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Every so often, people remember the Apple TV and ask, “What’s Apple doing in the living room?”. The latest is a TiPb post, “Should Apple TV Switch to the iPhone OS?“.

My take: it’s obvious to me that eventually Apple is going to make a strong play in the living room. Eventually what we’ve seen happen for phones, what we’re about to see happen in “tablet PCs” (with the iPad) will repeat itself in the living room.

Great hardware + base OS with great usability + platform for 3rd party app dev & distribution

At SnapStream, it was the absence of this platform + device for the living room that lead us away from our consumer PC DVR software and lead us to, instead, focus on our TV search solution for businessess/organizations.

Our thinking was, Until such a platform exists in the living room (and for a little while, we thought Microsoft’s Media Center Edition would be this platform, but IMO it never got there), it doesn’t make sense for us to try and build “apps” for the living room. Incidentally, creating this platform and device is what Boxee is trying to do.

Anyways, another question to consider is “when?” of this living room platform.

With smartphones, Apple released the iPhone in June 2007. The 1st Android phone (the G1) came out in October 2008 –16 months later.

Apple iPhone ————–time=16 months————-> Android*

(*Tmobile G1)

The iPad comes out in April 2010. I’m betting that Google, either through Android or Google Chrome, will release an iPad competitor in 2010, ie within 8 months of the iPad. IMO Google can’t afford to lose the kind of time they lost with the iPhone with “tablet computing” — time during which lots of people got hooked on the iPhone’s way of doing things.

iPad —time=~8 months —-> Google Tablet**

(**Android or Chrome OS)

So if the question is “When will Apple make an iPhone-like platform+device play in the living room?”, I think the trend above will continue, so I think we’ll see Apple and Google release their living room platforms close together — maybe Google will even beat Apple on this one.

I visited Guggenheim in New York today for the first time (every time I’ve meant to visit in the past, I’ve been caught by their early weekday closing time of 5:45pm). Designed by US architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, the building looks kind of like a fanciful parking garage from the outside (my fellow Houstonians will know what I mean) and inside, you get from floor to floor via a continuous ramp that spirals upwards. What a cool building!

The exhibit I enjoyed the most was the “Contemplating the Void” exhibit (NYTimes review), where 200 artists and creative types came up with concepts on how to use the central “void” space of the Guggenheim museum… the open area at the center of the building that the inside ramp swirls up around. There were all kinds of wacky ideas in this exhibit. One of my favorites was the idea of an “art trap” where people would be able to climb into the walls surrounding the inside ramp of the building. There, they’d be held in openings in the wall that resembled medieval stocks, becoming part of the building, an art spectacle (a bunch of people in the walls, flailing their arms and legs!).

I wish Monty Python had been invited to submit a design. I’m thinking of the architect sketch.

The exhibit signage/copy (which I admit, I actually read) opened the exhibit describing the central void space of the building as original, bold and “threatening”. I felt like this was all a bit much. A building constructed around a large open space? They’ve been doing those in India* for a very long time — they’re called aangans.

The other exhibit that I enjoyed was Anish Kapoor’s Memory (Guggenheim museum website link). It’s an installation piece from the guy who did the shiny, mirrory silver you’re-not-allowed-to-photograph-it object in Chicago. The piece basically tries to say, “Think of memory like the story of the blind men and the elephant**.” At least that’s what I took away from it. Yeah, just go see it.

* Note: while this statement makes me sound like the archetypal everything-was-invented-in-India Uncle (“Beta, do you know where algebra was invented? That’s right…”), I assure you that I have not become that Uncle. Not yet anyways.

** Come to think of it, didn’t the story of the blind men and the elephant originate in India?

This photograph is over 10 years old now. My sister, Arti, and I caught a ride up to Tsongo Lake a little ways from Gangtok. It was a holiday in Gangtok so the driver (who we had hired) asked if it was OK to bring his nephew along. Great! we said.

I stuck my camera (a Nikon film camera) out the window of the Maruti/Suzuki van we were ascending the mountain in to take this photograph. That’s the drivers nephew sipping a coke looking down as we climb the mountain. What a great adverisement for Coke!

