Papercasting

This is one of the wildest things I've seen yet: Papercasting. Instead of typing stuff into a blog with a keyboard or, heaven forbid, actually speaking into a microphone and uploading an mp3 or something of the sort, why not just write stuff on a sheet of paper, scan it to a jpg and upload it to a blog? Well, TDavid seems to think that it might cause some problems - especially with the sight-impaired - "with all the ALT tags on the images or in the XML feeds, they are unable to get involved."

I've actually started to enjoy podcasts, there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there. And music blogs really have some links to some very cool music and then there are people posting videos (here and here, for example) or whatever. There's so much cool stuff out there.

chris & mikey

chris & mikey
Originally uploaded by itzechris.

This is Uta's latest rendition of my dog Mikey and I. I love it.

Little guys on my desk

I've been hunkered down for a while here working on some stealthy stuff - isn't it great when you're in stealth mode on something? Nobody bothers you about stuff going wrong with this or that - ha! they can't because nobody's using it yet. Ah, what bliss.

Anyway, it's really cool how there have been these little guys wandering around my desk for a few days, one's black with little red stripes, the other one looks like some wild creature from some b-movie I saw a million years ago. The black and red guy had some problems a while ago, I helped him back on his feet though... right now he seems a little dazed - I wonder if he might need some food or something. What would you feed those guys?







Oh, I just dug out my Stone Roses collection tucked away in some obscure folder on my computer - they are simply the best... it was soooo cool - I was at my favorite laundrymat yesterday and the lady there had the Stone Roses going. Gosh, if you ever cometo Fairfax (in Marin), stop by the Hogwash mat on the main strip, it's the coolest place.

Ok, back to stealth mode!

the blur

I find it intriguing what Eleanor writes about "the blur" : where products are somewhere between consumer and enterprise. This seems to be especially relevant in the mobile space because people have their phones with them all the time, whether they're playing, working or waiting in traffic. And when you combine this with the information out there in blogs - whether as images or text or whatever - there's going to be a use for it whatever you're doing.

MobileMonday

I went to the MobileMonday meeting in San Francisco last night - wow, what a great event! The place was packed and the speakers talked about a lot of really interesting stuff. There will probably be more info up on that soon at the MobileMonday website.

It was really nice to speak with some of the people there: Jeff from SoftTech VC who reminded me that I should make sure the mobile NewsReader works with Buzznet, which it does - which means that you can view and save Buzznet photostreams on your mobile phone. Fabrizio from Funambol, who told me about their success with opensource, wow - now that's something I really have to start thinking about! I also got to meet Eleanor, she has such a cool blog! And here boyfriend Mike who's with Feedster - such a great web newsreader - I use it all the time. Mike's really a great guy. The event took place at Dimension 7, I spoke with Michael who's really doing some very cool stuff with video.

This was my first MobileMonday since I just returned from Germany a little while back - I will be going there again for sure - the next one's supposed to be at Yahoo, that'll be great.

It was really cool that I got to plug the Photo NewsReader - it's really nice how they have it structured as an open forum - it's so good for meeting people in the space.

Thinking @ Limantour

Pacific @ Point Reyes
Originally uploaded by itzechris.

The beach is a great place to think. And today was such a beautiful day, it was even easier to think... and of course I don't only think about the warmth, the waves and the sand, but also about other things - especially things that have to do with networked mobile apps. It turns out Yahoo has done something pretty cool, they've just published an api to access their web services. Pretty cool. Anyway, that's probably something we should plug into... just a little more thinking and there will be something new to write about!

Flash Lite again...

I agree with most of what Dave Stennett writes - that FlashLite is not going to replace Java - and Java is just on soooo many phones because of the games - so building apps in Java makes sense. But even with Java being as smart as it is, it can only do so much, so I think a back-end server will be really important for certain apps - and I suppose that would be the approach you could take with FlashLite... just have it do the pretty stuff, let the server do the thinking. And Flash Lite sure does make it so much easier to build pretty things that work on phones... if it would only work on more than just a handful... wait, wait, wait...