Well it isn’t launch day but I have done it.  I have two black iPhone 3G 16GB phones in hand. Unlike last year, the lines were shorter, with good reason, the wait was much longer.  I would say there were about 100 people in front of me and it took an estimated 4 hours to finally walk out of the store with the phone in hand.  Last year I think there was at least 200-300 people in front of me and the wait was an hour less.  But with that aside, once I got to the store the process was pretty straight forward.  I was able to walk out of the store with a newly activated iPhone, and two unactivated iPhone 1.0s, unlike the ordeal I went through last year.  ;) One thing I though was pretty interesting was the psychology of people, me included, while waiting in line for something you really don’t know if you are going to get.  First we started in the line and an Apple employee came out and said, no more Black 16GB phones.  Then everyone around me in the line...

Mike Arrington said “ voicemail is dead ”, and I used to agree. I hated voicemail forever but it was a reality we had to live with. (I’ve made my suggestions in the past on how to leave good voicemail ). The thing that changed that all for me was voice-to-text voicemail conversion. I couldn't live without SpinVox - it's invaluable for all of the reasons that Paul lays out . (E.g., Corey uses PhoneTag , formerly Simulscribe). Best yet, it's helped me achieve a single inbox with my voicemail and e-mails. Paul highlights an important piece at play here - for most of us, it's a lot faster to consume voicemail after being converted to text. It allows me to process messages quicker, it ties into my existing Outlook workflow, and it allows me to read messages when I couldn’t otherwise (e.g., in a meeting, a loud bar, etc). At the same time, it's often easier and quicker to generate that message. If you’re driving, don’t have a full QWERTY keyboard on your device, or whatever...

There’s been a bit of back and forth on what the best place to start a technology company is these days. The conventional wisdom these days is that the place to start and run a technology company is Silicon Valley. The key reasons put forth to justify this is money, talent, and expertise. If you’re initially choosing where to move and start a company, Silicon Valley seems to be the right choice based on the confluence of these factors – but I would argue that in some cases these advantages are not that strong and there are just as good reasons to start it elsewhere. Money Most of the time when people are talking about money in the context of startups, they’re talking about access to capital, particularly in the early stages of a company. Menlo Park has perhaps the highest concentration of VCs around, at least those focused on technology companies, but for the most part they don’t limit investments based on geography. Sequioa says it is "helpful" if...

An interesting article about the backlash with Google increasing its day care costs ( via Alex ). Two months ago, Google held a series of secret focus groups with employees who have children in Google’s day care facilities. The purpose was to gauge their reaction to the company’s plan to raise the amount it charged for in-house day care by 75 percent. Parents who had been paying $1,425 a month for infant care would see their costs rise to nearly $2,500 — well above the market rate. For parents with toddlers and preschoolers, who were charged less, the price increases were equally eye-popping. Under the new plan, parents with two kids in Google day care would most likely see their annual day care bill grow to more than $57,000 from around $33,000. At the first of the three focus groups, parents wept openly. As word leaked out about the company’s plan, the Google parents began to fight back. They came up with ideas to save money, used the company’s T.G.I.F. sessions — a weekly meeting for...

For the last year or so, I have been using my Laptop to allow me to connect to my server hosted in VM at my home. I had to use port forwarding to forward 3389 to my machine but I was reasonably happy (not thrilled) with the performance over Verizon’s EVDO rev A broadband network. I have been in a constant struggle of wanting a powerful laptop to host the 4-5 virtual machines on the road and portability.  I could go out and get a T61P and load it up with 8GB of RAM.  But, lately I have been thinking that I don’t want to carry my laptop around, I actually am thinking of something like the MSI Wind netbook to satisfy my need for always connected.  The other issue is that I now have an Amazon Kindle and I don’t want to carry anything big around anymore.  The Kindle is a topic for another post. So, enter RDP over HTTPS, sound familiar?  Well it basically uses the RPC over HTTPS that Outlook 2007 uses and tunnels your Terminal Services connection.  Cool right? ...

If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps.

Well it wasn’t meant to be.  But anyway I went and saw Wall-e.  Definitely another great movie from Pixar.  The movie had a wonderful message and did a great job (without any dialog) of getting you to feel for Wall-e and Eve. Unfortunately for a lot of people you either loved it or thought it ranked on the bottom of Pixar’s previous works. Keep up the great work Pixar. Now unfortunately the second part of the day wasn’t meant to be.  No iPhone until July 11th.  Lucky for us AT&T will allow us to get in on some iPhone 3G action at the subsidized price.  However, next year I don’t think that they will be so generous when iPhone 4G comes out. But by then we may have Google’s Android OS on some other smartphone and we will have forgotten how cool Google maps was on the iPhone. Or maybe, a blackberry will port their software to Android and smartphones as we know it will never be the same… Enough wishful thinking…

I've gotten a bad rap over the years as a "gadget guy". Every time something new is released, people have come to expect me to have it. I'm definitely a gadget guy, but I think people often miss why I buy gadgets. Unlike, say, Alex , you'll rarely, if not never, see me buy something new just because it's new. I don't own an iPhone. I'm definitely an early adopter, but only when the new technology enables me to do something I couldn't do before (or makes what I could do before drastically easier). For example, let's walk through my history with music players. I first had a Walkman back in the day. It was great, because I could make my own mixes and run with it. (My favorite version was the yellow Sony Sport one. It even had a sweet strap for running. Kick ass). Then I got a DiscMan. This enabled me to skip to the next song, something that was more tedious with cassettes. It still sucked because I had to carry a whole ton of CDs based on what I was...

Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re not looking for offshore firms or out-of-town developers right now. You can find a more detailed job description here . If you’re interested or know anyone who might be, please contact us.

While obviously a bit of an oversimplification, I think Erik’s drawing really does a great job of capturing the base dynamics of how copyright works ( via Dan ).   Basically, anything in the left circle requires permission; anything in the middle requires justification under the Fair Use test; and anything on the right is allowed by law.