I’m in India right now and I’m using this trip to really test out the Nexus One I bought a few weeks ago. The quick summary, so far: the Nexus One is a great phone, I can do almost everything I can do on my iPhone with this thing.

The few times I had used used the Nexus One in the States, I never got past the differences between it and the iPhone. Plus I’m married to my AT&T phone number in the States. But now that I’m kind of forced to use it (the iPhone is a hassle to unlock and use in India), I’m pretty happy with it. Even the battery life isn’t that bad. Anyways, more on this later.

I wanted to document one setting thing I had to do to get data working on my Nexus One with my local provider (Airtel) in case it saves someone else some time. First of all it didn’t just work. So I went digging and found this thread where someone mentioned:

The N1 (and presumably Android) cannot handle a SIM card with multiple GPRS/data access points – which is what Airtel has – Mobile Office and Live!

So I manually setup an APN in Android (Settings -> Wireless -> Mobile -> APN) with the following settings:

Name: Airtel (I think you can put anything you want in here!)
APN: airtelgprs.com
Username: 123456

(And then the MCC and MNC were automatically set to 404 and 10 respectively, and the Authentication Type was set to “None” — I guess these were successfully read off of the SIM. Everything else was ““)

I’ve been using the TED5000 home energy monitoring system to measure my energy consumption since October 2009.

The bottom line: I highly recommend the TED5000. What you don’t measure, can’t be managed… and so it goes with electricity consumption. What the TED5000 has done for us:

1) pushed me to replace every incandescent bulb in our house with CFLs (CFLs use about 1/8th of the electricity and provide more light!)

2) has me and my wife making sure we have lights, TV, etc. turned off when we leave the house.

3) it’s lead to a lot of great conversations with family, friends, and my eldest daughter (5 years old) about energy consumption.

4) Net-net: our electricity bill for November was HALF of that in October and we’ve consistently averaged 30-40% lower monthly bills.

What to buy: If you have one breaker box in your house, you need their TED5000-C kit — it costs $239.99. More info on the TED5000 on their website.

More details on my setup, including photographs of the TED5000 components and the whole setup process below:

(you might prefer to view this album directly on picasaweb)

(since once person I told about the TED5000 asked me, let me state: I have no financial interest in the makers of the TED5000. I’d just like to see more people have their eyes opened by real-time energy monitoring!)

Update (2/8/2010): While she didn’t talk a lot about the details, Purva Patel at the Houston Chronicle has a bit about my setup in this article about home energy monitoring.

Testing WP iPhone app + uploading photographs.

TechCrunch wrote today that they’re hearing Google might add Google Voice to their Google Apps suite of enterprise apps (link). I’m excited to hear this! (and I twittered this as a feature request just a week or two ago).

At both Snapstream and Piping (my father’s manufacturing company that I spend some time helping out at), we use Google Apps. Since I’ve been spending some time helping out at Piping, their phone system is something we’ve struggled with. The most immediate problem has been voicemail:
– their PBX has no ability up route them over email and no ability to transcribe them
– Traditional VM is a huge time sink – disrupts your workflow, requires you to pick up your phone and interact with voice prompts using buttons on your phone
– limited ability to forward or otherwise share received messages.

Their particular phone system (a Toshiba office PBX) has a module that we considered purchasing for $10k that would route voicemails over email. I was never excited about spending that money to buy something that was written 10-15 years ago, and has only a fraction of the features available in packages like Asterisk (open source PBX that we use at SnapStream).

But in the last month, the IT guys at Piping have started doing something interesting. They’ve figured out how the existing phone system can forward to a 3rd party service after x rings. So they’ve bought a bunch of Google Voice accounts (off of ebay – like $2 an invite) and are using it for voicemail! The user feedback on this has been hugely positive.

“No more stopping everything I do to check voicemails!”

“Now I get my voicemails on email as the day goes on.”

“Even though the transcription isn’t perfect it’s usually good enough to figure out what was said.”

They’ve setup 20 users with this (<10% of the users there), picking off the heaviest voicemail users first. When they add Google Voice to Google Apps, we'll certainly jump on it at Piping and SnapStream -- at least for the VM use case described above. Replacing the entire PBX with Google Voice? As much ad I'd like out my office PBX into the cloud, call reliability and quality will have to be perfect. I've had this conversation with my brother in law (who is a telecom guy) many times and he's right. Will a local small business -- say a pizza joint -- risk switching from their "it just works" copper phone line to an unmanaged over-the-top Internet-based phone service? Not until "it just works" too.

