Who has the best images of Google?

Heheh, a little cross-company smack talk going on over on the Virtual Earth blog. They link to all their competitors and say they have better imagery. Actually, what they are demonstrating is their new collections feature where you can gather together a collection of interesting places and put a link to that on your blog. Very useful! By the way, that and more are explained on other posts on the Virtual Earth blog.

Of course the Google Earth bloggers aren’t lying down in this competition. They just added a new layer feature which is very cool.

And, Ze Frank even gets into this fun too. He uses Google Earth today to show where all his “little yellow duckies” are (his viewers). Can you find me? My little Yellow Duckie is in Half Moon Bay, right by the Ritz. Ze told me I was the first member of his “ORG” and, looking at this now I see 10s of thousands of members who watch Ze Frank’s Show.

The one with the most stickers wins (and learning from the students)

Jeremiah shot this picture yesterday. I told someone “the one who dies with the most stickers wins.” according to Flickr I’m far from winning, though.

Hey, I had the best job at Microsoft and gave it all up so I could attend Lunch 2.0. But, Jeff Sandquist is hiring people for Channel 9. So, if you wanna walk around the best company with a camcorder (or work on the dev team) drop Jeff a line. I hear he has some new Channel 9 stickers coming next week so you could be the first to have that on your laptop! (Hey, Jeff, can you send me one? I’ll add it to my collection).

Last night after speaking at San Jose State University, Maryam and I wrote a new talk that we’ll give at Converge South next month in Greensboro North Carolina. Titled “10 ways to a killer blog” I think it’ll be fun.

Speaking of SJSU, last night I talked with about 30 students at the journalism department there. That brought back memories. Anyway, Steve Sloan took me to dinner last night and turned on the recorder so you can listen as we have dinner. I’m getting more used to being recorded almost constantly now. It’s sort of weird having almost everything I do on Flickr or other photo sharing sites, along with even dinner conversations.

One thing I like about speaking at Universities is you learn about how students are perceiving the world and what they are using. For instance, both the instructors and students told me that MySpace is very popular among high schoolers but loses a lot of its appeal in the college crowd. This remains true even among people who used MySpace like crazy in high school. They say they switched to Facebook when they move to college.

These social programs are part of the identity of who they are at those specific times in their lives. The unsophisticated nature of MySpace is attractive in high school, but that doesn’t carry over into college, it seems.

Facebook is trying to get outside of just the college world, it seems. But, that might be a bad thing to do. I’ve had several college students write me and say they are pissed about this decision. They want a program that’s only for college students, and don’t want to see high school students (or adults like me) in Facebook. It’ll be interesting to watch that one play out.

Will Facebook’s attempt to grow its business backfire? The university students I talked with say it could.

A conversation with SAP’s Shai Agassi

The audio from my interview yesterday with Shai Agassi, one of seven people on SAP’s executive board, is now up on Podtech. Shai has a unique view of the world of business (SAP is used by most of the world’s biggest businesses) and we talk about the trends he’s seeing, along with a little bit about what SAP announced today at its TechEd developer confab.

It’s about six minutes long, so won’t take you a lot of time to get through.

Lunch 2.0

When Jeremiah at Hitachi Data Systems asked if I wanted to come to Lunch 2.0 I thought “oh, that’ll be fun, probably 10 geeks will show up.”

Well, I was wrong. More than 200 people showed up. Lots of photos here.

Great fun, I barely got to eat anything cause I was answering so many questions. Now back to work San Jose State University where I’m having a conversation about media and journalism.

New Nano from Apple

Apple just announced a new Nano, along with new exclusive games developed for it by Electronic Arts. $4.99 each download. So, now we see Apple has learned that casual gaming is a very profitable way to sell games (Xbox 360’s casual games have been selling like hotcakes).

