The US Divided by Facebook
Rich has been a big proponent of Posterous for a long time. I’ve been meaning to try it out, so here goes.
I saw this link in my Reader today, pretty interesting stuff. I <3 data visualizations, as you know, so it was a gimme. Not sure how he got access to all the data though . . .
Data visualization by Pete Warden
Are Blog Comments Obsolete?
Photo by jrthoms from Flickr used under Creative Commons
I’ve been thinking about comments lately, mostly because several interesting points have converged to draw my attention.
First, Cult of Mac pointed out that John Gruber’s Daring Fireball will now have comments, via another site, i.e. DaringFireballWithComments.net.
Next, Engadget turned off their comments because the had “really gotten out of hand”.
Then today I see TechCrunch responded to allegations that they were deleting comments on old posts, an interesting point someone noted in the comments here.
Obviously, these are all very large sites that attract (or would, in Daring Fireball’s case) a lot of spammy and otherwise unhelpful (“first!”) comments. Long ago, I stopped reading the comments on posts from large blogs and news sites specifically because there was so much cruft, making it difficult to find useful bits.
Before Twitter, comments often led to blog posts and link love, but lately, there seem to be more blogs that broadcast without any response to comments.
I understand why John Gruber doesn’t want comments, i.e. they detract from his content. Makes old school sense. He’s lecturing. That’s fine.
I also understand why popular sites have comments, even though the authors rarely respond to them. Makes monetary sense. The volume would quickly overwhelm them; authors are paid for content not comments.
So that leaves all the other sites, like this one, where comments are enabled and welcomed.
I enjoy comments, and right or wrong, I internally measure the popularity of a post based on its comments (vs. pageviews). I blog to get information as much as to broadcast it, and the exchanges in the comments frequently add to the original post’s content. Read more
Welcome VirtualBox
Have you noticed the subtle change to the VirtualBox logo? Probably not, but thanks to ReadWriteWeb for pointing out the change.
VirtualBox is one of several open source projects that Sun oversaw, and in his strategy briefing last week, Larry Ellison announced that VirtualBox images will be deployable on Oracle VM, which is great news.
If you read here, you’ll know VirtualBox is my virtualization client of choice, and I’m geeked at the prospect of having VBox images of all the software I need readily available. No more building VMs.
I also hope that having a full virtualization stack will lead to more images for developers and customers. In many ways, virtualization trumps cloud-based offerings, so this makes a lot of sense.
I’m excited about this. How about you?
Scoring Topper on the Tablet
Image from Mac Daily News
Last week, you got not one, but two posts by authors not named Jake. I felt lucky too.
Matt (@topperge) gave us his rundown of “no brainer” features in advance of the iPad announcement. As a giggle, let’s score his accuracy:
- Books in the App Store: Win. Apple announced a new app called iBooks, delivered through the App Store for download to the iPad.
- It’ll run a modified iPhone OS: Win. The iPad will run iPhone OS 3.2, and the SDK was announced, in case you’re ready to start building apps.
- Sensors: Win. The iPad has the same sensors the iPhone does–accelerometer, GPS and compass.
- Front Facing Video Camera: Fail. This is one of the top misses for many people, but it seems pretty likely that it will be in future releases. Apparently, the SDK has already implemented the interface for a camera.
- New Health Care Focus: Fail? I was telling Floyd (@fteter) and Ted (@badgerworks) last week that this feels like a made up use case that someone threw out as plausible in a meeting that snow-balled into the killer use case. I didn’t watch the announcement, but since last Wednesday, I haven’t heard a peep about the iPad for health care professionals. Maybe 2.0.
- Wifi and 3G: Win, although Matt might see this as fail, since he said “this will be their place to get away from AT&T”. Heh, not so much. Matt predicted a $50 unlimited plan, but it came in lower at $29.99.
- Storage: Win. The iPad will come with a 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive. Matt predicted 16 and 32GB, with a bonus prediction of a 128GB model coming soon.
- Remote control interface: Yeah, fail, although this makes a ton of sense. Again, probably 2.0 or later.
So, five out of eight, not bad, Matt, and I’ll bet two of the three you missed will be coming soon, probably camera first. Although the iPhone OS finally implemented copy/paste in version 3.0, so the future is murky. Read more
What Do You Think of the iPad?
In case you were unplugged, Apple announced a tablet last week, called the iPad.
