SplaTT's Blog

corporate blogs and conversations...

John Porcaro who is a Group Marketing Manager over at Microsoft on the XBox team, has posted a good article on corporate blogging...

I think that the point he raises about companies "having a conversation with customers" is spot on....it doesn't matter if the conversation is on a blog, a web site, or whatever.....The Cluetrain Manifesto was right all along...if only more people understood the whole of idea of "markets as conversations" ...

I realise that i've been sounding a bit pro-Microsoft these days, and believe me, my friends are letting me know it, but i think they are one of the first to accept some of what cluetrain talks about and to understand its wider implications....i haven't coded seriously in ages, but i'm spending a lot of time reading the blogs over at blogs.msdn.com trying to get a grasp on what MS is working on next....and having someone like Robert Scoble blogging his heart out (hmm... he's taking a break this week...damn), is doing wonders for Microsofts perception in the tech and IT world (it doesn't matter if you agree with him or not), and its probably creating some good PR for them while he's at it. All of this information that i'm discovering and reading is helping me to do my job better and its not coming from the PR agency, but from the coalface itself...and the fact that i can converse with the people who are telling me these things at the same time is amazing...

All the blogs that sprung up around Microsofts PDC late last year, and the one that has appeared for the MDC in March, are all providing somewhere for a conversation to take place....sure its between coders and coders and not companies and people/consumers/cutomers (no insult meant to coders....they are people too) but it has to start somewhere....

retro games in flash...woohoo...

You have to give credit to Paul Neave who went to all the trouble to set these games up in flash....Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids, Hexxagon, Snake, Tetris, Tic-Tac-Toe, Simon and Sokabon.....

Not only can you play them online (with a full screen option)...you can even download executables for Windows and the Mac. The best bit, is that he has provided the SWF (shockwave) file so you can use them on your own site as well as the FLA (Flash) file so you go in and change stuff around (keep the copyright laws in mind if your going to do this though)...

newspaper to use images from camera phone users

The San Diego Union-Tribune is opening up a service with Text America to allow the public to send camera phone images to a moblog that the newspaper may possibly use on their website "SignOnSanDiego.com"...

Read the press release at the Yahoo Finaincial News site

I'm in print over at SpotStop......

I've mentioned before how much i like the forums and the site in general over at SpotStop.com, but now i have another reson to link you to them......

Two posts ago, i mentioned that i had found a way around being able to send MSN Messenger messages to a Spot watch in the US from Australia....Brian, the guy that runs SpotStop aske me to write up a little story about what you need to do for the sites news section....

Click here to read it....

Emerging Tech conference schedule v2 :)

An amusing re-write of the session listings for this years O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference by Trevor F Smith....

How to post an instant message to a Spot watch in the US if you are not based in the US

It only took me a couple of days...but i finally worked it out....

How to send a message to a SPOT watch from a country other than the US...and the answer is...

When you set your region in your profile on the passport site you need to tick the "Share my other registration information" field...if you don't, the region attribute (GeoID) in the core profile table stays set to region 0...this looks like it then sets your region via your regional passport login machine (or something like that) in my case, Australia...from where i can not send a message to SPOT watch....

As soon as you tick that share field.....bada-bing....i can now send a message to an MSN Direct Watch.....hehehehe....life is now good (will be even better when i can use a spot watch in Australia :)

microsoft play catch up with google

Microsoft have just released a beta of their MSN search bar....sort of like the google bar but it looks like it has more integration with IE and MSN services.....initial playing shows one nice option....the ability to setup an "allow" list of sites that bypass the popup blocker....

More info at blink.nu

Scoble, REI and the future of the retail environment

Robert Scoble gets to sit next to some interesting people on his plane flights...on a recent flight back to seattle he got to sit next to the President/CEO of REI, Dennis Madsen.....

They had an interesting conversation about digital signage, RFID technology, weblogs and RSS and a few other things which Robert blogged about...

In light of the work we have been doing with Telstra on their new stores, that includes a heap of digital screens, the comments that Dennis makes about digital signage and the fact that they are currently working on a "REI Future store concept" means that this is one place i will be stopping at on my visit to Seattle in late February...

