Renee Blodgett (she’s Silicon Valley’s PR maven) is talking with me. She wants to go to Paris, France, but needs to know that she will be able to use a cell phone in Paris. I told her “hmmm, I have no idea about that, so let me blog it.” I remembered that my readers are smarter than I am. I was wondering that myself cause I’ll be in Paris in December. One thing is we need to keep the cost of calls fairly low cost.
Category: sms
Cool cell phone apps coming soon
I’m sitting with Chris Dury, VP of marketing of ScanR. Really cool cell phone service. You take a picture of a whiteboard and it processes and and uploads and forwards the image. But a lot better cleaned up than if you were only moderately skilled with Photoshop. Same for business cards. The service runs on Windows Server 2003, they run on any phone, and have specialized apps for Windows Mobile phones. Coming soon, they are planning their coming out party for the CES show in Las Vegas in January.
They are thinking of other kinds of things you can do with cell phone cameras, too and talk about some of their ideas on their blog.
Spat asks ‘what about the SmartPhone?’
Spat asks why Microsoft doesn’t make a bigger deal about the SmartPhones when it comes to the iPod. I love my SmartPhone as much as the next guy, but you can’t compare that to the iPod. Here’s why: my son will not consider buying one. A cell phone has a monthly service charge. An iPod doesn’t. Also, an iPod is “cool” but a SmartPhone isn’t. There’s a variety of reasons for that.
By the way, I really dislike it when Microsoft employees post blogs but don’t put their names on their blogs (or their email aliases). Why? Cause I wanted to email Splat something internally, and I can’t. Please, please, please use your real name on your blogs and put your email address out there. Or don’t blog.
To make things even worse, I used the contact link on Spat’s blog, but my email was rejected by Microsoft’s spam filters. Sigh.
Back to the iPod. I brought home one of the older Portable Media Centers for my son to try out. He has been playing with it all day. Says “why didn’t you make a bigger deal about this, if you had, I would have considered one of these instead of an iPod.” What turned him on? He burned a CD onto both his 20GB iPod and the Windows Media Center. The Windows Media Center sounds noticeably better. Tomorrow we’re going to try some experiments to figure out whether it’s the headphones that come with both units, the format/compression, or the unit itself, but he’s right, his new iPod doesn’t sound as good.
I think we should do a podcast together tomorrow too, since he’s become quite the podcasting expert (he even told Woz about various podcasts that Woz didn’t know about).
Update: thanks to Jojjo, who pointed out that Spat is Steve Patrick. I still wish he would have that on his home page somewhere. Blogging is a very powerful relationship-building tool. How can anyone build a relationship with Steve if they have to dig through old posts to find his email and name?