I haven’t been posting much here… my blogging to do list:

• Review of my TED5000 (an energy measurement device that integrated with Google’s Powermeter and has changed the energy consumption habits at our house)
• What I learned switching from incandescent bulbs to CFLs. I recently switched almost every bulb in my house from incandescent bulbs (the things that get really hot that make light by passing electricity through a filament) to CFLs (the curly bulbs).
• My new primary laptop — the Acer Timeline 1810TZ (I’d link to their site, but it has a really annoying soundtrack that they don’t give you the option to turn off!).
• Voicemail transcription: Callwave vs. Youmail vs. Google Voice. I’ve recently tested all three and have deployed them at work and at home.

I hope I get to doing some of these write-ups in the next week or two!

I tried out the Motorola Droid for 2 weeks, including a business trip to Los Angeles last week and here are my quick notes:

• Google Navigation is nice! I like the user interface — for example, it’s nice how the next step in your driving directions are rendered in white text on a dark green background (just like the road signs on U.S. freeways!). It only made one small mistake that I can remember: rather than directing me to go right onto a jughandle that put me onto the freeway going in the correction direction, it directed me to take a left turn instead (near LAX, getting onto 405 S). We dubbed the female voice Vivian. How long before there are custom voices available? One of the writers at Current TV who had the same Motoroloa Droid as well said, “I’d LOVE to have my directions read to me by Mr. T!”.
• There were lots random stalls and lock-ups in the user interface. Consistent with Stewart Alsop’s review, I’d be doing something and suddenly everything would cease working for 30-60 seconds. It happened 2-3 times a day, but that was enough to significantly lower my confidence and trust in the device’s reliability.
• Google Voice is really great. The biggest GV feature for me is being able to click an international number in my phone book and trust that I’m not going to get reamed on the international calling charges. As I noted on twitter 10 days ago, Google Voice charges me $0.07 / minute for calls to India while AT&T (iPhone) charges me $2.49 / minute for the same call — more than a 35x differential! Sure, there are other ways I can get a low rate to India on my AT&T cell phone (and I do — I use Reliance CallIndia), but none as convenient as just tapping on a phone number in my phone book.
• I never use the keyboard. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by using an iPhone for the past 2.5 years, but I never use the keyboard on the Motorola Droid. I’d much rather take the size/weight reduction that removing the keyboard would bring. Apart from being conditioned by using the iPhone, I guess I just use my cell phone with one hand (while I’m walking, while I’m driving, in a meeting in my lap) a lot more than with two hands (required for using the keyboard). And the context switch from portrait to landscape + sliding out the keyboard is something that slows me down.
• The apps were fine. They were for me anyways. I know the iPhone app store has more variety and selection, but I was able to get the key apps that I use the most. On my trip, my colleague had entered everything into TripIt and TripIt has a native Android client, so I was happy there. There wasn’t a native Yelp app for Android, which I would have liked.
• Some UI quirks and lack of polish. I bought the G1 the day it came out and played around with it for a couple of weeks before giving up on Android 1.0. The version on the Motorola Droid is a lot better — soft keyboard in both portrait and landscape mode. Settings menu is less confusing. But as an example of a settings things that’s still confusing: Droid comes with a charming-for-a-few-hours consistent-with-their-branding robotic sound scheme — when you receive a new email the phone cries out in a deep robotic baritone: “DROID.” But you quickly realize that this sound scheme is useless beyond starting a conversation with people around you about Android’s latest phone. In the “Settings” app, you can turn all notifications on or off, but you have to go into the mail app to toggle email notifications on or off and change the sound that’s use as the notification. Kind of confusing and for a basic service of the phone, something that should be included in the phone’s native settings menu, IMO.
• Battery life wasn’t that great. Especially when using the phone for navigation! On one particular day, I think the phone lasted us for 3 or 4 routes and that’s all. We weren’t even using it for phone calls or anything other than navigation! I should note that I didn’t have the official Motorola Droid car mount because every Verizon Store I visited/called was out of them (maybe this include a power charger?) and that I think there were times when the navigation was still running after we got to our destination (it took me a while to figure out how to turn off the navigation after we had reached our destination!).

