What AT&T doesn’t want you to know about the iPhone
This fantastic video does a great job of expressing the unique advantages I enjoy through being on AT&T.
(I’ve also been meaning to update my review of the AT&T 3G Microcell… but I’m still waiting for another return call from AT&T tier 2 support. I’ve spent hours on the phone with AT&T over the past month.)
(via @scobleizer/@ChrisPirillo/@shadoestevens)
LeanScale and SFAppShow
I’m about to launch a new iPhone and web app, LeanScale at the next SF AppShow. Join us, it’s a great event, and look for more here soon.
LeanScale is the only tool that separates fat and lean for better health. Don’t watch your weight, watch your lean, with LeanScale. You get immediate, powerful feedback on what is happening with your body right now, even when you are making gradual changes (the best kind). If you’re interested in the private beta, please comment below.
Invite (or, what’s the opposite of a Fail Whale?)
We asked our friend Yiying Lu to make for us the opposite of the Fail Whale for our wedding invitation.
She calls her new design “Win Penguins”
We combined the new and the old when we got engaged on Twitter. I asked Laura to marry me on bended knee with ring in one hand, iPhone in the other, in a room that included many friends as witness. In the same way, our invitations include Yiying’s new design and Laura hand-wrote the text of each one with a fountain pen. They were mailed last week.
Thanks, Yiying! (And thanks to our friend Bob Meyer of Galaxy Press for printing them.)
UPDATE
Our friends at Laughing Squid blogged about our wedding invite, then Mashable.com posted about it, as did Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and the Huffington Post, too.
First AT&T 3G MicroCell Review (tested at two homes in San Francisco)
AT&T 3G Microcell
Yesterday I read on Mobile Crunch that the AT&T 3G MicroCell went on sale. I ran out and bought the last available one from the AT&T Store nearest me. I’ve tested it in two San Francisco homes and can report on how it works for me.
The theory is great. I pay AT&T an extra $150 to fix service that I’m already paying more than $100 a month for. They give me a cute little orange and white box by CISCO that connects to my broadband internet and makes a micro cell site out of my house. Voila, a little bubble of reliable service in the wasteland that is trying to make iPhone voice calls in San Francisco.
Or so I hoped. Read more
iPhone hype and App hype exceeded by results: iTablet / iSlate to match it?
Along with all the hype before the first iPhone was released, I added my voice, noting that it would forever change the mobile phone business in important ways. I camped in line to be among the first to get one. There was enormous hype. Yet, in the two and a half years since, more change happened than most hype predicted.
When the iPhone app store was announced, I predicted that even the most optimistic scenarios projected by analysts were likely to fall short of the mark. It seems that apps have also changed more than even the hype suggested — they were off by even more than I’d thought.
So what will become of the Tablet that Apple announces this morning? Is it possible that the hype will be exceeded only by the results? Read more
Check your plan: new lower cell voice rates not automatic
You’ve probably seen the ads: both AT&T and Verizon have dropped their rates for unlimited voice plans to $69.99 per month. But if you aren’t already on an unlimited plan, you may be paying more for less until you take action.
For example, I was on an $89 voice plan that gave me 1350 minutes a month with rollover. AT&T was going to happily keep charging me $20 per month extra indefinitely. (I effectively had unlimited minutes already — with text and data becoming my dominant means of communication, I had accumulated tens of thousands of rollover minutes.)
$69.99 per month for unlimited voice -- but I had to go online to make the change
I went online to login and make the change to my account. In approximately 90 seconds total, I switched and am now paying $69.99 per month for unlimited voice.
So now my iPhone costs $120 per month ($30 data plan and $20 unlimited texting) before taxes and fees (and apps!). Read more
It’s time to end TSA-sponsored terrorism in the air and on American soil!
In nearly three years on Twitter, rarely have I seen such widespread, rapid and uniform response to anything having to do with politics, security or terrorism. The complaints and jokes came on rapid fire this afternoon, filling my screen with everything TSA and terrorism. It was a slow Twitter day, but perhaps 10% of the tweets I saw over a few hours were on a single topic — that’s unprecedented.