It will be interesting to see how Microsofts "Smarter Retailing Initiative" and their joining of the "Future Store Initiative" with the METRO group will influence retail business and the shopping experience...especially with RFID being investigated more and more.....more info is available on the Microsoft Retail & Hospitality Groups site

I have put up an album on my moblog of shots from two of the new Telstra Shops for anyone thats interested...

PS. REI have shown how relevance in web site content works if you really think about it....if you go into their site and look up an actual real store, it has GPS co-ordinates for its location...check out the Seattle stores page.....nice....(oh yeah...they also have a 65 foot climbing wall in the store...cool)

John Howard, Australian Prime Minister...the blog....

This is an absolute crackup......you may only get the humour and references if you are Australian though.......John Howard, P.M.......

Oh yeah... it has a nomination in the weblog of the year category at the 2004 Bloggies...go on.....go and vote for it.....or at least vote for Boing Boing....

Flaw in Orkut...

Adam Hill talks about a major flaw in Orkut on his blog RandomPixel that was picked up by tangra from the #joiito IRC channel...

The flaw would allow him to email over 8000 users.....doh...

Bill Gates on orkut??? nah...

Someone's allready setup a fake Bill Gates user on Orkut....hehehehe

Screen shit at shahine.com/omar/

winzip in outlook....

MS Exchange Blog talks about a new add-on for the beta version of WinZip 9 that allows you to zip attachments from within Outlook...

Microsoft and Mars

Some of the guys over at Microsoft Research have been working on a tool which makes the human eye believe its seeing a 3D image made out of plain 2D images. Apparently it works on computers, video material, magazines and plain photos...

The cool thing is, is that they have put together a demo using some of NASA's material from Mars....good article explaining it over at Blink.nu

finally.....atom but not rss

Blogger have finally announced the ability to offer a syndication feed of your blog. On the old Blogger-Pro version (which you can't register for anymore) you get the option to choose between an ATOM or an RSS XML feed, but on the free blogger account (which i use), you can only get an ATOM feed.....so.....here's my ATOM feed.....

Now i understand that ATOM is the going to be the standard moving forward, but my RSS reader, RSS Bandit, is just that, an RSS reader. It certainly don't like looking at the ATOM feed i now have (for a start it doesn't even support links). NewsGator 2.0, which i just installed reads the ATOM feed perfectly (including links).....hmmmm...just might have to get used to NewsGator or another reader until RSS Bandit add the functionality as i really like the layout of their reader, especially the version i just installed (1.2.0.81)

PS. I just noticed that if i view the xml file in IE, it also doesn't show links...hmmm.....

Thumbs up to SpotStop and Microsoft staff...

I've got to hand it to both the team that run SpotStop as well as the guys in the Spot/MSN Direct team at Microsoft.....well done guys....

As you probably read in an earlier post of mine, the idea of the Spot watch really works with me.....and on my trip to the US in February I will definitely be buying one (I am a geek with a gadget fetish after all ;). I can see huge value in a technology like this (DirectBand) in both communicating with people from a business perspective as well as giving them another way to communicate amongst themselves wether it be through a Spot watch, a key ring, a pendant, a fridge magnet (? ;) or any other device that gets the technology embedded in it.

What's been really useful, is having a site like SpotStop and their forums in answering questions and just in providing a very useful read. Brian (the Editor in Chief) and his team have put together a great site.

It all gets even better when you have guys from the Spot team at Microsoft themselves answering a lot of the queries and questions people are posting.....Microsoft staff, like Joel Grossman (the Lead Program Manager for Spot) in particular, are doing a great PR job for Microsoft and Spot/MSN Direct by providing quick and relevant answers to most of the questions posted.

Keep up the great job guys.....

Now all Joel needs to sort out is the fact that I can't send a Messenger IM to a spot watch in the US from Australia.....that and a little thing about getting the service extended to Australia.... ;)

Big Day Out 2004 moblog

We have set up a moblog for the Big Day Out 2004 in conjunction with one of our clients Nokia and one of their partners Channel V......

We've set up a basic .net app, that checks an email address for images that have been taken and then MMS'd from a number of Nokia 7650's we have handed out to channel V staff at the event.......check them out.......

geek test.....

