brinking

I've had a love/hate relationship with my Danger Hiptop over the last year. I received it courtesy of some connections in Tmobile roughly a month or so before it hit the streets, so I've just passed my one year anniversary of using it. I have been seriously considering dropping it as a year as come and gone, largely because some of the biggest outstanding issues with the device (no copy/paste, no sync with Outlook) have never been answered by Danger.

Well, since the early adopters are just now rearing up on their one year anniversary and will have a chance to cancel it seems that Danger has gotten its act together (thanks Boing Boing) and is actually going to release a functionality upgrade.

The Hiptop/Sidekick still does some things that are first rate in the business. This is the only device I've found to fulfill the promise of 2.5G GPRS, it will actually stay online continuously. Handspring and Palm claim it, but they log off when you go to a screen saver. It's great to see

InformationWeek: Offshore IT Outsourcing Should Boost U.S. Economy: Deloitte Consulting's Carl Steidtmann argues that U.S. companies that ship IT work to India and other emerging countries will be more competitive, grow faster, and have more money to invest in research and development. I'm fascinated by the transformation the U.S. economy is going through as skilled white collar work gets moved offshore. I'm caught between my normal internationalist notions that a rising tide lifts all boats, and the slight worry that the only jobs in Mr. Steidmann's world for American's are people in Research and Development.

This is also occuring in the retail product industry, which I've gotten to know quite well in building Ambient Devices. Everything being made in China is nothing new, however I'm talking to local industrial design companies that are now competing for actual creative design with these same manufacturers. Can it really only be alarmist fear to worry about the fact that many of the major manufacturing houses that make your Samsung and Motorola phone have branched out into actually designing those phones as well? The millions in America were told to get more education to move up from labor to white colar work, but where does one go above programming or design?

Long ago I stopped being surprised by how good Google really is. And in fact it has been some time since a search or culling technology really seemed to be creating something new. Googlism is cute, but there's got to be something in between the mess of popularity-based listings and the nirvana of the Semantic Web.

So I had a newfound faith in the utility of old data repurposed when I saw CorporateAlumni (thanks Seth). It does a scary good job of making at least a modicum of sense out of millions of press releases and SEC filings out there. What was once a million tiny tidbits is organized into clean, searchable, database material that's actually not half bad. It also got me thinking about the confluence of a tool like this with some of the studies of the social networks of blogging like the visual mapping of LiveJournal relationships. Perhaps we are not too far away from using search technlogy and a little intelligence to infer more complex relationships.

NECs advanced designs (Mobilemag.com): NEC is leaking some of their latest design concepts, which exhibit a clear unified approach to enabling mostly portable technology to record and show media better. The candy is video-capturing bracelets, 360 degree camera-phones, and the like. The most interesting seems to be the idea of building many different dedicated media devices into a set of pen-like gadgets called P-ISM. You have your video projector pen, your virtual keyboard, pen, and your scanner pen. An interesting form factor to use as a launching point for a line of electronic products. I hope those see the light of day, in the meantime enjoy the diversion.

Dean Launches Social Networking Software The Howard Dean campaign will not go down the first to tap into not just using the Internet as a tool, we've had a couple elections under our belt now with mass emailing and the like. But the campaign is certainly the first to really ride the forefront of using the Internet as a medium. Creating a Blog that has become one of the most read on the Internet might have been a fluke, but it's been one hit after another: Blogs, Meetup, eCommerce, and now their own social networking software, DeanLink.

The bare-bones beta just launched, with only some of the functionality some have grown to love at sites like Friendster and LinkedIn, but it certainly has the potential to both galvanize Dean supporters to enlist their friends, and perhaps even raise the stature of social networking to another level of publicity.

If DeanLink does for social networking software what they did for Meetup it could launch the field, already getting quite enough attention, into the mainstream. One interesting thing to watch is whether this phenomena is ultimately going to boil down to one or two hubs for people networks (a'la the hubs of Yahoo), or if this is going to be a decentralized revolution like blogging, discussion board, etc where vertical integrators and toolsets win out.

Friendster and LinkedIn seem to take the hub approach, representing the Left wing ideal of a centralized service managing everything you need. Although I haven't found a generic toolset yet, DeanLink seems to represent a niche-oriented play. Keep an eye on (although Tribe as well, since it seems to be trying to play both sides.