One of the huge benefits of having moved to San Francisco last fall is that I get to attend all the neat things that are hosted here. This week was the Macworld Conference and Expo 2011 at Moscone West presented by IDG. While it seemed like a smaller vendor showing than I’ve seen or heard of in the past, there were still plenty of great things to see. OmniGroup had a huge booth where they hosted Q&A sessions and product session; HP, SMART, Fujitsu, Nuance, HyperJuice and others also had a big showing but Canon, Adobe and others were no shows. But, on the upside, Macworld (the magazine) had many of their editors and staff on stage at Macworld Live to host a few panels, including a great one on ‘Future of the Mac’ with John Gruber. I’ve posted the photos I took onto Flickr and added them to the event pool.

Tomorrow, the wireless arm of Verizon will announce at a press conference in New York City that they will begin a CDMA version of Apple’s iPhone 4. This will end forty-two months of exclusivity in the US the device has had with AT&T Mobility. It will mean that Verizon is able to stem customer defection to AT&T for those wanting iPhone, will increase ARPU and data adoption, and cost AT&T in subscriber growth and post-paid customer churn. But that’s not what makes this announcement interesting. iPhone is important for many reasons, but it unique insofar as it has revealed quite a bit about the carrier relationship with subscribers and handset makers that was never a point of focus when the market was filled with dime-a-dozen flip phones and clunky email devices.

It’s rumored that when Apple first set out to partner with a US mobile carrier for its first foray into making a phone, it went to Verizon Wireless. This partnership was, of course, not to be — but why? It’s a story of control. Both Apple and Verizon are notorious for their need for control. Verizon has never seen itself as one to be a dumb pipe or merely a service provider. Nearly every device that has been released for use on their network has been branded and customized through and through to offer an experience that puts its services from and center (e.g., VCAST media stores, branded LBS products, mobile web), often at the expense of ODM (original device manufacturer) provided functionality. Even basic messaging products were rebranded to fall in line with their TXT/PIX/FLIX unified branding strategy. Smartphones were no different, and even presently sold handsets have undergone the same treatment where devices include the Verizon suite of “value-added” products that lead back into its walled content garden. iPhone, in all its iterations with AT&T and across the globe, are not this way. Software update schedules and functionality are managed by Apple and the carrier interference ends at the network backend for things like Visual Voicemail.

But it’s unfair to place Verizon under such scrutiny for how they managed their phone lineup and the device software. AT&T is in many ways the same with their Media Mall/AppCenter and similarly branded services. Sprint and T-Mobile too. But on iPhone, this wasn’t the case. Even when AT&T brought some of their services like its cobranded TeleNav offering to iOS and Family Map, the devices weren’t permitted to be preloaded on the device, but rather had to be downloaded from the App Store.

The phone is pristine from the consumer perspective, as though it managed to make it out of the wild without any battle scars from the carriers. iPhone bears no carrier marking on it to mar the clean design, and the software is all Apple. And it is this that defines the experience that smartphone buyers allude to when they express interest in iPhone by brand rather than fully articulating what about it is better. It has been doubly vexing for competing carriers to fully counter the demands by subscribers for why it isn’t available on their network. That is, because Apple has marketed it in a way that is carrier independent. They promoted an experience that customer’s could expect but didn’t tie it to their launch partner. It’s a phone that happened to be on AT&T, but it wasn’t an AT&T iPhone. For most, they thought it was like an iPod in that sense. CDMA, GSM, EV-DO Rev. A and HSPA+ are not things the average consumer worries about, and they shouldn’t have to.

In that sense, iPhone was a revelation about how Americans bought phones and how they carrier model was subject to change. Before this device, customers didn’t take the time or ever need to know that the BlackBerry 8310 was an AT&T exclusive with GPS but the 8320 had WiFi on T-Mobile, and that Verizon had the 8330 which had an unlocked location radio. They just walked into their carrier’s retail location when their two year was up and saw a BlackBerry there and were satisfied. It was around the time of the iPhone debut that phone exclusivity because a big deal in the US. Verizon scrambled to find something that would appease customers; this ended up being the colossal dud known as the BlackBerry Storm and Storm2, both exclusives to them in the US. AT&T currently holds an exclusive on the BlackBerry Torch for the time being.

