Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Here’s a fun story about my partner Howard, and his custom painted Blackberry.  The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram tells all.  The job was done by Roy’s Pontiac Buick Cadillac in Cornwall.  Check it out below (ignore all the top-secret iotum stuff on the board in the background… please!).

Photo by Jim Courtney

Om Malik is running a quick poll on who should be the next Microsoft Mandarin… Steve, Ray, Kevin, or…

Hey Om, what happened to Andy’s suggestion — Bill Clinton?

Head on over to GigaOm to place your bet (er… vote).

Don Dodge writes about a recent panel he participated in with Ajit Nazare of Kleiner Perkins.  Nazare outlined his 7 rules for startups:

KP’s 7 rules for start-ups

• Instant Value to customers – solve a problem or create value with the first use
• Viral adoption – Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
• Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
• Simple, intuitive user experience – no training required.
• Personalized user experience – customizable
• Easy configuration based on application or usage templates
• Context aware – adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices, etc.

I find the context awareness point very intriguing.  Wish that I’d been there to hear the panel.  Naturally, I believe that context awareness is a critical element of producing truly useful software, and true context awareness is difficult to achieve in all cases.  Take presence, for instance.  Most implementations require you to set a specific presence status.  Some can anticipate some kinds of presence (“oh… there’s been no typing for a while… you’re probably away from the PC”).  None can automatically set all presence settings based on context.  Perhaps that’s too much to ask, as well.  Who knows?