it less. Computers could last for years now if we stopped tinkering with their configurations (and all the software you need is free). It wouldn't take many people to care for the needs of alot of people. But if everyone only works a little bit, what do you do with all that extra time that people would then have? And what do you do about the people that work 60 hours a week? Do you let them collect more for their extra hours? Do you let the few people who are willing to work 80 hours a week distort the curve for those that only want to work 10 or 20? And if people have all that extra time, do you let them organize into political groups? With all that extra time, maybe they petition and protest more? Do you want alot of change in your system? Or do you want to find a way to keep people busy enough that they don't have the time to work toward much change? Status quo is predictable, benefits and pitfalls are well known, once something works, why tinker with it?

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Hoffmaster Park

Jenn and I went out to Hoffmaster park near Muskegon. (Oddly no sign of David Hasselhof, not even a Black Firebird and no lifeguards in orange trunks were seen). We did a hike through the "One Mile Walk" trail, ended up on the beach. Also brought home way too much sand in my shoes.

Good times.

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Random Non-Sequiters

There isn't really a problem with the government. It's not too involved. It could be more involved. It's designed to be inefficient, it's designed to not work well, it's designed to be hard to change. You want to wake up each day and know how the rules work. That's why the government was designed to be inefficient, so you wouldn't wake up one day and find all the rules changed.

At some point corporations became transnational. Many are larger than most nations. they are not democratic, except perhaps slightly within the whims of their shareholders. They are designed to shift private risk to the public and if possible the wealth of the commons to itsself. They can change very quickly.

Both of these entities are bigger than the individual. Both of these entities are focussed on growth. At present all of these entities are trapped on a single planet that is fixed in size. Growth at somepoint therefore will have to cease.

If you're not focussed on growth, what do you focus on?

As to people.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

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Random Non-Sequiters

Jenn and I went to the Fulton Street Farmers Market today. Mind you we live essentially across the street from a Meijer. Mind you, I don't eat fruits and vegetables except the occasional apple or strawberry. In anycase, it was a fairly busy place. Lots of people, lots of produce. If you're into that sort of thing seems like a nice enough set-up.

Also went driving around west of Jenison abit. There is nothing west of Jenison at all, except Churches. Get out west of Jenison and basically you have stop light after stop light after stop light of churches. An excessive amount really.

It was delightfully cool outside today. Hoodie weather. I didn't grab one, but I should have. Love fall, looking forward to more weather like today.

Fall 2010 TV

So I'm looking at the Fall 2010 TV shows. Stuff that looks worth watching one episode of:

• No Ordinary Family -- Looks like the Incredibles more or less live action.
• Detroit 1-8-7 -- Mostly interested in how badly they interpret Detroit.
• $#*! My Dad Says -- Twitter inspired, Shatter realized, how can you go wrong (well probably alot of ways, but I'll check out one episode at least)

I watched the trailer for Outsourced. Kindof seems like they are going to make fun of people from India like Big Bang Theory makes fun of geeks. It's got the guy from Office Space in it too. Can't see myself watching this show.

The Office and 30 Rock return. I actually haven't seen much of the 2009 season of those, so at least I'll have plenty to catch up on there.

Nothing else really jumps out at me.

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Let's Go Surfing

- Do-gooders get voted off island first: People don't really like unselfish colleagues, psychologists find
source: del.icio.us/cshirky

ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2010) — You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with?

That's right: Other people really can't stand them.

Four separate studies led by a Washington State University social psychologist have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island.

"It's not hard to find examples but we were the first to show this happens and have explanations for why," said Craig Parks, lead author of "The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group" in the current Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The phenomenon has implications for business work groups, volunteer organizations, non-profit projects, military units, and environmental efforts, an interest of Parks' coauthor and former PhD student, Asako Stone.

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said.

"What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It's as if they're giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end.

- Palm Sighting: Shatner on NYT's Screen Test [video]
source: PreCentral.net

That... is... awesome...

- Fullscreen and more!
source: Official Google Reader Blog

In Google Reader, just press "f". Very useful on the netbook.

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Blog, now with more roundness.

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Let's Go Surfing

- Justin.tvs Android App Lets You Broadcast Live Video Anytime, Anywhere
source: Mashable!

Nice. This is one of the few apps that still need to come to WebOS. Not that it comes up very often that I need to stream live video to people or anything, but I can think of sometimes when it might be useful.

- Apple Overhauls iPod Lineup
source: Mashable!

The new nano multi-touch seems silly since it's smaller than your finger. Bummer about the lack of video recording. The video recording on the current nano is very nice, but now if you want Apple video recording it looks like you'll have to pay abit more for the Touch.

The Touch looks nice though. An iPhone without the Phone and without GPS. Could use the tether on my Palm Pre to use the Touch over 3G. It's tempting since I still don't have an iOS device to directly play with.

- Samsung reveals the 'official' Galaxy Tab commercial
source: Android Central

Video, commercial for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, 7" Android Tablet. Nice little Animated Android mascot at the end too.

- The Future of Screens, Circa 2014 [Concepts]
source: Gizmodo

Some neat ideas here, nothing too original, but it's always neat to see nicely done "future" videos.

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Grand Rapids Fulton Street Artisan Market

Last weekend Jenn and I checked out the Fulton Street Artisans' Market. Not very large, but worth the swing by. I'll drop in again I think. Video below.

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