Rubénerd!

Everyone is all abuzz at the news that CNN may acquire Mashable. Presumably to tap into their social energy and reach, CNN will use them to adapt their infinitely larger, more bureaucratic, slow moving organisation into a nimble social media powerhouse. As all the tech pundits are saying, it's a brilliant strategy! A perfect fit! Synergistic paradigms!

Of course not. In reality, I predict Mashable would still be relevant for a year or so, then Peter Cashmore will leave CNN and start a new blog network. It happens. Every. Single. Time.

As an aside, the last (and only other) time I mentioned Mashable here was in 2009 for their Open Web Awards, of which I was less than impressed and came up with my own recommendations!

Facebook is about to go public. Typically what happens with such deals is the prospective public company enlists the assitance of an underwriter, who sells the shares on their behalf. Only a select few are given a crack at the first rounds before the stock is sold to the general public. Understandably, those who get in first make instant millions. Nice work if you can get it.

Sincerely, I've got to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. Since starting Facebook to get the phone numbers of girls he was too embarrased to ask (darn, why didn't I think of that?), he's arguably demonstrated nothing but contempt for his users, yet here's his project on the cusp of earning billions. Meanwhile, to quote but one example, Julian Assange remains under house arrest. Think about that.

With photos from my bedroom in Malaysia in 2006; only photos I could find of my old 7280 on such short notice!

BlackBerry go Boom

The retirement of the dual CEOs from BlackBerry have the tech world all a dither. The current meme on Twitter seems to be how RIM is just as irrelevent as Kodak. Seems less brilliant and insightful after you've read the same thing several trillion times.

Given the ridiculous amount of coverage from all across the tubes, I could have my pick of news outlets. So I did. From Ryan Kim over at GigaOm, my favourite tech journalism outfit and currently one of the few I can stand reading:

Research in Motion, scrambling to keep up in a smartphone market it once led, has announced it has replaced co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie with Thorsten Heins, the current chief operating officer. Laziridis, who founded the company in 1984, will serve as vice chairman of the board of directors, while Balsillie, who joined in 1992, will stay on as a director. Both also served as co-chairmen but they will be replaced by director Barbara Stymiest, a board member since 2007, who will now serve as the independent Board Chair.

In a nutshell, while everyone is talking about the retirement of the co-CEOs, they're not going anywhere. Sounds far less revolutionary when one actually reads the news stories instead of just retweeting them.

Back down to Earth, please

BlackBerries have the reputation (undeserved in my opinion) as business phones that people only begrugingly use. I had a BlackBerry in 2006, and it was by choice!

I'd suspended my uni studies for family reasons, and had joined the family back in Malaysia. Low and behold, on a trip back to Singapore, in Sim Lim Square a merchant was selling a GSM BlackBerry 7280 for peanuts. I'd had a Windows CE device, a Palm Tungsten W, but never a BlackBerry and decided on a whim to try it out. I popped in my regular Maxis SIM card which I'd had activated with a data plan. I never used the BlackBerry Messaging system or whatever it is you're supposed to do, I just used it as a phone with a QWERTY keyboard.

Even in this more restricted capacity, it was one of the best phones I'd ever had. Initially I missed having a touch screen, but I quickly realised I was just as quick navigating the screen with the scroll wheel and clicking to select than I ever was tapping a screen. Within a few weeks, I was faster. I reckon if I timed myself from the home screen to sending a message on my iPhone and on my old BlackBerry, I'd be faster on the latter!

BlackBerry Vista

As a temporary customer I know little about of their current devices save for their tech specs and a few minutes of playing with them at my local Optus store. What I theorise however is BlackBerry fell into the same trap as Microsoft. The BlackBerry was great at sending email and SMSs and generally getting out of your way, but they developed envy for another platform and broadly attempted to clone it. The result was a mess that compromised on the strengths they had before, while not becoming the device they'd copied either.

I hope the new executives (of whom the former CEOs make up a part) can figure out a way to bring BlackBerrys back to their roots. The rest of the tech world has already put them out to sea, but they still have tremendous reach in the business world and I still know enough CrackBerry users who wouldn't trade their devices for anything. Frankly, if BlackBerries had Foursquare, Twitter and a solid Sudoku game I wouldn't mind having one still!

I'm cautiosly optimistic there's room for a comeback.

Notes

Yes, that's the same MacBook Pro I still use as my primary mobile workhorse now. MacTheKnife has been a real trooper :').

