Now that we’re out of a kitchen, we mooch dinner whenever we can. This weekend we decended upon Mie & Dav’s place. Mie gave the kids a bubble set and Dav took this really great photo.
Year: 2006
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Mac Porn
The sheer beauty of their design and packaging brings out a bout of technolust. Jason O’Grady posts a pictorial of the unpackaging of his brand new MacBook Pro. He even takes photos of the styrofoam cutouts!
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San Diego
We took a quick trip down to San Diego (photos) last weekend to escape all the banging and clanging going on because of The Kitchen Project.
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Apple embeds poem in Mac OS
Text of a poem that’s embedded in the new version of MacOS which runs on Intel chips. Apple today confirmed that it was put there to prevent piracy (or at least make those that pirate their software think twice.)
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he’d do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined. -
Yahoo Startup Kit
I’m not going to post about this at length because Chad Dickerson pretty much sums up everything I wanted to say (although I do like Havi’s label of this as an early Valentine’s Day gift). Suffice to say, Yahoo has basically open-sourced all their UI designs so you no longer have to build widgets like sliders, tree controls, or calendars from scratch.
I have a quote by Leonard Lin on the bottom of my Yahoo 360 page. Now, more then ever, it rings true:
Part of the Yahoo! spiel is that they see themselves as having one of the world’s best kitchens for chefs to come in and do their thing. All I have to say is, there are mouths to feed. Let’s get cooking.
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Google’s Real Market – Small Business
Keen observation by Phil Sim on Squash – follow the money trail and you’ll see that Google’s real customers are the small business clients that are buying advertising, not the millions of users running searches. This puts them in direct competition with Microsoft who sees their fastest growing market in the SMBs.
People have questioned why Google needed to acquire Measure Map. To me, this is the obvious answer. Analytics will be at the heart of Google’s SMB offering. Let’s remember what Google’s core business is. It’s selling advertising. Who is it’s core customer base. SMB’s for whom contextual advertising finally represents a cost-effective marketing mechanism. How much penetration do you reckon Google has into this market. Bugger all. How can Google most effectively increase it’s core revenue. By getting more SMBs to do more contextual advertising. How can they do this? By helping SMBs to understand the effectiveness of electronic sales and marketing. How can they do this? By offering SMBs free CRM and marketing analytics.
If you follow that, then look for Microsoft to go shopping for an analytics package (it looks like they have a basic one already) to plug into their Office Live suite and look for Google to buy up a Netsuite or Salesforce.com to plug into their Ad Sense portal.
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Yahoo Olympic Coverage
Those of you who follow sports on a regular basis probably already know this but if you’re like me and haven’t had the time to catch up on your TiVo backlog of Olympic coverage, Yahoo’s got a great micro-site which pulls it all together for you. Turin 2006 Winter Olympics on Yahoo! Sports has been specially formatted to host larger format photos (today’s shot is a great example), exclusive analysis, and also features RSS feeds of the latest news and medal counts.
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More Julia-isms
When Julia has a stomachache, she says she has a “stomach egg.” It took us a while to pick up on this and it wasn’t until she complained to Izumi about an “egg” on her knee that we finally figured it out. Applied to other areas of the body it kind of makes sense. I think we all sometimes wake up in the morning with a “back egg” or a “neck egg” but we eventually shake it off and it’s gone.
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Just call me Ambassador
Back in December I got an email from Sprint asking if I’d like to try out a new phone and service that they are rolling out in North America. Half thinking it might be a way to get me to switch providers (I use Verizon), I read through the fine print looking for a catch. When I didn’t see any reason not to take them up on their offer for a free new phone and free service, I threw caution to the wind and signed up. The folks at Sprint/Nextel had read this blog and were interested in getting my input.
As a qualified participant, we will send you one Sprint Power Vision phone and provide you with six months of all-access service (at no charge). You’ll have access to the Sprint Music Store(SM) live TV broadcasts, gaming and more. Yes, you will also have unlimited free calling and data service. It’s a pretty good deal and all we ask for in return is your candid feedback (you decide how much and how often).
OK, I can’t be bought off that easily. I have been testing out the service for the past few months and will give you what I think of the service straight up. As you read my review, understand that I also am not a huge cell phone user. Sure, I use the things like anyone else and lived 10 years in Tokyo where the things are damn near an extention of your body. Yet here in the US I am bathed in wifi both at home and all over the Yahoo campus at work so see little need to bring up a small screen stream of the latest headlines except to impress colleagues or make a point about the future of mobility.
Read on for the in-depth review:
