Month: April 2010

Playing with the ipad my thoughts

Ipad

So while in Ireland for Media 2020, I got to play with a couple of people’s iPads. Now you all know I’m not a fan but these are my honest thoughts while playing with it.

Its bloody heavy, I expected it to be much lighter. When you use two hands its ok but I can see why people end up resting it against something for a while. The screen is vivid but you can see the pixels easily and even worst with apps which are blownup using x2 option. Reading an actually ebook was disappointing and felt like readiing from my on laptop. Adjusting the backlight down helped but no where near the ease of eink.

Why is it curve on the back? It seems to make even hard to hold and its not helped by the shiny back. I really would not want to carry this in a crowd in fear of it slipping out of your hand due nudges and the usual human traffic or if someone really wanting to nick it off you. Talking of which, what on earth kind of glass screen tech are they using? It picks up greasy finger prints in seconds. Not good.

Finally I thought it was meant to be slightly bigger that my Sony Ebook reader, no actually its exactly the size of two of my sony ereaders side by side. Which says to me its far too big. One of the people who had bought one had a special rubber case which i guess helps it stay clean but geez its ugly. Obviously not designed by Jon Ive.

The inhert flaw with paying for dating sites

OkCupid has another excellent break down of dating sites, this time its showing how the business models of eHarmony, Match.com and others are conflicting with users finding each other on the site.

If you’ve ever joined a paid for site or even interacted with one in anyway, you will instantly recognise this problem, and this is just the start of the problems.

Pay Sites Want You To Message These Dead Profiles

As you can see from the flow chart, the only way they don’t make money is to show subscribers to other subscribers. It’s the worst thing they can do for their business, because there’s no potential for new profit growth there. Remember: the average account length is just six months, and people join for big blocks of time at once, so getting a new customer on board is better for them than eking another month or two out of a current subscriber. To get sign-ups, they need to pull in new people, and they do this by getting you to message their prospects.

If you’re a subscriber to a pay dating site, you are an important (though unwitting) part of that site’s customer acquisition team. Of course, they don’t want to show you too many ghosts, because you’ll get frustrated and quit, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re relying on you your messages are their marketing materials to reach out to non-payers and convince them, by way of your charming, heartfelt messages, to pull out their credit cards. If only a tiny fraction of your message gets a response, hey, that’s okay, you’re working for free. Wait a second…you’re paying them.

There is a nasty speed dating service which I used once, which adds its results to a paid for dating service. Luckily everyone who was at the event could message each other if they both gave each other ticks in the speed dating section but you would also get loads of messages from people who were paid for members, so you couldn’t read the actual message. Of course most of the actual messages would be from spammers. Weirdly, I’ve gotten more spam from the paid for services that the free one. Maybe another investigation for OKTrends?

Refreshing my laptop

Ubuntu 10.04 is only a few days away and I’ve decided to do a complete new install of my laptop. First thing I want t do is replace the 120gig Hard drive with a nice new 320gig Hard drive. 2.5 inch notebook drives have really come down in price and to be honest I tend to low on space all the time. Usually I just shift stuff around but what I noticed was that I didn’t make full use of virtual machines because of the space.

I however wonder if I should make the switch to the 64bit version of Ubuntu but I’m worries about apps like Skype, Hamachi, Java and maybe XBMC/Boxee. I’ve had 4gig of memory for ages and been restricted to 3267meg for ages. There must be more advantages to 64bit processing that just more memory allocation I’m sure. I was thinking if worst came to worst, I could just run Ubuntu 64bit an 32bit side by side, I mean I’ll have the space to do it plus I could maybe even share the home directory to ensure consistency between the platforms?

Ok I was never going to be happy reading the Wired top 100

Top 100

The Wired 100: Positions 10 to 1

The Wired 100: Positions 11 to 50

The Wired 100: Positions 50 to 100

But I almost threw my ereader across the hotel restaurant table this morning when I read through the wired 100 list.

Who are the influential people in the digital economy who can make things happen? Who are the designers, innovators, investors and creatives with the power to touch the rest of us?

I later in the day showed Sheila and she counted how many woman had made the list. Not many as you can imagine but I noticed something even more alarming. There are no woman in the top 10 at all. Its not till you get to 11 which Martha Lane Fox occupies before you start to a lot more woman.

I was also trying to work out the bias toward the South East of the country (aka London). Don’t get me wrong a lot of the firms are based in London or the South East, so it makes sense but I’m having a really hard time working out any Northern entries which are not games related. This tells me that Wired magazine needs to spend more time looking at the rest of the country for those pockets of innovation.

One person who I was certainly would be in the list was Herb Kim.

Not only is this guy CEO of the hugely successful Codeworks, the mastermind behind the closest thing to TED and Pop!Tech we got in the UK, Thinking Digital but he was the driving force behind the collaboration of TEDxNorth. He also took up the challenge and did all this in the North east, which if you believe some people is only known for Games, coalmines and football. The guy from Brooklyn has done some amazing things and can usually be found either in the company of some of the greatest thinkers, in a TED conference or zipping back and forth between Liverpool and Newcastle.

The fact he’s not even on the list is shameful, he should be floating around the 25 marker for sure. Wired editors are certainly overpromote alot of no-hoper in this list. I won’t say there names but theres a lot of people who have gotten into positions which are high but not really done much. In my book thats no good. You can be the head of whatever but if your just riding out time, you shouldn’t be on this list. There’s plenty of people who deserve to be on the list and are not.