From RTÉ News, a credible site because of the accented é.

US camera pioneer Eastman Kodak, which brought photography to the masses over a century ago, has filed for bankruptcy. [..] it has been struggling to keep pace with the digital age [..]

The irony is Kodak engineers invented the digital camera, the very device that hastened its demise. Where its competitors succeeded, Kodak faltered. It's a real shame, few companies have had such an impact on people's memories and on the state of technology, research and design.

As an aside, I've noticed a correlation between failing companies and "modernised" logo changes. Kodak discarded their classic red K in 2006.

CNET is reporting Dell will no longer be selling netbooks, due to falling demand and likely low profit margins:

Dell is [no] longer interested in selling Netbooks--that category of 10-inch class laptops that saw mild success for a couple of years but is now facing a serious existential crisis.

And here was Michael Dell's backhanded comment about HP deciding to stop selling PCs, less than 6 months ago, due to falling demand and low profit margins:

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP?

How would you say goodbye to Dell?

Some over reported news:

Alec Baldwin likes [Zynga's] Words With Friends, the Scrabble game available on multiple platforms including the iPhone, so much that he missed a flight because of it. [..] On Tuesday, Baldwin was kicked off an American Airlines plane at the Los Angeles International Airport and had to switch to a different flight.

A more recent update on older news:

Online games powerhouse Zynga is shooting for $1 billion in its IPO, according to an amended prospectus filed on Friday morning.

Well, what do you know.

When I went to bed last night, HP were still making computers and webOS devices. A lot can happen in one night!

Then rhymes with "Gwen"

See what I did there?

I don't know exactly when this started, but lately I've prefaced most of my blog posts with rambling bouts of nostalgia punctured with lame attempts at humour, then signed off with a submissive "but I digress" before launching into the meat of the matter. This post will be no different.

My first experience with HP was a year before I got my first iMac DV in the late 1990s. The 200MHz Pentium MMX machine we'd built at Funan Centre was starting to show its age (though ironically it's outlasted ever other machine I've ever built and still runs even now!) and we were on the lookout for something new. Out of the blue at COMEX in Singapore, HP were having a sale on the Brio BAx line of business desktops, and we snagged one.

Compared to the ugly, overly plastic boxes the Pavilion desktops came in, the Brio line looked rather smart with its simple lines and slight curves at the front. The machine had a blazingly fast 450MHz Pentium III (or "Pentium !!!" if you took their marketing seriously), a 8.4GB Seagate hard drive and 128MiB of PC133 memory. Because it was technically a business machine it only had onboard graphics, but it was all someone like me needed, particularly when I spent most of my time in an editor hacking away at my latest favourite programming language and only briefly stopping for some SimCity 3000.

Cooler still was what came with it. It happened to be the first computer I owned that came with a CD burner, and a gigantically massive 17" display instead of the crusty 14.5 I'd been using as a loaner from our original 486 machine from 1991! It was also a fateful machine in that it was the first one I tried Red Hat Linux on back in the day, but that's for another post :).

The only other piece of HP hardware I had from that time was a so-called "handheld PC" Given I was still a kid, my dad didn't trust that I wouldn't drop a laptop, so he bought me this little HP 620LX Windows CE 2.0 device for my birthday one year. For family trips overseas where we'd be away from my beloved desktop, this little machine let me keep programming and tinkering :). As of today, aside from a vertical cyan coloured stripe across one side of the screen, it still works!

Today rhymes with "away"

So now we finally come back to the present. Hewlett Packard, one of the original icons of technoligical innovation and progress, has had a troubled recent history. Carly Fiorina's acquisition of Compaq gave them the server hardware and expertise they wanted, but also a legacy of race to to the bottom hardware.

In trying to be Dell, they only hastened the demise of their personal computer unit. Their "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign was embarrassing, couldn't shake off their reputation for being a business company, and fell on deaf ears as creative professionals and those really looking for Something Different fled to Apple.

On the mobile side, their acquisition of the troubled Palm didn't reverse their fortunes either. webOS, in my opinion the finest mobile operating system on the market today, was doomed from the start by slow hardware, face-palmingly poor marketing and a strategic position that none of us understood. It wasn't much cheaper than the also vertically integrated iPhone, didn't offer the breadth of devices of Android, and was only sold in a few select markets.

While for my own personal reasons I'm disappointed in the latter, from a business perspective it makes sense for HP to do this. Junky desktops and laptops simply aren't profitable anymore, and their webOS devices always seemed like an odd fit for an enterprise company who's only other consumer focused devices were high end calculators.

