Global Nerdy

From a Hooters news release:

(Atlanta, GA) While they surely don't need the help, the world's two richest men can now eat for free at Hooters restaurants. On Friday October 20, 2006 Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were presented with Hooters VIP Cards at a Hooters Restaurant in Kansas City, Kansas. The Cards entitle the gentlemen, who currently rank numbers 1 and 2 on the list of worlds richest, to free food at any of the chains 435 locations in 46 states and 20 countries exclusive of tip and alcohol.

The pair made a stop at the Hooters Restaurant along with members of the Board of Directors for Berkshire Hathaway. The visit came at the request of Buffet so the group could pose for a Christmas Card photo with the chain's beautiful Hooters girls. “It was an honor to have these powerful individuals dine in my store” said Jason Fetters General manager of the Hooters located at 1712 Village West Parkway, Kansas City, Kansas. “Clearly these guys can go anywhere they want to. The fact that they picked Hooters hopefully says something about the strength of our brand.”

I guess we can assume that from now on, all of Bill Gates' and Warren Buffet's reviews of Hooters on their blogs will have the taint (hah!) of bias.

(Yes, I did note that the Hooters site runs on old-school ASP…)

Today's PvP comic made me laugh:

Link

The iPhone (I didn't think they were going to call it that—my money was on iPod phone), by my estimation, lived up to the pre-show hype. Using an old salesman's tactic, Steve saved the price for the end: $500 for the 4GB iPhone, and $600 for the 8GB model. At the low end, Apple's giving their smartphone competitors a $100 advantage. Will customers go the extra c-note for Apple?

It helps to dig into the way Apple's positioning the iPhone. I rather like the way Jobs described it as really three devices in one: an iPod, a phone, and an internet client.

As an iPod, the iPhone:

• has as much storage as an iPod nano
• plays video like a 5G iPod
• has a high-resolution 3.5 inch widescreen display
• syncs through iTunes

As a phone:

• is a quad-band GSM world phone with EDGE for data
• incorporates a 2 megapixel camera
• uh…makes calls, manages voicemail, and supports SMS
• synchronizes contacts from your desktop computer

And, as an internet device:

• it runs a real operating system, Mac OS X
• sports a real browser (Safari)
• has an HTML-rendering email client that supports most POP and IMAP mail services
• has custom-built support for Google Search and Maps
• can run Dashboard widgets
• can connect over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

So what we're really looking at is a single device that, taken as any one of it's three stand-alone components, does something new (it's the first widescreen iPod, it's a significant new mobile network computing device), or does something particularly well (thanks to the Mac OS X underpinnings and the touchscreen interface, it's a very, very slick phone). And the way the iPhone works is where Apple starts to really pull away from the competition.

Doubtless we'll hear Palm and Microsoft, for example, counter Apple's hype by pointing out their devices can claim similar, if not even more impressive feature lists. Take the Treo 750, which runs Windows Mobile, but already retails through Cingular for $100 less than the lower-end iPhone will. You'd have to call Windows Mobile a real OS, Microsoft has Windows Mobile Office viewer applications already developed, and the 750 already supports 3G, which gives it a significant speed edge (where you can find coverage, that is). Again, though, even if Apple and Microsoft are close on the "what," Apple blows them away on the "how." Apple's iPhone is to Windows Mobile as Mac OS X is to Windows XP; Microsoft needs the equivalent of Windows Mobile Vista to even catch up to the iPhone's (clearly obvious) ease of use.

And let's not even get started on pitting Apple's industrial design against Palm's.

The question, again, is whether buyers will see the extra $100 they have to pay (while not getting 3G in the deal, and other little quibbles) as a bargain, given not just what the iPhone does, but how it goes about doing it. Personally, T-Mobile can expect this subscriber to be cancelling his contract in the second half of this year. Judging by the reaction in the markets, investors are betting that I won't be the only one, either.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, MacWorld Expo, iPod, Treo, Palm, Microsoft, Windows Mobile, GSM, G3, EDGE, Mac OS X

Part of me is cooly professional about the whole thing, the rest of me is giddy as a schoolgirl. Apple's Steve Jobs will counterpoint the hoopla from CES with his keynote at MacWorld Expo. Steve won't take the stage for several hours, but the Wall Street Journal has already started the drip, drip, drip of news:

The anticipation for this year's Macworld — the main trade show for Apple products — has been unusually strong, stoked by a widening array of bloggers who constantly churn out Apple rumors.

