Wednesday, March 30, 2011

What The Fuck Is Happening To The World??????

I woke up this morning to hear the USA are supplying weapons to ex-AlQaeda people in the east of Libya (...where is Ollie North these days anyway? I'm sure he has some cocaine to help facilitate the distribution of).

It makes me want to puke.

I'm almost thinking of leaving the USA in political protest, where are all the democrats who objected to Guantanamo and the invading of Afghanistan/Iraq? Where is MSNBC to throw barbs at a president who didnt consult congress before throwing 550m worth of tomahawk missiles at some rocks.

Oh wait is it because he's black?

Maybe this was the republican plan for world domination all along, lets face it .....were they really serious with McCain and Palin? or was losing to a black democrat the plan all along, whitelabel branding works for FMCG goods all the time - why not politics.

Are peoples memories so short that the last time the USA supplied weapons into the middle east for guerillas (you know the whole iron curtain/cold war/afghanistan mujahedeen/taliban/al-quaeda experiment) where they ended up with 9/11?

What is wrong with this country?

Melissa Ferrick - Rubin Mueseum of Art

Just bought 2 tickets, sounds like a great venue, never been.


Friday, June 24, 2011
Melissa Ferrick @ Rubin Museum of Art-Naked Soul159 W 17th St., New York, NY 10019 (United States) - Map
212-620-5000 Set: 7:00 PM
Doors: 6:30 PM
Tickets: $25adv $30
Other Info:
The Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) and Music Without Borders proudly present Naked Soul, an all acoustic unamplified music series located in RMA’s 137-seat theater, an exquisite cherry wood lined room with one of the finest natural acoustics in NYC.
The Rubin Museum of Art offers instrumentalists and vocalists alike an opportunity to allow themselves to be heard as they really sound—as if they were acoustically naked.


Lol feeling all mellow, had the Ferrick website open for last 20 minutes listening to her version of Creep over and over and over and over - http://www.melissaferrick.com/ - lol even had two windows open at once doing harmony.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Please dont tell me all competitors should roll over and play dead for Apple

I just spent this afternoon with a bunch of very smart but very ignorant people having a discussion along these lines.

I'm surprised how myopic people are to think Apple is and always will be the "be all and end all".

This is my last comment on this issue as I'm so bored of this topic.

Are you so naive to realize Apple itself is on V2.0 as we speak and at one stage they were about as dead as Nokia are at the moment.

I sometimes wonder what is the human condition that we forget these things so quickly.

Yes Apple is on a good run at the moment but Steve Jobs is likely to die sooner than most people reading this post, and as we know success is a fickle animal.

If Apple can come back to dominate the mobile market so effectively who is to say Nokia cant win back the mobile space, or that your next home internet appliance wont be a Cisco terminal......oh wait you didn’t pay attention to the Scientific Atlanta purchase?


Cheers,
Dean

Friday, March 25, 2011

652893

This is why there is no tech bubble.
Can you remember a time where there "wasnt" a LinkedIn - what the hell did people do to find out more about work contacts?

Cheers,
Dean
http://www.LinkedIn.com/In/DeanCollins


___________________________________________________________________

Dear Dean,

I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn's first million members (member number 652893 in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.
We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site.


When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world's professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more.

We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.



Sincerely,
Reid Hoffman
Co-founder and Chairman
LinkedIn

Monday, March 21, 2011

Lisa Loeb is now an eyewear designer

In a very "only in New York" kind of moment I got to see Lisa Loeb perform on Saturday night at City Winery.
This was yet again a string of very NY style experiences, I'm sure she's toured in Australia before but when acts like this do they'll play much bigger rooms than City Winery where i was sitting less then 20 feet away.

So the good..... she's cute, she's funny, she's chatty (overly?) she sounds exactly like she does on her albums (eg she doesn't have a lot of "studio manipulation"), she's some one that is blessed with amazing talent and sounds chillingly perfect.

So the bad.......(stop reading if you are a fan).......Lisa Loeb is no longer a singer -she's now an eye wear designer.

Basically she sucked on Saturday night and not only would I never pay to see her perform again-she really should offer a personal apology and a refund to every single one of the 400 paying fans that went to Saturday nights show.

It was such an amateur performance that was only made worse by moments of pure brilliance.

I mean if she just sounded bad, or played badly i would just walk away and say wow that was disappointing but it wasn’t that.

There were moments of surreal brilliance that i couldn’t believe wow how amazing is this.....unfortunately they were few and very very far between and most of the night she stumbled, fumbled, forgot words, couldn’t think of which track to play next - i mean she literally walked out on stage without a set list (let alone having practiced the set with her 3 guest artists who came on for various roles), she forgot the lines from the 3rd verse of a song (lol some of the fans in the crowd sang her through it). She asked the crowd for requests and when the crowd resoundingly asked for "Jake" she tried to play the first few chords and realized she didn’t know it ....this is her own song she realized she didn’t know.

So what happened?

It came out in her "chatty periods" that she had a baby and how long it had been since she toured, ok - some people make choices so i can understand that, but then the real issue came out, she talked about how she had been at an eyewear trade show all day and she had been working really really hard with this amazing company in San Diego blah blah blah - this was the frustrating part, when she was talking about her eyewear line she was all illuminated and excited but then when she was singing she was "going through the motions....barely" most of the time.