Should you take the geek test or shouldn't you????? do you really need to know the answer????

or are you a chicken?????

woohooo....digital (interactive) tv

Finally.....after years of just talking about pure digital (interactive) cable, we finally had an announcement today in Australia that Foxtel are going to release the Foxtel Digital cable service...

More than 130 channels (including TechTV), time-shifted channels, CD quality audio music channels, 30 channels providing near-video-on-demand and true interactive channels..more info can be found here

even if its just for techTV...i'm sold....

Mail Enabling SharePoint Document Libraries

A great tip for adding some really useful functioanlity to SharePoint...." the ability to connect a document library to an Exchange public folder and have that document library populated automatically with attachments submitted to that public folder"....

zap......damn....

Gotta watch the static electricity with the spot watch (when i get it ;).....

bummer dude...

Nice blog post about an FBI/Secret Service raid on a guy (toshok) at 6:30am on January 14th.....the raid was in relation to the HL2/Valve code theft a while ago...

iceblog...the name says it all....

Now if this blogs authors location isn't the best damn excuse to start a weblog and moblog.....i don't know what is...

The iceblog!...live from Antarctica...

moblog company raises EUR3.2 million

The company that provides the site that i host my moblog on, Ireland based Newbay Software, has recently raised EUR3.2 million in funding...

This article at Electric News has a few quotes from Newbay CEO, Paddy Holahan, and he mentions that they will be launching a new product soon that is not just an upgrade to FoneBlog....i can't wait to see what it is....

well done guys, and congrats on the investment..

mobile phone knoweldge base

Russell Beattie just announced that he's opend up a new web site called MobKnowledge...

"So what's the plan with this site? Simply put, I envision a "knowledge base for mobile phones." I wrote about my ideas for MobKnowledge in detail months ago and since then I've just seen the need increase. The idea is not for "Yet Another Mobile Weblog" or a tips site, but a repository for hard info. The stuff that most people spend time scrounging the web with Google to find out right now. Access points, links to manufacturers, help on setup, device capabilities, etc. "

Nice one Russ....

Intersting looking piece of software he has used as well....Jive Knowledge Base.....a java based application with open API's and source as well......looks OK...

Nokia 6620....

Nokia announced the 6620 mobile phone a few days ago......and Russ can't wait for it (hes not the only one :)

quick list of features: EDGE, 12MB internal RAM (up from 6MB in the 6600), faster CPU and the fun/cool add-ons of Instant Messaging and Presence.....

Mobileburn.com has a good review and photos...

view dwf files in the comfort of your own browser...

Only noticed this today...not sure how long its been out though....

Autodesk have released a browser plug-in and desktop app for viewing DWF files (native autocad) which is installed via a really simple donwload.....

I used to work with autocad around 15 years ago (previous life when i produced corporate roadshows for a living) and have been dying to find a way to look at my old stage amd lighting designs....even better, i can now ask the builder whos working on our new office space to send me the dwf files so i can have a look at them on pc....

nice...

you call that an OS???? when i was i kid.....

aahhhh...remember when.....

This Russian site has posted up a few images of Windows 1.03.... the memories (good and bad) are flooding back....

buzzzwords by sms...

Buzzwords......thats a new sms based service launched in late October by an Australian company called B33hive that is currently being rolled out by ninemsn (Australian MSN division).

We had a meeting today with Niamh Collins (ninemsn Director of Wireless) and Mary Hunwick (our ninemsn Account Manager), and they took us through their wireless offering for 2004...some interesting stuff in general, but buzzwords was by far the most interesting....

Buzzwords allows you to register a "buzzword", like splatt and to setup a response phrase or quiz that is sent to people if they SMS a certain number followed by your buzzword......and as a premium SMS service (55cents Australian), for every SMS sent, the person who set up the buzzword gets...wait for it...5 cents....woohooo...(i'll make that million yet)..

to give it a go, sms 1889922 splatt to receive my link of the day (well ....yesterday actually ;)...I'm also pretty sure that this only works in Australia....

go on....get buzzed.....

map you sites neighbours with google

Nice tool to let you visual your neighbours. The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser V1.01 allows you to type in your site/blog URL and it draws a visual representation of that URL's related neighbours...ie. a map of sites Google considers similar to your site

wwmx - mapping your moblog...

