Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar… great news for a really cool company with a great product. I dig that Sling Media has always had a strong interest in mobile. They have had a Windows Mobile client for a quite a while - it is pretty slick. And recently I believe they announced a version for Palm and intentions for a J2ME client.
I got my first Sling box from my friend Andy. He let me borrow it - it was one of the original batch and the streams were unencrypted - Windows Media format. I was trying to hack the thing to see if I could pull off a stream from my cable box, pump into a media server, and broadcast that stream live (their software limits you to a one-one peering). Yeh, I know the pirating implications are not admirable, but it was a fun project. That led to another project, which led to a dead end… but valuable lessons learned along the way.
Anyway, congrats to the team, local investor Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Hirschhorn from Sling who I met through NewsGator.
September 25th, 2007
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Is Mint right for me? Mint won the TechCrunch40, and I certainly would love to have better control over my finances… Quicken & MS Money just take too much effort.
Mint looks cool - check out Scoble’s video for a quick overview.
There are a few problems I have though…
- The obvious - they have my secret information. That makes me a bit nervous.
- The not so obvious - the service is free. Sounds good, but wait a sec… how do they plan to make money? Will they be providing me the best advice when suggesting cost savings? From their site, “Mint identifies products having the best price or interest rate.” … or the highest bidder? Also, one’s purchase stream has a very high value. Will this be in jeopardy?
I am gonna give Mint a go… Aaron Patzer, the CEO, seems genuine and the product’s value prop looks really good. Mint has a great personality! It looks like Aaron went out in old-school entrepreneur style and built an elegant thingie that solved a real pain that he was having. That’s cool!
September 20th, 2007
Over the weekend I took the kiddos to the Denver zoo… Holly got a well deserved day off for hiking and coffee with friends.
We had a fantastic time seeing all sorts of cool animals, making cotton candy messes, and taking numerous laps on the carousel. It was all courtesy of NewsGator… that is pretty cool!
On Friday Veronica put together a package for each family that was going to the zoo. Emma, Asher, and Ava each had their own goodie bag full of goodness. They were totally psyched when I got home on Friday. NewsGator also gave us a very gracious amount of zoo bucks so we could eat cotton candy ’till we turned blue. It was a great time. Thanks NewsGator!
September 9th, 2007
I have been a long time Twitter fan, and I am also am starting to muck around in Facebook… one of the points of redundancy is the status feature in FB. I’d rather just update Twitter and have that post to FB.
So, this am I whipped up some waffles for the kiddos while Holly was hiking. As they were making a mess, I made it happen and created a Twitter to Facebook app. I took some code I wrote for Brad a while back for pumping RSS content to Twitter. Then I ported some nifty code that updates one’s FB status; there is no API yet for this, but you can “leverage” the FB mobile endpoints. I am not sure that this is okay to do, but hey it is my account after all.
So now I update Twitter and it automagically posts an update to my FB status Very Sweet (see images below)! FYI: The Twitter screen shot below was taken from Tiny Twitter - it’s a client I created for getting Twitter on your mobile… that’s cool too!
September 1st, 2007
RIM shares rose on speculation of a Microsoft takeover. I called this possibility back in April:
Now, that isn’t particularly interesting or compelling to me, but got me thinking and my first thought was that Microsoft must be acquiring RIM.
August 30th, 2007
With all the news about the iPhone lately, it seems like a good time to give some love back to the Windows Mobile world. iPhones are stunning, heck, we even got in on the fun and created an iPhone NewsGator reader (I’ve got to write down my thoughts on that process soon … some really good, some not so good). By the way, I have a list of to do’s for NewsGator iPhone v 2.0 that are queuing up. Keep an eye out for that in the near future.
But this is about Windows Mobile and NewsGator Go! Today we put out beta version 1.5 – please take a look. This version has a ton of new features and fixes (see below) and has been a blast to work on. When not on my bike, I spend a lot of time on the bus between Boulder and Denver and most of that is spent using Go! It is the mobile application I use the most, and I hope the latest version of Go! will improve your mobile experience as well!
We’ve added features that users have been asking for, incorporated ideas that other NewsGator folks (Brian, Brian, Brian, Greg, Jonathan, Ashley, Doug, and others) have surfaced – yep we have lots of Brians around here, fixed things that needed attention, and put in additions that make my commute more enjoyable. Whether you are waiting in line at the coffee shop, sitting in a boring meeting, or any other time you are away from your desktop, Go! will keep you in touch with your RSS. Here is a screenshot of the Go! media/podcast interface as an appetizer:
Over the next few days I will talk about some of the new features in Go!, but in the meantime please kick the tires and send us your feedback to the NewsGator Forum. Take a look and let us know what you think, what is still missing, and what needs improvement.
IMPORTANT: There are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- At a minimum you will need the .NET compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 (it has to be SP 2 or better –there are some issues with the browser control and htpp requests/aborts in prior versions)
- If you are using Windows Vista, you will need to install using the CAB files (either copy the CAB over to your device or fetch from your device browser). There is an issue with the desktop installer on Vista. THANKS NickH for finding that one.
On another note, the great folks from across the hall put out NewsFriends today a great app for you Faceboook fanatics. Check it out as well; it’s cool!
