I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Apple has just announced the iPod Photo.
Photo viewing, not video. iTunes updated for Photo Syncing.
I hope they do a phone.
I wonder why they haven’t added a tuner? If they did a tuner and a DIN car mount it would be a compelling replacement for car stereo.
InfoWorld reports Microsoft pushes SQL Server 2005 back.
SQL 2005 was one of those products I was dying to play with. A year ago I thought I didn’t have time and so could pick it up later.
That was call I seemed to have got right. I have no doubt it’s going to be a fantastic product but with another 12 months + to go I can’t invest yet.
“After removing the 2006 “Kodiak” release of Exchange Server from its product road map earlier this year, Microsoft’s plans for the messaging software have gotten even cloudier.
Microsoft in May said it would deliver in 2005 an addition to Exchange called Edge Services, an intelligent message transfer agent for the edge of a company’s network that offers security, spam and virus protection. The software maker is now backpedaling on that commitment, which was the only announced release for Exchange beyond 2004.”
Given that WinFS is pulled out of Longhorn and you woudl have to think there is a dependency between WinFS and Kodiak, this is no surprise. Good for us.
Hardware vendors beathe a sigh of relief that Microsoft has decided only a Single License is required for Dual Core processors.
This great news.
Microsoft said its SQL Server Standard edition could run on a four-processor server with dual-core processors firing on all eight cores and needing only four licenses.
Dual-core processors, which consist of two cores on one chip, are widely seen as a promising way to boost computing power, allowing servers, workstations and PCs to perform more functions simultaneously. Both Intel and AMD report that they are shifting to a dual-core strategy in 2005 with massive volume shipments expected in 2006.
“This may not have been a ‘must win’ for AMD and Intel, but it sure could have slowed uptake of their dual-core chips if Microsoft had decided to take the opportunity to try to squeeze more money out of users,”
Mentioned and a picture over the London skyline in this months New Zealand Trade & Enterprise Bright Magazine.
Going in prepared (pdf).
Somthing we do well in our collection of rocks in the South Pacific is windsurfing. The wave sailing nationals are on next weekend. Check out some of the footage below.
http://www.taranakiwaveclassic.com/gallery.htm
Netcaster Digital Entertainment Network who tried to build a business around extreme sports content matchmaking were 7 years too early.
Reuters writes about the impending collision between iPods and Phones.
Is the Mobile Phone the Next iPod Killer?
Troy Angrignon has a good perspective.
Here is my concern. PDAs and cell phones were on a crash course. PDAs lost. Their sales are in decline, while cell phones are integrating their functionality, adding QWERTY keyboards, and essentially absorbing all of the key functions that the PDAs used to do.
Very insightful interview in Business Week on Steve Jobs and Apple
The Seed of Apple’s Innovation.
Blinkx is a Mercedes compared to Google which is like a yugo. … Google needs to learn one thing: what works as a web interface doesn’t necessarily work as a desktop UI.
I’m sure in the Google business plan there is an item that says, get our technology inside the enterprise.
Phase one launched today according to News.com. Google unveils desktop search.
Google has “not only beat their rivals to the punch, they’ve also changed the rules,” …”They’re saying, ‘We’re not making search part of the operating system, we’re making the desktop part of Google.’”
Comment:
Mauricio from Geekzone notes: Google goes corporate all right - but this kind of tool existed before. I’ve used Altavista Desktop Search back in 1999!
and
A BLOG without comments!
I’ve got far to much to hide to let people post on my website!
The People at Segway have been having fun.
http://www.segway.com/centaur/
Here is the video.
Sitting at Sydney airport after a 39 degree day wondering why I live in Wellington.
39 degrees feels pretty awesome when 20 is a good day at home.
You’ll be happy to know that the carriers are screwing wifi here as well. A casual connection at the airport is $AUD13 for the first hour. Lucky I have an MSN dial up. Zippo for 56k.
Wahoo! I was waiting for this.
.mobile Contacts Phone Edition
Downloading …
On Microsoft Watch Microsoft’s enterprise messenging server (Live Communications Server 2005) is due this month.
“Microsoft’s end game is to become a telephony provider and give Vonage, Verizon, etc., a run for their money,”
Today I was demo’d two great examples of New Zealand software. Similar to our own product AfterMail, these products
- encapsulated thought leadership
- were designed by people with broad skills who are focussed on solving business problems
- were quite horizontal, and therefore can add value to virtually any organization, anywhere
- are signing up good global brands and well on the way to go international
They are …
Astarte, who’s product PlanWise, allows an organisation to manage the many projects being worked on. It aligns projects to company strategy and provides visibility of all activities. PlanWise is available as an ASP solution.
XSol provides a very slick installed application, that allows an analyst to very quickly enter complex business processes in a graphical tool. The mapping module I saw created as output full documentation of those processes in Word or linked HTML pages.
For a company growing rapidly both these tools add a huge amount of value. As fellow NZ companies were excited about being able to demo these excellent solutions to our customers.
Several gems in here ..
Investor doesn’t see browser in Google’s future
Especially this model …
The “near” Web represents the PC; the “far” Web stands for television; the “here” Web represents mobile devices; the “business-to-business” Web for XML, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and other backend technologies; and the “weird” Web is for 3D experiences or virtual worlds that could be developed.
I was talking to another CEO this morning on how we can use the web as a support tool for selling higher value solutions. That is to move past a brochureware site.
If our bottleneck is getting front of customers in a physical meeting, then by taking some of the physical time out of the process our resources can be more leveraged.
Selling low value, low complexity solutions has been done before but there are not many examples of how to sell high value solutions.
Our first step was analyze the sales process to see what parts we could better support through the web. We saw those steps as:
- Awareness
- Education
- Evaluation
- Building a Business Case
- Purchase
- Support
These will form the basis of the design brief for a new site.
For most of these steps there are fairly well known mechanisms for support through the web. E.g. WebEx for education and evaluation. Newsgroups and FAQ’s for support. Puchasing for high value items will not, of course, be credit card so we have to think more about the traditional world of Purchase Orders and banking.
Could a ‘GBrowser’ Spawn an ‘MBrowser’?
Interesting how a new competitor arises. Now cashed up Google can certainly tackle MS in a few key areas.
With daylight savings just arrived I was delighted my long ago ordered present for my wife just arrived.
She now has the First Lady to go with my Air Force One Presidential Cruiser.
Roll on summer.
Dave5 from Provoke just sent me some
new feeds to subscribe to. This one was pretty funny.
What would you do?
blog