For the last week, I’ve had the pleasure of working in Denver at the Democratic National Convention to support HD live and on-demand streaming of the convention through the DNC website: demconvention.com.  The content is being delivered to the Internet over Level3’s content delivery network using Move Network’s delivery technology integrated with a Microsoft Silverlight player developed by Vertigo.  The result is an unprecedented rich media experience that provides end users with gavel to gavel live and on-demand coverage of the convention, exclusive interviews, and behind the scenes coverage of DNC happenings.  Though conference coverage is available on many different sites, the DNC coverage is the highest quality content available and is uninterrupted by advertising or commentary.  Additionally, the site offered an alternate camera angle of the convention from the Pepsi Center and, for the first time in convention history, the site offers a Spanish feed (sponsored by Comcast).  Check out the live and on-demand media on the DNC site and let me know what you think of the experience.  
On another note, I had to include a picture of the Daily Show Bus.  The fact that it presents itself as a rebranded RATT tour bus is brilliant.  Check out other photos of the convention on flickr. 

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I installed beta2 of Extensions for Windows and I am pretty impressed.  The exstensions suite is customizable in the sense that users may install only the utilities that are desired, but I find that I have uses for all that are included.  Extensions offered out of the gate include a Screen Capture Utility, a Virtual Drive creator and manager, a Shortcut Manager, a File Compare Utility, a Find and Replace Utility, a Disc Analyzer, an Explorer Extension, a Task Manager Extension, and FTP client, and a File Converter.  The Shortcut manager is a very convenient way to create, modify or remove Windows keyboard shortcuts.  My favorite extensions so far are the Explorer extension - which is like the Windows file explorer on steroids.  It enables tabbed explorer windows, side by side explorer views and a host of other helpful options.  Most of the extensions are available by clicking on the Extensions Icon in the system tray.  However, a couple of my favorite extensions are accessible by right clicking on files. Right clicking on image files gives you an “extension” option that allows you to quickly convert or resize images (See image below).  Doing the same on office documents lets you quickly “print” the document to a PDF.  This is cool, and so far the bugs I’ve encountered have been minor and the installation did not appear to slow my machine down.  So far, I give Extensions for Windows two opposable thumbs up!

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In mid-July, Microsoft will begin selling office programs to consumers on a subscription basis.   This is a bold new business model for Office that is rumored to start at about $70 per year.  The price seems reasonable for what you get (especially when I consider that I spend over $100/month on my cable bill), but you be the judge.

Equipt will include:

• Word 2007
• Excel 2007
• PowerPoint 2007
• OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office Live Workspace
• Windows Live tools (Mail, Messenger, Photo, etc)
• Windows Live OneCare
• Upgrades and Updates

What do you think?  Good deal or bad deal?  Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Categories: Technology
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Let’s face it, right out of the box, Windows PocketPC phones don’t seem quite as sexy as the iPhone.  That said, these devices pack a lot of power and flexibility so with a few of the right programs installed, PocketPC phones can become pretty fun to use.  I have the AT&T Tilt and following are some killer applications that I have installed:

• Spb Mobile Shell: This UI shell makes everything easily available at your fingertips and gives the look and feel of the phone an overhaul.  A great application with a terrible name. 
• Resco Keyboard Pro: The default GUI keyboard on the PocketPC phone is designed for a sylus.  This keyboard application swaps that out with a nice touch keyboard complete with “gesture” (flick) support. 

Once you’ve installed the above applications, it will be like  having a whole new phone.  Now lets move on to some bells and whistles:

• ShoZu:  This application does a few different things, but I like it for it’s photo-sharing abilities.  Snap a photo and instantly send it to Flickr, Facebook, email or several other destinations of your choosing.
• Spb Insight or NewsGator Go:  No mobile device is complete without an RSS reader.  I prefer the look and feel of Spb Insight, but I like that NewsGator Go stays in sync with my NewsGator / Feeddemon subscriptions. Spb Insight also puts news flashes on your today screen.
• Windows Live Search (the downloadable mobile version):  This is a great application for general search, directions, traffic, movie times, and gas prices.  It even does GPS locating to help you pinpoint places near you.
• Office Mobile, OneNote Mobile, and communicator are obvious helpful tools for the mobile office worker.
• ComVu Pocket Caster: Webcast from your pocket with this PocketPC video/audio encoder.  Turn it on and be instantly webcasting to the web.  Similar to QIK but supports more phones.
• Finally, check out PocketSolutions for screen protectors.  They are pretty good quality and you can get three packs, cut to size, for under $5.  This is a much better deal than what you will find at the cellular store. 

So there you have it.  Hopefully using these applications will renew your love for your PocketPC phone.  Admittedly, the missing piece is still a web browser that lets you comfortably navigate the non-mobile web.  However, that is coming very soon in Windows Mobile 6.1 so relief is just around the corner.  Do you have other favorite mobile applications?  Put them in the comments.

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It’s a bit like the Millennium bug that threatened applications that were not prepared for the year 2000.  Some older dial gas pumps were not designed to exceed $3.99 per gallon and did not have “4″ as a possible dollar amount.  Now that gas prices have shot past the $4 mark in many places; smaller, older service stations are in trouble.  Many mom and pop shops cannot afford the tens of thousands it can cost to replace the pumps.  Furthermore, it is illegal to sell gas from a pump that cannot register the price correctly.  That said, regulators understand the bind that small service stations are in and have allowed them to stay open so long as they can demonstrate they are working to retrofit or replace the pumps.  In the mean time, service stations must calculate the price of gas manually.  I suggest we keep gas below $4 a gallon to help these guys out, what do you say?  More detail can be found in this Article from the Seattle Times.

