Author: rakesh

I’ve just kicked off about 23 simultaneous export jobs (give or take) from within Picasa — I’m exporting the more than 8,000 photographs that were taken by me, Johanna, and Donnie at my sister’s wedding at the end of December. It should keep my PC busy for a little bit… the question is whether Picasa will crash or not. I certainly hope it doesn’t.

An insightful quotation from Lev Grossman’s Time Magazine write-up on the Apple iPhone:

When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.” In other words, when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

I love the Onion. Today, they have this article on cell-phone TV. Lyor Goldberg, fork-lift operator says: “Big deal. Get back to me when I can watch TV on my cat.”

And in other news, I just heard that while at school today, my daughter Ananya took off one of her shoes, went to the sink, and filled it with water. Because she thought it was dirty and wanted to clean it.

Seems that Yahoo Go TV is no longer being promoted through the Yahoo.com website. It used to be located here:

http://go.connect.yahoo.com/go/tv/get_started

…and now these page redirects to Yahoo Go, Yahoo’s rich client for mobile devices.

UPDATE: This post in the Yahoo forums says it’s a temporary mistake. Possible I guess.

UPDATE 2: As Pablo from Yahoo points out in the comments, Yahoo Go TV is back up and running.

About 8 months ago, I wrote about my switch over to Gmail as my primary work email client. Seems I’m not the only one doing this based on this story in today’s New York Times (which, incidentally, I first read in my car on my Cingular 2125 Windows Mobile phone while I was driving into work this morning and then read again on Google Blogoscoped). The one thing this article misses, in my opinion, is a key reason I made the switch: productivity. Gmail has some massive productivity enhancers that are absent from Outlook and other Windows-based email clients. Conversations, quick and always-works search, effective spam filtering, instant filtering, instant mobile access, and tags are some of the productivity enhancers.

I’m back from CES this year… managed to catch an earlier flight yesterday and got back to Houston in time to catch a great basketball game — Rockets vs. Lakers — last night.

I’ve had several conversations with folks about the show, what I saw there and what was interesting. Katie over at Om Malik’s blog has a good post on the Top 5 Trends at CES. I agree that THIS year’s CES was incremental, but I thought this was in contrast to last year’s CES. Last year’s CES was all about content — Google announced the availability of CBS and NBA content on Google Video, Intel announced content partnerships as a part of their VIIV campaign. Last year everyone was competing to see who could get the bigger celebrities in their keynotes (Yahoo had Ellen Degeneres, Tom Hanks, Intel had Morgan Freeman and Tom Hanks, Google had Robin Williams). Just a few months before CES, Apple had starting making TV shows available through iTunes. Last year’s CES was all about video content deals, and this was big and different news. In contrast, CES this year was only incremental. No big new technologies or products, just people trying to improve their digital devices — higher resolution, more functionality, access to more content, etc. Things that the companies exhibiting hope to improve user experience and drive volume for their products.

🙂

I’m at CES from today until Wednesday afternoon. If you are interested in meeting up, email me or call me at 713 446 7725.

Today, I mourn the death of James Kim.

Like others who are current users of the web-based Gmail Mobile, the net-net experience with the new Java-based Gmail client isn’t great. It looks nice and it does a number of things that I’ve always wanted to be able to do with the web-based version (easier lookup of email addresses, mark messages as spam), but this is a case of two steps forward, five steps back. Some of the issues that I’m having are issues with my Windows Mobile 5.0 JVM (I have a Cingular 2125):

* My Java Midlet Manager constantly asks me / prompts me if it’s OK to the access the Internet. How do I get rid of these prompts and just tell it to log me in when it needs to log me in?

* How do I get text entry to default to T9? Right now, I have to change the setting everytime I enter a textarea / textbox to enter an e-mail address or a message. On a related note, getting into a text box requires too many clicks! Click in the Gmail Java Client and then click again in Windows Mobile to edit the textarea. And then two ‘accepts’ when I want to get back to the Gmail Java Client.

* How do I link directly to Gmail from my main menu rather than having to go through the midlet manager?

* And, like Paul mentions in his post (linked to above) the context switch from my mobile web browser is a pain.

* Related to the context switch, the back button on my phone doesn’t behave the way I expect it to. When I hit back, rather than taking me to the previous screen in the Gmail Java client (which is how the web-based version works), it takes me out of the midlet manager. Ack!

I’m looking forward to iterative upgrades to this client. The client gives a glimpse at a superior class of mobile web experiences, but it also reveals the (fixable) shortcomings of today’s mobile phone platforms.