After a failed terrorist attempt yesterday, the TSA has responded with the next escalation after their previous high-water mark of stupidity (no pun intended), the no-liquids rule. Now: no more electronics in flight, nothing in your lap, only one carry on, and no movement in the last hour of flight. Many of those I follow on Twitter are frequent travelers, most are highly intelligent. All who’ve commented seem pissed (and not just that they won’t be able to pee).
They know the real impact of what security expert Bruce Schneier calls Security Theater (if you don’t like that link to his blog, try this one to 60 Minutes, even if they haven’t read his latest reaction.
My first reaction was When I stop flying, it doesn’t mean the terrorists have won, it means the TSA has! Read more
To marry a geek, propose like one. Engaged! (Yes, on Twitter, like real geeks.)
(photo by Ken Yeung)
If you want to marry a geek, you should propose like one. That makes Twitter and Facebook mandatory. Optional, but highly desired: a room full of San Francisco’s tech elite. At least, that was good enough for me, and I’ve managed to get very lucky.
At AT&T Unix Labs, Laura La Gassa helped maintain the C libraries and several standard Unix utilities. She was the build engineer for the first Pentium ‘C’ compiler. From there, she was an engineer in five silicon valley startups, though she’s spent the last ten years as a competitive ballroom dancer (and maker of dresses for same). They don’t come much prettier, more wonderful, or more geeky. (I’ll spare you lots of other adjectives I’d carry on with at length.) Fortunately, even though I’ve gone longer than she without coding, I have a small bit of my own geek cred, and was up to the task.
You can find the proposal (and about 150 reactions) in Laura’s Twitter favorites. A few blog posts (with pictures) about the evening:
http://technologizer.com/2009/11/20/a-night-to-remember/
http://bub.blicio.us/the-twitter-proposal/
http://sunshinemug.blogspot.com/2009/11/twitprosal-at-tech-halls.html
iTunes 9 Home Sharing/Sync the Wrong Solution. Give us automatic media caching!
We live in an age when homes don’t have a single computer on a desk, everyone has their own laptop. It’s great that iTunes9 recognizes the need to share files between computers so that everyone in a home can make local copies to hear each other’s music and watch each other’s videos.
Except that we have tiny storage in iPhones, MacBook Air and netbooks — some iPods hold more. We need to solve the problem of keeping only the files we need with us and having the rest stored on the network. I want an automatic system to swap in and out the files on my machines based on my requests and favorites, caching all the most used files locally and pulling less-often used files off the network as needed.
Competition Reduces Friction for Payments
Great news for business models that monitize by charging users: new competition in the payments space is heating up.
The iPhone AppStore capitalizes on 75 million iTunes accounts attached to credit cards to make buying cheap apps frictionless for users. I still want to extend it to paying for web and desktop apps and add flexibility for content and subscriptions.
PayPal powers payments on EBay (where the payments are larger), but doesn’t have quite the same easy single-click power and hasn’t been widely applied to the application/content space. Others, such as Google Checkout have never reached critical mass.
Yesterday, Amazon.com launched its Flexible Payments Service (previously in limited beta), touting it as “the first payments service designed from the ground up for developers.” They clearly intend it to work for e-commerce, digital goods, donations and online services, including digital music and online storage, and provide for subscriptions and recurring payments. Customers pay using the same login credentials, shipping address and payment information they already have on file with Amazon. In other words, it looks like it could compete with both of the above.
Sounds like a great foundation for the service I want to create…
About Dale
Entrepreneur and Advisor.
Founder, LeanScale.
Partner, SF AppStudio.I've been a software engineer, a rocket scientist, a CEO, an author, editor and publisher, a personal trainer (to movie stars, Olympic and professional athletes), and helped build a couple of mobile and Internet ad agencies.
Yeah, I was also the guy at the front of the iPhone line; all three times. iPad, too.
I write about startups, business, technology (especially mobile, social and web), and sometimes I review the gadgets I love to play with.