Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Susan Crawford writes about the practice of leaving cards — the politeness of a another age where people presented a request for an appointment of some kind, and the expectation was a response, positive or negative. 

The calling card experience is a metaphor we have consciously imitated with iotum Talk-Now, but modified for modern times.  You can check the Talk-Now application from your BlackBerry handset, see whether the people you need to speak with are available, and make a request (if they’re not).  The other sees your request in an incoming queue (labelled “Waiting to talk to me”), and can make a choice to take the call now, or not.  The iotum Relevance Engine performs the function of the butler — it makes judgement calls about how to represent you to various individuals, based on the relationship you have with that person.

Online / offline RSS browsing has been a horrible compromise for a long time.  The tools were lousy, synchronization didn't work well, or they made stupid compromises like only downloading headers.

That's why Google Gears and Google Reader are so interesting.  Gears is a DLL that you can install in your browser that creates a persistent store for using web applications offline, and synchronizes that store with data on the 'net when the application comes back online.  Google Reader has implemented it with a simple button that says "Go Offline".  Press the button, and Gears does a quick synch with up to 2000 unread posts, and away you go.  Press it again later, when you're back online, and Gears will synch up with the Google Reader database marking the stories you read offline as "read".

Simple, and very effective.

Some pundits are pointing to this as yet another example of Google's assault on Microsoft's turf.  The argument is that you can now turn the Google office apps into online and offline apps and have the best of both worlds. Not so fast, say I.  Google's spreadsheets and word processors are a far cry from the sophistication of Office 2007.  It's going to take a lot more than simply making them useful on an airplane for Google to unseat Microsoft.

But for reading RSS feeds it looks like just what I've been looking for.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I've long been a fan of clamshell design mobile companions.  They start quickly, they're ultralight, and their batteries way outlast laptops.  Does anyone remember the NEC Mobilepro line?  How about the Sharp Mobilon Pro?  The Vadem Clio? Don't worry.  Nobody will hold it against you if you can't remember them… it's been nearly 10 years since these products were on the market, although you can still pick up a ready (if dwindling) supply of used ones on EBay.

They were all what we in the Windows CE group at the time dubbed HPCs, or Handheld PCs.  Running Windows CE, with solid state memory, they were designed as companions for a desktop.  And they were superb!  They were also abandoned like a hot rock by the industry when a runaway hit called Palm entered the market and showed everyone that a pocketable tablet with basic handwriting recognition (the PDA, as we call it today) was the wave of the future.

That's why there's more than a little irony in Palm's announcement of the Foleo today.  The Foleo is a 2.5 lb clamshell, with a five hour battery life, that does email and web, and is married to a Treo, as opposed to a PC.  In fact, it appears that the only connectivity option the Foleo has is a Treo. 

Without commenting on the Foleo specifically, because I haven't seen it yet, I'm a huge proponent of this class of device. But a breakthrough device?  The future of the company? As the old saying goes, "Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it".

For Palm's sake, let's hope that's not the case.

Raising funds?  Suzi Dingwall-Williams' candid list of reasons why she took meetings as a VC is a good, and potentially eye opening read.

Ken Camp asks Has Skype Lost Relevance?.  He's observed that fewer people are using Skype today than a few months ago.  True.  There are now so many options for quality cheap calls that Skype isn't as exciting as it was when it first hit the market a few years ago. 

It's been off my computer for several months now.  Around the ETel timeframe (March or so),  something in one of the releases began to interact badly with something else installed on my PC.  At boot time, CPU usage would peg at 100% for 10 minutes or more, and the culprit was Skype.  After spending a few hours cleaning up the PC, returning to previous versions of Skype, and not being able to determine the issue, it was time to say goodbye.

I had similar quality issues with Gizmo.  Today the only VoIP client I use on a regular basis is GoogleTalk.  For all other cheap calls… it's Jajah all the way.  With no PC in the way, there are no worries about DLL interactions and all of that other garbage.

For me personally, it's disappointing.  PC telephony has huge potential. However, if the companies bringing those products to market can't get quality under control, it will never happen for the mainstream.

Your mileage may vary.  Skype and Gizmo may function perfectly on your computer, in which case I am envious.