Great literature on iPhone? You bet!

All iPhone fan boys love trolling for new and interesting apps. So do I - and I am now reading “Great Expectations” on my phone. Dickens may have just rolled over in his grave - please accept my compliments on the tome, Chuckie D. Solid, solid work.

Over the last few months, iPhone has really trained me to read on a small screen. As long as I can zoom in and really bury my face in the device, no problem. I mean, I’d be crashing into street lights and mailboxes while walking around *anyways* - I may as well read and learn something interesting while risking personal injry and looking like a jackass.

This is why I was so excited when I came across the “Books” category in App Store. While its selection is NOWHERE near what you’d find if you purchased a Kindle, it contains a small but powerful set of books that are generally accepted to be great literature. My guess is, the copyright on those titles has run out so you don’t have to deal with pesky-ass publishers if you are the guy developing the app.

Reading Great Expectations has been a lot of fun so far. And I always have it with me, in my pocket. Yay! The part that sucks is that the developer should have made it easy to look up terms in a dictionary. It is just too damn painful to find an obscure word, kill the app, go to browser and look up dictionary.com. Boo!!

But overall, well worth the 2 duckets.

On iPhone 2.0, Shazam and the future of music

Shazam!

Like every other Valley Apple fan boy, I’ve been spending lots of time downloading, discussing and evangelizing iPhone apps.

My favorite app right now, bar none, is Shazam. I cannot believe that the list of fawning servile fans of this app is so small, but let me be the first in line. Not only is the app usable and ridiculously useful, IMHO it points to something the music industry should have been working on for a long time.

What is Shazam? its an app that you install on your cellphone and run whenever you come across a track that you can’t recognize (which happens ALL the time to most of us at the gym, the car radio, and if you are a major Kenny G fan, in elevators). Once the app “listens” to a few seconds of the song, it sends the audio fingerprint up to the server and figures out the actual song and sends it down to the device. You can then proceed to purchase the track (at least on the iPhone you can) or watch a YouTube video.

This is great, but it is rendered more powerful by the iTunes model of music. Several commentators smarter than me have commented on how the album - a collection of songs sold as a whole - is still a valid form of music retail.

Based upon my personal behavior over the last 2 years, I call bullshit.

Purchasing music now is like purchasing a stick of gum while standing in line at Safeway. Or the National Enquirer if you want to be trashy about it. In other words, music purchases are starting to be impulse buys. You hear a great track, you WANT TO BUY IT RIGHT THERE. Given the low price point of 99 cents, you don’t think twice about making a purchase RIGHT NOW.

This impulse has been around since iTunes started to take off but its been dormant. I hear a great track on Entourage, I have to do the heavy lifting of remembering the stupid lyric, Googling the lyric (game over right there), finding the track on iTunes and then paying 99 cents for the privilege. Uhh, no thanks.

On the other hand, Shazam greases that impulse better than anything out there on the market right now. Plus, it retails for FREE via the appStore.

What’s not to love??

More things that piss me off about Google Knol

Okay, I’m pissed because I care. Or something like that.

You see, as a purveyor of fine health information, it is my job, nay, my calling, to wade through the trenches of health websites. There’s good ones (WebMD, Mayo, NIH sites, etc.) and then there’s the really bad content (don’t even get me started).

That’s why I was giddy like a 13 year old going to see Hannah Montana when I first previewed Google Knol. Seeded with a few hundred health topics written by physicians, the content quality and depth is unbelievable. It puts Wikipedia to shame. It puts everything else out there to shame.

Only problem? Doctors write when actively courted by Google (who doesn’t love a little love from our overlords?); they probably stop writing when they find that the AdSense ads surrounding their content monetize at 10 dollars a year.

Yeah. Doctors are people too, and sometimes wretchedly money-grubbing people. Fair enough.

So to really measure Google Knol’s quality since takeoff last week, we need a better way to navigate and access the site.

• What were the last five (or five hundred) Knols created? If they were about how to sell snake oil as opposed to medical topics, uh, I’d kinda like to know so I don’t syndicate that.
• How many Knols exist overall? Note that Wikipedia provides a pretty easy way to get to that number. Its called a full database dump and my company Kosmix uses it. Knol? Umm no. Evil much??
• Nav for the site is pretty retarded. I mean, look at this: http://knol.google.com/k/knol/directory-000#. Where is the categorization?
• Good Lord, there isn’t even a way to SORT the goddamn link above!!!
• Final offense: the title says “Collection of Featured Knols”. That means that the tip of the iceberg could be shiny and pretty while the rest of the iceberg is trying to sell me Viagra on the cheap. Come on, Knol, stand behind your product!

Things that tick me off: Google KNOL doesn’t syndicate

Google Knol made a ridiculously loud fat-man-diving-into-kiddie-pool splash last week. Why? Three reasons:

a) Google is involved, and anything with our Interwebs overlords in charge should be greeted with deference.

b) Wikipedia might get crushed in the process. Nerdy Wikipedia editors are just so annoying, after all.

c) The content, at least for the seed list of topics, is FANTASTIC.

Most of the articles have been licensed under Creative Commons. So why the hell is it so hard to get to the content via XML? Let’s say I want to syndicate Knol Content on my site? Why can’t I do that? There isn’t even an RSS feed that will let me get to the first 1000 characters of the Knol.