Some of the new features in Go! V 1.5:
- Media
- Resume interrupted downloads
- Play using default device media player (media types supported dependent on media player)
- Scheduled downloads – not completely yet implemented
- Specify the storage location (external storage card recommended)
- Special icon indicate a feed with media
- Special icons denote articles with media
- Play using default device media player (media types supported dependent on media player)
- Specify the storage location (external storage card recommended)
- Special icon indicate a feed with media
- Special icons denote articles with media
- Scheduled Sync
- Specify how often to sync with NewsGator API
- If syncing once a day, specify the sync hour
- Auto Update Feeds
- Automatically fetch feed updates when feed is accessed (optional)
- Clipping
- Clip to any of your clippings folders
- Specify a quick clip folder for fast clipping
- Feed Management
- Manually add feed url’s
- Working on better feed discovery – not completely implemented
- Unsubscribe from NewsGator
- Unsubscribe from NewsGator Go!(mobile location)
- Email Articles
- Enter in arbitrary email addresses
- Select recipients from your contact list
- Navigation Improvements
- Navigation through feeds using the D-Pad (in ALL views)
- Refactor Settings
- A plethora of setting have been added to customize the experience
- All settings can be set from one view
- Flight Mode
- River of News
- View all articles in a folder sorted chronologically
- Auto Scrolling of Article Titles (optional)
- For articles with long titles, the entire title will scroll when activated
- Search
- Search for feeds to subscribe to
- Search for most relevant articles on a particular subject
- Exception Handlin/Logging
- All exception are logged to a circular log file (optional)
- Post scrubbing
- Article content is scrubbed to remove malicious code and to ensure valid Html
- Top Posts
- View most popular posts over all NewsGator subscribers
- Today Screen/Home Screen Integration – not completely implemented yet
- Day Separator in Article View
- Organize your article list by date – very useful in the River of News View (optional)
- Links are optimized for mobile viewing (default Skweezer transcoder)
- SSL Support
- Proxy Support
- Mark This and Older Read feature – clipping mark old articles in a feed as read
August 28th, 2007
After our Sunday ritual of shopping/dinner at Whole Foods, Holly put Asher to bed. He was blowing up after not getting much sleep on our camping excursion. Little Ava had an afternoon nap and was hanging in tough and “helping†me clean my bike in the garage. Here she is mucking around on my ladder.
While Ava and I were tinkering in the back of the house, Emma had managed to drag out her kiddie table to the front yard, make a few signs, assemble a money container with proper label, “money garâ€, and pull some flowers from the front yard (and some of Holly’s from inside). Emma had put together an impromptu flower sale! Nice! I noticed the original price was s 2 c 99 ($2.99) which was scratched out and replaced with 1 dollar. I guess there are some future car salesmen in the hood that talked her down.
So, when I was putting Emma to bed I had to ask, “Emma are you saving up for an iPhone?â€â€¦ her response, “what’s an iPhone?â€. At least one person hasn’t been touched by the iLaunch! By the way, Emma is trying to save 100 dollars so she can get a guinea pig and all the accessories that comes along. She made about 5 bucks today. We already have 2 dogs, a cat, fish, and crabs. What the heck, what’s one more?
July 2nd, 2007
Google announced that they are offering $5K to gadget developers to flush out their widget and $100K seed to a select set of those devs to build out their business. This is a brilliant and cost effective way for Google to add applications/gadgets to their suite and clearly a defensive move to steal some of the thunder from the Facebook Open Platform move (which was incidentally a page straight from the Microsoft playbook).
So back to the post title… this is a great thing for developers. Now you, developer, have a way to get paid to build cool apps/gadgets/widgets, and I suspect that trend will continue. If you’re a business trying to hire the best devs now you may also have to compete with the likes of Google (and the other big guys who will follow along) scooping in on the local talent.  Good news for devs - but perhaps this puts a strain on hiring managers.
June 27th, 2007
Any day now I am expecting to get a Facebook friend invite from my grandfather… he’s 82 and doesn’t own a computer. But I have visions of his avatar and friend request, “I have know Kevin for 82 years, at one point his mother lived with me, and he used to shoot baskets in my driveway”.
Facebook is off the hook. I am still intrigued and checking in; I have no real compelling reason to hang on for the long haul but holding out hope… maybe that’ll change and I will discover the Facebook killer app for me.
June 27th, 2007
The iPhone is everywhere – vlogs, blogs, forums, newspaper, magazines, and TV (just saw a cool commercial while half tuning into Leno). I am not sure what the long term outlook is for the iPhone (I haven’t held one yet). But I do know that Friday, June 29th 2007 is a great day for mobile developers. The mobile revolution that has slowly been going on for several years and has finally landed on solid ground. I don’t see anything incredibly revolutionary about the iPhone – all of the features and functions can be found in today’s smartphones (except for perhaps the accelerometer magic). But the iPhone is gorgeous, the design is brilliant, and the marketing campaign is genius. The hype is going to introduce moms/pops and kids and everyone in between to the power and capabilities of mobile devices. And that is the significance to us mobile geeks.
During the first few weeks after the iPhone gets in peoples’ hands, Apple/AT&T will sell a shit ton of these puppies. I also know that we will hear a bunch of the bad stuff right away (this always happens and is the nature of humanity – as flawed entities, we like to identify and focus on the flaws of other entities). People will bitch about the glass screen and scratches as it is jammed against the car keys, the lock in with AT&T, the slow network, big fingers on touch screen, the pains when trying to view one’s favorite Web 2.0 sites, the need for two hands, and on and on. But all that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the bar has been set high for mobile devices from this point forward. The expectations and perception of what mobile devices can do will spread outside our little geek circles. Device manufacturers will need to innovate, networks will need to get faster, walled gardens will be forced to crumble, and mobile software will need to get better. Prosumers will demand this and deserve this! It’s game on… again!
Oh, as far as the success of the iPhone goes, we will have to wait and see. The real proof in the pudding will come after the diehards get their devices and whether or not they will recommend them to their friends and family. We shall see. Am I going to get an iPhone? Not right away, I’m gonna hold out a bit.
June 27th, 2007
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