By now, the jokes have died down and the geek world has been furiously dissecting the pros and cons of the iPad. It’s what we do.
My quick take is the same as its been for a while: I don’t need a gadget that fits between my iPhone and my laptop. That gives me some impartiality I suppose, since the iPad wasn’t awesome enough to create that need for me.
The iPhone’s success came initially because it met one super obvious use case: cellular telephone. And it just so happened to do other smartphone things in useful ways.
The iPad lacks that same killer use case, and general consensus among most geeks is similar. The iPad doesn’t create a need for them; it creates (or meets) one for casual users, e.g. your mother.
Ah Mom, the classic geek measuring stick for so many use cases.
The problem with all the analysis is that it’s being done by people who don’t share the killer use case; we’re all guessing. Arguably, everyone needs a cell phone. Not everyone needs an internet appliance, probably the best term I’ve heard to describe the device that’s not pocket-sized, but is still relatively portable.
The Importance of January 27, 2010
Wednesday was an interesting day, with two very interesting announcements happening at the same time, one in the consumer space, one in the enterprise space.
I’m talking obviously about the Apple event to announce the iPad and the Oracle-Sun strategy announcement.
It’s well-known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have been friends for many years, and there are very few figures in technology as well-known and polarizing as these two. Oh, and they both know how to put on a show for an audience.
I spent my Wednesday attending an Enterprise OpenSocial meetup at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, so I didn’t have to make the tough choice between the events. Of course, in this day and age of broadband intertubes, I’m sure many people followed both simultaneously (kudos Floyd).
Heading into the Apple announcement, Steve Jobs was rumored to have called the iPad “the most important thing I’ve ever done”. Time will tell, but the iPad definitely has potential to be a game-changer. Whether it forces good or bad change is the question. More on that next week.
On the possibly less exciting, but equally important enterprise side, the Oracle-Sun announcement was months in the making, and ever since it was announced, way back in April 2009, I’ve been excited for the future combination of companies.
Why? Read more
Be Safe Out There Kids!
Last week my imac (home computer), that my wife uses to run our little lunchbox company begin having some serious issues. Slow access times, constant rebooting and as of yesterday a complete inability to boot. Just a lovely grey screen of solitude much like the image above, until it refused to even show that little folder after numerous frustrated reboots. I am quite certain that this would never happen to the Jesus Tablet, but I digress…
So I grab my trusty Snow Leopard install CD (Family Pack, yes I am a sucker). Throw it in, hit the button on the back of the imac, holding the “c” key of course, and it happily boots to the disk. I confidently launch the disk utility and low and behold, no hard drive shows up.
See this is where I get kinda worried. Usually you are able to at least SEE the hard drive. Then you do all the fun repair, repair permissions or worst case reformat and move on with your life like a bad first date. In my case, this baby was lost beyond all recognition.
Once again I pay a visit to the gods of the Internet for advice. Turns out a few nerds (here and here) have actually taken their imac’s apart and swapped the hard drive. So I figure, how hard can it be, I own a drill. I pick up a 1.5TB Seagate drive ($128), a set of Torx wrenches ($18.51) and a suction cup ($10.95) for removing the screen – all from Amazon with 1 day shipping for $3.99 – Have I told you how much I love Amazon?
Here is how it went down: Read more
13 Hours Until the Jesus Tablet
Tomorrow is going to be a challenge trying to figure out who’s getting my attention. At noon Larry is going to be revealing the strategy for the Sun acquisition here, and Steve will be releasing his new world saving device the Jesus tablet. I’m 
sure Larry’s 5 hour presentation tomorrow is going to be riveting, it’s especially going to effect my Identity Management world but for now lets focus on some consumer fun. You can’t hit twitter or any blog without seeing someone predicting what features the tablet with have. Here’s my list of no brainer features:
- Books in the App Store – Steve doesn’t like anyone making money that he can’t dip his fingers into. With the success of the Kindle, the Sony, and Nook eBook readers it only makes sense.
- It’ll run a modified iPhone OS – Because of the power of the app store, it just makes sense for the tablet to run the same operating system. The biggest issue will be to see how they scale the graphics / applications. I think we’ll finally see the ability to background apps or run multiple apps at a time like windows widgets.