Allright...i weblog...i moblog....and now i wwmx....check out my wwmx of my recent xmas trip to Melbourne....this is by far one of the coolest things i have seen in a long time...

I saw wwmx (World-Wide Media eXchange) a while ago, but i stumbled across the site again today and noticed that they released a tool called the Travelogue Authoring Tool recently (nov 2003).... You take your digital photos, and if you happen to have recorded a track with your GPS you can map your photos to the track.....if you don't have a GPS, you can use the aforementioned tool to give your photos a co-ordinate reference via a drag-and-drop interface...very easy and very very cool

Where is gets even cooler is when you roll your mouse over one of your images in the thumbnail area, a dot on the map highlights so you know where the photo was taken...the same works in reverse, roll over a dot and the relevant thumbnails images get a highlight...

The tool has been built by the talented guys and gals over at Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond. An article explaining what it is and exactly how it works can be found here..

well done guys...

moblog from mars....

i know this is a bit behind....allready seen on BoingBoing....but here it is anyway...NASA's Mars Moblog....

the best of CES 2004...

now that CES is over for another year, you can check out the list of most innovative products seen over the four days....

my favourite.....the lightglove of course....

link crazy...

lots of stuff to look at and i've been hording it all for a couple of days....so i'll dump all the links into one post....

A Windows XP box that runs Windows XP.

Photoshop CS won't let you open/modify images of the US dollar and the Euro...courtesy of /.

Introducing the Linksys DVD Player with Wireless-G Media Link (WMLD54G) - announced at CES and releasing the 802.11g DVD/media player by end of Q1 2004...very nice...

Very cool presenation software....Stereolize...the output looks like the stuff we used to do in the old days when i used to produce corporate theatre roadshows where we would use 20+ 35/70mm slide projectors controlled by pretty high end (at the time :) 286's.....

Send email to yourself in the future with futureme...."what will you tell yourself in the future??"

All right...this is just plain funny...wrapping someones flat and all their belongings in tinfoil....

a tale of two time pieces....

so i need a new watch anyway, but i can't decide between which one to get....<whisper> may have to get both</whisper>

spot watch
microsoft finally announced the availability of their spot watches initially announced at comdex in 2002, which utilise the msn direct service at ces the other day

the ability to get news, weather, sports, stocks and travel info (to name a few) along with messages from ms messenger and sync'ing your watch with your outlook calendar is a pretty amazing step forward in portable connected devices...

now i know everything i have just mentioned i can get on my mobile phone, but until my mobile phone is sitting on my wrist and i can access all this information with only one or two button presses and it automatically changes its time based on where i am at that particualr moment (as long as i'm in the US...obviously)....the spot based watch is a jump in the right direction..

the guys over at Mobitopia and a number of other places are giving the spot watches and the msn direct service a bit of a bagging at the moment, but i think given a bit of time, the issues they have with the service not initially being what it was promised to be will be just a case of launch time bugs...saying that it will flop because all the services it has are primarily available via SMS i don't think stands up.

in australia we have had sms up and running for a while longer than the US and though it is hugely popular i don't find that myself or any of my friends (or anyone i know for that matter) use sms to get weather reports or any of the other services that you can, or will be able to get with spot/msn direct. i think the primary reason comes down to the percieved cost of sms, because even though you are paying for the msn direct services, because its a monthly (or yearly) fee and more to the point, because it comes straight to your watch, the perception will be different....but think it also goes beyond perception...

your average person just does not know (or care) how to set their mobile phone to receive additional info...if you can't do it via a wap or gprs connection....go to your service providers web site, find the right page, work out the individual prices, send an sms message to subscribe, wait for an answer, send an sms message to confirm subscription...and if your lucky, the info will come through....travelling to another state??....lets go through the process again...travelling overseas???...does you provider even work properly....all inall, to much of a hassle even for me....

the biggest issue that i agree with everybody on is the time between needing to charge the battery in the watch....then again...i charge my mobile phone, my bluetooth headset, my blackberry, my tabletpc, my ipod, my gps, my digital camera...who says i can't get used to charging my watch...i don't exactly wear it for up to 6-8 hours a day when i'm in bed which is when i charge everything else....

