Silicon Valley Musings

We are two thirds of the way through February and we anxiously await another installment of the State of the Blogosphere from Technorati.

I found this article from the 3GSM World Congress interesting.
“The “Phones-for-Health” project will use software loaded on to a standard Motorola handset to allow care workers in the field to enter critical health information into a central database in real time.”
It is very similar to a pilot project we were designing during my tenure at […]

Zonetag automatically adds location tags to pictures uploaded to Flickr from your Nokia Series 60 phone. Zonetag is a product of Yahoo! Research Berkeley.

In a conversation with Guy Kawasaki about Small is the New Big, Seth Godin compares the role of storytelling and customer dialogue in marketing.
A great example of story telling and customer dialogue is Tesla Motors’s blog entry by Elon Musk, eBay co-founder, CEO of SpaceX, and chairman of Tesla Motors entitled The Secret […]

Robert has started a discussion about email and GMail. I used Outlook and Exchange for over a decade at Reuters. During my DV fellowship, I was lucky enough to get a very early invite to Google GMail. Over the last two years, I have become a GMail convert. Below are some of my reasons.
Things I […]

I have been using Firefox for a while now. The killer features are the tabs and Google’s Toolbar. But since I upgraded to version 1.5, I have found it a bit buggy. It crashes fairly frequently. And after several hours of use, it picks up the annoying habit of ignoring the resize of the […]

It has been a month since the DEMO 2006. There were many descriptions and much commentary directly following the event. I would recommend reading Jeff’s posts or listening to some of PodTech’s podcasts if you did not get a chance to attend.
I remember two things about DEMO: the emphasis on applications for the […]

Reuters has quietly released its Reuters Labs Web site.
One of the innovations they are showcasing is Reuters news articles being “read” by a text to speech engine (Nuance?) and distributed as MP3 files via a podcast.

Ken Norton finds the use of sliders in Yahoo’s new Mindset offering intolerable.
Even more intolerable is the introduction of “roll over” ads on some My Yahoo pages. Roll over ads are essentially popups created by Java script instead of HTML popup windows.
They share the annoying characteristics of popups, namely they appear without permission and obscure […]

SunPower’s solar panels already produce up to 50 percent more power on a typical residential roof compared with conventional panels,? said Tom Werner, SunPower’s CEO. “Our new line of high-efficiency inverters further enhances the performance advantage of SunPower’s solar systems and allows us to offer our customers an unmatched 10-year standard product warranty on the […]