I'll be interested to see where they go from here. I suggest they do some Invent-ing.

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to mirror their site with httrack. I'm a sucker for nostalgia, not that you'd know.

Analysts at Westpac noted on Wednesday that the US dollar erased its overnight gains in Asia as the market shrugged off Moody's downgrade of Portugal's credit rating to junk status and the placement of it on the negative watch list. Traders also paid little reaction to Moody's warning that the banks involved in Greek debt roll over may have to record impairment charges. ~ AFX News

Hardly surprising, if true. Where were these ratings agencies before the global financial crisis? I wish I were the first to make this observation, but I would rate their relevance and predictive performance as "junk".

As I blogged about in February, Borders had clearly seen better days in Australia and are now in the process of closing down. I headed into their Bondi Junction store today to grab some bargains, and to explore a familiar setting one last time.

Getting there

Of course, I couldn't have timed my expedition any worse! Bondi Junction is served by the Eastern Suburbs and Illawara line, which CityRail decided to perform track work on this weekend. Unlike most of the industrialised (or developing) worlds where train work is done overnight so as not to inconvenience ticket holders and taxpayers, CityRail regularly performs such work in broad daylight. Worse still, they replace eight double deck carriage consists with single buses that seemed to arrive and leave as they pleased. I've been to Canberra, and if they can operate buses to a fixed schedule, then surely an operation as large as CityRail could!

To their credit the Bus Marshals couldn't have been friendlier, and the one who served us at Central bore an uncanny resemblance to TechTV and TWiT luminary Leo Laporte. They could have been separated at birth, and raised in different countries. But I digress.

Being there

For those not from Australia, Bondi Junction is one of these upmarket mega shopping centres you would expect to find on Orchard Road or Jalan Ampang. The Borders itself is located at the end of one of the buildings. At its peak it was operating over two floors, though the top floor was empty by the time I got there.

Much of the stuff had already been sold (including a substantial amount of furniture!) but there was still enough there to occupy my time for a while. A couple of friends from my university and I explored the manga and computer book sections without much success, in the former were series we'd never heard of and plenty of Ken Akamatsu which we've all read but would never admit to (whoops), and in the latter there was almost nothing but thick blue Microsoft training tomes remaining! In year 11 and 12 I had to do several assignments in .NET, so I know of those books all too well!

Walking around with most of the shelves empty, burnt out light bulbs on the storefront sign, carpets askew, posters torn and hanging at weird angles, empty powerboards, hazard tape across entire sections, row after row of boxes... it felt eerily dystopian, like the rapture had happened for real this time.

Buying stuff there

I left with three manga volumes overall, for $18! That's a tad more that I would spend on a single volume in Kinokuniya or any of the small comic book stores in town! One was a copy of The Star Trek Manga which I disgust myself as a Trekkie for not knowing that it even existed! I don't remember the female characters being quite so... shapely, but the caricatures of Spock and Kirk are eerily accurate!

The other two were the first two volumes of Shakugan no Shana; I absolutely loved the anime with its Rie Kugimiya voiced, ultra cute zettai ryouiki heroine, but as is typically the case I was told by many a fan that the manga was better. Flipping through the books while waiting in the queue I could tell the graphics and art are just gorgeous! :)

You may recognise her on my site from the heading image for my OpenInternet post series... a spooky coincidence given Telstra's latest filter move! But I digress.

Now if only I had arrived there sooner, or had the trains been running as they should have been, perhaps I could have snagged some K-On! I mention this because one of the employees I talked to claimed two people between them had emptied out all the stock of basically every manga volume that Kyoto Animation had since got their hands on. You know the ones of which I'm referring ;).

With our recent move back to Australia it was mighty tempting to purchase some genuine Borders bookshelves or some of the signs that graced them, but money is a little tight for us right now (international moves and taxes are fun!), and given I had to get a CityRail replacement bus home with less space to breathe than a sardine tin, I wouldn't have been able to transport them home even if I wanted to! The only sign I was tempted by was a giant white on black ANIME AND MANGA sign, though some of the letters were scratched up. In hindsight it may have been nice to have anyway, just for nostalgia. I'm a sucker for that you see. Oh well.

Reminiscing about stuff over there

Granted it was in their branch at Wheelock Place in Singapore, but I spent a large amount of my childhood exploring Borders. I can still remember when they first opened there with much pomp and celebration, and how crazy my little mind thought it was to have a bistro in a coffee shop! Sure Meg Ryans in Brisbane where we'd lived previously had coffee in the shop, but I had a smoked salmon and sour cream pizza with capers and onion, right next to the non fiction books!