For one thing, people familiar with the matter say Apple is working on a device that combines the iPod with a cellphone, which is expected to be announced as early as today. Cingular Wireless, owned by AT&T Inc., will provide cellphone service to go with the phone, these people say. Such a product would give Apple access to the huge wireless business, with nearly a billion handsets shipped every year. That dwarfs the nearly 70 million iPods Apple has sold over the past five years.

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling declined to comment on what he called "rumor and speculation" when asked about a Cingular-Apple deal.

The language is loaded with careful hedges, to be sure, but the Journal's decision to run with the story puts some weight behind what, until now, had been speculation.

Also of note, the roster of studios putting their movie titles on the iTunes Store stands to grow one name longer, with Viacom joining Disney:

n a deal that Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs could announce as early as Tuesday at his Macworld conference, Apple plans to start selling Paramount titles on its iTunes service, according to people familiar with the situation.

For the moment, the deal will only cover Paramount's back catalog, the people said. Paramount's catalog includes titles such as "Forrest Gump," "Mission: Impossible" and "The Truman Show."

Until the studio can allay fears among their retail partners that new DVD releases won't suffer from a digital sales channel, Paramount will stick to their back catalog.

Tags: Apple, MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs, keynote, iPod phone, iTunes Store, movies, Viacom

I thought I'd add my perspective on Daylife's recent move from private alpha to public beta.

Daylife's a much-anticipated project, given its star-filled investor roster and its discreet-bordering-on-secretive launch early stages, so it was bound to get a throrough once-over when it de-cloaked, but after Mike "Techcrunch" Arrington deemed himself "underwhelmed" well, that raised the stakes a little.

It seems like a lot of the negative reviews stem from what I think is a misunderstanding of what people are really seeing when they look at Daylife. It's more than a simple news aggregator (like Google News, TechMeme, or Megite), and it's definitely not a news community (like Digg or Netscape.com), nor a hybrid (like Newsvine). Sure, on the surface it looks like some of those services, probably because the initial functionality you see is a very slick, capable news magazine that pulls stories from a number of online sources, but a few clicks will show you that Daylife goes much deeper.

Like Google News or TechMeme, Daylife clusters stories around a single event, giving you multiple perspectives on a topic. Where Daylife distinguishes itself is in pulling other relevant elements out of those same stories, and letting you drill-in or pivot on them. For example, say the G8 leaders meet in Paris to discuss debt relief for Africa, and Bono drops by to give them a little talk. Both Google News and Daylife will collect stories on this international event from across the web, but Daylife will also link you to news about the people involved (President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, or Bono, to name a few), the places featured (Paris, Africa, Europe, etc), and the organizations (the G8, IMF, or World Bank, let's say). Click on any of those links, and not only do you get the G8 summit angle on those people, places, and organizations, you also get to see any other recent news related to them.

All of these neat features highlight the really important thing about Daylife: they're building a database of news that tries to understand and map out the connections between the people, places, and organizations that get mentioned within the stories (and who knows what other news elements they're busily wiring together under the hood), and making that platform available for others to use. Daylife The Application—the thing you see when you dial the Daylife URL into your browser—is just one reference application built atop Daylife The Platform.

So, if there's no comments, voting, or RSS (for now), I'm not particularly concerned. As someone who's been using Daylife for a few months now, I think it's a great application, well-presented. As an eager reader of the news, I'm excited to see all the information news sources create mined and processed to tease out the connections we all know to be there (and those connections, in turn, made available for others to do with as they see fit). As a friend of the company, I wish them luck.

