Mike Arrington has provided an update on the TechCrunch tablet, which I personally maligned on Twitter a few months ago. Fast forward to today and they have a working prototype, a set of partners to work with on the hardware and some software that supports the prototype. I’m very impressed with this effort and it is causing me to toss aside conventional wisdom. This is the “maker” spirit at its finest.
Conventional wisdom would say that a content provider with no background in hardware or software development can’t possibly create a tablet device for wireless internet that costs less than $200. Meanwhile, they have a prototype in place and a great vision for what they want to deliver. If they ship this unit, I’m going to buy one for sure. Kudos to Mike and the TechCrunch team for taking a big, bold goal and going for it.
Jon Udell: “Microsoft platforms have not historically encompassed the continuum of access styles. Happily, the emerging cloud does. And while the novelty of “just coding to a URL” on a Microsoft platform will undoubtedly attract some tirekickers who otherwise wouldn’t show up, the real draw will be the ability to exercise choice along the whole continuum.”
Good commentary from Jon about the nature of cloud services and how Microsoft’s services platform will open up access to a host of new developers.
News to me, but apparently Paul Buchheit created the slogan “Don’t Be Evil”. Wikipedia confirms, but also erroneously credits Paul with creating Ajax (the underlying Ajax technologies were introduced by Microsoft). Frankly, it is hard to take anyone seriously who created a company motto reminding an organization not to be “evil” to their customers. Friendfeed now seems a little lamer to me than it did before.
The Boy Genius Report: “By “Jaiku is the new Twitter”, we’re hardly suggesting it is a popular new microblogging site that may overtake the reigning king. No, that ship has sailed. We mean it never works anymore.”
Recently Zoho Blogs highlighted a new video sharing feature with Zoho Share that they describe as “SharePoint meets YouTube”. SharePoint already has these features for video sharing and podcasting features via the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint, but it brings to light an important point- video sharing is becoming a major part of collaboration in the enterprise. An interesting example comes Mike Gannotti, a SharePoint technologist in the Microsoft field organization. Mike has been producing a series of podcasts that he records in his car while driving to meet customers and colleagues. Mike’s podcast, “Michael on the Go”, has been featured on Microsoft’s internal podcast series for executive outreach, product and technology education and awareness building for new products and services. Over the next few years, I expect that it will be mainstream for companies to offer these kinds of video collaboration and sharing capabilities to all employees.
