People came prepared for a long wait with their laptops, surfing the web for the latest updates on blogs, watching APPL stock, and talking about why they’ve taking time out of a beautiful Friday to spend it inside a mall, standing in line.
This is one of the last shots from the Apple store at the Mall of America before is went dark at 2pm local time.
By 3pm, the line had doubled over on itself:
Now, at 4pm, the 3rd row is forming, with 2 more hours to till launch.
A young girl yelled down from 1-story above, “What are you guys waiting for?” To which someone in line responded, “A cell phone.” Seriously? A cell phone? People don’t sit on the floor for a day for a cell phone.
An employee from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester decided to show up around 1pm to get in line. His current phone, pictured below, clearly ready for a replacement:
and past out of contract, so life is good.
Masergy is a global network service provider created to deliver the strongest network experience for expanding mid-size to large enterprises. Howard Lichtman of the Human Productivity Lab sat down with Chris Carr to talk about their video specific solution that provides a number of key features essential for telepresence
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Apparently, there is a new phone coming out on Friday from Apple called the iPhone. We thought it would be fun to cover the launch at the epicenter of American retail: the Mall of America, which happens to be only a few miles from Technology Evangelist headquarters.
And, why not have a bit more fun with it by bringing Justine from iJustine.tv to town for some co-coverage?
Starting Thursday afternoon (assuming airlines cooperate), I’ll be hanging out in Minneapolis with Justine and a local techie, Aaron Landry. The Aaron Landry that we’ve interviewed before on Technology Evangelist. Aaron happens to be a neighbor of mine, but I met him through conversations on local blogs.
It turns out this Internet thing is a small small world.
At some point around 18 months ago, I mentioned to my wife that I had an “online friend” named Aaron who I thought was originally from Stillwater, Minnesota. It turns out that Aaron and my wife went to high school together a decade ago.
And it turns out that there is an Aaron and Justine connection as well. Justine won a contest on Iminlikewithyou.com held by Aaron where he sent a postcard (yes, the paper kind) to Justine. Justine showed off the card she won in this video.
I’ve never met Justine and I’ve only visited with Aaron in person around four times, including a time when we tested the Twitter scavenger hunt game, Least Dangerous Game. Yet, I’m sure we’ll have fun together since we’ve all had a chance to get to know each other through our blogs, videos, emails, and analog postcards.
If you live in Minneapolis and have time to hang out on Thursday night, send me an email or give me a call. My contact info is on my profile page. Let’s turn a few more online friends into real-world friends then see what this iPhone hype is all about.
There are literally thousands of websites in existence today that allow you to sign up and contribute information. But, how do you decide which sites are worthy of your time?
This comes to mind after noticing tonight that I’ve rated over 400 movies on Netflix, yet not one movie review on Amazon.com. Yet both sites - and many more, such as IMDB - offer rating services for movies. In my case, Netflix was the first site that offered an immediate return on the information I contributed. Plus it has a social network where I can let my friends can see what I’ve rated.
I contribute to Wikipedia articles from time to time when I think I can add some value, but without the immediate return I receive from changes to my Netflix recommendations.
And I post comments on at least 100 unique blogs a month in order to join conversations that interest me. My reward here is making contacts with people online who share similar interests.
How do you decide which sites are worth contributing to? Do you seek an immediate or obvious return on your investment of time and knowledge or is implied reciprocity good enough?
My only hope is that someone finds this post worthy of a response. 
Polycom has been one of the leaders in visual communication technology. Their products can be seen in boardrooms across the World. Howard Lichtman of the Human Productivity Lab, sat down with the President of Polycom, Bob Hagerty to talk about Polycom’s RPX product line.
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After finishing dinner tonight, I hopped on Facebook. I could have just as easily watched some TV shows - on my computer, since I don’t have one of those clunky wall units - but I found myself catching up with my friend’s updates, including relationship status changes, Twitters, groups joined, and party invites.
Once caught up, I turned to the web, where I read a blog post by Brad Feld, who raised an interesting point within a recent post about Facebook:
Last week, I started saying to people “Facebook is a substitute for television.” I don’t think I made this up (I’m sure someone else said it first), but for the last decade many people involved in the Internet have been searching for the pure substitute for TV – what will you spend your online time playing with instead of sitting and passively watching TV. Facebook finally seems to be the tipping point for this.
I absolutely agree with Feld’s point. Personally, Facebook has overtaken TV as my first choice for entertainment at home, since it’s much more interesting to login to Facebook and catch up with friends than it is to passively watch a show. Facebook’s News Feeds allow me to find truly interesting content with only a few clicks. Interesting things that I find myself talking about with my wife and friends later in the day, such as a change in relationship status of one my wife’s brothers today (good news).