My ISP’s Response to the Digital Economy Act

My ISP is UKFSN and there the small kind of ISP which you use to get years ago. They don’t like restricting there customers and they hate things like Phorm and other content interception. So what do they make of the DBill?

Recently the UK government pushed through new legislation aimed to address many aspect of the “digital economy”.

Much of the Act is reasonable and needed to ensure that things like the rollout of digital television and radio services can be accomplished properly. The Act also included various measures to do with the Internet that were not well considered and were certainly not properly debated by Parliament and which have attracted much comment from many different parts of society. As an ISP our position on the Act is limited to the parts that relate to the Internet and the operation of Internet Service Providers, including UKFSN.

The Act seeks to implement measures to protect the rights of copyright holders from unauthorised copying and distribution of the works on which they hold copyright. This is a worthwhile aim however the Act has failed to accomplish what is set out to do for a number of reasons. Firstly the Act is clearly written by people who simply do not understand the Internet and how it is used. This shows in a number of ways but primarily in the manner in which the Act seeks to make ISPs and other network operators responsible to prevent copyright infringement and to act as enforcers for the civil rights of others completely bypassing the courts. This is a serious abuse and is, I believe, a prima facie breach of the Human Rights Act in that it removes the protection of the courts from those accused of unlawful activity.

All ISPs and network operators are bound to operate within and to obey the law. This applies to all laws including the Digital Rights Act. This means that we are obliged to act in response to a valid copyright infringement notice or a valid requirement to block access to a site and we will comply with any such valid requirement. Note that I have emphasised valid. The Act states a number of things that will be necessary for such a report or request to be valid. The most important one of these for copyright infringement notices is that we must act in response to a valid notice from the copyright holder or their authorised agent. In order to comply with this requirement we will need anyone who sends such a report to have registered their copyright in a recognised database to which we have free access and to have registered details of any and all agents who are authorised to make such notice reports to us. Further we will need a means of assuring that any notice or report we receive is really from the registered copyright holder or agent – this means they will need to implement a recognised and reliable digital signature system which we can verify. We simply cannot comply with the Act without this.

The Act specifies that copyright holders and ISPs must share the cost of any systems needed to implement the Act. I strongly believe that, as the only beneficiaries of the Act are copyright holders, they should be the ones to bear the cost. I propose that ISPs implement a system such as I have outlined above and charge copyright holders a very smallannual fee to register each copyright and each agency. This will help to prevent the Act’s requirement on ISPs to act in response to infringement notices from becoming a means for anyone to implement a massive denial of service attack.

I have already had some discussion with other ISPs about this and these ideas are being actively pursued. As things become clearer I will make further statements.

If your ISP isn’t standing against the Digital Rights Act, you really should consider moving to another one and support them.

There is something about E-ink which is changing the way I read

Ereading from the beach

I no longer like to read on my LCD screen. Its just not the same.

Eink is lovely to read on and for me changing the widths of text is still a dream come true. Its really changing the way I read and I can’t help but pull it out when I got a spare moment or two. What I’ve also got setup is the regular morning syncing. Every morning when I wake up there is a selection of news from places like ars techinca, the guardian, etc on the device ready to be consumed. I then also have it setup so that if that book goes out of date by 7 days, it will be removed from the device automatically. Its all down to a great piece of software called Calibre.

I do kind of wish the Sony Ereader did have wifi or at least bluetooth so it could remotely do what Calibre does but to be fair its not a big deal leaving the ereader synced over night, just a bit pointless because the battery life is weeks at a time.

I’ve got Google Reader working with Calibre but the documents it creates are so big, navigating them on the Sony Ereader is painful. I either need to modify the script so it creates smaller chunks of my whole Google reader account or sort out the massive amount of stuff I don’t read on the account. Maybe a bit of both sounds right. Another reason for the wireless would be to tell Google that I’ve just read a article so I don’t have to read it again on my laptop, but with no actual API for that on Google Reader and no wireless on the Ereader, I guess I’m double out of luck.

Lastly a bit of colour and speed would be great. I’m not suggest the same as LCD or even OLED, in actual fact eink is great but I like the idea of colour eink even better.

Mix transfer from elsewhere, great but…

Upload mix

Lets mix has launched a new way to upload a mix. Enter a url of a Mp3 and it will grab it and upload it for you. This should be a standard feature on a lot of social sites. The next step would be upload a RSS feed and it would strip any links to mp3s.

What I don’t get is Let’s Mix generally, is it use to be based around the Pacemaker and now the pacemaker seems to have been forgotten. For example when you upload your mix, it gives you the option of where you made the mix. So you got all the usual options like live, virtualdj, pcdj, etc but no pacemaker option.

Let’s mix is a weird place right now, I can’t work out if there trying to replace Soundcloud.com or do something different. They had better sort it out before I have a uploaded library on both.

Urgently on the look for hot properties

Urbansplash's Chips and Islington Wharf

It was about a year ago when I went looking for a place to buy in Manchester and the new islington or ancoats part of the city centre (East Manchester) was looking pretty attractive. This time around I’m much more secured in my mortgage and how much I can spend (although thats not a lot due to a base line deposit) so hopefully this time around it the question really will be Chips or Islington Wharf?