3G smart phone options abound, as Apple gets set to unveil its 3G solution at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 9, according to analysts. But with all the pub the iPhone gets, you’d think it was the only game in town. Not so.

There are some excellent alternatives to the iPhone, led by mobile phone giant Nokia. After considerable deliberation, I went with the Nokia N95 8GB, which has been available for some time. It doesn’t match the 16 GB of space the next iPhone will have, but if you want 3G and you want it now, this is a viable option. The N95 was first with built-in GPS navigation, and the 5 megapixel digital camera is a major advantage over the iPhone’s 2 megapixels . My digital camera hasn’t left the house since I bought this phone. I also love the option of listening to the built-in FM radio, a feature Apple – widely known for its musical prowess – inexplicably left out. And when my battery eventually goes bad, I can simply get a new one. Not so with the sleeker iPhone… as you may already know, the fact that its lithium ion battery is built in and not removable has caused quite a stir with consumers. (more…)

I must admit that texting is not my favorite activity.  It's something that I rarely do.  In fact, when friends send me text messages that require a response, I typically call them back hoping that the they get the tacit hint.  However, Amazon may change my druthers.

The Associated Press reports today about Amazon's text message shopping feature, which launched late yesterday.  Now people can send a text to 262966 (which spells "Amazon" on the telephone keypad) with the description, UPC, or ISBN of an item.  Amazon will see if it has the item and send back two items at a time.  The texter can request more items or buy the item by texting back.

That's pretty spiffy and useful.  Who would've thought that text messaging would serve as a viable comparison shopping tool?  Since I like to use Amazon, this might coax me to text more. 

However, one thing that I do have to consider is the occasional impulse buy.  Do I really need that toothbrush shaped Pez dispenser?

About a week ago, I wrote a blog entry on my newfound paranoia and fear of cell phone spam.  Fortunately, I have had time to relax, breathe, and find a totally new fear.  "Vishing" is a term that is the combination of the words "voice" and "phishing."  In case you are unfamiliar, phishing is basically an attempt to illegally and fraudulently acquire sensitive details, such as usernames, passwords and credit card information, by masquerading as an upright entity in an electronic communication.  Vishing takes this idea to the next level, an annoying and scary level.

(more…)

I currently own a fifth-generation iPod that is about to breathe its last breath.  After damaging the screen over a year ago, I have been waiting for the release of the next generation of iPods so that I could justify buying a new one.  Now that the iPod Touch is releasing a 32GB version, I figure the time is nigh.  But what to do with my old iPod?  It has given me many years of dedicated service in avoiding the awful remixes played at the gym, so it deserves a proper afterlife.

Unfortunately, according to Second Rotation, I would not receive a lot, if anything, for my poor MP3 player in resell.  I suppose that this hilarious parody from MadTV should have tipped me off sooner.

Fortunately for me, there will soon be another option for my dilemma.  According to the PR Newswire, The US Post Office is going to start a "Mail Back" program that will be featured in approximately 1500 post offices across the nation, including locations in San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.  Consumers will be able to use free envelopes (postage-paid) to mail in inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players.  Postage for the envelopes is paid for by Clover Technologies Group, a company that recycles, remanufactures and remarkets inkjet cartridges, laser cartridges and small electronics. 

The Group refurbishes and tries to resell your mailed-in item.  If this cannot be done, its component parts are reused to refurbish other items, or the parts are broken down further and the materials are recycled. Clover Technologies Group has a policy that the company does everything it can to avoid contributing any materials to the nation's landfills.

Sounds good.  I know where my current iPod is going once I purchase the iPod Touch (which will be obsolete in two weeks, I estimate).  Next step, saving up $500 for the new one.

It finally happened to me; I was hit with my first spam message via my cell phone.  I was foolish enough to believe that spam stopped with email, but luckily I was prepared for this eventuality and deleted the message without opening it.  This is my first word of advice for anyone who receives one of these dastardly messages.  Merely opening the message may result in charges being sent to your cell phone.

Text message spam has grown to amounts of 1.1 billion last year, according to recent reports.  The cell phone spam problem has been something that has engulfed countries such as China and South Korea for years now (sigh…they are always ahead of us in technology!).  According to the CAN-SPAM Act passed in 2003, this should be illegal, but I have my doubts as to how many of these spammers are going to be caught.  However, after some exhaustive research, I have come up with a five-point plan for combating requests for purchases of fake stocks and penis pumps. (more…)

While at the Politics Online Conference yesterday, I attended a rather interesting panel about using cell phones in political and advocacy campaigns.  Some of the panelists represented the One campaign — think Bono — and Rock the Vote.  Since both of these campaigns cater to a younger crowd, they need to use cell phones in connecting with their audiences.