So that’s my quick rundown. If I was on Verizon already and didn’t have an iPhone, I’d consider the Droid. But the iPhone is still much better device IMO. I think I even like the Palm Pre more than the Motorola Droid. But Android is getting better and better and the Droid hardware isn’t bad. Given how thorny it is to unlock the iPhone and use it overseas with a local service provider (I tried on a recent trip to Barcelona and could never get data or GPS to work for me), I could see myself getting an unlocked Android phone to use when I travel internationally.

(On a side note, I ran into a friend at the grocery store yesterday using an HTC Hero on Sprint and that looks like a great device — no keyboard, decent screen, pretty thin, none of that chin that the G1 or the HTC Magic had. Where can I get an unlocked GSM version of the HTC Hero?)

UPDATE (12/7/2009, 3:35pm): It turns out that Yelp for Android was just released today and it also turns out that Google’s added a “What’s Nearby” feature to Google Maps for Android, something I would definitely have used last week!

I’ve been traveling a fair bit as of late and I’ve learned a pretty useful trick to buying mileage tickets (and this can also apply to cash tickets as well). Others might find this a useful way to save themselves or their companies money. Make-up some of those extra $$$ airlines charges these days for checked baggage, food, ticket changes, etc.!!!

A little bit about the kind of traveling I do:

• Most of my travel is business travel
• I usually don’t stay weekends — which means no Saturday night stay. Which means much higher cost tickets, especially if they are booked at the last minute.
• I frequently travel to the same cities — for SnapStream, we have customers all over the US and Canada, but there are concentrations of customers in particular cities like New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles.
• I like flying direct, non-stop flights — I save time, which means more time for meetings and I end up less tired (which ultimately represents better meetings)

So let’s say I want to travel to Washington DC next week from Houston, leaving on Monday and returning on Thursday. This ticket might cost $1,200 on Continental Airlines. The mileage ticket would cost 50,000 miles (all round-trip mileage tickets on Continental that don’t include a Saturday night stay are necessarily 50,000 miles). Now, spending 50,000 miles on a $1,200 mileage ticket is a reasonable use of miles.

But what if I could get two round-trip tickets to Washington DC and spend the same amount of miles? That would be really awesome!

It turns out this is possible if you can plan two trips to the same city at one time. Here’s how it works:

1. Decide your two travel dates to your destination city — for our example, let’s say I’m going to Washington DC June 22 through June 25. We’ll call this trip1. And I might plan another trip to Washington DC August 3rd through August 5th. We’ll call this trip2.

If I bought two mileage tickets for these two trips, it would be 50,000 miles for the June trip (trip1) and 50,000 miles for the August trip (trip2):

trip1: Houston –> DC, June 22 (Mon) – June 25 (Thurs) (50,000 miles)
trip2: Houston –> DC, August 3 (Mon) – August 5 (Wed) (50,000 miles)

2. Instead, I purchase two round-trip mileage tickets — the first one (ticket1), departing Houston June 22nd (trip1) and returning to Houston on August 5th (trip2). This ticket has a price of 25,000 miles because it involves a Saturday night stay (technically, it includes a bunch of Saturday night stays! :-))

3. And then I purchase a second round-trip mileage ticket (ticket2) — departing Washington DC on June 25th (trip1) and returning to Washington DC on August 3rd (trip2). Also 25,000 miles.

A summary:
ticket1: Houston –> DC, June 22 – August 5 (25,000 miles)
ticket2: DC –> Houston, June 25 – August 3 (25,000 miles)

Because each ticket includes a Saturday night stay, each ticket costs me 25,000 for a grand total of 50,000 miles.

I just did this for a trip I’m taking next week and it worked out beautifully! Two airline tickets for the price of one.

And even if I somehow don’t travel on the latter ticket, I didn’t spend more miles than I would have otherwise. Also, changing mileage tickets is a lot more flexible than changing paid tickets. So I could even change the August trip (trip2) in the example above with some, relatively speaking, reasonable change fees.