I also heard on CNBC (Jim Goldman was sending text messages to the hosts from inside the Apple event) that Apple is releasing a new video device that’ll let you watch downloaded videos on your TV, I don’t know enough about that yet to comment, but it sounds interesting! Hmmm, see, Apple does get that there’s a new market now that HDTV screens are coming into the home. Oh, did you miss that Best Buy profits were way up last quarter? Almost wholly on the back of increased large/flat screen TV sales.

Good luck getting through to Engadget and other Apple-watching sites. I got through to Engadget’s minute-by-minute report, but only after trying several times.

UPDATE: I’m sitting in front of Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara. Listening to CNBC. Watching MacRumors Live. What a wacky way to get the news.

They just announced movies. And both TV shows and movies are now encoded at 640×480. The movies are selling for $9.99 to $14.99. I still don’t get why I wouldn’t just rent movies from NetFlix, especially since DVDs are better quality? I guess this is useful for travelers, and for people who have kids so they can load a laptop up with lots of Disney stuff and keep the kids busy in the back seat of the car.

iTunes 7 is shipping today.

Dunn apologizes and steps down from HP board

I just arrived at Oakland Airport and my phone was filling up with email saying that HP had announced a decision. On first look this is a good first step, but I wonder if this board will be able to do anything for months? After all, the leaker is still on the board. So is Patricia. I can’t imagine that those two will see eye-to-eye on much. Anyway, at least we can get on with other things.

For instance, I’m judging the Made-in-Express contest entries this morning. Some really interesting things there. I’ll decline commenting until the winners are announced.

UPDATE: my readers are reacting VERY negatively to this news. I’m going to absorb a bit more about what was just announced and think through my reaction beyond what I post above. Zoli, for instance, calls this “lame half steps.”

UPDATE 2: I missed that the guy who leaked stuff, George Keyworth, has resigned from the board as well. More reaction on TechMeme.

HP has a major ethical problem, day 7

I tried to get away from the HP thing, but it is still getting worse for HP. Now Congress is involved.

I saw this quote in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Despite the furor over pretexting, investors have largely ignored the scandal. HP shares rose 27 cents Monday to close at $36.36 on the New York Stock Exchange, near the top end of its 52-week range of $25.53 to $36.73.

A friend who is a stock trader told me that the market might actually be predicting that a new board is coming — and is raising the price in advance of such an event. A new board would mean better leadership for HP, which would increase growth and everything that shareholders love. But, it’s a weird signal to send, most people will see the increase in share price as evidence that the shareholders aren’t willing to do anything about this board. The problem is, what if this board stays in place? Is there any chance that this board will be able to heal the rifts, get through the bad PR, and start doing anything close to what a board is supposed to do? Plus, with Congress getting involved this will be a distraction for top management at HP, even those who aren’t on the board. Will shareholders continue their excitement if this drags on for weeks, or months? Yeah, the PR will go away, we all have short memories and there’ll be stuff that’s more fun to talk about soon (Steve Jobs, please save us from this story!)

This quote, in the San Jose Mercury News, though, captures the mood of most of the people I talk with about this:

“Whatever else happens, it’s a sad day for HP, and a sad day for Silicon Valley,'’ said venture capitalist Venky Ganesan, managing director of Globespan Capital Partners in Palo Alto. Hewlett-Packard “stood for what we all feel proud about in Silicon Valley. It was an icon about two guys in a garage who had very idealistic notions: non-hierarchical, collaborative, meritocratic. It was about doing the right thing.”

Update: The Los Angeles Times writes more about shareholders’ reticence to punish this board and also says that if CEO Mark Hurd gets tainted by the stench coming out of the board that HP could pay a “catastrophic” price.

Lunch 2.0 today

I’m flying back to attend Lunch 2.0. See ya in Santa Clara.

Michael Dell reaches out to gamers (HDTV is where it’s at)

Over at the Direct2Dell blog there’s a video of Michael Dell who spoke with gamers at the Austin Game Conference. It’ll be interesting to watch the Apple announcements tomorrow. Apple has been gunning for Dell’s marketshare. But, the interview is interesting cause Michael explained some of Dell’s hopes for Vista and PC-based gaming and also explains what’s happening in the high-end of the consumer world.

