I’m no web designer.  But I’m pretty picky about efficient design - and moreover, I just couldn’t accept our little blog here looking like dozens of others that used the same out-of-the-box Wordpress template.

Well, that was a slippery slope -  I chose a template as a starting point, and I ended up (spending way too much time) effectively rewriting most of it.

The Wordpress platform is very well-thought out (so much so, it’s also sometimes used for content management on non-blog sites).  the PHP scripting effectively shields one from having to deal directly with the back-end mySQL database, and there are a wealth of useful and well-written 3rd party plug-ins available -  but to get things looking like I wanted them to, I was going to be in for a bit of a learning curve, there was no way around it - not only with the PHP, but also with the CSS (the ancillary document that defines the layout and style of the web pages themselves).

While I think the PHP’s pretty transparent to anyone who’s had any experience at all with programming and/or scripting languages, making changes to the CSS was a particularly painful hit-or-miss process I had frankly little patience for – until, that is, I came across Firebug, a Firefox add-on for web developers.  The Firebug icon sits down in your Firefox tray and when needed, will (among other things) allow you to locate the relevant CSS code for any element on the web page, to make changes to the CSS, and to see the resulting change in real time.  Using Firebug is simple and intuitive, and I would recommend it to anyone with a need or interest in modifying website design and/or javascript – it’s an excellent tool (at least for identifying CSS elements and auditioning changes, which is all I used it for), and fun to use.

Just off a subway ride on the 6 line, from 38th street to Time Square.

While on the train and others prior, I notice again and again, people don’t seem any happier since jumping on the consumer gadget band wagon.

Although plugged into countless iPods, Kindles, and Zunes, typing into Blackberries, and watching videos on PSPs and iPhones, if New York subway riders are at all indicative of the larger mass - despite all our digital consumer innovation might - it just doesn’t seem to have made anyone genuinely more content compared to, let’s say, reading the newspaper or a hard cover book (as many might have in the past).

If that’s true, what user experience element is it that our consumer digital technology industry keeps ignoring?

Asking the experts might help.

Just back from this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Intel’s Director of User Experience, Genevieve Bell, gave a purposely simple but rather powerful talk about the art of truly matching our every day lives with the appropriate digital technology.

Amazing how different a role consumer digital innovation plays depending on where you go around the globe.

Back to the us - the New York subway. In all fairness the news these days must add to anyone’s level of discomfort. I concur.

From political battles and hurricanes, to mortgage woes and banks collapsing, OK, so maybe there’s good reason to stay somewhat bleak and subdued while hasting from one hectic place in Manhattan to another, never quite “catching up”.

Still, isn’t it exactly right here where the US consumer electronics market is making substantial money? In large cities like New York, rich with affluent first adopters and technology aficionados looking to buy into personal devices designed to make it all easier, more bearable, dare I say it - more fun!

Looks to me, mission yet to be accomplished.

Off I go, my Blackberry in hand, trying to catch the next train out.

Wow.  Wow in italics.  That’s how the NY Times’ Virginia Heffernan recently described the availability of vintage Warner’s/WB Network content on the recently launched thewb.com.  And we’re talking vintage: ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Felicity’, ‘Friends’, ‘MadTV’ – shows many years out of production.  Although a very limited amount of fresh programming is also promised, to the extent the site is primarily about exploiting Warner’s more stale content as fully as possible (and from a quick visit to the site, it sure looks that way), I would disagree with Ms. Heffernan.

Strangely, the article fails to even mention hulu.com, the NBC/Fox joint venture that predates thewb.com by about a year and a half now.  And not only was hulu first on the scene - it’s also more noteworthy for being a joint venture between two broadcast competitors, for offering a wide selection of current broadcast content, and for making several NBC shows available before their fall 2008 premieres.

Add to that the fact that Comedy Central has been making its current content (including ‘The Daily Show’) available online imediately the morning after airing for months now, and it becomes clear that theWB.com is not exactly wow-worthy – on the contrary, the exclusion of current broadcast content and the general age of what is available on the site indicates something of a hedged bet on the part of Warner’s.