And then there’s Android. While this deserves an article in and of itself, it’s necessary to briefly touch upon it. After the failure of the BlackBerry Storm to satisfy customers wanting a touch screen device on Verizon, they bet the farm on Android, Google’s iOS competitor that had been first commercially released in the G1 on T-Mobile. In October of 2009, Verizon, Motorola and Google announced the Droid A855, the first successful Android based handset to fall into consumers’ pockets. It was fully featured at the time, had strong branding licensed from LucasFilm, and an healthy advertising budget. Droid from Verizon was truly the first device that was at least 70% as good as iPhone, and for most people that was enough. But the interesting data point from here relevant to the carrier discussion is how Droid for Verizon was introduced in marketed.

DROID. When you read that, you knew it meant Android but you thought Verizon. And that’s how the story gets interesting. On marketing material and ads, you see the device but you’re shown it as though it was a Verizon product. It’s not the Motorola A855 Droid. It’s Droid on Verizon (from Motorola). And it was smart, because the Droid branding was not for just one device, it was for an entire class of phone that evolved with a new model every three months. But Android as an OS and concept became popularized as Droid even if it wasn’t on Verizon. And better yet, it worked because if you were to poll a random sampling of the public, a significant percentage would tell you that Android is a Verizon product. It’s epitomized by the launch event for the original Droid device in which the corporate logos were arranged, from left to right: Verizon, Motorola, Google.

You can’t count on that happening this time around. iPhone is not a Verizon property, it’s an Apple device that will run on Verizon’s voice and 3G data network. It will not be an LTE-capable device. It will not carry a Verizon logo, a checkmark, or a red and black splash screen before boot. Verizon knows this, and it’s why they’ve spent so much to differentiate themselves through marketing to position themselves as the market leader in reliability and overall coverage because the differentiation will not be on the device level. Even when it was taking on AT&T and its most popular device, it never sought to convey that the iPhone was a bad product (save for the ill-fated iDont ad), it was that it was on a sub-par and over-saturated network. That will change tomorrow.

And things just got a whole lot more interesting for Android ODMs that were relying on people who won’t or can’t leave Verizon, who now can get the device they actually wanted.

Earlier today, the city of San Francisco held a ticker tape rally and a ceremony to hand over the key to the city to the Giants, the 2010 World Series Champions. I’ve uploaded a number of the photos I took at the event at the Civic Center and City Hall to Flickr; unfortunately they had the areas with the best views cordoned off for VIPs.

It was rather exciting for them to go all the way this year, having just moved to San Francisco in September. I had never been a Dodgers or Angels fan in Southern California and opted to support the Giants some long while ago. There’s that great feeling permeating the city, bandwagoners and all.

Keeping your data organized is hard. Keeping your data organized across many devices is harder.

Today, I’m going to show you how to keep your calendar, contacts and email in sync across devices using Google as the glue. As a bonus, I’ll even tell you how to have your files and notes everywhere too. Be advised that some of the puzzle pieces here are subscription based and cost money — things that work well usually do.

My data is stored across three applications on OS X: Mail, iCal and Address Book. They’re simple, fast and to the point. Email is painless to access across devices because of IMAP and its quick using IDLE, but calendar and contacts get tricky. Address Book is unique insofar as it has built-in support for Google syncing out of the box. It does, however, have a knack for forgetting to continue syncing after a while. iCal is the big one for most people and there are ways to rig syncing for free using CalDAV and tools like Calaboration. It quickly becomes a mess and is beyond most people; be sure you have backups of your data before trying.

With your Gmail or Google Apps email account, you’ve already got Google Calendar and Google Contacts. With these, you’ll be able to access contacts and calendar using any web browser, as well as push syncing on Android smartphones and iPhone.

Getting your data into Google’s cloud services is simple with the help of Spanning Sync. It installs on your Mac(s) as a preference pane that coordinates hourly syncs to Google of your iCal and Address Book data. Pricing is fair at $25/year or $65 for a lifetime subscription. Their pricing model is per Google account rather than per device which is a plus if you have more than one Mac.

Prior to starting your first sync with this, it’s always a good idea to backup your data. You can do this in both iCal and Address Book easily by going to File > Export > Archive in each program. Syncing can get messy and having backup takes a few seconds and saves hours of headaches.

Go ahead and start your first sync, it’ll take a while depending on how much data you have. Upon completion, explore iCal and Google Calendar and make sure events are linked to the correct calendars and that any recurring events are as they should be. For your contacts, compare the number of contacts in Google Contacts to the status bar’s count in Address Book. Everything matches up? Great. We’re half way done.