During the panel the representative from Rock the Vote shared an interesting campaign that they just did using text messages.  His organization used their member database to print out voter registration forms and mail them to those people.  All the recipients needed to do was fill in their SSN, sign it, and send it in.  However, Rock the Vote knows that the typical person in their target crowd virtually ignores snail mail.  So they decided to send out a text message to everyone who they sent forms to alerting to them to the fact that the registration form is in their mailbox.  I found that interesting that they would send out something and use another channel as the call to action.  The panelist said that they didn’t have data back yet since they just did this campaign, but I would like to know how effective the text messages were.

Another interesting tidbit from that session was about a health care advocacy group in California that asked people to send it text messages about how they feel about health care as the California State Legislature was debating some new legislation.  This organization then rented out a jumbo-tron and placed it across the street from the legislative chambers.  Thus, when legislators walked outside, they saw text messages about health care from normal citizens on the large screen.

What are some interesting campaigns that you’ve seen involving cell phones?

In mid-November I wrote a post featuring nine technology predictions for late 2007 and early 2008. Some of those were quite forward-looking (up to 6 months). Some were not. Below I go over the predictions I made whose time has already come and gone.

1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops. Predicted for mid-January.
This prediction, while it wasn’t particularly hard to make, actually came true. As a result, other manufacturers are tripping over themselves to try to get a piece of the sub-notebook market. Just check out a search for “eee” on Gizmodo…
Right on!

2. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success. Predicted for mid-February.
The Pearl is now 3G on Sprint, likely with others to follow soon and the Curve has been a massive hit for RIM.
Right on!

3. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms. Predicted for mid-February.
Yay! Another prediction come true, kind of …
Just on.

4. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off. Predicted for mid-February.
This hasn’t happened But who’s to say it won’t in the future? I think it might in the next 3 months so I’m going to extend this prediction a little longer…
Wrong.

5. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20. Predicted for mid-May.
This prediction looked 6 months forward from the date of the original post, but we may as well write it off as HD-DVD is now officially dead, which I inferred would happen earlier in the year (no crystal ball was that necessary for that one after Warner stopped supporting HD-DVD).
Wrong.

So, discounting Google and OpenID and my generous extension of my own prediction deadline by 3 months, 3 out 4, as Meatloaf might say, ain’t bad. More updates in another 3 months…

These are probably the hottest electronic gift items for the 2007 holidays. We've got a little bit of everything in here. Personally I'm waiting for the 3G version of the iPhone so that's not on my list. So instead I asked for an ASUS EEE and got it early! I'd review it but there's so much written about it already I won't bother. Suffice to say that it's tiny and light and fine for basic computer usage.

What? The item you lust after most is not in our poll? Feel free to complain in the comments area!

 Loading ...

I thought I'd kickstart the end-of-year-prediction-writing season with my own wacky technology predictions for the next 6 months.
 
1. The ASUS Eee laptop is going to sell like hotcakes over the holiday season and other manufacturers will soon follow suit in creating light, barebones, home-use laptops.
Its 2 pounds of weight, small form factor, integrated camera, wifi, few moving parts (read: it's durable), decent battery life, and $400 price tag all spell good news for Asus's home-use ultraportable. It's not a Windows PC, instead it provides users with a suite of basic browsing, messaging and productivity applications over a dumbed-down version of Linux. The word on the street is the preinstalled install is fantastic, although you can install XP on it if you want to. Reviews have been very positive. I think I'll be picking one of these up. (2 months)
 
2. Apple will announce a digital camera with integrated video recording and wifi, and seamless YouTube video upload functionality.
Now before you call me crazy, remember that Apple is now a consumer electronics company. What does everyone want and not have? A way to effortlessly get their videos from their digital camera immediately up on the web. Apple's recent collaboration with Google on the iPhone underscores a relationship that I think will continue. (6 months)
 
3. RIM will release a 3G Blackberry and the Curve will prove to have been a huge success.
This will help Blackberry sales in Europe where 3G has more widespread use and availability than in the US. I also predict that Blackberry's balance sheet will show that the Curve has been a huge success. (3 months)
 
4. PS3 will outsell the XBox360 in the US.
Granted, this has already happened in Europe and, of course, Japan, but here in the US the PS3 has finally found its sweetspot — a lower price and a great new advertising campaign. With every firmware update the platform also keeps getting better and better (read about the recent decision to add local and network play of DivX files - this is huge), and Sony's take on a SecondLife-like virtual meeting place for gamers, Home, promises big time. Couple all that with a slew of games from exclusive franchises coming out in the next 6 months and you've finally got a winner. (5 months)
 
5. The Wii will outsell all other game consoles, but the number of game sales per owner will be significantly lower than on other platforms.
Why? Demographics: the Wii is a disruptive platform that has successfully found a new market of gamers. Still, many of those users are not hardcore gamers and do not spend as much time on the Wii as other players on other systems. Those users will be content with a handful of decent games to play on social occasions. (3 months)
 
