David Emery Online

Remembrance

I will be away for the next two weeks – hopefully some of you will be still reading when I get back…

PodTones? RingCasting?

Names are important.

People pay millions of dollars for a “good” name (see my last post for some of the reasons behind the quotes round good).

So why in the tech industry – and this really is an industry wide problem – do we get naming so wrong so often? Think of one the most popular sites out there; MySpace. It’s such a poor name. It really is. Of course, it’s fairly representative of the site and brand (both being poor themselves), but the practice of smashing two fairly boring words together in this manner has really got to stop.

Podcasting.

Bloging.

Mobloging.

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Don’t get me started on “Web 2.0” companies, either. Tagworld? A world of tags? Is that like “World of Leather”, but for those things you attach to luggage with your name on? I’m trying not to think about the adding-random-dots-into-you-name meme, de.licio.us style. Steam. Ears. Etc.

There is an upshot, of course. If you’re a startup, naming a new product or rebranding in some way your life is really a bit easier. Possibly the biggest challenge in these situations is how to stand out from the crowd.

Well it’s easy. Just use a good name.

Good Parties

I just plain and simple don’t “get” consulting.

Why on earth would you voluntarily bring someone in on a project that would most gain by it running massively late and over budget? In fact, if the skill that a consultant has is so important that you’re willing to pay the outrageous fees they command, then why don’t you employ them full time?

This goes hand in hand with the large set of people in the tech world that seem to spend their entire life flitting from conference to conference, “networking”, “speaking” while writing their next book at the same time. I’m a firm believer that 99% of tech conferences are a huge waste of money – most cost hundreds, if not thousands to get into and what, exactly, do you get for your money?

A bunch of people re-hashing what you can read on the internet for free, and some good parties.

Of course, that’s assuming what they’re waffling on about is interesting enough to bother reading for free – quite unlikely really – and also assuming that they haven’t simply pulled it out of their ass.

Which brings us back to consultants.

I suppose it all works out ok really, when we get to the...

Have You Seen This Man?

I have.

This is quite fun, really – it’s really great to be involved with something from slightly off the wall inception all the way through to reality.

For any London based readers, you may be able to catch the man around town this week.

More at have-you-seen-this-man.co.uk (and yes, I’m being deliberately cagey – I don’t want to give the game away now, do I?).

Modern Graffiti

As seen in Wandsworth, South London.

$666

Another week, another Google product launch. This time it’s Google Checkout – and fairly obviously it’s a play for the Pay Pal / online payment processing space.

As far as checkout process’ go, it’s seems to be a fairly good one; the simplicity of Google’s house style really works for a checkout system, and the unification of your payment history and tracking across multiple sites are pretty good features. The integration with adwords is a nice bonus as well – Google is really at it’s best when it’s leveraging it’s core business (advertising).

The stumbling block is however, whether you trust Google any more.

To pay for something using Google Checkout requires that you have a Google account – which is a big stumbling block for anyone who just wants to use it as a payment processor only. It also means that Google then knows what your purchase history is, and hence could – in theory – use it to target ads at you. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing – I’d prefer better ads is I have to have ads – and while they claim they don’t do the whole “evil” thing, does anyone believe it any more?

It’s quite funny...

Happy Lite

To try and counteract the negativity of yesterday’s post, here’s something I like for a change:

The Nintendo DS Lite is possibly the best games machine ever made.

Better then the Snes. Better then the original Gameboy. Better then the Playstation.

The combination of a really nice hardware design – finally, someone other then Apple gets it – with innovative features such as the touch screen is a real winner. This coupled with the best game I’ve played in ages – New Super Mario – just hits it out of the ball park.

It’s the little touches, though, that make you realise why Nintendo are the masters of the game business. Things like the sleep function, which lets you shut the DS and open it at later point exactly where you left off. Or the simple joy of the bundled Pico Chat WiFi IM program, which lets you send crude, hand drawn pictures to your friends.

I fail to see why anybody would spend the extra ~£40 on a PSP.

Tuneless

Finally, a mac version of Songbird – the iTunes clone competitor – has been released. However, it’s only at version “not-yet-ready-to-be-called-0.2”, and boy does it need a lot of work.

Now, I’m quite happy to forgive somethings as it’s obviously alpha software, such as the default setup options failing when trying to install a non-existant extension; or a “Cheesy Video Window” (their title, not mine) appearing with no content on launch.

However, these guys quite obviously aren’t mac users, as the mac interface is awful.

For a start it suffers from all the problems that Firefox – on which it is based – suffers from, such as non-native “faked” interface controls (which almost behave right, but not quite). But on top of that, instead of trying to make a “mac like” interface like the Firefox team have (and they’re doing a pretty good job) they’ve just ported the windows interface whole sale.

To start with, the main window, which looks like the iTunes window, is itself contained in another “proper” window, so that it has two sets of window controls, and two window titles. Of course, the inner window controls are “windows” controls, in both style and position (on the top right, not...

Macbook Notes

I’ve now had my shiny new MacBook for about a week and a half, and for the benefit of Google et al here are some notes:

Firstly, it’s great. I’ve read a lot of comments on the internet that seem to be having all sorts of problems with their MacBooks, but either there was a batch of them with major problems or the echo chamber is getting really echoey.

Secondly, boy – these intel Macs sure love ram! I struggled with the stock 512mb for almost a week and was quite disappointed with the overall performance. It’d run quick for a a little bit, then whenever you’d switch programs it would slow to a crawl. While over in New York, however, I picked up 2 1GB sticks and now it flies.

It feels easily like the fastest mac I’ve used, and this is the stock 1.83Ghz model.

Even using Rosetta, it flies. Also, before I forget – Rosetta is amazing. It could be the most amazing piece of software I’ve ever used.

It just works.

Perfectly. Every time.

Some of the other gripes I’ve read have been with the possible discolouration of the case, which I haven’t seen any...

Beggars and Spam

Beggars.

Nobody likes them.

And yet, if nobody gave money to them, they’d go away. It’s that simple really. Life has so many problems that could be solved so easily if people would use a bit of common sense.

Transferring to the online realm; pop-up windows, loud flash adverts and spam. No of these would exist if they weren’t affective in some small way.

Of course, the big one among those is email spam – the others being merely irritating, email spam costs business millions in lost productivity.

But if no-one clicked on any of the links, spam wouldn’t exist.

Crazy, isn’t it?

Maybe we should use automated spam filtering not to filter out spam, but to identify the people that are clicking on the links. I’m not sure what a fitting punishment would be though; maybe your email address should get blacklisted, or just taken away completely. Or maybe just posted online, so the spammers can target just them, and don’t have to bother with the rest of us…