mars standard time
a small master watch maker Garo Anserlian of Executive Jewelers tool an unbelivebale order from NASA JPL staff who are involved on the Mars Rover "Spirit" crew to create a watch which lost 39 minutes a day (the martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long) so that they could be synchronised with the rover while it is operational on Mars...

as it turns out, Cory Doctorow (of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and "A place so foreign and 8 more" fame) is about to release another book called "Eastern Standard Tribe" about a group of people bound together by a sleep schedule based on the east coast of the US....

either way...gotta get me a watch when i am in the US for etech (or maybe two ;) along with Cory's new book.....

blutooth wireless speaker phone

this is pretty cool...Motorola have announced a bluetooth wireless speaker phone that can connect with upto 8 devices including your mobile, PDA and PC.....loose all the cables on your desk....i really like the idea of using this to replace a computer headset for apps like ms messenger and skype...

phonecam anthropology

The latest version (Issue 4 2003, December) of Ericsson's consumer magazine "On" has an interview about moble technology and moblogging with Mizuko Ito (Joi Ito's sister) by Xeni Jardin.....

what the hell...the whole magazine is a good read....

i know what the logo looks like....doh.....

interesting experiment in brand recall.....Brandmarker....

25 people trying to draw famous brand logos from memory....

mmm.....lego....

lego make the coolest things.....Digital Designer

the butterfly returns.....microsoft do make some good ads...

MSN's latest ad campaign....Lifes better with the butterfly....TV and print spots....and the logic behind them

an earlier life.....when cdrom's ruled the roost...

my past life stored on the web for all time....

i was playing around with the web archives wayback machine (a brilliant tool providing an insight into the history of the web) when i checked the archive for one of the first companies i worked for when i moved to sydney in 1995, VRX...found some photos of the launch of one of the largest CDROM's we did while i was there....Sydney-ROM

i remember spending months helping to develop the original project and then many a week working on the transfer of the original MAC version to the PC in Macromedia Director...it was also the first time that Quicktime VR was used in Australia on a commercial project...

i originally came up to sydney for the first ever Australian Internet World (now sadly no more) in May or June of 1995 and ending up getting an offer to work for VRX primarily building their web site....tables had only just came around and all was good...aahhhhh...the memories.....

Mars Rover Spirit lands....and all the actions on #joiito

The NASA Mars Rover Spirit landed at 9pm (PST) / 4pm in sydney....and where could be a better place to watch than on Nasa TV and hanging out with the guys and gals on Joi Ito's IRC channel (image here).....which is where the following quote was heard after Spirit landed...

<adamhill> THE MDF (martian defence forces) CAN KISS MY OXYGEN BREATHING ASS

ADDITION - first shots from Spirit

2003....the google perspective

googles wrap-up on the over 55 billion searches that made up 2003...the 2003 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

sms crazy...

While Russ is trying to get americans to use sms, we australians are going hell for leather (of course).....the sydney morning herald has an article on our sms and other mobile phone usage stats for the xmas and new years day period....

welcome to 2004....

it came and it went with a bang.....fireworks everywhere and lots of drunk people as well.....i saw in the new year in a little town called indented head (near port arlington) at the bottom edge of melbournes port phillip bay.. the fireworks worked their way up and down the coast line at the strike of midnight and people started chearing and hugging and wishing well wishes upon anyone and anything in sight....

but...like all things...the holidays are drawing to an end....drive back up to sydney (900km) when i get up in the morning and will probably stop in canberra on the way back to say hello to friends.....great town canberra...good friends, good coffee, and a great place to just hang out....

but enough of that...back to the task at hand...a few links below that caught my interest today...the first day of 2004....

John Perry Barlow and JoiIto enjoy the casualspace of audio conferenecing over the web...

Steve Gillmor posts his Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in '03 to eWeek...

Robert Scoble asks "what should the next ms windows operating system be called?"...

and russell beattie posts his weblogs stats for 2003 as well as attempts to get americans to use sms...

it looks like its going to be great year...i should be back in sydney for the next posting....or maybe sitting in canberra after hopefully finding a wifi spot...you never know your luck in a big city...well...not so big....