- Sensors – Its going to have all the same sensors as the iPhone, compass, GPS, and accelerometer. This is critical to keep all the games from the app store alive
- Front Facing Video Camera – With the form factor of the device its definitely not going to be made to take any pictures, but it makes sense to have a front facing video camera for iChat and Skype type activities. We may have a new application that logs you in by your face since some are saying Steve only sees one tablet per family. The camera can’t differentiate between twins so maybe not a feature.
- New Health Care Focus – Most of my doctors already carry an iPhone or touch in the office to look up all their drug and treatment information. The tablet gives them a better platform to read charts, view x-rays, etc. It should really revolutionize the health care industry. I’m not seeing a major business play yet, but someone smarter than I will come up with some killer business apps…maybe some BI real time analytics applications.
- Wifi and 3G – This will be their place to get away from AT&T, the Verizon network just makes sense here. Verizon learned their lesson the first time around missing out on the iPhone boat and they won’t want to miss this one. My guess is a $50 a month unlimited plan.
- Storage – 32 and 64 GB options for the launch, they’ll release a 128 GB version in 6-12 months.
- Remote control interface – The tablet will be able to remotely control all the Apple devices in your house. Whether its the Apple TV, Airport, or iTunes, you’ll be able to remotely control it like the Sonos controllers.
All of these features seem pretty obvious to me, nothing truly ground breaking. We’ve been talking about this a lot lately and they really need a killer application to marry with it. There are two pieces that will make this a killer device. Read more
Does Geo Location Matter to You?
Photo by BluEyedA73 from Flickr used under Creative Commons
As with last week, the geo news has been hot and heavy again this week, but before I get to the tidbits I’ve found interesting, let’s talk about why geo matters or doesn’t.
Unlike social, you shouldn’t be guilted into geo. Not that you were guilted into joining Twitter or Facebook, but the riskiness of joining those networks is much lower than joining a geo location service and adding all your contacts.
People seem to get this, for the most part, which is why I’m sticking with my prediction that the “where are other people” use case won’t get off the ground, and the “where am I” use case is the one that matters more to people.
Why? Because there are real incentives to telling retailers where you are, or are not, which is leading to rewards like mayor deals and virtual loyalty programs. Venues can take advantage too by encouraging others to checkin and play the game for rewards.
This symbiotic relationship between the geo location service and the retailer holds a lot of promise for consumers. Beyond the obvious capitalist applications, there are others as well, e.g. tracking travel patterns leads to better routes for you and for your city planners.
Foursquare is already partnering with BART, and it’s logical that as geo adoption increases, city officials would welcome views of how their citizens travel. Having more data always helps, e.g. yesterday’s speed data from Tele Atlas would be a nice compliment, assuming they have an API.
Need more use cases? Marshall has a bunch of other examples. Read more
Speed Data Pr0n
Photo by JaseMan from Flickr used under Creative Commons
If you read here, you know I love data and data visualizations.
So, you won’t be surprised to hear this post from Hot Hardware immediately intrigued me: “TomTom’s IQ Routes Prove Americans Aren’t Speed Demons”.
Aside from the blatant advertising, the conclusions, initially published by Tele Atlas, TomTom’s map business unit, were great data points for me, since I’ve lived in and driven in many of the larger cities here in the U.S. of A.
- The fastest road in America is I-15 in Utah and Nevada, where average speeds top 77 mph. The posted speed limits are pretty high there, and take it from me, it’s pretty sparse and flat, making it easy to go fast.
- Washington D.C. has the slowest average speeds on its interstate highways, only 46 mph. If you’ve driven in that area for any amount of time, you’ll be shocked that the average is that high.
- Hawaii’s average interstate highway speed is second-lowest at 53 mph. This seemed surprisingly high at first, based on a) the small number of major roads on the Hawaiian Islands and b) how winding and small they are. Interstate is a funny word in this case, and there are actually three interstate highways, all on Oahu.
Tele Atlas published a similar report on traffic congestion in major U.S. cities in December. Not a lot of surprises here, except maybe that Seattle has the worst traffic, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and New York.
Interesting stuff, at least if you live here in the States. I’m sure Tele Atlas has similar data for international cities as well, e.g. they mention that speeds on unregulated stretches of Germany’s famous Autobahn average over 100 mph.
So, how did Tele Atlas get these data? Read more
More WebCenter Goodness
Yesterday, Vince posted the third installment in his “What is WebCenter” series, and as promised, he dives into the design points with more detail.