With respect to mobile devices, I have two to worry about: an iPhone 4 and a Droid Incredible (Android 2.2). Since we’re in the Google ecosystem now, the Android part of the equation is simple. Log into the Gmail or Google Apps account and enable syncing for all three categories (Calendar, Contacts and Mail). You’re data is set once you see the icon disappear in the notification bar.

Now onto iPhone. Most people are syncing their Gmail and Google Apps with iPhone incorrectly, perhaps because they don’t know there is a better way. Google has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft and uses this as a simple way to get comprehensive PIM syncing working on iOS as part of Google Sync. What you’ll need to do is set up a new mail account in iOS 4. Select “Microsoft Exchange” as the type, use your Gmail username or full Google Apps address as the username, leave the domain blank and use “m.google.com” as the server address and you’re set. Ignore any certificate warnings that pop up and ensure SSL is checked. Give it a few minutes and your data will be synced to iPhone as well. One benefit you’ll notice about this method for accessing Gmail, other than it now syncs your contacts and calendar too, is that mail is now delivered via push instantly. Nifty.

Here are some other steps you may or may not need to worry about. If you have multiple iCal/Google Calendar calendars, you’ll need to manually turn on syncing of these for iPhone as by default, only your initial Google Calendar gets access via Exchange ActiveSync. Go to m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, tap on “Calendars”, and add a checkmark to those you want on your device. You’d also want to disable syncing of your contacts and calendars when linked to iTunes since that will have been obviated by over-the-air syncing. Lastly, for Google Apps users, Google Sync needs to be enabled in order for this to work. You can do this by logging into your “Manage this domain” control panel, clicking on “Service settings” and then “Mobile”. Check the box next to “Enable Google Sync” and you’re set.

One more thing about iPhone and Google via Exchange. When you add new contacts to iPhone, be default it will save them to the phone only in its own address book. Go to “Settings”, “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, scroll down to “Default Account” and change it to your Exchange ActiveSync account.

That’s it. Your contacts and calendar and mail are all syncing over the air, accessible across your Macs, on the web, and on your mobile devices all the time. Changes on one reflect on the other and you don’t have to worry about plugging in your iPhone for anything other than adding music and updating podcasts.

I’ll cover text capture and file access later this week, but it’s easy: Simplenote for web and iPhone, Notational Velocity for Mac and Andronoter on Android. Don’t touch Evernote with a ten-foot clown pole.

What’s even more shocking is that it all works together flawlessly, links to an online service to share and compete with others and is completely reasonable in price. It may not be a personal jetpack or teleportation, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. With respect to Apple in this scenario, it’s a testament to the restraint to adopt and innovate new and existing technologies to make complex ideas into simple and compelling features for the end-user. It’s not about being first to market or designing a device that wins on a spec sheet alone; it’s about offering features that translate into practical usability.

And speaking of usable futuristic technology gone mainstream, how about that iPhone 4 FaceTime ad? Or Face/OffTime, if you will.

…and, “What is Newton?” circa 1994.

The company had many challenges ahead of it as BlackBerry hit the big time, securing not only the enterprise and SMB markets but also achieving success in the consumer space with the Curve and Pearl models, and Apple who released the iPhone in 2007 which spelled doom for last generation touch devices like the Treo.

In January 2009, Palm announced its answer to the competition and placed its future in the hands of its new webOS software. Early adopters and investors seemed impressed but unfortunately it failed. Palm was acquired by HP (HPQ) on April 28th, 2010. The failure is three fold: business and marketing, software, and lastly hardware. In this post, I’ll cover the business aspects of the situation.

Palm chose Sprint Nextel as their launch partner of the device in 2009. The exclusive launch partner. It made sense, somewhat. Sprint was still hemorrhaging customers because of its divided attention after the Nextel acquisition, lackluster customer service, and deficit of focus. Palm expected that it could divide marketing costs with Sprint, receive more prominent placement in stores and have the Palm Pre, the first webOS device, serve as the flagship device for Sprint’s rebranding campaign. Having announced the device five months before it would actually ship, the hype machine was in full force and many were hopeful for its resurgence. Palm was trading at $1.42 as of December 8th, 2008 on the NASDAQ and by the launch of the device, it was at $13.01 in early June.