In any event, hulu.com would have been the service to write about.

I imagine professionals in any field wince when they see their field covered incompletely or misleadingly in the general media, but Ms. Heffernan’s article misses a more major point: any Flash Player/browser-based video over IP solution (even those offering content from this century) will ultimately be limited by its dependence on the PC – because when it comes to content much longer than the 90-second long tail videos we all snack on from youtube, what’s commonly known as ‘watching TV’ is (and will continue to be) done in front of a coffee table, not a desk.  That’s not to say the paradigm shift to video over IP is not inevitable and already well underway - it is.  But what it’s first going to take is an innovative hardware solution to get that television onto the home network (either a dedicated set-top box or an Ethernet-enabled TV, DVR, or DVD player).  Only then will video over IP services (even the more viable ones such as hulu.com) have the opportunity to really change the game.

“Apple will announce Sirius/XM satellite radio support on September 9th”, I wrote back on September 5th.

OK, I was throwing the long ball there and it didn’t work out that way (at least not yet…)  - my bad.

Instead,  Apple’s much anticipated press event was somewhat less earth-shattering: new iPod Nanos and Touches with marginal improvements:

• New iPhone firmware.
• The introduction of HD television content on iTunes (the increased data transfer required for HD being Less of an issue given Apple’s non-streaming service).
• The return of NBC/Universal content to iStore (one prediction I did get right).

However, I remain convinced that since satellite radio is particularly well-suited to mobile users, an iPod/iPhone agreement (along the lines of Apple’s audio book partnership with Audible.com) remains an interesting possibility – and since Sirius/XM still needs a new way to grow quickly (new car sales are way down, the economy is affecting discretionary spending, and their stock price has been hammered), Apple would have substantial negotiating leverage.
“Yahoo mail search broken”, I wrote back on August 8th.

Well, another month has gone by and still is.

Add to that the continued lack of IMAP support and the queasy feeling one gets reading about Andreas losing 5 years’ worth of Yahoo email, and I’m finally off the Yahoo reservation, for good. It’s actually a bit baffling to me - both how cavalier they’ve been about their technical shortcomings and also how little adverse press coverage they’ve received - still, I wonder if the brand is in the slow process of becoming the next AOL or Radio Shack…


Anyway - speaking of IMAP, if you have a smartphone/PDA and a Gmail account, that’s the way to get your email (for more on why it’s superior to POP3, read this).  While Gmail and the iPhone play very nicely via IMAP, I’ve always wanted Google calendar sync as well, though – and I’ve recently found a very nice way to do that: nuevasync.com, a new service (still in beta) that can sync Google contacts and calendars to mobile devices without requiring any client-side software.  It does this by making the Google (and Plaxo) services available via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.  In other words, nuevasync acts as the conduit between these two corporate rivals (in fact, the nuevasync.com home page avoids explicitly mentioning ActiveSync, referring only to using “synchronization protocols that are already built in”).  This begs the question: how does Microsoft feel about all this?  Since Nuevasync also makes the Google/Plaxo services available to Windows Mobile devices, to the extent there’s demand for that, it would tend to help drive sales of the Windows Mobile platform - and anything that makes Exchange compatible with more mobile devices could also be a net positive  – but these benefits come at the expense of letting Gmail users (such as myself) avail themselves of a Microsoft protocol.  For free.  For now, though, Microsoft seems to have no problem with Nuevasync, but that could change…

The New York Times website (which already does just everything pretty well) has recently starting publishing lovely 360-degree panorama images of select occasions, such the recent opening Olympics ceremony in Beijing or John McCain’s nomination at the Republican Convention.

