My colleague Ernie Makris from Kayak released his first facebook application-- You did WHAT?.

Try it out and let me know what you think. ¶10:54 PM; digg

Scott Kirsner has a new gig - check out his new "Innovation Economy" blog. Scott just returned to the Boston area from his stint in San Francisco. ¶3:38 PM; digg

Look carefully at this image. Can you guess what it is? I will give you a hint. It is called a 3D blobular map, and it represents data for something very large.

(Thanks to gregp for the link.) ¶9:06 AM; digg

World On Fire is the latest music video from Sara McLachlan. She made this video in her kitchen for about $15, and she then donated the otherwise typical $150,000 video production cost to groups which will use that money to impact the lives of one million people. ¶5:04 PM; digg

The Mail&Guardian online has published an excellent article and photo journal about the PIH project in Lesotho, Africa.

Labels: basotho, lesotho, pih

¶7:43 AM; digg

meraki has started shipping their wireless mesh routers. The meraki mini costs $49. That is not a typo-- it is forty nine dollars. There is an outdoor version for $99 and it has range up to 750 feet, or up to 8km with optional third party antennas.

Meraki is now setting up a free mesh across San Franciso as a demonstration of a low cost mesh. So far they have 2800 nodes setup in San Francisco alone.

Wow. (Thanks to julie for the link.) ¶7:38 AM; digg

I got an iPhone. My god this thing is sexy. Super bright, colorful display, tasteful/fast animations. The biggest problem for me as a Crackberry user is that iPhone email sucks. Let me count the ways:

• Not asynchronous, but instead you have to ask it to poll, and the most frequent poll time is 15 minutes
  
• No autotext macros! I could never imagine Blackberry email without these
  
• Slow to delete a message; it shows some damn animation which is cute the first time, but jeez, get this damn thing out of the way; not useful for someone who gets hundreds of emails a day
  
• The keyboard is impressive for a soft keyboard, but compared to a real/Blackberry keyboard, the iPhone keyboard sucks
  
• Calendar sync does not yet work with Outlook/Exchange, near as I can tell. It does work with Google Calendars iCal link, so I will try using that.
  
• Contacts do not sync with Outlook/Exchange but I will try to find some other solution.
  
• Sometimes the iPhone freezes for ~30 seconds or so, perhaps when it is receiving new email. The Blackberry never froze under any circumstance, and I've been a heavy duty Blackberry user for years.
  

Still, I'm going to try to keep the iPhone, which means (and my friends and colleagues might be rejoicing right now) that I will do much less email than before. This means my "productivity" will decline, I will have to stop working on some projects, and spend more time smelling the roses. :)

Labels: blackberry, iPhone

¶8:18 AM; digg

Citibank sucks at security. I was just on the phone with a friend, when a call from 415-861-5594 shows up on my caller ID. When I finished speaking with my friend, I called back the other caller. A guy answers and says "Citibank". I say "I'm returning your call". He says "Can you give me your social security number so I can look you up?"

Are you serious?

How do I know this is really Citibank? I can't believe how stupid these guys are with security. They actually place calls to people from a number other than the one on the back of my card, and when I call back, they expect me to give them my social security number?

I smell a scam coming. Bad guys who read my blog-- please do not start placing phone calls from your fake Skype accounts claiming to be Citibank, then asking people for their social security number when they call you back. ¶3:44 PM; digg

billo got an iPhone and he let me play with it. Very, very sexy. Probably the best consumer electronics product I've seen in years. Who knows how it will hold up in production use (vs just the quick demo). I crave one, but AT&T/Cingular sucks, and, I fear the iPhone won't be nearly as good as my Crackberry given my email addiction. (But maybe that would be a good thing, to make me do less email.) ¶11:08 AM; digg