Another step further into the cloud - expanding use of Google Voice

I received a letter in the mail earlier this week indicating that the AT&T mobile numbers and account numbers for all IBM employees (myself included) had been inadvertently published to the Internet. Lovely! One of AT&T's remedies was to offer a free phone # change to anyone affected.  I thought to myself, time to make some lemonade from their data breach lemons.

I took this as an opportunity to make my break to fully using Google voice. I already had GV forwarding to my mobile phone and have been using it as the voicemail service in lieu of AT&T voicemail, but lots of folks call or text me directly on my phone. The new mobile # is a clean start. I now give out just my Google voice number, which supports voice and text and selective forwarding (to my mobile, Vonage business line, or whatever). 

The google voice app works nicely on my iPhone and iPad and I'm trying out the free VoiceMac app on my Macbook pro. Loving that voice and text are now everywhere. 

Morning

I love this time, early in the morning before the rest of the household wakes. The morning air is crisp. It's light out, but the crickets are still chirping. As the aroma of brewing coffee spills out from the kitchen to the dining room, I plop down in a comfy chair and face the choice -- kindle reader for some escapist fiction or tech news and social networking. As the coffee finishes brewing with a gurgle and splatter, i grab my cup from the Keurig and settle down into the joy of quiet calm.

School Supplies

I went out yesterday to do the annual shopping for school supplies. Interestingly, this year's list seemed lest daunting than previous years.  What didn't change was the chaos of the school supply aisles at the local megamart. It was complete madness. Parents scrambling everywhere, employees restocking the quickly emptying shelves as quickly as they could. As usual, they couldn't keep up with certain key items -- most notably on my list, dry erase markers. I went to multiple stores and none of them had them in stock.

Then it struck me. Why the !@#$% am I buying dry erase markers? "Feck that!", I said to myself (or perhaps out loud, judging by the startled reactions of other parents in the school supply aisle). And hand sanitizer and kleenex and ziploc bags? And copy paper?!? Feck those, too!

This year, I'm sending my kids to school with the actual school supplies. After paying textbook fees, tech fees, bus fees, and even $50 for a bloody parking pass at the high school, I'm pretty well fed up. I believe we need to fund our schools appropriately and they need to operate within a reasonable budget. Foisting the cost of office supplies off on parents simply sweeps that problem under the rug instead of dealing with it. 

So I'm making my stand. It's stupid and petty, but this is my stand. I appreciate that the schools have a budget crisis, but they need to get their hands out of my wallet and deal with it!!

Kindle Cloud Reader

I'm a fan of eBooks. While I have a couple overflowing bookshelves, most of those tomes are older, as all of my book purchases have been electronic for several years now. The turning point was around March 2009, when Amazon released their Kindle app for iPhone. While not the most compelling form factor, the portability afforded by the iPhone app was irresistable. When the original iPad came out and Amazon published their Kindle app for it, I was completely sold. iBooks? Nook? Nah ... I'm all in with Amazon for my library.

My wife and I share an Amazon account. This has the interesting side effect of allowing us to not only share books, but share bookmarks as well (since they're attached to the book and synced across devices).

I find reading books on my iPad2 to be a compelling experience. The Kindle app just gets out of the way. No flashy animations, no UI elements ... just my book.

Amazon recently released their "Cloud Reader" (http://read.amazon.com). This is clearly a response (at least in part) to Apple's policies that disallow linking to the Kindle store to buy books (which I find to be a little bit of an inconvenience, but certainly not a deal-breaker). I say disallowing because Apple's requirement of a 30% cut isn't remotely feasible in the current eBook business model.

I decided to check out Amazon's cloud reader on the iPad and was surprised to find it to be quite comparable to the iPad app.

Here's the reading experience on the iPad app (left) versus the cloud reading app in a browser (right).

 If you could hide the browser toolbar, you'd swear you were in the local app. Gesture to swipe between pages (though not quite as smoothly as the app), change fonts, set bookmarks, and more.

Browsing your library is nice and clean, even enabling you to cache your books locally for offline reading. 

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the Kindle app go away on the iPad in favor of their cloud reader. An interesting link back to Apple's original vision of web apps on iOS.