That blows. And Google should really fix it.

A Few More Thoughts on the Cuil Launch

Since I’m just an overexcited Internet fanboy at heart, I cranked out a post for VentureBeat late last night. You can find it here or via The Industry Standard here.

Things that tick me off: gratuitous office whiteboard usage

The whiteboard is a sacred Silicon Valley office artifact. No matter how scrappy your startup, if you ain’t got 2 whiteboards for every warm body in the office/garage/homeless-box, you ain’t a real company.

The whiteboard is a company’s mission statement, its values, its creed and its soul rolled into a smooth white surface. Whenever I walk into a startup’s office, I look at their whiteboards like women look at their date’s shoes. Are they squeaky clean because the admin has a mild case of OCD (no joking matter, btw)? Are they littered with pseudocode scribbles because some engineer drank down a 40 and decided to show off? Did someone draw a naughty version of Dijkstra’s shortest path (don’t ask)?

As with shoes and men, you can tell a lot about a company from their whiteboards.

That’s why I’m pissed off when people use whiteboards for stupid, obvious shit that discredits the written form. I’m in a meeting and we’re brainstorming ideas, discussing tasks for a project, figuring out timelines. Someone will invariably stand up suddenly and motion excitably with a hand wave; they’re looking for a marker.

At this point, I get myself primed! I clear my brain; something interesting is about to happen. Maybe he’ll write down an algorithm that will solve my problem. Maybe he’ll just scrawl a mathematical formula John Nash-like and demonstrate to me superior intellect while I nod along like a chump. Sometimes, I just blank my brain and get ready to be schooled like I’m back in junior high.

But then they pick up the stupid marker and start making a dumb list. Or put down a stupid non sequitur like “Its about persistence”. Or start drawing a crude Gantt chart, which just makes my head explode.

People: whiteboards are for math, code and software architecture diagrams that are simply too beautiful to be put down on Visio. Do NOT draw dumb “strategy boxes” on them.

This shit has to stop (random aside, I’m thinking about copyrighting that line. Idea of the year?).

Lazy Linking: iPhone wannabes, meet AppStore

I’d rather not blog than be a lameass lazy habitual linker. But this article is different. Written last month about how Apple was courting developers aggressively, the article presciently talks about the marvel that is the AppStore.

To me, this is the true disruption. For the first time that I can think of, mobile developers can bypass carriers altogether and get to the end consumer. Sure, they gotta write some bitchy Objective C code (vomit) but hey, whatever. Have you seen some of these apps?

Its like a tasty tech snack.

Oh yeah, and the Samsung Instinct. What chump would make an argument that this POS is an iPhone killer after July 11th?

Funny Signs from my India Trip: Part One

I recently visited my folks in India for three weeks. I hadn’t been back in years and its always fascinating for me to hang out in the land of my birth and adolescence. India 2008 is in so many ways so different from India 1999.

But the best parts for me have nothing to do with India’s non-Hindu blazing growth rates. They have to do with the cultural differences that make themselves known in that most mundane manner: billboards, street signs, banners.

Here is a fun example from my hometown.

“Banjaara” - which means nomad for the uninitiated - is a little restaurant in my folks’ neighborhood.

I already have an issue with the name; why name a RESTAURANT after people whose sense of hygiene is, well, nomadic. Why christen a place of good after people who move every time the sand blows in their face? But fine, I can deal with it.

Here’s my real problem: these guys really can’t make up their minds! Is it a hotel? Or an inn? Is it a family restaurant? And if so, why is the word BAR prominently tacked to the end?

And last but not least, why the gratuitous use of the word “PRESIDENT”?

Best Twitter Quote of the Day

I know. I’m NOT supposed to be talking about Twitter. But this one is slightly subversive (as opposed to the normal blogger bitching about uptime, downtime, business model, blah blah blah).

I found this great quote about Twitter on a - of all the places - Wired blog.

“Twitter takes the Pringles analogy to its logical conclusion. It’s something like a collection of personal blogs, only each entry is limited to 140 characters, so you end up with a vertical stack of bite-size, artificially flavored communication snacks. They’re oddly compelling while remaining staunchly unsatisfying, and it always feels like maybe the next one will quell the roiling ennui inside.

Like an elderly widow keeping the TV on for “company,” I keep a Twitter window open whenever I’m online, and accept that as sort of, kind of communication. Over the course of my day I learn that Wil Wheaton enjoys the new B-52s album, Jonathan Coulton is taking a minivan cab and Kottke himself is having a “really crappy morning.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Hey T-Mobile! You suck, take your whining elsewhere

I just love this. T-Mobile is suing Starbucks because the coffee hawker has come to its senses and stopped charging a ridiculous 30 monthly dollars for its WiFi access.

http://gigaom.com/2008/06/07/t-mobile-vs-starbucks-free-wifi/

Can you believe this?

GigaOM also makes an interesting observation that iPhone users who hog bandwidth for a paltry 20 bucks a month need to use more WiFi, less 3G. I can’t find fault with that - God knows I use my iPhone way more than I ever did for my Nokia E62, and I paid 45 bucks a month for that connectivity. Now: 20 bucks flat.