So I’ve been a little busy at work and the Q-man has been busy with work and school, so we’ve been ignoring the blog for a while.  I’m hoping that this will change in March but won’t be able to tell for sure, since I start teaching a new class at my gym.  Busy busy busy!

Before I got so busy I had a chance to chat with an awesome new company.  tXtBlocker sent us a press release during the CES leadup, and I found them interesting enough to arrange a call with their media relations guy.  I came away quite impressed with their potential.

tXtBlocker provides a service that prevents cell phones from being used under user-specified conditions.  I say service because it’s not software that is installed on the cell phone itself; rather, compatible cell phones are registered on tXtBlocker’s servers and associated with an account.  This allows the account holder to identify and set up rules around when that cell phone can be used for calls and texts.

As an example, consider the very simple rule “no texting while driving”.  By using the tXtBlocker service, the phone is automatically prevented from being used for texting when the service registers that the phone is travelling faster than a pre-set speed.  It is transparent to the user in the sense that the phone just doesn’t text when the condition is met.  At CES, the company was selling this as a service to parents of teens, who are among the most prolific of violators of this particular rule.  However, the flexibility of the service is useful to companies as well.  We discussed many use cases, including:

• preventing calls/texts from a user-defined radius (ie, a school, a church, etc).
• preventing calls/texts before or after a certain time (ie, during school)
• tracking the location of a phone
• preventing texting while driving
• theft deterrence and tracking

Emergency calls to 911 are always available, regardless of whether or not a rule is in effect.  And rules can be added/suspended via account access – they don’t need to have physical access to the phone for rules to be implemented.  So if your phone is stolen, you can log in, prevent it from being used for calls or texts, and track where the phone is.  How awesome is that?  If need be, the phone owner can request that the block be removed temporarily.

In my opinion, the true utility is for corporations.  How many companies give their employees cell phones or Blackberries and only have soft guidelines about using them in inappropriate situations?  I’m honestly not sure why an enterprising lawyer hasn’t sued a major corporation because an employee was texting or replying to email while driving.  Yes, there’s some employee responsibility here but in today’s job climate, it’s very believable that an employee feels the need to always be available and to take unreasonable risks if they think it will help them keep their job.  By activating corporate phones on tXtBlocker, every employee’s phone can be set to prevent use when the phone is traveling over 15mph.  Simple, transparent, and safe.  The theft deterrence and tracking capabilities are a close second in terms of corporate benefits as well – a nice big sticker on the back saying that the phone can be tracked and retrieved will go a long way to removing it as a potential hijack.

Right now, the service is primarily compatible with Blackberries, plus a few other phone models.  But tXtBlocker indicated that by the end of 2010, they expect that their service will be compatible with the vast majority of GPS-enabled phones.  The big exception, of course, is the iPhone because of its walled architecture.  And since Apple sells a competing service (at least in the retrieval area), I don’t know how willing Apple would be to let tXtBlocker gain sufficient access to the background OS processes to make their service work.  I figure we just need a few high profile cases where people cause accidents while typing on an iPhone to raise the visibility of the issue enough that Apple starts looking for a way to do this (or at least allow tXtBlocker to do it for them).

The service has an annual fee with discounts for each phone registered to an account.  I know the last thing people want is another fee in these economic times, but as a parent of a future teen driver, I know I will be seriously considering this service.  The cost is not all that high when you consider what it might be preventing.

Google recently announced that they will be experimenting by building a super fast fiber network. I wrote a post “Why Google Needs to Become an ISP” a few months ago stating that Google needs to become an ISP because their search can be simply defaulted to another search engine. It is a war between tech companies to see who can control the platform and end-to-end services. Apple has devices, software, and stores. Microsoft has operating systems, office products, and mobile OS. Google’s strategy is simply to diversify and unify as much as possible.

Never thought my words would actually be heard from Google. They must have found it through Search

Why is Google building a high speed network? It is because the faster the network, the more people will be online which means the more ads they can display. Furthermore, Google can charge a subscription for access that is competitive to other ISPs. Google can also lease its fast fiber network to other ISPs as well for further revenue.

Captured at 1/1 11:11

Happy New Year to everyone from the folks at GadgetMETER. GadgetMETER is now officially 1 year old and I am proud of what we’ve accomplished in that time.

One of my New Years resolution consists of simplifying my online and offline lifestyle.

• Get rid of junk in my house I haven’t used in years
• Eat less or no meat.
• Reduced the number of RSS subscriptions.
• Deactivated my Facebook account. (I’ll talk more about this later).
• Discovered http://mnmlist.com and http://minimalmac.com. These are two great websites if you feel you are too distracted with todays bombardment of information.
• Run a 10k
• Enrolled at UPenn for Graduate School.
• De clutter my MacBook desktop and menu bar

Now, if you are wondering how this screenshot is appropriate for this post. Well, I just happen to look at my iPhone at exactly 1/1 11:11pm so I quickly captured it. The background is a picture of Monica Belluci on my jail broken iPhone. Pretty cool huh? It must be a sign because I see it as a way to reset our tech lifestyle and look back at what’s really important: family, friend (true friends, not the persons you don’t know on your Facebook), health, and the environment. Today, we have way too many distractions in our life that really clouds our judgetment on what’s really important. Let’s take time to get rid of online and offline baggage and welcome the New Year!

