Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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Frequent flyers rejoice!  Seat Guru is here.  Pick the airline and the airplane, then seat guru will will let you know which are the good seats - which ones have the leg room, the best recline, the best view of the movie and so on.

Randy provides a link to Google Maps beta with satellite images.  It’s very cool.  You can see all kinds of things in the photos.  For instance, if you zoom in this link to my neighbourhood, you can compare all the neighbour’s swimming pools.  Ours is the kidney shaped one in the middle of the photo. Unfortunately, Google Maps isn’t all that accurate.  It places our house in the middle of the park.

I got a great new toy today — the mVox MV900 Bluetooth speaker phone.  This little fella uses either Bluetooth or USB to connect to either a PC or a Bluetooth enabled cell phone.  The sound quality is excellent.  In addition, it has voice command software built into it, which allows me to program spoken word speed dials, and access features on the cell phone by speaking to the speaker phone. It’s got a rechargeable battery good for up to 3 hours of talk time, it will recharge using the USB car adaptor that came with my Blackberry, and it even has a visor clip to stow it away safely up top. What a great little gadget!

I’ve just discovered Tom Evslin’s excellent blog Fractals of Change.  This article, Great New Product Ideas – DON’T Ask the Users What They Want!, should be required reading for all technology startups.  Too many product ideas are squashed by the marketing folks who say "But customers don’t want that…" (or the VCs saying "How do you know customers will want this?") when the customers are incapable of imagining what the possibilities of a technology are.   Some innovations really are show me technologies that defy description.