6. 24 inch widescreen monitors will hit the mainstream and soon thereafter will become the norm.
Quick on the heels of 22 inch monitors, the price of 24 inch LCD monitors will come down below $300 and people will begin to look at this monitor size as the size of choice. (5 months)
 
7. Cellular providers will start to offer cell-phone Internet plans with VOIP.
It's like what happened to the music business with mp3s — there is just so much pressure on them to open their services up to VOIP that it's simply inevitable. The first provider to cave in will be Sprint. (4 months)
 
8. Google will embrace OpenID and it will finally take off.
For those not in the know, OpenID is an open effort to create a multiplatform sign-in solution for users. That means create an account in one place and use it on many sites. Sounds great to me. Todd wrote about it a while back too. Google is looking to regain some of the goodwill it's lost over the last year. Much like its involvement in creating an app platform with OpenSocial , it will embrace OpenID in the same way. Unlike OpenSocial though, OpenID already has a small following (if you call AOL, LiveJournal, Technorati, Wordpress and Vox small). Google will resist the Microsoft-like urge to copy the OpenID idea and pull together a competing platform and will instead join, support and improve on OpenID. (3 months)
 
9. The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps will start collaborating and the price of Bu-Ray and HD-DVD media will be sub-$20.
Blu-Ray definitely had the edge, but with el-cheapo HD-DVD players available over the holiday season and Paramount's exclusive HD-DVD deal, HD-DVD will still remain very much alive. This will force both camps to consider working together. In the end, this is the only thing that really makes sense. Sony's CEO made comments recently that allude to this being more than just a possibility. As far as media prices go, you can currently get a Blu-Ray movie on Amazon for about $24. For some reason Best Buy et al are still selling these at $30 or more. I'm thinking $18.99 is the sweet spot and that we'll hit that in the not too distant future. (6 months)
 
There you have it, my wacky predictions for the coming first part of the year. What do you think?

Disclaimer: these predictions are based purely on my hunches and accumulation of publicly available knowledge, not on insider information or any other type of institutional knowledge. Full disclosure: RIM is an ImpactWatch client.

With all the hype surrounding tomorrow's release of Apple's iPhone, I had to throw my two cents in.  There are reports that both praise and criticize Apple's newest addition to its family of trendy tech products, and both sides have some good points.  The pro-iPhone camp is excited about having a sleek, attractive, all-in-one device that offers a fantastic web browser and a great screen.  Those hesitant about the iPhone argue that the device is overpriced, unproven, lacks sufficient storage, and limits customers to signing a two-year contract with AT&T.  In addition, questions about the device's "keyboard" still remain.

For me, I think it would be fantastic to have one device that combines my phone, iPod, and web browsing in a pocket-sized package.  However, I can't see myself shelling out $600 for the phone and $2,000 over two years for the service. The phone's 14-day return policy also makes me a bit wary.  I, for one, will definitely be waiting for at least version 2.0 before I can even seriously consider buying this smart phone.

Still deciding?  Check out these CNET videos: Top 5 Reasons to Love the iPhone and Top 5 Worst Things About the iPhone .

What about you?  Will you be waiting in line on Friday?

 Loading ...

Way back in February, I wrote a speculative post about technologies I thought might impact the 2008 elections. One of the technologies I mentioned was Twitter. The Hotline (and David All) noted last week that House GOP leader John Boehner is twitterring (sorry). Today, I stumbled across the recently created profiles of House Whip Eric Cantor and the National Republican Congressional Committee (first committee on Twitter I think).

I know that Dem Presidential candidates have jumped on the bandwagon. Does anyone know if it is gaining traction among Dems in the House/Senate like it slowly appears to be doing with the GOP?

My Twitter profile is here.

Fuzzy Zoeller is suing Wikipedia.

Well, at least, he wishes he could.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Fuzzy Zoeller is suing a Florida-based consulting company for vandalizing his Wikipedia profile.  The paragraph in question has since been removed from both Wikipedia and Answers.com (which draws lots of its info from Wikipedia articles), but according to the Smoking Gun, the entry included false information about Zoeller abusing alcohol and drugs as well as physically abusing his family.

Zoeller, known for his slightly unorthodox temperament on the golf course, is known for being a jokester.  Example: check out these comments in a 2001 interview with Golf Digest:

Did any fellow competitor ever ask you to tone down the joking around? I've heard some guys say that you were a little difficult to play with.
Don't care. Tell them to speed up. Get ahead of me.

Some guys don't like the crowd getting into it, saying it affects their play.
Tell them to go look in the mirror. I don't hit their shots for them. Like firing caddies out here–caddies never hit a shot out here; what are you firing the caddie for? I haven't had a caddie in 27 years who ever hit a shot for me. I know they'd like to, but it's never happened.