I think the real issue is Lisa is probably someone who has been gifted with amazing musical talents and in years gone past probably just winged it and her audience lapped it up – I hope someone taps her on the shoulder and says hey….follow what you’re passionate about, either become a full time eyewear designer and a mum or if you are going to take peoples hard earned money then practice and put on the show of your life – wasting your talents stumbling through set lists isn’t what you want to be remembered for; Compared to last time i was at City Winery for coincidentally Paula Cole's post baby comeback gig where you could tell she loved being on stage and relished the spotlight - the two gigs couldn’t be more juxtaposed.


Cheers,
Dean

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Canada sincerely apologises

Its funny how Australians and Canadians have the same sense of humour
:)

Friday, March 18, 2011

So is it too late for QR codes and NFC is the next big thing?

Until all of the carriers and handset manufacturers come together to agree on a common platform NFC will never take off. It's too big a problem for a "winner takes all" competition style solution to come about.

As the American market is never going to agree to co-operate this means its an idea that is probably doomed

Of course you do realise the only reason why QR codes exist as a standard is that the 4 Japanese carriers sat down around a table and agreed to adopt the Denso solution..... America couldn't even do that right with the various 2d bar code related lawsuits and patent fights. (google Neomedia + EFF).


Cheers,
Dean Collins
www.Cognation.net/QR

Thursday, March 17, 2011

New York Times just went paywall

New York Times just went paywall - very big day in the history of internet content.
I think they overpriced but thats another discussion.
 

I wonder if they are going to add “more” software functionality for paid users – searchable databases, content markup where you can save notes and come back later, forwarding to a friend with comments etc.

At a minimum i think that people paying $195 a year should be served content in ad free format as "YOU" are now their customer rather than the advertisers.


Cheers,
Dean

Monday, March 14, 2011

Trainwrecks or traction?

I'm reading how "social media pundits" are commenting on how "genius" Charlie Sheen is being able to secure 1m twitter followers in 1 day.

How many companies have had a long running prime time tv show leading up to them registering a twitter account?

If Emilio Estevez went out to register a Twitter account tomorrow how many people do you think would be following by the end of the week?
 
 
Cheers,
Dean

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Think you can pick winners?

Chances of a perfect #MarchMadness bracket selection?

Try one-in-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 ....(thats 9 quintillion) - http://on.fb.me/eT6jo0

Friday, March 11, 2011

NYC Quits tv ad



OMG - how fantastically scary (and i assume effective) an anti smoking tv commercial from NYC Quits.

Libyan rights to sovereignty

oh the irony, Obama calling out Gaddafi for hiring mercenaries, hmm someone want to remind him about invoices for Blackwater etc.

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Zugara

I've posted about this company before but they are back with an even better version of their AR app.
Zugara_Demo_2011

I love the social network integration component.



Cheers,
Dean

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Get Clicky

We are testing out GetClicky analytics on the www.LiveChatConcepts.com/Sites (seems to work well and pretty reasonably priced at $60 a year).

One of the cute features i came across was "Chat with your visitors from Spy"

We get a lot of requests to implement a visitor chat feature. We also have a lot of users who have Olark installed on their web site, which is a visitor chat service. Rather than write our own chat service, which is not really something we wanted to do, we decided to implement Olark chat right into Spy
http://getclicky.com/blog/250/chat-with-your-visitors-from-spy


Neat idea.

Cheers,
Dean

Most invasive Facebook app ever

Often wondered what all of these looked like and if you could include every option available.

http://on.fb.me/MostInvasiveAppEVER

Thanks Dennis for setting this up.

Cheers,
Dean

2013 land speed record

"That’s why you need an F1 engine as a fuel pump" - holy crap... reread this twice to make sure i understood why they had three engines.
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/03/07/the-car-faster-than-a-speeding-bullet

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Hack project ideas?



Randomly came across this on ebay - http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-Wireless-FM-Transmitter-Car-MP3-MP4-Player-SD-MMC-/270691809924?pt=Other_MP3_Player_Accessories&hash=item3f067d3a84


$13 including shipping in the USA for a 1.8” screen/sd card reader/fm transmitter etc – someone has to be able to come up with some cool ideas on how this can be hacked to do something neat.
Any thoughts?


Cheers,
Dean

Thursday, March 03, 2011

Chinese equivalent websites

 Great post from Marshall Sponder - http://www.facebook.com/marshall.sponder/posts/181912591852029


Anyone know if there is a version of this with hyperlinks to the respective sites?

Cheers,

Dean

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Lift

Fantastic insights into humanity - watch it for at least 10 minutes or so - it gets incredibly interesting.

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Charlie speaks soundboard

http://www.spearhead-entertainment.com/storage/charliesheen.swf

This is exactly what the internet was created for :)



My wifes comment was it's like he has hijacked the character from Two And A Half Men and just "moved" it from Monday night into reality.

lol "Two And A Half Men now new and improved powered by Tiger Blood"

Boxee close $16.5m in C round

Looks like Boxee aren’t going anywhere soon, saw in Dan Primacs email this morning that they just closed $16.5m – nice round considering they had already raised $10m.


Boxee Inc., a New York-based developer of a social media center, has raised $16.5 million in Series C funding. VentureWire cites a company executive as saying the round valued the company at around $66 million. SoftBank Capital and Pitango Venture Capital were joined by return backers General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The company previously raised $10 million. www.boxee.tv


I wonder what the money is going to be used to build? Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Dean

Toyota darth vader spoof