After reading all three parts, it should be clearer that WebCenter is a lot of things and is therefore, difficult to describe in a terse manner. To date, we’ve been working to extend and tweak WebCenter Spaces using its native capabilities, mixing in a generous amount of the REST APIs.
As Rich mentions on this post on WebCenter’s REST APIs by Peter Moskovits, he’s posted some of his code to GitHub, in case you’re interested in taking a look.
Now that you know more about WebCenter, you can try it out for yourself using the OTN development licenses.
Remember my install-WebCenter opus? I chatted with some folks in product management about documenting that process and voila, there’s a new Oracle-by-Example (OBE) for installing WebCenter on Linux here.
The OBE covers all the pieces you need, including UCM, and all the steps you’ll need to take in a single place. Plus, it has lots of screen captures, which always helps me.
Good stuff.
I’m curious to know thoughts on WebCenter, now that you know what it is and how to install it.
If you’re a consultant (ahem, Chet), would you consider learning WebCenter to add to your list of skills? Why or why not?
If you’re in IT, would you consider using WebCenter internally?
I’m interested in your impressions. Find the comments and share them.
Oracle & Sun Strategy Webcast
Word leaked yesterday that the EU was set to approve the Oracle-Sun acquisition, and today, it’s official.
Justin announced that Larry Ellison will hold a live webcast on January 27 to unveil the corporate strategy for the combined companies. Here’s the official description:
Transforming the Way You Buy, Run, and Manage Your Business Systems
Find out how Oracle + Sun goes beyond your expectations to:
- Offer a broad range of products including servers, storage, networking, and software
- Integrate all the components–hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications–for unmatched performance, reliability, and security
- Simplify IT management and reduce system deployment and integration costs
- Continue to drive innovation in SPARC, Solaris, the Java platform, and many other technologies
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about how this powerful combination will transform the IT industry. Register today for this live Webcast.
I don’t know if space is limited or not, but it’s probably a good idea to register sooner, rather than later if you’re interested.
Of course, you might be doing other things on January 27, like maybe attending the Apple event, rumored to be chock-full of goodies, and maybe later that day, watching the State of the Union address.
Better start planning now, looks like the 27th will be a busy news day.
Would Better Online Ads Matter?
Photo by missbossy from Flickr used under Creative Commons
Earlier in the week, I posted about Next Jump and their use of data and algorithms to target offers at consumers who are most likely to buy.
Their results are impressive, 60% click-through on offers with a phenomenal 11% rate converting browsers to buyers. Apparently, 5% click-through with 2% conversion are consider very good rates.
I find myself wishing they’d hurry up and colonize the intertubes because since online ads aren’t going away anytime soon, they might as well be interesting and useful to me.
My personal rates for these two metrics are so close to 0 that any measurable data would be considered a statistical anomaly. I mainly ignore ads, and the only click-throughs I can recall registering are on accidental, errant clicks. I don’t remember ever buying something based on an online ad.
Although I manage to ignore pretty much every ad I see, a couple lately have annoyed me into paying attention. Read more
Geo Me This
Photo by .schill from Flickr used under Creative Commons
Wow, geo is a hot topic lately, with coverage, announcements and features dropping every day.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve seen lately that caught my interest:
- Gowalla appears to be preparing an API.
- MyTown has 500,000 users, even though no one talks about it.
- Yelp is adding location checkins to the next version of its iPhone app.
- Eric Butler (@firerabbit) built a sweet foursquare app for OS X called FoursquareX.
I like all this activity because it means innovation in geo, and the release of APIs for geo-services means development, which means cool apps. It’s like mid-2007 for Twitter.
Competition among services is also good for users. Remember Jaiku and Pownce? Probably not. They taught us that the network mattered, which is why we all stayed with Twitter despite its downtime issues.
Geo services don’t turn out to be as social as people expect (one of my 2010 predictions), so to attract users, services need to be engaging and fun, the main reason I’ve stayed with foursquare. Read more
The Evolution of Crayon Colors
As a lover of data visualization, I couldn’t resist sharing this one from Stephen Von Worley depicting the evolution of beloved Crayola crayons from their humble roots as an eight-pack of fun in 1903 to today’s 120-pack.
I’m a total data geek, which is why I love data visualizations. I couldn’t help looking for patterns and analyzing the official chronology of what has been added, retired, renamed, etc. in each iteration.
Some noteworthy nuggets I found: Read more
Next Jump and Why Data Win
Ever heard of a company called Next Jump? Me neither until I read this piece in the New York Times (h/t TechCrunch) last week.