You used to joke that your prescription for the bad back was "vodka and Advil."
You gotta tell 'em something. I do take a lot of Advil. But only when I'm on the road. When I'm home, I'm off.

Is vodka still your drink?
I'll even drink a few beers now and then. But then I might go home and not have anything for two or three weeks, a month.

A lot of the great characters in golf history–Hagen, Demaret–enjoyed their beverages.
That was a little before my time. Back then that was how all the guys played; they carried flasks in their bags. There's nothing wrong with that.

It's changed a lot over the years.
Yeah, but what else did you have to do back then? Think about it.

Now there's the fitness kick on tour.
The last five years, everybody feels that they gotta look their best out there.

Has that hit you yet?
Look at me! [Laughs.] I tell you, every time I get the idea of working out, I have to sit down until the thought leaves. I don't want to go out there and sweat. [Laughs.] Seriously, if I had a good spine, I'd probably do it. But I have no spine.

Even though Zoeller often made jokes like this in the past, there is a huge difference between joking around about vodka and advil and publishing malicious and damaging remarks about someone's character in a public environment.  Zoeller claims that the comments made about him on Wikipedia caused him "mental anguish" and "loss of income".

This brings me back to my original purpose in writing this post.  What kind of protection do people have against slander and defamation on sites like Wikipedia?  Not much.  In its disclaimers, Wikipedia clearly does not take any responsibility for the content that appears in the open-source encyclopedia.  It seems like the site is invincible: since most articles are written/edited by individuals not associated with the website, the encyclopedia is not necessarily responsible for the information that is published on its pages. As Fuzzy Zoeller discovered, you can't sue Wikipedia!

Wikipedia Disclaimer:

None of the contributors, sponsors, administrators, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages.

Since Zoeller and his lawyers can't touch the website legally, the pro golfer has approached the source of the comments.  By identifying the IP address of the original "vandalism", it was discovered the the comments came from a computer at Josef Silny & Associates, a Miami-based consulting firm.  Zoeller is suing the consulting firm in order to "put a stop to this. Otherwise, we're all just victims of the Internet vandals out there. They ought not to be able to act with impunity ."

Zoeller's defense team is right. Online users should not be able to slander whoever and whatever they want on the Web with no recourse for punishment.  But should Zoeller be able to sue an entire company for something that most likely only involved one employee in non-business-related activity?  I'm not sure.  In addition, Should people like Zoeller be so concerned with false information appearing on a site that everyone knows provides unreliable information in the first place?  I'm not sure about that either.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in response to this event, "We try to police [Wikipedia entries] pretty closely, but people do misbehave on the Internet."

I think that situations like the "Zoeller Incident" speak to the structure of Wikipedia.  While having an open-source encyclopedia is in theory a great (if not utopian) idea, I think that the site needs a better system of identifying individual editors.  That way, individuals could be held responsible if they purposely publish false or damaging information to the encyclopedia, possibly discouraging the publishing of malicious or false content to begin with. 

Also, should people be able to sue Wikipedia?  It seems strange to me that just because of a few disclaimers, the site is free of any responsibility of the material that shows up online.  If a Wikipedia article is the source of a reputation-killing piece of false information, should the site's owners have to take some responsibility?  I think to some degree, they should.

I'd be really interested to see what other people have to say about this, so please feel free to chime in with your opinions.

We have just finished a new mini-research study in which we examined the availability of mobile features for the top 50 newspaper websites and the top 50 English-language blogs. The results were surprising. Just 24% (twelve) of blogs provided mobile content, while 54% (27) newspapers offered a mobile browsing option.

(more…)

Apple did a masterful job of announcing the iPhone at MacWorld Expo. The phone is a hit with Wall Street and consumers (me) are salivating.

One unintended consequence of Apple’s shock and awe announcement style is that the search engines are way behind. If you search for “iPhone” on Google today you get a bunch of dated results that have nothing to do with today’s announcement.

Of the top 10 results:

• 2 have nothing to do with Apple or the iPhone
• 7 are speculative pieces about the iPhone written weeks and years before today’s announcement
• 1 (the top result) is a fan blog about the iPhone that must have been started a while back

Apple’s official site is nowhere to be found in the first few pages of results on Google, although there an Apple ad that appear in the sponsored results.

It’ll be interesting if we get to a place soon where Google’s main search updates in close to real time. In the meantime, I’ll bet some of the webmasters on that first page got a nice and unexpected traffic bump today.

Screenshot of top results after the jump. (more…)

For those who care, Apple announced the iPhone today and has launched a section of its website about the new cell phone. This phone looks incredible and will probably change the way people think about and use cell phones.

For web developers, it is interesting that Apple is trying to give users a full, computer-like web browsing experience instead of the simplified browsing experience most phones go for. Screenshot below: