Some good commentary on the Amazon Kindle “wireless reading device”: Daring Fireball: DUM Dive into Mark: The Future of Reading /Message: Another iPod, or Another Newton? Not considering whether they’ve created a good solution for reading eBooks and other online material, it sounds like it’s the same old digital rights management harassment. I’m amazed that no one has tried to come up with a good solution that allows casual sharing (close friends or family), while preventing wholesale pirating. Companies are still approaching it from the viewpoint of complete lockdown to the single customer who bought the product. When I worked…
There are certainly a large number of URL shortening services available today. Tinyurl.com is probably the best known, but there are dozens of clones and competitors that have popped up (just search for “url shortening service”). I recently found a new entry called DecentURL.com whose goal is to make shortened URLs more…decent! The author has implemented two unique steps: First, the original domain name is included in the path (minus any “www.” prefix and the top level domain stripped), so you get an idea of where this link is taking you Second, the link creator can edit the title to…
Yesterday (October 20th), we here in the South end of the San Francisco Bay Area had a moderate 5.6 earthquake (officially designated by the USGS as event nc40204628). We were fine, even if the kids were a little rattled. (I had to explain to them that earthquakes are part of living in California.) I tried to call my parents to see if they felt it, but got the dreaded “all circuits are busy” on our standard AT&T line. Not too surprising. What surprised me was that my Sprint mobile was also not working, but rather than a decent message, it…
Jeff at Coding Horror has a great topic this week: Why does software spoil?: In the software industry, the release of newer, better versions is part of the natural order. It’s a relentless march towards perfection that started with the first personal computers, and continues today. We expect software to get larger and more sophisticated over time, to track with the hardware improvements that Moore’s law has provided us for so many years. Rapid evolution is a good thing, and it’s one reason the computer industry is so exciting to work in. If you don’t like the way things are…
AdMob is an up and coming mobile advertising platform, supporting both the advertisers and publishers (including my Mobile Website list). AdMob is in a unique position given they serve millions of ads to mobile devices each day. Today they published a summary report of some metrics from September 2007: AdMob Mobile Metrics is a new report with market level data. This initial report covers the month of September and includes manufacturer, device and country-specific data on AdMob’s top four markets by impressions served: US, UK, India and South Africa. In the future, we plan to add operator data and incremental…