A quick look at the HTML source code confirms it’s all done in Adobe Flash, the same platform Google uses for their new Street View panoramas. While the ability to drag around in Flash (or Apple’s Quicktime) is nothing new, Google Street View and the Times panoramas are impressive for other reasons: in Google’s case it’s the sheer ambition and scope of the project, and in the case of the NY Times panoramas it’s the quality of the photography and of the real-time processing of the individual composite 2-D images to create such an impressive faux 3D whole: it’s particularly striking to pan down from the main spectacle to the more mundane shoes, cables, and strewn paper cups of the adjacent photographers (you can also pan straight up if you’d like, and the Flash object is smart enough to prevent you from coming back down full-circle along the other side, upside down).

The Times also adds audio from the event, which is also nice, and leads me to imagine how incredible it would be someday if one could interactively pan around inside a streaming video rather than a static image (I know, I’m never satisfied ). Of course, while that would amount to a true remote virtual presence, the bit stream required to pull that off would be far beyond what’s currently feasible given the CPU cycles available on the average home computer, let alone the typical user’s internet downstream bandwidth (currently barely good enough for non-panoramic video).

But kudos to the Times and Google for leveraging the Flash panorama functionality so impressively, even if the technology’s been around for a while. Maybe the takeaway here is that the technological tools alone aren’t enough to make a media experience truly compelling – maybe making really effective media still also involves good old-fashioned human elbow grease at some point (i.e. Google’s spectacular ambition or the Times’ high production values).

I’d like to think so.

Currently at the San Diego airport, on my way back from the annual start-up launchpad extravaganza Demo Fall 2008.

While listening for two days to what amounted to over 70 companies on stage - no matter whether US or overseas presenters - I was surprised to see how culturally homogenous the presentation style turned out to be.

Sure, Demo’s organizers (it seems mainly the omnipresent Chris Shipley) pre-determined the permissible presentation format.

But this doesn’t fully explain why the new software pitch of a French executive sound virtually indistinguishable from the one just delivered by his peers from the US, Italy, or India.

Clearly, everyone was free to market their innovation as they pleased. And they certainly did.

To that end, the vast majority of company presentations went something like this:

“The world of digital technology is facing a fundamental (fill-in-the-blank) problem”;
“Hello, I am the CEO of (fill-in-the-blank) company, and I can help”;
“This is how we solve the puzzle posed” (several details plus a live demo follow);
“Thank you, be sure to visit us at our booth”.

With that, overseas presentations were (luckily) surprisingly void of lengthy, Euro-style powerpoints or meticulous “every-detail-I-can-think-of” product descriptions we might expect from, let’s say, an Asian or European engineer.

But how did Demo manage to curb those cultural idiosyncrasies for the benefit of fairly digestible “plain English” start-up pitches, without so much of an attempt to structure things?

To be sure, Demo’s secret sauce is a 6-minutes-only, live on-stage presentation format. No tele-prompters, no reading off cards. Instead start-up representatives directly address a diverse audience of peers, investors, and media representatives to promote their individual wares.

Yet, despite these deliberate limitations, overseas presenters seemed amazingly “at home” and (well) prepared to equal their US counterparts on quick-and-plenty use of American-style rich adjectives and superlatives to get their points across.

As a result, the conference hall quickly filled with verbage insinuating nothing short of “bold vision”, “clear direction”, and that “unshakable sense of purpose” every start-up should have - only here at times delivered with the added sincerity of a Taiwanese, Italian, or French accent.

Begs the questions, are our overseas presenters merely mimicking their US counterparts or is there such a thing as an “American presentation style” that has become as sure an export hit as Apple, Coke, or Google?

Let’s face it, the art of marketing wasn’t invented in Zurich or Shanghai. And marketing starts and ends with words.

As it stands, Silicon Valley start-ups not only deliver tremendous innovation globally, but also the lingo that comes with it. That was new to me.

Are you like me - do you lay awake at night wondering what the big news from Apple will be when they host their much-anticipated press conference next Tuesday (Sept. 9)?

While predicting the future is a risky endeavor, I think I’ve got a hunch:

The FCC cleared Sirius to buy XM in an all-stock deal 2 months ago.  Since then, the stock has continued to tank, and tank in a major way (down a full 50% to $1.26 since the deal was announced in June - and this is a stock that was trading for almost $60 back in late 1999).