So I propose this New Years Challenge for you.

• Go take a walk.
• Meet with a friend for coffee.
• Enough with Twitter already. It’s really just for celebrities!
• Delete contacts on Facebook you don’t ever engage with. Heck, deactivate your Facebook account like I did!
• Delete LinkedIn. Who really uses this anyway?
• Stop texting while having lunch or dinner with someone. Enjoy the moment.
• Volunteer at a community center or shelter.
• Donate to a charity: time, money, clothes, food. It can be anything.
• Read a long form book.
• Go camping or hiking.
• Call up a friend. No texting!

I read the New York Times recently published “Search, but You May Not Find” and find it to be one of the most biased and misguided articles from a supposedly reputable news source. The article discusses net neutrality which prohibits Internet service providers from discriminating or charging more for access to certain services or applications on the Web. The author, Adam Raff, uses the same net neutrality argument to support his claims for a “search neutrality” which you will see is a slippery slope argument

Adam explains that Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, are becoming gate keepers of information and that their results should be unbiased and ranked on relevance. There is truth to this. If Search Neutrality should be the case, we would essentially have a single search engine for all our needs because they would all share the same algorithm to rank sites and content. However, what search neutrality implies is that all the engines would have the same exact results which would be anti-competitive. A user is not forced to user Google or any other search engine. The openness of the Internet allows for anyone with the best service to succeed without prohibition. Isn’t that what Net Neutrality is all about? Google itself hardly ever advertise it’s service. Users flock to Google because it does provide the most simple and effective search results. By having different search engines with varied results and services, creates competition for all sides and ultimately benefiting the users.

Adam Raff does disclose that he works for Foundem – a search site to compare products. Raff alleges that his site’s Google search rankings disappeared and thus stunted his company’s growth. Writing an article against Google on the NY Times is also a sure way to bring exposure to your company doesn’t it? What Raff doesn’t explain is why his site disappeared from search results. Gaming the system by adding keywords hidden behind background colors can do this. Listing your site on link farms solely for the purpose of Search Engine Optimization can also put your site in the “bad neighborhood”. Raff does not explain how his site might have been black listed by Google or what he tried to do to remedy the situation.

Raff further claims that Google isn’t innovative as people expect but instead buy a lot of other companies such as YouTube and Applied Semantics (now AdSense). AdWords is developed by Google but licensed under its inventors Overture. My response to this is – so what? Is buying another company a moral crime? What does acquisitions have to do with search neutrality? My understanding of what Raff is trying to say is that Google can provide preferential treatment to search rankings for it’s affiliated services as somehow it is not beneficial to the user. Hey, Raff, remember, you can still use Bing or Yahoo if you want Search Neutrality as you claim. Why is Google singled out in your article? You didn’t mention Microsoft’s interest in providing Bing as the search engine for Yahoo. I take it because your site wasn’t black listed from them.

Raff has a lot of superfluous reasons for search neutrality. However, he can best support his argument by presenting a case where if a site is black listed from a search engine without justifiable cause, then there should be an explanation and process to fix this. However, Raff’s article seems more like a kid ranting he didn’t get picked to play basketball. Maybe Raff’s next article should be on Sports Neutrality where every player no matter what his skill set, gets to score.

Google Phone

The rumors of the upcoming Google Phone has been laid to rest. Here is a screenshot of the Google Phone running Android 2.1 operating system. It is a Google branded phone but built by HTC. It is expected to be available as unlocked GSM in early 2010 on both AT&T and T-Mobile. Google apparently had a lot of influence on how the phone should be designed and operate since it is essentially their brand.

This comes only a few months after Verizon’s successful launch of their iPhone competitor Droid which also runs Android but version 2.0. Seems like iPhone competitors are coming out before the release of the next generation iPhone 4G which will be a bloodbath.

Via TechCrunch

Google doodle featuring Popeye

• Google doodle depicts Popeye eating spinach
• 115th anniversary of E.C. Segar’s birthday

When I was 5 years old, I went through a phase where I was really into Popeye. I remember as a kid walking around acting tough (and even enjoying my spinach). An aunt still calls me by Popeye till this day. I even had a pipe through blew out bubbles!

When I opened up Chrome this morning, it went straight to the Google home page where I saw this latest doodle. It brought back a lot of childhood memories. Popeye was an inspiration to me where the little guy can beat the brute (his nemesis was Bluto) and still get the girl Olive Oyl. Whenever Popeye and Bluto fought, Popeye would lose at first until he finds a can of spinach in his back pocket or laying around some where. As soon as he eats it, his fore arms grew 3x its size. I always wondered why Bluto wouldn’t just eat the spinach as well. Heck, even Olive Oyl could use some calories.

Google Wave Invite

Google Wave is a hot topic now. It is Google’s ambitious project for next generation unified real-time communication and collaboration tool. I finally got my invite and can now invite up to 8 others. I’m giving them away so if anyone is interested contact me through the web form. It even works on the iPhone!

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.