I think Amazon has the right vision for consumption of their eBooks. I continue to be an Amazon eBook fan. 

Education for 50p

A lovely e-mail hit my inbox today confirming new school fees for this year. Let me just note that when education budgets get slashed, rather than cut costs, they now foist the burden onto parents. We have textbook fees, bus fees, tech fees, athletics fees, and absurd school supply lists that include paper towels, tissues, ziploc bags, dry erase markers and more. I even had a fellow parent tell me their required supplies list included "large bag of skittles" for each student.

Are our schools now being run by RyanAir?

There's no such feckin' thing as an education for 50p. 

Budget cuts result in textbook/material/supply fee for students
As a result of a $25.5 million budget shortfall for 2011-2012, the Adams 12 Five Star School District has instituted a Textbook/Material/Supply Fee that will be assessed to all students. 
The determination to assess a fee came after a comprehensive effort to collect feedback from our community last spring with regard to the budget reductions and challenges we faced as a district. After numerous surveys, and conversations with our community and staff, the board of education approved the fee assessment of $30 for all high school students and $45 for elementary and middle school students. 
State law, C.R.S. 22-32-109(1), -110(o), -117(2)(6), allows for such a fee. It states school districts can charge fees for textbooks and supplies. In addition, Colorado law requires the district to exempt this fee for students who receive free or reduced lunch benefits pursuant to C.R.S. 22-32-109(1)(u). 
This fee is non-refundable. Payment can be made at individual school sites for all school and district fees. Cash, check or credit cards are accepted, and if necessary, individuals may set up a payment plan with the school to avoid financial hardship.
If you would like to learn more about the budget cut process that took place last spring, please visit www.adams12.org/budget_cuts/plan. 
Thank you for your continued support of the students and staff of Adams 12 Five Star Schools.

Keurig My K-cups

I've been enjoying my new Keurig Platinum coffee maker. I've worked my way through most of the included sample pack of K-cups and found a couple favorites. Gloria Jean's Butter Toffee with a splash of Coffeemate Italian Sweet Creme (not too much or it becomes overly sweet) and Coffee House Chocolate Glazed Donut top my list. The rest of the family appears to be addicted to Chai Latte.

Today I decided to try the My K-Cup accessory that provides a filter basket to brew your own ground coffee. I used Starbucks tribute blend, ground coarsely for French press. I found the resulting brew to be drinkable, but not stellar. Having used this brew in both a drip system and my french press previously, I found it to be about halfway between the two. It seemed a bit watery with only a light aroma. This contrasts with K-cups that fill the kitchen with delightful coffee aroma, the wafting of which draws the rest of the family and results in rapid consumption of K-cups. On the plus side, there were no grounds in the cup as is often the case with French press.

My take on this is that the My K-cup accessory can produce a reasonable brew with your own beans in a pinch. It's certainly better than a drip coffee maker and the single cup portion is handy. However, if you're a serious coffee lover with a French press, I recommend using that for your beans. As for me, I have found some great K-cup varieties that surpass what I'm getting from my French press and will use the Keurig for most of my coffee. I'll pull out the french press when I want something not available in K-cups.

Google+

Here is why I'm excited about Google+:

Google believes that with Circles it has solved the tough sharing problem that Facebook has inexplicably failed to crack. “With Facebook I have 500 friends — my mom’s my friend, my boss is my friend,” says Shimrit Ben-Yair, the product manager in charge of the social graph. “So when I share on Facebook, I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare, because it’s public. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.”

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/all/1

My concern is that they're opening it up in a limited fashion. The interwebs are all a-twitter (pun intended) with news of Project Emerald Sea (Google+). That buzz will be wasted if the service isn't widely available to leverage network effect. A gradual roll-out ala Orkut or Google Wave will kill it.

You've really got something killer here, Google. You're addressing a pain that Facebook should have solved by now! Ramp it up and take 'em on.

Denver Auto Show

I attended the Denver Auto Show yesterday. Apart from the "ooh, shiny new cars" reaction I generally have to the auto show, I have some observations.