I think Michael Dell is still missing the huge trend inside homes that’s hitting now: large-screen HDTV. He’s focusing too much on PC-based gaming and not enough on what happens to entertainment priorities when a new large-screen TV shows up.

More and more people are going to buy large-screen TVs for their homes (you only need to hang out at Best Buy and see where all the action is to realize that these things are selling like hotcakes). When the buying decision happens to put one of these suckers in your home, everything about your media usage changes.

Most people aren’t going to buy a new PC just to play games. Now, don’t take me wrong. PC gaming is still very important. It’s just not going to be where the industry sees massive growth. That’s going to come from the war between Xbox 360 and Sony’s Play Station 3. Why? HDTV.

Me and my friends are noticing that we are already budgeting out our discretionary spending for the next year. I’m far more likely to buy a new HD Tivo, like seen on TechMeme today, or a new Playstation or Xbox than I am to buy a new PC that can play the latest games. The unknown variable in that mix is Windows Vista. But, even there, my first Windows Vista purchase will be a HD media center, not a gaming machine (and that’s despite having a 12-year-old who loves playing video games. The Xbox is just a better place for families to game together than a PC.

Dell remains particularly clueless about HDTV. Look at its website. Quick, find me the words “HDTV.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple jumps into the HD world left alone by Dell tomorrow.

My HD media center will sit upstairs. Have a massive hard drive on it. And will be shared to my HDTV screen downstairs via the Xbox 360 (this is one of the coolest features of the 360, by the way). That’ll let me watch PC-based videos (I want to subscribe to ZeFrank and watch him, along with other videobloggers, on my 60-inch screen downstairs), and also get a great game experience with the Xbox. Plus my photos, my music, all will be stored on the huge hard drive upstairs and displayed through the Xbox 360’s extender capabilities. Where in this scenario is room for a killer gaming PC? I don’t see it.

Why? Cause the Xbox is gonna do the heavy game lifting and the Vista machine upstairs just needs a decent enough video card to display Vista’s glass interface, not to give me a great game framerate.

Translation: I don’t think Dell’s strategy of focusing on PC gaming is that exciting. Dell, please focus on HDTV, that requires you to put HDTV front and center on your Website — you have a couple of laptops that are better for HDTV than Apple’s offerings but you don’t even point that out. What does that demonstrate to me? That Dell is clueless about HDTV and the real trends that are going to hit the livingroom over the next 36 months.

If you don’t focus on HDTV, Apple will come in and take the home away from you. And Steve Jobs has a big stick in his hand: Disney content.

When Michael Dell starts really showing some leadership in the HDTV world wake me up. Thanks! Until then I’m saving up for the new HD Tivo.

Congrats to Windows Live team (and the Atlas team)

Lots of new stuff came out today from Microsoft’s Windows Live team. Yes, they still are behind in lots of areas but it’s a marathon and where before today they used to be 20 minutes behind the leaders now they are two minutes behind. Will they catch the leaders and pull ahead? That is yet to be seen, but at least they are back in the race. How do I know that? Cause Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawdony is paying attention.

Microsoft has lots of news today. Scott Guthrie also has a roadmap post on Atlas, Microsoft’s AJAX toolset. Are there developers interested in Web 2.0 concepts? 250,000 downloads this year so far say “yes.”

The enterprise reeducation of Robert Scoble

I guess it’s pretty fitting that I totally butchered Shai Agassi’s name (he’s president of product and technology group at SAP and is one of seven people on its executive board). I’m so embarrassed. I was a bit nervous, which is a bit ironic because I didn’t even know who he was a few hours earlier, but the crowd that quickly formed to listen to Shai talk in the hallway at SAP’s big developer show going on now demonstrates that Shai commands the respect of everyday developers in SAP’s community.

Dennis Howlett nailed the real reason I hacked his name: I’m not astute in the enterprise world and I don’t have a good mental model of who the players and shakers are. He’s right that most of the time I think about more end-user stuff, but my whole career has been spent trying to figure out what drives developers and getting half a million developers to join a community in three years got my attention.

SAP is no Web 2.0 business. The cool kids like Mike Arrington don’t follow its every move like, say, the way we follow Google or Microsoft. On the other hand, name the business and it probably runs on SAP. Shai pointed out that they have had a developer community for a long time but that SAP only started paying attention to it three years ago.

Aside: one thing I notice about meeting intensely smart people like Shai (I’m in awe of his career track, he has shot to the top of SAP at age 34) is their focus. The ability to shut out everything else and focus intensely on what is in front of him is a skill I’m in awe of.

Of interest to me is that Ross Mayfield noted almost the same thing about SAP that I noticed, but he noticed it back in May. Over the next few months I’ll definitely be visiting SAP more often to continue my “reeducation” and I promise I won’t hack Shai’s name next time.

Also part of my enterprise reeducation was meeting with Dana Gardner (enterprise blogger and analyst) who spent most of the day yesterday with Maryam and me. His ZD blog is one of those that I look to first for information on enterprise players like SAP. Speaking of ZD blogs, sorry to hear that William Ziff (where Ziff Davis got its name) died today.

Anyway, thanks to the SAP community who invited me to come and listen. I wish I had spent the whole week. There’s a lot more I can learn from SAP’s developer community.

Oh, and thanks to Charlie Wood for making a photo of me interviewing Shai.

IE 7 team details RSS security precautions

I remember hearing many of the plans that the IE 7 team was working on to make sure customers remain safe. Sean Lyndersay of the IE team caught my eye with a post about the RSS security work in IE 7.

Hello from SAP’s unplanned, but cool, community conference

I thought this guy looked familiar, I met him at Foocamp a few years ago. His name is Mark Finnern and he works for SAP.

But check out those boards behind him. Yeah, SAP is using the unplanned model that Foocamp introduced. Put a grid on the wall and let people suggest their own sessions. It’s going over big time here in Las Vegas. Mark adopted the Foocamp model to SAP’s community event, meeting in Las Vegas today.

I was just there and they have 312 community members here today for SDN Day, which is SAP’s new developer network (more than 5,000 more come tomorrow for the full-blown SAP conference).

I learned from Mark Yolton, vice president of SAP’s developer network, that SAP is turning from a siloed app model into a platform model where developers can build all sorts of stuff on top of, and around, SAP.

Has this converstion been successful? They just celebrated having more than half a million developers in its developer network. In just three years. This is stunning growth for a developer network, especially for a product that doesn’t have the consumer appeal of, say, something Google or Apple builds.

This team is getting quite adept at building huge communities. Another proof point? Tomorrow SAP will announce the Business Process Expert Community. It just opened and already it has 30,000 members.

Anyway, meeting lots of SAP’ers. Anything you want to know about SAP?

One other thing, SAP has a strong blogger relations program. When I got up to the registration booth they even had a separate area for bloggers to register. They even have blogger badges.

My 9/11 history was erased

UserLand erased my 9/11 posts. I was reminded of that by the Wired article on how 9/11 catalyzed blogging.

Back then I was blogging on UserLand’s Manilasites service, which was free. About a year ago UserLand turned that service off and my posts from 9/11 were lost forever. Even the Internet Archive doesn’t have them.

I remember waking up at around 8 a.m. to the radio, which was already carrying wall-to-wall news about that awful day. I immediately got up, turned on CNN just in time to see the first tower fall. I could not believe it. I remember talking with Dave Winer several times that day.

My son drew two pictures, one of a happy NY and one of a sad and destroyed NY. Those were linked to by Lycos, which sent probably hundreds of thousands of people over to my blog. I so wish I had those images to share with you today. I remember the frowning sun.

One other thing I remember was having tons of IM windows open. I believe I talked with people in more than 30 countries that day. Even back then the word-of-mouth network was getting to be hyper efficient. I can’t even imagine what TechMeme or Digg would do with such a story today. The next disaster will be dramatically different because of sites like those.

It’s too bad the first couple of years of my blogging are gone. 9/11 kicked off quite a tumultuous period in my life. In late October I had a car wreck where I totaled my car. Around that time my first marriage blew up, and I started going out with Maryam. Oh, and we shipped Radio UserLand. My grandma died. I laid myself off, then found a job at NEC. And a few other things happened there too. Oh, yeah, I proposed to Maryam in front of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas January 1, 2002. All this happened in a six-month period after 9/11.

Speaking of which, I’m staying in the same hotel I proposed to Maryam at (the SAP shindig starts in a few hours). I miss her. I miss the towers. I miss my old blogs. I miss the freedoms we’ve given up since (having my carryons checked for chemical explosives and not being able to carry in drinks at the airport is just a couple of the ways things have changed).

I have a good attitude toward losing my blogs, though. It doesn’t matter in the end.

I wonder if we come back in 100 years how much of any of our blogs will still be around and findable? 300 years? 1,000 years?

Funny enough, I wish I could erase my memories of that dreadful day … Sigh.

The electric rail that HP touched

If you walk along the BART tracks (Bay Area Rapid Transit, San Francisco’s version of mass transit electric-driven trains) you’ll see a big fence, covered with barbed wire, along with lots of signs that make it clear that if you cross the fence you’ll die. Why?

The electric rail.

It’s not lost on me that when I worked at Microsoft there were a few issues that people would tell me not to touch cause they’d cause trouble for me. How did that get communicated to me? “That’s an electric rail.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that electric rail metaphor today and why I am giving HP such harsh treatment. Privacy is an electric rail.

Let me explain. Big companies rely on our private data to make money. Verizon knows where and when I use my cell phone so it can charge me. At Microsoft if you attended the PDC you had to put your name and address and credit card number into the system so we could charge you and get you your ticket. At health care organizations they know even more detailed private information. And so on and so forth. Big companies have a lot of our data locked up in their data centers.

So, why did I care that HP’s board of directors pushed the boundary of where private information could be used? Because private data must be held sacrosanct. Private data is an electric rail. Use it properly and it will power your business. Use it improperly and you should get fired. There’s no other way to put it. It should be that clear. It IS an electric rail.

This is why I’m giving HP’s board of directors such a hard time (and will continue to do so). They touched the electric rail. You just can’t do that without severe consequences.

Note: the electric rail doesn’t care if you have a reason to touch it. You touch it, you pay severe consequences. Why does that need to be true? So no other company thinks of touching it in the future.

HP has a major ethical problem, Day 5

Newsweek has this as its cover story in the September 18th issue: Scandal at HP: The Boss Who Spied On Her Board. A thorough look at the events that led up to where we are. I don’t see anything that makes me want to turn back, even a little bit, from my point that Dunn should be done. Day 5 will be known as “the emergency board meeting.” Boy, wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall in that one! Maybe the guy who leaks from board meetings could give me a call and tell me what happened.

Amazon next Google? Maybe not…

A couple of days ago I said that Amazon might be the fearsome Microsoft killer we were expecting Google to be. But after reading the latest reviews of Amazon’s new Unboxed, I should take that back.

Which shows that it isn’t enough to be first. You also have to have the goods. It also shows that the first round of hype will get wiped out in days by a deeper look (yes, I’m sorry I hyped everyone up here).

Here’s the reviews that caught my eye:

Simon Phipps: “Unbox Unusable.”
Tom Merritt, on CNET: ”My Fight with Amazon Unbox.”
Uninnovate: “Amazon Spends Over a Year Developing Movie Download Service Then Shackles It With Absurd Restrictions.”