Kinokuniya across the street in Ngee Ann City (the red building with Takashimaya) had a wider selection of books, particularly technical manuals, but Borders felt cozier. I bought (and read!) my first O'Reilly programming books in their computer section, and bumped into my first crush there. When high school came around and much of my cohort were experimenting with nighclubs and alcohol, I was spending my Friday and Saturday nights with my good friend Felix Tanjono exploring until they closed at 11pm. When my mum had those brief breaks from her chemotherapy in the 12 years she was having it, we'd make it a date and wander around there together.

I know it's not politically correct or cool to like chain stores, but Starbucks and Borders and Ikea were where I grew up. I'll be sad to see Borders go.

A new press release from Virgin Australia says the company has "signed a landmark agreement which will enable them to establish a long-term alliance". Be afraid, be very very afraid?

For those who didn't understand the heading, it was a play on the No Way BA/AA campaign, headed up by Richard Branson of all people! And while I'm in italics here, the photo above is of a Singapore Airlines 777-300 series plane taken by Juergen Lehle and uploaded to Wikipedia.

It was suspiciously pro-lawnmower ~ Marge Simpson

The points from the aforementioned press release:

Co-ordinate schedules between Singapore and Australia and beyond to provide seamless connections

I guess that could be useful, though a last resort option if I couldn't book SIA all the way. Hey, I just made a rhyme. Wouldn't it be great it made and rhyme... rhymed? But I digress.

Offer reciprocal frequent flyer programme benefits and lounge access;

My sister and I basically grew up in airport lounges. Well okay a bit of a stretch, but we lived all over the place and had to go between them constantly. We've been in them all, and SIA lounges are by and away the best. Well okay a bit of a stretch, but the point stands. I feel as though I've said that somewhere before.

The idea of cashing in on tons of SIA Solitaire points for domestic Virgin Australia flights would be appealing though, again provided I couldn't book SIA all the way.

Engage in joint sales, marketing and distribution activities.

Most people I talked to (all three of them) thought Virgin Blue's marketing was creative and edgy, but I found it face-palmingly embarrassing and hollow. A company advertising themselves with smiling faces and claiming to make the air fair by cramming seats even closer, charging for bottles of water and electronic checkin machines that failed more often than they worked for me came across as just a wee bit disingenuous. To be fair, Jetstar's advertisements with super hip young women in bikinis jumping around a beach shouting "thank you Jetstar!" -- presumably after surviving their brush with a tightly packed, pressurised, cylindrical sardine tube -- are perhaps even more insulting to the intelligence of their customers.

I guess the adage applies, you get what you pay for. What was the point in this? Oh yeah, I hope SIA's marketing isn't sent down this path!

None of that sounds too scary...

That's because I saved the first point for last. Put your tray tables up and assume the brace position by locking your arms under your legs or on the seat in front of you.

Codeshare on each other’s international and domestic flights;

This. Is. Horrifying.

Jokes about first world problems aside, if I buy a ticket for an SIA flight and board the plane to find it's Virgin Australia codesharing for them... I'd finally understand why airports have those metal detectors and radiation spewing, carcinogenic full body scanners. I would have a blunt nail file with me, and my resulting rage would not be a pretty sight.

Australian regulations make it difficult (AFAIK) for SIA to fly domestically in Australia so the market for Virgin Australia is there and understandable, but if Virgin Australia started flying to Singapore and replacing SIA flights on some of those routes, the last tiny part of me that still enjoys flying would die forever.

Not to beat around the bush on this, but as a customer there are few companies I hold in as high regard as SIA. They offer the best product, bar none. In the decades my old man flew with them, they only lost his luggage once, and he got a signed letter of apology from the CEO and full compensation. Conversely, he's only travelled with Virgin Atlantic a dozen times, had luggage lost twice, and never got anywhere with the phones. You do the maths.

It would be akin to IKEA doing a deal with Kmart for furniture, or Starbucks with Nescafe. Not that I'm biased, nor am I suggesting (for legal reasons) that Kmart or Virgin Australia or Nescafe are bad, just not my cup of tea. I hope they leave SIA alone, but histories of tie-ups like this are littered with failures, and those who don't learn from history are destined to repeat it, like an onboard entertainment system with the same three movies each flight.