Goodbye, Analog
Posted by: Jeff in Business, HDTV, Internet, Internet TV on June 12th, 2009
Today marks the end of Analog TV broadcasting and the final switch to digital only broadcasting in the USA otherwise known as the DTV transition. The date was changed at least once and the process took a little longer than was initially expected, but the time has now come to say farewell to Analog TV. If you’re reading this and you have no idea what I’m talking about then check to see if you’re using an antenna and if not, you’re probably okay… The biggest question is how could you have missed all the annoying “Are you Ready” ads by Comcast and other various announcements saying that you can get a converter box and you need to be ready for digital? Even YouTube has joined the party and is celebrating or marking the occasion with a Goodbye, Analog YouTube Animated logo:
Getting rid of the Analog TV broadcast frees up a huge amount of airwaves for future use. I’m hoping that this could help with some new modern 4G wireless networks that will be faster and better than ever. I’m sure this is still a little while off and it’ll cost you extra money… Or maybe some more open free to the public band for newer WiFi would work. Either way, I welcome the new uses of the airwaves.
In the meantime, I just want to say welcome to Digital TV and Goodbye, Analog…
Apple undercuts Palm
Apple iPhone 3GS
The Palm Pre was just released on Saturday at $199. Reports seem to be consistently saying that Palm was successful in selling the quantities that they wanted over the weekend. The Palm Pre looks like a great device with lots of potential for techy consumers that want some thing new and something non-Apple, Blackberry, etc.
The biggest question for Palm is whether they’ll be able to continue selling their device. Today at the big Apple Keynote for the WWDC, Apple made this question even bigger. Apple has officially announced a new device, the Apple iPhone 3GS with a superior camera and a few great new features at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB. What’s more potentially disastrous for Palm is that they also announced that the old iPhone 3G 8GB will continue to be sold and is now priced at $99. That price is the same as several phones that are nowhere near as good as the iPhone and $100 less than the Palm Pre.
These two announcements quickly took over the “Trending Topics” on Twitter.com and flooded all the tech blogs quickly. The biggest question for Palm will be if they can regain the hype online around their phone and whether they’ll do anything to counteract this challenge or if they feel their phone speaks for itself at it’s current price and with it’s current marketing. I don’t know any non-tech friends that know a thing about the Palm Pre and I’m concerned that they haven’t made it desired enough. I think the competition is great and I don’t think Apple’s news will kill Palm (or others for that matter), but it does present even more challenges for other phone manufacturers as Apple continues to add to their feature sets.
ManagedMarks Goes Live
Posted by: Jeff in Business, Internet, ManagedMarks on May 28th, 2009
In an effort to avoid to much feature creep and in an effort to get something else web related done for my resume, I’ve decided to release http://www.managedmarks.com out into the wild. I’d like to figure out a good way to either charge for the service or generate a little revenue via ads, but I’m not too sure how either would work. This wasn’t started as a business idea as much as it was started as a solution to a problem I had. I’m sure you could argue various other solutions such as a wiki, but I felt that a simple and focused web-based tool was what I wanted. ManagedMarks serves it’s purpose as a simple and very focused tool.
If you haven’t checked out ManagedMarks yet, see the site tour video below for some details. I originally thought this was an interesting project to take on since I found that my previous employers team in India had crippled access to the net. Links were often buried on the internal website, in emails or in process documents. Maintaining all these different locations was always an issue and I thought it’d be better if we could just reference one location that was always maintained. If we had a good central location that could be easily updated, the team would easily be able to set that as their homepage in their browser.
I also felt strange starting up Firefox or IE and having my iGoogle pop up with personal stuff when I was in a meeting or giving a presentation. As a result, I made a simple .html file with a few a href’s to the sites I frequently used. My manager thought this was an interesting solution, but we never really had time to do anything more with it. As a result, I wanted to come up with a slightly more sophisticated way of accomplishing the same task. ManagedMarks was a name that stuck and I loved the concept… I was laid off and never got to do this for my previous employer, but I wanted to do it for myself anyway… Let me know what you think.
ManagedMarks.com Site Tour / Walkthrough from ManagedMarks on Vimeo.
