Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Qwisk is a new social browsing tool that launched yesterday at the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp.  Qwisk lets you quickly and easily share content with your social networks (Twitter and Facebook supported, plus the Qwisk network).  It inserts a messaging pane on the left side of your screen to give you access to your social networks as you browse, and adds a sharing toolbar at the top of the screen to allow you to share content as you browse.  To access content that others have shared, you simply click the individual messages in the messaging pane.  To share content, press the appropriate button in the toolbar.

One can also start an IM-like conversation about a particular page with another Qwisk user by simply dragging that person’s image from the left pane onto the page.

It’s a clever implementation, although others have tried similar projects before (anyone remember me.dium?).  The timing for a social sharing tool, however, is better than it has been previously as sites like Twitter and Facebook have rapidly become a constant firehose of links.  Moreover, every link shared via Qwisk is actually a link embedded into Qwisk, making each user who clicks into a Qwisk user.  Qwisk should propagate virally, and very very quickly.

In use Qwisk is reasonably unobtrusive, although it requires the user to remember to browser using the Qwisk URL bar rather than the standard browser bar.  With large widescreen monitors, the extra real estate Qwisk consumes isn’t an issue.  It might be irritating on a netbook.  It is, however, far too easy to leave the Qwisk environment – the simple act of clicking on a link forwarded via email brings up the browser without the Qwisk add-ins.  The Qwisk team needs to find a way to make their tool a permanent feature of my browsing environment, and not something I have to remember to browse to each time before beginning to browse.

Will people leave the tools they’ve become accustomed to for Qwisk?  That part is unclear.  Tweetdeck is a staple in my toolbox because of the other features – searches, filters, and so on – and not so much the fact that it makes it easy to share content.  Qwisk, while promising, has more work to do before it’s a replacement for me.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with the Yamaha SoundGadget PSG-01S – a Skype-certified speakerphone provided to me for evaluation. This pint-sized device provides business travellers with a high quality portable alternative to the conference phones that can be found in boardrooms everywhere.

The SoundGadget packs an array of four microphones and two speakers into a tiny rectangular pillar standing less than 5 inches tall.  The speakers support frequencies from 300 Hz to 20 KHz, making them an excellent alternative to the cheap units in most laptops, especially for casual music, video and podcast audio.  The microphones are arranged in a 360 degree array at the top of the unit, with internal echo cancellation and noise reduction firmware.  It’s intended to be used at a table for meetings, but it also worked incredibly well for me as I walked around my office.  The extra microphones apparently made a huge difference.

Windows 7 recognizes the SoundGadget as a simple USB microphone and speaker combo.  To the operating system, it’s little more than a USB headset.  However, with the addition of the convenient utility packaged with the SoundGadget, the row of buttons on the side of the device are now activated.  You can now answer and hang up calls with the touch of a button rather than searching the desktop for Skype.  That’s a nice usability improvement, albeit not completely necessary.

If this were just a speakerphone it would be a handy gadget.  However, recognizing that road warriors prefer to be economical about weight and baggage (see Jim Courtney’s comments about his recent experiences flying to Europe with the SoundGadget), Yamaha has added a couple of extra features to expand the SoundGadget’s appeal.

• When turned on its side, the SoundGadget converts from a mono speakerphone into a tiny set of stereo speakers.  In my use, it was a nice improvement over the speakers in my HP laptop.
• Coupled with the software utility included, the SoundGadget can also function as a high quality microphone for recording podcasts or even music. 

Until December 31, 2009 the SoundGadget is available at $199.90 at any Skype Store.  In fact, the price is my only reservation about this device. To ameliorate that, it’s being offered with a full money back guarantee during this promotional period.  If you don’t like it, just ship it back at their expense before January 31, 2010 for a full refund.

Last week rumours circulated (again) that Nokia might acquire Palm.  Palm shares rallied, but seem to have settled back down this week. The “deal”, after all, is a Wall Street wet dream, and not much more. 

It’s true that Nokia’s stock price is suffering and that Nokia’s share is slipping in the smart phone market. The mobile market is in transition, and Nokia was ill prepared. Nokia is fundamentally a hardware company trying to become a software company in a market which has lurched sharply toward software as the core differentiator.  Wedded to Symbian while top competitors Apple and Google have bet on *NIX on the handset, Nokia knows it has to make some changes.  The advantages of a modern OS architecture on the handset simply can’t be overstated.

And, in fact, Nokia is making changes.  The N900 is a mobile Linux device, running Nokia’s home grown Maemo OS.  The N900 has debuted to mixed reviews but Nokia isn’t asleep at the wheel.

And that’s why the billions required to buy Palm aren’t going to get spent.