At this point, I see college students refreshing Facebook on commercial breaks while watching TV. This puts their attention at around 3:1 in favor of TV. But if you forced them to choose between Facebook and TV I’m sure a large percentage of them would choose their friends (Facebook) over their shows.
As Facebook user’s networks grow, just keeping up with changes becomes a big time commitment. But it’s a commitment people are willing to make since it’s extraordinarily interesting content. Eventually, something has to give, and I think it will be time spent watching commercial TV.
I explained the other day how you can
claim
your Twitter account on Technorati, giving you an easy way to track who’s
linking to your Tweets. It turns out the same thing can be done with your Flickr
account, allowing you to track who’s blogging about your photos.
Here is how you do it.
“Claim
Your Blog” link on the Technorati homepage.
2. Enter your Flickr Photo page (example):
http://flickr.com/photos/edkohler/
3. Choose Post Claim
4. Grab just the URL of the post claim URL and add that to the description of
one of your most recent photos. For example, if it said you should post <a
href=”http://technorati.com/claim/abcdefg” rel=”me”>Technorati
Profile</a>
Just grab the URL: http://technorati.com/claim/abcdefg
and post that to a recent photo’s description on Flickr.
Additional copy can be in the description field too, as long as it doesn’t
interfere with the hyperlink.
5. Once you’ve posted your Flickr photo, finish the confirmation process on
Technorati.
6. You can remove the claim code from the photo once you’re reached the above
confirmation message on Technorati.
I recently sold something on Ebay for $100 that could be purchased for $106.99 on
Amazon. I was surprised by how much it went for. The product I sold was new in
the box, so there was nothing wrong with it, but I expected it to close for
considerably less than $7 less than what someone could buy it for on Amazon. In
fact, if they qualified for free shipping on Amazon, the cost differential would
have been only $2.00.
This made me wonder: how much cheaper would something have to be on Ebay to
justify buying it from a private seller vs. buying directly from a well known
reputable online retailer like Amazon? This isn’t to say that Ebay sellers
aren’t reputable. The site wouldn’t be as successful as it is if they weren’t.
But there is certainly more risk tied into buying something from a relatively
unknown retailer than buying from the biggest retailer on the web.
Put another way, what’s the premium you’d be willing to pay to buy directly from
Amazon over the discount you may be able to find on Amazon.
Another example: The Canon SD800 IS digital camera current costs
$306.48
directly from Amazon. The same camera in new in box condition has been
selling in the
$240
range on Ebay over the past few days. Does the $66 difference justify buying
from a private seller?
In my case, I would have gone with Amazon over myself for a $7 difference on a
$100 purchase, and would have gone with the Ebay seller to save $66.
What is your break point, and how do you justify it?
Did you realize that Twitter is a blog? Yes it is, and if you don’t believe me,
just ask Technorati.
It turns out that you can claim your Twitter blog on Technorati. Why would you
want to do that? Because it makes it easy to track how many blogs are blogging
about things that you’ve Twittered about and who did the blogging.
How do you do it?
“Claim
Your Blog” link on the homepage.
2. Enter your Twitter Username’s URL: http://www.twitter.com/yourusername
3. Choose Post Claim
4. Grab just the URL of the post claim URL and post that as a Twitter tweet.
For example, if it said you should post <a
href=”http://technorati.com/claim/abcdefg” rel=”me”>Technorati
Profile</a>
Just grab http://technorati.com/claim/abcdefg
and post that as a Tweet on Twitter.
You can add additional text after the URL (give it a space) to explain to your
friends what they heck you’re doing.
5. Once you’ve posted your new Tweet, confirm that on Technorati and you’ll be
good to go.
To see an active Technorati claimed Twitter feed,
check
out mine here. And here is
my Twitter
account in case you’re into that sort of thing.
Is it a bad sign when John Battelle, the man who wrote the book on Google, the man who received unprecedented access to all things Google while writing his book, is now saying that he may have reached his, “Google saturation point?”
It’s not that I don’t trust Google, it’s not that I don’t like the applications, it’s that I’m worried they might fall to some ill use, out of the control of the current brand as I’ve come to understand it today. Or perhaps it’s deeper than that - I simply can’t let too much of my online life run through any one control point, regardless of who it is.
At what point does convenience flip over to privacy concerns? Is this simply a case of growing pains as people, like Battelle, transition from desktop to web based computing?
In my opinion, web based computing is here to stay so documents, spreadsheets, presentations, accounting applications, and project management solutions will have to reside with somewhere. Is that’s the case, should they reside with an extraordinarily financially healthy company like Google, or with the next strapped for cash web start-up? Who has more to lose by violating your privacy?
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