The single carrier exclusivity strategy was ill-fated. It limited the audience of the Pre to just too few consumers. In the quarter leading up to the release of the device, Sprint reported that it had lost 1,250,000 postpaid customers, 531,000 from the Sprint CDMA side of the business. That meant that at launch time, Palm had an possible embedded sales base of just 25.3 million customers, because remember, even though Sprint had 49.3 million subscribers, only a little over half are on post-paid CDMA contracts. Sprint led the industry in the worst way possible with 2.25% postpaid subscriber churn. Sprint bet, and most likely made concessions for the exclusivity, to draw in and keep high-ARPU smartphone users who would want the Palm Pre.

Yet Palm, even riding the wave of pre-CES hype in 2009, didn’t have a magical and lust-worthy device like the iPhone which would lead to customers ditching their old wireless providers in droves. Apple didn’t have that problem; even though they were new to the phone business, they picked a huge carrier and had a built in audience that would pay an early termination fee just because Steve Jobs blinked in their general direction. Palm had no such luxury, and they blew it. It wasn’t until the following CES in January 2010 when Palm announced the device would land on its second US carrier, Verizon Wireless, which would prove to be too little too late as the momentum in the smartphone space had shifted to Android and BlackBerry for other carriers and to iPhone for AT&T.

Much of this analysis deals purely with the business aspects of the failure of a reinvented Palm, but a significant part of the dismal sales numbers had to do with the marketing of the launch device, the Pre. The ads were, to put it succinctly, creepy and perplexing.

This ad did little to show what the phone was capable of and instead gives us an alarmingly creepy woman that seems to be fond of prolonged pauses during her allegory about how jugglers can juggle many objects with ease. This wasn’t just one poorly focus-group tested ad, it was one in a series of about seven ads featuring the same themes. It took Palm until early March 2010 to produce a strong ad which displayed in an easy to internalize way just what the new operating system could do and its particular strengths like unobtrusive notifications and aggregation of personal information across cloud services.

And here’s the kicker, Palm had a case study in great and effective advertising for a phone from their chief competitor: Apple. If there is one thing that Apple had proven is that the can market anything and do it well. Their ads for the iPhone, for each successive iteration of the device, have shown exactly what it can do, how simple it is to operate, and who makes it. Even if you hate Apple, you couldn’t fault them for not communicating the what, why and how of their product.

As a quick aside: look at BlackBerry, another company which is struggling in the branding and advertising space. Back when it was chiefly a business brand, they didn’t have to do much advertising outside of print and online ads targeted at their core audience, IT managers, C-level executives and those who aspired to be them. Now, with their half-decade long foray into consumer devices achieving moderate success, they decided they needed to position themselves as a lifestyle brand. With the marketing tagline “BlackBerry: Love What You Do“, Research In Motion jumped the shark and almost made it to the moon. The 30-second spots featured break dancers, a punk band, and a poor cover of a beloved Beatles track as a means of selling an push email device that was still two generations behind Apple in terms of usable software.

Coming up next this week, how Palm failed with software and hardware and what the HP acquisition means.

This is the page I got as a result of typing in my ZIP code to get the weather report yesterday. It measures 1266 pixels wide and 678 pixels tall. That’s a total of 858,348 pixels with which they could have told me the weather. That, was  – I thought, a simple request. And apparently it isn’t. I don’t run Adblock, but apparently I should. I usually go to wunderground.com or weather.com, both of which are far more tolerable, but I thought I should make mention of this anyway.

There comes a point when a company, in this case – Accuweather, needs to ask themselves: what the fuck are you doing? Do you have that little respect for the people who use your site?

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

Well, you put the effort into sending me the book. Might as well read it. Wow, this Edward fellow sounds like a dreamboat.

Turning the page to page 54… Wait, what?

Page 179.

Page 293.

That just happened.

I believe in the magic illusion business, they call this misdirection. Try as you all might, but I don’t believe there will be a Secret Santa gift for this year that will be able to top this. It has everything. Mystery, suspense, brooding vampires, Star Trek, Adam Sandler, and a battle-scared iPhone. Dennis (coderascal), that was awesome. Higher-resolution images are available by clicking each photo or by going directly to the Flickr set.

Apologies in advance to my Secret Santa recipient. It doesn’t have one tenth of one percent the creativity that this did. And now it’s time to go watch Funny People.

Note: this post was erroneously generated by a new plugin, but this post has comments foreshadowing to the gift described in the next post, so it stays.