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Today it was announced that Xobni has released for the general public to download.  Xobni is the best Outlook plug-in that I’ve seen in a long time.  This sidebar allows for fast and easy email search, attachment aggregation, and thread compression.  Another handy feature of the tool includes extracting contact information from email signatures - this is extremely handy for quickly finding contact info for folks that don’t yet exist in your contacts list.  There is also a host of bells an whistles thrown in around inbox analytics (who you send mail to, who you receive it from, etc) and fun ways to drill through your network of email contacts.

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Let’s Face it, there are far too many ways to keep in touch these days.  Blogging hit the scene, but it appealed more to publisher types, not folks that just wanted to have a simple online presence.  Then came LinkedIn, which is a cool portal for managing your contacts network (though I think if Plaxo had built out their feature set a little faster, they could have owned the LinkedIn crowd).  That said, LinkedIn is a glorified address book with a little 6 degrees of separation cool factor and it didn’t pack the social aspect that Facebook and Myspace brought.  Myspace went after a younger crowd that prefer websites to be completely annoying, auto-play music, and look like the 1996 Internet threw up all over it.  Facebook brings a bit more sophistication…  Folks who want to create a professional network but still want to let their hair down and slay some vampires every now and then.  Eventually, someone realized that the world really needed a way to IM people in mass, and presto, Twitter was born.  I’m not sure what will be next, but I suspect it will be shorter and easier than Twitter.  Seven character Twitter perhaps (we can call it LicensePlater – CoolHuh? IthnkSo).  But wait, all that is just the Web 2.0 stuff.  Don’t forget you also need to stay sociable in the Zune Social and keep the points coming in on Xbox live.

On the surface, this evolution seems like a great thing.  However, in this era of hyper innovation (and hyper distraction), the predecessors are not going away as new sites, services and technologies emerge.  This means that folks like me are left trying to keep up the blog, build on the LinkedIn network, keep Myspace and Facebook reasonably up to date (and not let my vampire army get too beat down), and Twitter with whatever time there is left in the day.  Whew – factor in eating, sleeping, working, and commuting and this starts to get pretty tough.

This is where one must decide to give up all together and go outside for a walk (yeah right) or become a master of Social Load Balancing. 

Social Load Balancing (SLB) is a technique to spread content between two or more social networks or technologies in order to get optimal resource utilization, throughput, or response time. Managing multiple social networks and services with social load balancing, instead of managing a single social network or tool,  will increase reliability and coverage in your social representation. Social Load Balancing is handled manually by many, others are beginning to adopt Social Load Balancing tools to simplify or assist in the SLB process.

Tools are emerging to make SLB easier to manage.  For Twitter and Facebook users, you don’t want to be without the Twitter Facebook Application.  This allows your twitters to automatically update your facebook status.  Boom – just like that we are killing two birds with one tweet.  There are also applications that will send your Facebook status updates to Twitter, but that doesn’t seem like the direction most users would want to go.  For you bloggers – maximize your blogging by using a tool like Windows Live Writer.  With Live Writer, you can write your blog posts (offline even) and then sync them to several blog posts at once.  Other software that does this includes Qumana, ScribeFire for Firefox, and Ecto for the Mac.  Still spending too much time bouncing between social sites?  Minggl is a browser toolbar that concentrates Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Myspace into your browser toolbar.  If you want even deeper integration, you might want to try Flock.  Flock uses the Mozilla browser base and adds a ton of social networking capability on top of it (including Flickr and YouTube).   Regardless of how much SLB you do, Twitter is hard to keep up with (especially if you are compelled, like many of us are, to follow as many people as humanly possible).  In this case, you may want to use Twitt(url)y to keep up on what links are being shared in Twitter. 

Above are just a few ways to start to load balance your social life.  Of course, hopefully you also foster an offline social life and you will have to be the judge of how that fits into your SLB strategy.  That said, be careful taking your online social life with you into your offline social life because your romantic evening will tank quickly when your date gazes across the table only to see you Twittering on your iPhone (if only she knew what you were Twittering: “dude, I’m on a date right now”  –  “She just ordered a double Vodka” - “She’s looking really pissed right now” – “Think she’ll go home with me if I ask the waiter to split the bill?”).  Finally, I want to plug one more technology that has the potential to greatly simplify today and tomorrow’s SLB process: OpenID.  It’s bad enough trying to keep up with your online social life, let alone trying to remember your login IDs and passwords on all of these networks.   OpenID aims to drive all of these logins into a single ID system that all of the sites and applications can leverage.  Will they succeed?  Maybe not any time soon, but the goal is admirable.

And with that, I’ve got to wrap this up.  I’ve spent far too long on writing this post and my status on Facebook has become terribly out of date. 

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Mix08 is in full swing and it’s all about Silverlight!  I just got into town today, so I missed the first day of sessions, but today was already worth the trip.  For today’s general sessions, Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki had a great conversation that spanned topics ranging from the Yahoo acquisition bid to Vista.  they take turns jabbing each other, but ultimately - both were great sports and the conversation was very intersting.  Click here to view the on-demand webcast: 750k, 300k.

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Ever plan to go shopping at Macy’s, get to the mall, and then find that a security guard is standing outside asking you to wait until other shoppers have cleared out because they’ve reached capacity?  Neither have I.  The same can’t be said for Macy’s online store.  Below is a screen shot that shoppers were presented with when Macy’s website got a little too crowded for comfortable shopping this season.  Just goes to show that regardless of whether you take the Brick and Mortar or the Click and Mortar approach this Christmas, you’re still going to be stuck in the holiday crowds.  

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I just wanted to share this error message I received on my machine today.  I don’t even recall what threw the error, but I love the way it’s worded.  I wasn’t trying to destroy anything at the time…

Categories: Miscellaneous, Technology
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