I love the new Max, but… (& speaking to BlogCamp in India)

I LOVE the new Microsoft Max that just came out. I’ve been waiting for this for some time. The downside? It is slow on my Tablet PC. I bet it runs great on a faster desktop machine. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the news display in this thing. More later, I’m giving a talk to BlogCamp in India via Skype. Read more about that on Kiruba’s blog.

This is a fun way to give a talk to a conference. I’d rather be there, though, but I can see the audience in a Flickr tag feed for “BlogCamp” and a video feed (which I’m trying to get access to right now).

Yes, it’s midnight here, but what the heck?

UPDATE: bummer, the audio isn’t working great. Problem on their end. What’s funny is I can read blogs from the audience almost as fast as they are posted.

UPDATE 2: since my speech has been delayed a few minutes I am playing more with Max and reading other blog posts about it.

This is NOT a Web based aggregator. It’s built on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation which includes better fonts, better page layout capabilities, and more. It’s awesome, but needs more testing…

I agree with Ryan Stewart that it’s stunning, though. Shows what you can do if you have a new framework underneath you. Yeah, there are some problems (I’m trying to figure out how to import and export an OPML file, for instance), but, boy is this thing beautiful.

Am I being fair to Patricia Dunn

Don Park raises a good question of whether or not I (and other journalists and bloggers) are being fair to Patricia Dunn?

I’ll be happy to give Hewlett Packard or Patricia Dunn an entire blog post (take as many words as you want) to give her side, or HP’s side of this whole thing. I’d even be happy to take my video camera over and put the video up on YouTube or Google Video or Blip.TV and let anyone at HP say whatever they want unchallenged by me and I’ll put that up unedited.

I won’t even link to David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Magazine, who called for her head.

Is my reaction over the top? Yeah! But like Russell Shaw says, it’s an American tradition!

Is this story boring yet? I really don’t care if I lose every single reader I have because I keep rambling on about this story. Patricia Dunn has got to go. The HP board has to realize this story is not going away.

Well, it shouldn’t. Where are we going to draw the line on privacy? At pretexting? Or when they stick a little recording device in my bedroom to see who I am talking with? Oh, not willing to put the line there? Well, how about just implant an RFID tag in my head along with a GPS and a little transmission device.

Hell, let’s just get rid of this privacy idea altogether, right? OK, I’m game. Patricia Dunn first please. If she does it, I’ll go along with this whole “get rid of privacy” game that seems to be how many employers want to play it (ever look into how deeply employers can look into your private life? It might scare you.)

HP should prepare itself for a raft of headlines like this one, HP Boosts Its Integrity, in InfoWorld.

Is that unfair? Sure! But we aren’t the ones who broke the law.

Anyway, to answer Don’s question: I don’t really care at this point. I’ve been reading very carefully trying to find a reason to take Patricia Dunn’s side. I’ve been talking with dozens of people behind the scenes. I can’t find one reason to take a different stance than I now am taking. That said, I’d be happy to learn tomorrow that we’re all mistaken and that we’re barking up the wrong tree and I’d be the first one to report I was wrong.

The facts in this case, though, don’t get better, they just get worse and that’s after the New York Times reported Patricia’s own words. Translation: I doubt she’ll take me up on my offer.

Update: Blog Herald goes further and asks “Will Social Software Mutate Blogosphere into Mob Rule?”

CNNMoney takes aim at Dunn

CNNMoney: “Are you lying … or incompetent?”

Like I said, this story isn’t going away and the reporters aren’t going to get nicer from here. They also aren’t going to let this story go away. Christopher Coulter predicts we’ll see six months of this. Well, if the whole board resigns, then this will go away in a week and we can all get on with life.

Oh, I tried to go to the beach and see if I could get away from the smell that was coming out of the HP board room. Nope, I couldn’t, it was such a strong smell that it did reach all the way across the Santa Cruz mountains. Oh, or maybe that was the rotting seaweed on the beach. I couldn’t really tell the difference. Sigh. I did Flickr a few photos, though, including some blog links I left in the sand.

Back out to have more fun. Hope you’re having a good weekend.