Luckily, this week – Apple decided to offer a matte “anti-glare” display option on the 15″ MacBook Pro. I purchased one Friday night from the Apple Store and am posting a few pictures here since it seems to be mildly elusive and CTO MacBook Pros from the website haven’t shipped yet. Thus far, I’m really enjoying it. Take a look below.

It looks very similar to the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. Wider bezel than the 17″.

You can find more pictures over on my Flickr photostream.

Example: Andy Baio was totally just ‘boinged, but it’s totally fine because BB is hip and so-not-corporate.

So – who wants a steampunk waffle-iron?

“Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter’s suggested friend list. They sure were not more popular than @leolaporte two weeks ago.” – Robert Scoble

Well, first. When you pull a ridiculous accusation out of your ass, I do believe that the burden of proof is on you. The issue here is that Robert Scoble has become increasingly more and more irrelevant as the whole free-money Web 2.0 “social networks as conversations” thing began to wane and he can’t handle that. For some inexpicable reason, there are a small few that actually do listen to him and we end up with gems like this.

Twitter has a feature called “Suggested Users” so people can find new interesting people to follow. It’s not really based on any true metric or algorithm as far as I can see and thus, it’s not a popularity contest in the way that Scoble would like things to be. Thus, he feels the need to accuse Michael Arrington of ‘bribing’ a Twitter founder to be on that list. Other people on the list are Veronica Belmont, Felicia Day, Kevin Rose and other assorted popular users. The problem here is that Scoble and others feel that every social network has to be open and trasparent so that “thought leaders” (and I mean that as a pejorative) can quantify their excellence through popularity and notoriety.

Robert Scoble is angry and whining because of the fact that he’s not on it. That’s all. He’s angry that nobody actually cares about what he has to say except desperate start-up owners looking for him to schill their product. Scoble has an always will be an attention grubing blogger who, much like Dave Winer, have completely lost sight of the revolutionary environment they were thought to be fostering in the early days of Web 2.0.

The quote link leads to a thread on FriendFeed which is an interesting read for the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

[image]

You’re welcome, federal government.

First, please note that the laptop in this (intentionally absurd) ad is a MacBook Pro. Second, one of the characters actuall says “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?” Really.

But that characterization may be unfair based on just one project. After all, they did release the Zune – a 30GB brown media player which stopped working for two full days when it was a leap year.

Click on for some choice samples of that Songsmith magic!

I won’t begin to claim that Apple reinvented the music industry or make any sweeping claims, but it must be acknowledged the impact that this company has had on the the creation and consumption of music. With iTunes + iPod, Apple introduced a new and simple way for the younger generation to experience their music. Physical media was obviated through the digital distribution channels that were created through the iTunes Store. As of the last reported quarter, Apple has sold over 170,000,000 digital music players worldwide. Other consumer electronics manufacturers attempted to break into the market for digital music like Rio, Creative and iRiver – yet Apple succeeded because of attention to ease of use and aesthetics. As of January 2009, nearly all tracks on the iTunes Store are free of DRM. OTA song downloads to mobile devices is now possible without a premium price.

Apple, on the both the professional and consumer level, has simplified the creation of music. Through applications like Logic Studio (acquired IP) and the in-house developed Garage Band, creating music from pre-recorded loops and real instruments is approachable to the masses. Through the iLife suite of applications, Apple did not position Garage Band as a niche product – by offering it for free on each and every OS X machine, it took the position that music is not an exclusive art. The latest edition offers interactive lessons from renowed artists to extend this metaphor to helping anyone take on an actual instrument. No other company has done anything of this magnitude (reference the next entry).

Context: Disillusioned David Archuleta fans as the winner of American Idol 7 was announced in May earlier this year. I think it was the screen-printed Archie-shirt that did him in.

SLYT video is behind the cut…

First, Matt Santos was a character on the West Wing played by Jimmy Smits. Santos was a Democratic senator from Texas who ascended to the presidency on the show. Writers on the West Wing noted that Santos’ character was based on upstart Illinois senator and President-elect Barack Obama.

Jimmy Smits has a recurring role as Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama Dexter. He plays a District Attorney who has become quite fond of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills those who kill others. Next, Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, stated in the final weeks of the election that “[Obama] pals around with terrorists”.

Therefore, “Matt Santos pals around with serial killers” is funny.

For the first time in a long while, I’m excited and hopeful for the future of this nation. Join me in fulfilling our civic duty.