Tags: Daylife, Arrington, news

I take back every nice thing I said about Windows Home Server in my post below. Every last word. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that this irritating jerk would be the best way to overcome the difficulty of selling the idea of servers into the home:

One visit to this site and I've gone from thinking that Microsoft was well-intentioned, but confused, to believing they're blinkered, arrogant, and tone-deaf. Is this Dr Blowhard Moron, MD, character meant to represent how Microsoft helps me, or does this cross-dressing, plushie-fondling granny represent me, the hapless home user? This guy is an idiot.

They're insane.

And, yes, I know Microsoft's been running this "viral" site for a few weeks now (at least), but I hadn't bothered taking a look until today.

Tags: Microsoft, marketing, Windows Home Server, irritating jerk, WTF?

The one-two punch of CES and MacWorld Expo is a real balm to my soul. Even an optimistic fellow like yours truly can't help but feel a letdown after the holiday season—stores take the displays out of their windows, the glittering lights are shut off, and discarded trees line the street. But this new year's orgy of media plays and gizmos keeps the embers of out-of-control consumerism burning just that much longer for me.

Of course, it's also fascinating to see how the technology + media battle for the living room has really broken into two parts: the Mac World, and Everybody Else (Nominally Led By Microsoft). As is customary, Bill gets to address his troops first in Las Vegas.

I noticed, as others did, that Bill's speech seemed to be more grounded in reality than it has in the past—he talked more about what Microsoft could do today (or at least within the next few months) than Microsoft's vision for a distant, connected future. Given that the company has a whole lot of Vista to sell in the next 12 months (not to mention an inventory of Zunes lying around), that makes sense. What's frightening is the form in which that Microsoft vision takes shape.

Let's start with the idea of Windows Home Server. Now, I don't debate for a second the need for some way to hub all of the devices and data that are going to power the digital living room, but who, in god's name, thought a discrete "home server" component was the best way to address that issue? It's consumer electronics only a sysadmin would love! I don't see a real groundswell of desire out there among the masses for a wholesale replication of the enterprise data center experience in the home, but that's exactly what this name implies.

What's worse, there's good thinking buried in this box: the reference designs showed by HP, AMD, and others are small, and the version of Vista running underneath the thing is low-touch. It can back up any computer connected to your home network (including boxes running Mac OS X and Linux), and it'll let you remotely connect to your Windows boxen at home over Microsoft's Live services. What's more, it can stream music, movies, and pictures directly to any Windows Media Connect-compatible device on the home network (such as an Xbox 360).

The only problem is you have to explain stuff like "servers," or "backup and restore disk image," or, "Remote Desktop," or "Windows Media Connect" to people before they can really take advantage of everything there.

Even so, that's not as scary as when Bill talks about who Microsoft "loves." I think the reason I've always been partial to Apple is that I feel they're making technology that's supposed to work for me; that's on my side in the fight with, well, everything else. Tell me if you get that same sense from the following quote Bill Gates gave a bunch of reporters after his CES keynote:

We were at the (Wall Street Journal's) "D" conference where (Apple CEO Steve Jobs) talked about (the fact that) he doesn't go into markets where he has to go through somebody else's orifice, which is how he described the broadband companies and the cable companies and the phone companies and the things like that. We love those guys.

I believe Gates was telling the 100%, unvarnished, irony-free truth there. Microsoft understands companies. They understand how corporate customers like to buy and use technology. No matter where you work, chances are that you're using a box running Windows, and that box is connected to a lot of other boxes running Windows. I'm quite sure, in fact, that Microsoft's best bet to get control of your living room is to help corporations like your phone company or your cable company by selling them technology that serves their interests. Now, are the interests of your phone company the same as yours? If they're anything like my (erstwhile) telco, Verizon, probably not. As for my cable company, their interests were served by providing me with a DVR that's quite a bit less capable than a TiVo. I'm sure there's a good reason for that, but it probably wasn't to provide me with the best home media experience possible.

Microsoft, in it's soul, is a company that sells product in bulk to corporate customers. I think a lot of it is very good stuff, but I'd like to keep it at the office, thanks.

Tags: Microsoft, Windows Home Server, Windows Media Connect, CES, Apple, MacWorld, Bill Gates