Silicon Valley Musings

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 […]

A friend that works at Yahoo mentioned that the SBC Yahoo web pages don’t evolve as quickly as the rest of the Yahoo sites. Most notably My Yahoo and SBC My Yahoo are quite different.
The recent upgrade to Yahoo News prompted me to reactivate my original Yahoo ID. I also ponied up the $19.95 annual […]

Here are a couple ideas for RSVP and BuddyBuzz.
Mail
Reading mail on your phone would is currently very difficult. A RSVP/BuddyBuzz-based email reader would is an obvious improvement for some people.
Dual Camera Phones
I noticed recently that the phone manufacturers are starting to build “dual camera” or “frontal VGA-camera” phones. The second camera is lower resolution and […]

For the last six months I have been working with the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab on a project called BuddyBuzz.
A SiliconBeat article on the project can be found here.
UPDATE: The article also appeared on May 9th in the Mercury News.

I have been following Jeff’s coverage of Les Blogs.
One of themes that seemed to be overlooked is the Weblog as tool for consumer advocacy.
A while back I had difficulty with my refrigerator and was charged what I felt was an unreasonable amount for the repairs. I documented the service call and my frustration on […]

I have been playing with Yahoo 360. Here are a couple of my suggestions for 360 enhancements.
Dictating Mobile Phone Weblog Entries
Yahoo 360 users can email photos from their camera phones to their Weblogs (though I had trouble with this because pictures sent from my phone come from a Sprint provided email address).
I have always wanted […]

I have been reading John McDowall’s Weblog Fast Takes for a while. John and I worked together at Teknekron/TIBCO and he is now the CTO of InStorecard.
He has been writing some interesting things about SOAP, REST, and the role of simplicity in Web Services. I sent him this comment about his recent entry, Simplicity Rules!:
“Simplicity […]

Using the satellite images in Google Maps you can easily track environmental damage in your neighborhood.
Here are some pictures of the Kaiser/Hanson Cement Plant in Cupertino. Notice how the mined area is almost as big the very popular Rancho San Antonio Park.
You can read more about Kaiser/Hanson Cement at the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition Website.

I was the development manager for a product called MarketSheet for Windows (MSW) during the later part of the last century. Someone asked me the other day what I would do differently if I had to design a MarketSheet like product today.
Below is an outline that starts to identify what would shape the architecture of […]