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From here to VOIP
Here's a product I want: a cordless phone. No, not a cellular phone. Just a cordless phone. And yes, while there are tons of such phones on the market, the one I want is not available. Read on for my first draft of what it looks like.
An Oregon restaurant is replacing wait staff with wireless touch screen ordering devices. I've been thinking about this for some time now. Doesn't seem like all the pieces are in place yet. But what about this idea: very soon (in the next 2 years) you could just let people order through their (wifi, bluetooth, GRPS, CDMA, whatever...) mobile devices. You could even identify repeat customers this way. Walk into a restaurant and todays menu is immediately sent to your handheld. Check what you want and send it back. Plus, you could store user preferences on the restaurant server, like: "I always want my hamburger medium rare."
I guess this is one small piece of my larger feeling that digital identity will be tied to our mobile communications devices.
This is like a mini dream come true for me, at least as far as having fun watching corporate america goes: Jobs blasting Eisner in public.
"The truth is there has been little creative collaboration with Disney for years," Jobs said. "You can compare the creative quality (of Pixar films) with the creative quality of Disney's last three films and judge each company's creative ability yourselves."And:
"We feel sick about Disney doing sequels," Jobs said. "If you look at the quality of their sequels, such as 'Lion King 11/2' and (the Peter Pan sequel 'Return to Neverland'), it's pretty embarrassing."If you're not following the story, Steve Jobs is CEO of Apple and of Pixar (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, etc...) Pixar had a distribution deal with Disney which is now coming to a close, but the two sides were unable to reach an agreement on extending the partnership. So Pixar is going it's own way, apparently with some hard feelings on each side.
Although the real picture is probably a little more complex, from my perspective these two CEOs represent the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their visions for the future of digital media. Jobs wants the technology to empower people - as consumers, sure - but also as creators. Eisner would like to see general purpose computers outlawed so that all we could do is watch the crap his company produces (for example, he was a major supporter of the SSCA.) Both of these guys have *massive* egos, so the battle is fun to watch. To me the idea that someone can diss Eisner is just beautiful.
But it's even juicier than that. While these rumors have been around for a while, they have picked up a lot of steam lately. Could Jobs replace Eisner as the next CEO of disney? What would happen if a major global media company was run by someone who appears to favor the dissemination of technology?
Kind of makes me giddy...
Try to keep up please. 802.20 wireless: "FLASH-OFDM stands for Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Handoff Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing."
Slashdot article, Reiter's Wireless Data weblog.
Now you tell me! It turns out there is a setting in iTunes that causes the program to automatically fetch CD track information, rip the CD, and then eject it, every time you put a new CD in the drive. It's a small thing, but it would have made my life a little bit easier lately had I known this.
Wow. Credit card sized camera phone from NEC (available soon, but in China!) Really nice looking design I think.
The end of the laptop?
Home servers and smartphones will eventually replace notebook computers for most users.I basically agree with this trend. Certainly by early 2006 (this is my projection for when CPUs will be small enough to give smartphones the power they need.)
Cool hook for a travel blog service: easily create U.S. and world maps of all the places you have been. Here's my U.S. map, since my world map would look pretty barren (typical lame American!)
create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
Visited states in red, of course.
So I remember: retractable USB sync / charger cable for the Treo.
Digital music (industry?) blog co-operated by Om Malik and Rafat Ali.