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CTO Breakfast Report
The first item of discussion at today’s CTO Breakfast was iPhone features and unfeatures. A few of us had one. I passed mine around for people to play with. We also discussed some other devices, like the Blackberry Curve. Apparently the voice recognition on the Curve is very good.
Scott Lemon brought up openmoko, a hardware device for building open phones. Looks cool.
The discussion of the iPhone’s lack of GPS led to a great discussion of why GPS is cool. Someone brought up location reminders: “Next time I’m at Home Depot, remind me to pick up…” We talked about the fact that most state traffic data is closed so that the state can sell it and the ability of GPS-enabled cell phones to gather traffic data from everyone’s phones.
A discussion of how GPS enhances out natural abilities (and causes some directional skills to atrophy) ensued. I brought up Natural Born Cyborgs, a great book about this phenomenon.
I started a discussion of Facebook. We talked about Facebook as a poor man’s aggregator. Lots of people who don’t use aggregators use Facebook or MySpace as a way to keep up with friends in the same way that bloggers use aggregators. Personally, I don’t spend a lot of time on my Facebook page continually updating it, but people do.
We also talked about Facebook as a convoluted email replacement. Steve brought up that some people will leave him a Facebook message, which sends him and email so he can click out to Facebook and read it. Facebook is serving as a mediator for contact and interaction. It’s a whitelist-based communication center. I mentioned Scoble’s new broadcast network based on Facebook.
Scott Lemon said something that I found very funny: “the local news is a way of highlighting statistical anomalies.” In other words, it does a great disservice to the community by making people worry about things they don’t need to worry about.
Posted by windley on July 20, 2007 10:04 AM
Comment from Scott Barlow at July 20, 2007 11:22 AM
I'm on my 5th BB, and have the BB 8830 from Sprint right now. After email and phone, I use the GPS feature the most. I'll have to say this is the nicest BB I've ever used, and feel that they finally got one made correctly.
On Wednesday I tried out a friend's iPhone while eating with him at Apple's cafeteria (business travel). It did make me a little jealous, as everything was so smooth and the display is wide and beautiful. I didn't realize that it doesn't have GPS, but on the other hand, I wish my BB 8830 had Wi-Fi (the 8820 _will_ have Wi-fi and be out on AT&T)
The location-based reminders you mention. Was that a 'nice to have' thing or are you saying the BB Curve does have those? I haven't seen those on my BB.
Have you seen the a Universities study on cell phones and traffic movement during the day in and out of cities? It was something in Business 2.0 (if I remember correctly) that Universotie are studying in joint with cities, as traffic lights and lanes come into play to get people into the city the fastest, and then out of the city the fastest. They have cell density maps that update real-time and change colors based on the number of cell phones in each area, etc. I'll have to find the link if you're interested.
Here is one:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/cdisalvo/chi2007workshop/papers.html
Urban Ritual in Rome: Characterizing the City with High-Resolution Cell Phone Data
Matthew Jull & Carlo Ratti
Regards -
Scott
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