Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Jared Benson, writing on Idlemode, has given us the 10 essential attributes of mobile presence:

1. Presence should not be interruptive. Imagine how irritating it would be if your pocket vibrated every time one of your mobile buddies' status changed.

2. Users must set/maintain their own presence information. Or, more accurately, users have to have control.

3. Setting presence should be quick, simple, and easy. Amen.  Make it hard, and it won't get used.

4. Presence should accommodate for a contact’s different phones.  Communication is person to person, after all, not device to device. All presence systems need to observe this principle.

5. Presence should allow users to display different statuses to different groups. Preach it brother!

6. Mobile presence should include communication preference. Agreed, but it needs to be even simpler than the syntax that Jared proposes. 

7. Presence should include a universal visual/icon system for quick reference. Jared proposed green / red, and another colour for blocked / not available.  Yup.  At iotum we also use Yellow for busy, but interruptable.

8. Presence should allow connections to other mobile services.  Location based services, landlines, etc.  Absolutely. Remember the principle — communications is person to person, not device to device.

9. Presence information should be seen anywhere a contact is referenced in the mobile UI. We live in a Web 2.0 / Web services world.  Why stop at the mobile?  Integrate it everywhere — the mobile UI, the web, the desktop UI. 

10. Presence should be maintained by a non-carrier third party. Spot on.  Carrier to carrier federation models will be difficult to manage.  A third party is a much better solution.

Got a BlackBerry Jared?  You need to give iotum Talk-Now a whirl.  And welcome to the world of "New Presence".

Rick Segal has written an obvious post around a very easy to grok concept: VC's shouldn't steal entrepreneurs ideas.  Seems intuitive, right?  Let's see… VC steals entrepreneurs idea, word gets out, deal flow dries up. No more investments, no more investment fund….

Sometimes greed trumps common-sense.  Without naming names, there's at least one firm that I would never do business with, having seen exactly that behaviour. My advice? Do your homework.  Don't show all your cards on the first meeting.  Wait until the signs of a real engagement are there, before revealing too much information. 

Moshe Maeir and his Flat Planet Phone Company are on a roll.  First the Etel Launchpad, and now selected to present at TWS2007.  Mazel Tov!

Steve Lohr, writing in the Sunday NY Times, provides a counterpoint to Stowe Boyd's elegant defense of Continuous Partial Attention at Etel.  Slow Down, Multitaskers; and Don't Read This in Traffic… and who hasn't? According to Lohr's article, recent research suggests that it's wisest to cut out the cacophony.  The experts advise checking email only once an hour, for instance. 

Perhaps the most striking piece of the article for me was this:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

That's more than twice as long as previous reports. Sounds like serious ADD!

Of course, Stowe would argue that anything important will find it's way to you again, and again, and again… so go ahead… multitask, and don't worry about it. Myself, I shut down the emails and turn the phone off when I need to concentrate.

Blackberry Cool dropped into our offices in the middle of a snowstorm last month.  They were there for a quick tour, and a demo.  Well, the video is up, and it's awesome!

Thanks for coming by, guys.