Phones: How good an endpoint?

Not so good, says Dave Michels.
http://www.nojitter.com/feature/227900658

Think Seriously About a Post-PC World, Ray Ozzie Says

"It’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has just announced his resignation.

"How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?," Ozzie says everyone must ask.

Whatever happens, the future is likely to include approaches that attack the complexity that now characterizes the PC-based computing model.

And make no mistake, Ozzi believes "we’re moving toward a world of cloud-based continuous services and appliance-like connected devices."

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that are constantly assimilating and analyzing data from both a user's real and online worlds.

Tomorrow’s devices will be relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design. They will be instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss. A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

"Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets of simplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success," Ozzie says. "If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-like connected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets."

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Windows Phone 7 Review: "Enticing," "Unfinished"

While it is superficially an enticing interface, whose appearance certainly distinguishes it from every other platform out there, the key problem with Windows Mobile 7 is the lack of information density, Charles Arthur, Guardian technology editor, says.

No matter what the screen size, you don't get many tweets, or emails, or just words on there, he says.

At first it's relaxing, he says, but over time, the lack of information density will make scrolling through long lists of apps tedious, and reading chunked information (such as Facebook and Twitter) exhausting.

Those issues can't be sorted without an overhaul of the interface, he says. If you want a lengthy review of Windows Mobile 7, with lots of comments from readers, this is worth reading.

Windows Phone 7 review: HTC HD7 on O2: did Microsoft write this? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Thanks To Social Networks, Americans Feel More Connected to People

We can debate the issue of whether people are spending less time "face to face," and what that might mean. It is harder to argue about the subjectively perceived value. People do think they are more connected.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/590/Default.aspx

A business built around online copy and paste

I think there's something to this. You might argue that people already use related sharing, rating or comment apps. But this approach potentially creates lots more analytical value, essentially surfacing content communities and making them more visible.

It's sort of a content version of "people who bought this also bought" or "people who liked this might also like" but bridging both consumer and producer parts of a content community.
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/tynt-a-business-built-around-online-copy-and-paste/1555

A Whole New Way of Looking at Augmented Reality

A humorous look at augmented reality, using subtraction rather than addition, which is the normal way we think about augmented reality application.

Starbucks Wi-Fi Usage Shows Dramatic Increase in Mobile Usage

Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett says laptop usage in the company's stores is flat, or even slightly declining, and that mobile usage is on fire and growing a great percentage every month.

Gillett also said that iDevices from Apple are used more in its stores than any others. How important is that? Well, Gillett wanted to use Flash on the social network, but there wasn’t any way he could because of Apple's  refusal to support Flash. So Starbucks built its system using HTML 5.

In other words, the new Starbucks Digital Network is going to be optimized for mobile devices rather than PCs, and for HTML5-authored content.

Starbucks CIO shows why next version of Windows is “risky business” for Microsoft — Scobleizer