thoughts to blog

My iPad

Wanted to post a quick review of my iPad. Snagged one from a highschool kid in West Texas for a steal of a price. $550 for an unopened, 32 GB Wifi model. These are hard to come by (nobody has had them in stock for months).

After playing with it for a week, my laptop use has gone down DRAMATICALLY as well as my iPhone use. I’m sure it’ll balance out more, given it’s a new device, but it has serious potential to help me forget about my laptop.

Pros:

• Amazing touch screen
• Vivid colors
• Fast processor
• Bluetooth Keyboard support
• Battery Life is killer

Cons:

• A touch heavy. It’s sitting at 1.5 lbs and requires a knee or table after a period of time.
• The icons on the screen are a little small and spaced out, lots of wasted empty space.
• No camera.

Wishlist:

• More games - great screen + 3D acceleration == capability
• More dashboards - this thing screens instant status check
• More apps in general
• Matte screen
• Camera
• A grip edge around the outside, instead of bevel all the way to the middle.

Favorite Startups at the Moment

I know I haven’t been posting lately… because I’ve been busy with work and such… You know the drill :)

So I thought I’d post a few of my favorite hot startups at the moment…

• indaba - Find People. Make Music.
• simplegeo - cloud based location infrastructure
• github - social distributed source control
• twilio - voice and SMS in the cloud
• crowdflower - crowd sourcing jobs/activities
• kickstarter - crowd sourced project funding
• eat.ly - a service to post and share food!
• foursquare - my beloved foursquare. location based check in service!
• tech wildcatters - startup incubator in Dallas
• flexvite - email based meeting helper
• dailybooth - daily picture stream!
• stickybits - physical augmentation using bar codes
• hunch - recommendation engine
• hot potato - social stream of content for events/happenings
• boxee - a media platform
• makerbot - a low cost 3d printer! let the revolution begin!
• etacts - it’s an analytics platform for your email. data pr0n!

Gadget Debates

The major debate right now is what to buy for a tablet, netbook, and e-reader…

Many people want portable devices but we’re not exactly clear on what features we really want in the device…

Do we want solely an e-reader?

Do we want to browse the web?

or sadly enough…

Do we want to “work” while we’re mobile?

The devices are all catering to those situations with different styles and sizes.

IPad, Nook, Kindle, eePC, the list goes on… Multi-touch, 4G, e-ink, HTML5, Android, epub, Jolicloud, etc. The buzzwords kill you.

My take on it right now is, is that these devices are all “Iteration 0” devices… Apple’s famous approach to device Caesarship is to put something out there and iterate every year. How many iPods and iPhones have you bought? That’s what I thought…

All of the technology out right now, in my opinion, is throw-away. Now, I know that they are all expensive and we really wouldn’t want to throw them away… but we all know the cliche of “it’s out of date yesterday”… With this, it’s even worse because these are pioneering devices… research devices meant to figure out if “this is what you want”…

The Kindle and Nook are betting on e-reading only… the iPad is betting on it’s multi-touch portable PC tabletism… Netbooks think you really want your laptop with you at all times…

It’ll be interesting to see how they’ve iterated in 2 years…

Multi-touch It

I was thinking about this today… while I was working with my normal setup (2 laptops and a large monitor in the middle).

I want my screens to be multi-touch, but not make that my priority.

Maybe my brain has been trained the last few years on my iPhone, but I swear to you today that I saw a dialog box come up with a big red X on it.

I instinctively reached up and pushed the OK button.

I love my mouse and keyboard, but wow did I really want that button to work. It almost frustrated me that I had to move my hand all the way back (after the reaction) to my keyboard/mouse to get rid of the dialog.

At any rate, boring post I know, but just thinking…

3D Printing with Makerbot

The latest gadget that I’ve been lusting over is the MakerBot…

This thing is bad-ass… When there’s all of this exciting stuff happening with large sets of data and crazy device interactions on the internet, there’s a home-grown movement to bring 3D printing and replication to the home front.

Enter the MakerBot. A realtively cheap ($750) DYI open source 3D printer. The Cupcake CNC is the platform in which cheap hardware, combined with hackable electronics and open source software, allow the average hacker to bring a 3D printer system to their home. Typically large scale, industrial 3D printers are $10,000 to $25,000… This is a fantastic start!

There are some limitations. They only extrude certain materials (plastic and frosting) and their build platform can only support 100mm x 100mm x 130mm, which is slightly smaller than a rubix cube. But it’s a start.

Beyond printing in 3D for fun and profit… are more exciting concepts. Distributed manufacturing comes to your home. The MakerBot needed a way to get more parts (which they print from the same machine) ready for another batch of machines. So what did they do? They asked the people who have already bought the machine if they would produce parts with monetary return on each part made.

Now THAT’S impressive. It’ll be exciting

Oh and btw, I have procured funding for a machine to be purchased in October, with a probably ship date in November… I’m not quite sure if I can really produce anything with it, but I have some time to start creating some models and ideas of what to print!