Meanwhile, new car sales (which were supposed to be the primary driver of satellite radio growth) are also way down.

So:

• Sirius/XM needs to find a new way to grow - and fast.  And bear in mind, the primary value-add for receiving radio via satellite is (and always has been) uninterrupted reception coverage for mobile users.
• Apple wouldn’t mind it if another compelling reason turned up for users to upgrade that iPod.  again.

…I think Apple announces a satellite radio-enabled iPod on Tuesday.

(Full disclosure: I own shares in neither company)

That’s it. Just like that. One morning you wake up to find most of your emails emptied, gone, vanished - never to be retrieved again.

Well, that just happened to me. But what happened really?

A happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer since February 2003 - a full five years of my personal emails dissolved into thin air this past week.

A moment of panic ensued. Then I started thinking.

The good news: I discovered that Yahoo! has a toll-free number to call (still relatively untypical for a .com), their customer service rep was exceedingly helpful and to-the-point, without schmoozie upselling attempts and just a minimum number of subservient “we-love-you-Mr.-Customer”.

And yes, I did get my follow-up call the same evening, just as promised.

The bad news: In a heartbeat Yahoo! (accidentally?) removed a full five years of my personal email communications with friends, family and many other folks I care about - only to confirm Yahoo! had forever deleted thousands of my digital messages off their server farms.

To me, that real question behind this unexpected personal data kill: In our hyper-social, interconnected world, what role does our email communication really represent within our personal sphere?

Certainly not as direct and personable as a one-on-one phone call, email is faster to-and-fro sender and recipient than, let’s say, a letter or a fax.

Conversely, email lags the speed of instant messaging and typically is slower than a briefly “spit-out” Twitter-style micro-blog post.

Of course email is searchable. In fact, Yahoo!’s recent free browser update improved my ability to turn scant bits of memory (… didn’t what’s-her-name’s email mention “engagement ads”?) into a series of (mostly relevant) hits.

Try that with past voice mails , letters or faxes received. It will not work.

But did I hold on to years of emails because I really needed to, or simply because I could? 

And what meaning do personal emails occupy in my daily life in terms of actual productivity gains?

Pushed by Google’s competitive Gmail launch, in May of last year, Yahoo! responded by offering “unlimited email storage” capabilities.

At one fell swoop, I was confronted with the pleasures of an all-you-can-eat email depository.

But just because competition got tough on Yahoo!, and storage cost had fallen dramatically, doesn’t really mean myself (or most anyone) actually needed the extra space and ensuing clutter.

Leaves my postmortem analysis with the legal aspect of my involuntary email vanishing act.

In short, a look inside Yahoo!’s service agreement failed to provide detail into the liability aspect of emails lost. (Do I actually have recourse here?).

But then again, it’s too late anyway.

What’s gone is gone, forever in the heavens of the Internet ether.

Beta-testing of the Windows version of Google’s new open-source browser Chrome starts at 2:00 EST this afternoon (Sept. 2nd).  They even wrote a comic book about it.  While I had been planning to go get that and play with it as soon as possible, on reflection maybe It Ain’t Broken…  I mean, I just upgraded to Firefox 3 last week – how compelling can a new browser be?

Supposedly Chrome is optimized for video, web apps, and security - and the java script engine is faster.  However, the Firefox 3 upgrade is already mostly about security - and since Google Chrome uses several unnamed Mozilla components (Firefox being open source too), how much new can there be in terms of security?  And in terms of performance, client-side browser processes such as AJAX and java script, etc. are *not* the bottleneck – it’s the internet connection.

So whether or not to be on the bleeding edge…  maybe not.  I expect a flood of internet reviews of Chrome starting in just a few hours, I’ll read those - what I’ll be looking for is whether Chrome features gmail/Google search/Google Apps optimizations – because I think Chrome is at least as much as improving the Google apps/cloud computing experience as it it is about faster/safer web browsing.

If Chrome turns out to be not only a browser but also a fatter client for a richer Google Apps experieince, now that could be very interesting.