I noticed that several auto makers were featuring hybrid options. I generally found that these hybrids differed little from their gas-only counterparts. There seems to be an overall trend of making hybrid technology just another drivetrain option rather than a unique model. So more like Ford's hybrid strategy (it is difficult to distinguish a Hybrid Escape from it's gas-only counterpart) rather than Toyota's Prius strategy (which I personally favor, but probably doesn't accomplish the goal of driving mass market adoption of electric tech). Notable exceptions were the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt.

It was interesting to note that Nissan had the Leaf out on the floor, available for everyone to sit in and explore. Nissan reps were friendly and knowledgeable. They invited questions. By contrast, the Chevy Volt was closed and on a rotating pedestal. Nobody was taking questions. It felt like they were saying "See, we actually made it. It's here. Now shut up." Alas, GM, you need to do more than make an electric car. You need to fundamentally transform your culture and how you approach the car business. You need to reinvent yourself, not just roll out a new model with a new power train under the same old business model. Go visit Nissan and Scion for some ideas.

I was surprised to find that Ferrari of Denver had a couple of their cars open. It was a bit thrilling to nestle into a Ferrari California and a Lotus Evora.

Jeep had a fun event going. They setup a trail course at the back of the show with obstacles that showed off articulation, ground clearance, suspension, and hill climb/descent. Particularly fun was the 18 foot hill with a 36 degree incline & decline. We took it with the Grand Cherokee Overland, which features variable ride height (a feature I have drooled over on the Range Rover) and hill descent mode. It was amazingly civilized, yet clearly had some great trail capabilities. Based on my Wrangler experience last year, I'm still not buying one. Our rep did note that they have a new Pentastar 3.8L V6 engine. Gee, why would they change that out? I believe Chrysler is another auto maker that needs a business and culture reset.

Most beautiful car at the show had to be the Aston Martin Rapide. The Lamborghinis in the booth next door were green with envy.

I sat in the Fiat 500. It gave felt like an Italian espresso machine (or perhaps a cheap knockoff of one, since the surfaces I expected to be metal were all plastic). I emerged from this tiny plastic-laden runabout exclaiming "Can I get a cappuccino here?!?" It felt really cheap and flimsy. I don't think this has a chance in the American market. Super compact buyers will more likely turn to the Mini Cooper or Scion's new offering. Smart was noticeably absent from the show. Or perhaps they'll go just a tad bigger and pick up the Honda Fit (my personal favorite), the newly-designed Ford Fiesta (which looked quite funky) or the Lexus CT hybrid (which I totally loved ... it felt like a luxury fit and had hybrid synergy drive to appeal to my green side. Unfortunately, it's $31k price tag struck me as unreasonable for this category when compared to a $17-19k Honda Fit sport).

Luxury car makers Infiniti, Audi, BMW and Mercedes appeared to have their standard offerings for the most part. I was really hoping to see the Range Rover Evoq, but it was missing from the show. The Range Rover Sport tickled my fancy, though.

Cadillac has some aggressive-looking designs and is very focused on performance. However, their interiors continue to disappoint. I think they've become too focused on performance in their desire to be the first choice for midlife crisis purchases and have forgotten their luxury car heritage.

Overall, I found the show to be enjoyable. There was certainly less flash and less schwag than I've seen in prior years, suggesting a much leaner industry. There was plenty of evolution, not much revolution (Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt notwithstanding).


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Apple and the Enterprise

I just stumbled across a podcast from Apple that features customer stories about how they are using iPhone and iPad in the Enterprise.  It is clear that iOS devices are being recognized as more than consumer gadgets.  I believe this is the tip of the spear in the "consumerization" of the Enterprise. While the companies in this podcast have embraced the iOS mobile platform, many others (like my employer) have attempted to resist. But these technologies are too pervasive, and their presence in corporate environments, even those where it is unsanctioned, is unmistakable. It would be far better for corporate IT to embrace emerging mobile platforms and drive responsible use than to ignore them. On the other side of the coin, it would behoove Apple to listen to their enterprise customers and build in the necessary safeguards to make their platform palatable for corporate security.  Personally, I'm hoping we will soon see the ability to divide corporate data from personal data within the device. If Apple is the first to bring that to market, it may slingshot them ahead of Android for business use.