Who might make a good dance partner for Palm? How about:

• Yahoo – Apple and Google have both demonstrated the value of an integrated user experience connecting web based media and storefront properties to the handset.  By all accounts, Palm’s WebOS is the best platform for creating mobile web experiences today.  What better marriage than Yahoo’s deep web experience and Palm’s sexy new mobile platform?
• RIM – BlackBerry OS is long in the tooth, and everyone knows it. The current king of the smartphone hill has a lot to lose, and the current crop of new competitors have better platforms to build their future businesses upon.  Meld RIM’s deep understanding of the enterprise to Palm’s mobile web platform, and market it through RIM’s well entrenched carrier relationships and you’d have a winner.
• In fact, RIM acquiring Palm might be so threatening to Microsoft that they’d conceivably enter the race just to make sure that RIM didn’t win the big prize.  The shift to web technologies on the handset and within the enterprise would threaten Microsoft’s core franchise.  However, given how poorly Microsoft has executed on mobile, a successful bid from Redmond would likely be the kiss of death for Palm. 

My bet’s on RIM, even though a Yahoo / Palm marriage has the potential to create one of the most exciting and dynamic companies in the mobile world today.  Palm needs a dance partner, but it’s not clear that Yahoo’s leadership has the stones to get the job done. The good news for Palm’s Rubenstein is that there are plenty of potential suitors in the market, if indeed the company is for sale.

My venerable BlackBerry Curve has just come out of contract with Rogers, so I’m in the market for a new BlackBerry and my pals at RIM tell me that the BlackBerry 9700 “Onyx” is the one to have.  Not only that, but here in Canada Telus and Bell have both just launched new HSPA+ networks that compete directly with Rogers.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s no way you could have missed the full page ads that Bell has been running in the papers.

Identical networks, identical phones… it seems like an ideal opportunity to compare service providers, no?

On the surface, it looks as if Bell and Telus are getting really aggressive.  Bell’s price for the 9700 is $229, Telus’ $249, and Rogers $299. Winner, Bell!

And what about the plans?

My experience on iPhone has shown me that I’m not a super heavy mobile data user, and I’ve got a 3G stick so I don’t need to tether to my laptop. I’m looking for a modest number of minutes that can be used throughout North America, and a data plan that will give me between 500M and 1G of usage in any month.

• For $40/month Rogers offers 450 local minutes.  1G of data is an additional $30, and North American long distance is $25, bringing the total to $95, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $65/month Telus offers 450 local minutes plus 1G of data.  Add a North American LD plan for another $35, and the total is $100, plus taxes, fees and so on.
• For $60/month, Bell offers 600 local minutes, plus 1G of data.  The North American LD plan adds another $30, and that brings the total to $90 per month, plus taxes, fees and the like.

Heavens!  Bell offers more for less money than Telus or Rogers.  Bell wins again!

Even taking into account the $35 activation fee that Telus and Rogers would charge me to switch, over the lifetime of the contract Telus is the most expensive at $3,884, and Bell the cheapest at $3,504.

Note that this doesn’t take into account the fact that Bell has given me an extra 150 minutes of usage per month as well.  Since I rarely exceed 450 minutes per month on this device (my primary phone is the iPhone) it’s unlikely I would need that insurance policy, but it’s certainly nice to have.

When you net it out, I could save $215 over 3 years by switching from Rogers to Bell.  That’s $5.97 per month. 

Is it enough?  For most people, probably not. I might switch this one phone away from Rogers just to see how good the Bell network is, but ordinarily even I wouldn’t consider the switch for $6 per month in savings.

I’m still waiting to see what happens when the real competition starts between these behemoths.

Infoworld’s product review format in the 1990’s was famous.  It consisted of a detailed and hard hitting qualitative review, accompanied by a grid rating the reviewed product on a number of different critieria.  Finally a weighted average of those criteria scores produced a single numeric score.  Many a company was made or ruined by that single number.

It’s back.

In Ultimate mobile deathmatch: iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Droid vs. Pre Infoworld ranks 6 smartphones on 7 criteria, and then weights the scores for personal use, small business use, and “regulated business” a.k.a. enterprise use.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, iPhone 3GS wins the top rating, and tied for second place are Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold.

BlackBerry bold smokes iPhone in Enterprise, while iPhone kills Bold for personal and small business use.  Weak points for iPhone?  Security, business connectivity, and voice capabilities.  Weak points for Bold?  The browser, app support, usability, and personal technologies (the media player and so on).  What would the world look like, though, if RIM fixed the browser and had more applications available?  It would be a neck and neck race.  Hence the reason RIM recently bought TorchMobile and launched the $150 million Blackberry Fund.  

Can RIM do it?  Or will Apple fix their Enterprise holes faster?  What do you think?