Cameron's Brain

Google's Calendar almost here?

Des & I were chatting on Skype tonight yet again about "dumping Outlook" and about alternatives. Then I read this news on GeekyInfo:

Google Rumours points out that the widely rumoured Google calendar program could be released soon. Does anyone have any information about the details of this program – what it will do etc?

‘We’ve heard for a while now that Google is prepping a calendar service, possibly to help bolster Gmail. Our friends at Google Addiction have done some WHOIS research and found that GCalendar.com is owned by Data Docket Inc. Not particularly damning until you know that Data Docket appears to be a holding company for Google’s upcoming projects. The company even held the domain GoogleEarth right before the sevice launched. ‘

Read more at google rumours

I've already dumped Outlook's mail client for Gmail. Cal, Contacts and Tasks are the current hold-ups and I'm playing with Time & Chaos as an alternative. But if Google are coming out with something... that could be interesting. A Calender-in-the-sky is what I really want. Something that can synch with my Pocket PC and can show me 5+ concurrent timezones.

Technorati Tags : google, calendar, outlook

iTunes 5 the CPU hog?

Anyone else finding iTunes 5 to be a complete CPU hog when it's downloading podcasts? I happened to be working on my desktop today (I'm usually on the Tablet) when suddenly the machine froze to a halt. I checked Task Manager and found iTunes sucking up 97% CPU! When I alt-tabbed to it, I discovered it was doing downloading podcasts. When I killed it, the CPU slowed back down. I did a quick google but can't find many people complaining about it. Is it just me?

New broadband service in the UK shows

The Guardian has a story on a new broadband service in the UK that shows, yet again, just how far behind Australia is when compared to other countries.

For £24 a month customers of broadband provider Be are being offered a download speed of up to 24 megabits a second, three times that available from closest rivals.

24 British pounds = 56.2642706 Australian dollars.
(Thanks Google Calculator).

I'm currently paying Netspace about $80 a month for 1.5Mb unlimited.

I'd move to the UK.... if it wasn't full of Poms. Maybe it's time I claimed my ancestral territories in Bréifne?

The Search For The Perfect Laptop Bag Continues

Ahhh... the eternal search for the perfect laptop bag is back on! The hunter in me comes out! I must have the ultimate! Nothing less will do!

I bought an expensive wheelie-type bag a couple of years ago when I was doing lots of flying with Microsoft, but it isn't practical on a day-to-day-meetings-in-a-café scenario, which is my life these days. It also isn't great for walking about the streets of NYC, which is what I'll need one for in a couple of weeks.

SO... circa Sept 2005, what is the greatest bag in the world?

Some say... the TIMBUK2 COMMUTE XL.
Some say... the WATERFIELD CARGO.
Some say... eBags FIREWALL LAPTOP BRIEF.
Some say... the MEGAMEDIA BAG.

Hmmm my birthday cometh (OCT 10 in case you were wondering)....

new Google News customizing

I just noticed that there's some new customisable stuff available on Google. You can even add RSS feeds to the news page. That's pretty cool.

Scotti's Record Shops - Buy It, Burn It, Return It

Check out these guys. Scotti's Records in New Jersey. You can buy a CD, take it home, burn it, then return it and get up to 70% of your purchase price back. Smart, very smart.

Two million Aussies on broadband isn't enough

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced yesterday that there are almost 2.2 million Australians on broadband, in other words, about 10% of the population. To put that into a global perspective, as of December 2004, according to the OECD broadband report, ten countries already had >10% broadband penetration. You can bet those numbers have improved in the last six months.

I can remember only a couple of years ago when Telstra were saying Australians didn't WANT broadband. Funny what happens when you are forced to stop anti-competitive practices.

Keep in mind that by 1997, Australia already had a world-class cable infratructure, courtesy of Telstra's attempts to throw money at stopping OPTUS getting a foothold in the marketplace. Why didn't we all have access to that glass eight years ago? My guess would be because Telstra doesn't want you to have broadband. Who knows what you might do with it??! You might start making VOIP calls! Then what would they do?

Telcos might install Skype-blocking technology

TheInquirer.net has an interesting article (which I found, btw, on Memeorandum's tech news site) about the new NetSpective® 2.0 Enterprise Filtering Technology which Verso launched last week. It claims to be able to allow telcos to block VOIP services, so they can stop Skype et al from gobbling up their voice revenues.

"Hey - we don't need to innovate! We can just prevent you from using our pipes and then continue to sit on our fat asses while we rape and pillage the marketplace a little longer."

This kind of competitive response kind of reminds me of a rant that total freaking legend Phil Torrone made back in the glory days of the Engadget podcast. I remember him bemoaning the American capitalist system which, once upon a time, would out-innovate the competition, but is now content to prevent innovation, using their wealth to buy favourable outcomes in court, or in Congress, or by preventing access to their assets.

Of course, they are well within their rights to do so, but history suggests that it's a self-defeating strategy.  You can rarely stop innovation when faced with a genuine demand from the marketplace for the new product or service. You might be able to slow it down some, but the energy you spend slowing it down to protect your existing cash cow is energy you should be spending innovating yourself, even if it means cannibalizing your existing profits in the short term. Of course, the sharemarket won't like it, but as CEO your job should be (in a perfect world) to ensure to long-term success of the business, not just stalling the inevitable until your options vest.

This kind of short-term thinking is what is going to kill the record labels, Hollywood, and many MSM businesses. It's also what's going to kill telcos. I recall our G'DAY WORLD interview with Amy Wohl a couple of months ago. She had just attended a telco industry conference and, when I asked her what their strategy for responding to VOIP was, she basically said "they don't have one".

I guess that's why Verso think they've got themselves a hot product, but I suspect any attempt to prevent these companies doing business will see a round of court cases that could go on forever. A quick injunction to stop the telco installing the Verso product, pending the outcome of a trial, and it's business as usual.

I'm pretty sure Meg Whitman has her legal team preparing the injunction as we speak.

16Gb in your pocket

Can you imagine what you'd do with 16Gb in your pocket? The first PC I ever bought, in 1995, cost me $5000 and had a 100Mb hard drive. Now Samsung are saying they will be launching their 16Gb chip late next year, earlier than expected. Imagine your mobile phone with 16Gb of in-built memory. That's enough for several hours of video. 2 thousand songs. Imagine a tiny, portable video camera that has good definition video which you use to capture the highlights of your day on video, every day. Take it home, dock it, and transfer the video to long-term storage.

Every mobile phone will be a portable media player.

Fairfax Digital vs Murdoch

UPDATE: ok, my bad. FD don't want money for current stories. I'm so used to them asking for money for archived stories that I jumped the gun on this post.... that said, I still prefer News' "no registration' approach. Get me to the content as quickly as possible.

Google News caught my eye this morning with the headline "Al-Qaeda threatens Australia". But when I tried to read the article, I was sent to The Age's website. Of course, they refuse to show me the article without forking over several dollars.

If you find yourself in this situation, I recommend heading over to Rupert Murdoch's NEWS.COM.AU. If you need a MSM fix, Rupe's the man. He has this crazy idea that you should actually be able to READ the news on his site. Whacky concept.

Anyway, here's the link to the story that Al-Qaeda is targetting Melbourne.