Author: rakesh

My friend Sumeet told me about this video of a Polaroid inkless printer demo’ed at CES. I love the idea.

For serious printing for albums and frames, I just use one of the many online photo printing services with local pick-up (wal-mart, sam’s club, pretty much any drugstore, etc.). But I’ve never had a good solution for quick printing at the house — when I want a print of a recent photograph to stick on the fridge or to put on the magnetic photo rope in my daughter’s room. Sure, I could get an inkjet to fill this void but most of them are too big to keep around for occasional use and I absolutely hate buying ink — or, more specifically, I hate running out of ink because it typically kills whatever impulse I had to pop out a quick print in the first place.

Solution? Stick the “ink” in the paper and deliver the printer in a small form factor. And as an added bonus, these photos have adhesive backs, multiplying their creative potential. This thing is due to ship from Polaroid later this year and the printer is supposed to cost about $150 and the per sheet paper cost is supposed to be <$0.50. A quick write-up on the product at MSNBC.

So after returning the Plantronics CT11, I read a description of the Plantronics Calisto Pro in Continental’s in-flight magazine. I did some searching around the Internet and read reasonably good reviews of the phone so I ordered one in the middle of last week. It came in a few days ago and while I haven’t used it much yet, I’m pretty optimistic after the 10 minutes or so I spent testing it out. Apart from seeming to work well as just a cordless POTS telephone (good audio quality, easy to walk with it around the office), the Calisto has some things that are bonus for me:

1) the headset is a regular bluetooth headset so it can be paired with other devices. And it seems to pair well with my cell phone (Apple iPhone) so I can use it to take cell phone calls while in my office, and

2) the cordless handset (the bar of soap shaped thing) can sync contacts with Outlook (limit of 200), which means I should be able to save some commonly dialed numbers to my handset.

Here’s a review of the Calisto Pro at Web Worker Daily and here’s the official Plantronics page. And even though I ended up buying it directly from the Sharper Image, Amazon’s product page for the Calisto Pro had a few useful customer reviews on it.

For a very long time now (maybe 5 or 6 years), I’ve used the Plantronics CT10 as my primary telephone at work. I like the fact that I can walk around with this thing within my office or around the office, answer phone calls from it (it’s a regular POTS telephone and most of the handsets on our office PBX have a POTS connector on them), and dial out from it. But in the past couple of months the voice quality has been marred by a periodic clicking sound so last week, with some downtime because of the holidays, I set out in search of a replacement.

I came across the Plantronics CT11 and it looked like just what I wanted — an upgraded version of the CT10, 2.4Ghz instead of 900 Mhz, basically, a newer model of my old favorite. It came in yesterday (courtesy of Amazon Prime) and I love the new device except it has one fatal flaw: With my old Plantronics CT10, I could use the phone while it was on its base charging but with the newer CT11 you have to remove the cordless unit from the base in order to use the telephone. A small thing (and not something that really could have been captured in a bulleted list of features) but it kills the Plantronics CT12 for me. I’d say that 70% of the time, I use this thing sitting at my desk and if I have to perform the extra task of removing the thing from the base and then replacing it everytime I make and finish a phone call, that’s a big step backwards from what I had before. Bummer!

Back to my old phone until I find something else.

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that, on the one hand, Salesforce.com’s marketing rallies against installed software (examples: their toll-free number is 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE, the banner on their frontpage has a big “NO SOFTWARE” image in it) but on the other hand, the only way to realistically use the Salesforce.com service on a mobile device is through a piece of… installed software?

Hey Salesforce, Marc Benioff — where’s the skinny/thin client? Everyone else has one.

Dear Photojojo,

I love your newsletter and, in particular, I loved your recent 2007 photography gift guide. I got that prime lense that I’ve been meaning to buy at a great price ($70 for a 50mm f1.8!) plus I picked up one of the accordion albums you guys wrote about too. I’m wishing I had bought the prime lense sooner and my 3 year old daughter had a blast putting together the album (with some assistance) and filling it with photographs for her Dadi’s birthday. Thanks Photojojo! Keep up the good work. Some photographs of gratitude (taken with my new prime lense) below.

Sincerely,
Rakesh

My daughter and her dadi (and some freshly baked mini blueberry muffins):

The accordion photo album:

(P.S. The accordion photo album was great. My only wish is that they include the necessary glue with the kit. It was kind of a hassle to find the right kind of glue and it was the only ingredient not included.)

I’m someone who spends a fair amount of time on my cell phone. And for those times when I have a battery of calls to make, I’ve often wished I had a way to build a simple phone call “to do” list on my phone and then go through them one by one. Maybe Google’s Android or the new iPhone SDK will help with this, but in the meanwhile I’ve started using this nifty hack:

1. Compose an e-mail with a list of the names and numbers I want to call:

2. Send the e-mail to my cell phone as an SMS (if you don’t know how to do this, find the e-mail to sms gateway for your carrier).

3. Now, on my phone (which happens to be an iPhone) I have all the numbers I need to call — I just tap on the number and it dials! And when I’m done with a phone call, it takes me back to my call list.

Whether this works for you or not might depend on whether your phone converts phone numbers in an SMS into something that can be clicked and dialed. My recollection is that Windows Mobile does this and that Palm does this as well.

