In case you were interested in purchasing the Audiovox SMT5600 Microsoft-based smartphone and wanted to know how the camera shots looked, I’ve uploaded a few to the Zoinger Flickr channel an affiliate on the Zoinger Network.
Of course, you could have also just gone directly to Flickr and searched on SMT5600 and found a bunch of sample shots.
I’m sure you’ve all heard about it now, but Google is offering a personalizable home page as one of their lab offerings. Not much really to write about it, since it’s basically a stripped-down version of Yahoo!’s My Yahoo!. However, I am sure that Google will be adding more modules to the offering to be competitive with My Yahoo!.
It will be interesting to see if Google rolls this feature out into a wider release in the future. This would probably push Yahoo! into offering more personalization on their home page as a result. Competition is a great thing.
Want examples of a lack of competition? How about the fact that IE (IE7 specifically) is finally going to offer tabbed browsing — about two or three years late. I can guarantee that the only reason why Microsoft is releasing a version of IE before Longhorn ships is Firefox’s success. Without some competition in the browser market, Microsoft was fine with not improving IE.
So, who is going to be the winner in personalization? The user.
As stated here, noctilucent clouds are:
Clouds at extremely high altitude, about 85 km, that literally (as the name suggests) shine at night. They form in the cold, summer polar mesopause and are believed to be ice crystals. Because of their high altitude, in a very dry part of the atmosphere, noctilucent clouds are rather an enigma and are being studied by a number of people around the world.
More information on these clouds can be found at the NLC FAQ. Here’s a nice pic of some of these clouds.
One of the recent podcasts over at ITConversations is a speech by Geoffrey Moore at the Open Source Business Conference 2005 (the closest I could get to a web site for the conference is here). Geoffrey Moore is the author of Crossing the Chasm. As summarized by ITConversations, Mr. Moore discusses:
The message is loud and clear: Identify the value creating activities in your value chain and keep them under control because they are core to your competitive advantage. Additionally, define the the non-core activities and identify how to leverage the collaborative capabilities of the open source community to manage them.
The podcast is about an hour long. I highly recommend listening to it if you are interested in business structure evolution, and how open source is helping to facilitate dramatic changes in how businesses are structured.
