Global Nerdy

Yet another reminder, this time via Leander Kahney's Cult of Mac blog, that the iPod World is far bigger than what Apple itself produces. It's constantly growing thanks to partners like Nike.

Via a tech-buying guide that gave a way a bit too much in Men's Health, meet the still offifically unannounced Nike Amp+, a wristband that communicates with the Nike+iPod to allow you to control your precious iPod nano from your wrist via Bluetooth. Now you can keep it wrapped up safely and make on-the-go changes.

Nike's one of the few companies that can go toe-to-toe with Apple in the icon department, given their gift for marketing and design at the cutting edge of the athletic lifestyle. Just look at the fetish-worthy black-rubber contraption they've designed for your iPod-enhanced run.

Microsoft's Zune made it onto the Men's Health list, too, but that's not the point. The point is that almost three quarters of the cars on sale today in the US sport iPod integration. If you're driving an older model, the top names in the aftermarket will be glad to help out. Four airlines who combined to carry 178 million passengers around the world this year have also put iPod integration on their agenda for 2007. And these are just the largest of the over 3,000 accessories that make up iPod World's ecosystem; everything from jackets, to socks, to hats, to pants. I expect pre-wired, iPod-compatible luxury homes to come next.

If there's one thing Microsoft understands, it's the value of controlling the platform on which others build businesses. The iPod is just such a platform, and I doubt iPod vs Zune will play out quite the same way that Mac vs Windows did.

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Tags: iPod, Nike, ecosystem

Over at the blog of my role model Guy Kawasaki is an entertaining entry titled The Venture Capital Aptitude Test, or VCAT for short. Guy makes it quite clear that:

Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.

The test is really more of a mental exercise rather than those silly web tests whose results bloggers love to post (“Which Three's Company Landlord Are You?”). The gist of the article is that you shouldn't become a VC until after “you’ve had the shiitake kicked out of you.”

(Come to think of it, George and I know a couple of VCs that we'd love to kick the shiitake out of…)

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Perhaps it's a little more “Local Nerdy” than “Global Nerdy”, but perhaps you might find it interesting. I attended a Toronto Board of Trade “Technology Innovators Breakfast” session this morning, where I heard presentations by Alizabeth Calder of Brainhunter and Dan Fortin of IBM Canada on how to make Toronto a world-leading center for information and communications technologies. I took notes and posted them on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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Who knew that recommendation engines could be funny? This made me laugh out loud.

Go to the Philips Norelco BG2020 Men's Bodygroom page at Amazon.com and take a look at the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section:

Click the image to see a larger version.

(Thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for the link.)

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Busy Airport by 'superlocal'. Click the image to see the original on Flickr.

There are a couple of articles that those of us who travel often (I fly about once every 6 weeks, and I assume that George flies as often, if not more) might find interesting:

First: The Socket Seekers is a New York Times article that looks at the half of the airport computing equation that isn't wifi: electrical outlets. I was surprised to read that some airports are actually adding outlets to meet the demand of travellers with laptops, mobile phones, iPods and other devices that need charging; I was always under the impression that they went out of their way to discourage the use of their electrical outlets.

The article offers some advice that's already well-known to regular fliers that casual fliers might not know: when looking for power, think like the custodial staff. They've got to plug in their vacuum cleaners and floor polishers somewhere. To this, I also add: look for things that rely on wall current, such as vending machines and internet kiosks. I don't recommend unplugging those machines to juice your laptop, but sockets often come in sets of two, and one just might be available. I also travel with an extension cord that lets three people share an outlet and pack a spare PowerBook battery.

Also: Why Isn't Internet Access Free for Travellers? Frank Gruber asks the question on his blog, and the comments seem to be split between “I wish internet access was free in hotels and airports too” and “It's called capitalism, Frank.” I think 'net access works better as a free amenity to attract customers rather than as a profit center.

Okay, I'm tooting my own horn here, but a number of people have found it useful enough that I thought it was worthy of mention in this blog.

Duke of URL is a little application that I put together that spits out up to 100 available domain names based on a word or phrase that you provide. The Duke spits out .com domain names by default, but you can also have him give you .net, .org, .info and .biz domains if you prefer.

The Duke is written in PHP (PHP 5, but it's compatible with PHP 4) and makes use of Tucows' OpenSRS API for provisioning and managing domain names. I wrote it to showcase the NAME SUGGEST API call that was recently added to OpenSRS and to demonstrate one possible use. Over the next few weeks, I plan to post the code along with explanatory notes as well as upgrade the Duke to some other possible applications, including mash-ups.

As I mentioned earlier, the Duke generates domain names that are also available. I was under the impression that most of the word-combination domains were taken, but so far the Duke has always been able to provide 100 domain suggestions for every word or phrase I've tried. As usual, there's a lot of junk in the results, but there have also been gems that would have me reaching for my credit card if I were more of a domain speculator. (Maybe I should do that.)

Give it a try!

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It's always great when the author of one of the blogs you read daily writes back in the comments. In this case, it was Kathy Sierra, author of the excellent blog Creating Passionate Users, who responded to yesterday's article titled “Web 2.0” and the Great Grunge Hoax, which in turn was a response to her article, Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword.

I'd like to thank Kathy for taking the article (and especially my parody of the excellent graphs that are her stock in trade) in the spirit in which it was intended. It's always tricky using smart-assery in one's writing style while not becoming a techno-vulgarian. I'm also glad she noticed that I can disagree with her without “losing faith in humanity” like Dare Obasanjo did.

In her comment, Kathy writes:

But I disagree (obviously and strongly) with your comparison between the grunge hoax and my post. People have all sorts of notions about why Tim talks about Web 2.0… but the worst characterizations always seems to be from people who don't actually *know* Tim as a personal friend.

I wonder how many people would feel the same way if they knew and trusted Tim as a human being. That doesn't preclude some of his friends from saying to him, “d00d…the concept is sound, but teh whole version number thing was lame.”

I do understand Kathy's concerns about animosity towards Tim. The recent kerfuffle over the Web 2.0 service mark has been the source of friction between Tim and a number of geeks. There's the strange observation in Paul Graham's piece on Web 2.0:

Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. I saw him walk by and said to one of the O'Reilly people “that guy looks just like Tim.”

“Oh, that's Tim. He bought a suit.”

Coming from the DemoCamp brain trust, a bunch of nerds who are also snappy dressers often seen in blazers and dress shirts, Graham's aside about Tim's suits feels like a desperate grab in order to add to a list of his faults. “Look! He's well dressed! NOT…ONE…OF…US!”

I bear no ill will towards Tim. It's been a while since we “swung on the flippity flop”, but we do get along:

I met him at a Peer-to-Peer software meeting at Microsoft in early 2001, and he invited me to play accordion at the closing keynote of the first O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference, the con that eventually morphed into ETCon and then ETech.

Simply put: we cool, we cool.

My beef with “Web 2.0” is that on the buzzword-jargon spectrum, it falls closer to the buzzword side. As George wrote in his comment:

Web 2.0 is carries so much water for so many terms, it's basically meaningless. It's the opposite of what jargon should be. Perhaps it most closely resembles the stuff that crosses over from being jargon and turns into poorly-understood mainstream language that newly-minted MBAs use (think “risk management” or “value add”).

And that's the point I was trying to make: not that the term “Web 2.0” was a hoax being pulled on us by Tim and company, but that it's got a slight whiff of fakeness to it. Just as the made-up “harsh realm” found a real use, “Web 2.0” is promotional term that got clumsily repurposed into a technical one.