Palm hires Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer
In an effort to find itself again, The New York Times is reporting that Paul Mercer, a former Apple computer engineer has joined Palm.
There’s this side of me that really, really wants Palm to return to its strong leadership position for handhelds. I loved my Palm devices. I’ve owned many of them over the years from the Palm Pilot up through the Treo 650. Their industrial design was always great. Easy to use. Functional. Fast.
But I’m not sure that they have anything to differentiate themselves anymore. Now that they jumped on the Windows Mobile bandwagon while handing their own OS, I’m not sure they have anything more than a legacy brand name without a core nerve center to drive their business. HTC has picked up a huge hunk of what Palm could have been by putting commodity OSs on relatively “okay” devices targeted at email and communicator-centric business users. However, HTC remains an invisible brand, choosing instead to OEM to Cingular or other carriers. RIM is entrenched with corporate America and their “server-side” support. Palm could have been there, but isn’t.
Will Palm simply be another me-too commodity player? Can they design something that has the mass appeal and sexy exterior of Apple’s iPhone — the iPhone’s sold itselft on its form, but I still think the function will have to sell itself to the masses. Good question. My hunch is that Palm will need to completely reinvent itself. Palm is a “old-person’s” brand. Most college age or younger people who are driving opinions on which mobile devices are cool have no real brand experience with Palm. In fact, in the survey’s I took over the past 3 years working with college students, they didn’t know what a PDA was. Nokia, Apple, Motorola, BlackBerry (not RIM) are the brands they know. PDAs are now phones.
Robert Scoble and Rocky Mountain Voices
Great day today at the SlopeCast with Robert Scoble. Robert gave a good preso on living in a Google world. It was cool to see how he starts his day and determines where the hot news is coming from that he should look into.
Great turn out, especially considering commuting this morning was a real pain with a big snow fall from 6 – 9 AM.
Cafe Trio food was great too.
Thanks Robert!
Brad and Amy hit Snowbird
Amy and I were able to get a neighbor to watch Abby for a few hours so we could visit Snowbird. What a day. Blue sky. Sunny. Above the valley haze.
We checked in and rented skis for Amy at the Creekside Lodge. Hardly anyone in the parking lot. We ventured up Mid-Gad lift to Big Emma and let Amy find her ski legs. After a couple of those, I convinced her she was skilled enough for the GadZoom lift. Skied down Bassackwards and The Lunch Run to Big Emma a few times. Then we cut across the mountain to the Snowbird Center for lunch. It was very relaxing just hanging out.
After lunch it was off to the Peruvian lift. Not a single time did we have to wait in a line. Chip’s Run was our way down. After a mistaken turn and a black-diamond, very bumpy, narrow-canyon decent, Amy was feeling pretty tired and wanted to rest. I sent her back to the Snowbird Center, and I headed up to the new tunnel. That was cool. You take the Peruvian lift to the tunnel. Go 600 feet through a mountain on a moving skiway — just ski on and ride the conveyor belt to the other side. You pop out in Mineral Basin. Cool times.
Enjoy some of the pictures of the day on my Flickr account. Or watch the video posted to YouTube.
First Round of Golf 2007
Friday, January 19. Sunbrook Golf Club. St. George, UT. Played The Point nine front; Blackrock back nine. Front nine I shot +4 40. Back nine +6 42 for an 82. Not too shabby considering the greens were rolling like 22 on the stimp since they were frozen solid and void of green grass.
Rate your geekness by counting cords
So tonight I’m working on the road. Just finished a focus group here in St. George, Utah. I need to get a video captured and onto a DVD for a 7:30AM meeting with a client tomorrow. So I decided to power up. The result was too funny. I plugged in all my gear — or should I say plugged in all I could based on the amount of slots in the powerstrip I keep handy in my camera backpack.
This is truly the sign of reaching geek / nerd status!
CORDS PLUGGED IN:
- MacBook Pro – power
- Canon XH A1 HDV – power / firewire to MacBook Pro
- Belkin 4 port USB expander – power / USB to MacBook Pro
- Maxtor 500 GB external hard drive – power / USB to Belkin USB Expander
- iPod – USB to Belkin USB Expander
- Flash card reader – USB to Belkin USB Expander
CORDS I COULDN’T PLUG IN BECAUSE HAD NO SPACE:
- Plantronic Bluetooth headset – power
- BlackBerry 8100 (Pearl) – power [I’ll just unplug the Flash card reader and use USB — thanks RIM for engineering a “multi-use” cord into the design or your device]
Press passes have their benefits
The Park City Chamber and Visitors Bureau and Deer Valley hired Rocky Mountain Voices to create a promo video for the Freestyle FIS World Cup event. I worked with Dan Campbell-Lloyd to produce the video since I was traveling at CES. Dan did a great job.
Friday I hit the slopes with my video camera in hand to cover the aerial events. Wow. First off, I was amazed at the HEIGHT of the ramps. They were like 10 feet high. After the athletes did their amazing rotations and flips, they’d land on an amazingly steep slope and have to stop quickly. Tough stuff. I caught a Swiss athlete over rotate and land on his back and side. Unfortunately, he was removed by the medical crew and flown away in a helicopter.
Tonight I took Amy with me. She was cold but looked cute all bundled up in her winter gear. She put up with me dragging her out in -13 degree weather. I taped some interviews with attendees that Deer Valley can use next year in a promo video. We also watched and filmed the mogul event. After, we hung in the VIP tent to warm up while we listened to The Wailers play on the Venue Stage.
Good times. Cold times.
Fun Times at the Bloghaus
Hanging out working at the PodTech Bloghaus. Had my headphones in for a while while editing podcasts for Control4. Great food. Fun times. Great bandwidth.
Technorati Tags: Bloghaus, CES 2007
Rocky Mountain Voices New Workhorse
Canon XH A1…Exciting
Two out of 20 for 2006 / Ajax offline in 2007
PC World magazine has published it’s top 20 most innovative products for 2006. I bought 2 of them:
1) Parallels — number three on the top 20
2) RIM BlackBerry Pearl — number 17
The prediction for 2007 looks cool. Offline Ajax applications. These only make sense. Even when we work offline, we don’t want to wait around for things to load. I believe that cross platform will continue to be key as Apple adds more marketshare. Ajax will help make the transition from web to desktop seamless.
It’s one of the “well dah” products that we all expect — same user experience if you’re online or offline. Functionality just replicates data automagically when you get a network connection. And if you’re not at “your” computer, you can still access and use the application and data.
Podcasting #1 Improvement to Learning
The 2006 ECAR studies of students and information technology was just released. This study is based on quantitative data from nearly 29,000 freshman and senior students at 96 higher education institutions. The focus is on the kind of technologies students are using, with the skill levels, how technology contributes to the undergraduate experience, and the value in terms of learning.
Podcasting was recognized as the top technology to improve learning (see page 84, Table 6.4). 23 percent of students said Podcasts improved their learning. This is more than double the benefit of course management systems (like Blackboard). Podcasts ranked higher than instant messaging, blogs, social networking services, email, PowerPoint presentations, and more.
Unfortunately, the number of students who are using podcasts is still low. This is probably due to two issues:
- MP3 device use is growing, along with computers (the report shows MP3 players have grown from 28 to 59 percent of student population in 2 years)
- The number of universities distributing lectures in podcast is still low (again, the report shows growth here with leading universities integrating MP3 technology directly into the curriculum)