I’ve decided to cut loose from Yahoo Hosting for this blog — it’s just too slow! When I’d go to make a posting on my Yahoo Hosted WordPress blog, loading the wordpress admin interface would typically take 30 seconds and sometimes even more! So let’s see if my blogging behavior changes any with the switchover. I’m thinking of making wordpress.com my new home. I’ve met Matt and like him plus I figure they probably know a thing or two about hosting wordpress.

I can see how someone would be pissed if this automatically showed up in their facebook feed without the request for permission that I got. With the request for permission and without thinking about it *too* much, I don’t really have a problem with this.

I got home from a 3 mile run this evening to find my 3 year old daughter playing with a yo-yo she got trick-or-treating on Halloween. My wife, my running buddy (Sachin) and I sat around takling and when the conversation turned to yo-yo’s and I said, “Wait there’s this video you guys have to see of people doing incredible things with yo-yos” and I went looking for one of the first episodes of Mahalo Daily on my iPhone. I found it and started playing back the video. My 3 year old daughter was instantly interested: she climbed onto a chair at the table, started watching it and said, “I have to learn how to yo-yo too.” But having it on the table just didn’t make it easy enough to watch and practice at the same time… so the next thing I see is she’s holding the iPhone against the refrigerator, trying to get it to sit on top of some magnets she has there. “Very cool idea!” I thought and I completed the concept for her with some extra magnets. The final product was a delightful prototype of a portable tablet TV (ie my iPhone) loosely coupled with our kitchen refrigerator… further evidence, I say, that a slate computer with iPhone-like touch and web-browsing capabilities is bound to be very successful and disruptive.

My 3-year old daughter tries to learn to yo-yo from Veronica Belmont and Mahalo Daily on an iPhone she mounted (with some help from me) on the refrigerator in our kitchen.

A close-up of “The Elevator” yo-yo move as demonstrated in an episode of Mahalo Daily

Something that’s been on my mind recently is the merger of technologies and experiences that exist on the web and retail locations. Here are some examples to illustrate what I’m talking about:

• Most hotels maintain a list of nearby restaurants and other stores — to get this list, I have to call someone up on the phone and get them to read the information to me or I have to walk downstairs and get a print copy of it. And then, I’m left with a paper copy of the information and it’s hard for me to make comparisons from there of, say, the hotel’s rating of those restaurants to the ratings of those restaurants on Yelp or Citysearch. Why doesn’t the hotel publish all this information on a hotel intranet all of the listings displayed on a map? Even better, why don’t they make this information available to prospective guests?
• And the hotel concierge has all kinds of other information — directions to nearby attractions, directions to the airport, guides to the city’s public transport, train schedules, etc. Same as above — this stuff should be on a hotel intranet that’s searchable.
• Any place where I spend a lot of time talking to a human being answering questions and making choices, there should be a web-like experience that can be brought in. Kiosks have already completely changed the way we check-in for flights here in the U.S. Car rental companies need to take note here — they still typically require you to talk to someone and answer various questions. However, on a recent trip, I rented from Alamo and I went through the whole process of “filling out my car rental paperwork” without talking to a human being — I did everything on a kiosk. It included all the steps in the process from “do you want to upgrade your rental?” to “do you want to pay for insurance?”. I loved it. Hotels should do the same thing — I used an automatic check-in once at the Hyatt Grand Central and I loved it too. I could go on and on with examples here — this particular line of thinking might hold the most opportunities. Just yesterday, I went to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the lines were way too long (I should have guessed it, but when it rains in Houston, the museums do mad business). They should have a bunch of kiosks that sell everything from yearly memberships to exhibit tickets.
• One of the simplest but coolest things that Apple does in their retail stores is they give you unfettered web access (well mostly unfettered — I bet they were blocking access to http://jailbreakme.com/ 🙂 ). Apart from attracting people to Apple Stores to use Macs to check their e-mail and surf the web, it means shoppers can search for product reviews and more product information. It effectively brings search technology into the retail experience (though in a non-integrated way). I was recently looking for a bag that my wife could use to carry her Macbook so I parked myself at a Mac in an Apple store where I searched for laptop bag reviews, browsed through the Apple Store’s inventory of laptop bags (figuring that the Apple Store was a good filter on the domain of available laptop bags out there), and got exact dimensions for the Macbook (so I could figure out which bags would fit the Macbook and which wouldn’t). Retail stores should recognize the role that the web plays in people’s buying decisions and do a better job of making it available within their stores.
• Why do I have to walk up to a store clerk and have them tell me whether they have inventory on a particular item? I’d like to be able to search the store’s inventory myself to see what they do or don’t have in-stock. Yeah, I understand that inventory counts are typically plus or minus a few units. If I could search the inventory sitting at home, all the better. And I don’t just want to search — it would be nice to be able to browse as well, like I can browse departments and categories on amazon.com, except I just want to see stuff that’s in the store. I read this article in the New York Times about EveryScape, a company that’s doing 3D tours of storefronts. The example they give in the article is the Harvard Coop (a bookstore). But looking at photographs of bookstore shelves is the last way I, personally, want to browse a bookstore’s inventory. I want more of an online search and browse interface (like what amazon.com offers).
• When I walk into a store, it would be useful and cool to see what the top-selling items in that store are and for larger stores (e.g. Target) it would be nice to see this information by department. What was the top-selling DVD at the Target near my house in Houston, TX? Retailers should be harnessing this data to enhance the shopping experience for their customers.

I don’t think there’s a name for this trend, but I basically want the experiences that I have when I’m not using my computer (or my phone) to be more web-like.