Next Jump had stayed stealth for 15 years, raising $45 million in venture money and hiring 225 people, all the while signing 60% of the Fortune 500 as customers.
Not too shabby.
It gets better. Next Jump is in the data business. They operate employee discount and reward programs for about 90,000 companies, organizations and affinity groups reaching more than 100 million consumers.
They connect about 28,000 retailers and manufacturers, who typically provide deep discounts to Next Jump, to these 100 million plus consumers, of which 10 million actually become customers.
Why the discounts? Because Next Jump has great data.
Next Jump collects transactional data, preference data from its customers and demographic data about its customers from their employers. All of which, analyzed with a great algorithm, produces offers people really want to see.
This approach is better than social advertising offered by networks like Facebook. Next Jump is considered a benefits provider, i.e. they are contracted by HR to offer employees a benefit paid for by the company, and because of this status, they are granted access to some parts of the employee record, e.g. name, address, employment status, home and work address, marital status, and sometimes even job title or salary grade.
Next Jump cannot determine actual salaries, but the salary grade information is to put people into salary buckets, which is a key attribute. Read more
What is WebCenter, Part 2
In case you’re following along at home, Vince has posted the second installment in his “What is WebCenter” series. You can find the first part here.
So far, he’s kept it pretty high level, which makes sense. I expect that in future parts he’ll dive into the nitty gritty details a bit more, e.g. he says his next part will cover “core design points”.
Drop a comment here or over at the official WebCenter blog if you have specific questions or want Vince to cover particular areas in his series.
My iPhone Dilemma
If you follow me on Twitter (@jkuramot), you might already know that my iPhone, the OG version, is failing.
I noticed last week it wasn’t charging or syncing over USB. I performed all the usual tests to trap the problem–swapped cables, swapped ports on the Mac and on my USB hubs, swapped ports on my Ubuntu box–nada.
I was really freaking out, as the battery faded, but luckily, I can still charge it with the AC adapter, if I jiggle the connection just right.
Not a good thing because behavior like this almost always spells the end of a gadget. An hour, mostly waiting, at the local Genius Bar, confirmed my suspicions; water damage, the Genius said, was corroding the port.
Crap. I’ve never dropped my iPhone in water. However, it does rain here in Portland sometimes, and I do talk on the phone in the rain. Still, the port is at the bottom of the phone, making it tough for gravity to put rain in there.
Weird. Read more
You Asked What is WebCenter . . .
A little while back, Chet (@oraclenerd) asked the Oracle WebCenter account (@oraclewebcenter) over Twitter, “What is WebCenter?”
Makes sense since Chet, and many others out there, are general Oracle practitioners, meaning they may specialize in a specific product, but are always curious and eager to expand their knowledge to other Oracle products, which is very easy to do thanks to OTN (@oracletechnet) and its developer licenses.
I like to think that WebCenter had risen to the top of Chet’s mind due to the WebCenter content published here, which has increased since we joined the team.
Anyway, “What is WebCenter” is a tough question to answer in 140 characters, and one I thought warranted some ink here. So, I went to the source. Read more
Email Address Matters
Thanks to Reader, today I found this piece (h/t Slashdot and Lifehacker) by a freelance writer asking whether her aol.com email address was hopelessly square and dated.
I noticed this post initially because I can’t think of a single contact of mine with an aol.com address. I used to help a friend with AOL about five years ago, but eventually, she switched to Yahoo and forwarded her AOL account.
Lifehacker turned an interesting phrase by asking “What’s Your Email Prejudice?”, which totally rang true for me. You can tell (or assume, anyway) a lot about someone based on an email address, or more specifically, its domain.
In this case, I’m referring to consumer domains, i.e. webmail and for-pay inboxes provided by ISPs like AOL, Comcast, etc. not to work domains.
The more I thought about this, I realized that I expect a GMail account when vetting resumes or candidates for work or other collaboration. Frankly, an address on a personal domain is probably highest on the list, then GMail.
After that, they all seem pretty equal, maybe with aol.com at the bottom. Tough to tell really. I can’t recall the last time I came across that domain in a professional situation. I still see some yahoo.com and a few hotmail.com, but it feels like pretty much everyone has GMail.
Obviously, I work with a much geekier crowd than average, so I doubt my prejudices are typical. Read more
