I started thinking about what a converged device the iPhone is and compiled this impressive list of devices I used to carry that are now replaced by my iPhone.  This is an unprecedented level of convergence if you ask me.  A quick informal tally shows that the iPhone is replacing $2700.00 dollars worth of equipment and several pounds worth of gear.

1) Blackberry – I used to carry a dedicated Blackberry for email in addition to my phone.  Most users will just use their Blackberry as their phone, but I was never really happy with the BB form factor as a phone.  The iPhone serves as both my email retrieval device and phone.

2) Phone – See above.

3) iPod – My iPhone has a built in iPod.  No need for a dedicated device, though in all honesty I usually carry my iPod Touch or Classic with me on travel as well.

4) Nuvi GPS – With built in GPS (and soon turn-by-turn directions) I’ve had no need for a dedicated GPS device.

5) Sirius portable player – I used to carry a Sirius radio portable player on travel for access to commercial free music and talk radio.  With my iPhone I can stream Sirius over 3G or WiFi.  Unfortunately, there is no Howard Stern which may be a deal breaker for some users, but not for me.

6) RSA SecureID – With the RSA application, no need to carry a separate token.

7) eBay/PayPal SecureID – Another iPhone application eliminates the need for either of these devices.

8 ) WiFI SIP phone – My iPhone has a SIP phone client that I use to connect to my SIP provider over WiFi from anywhere in the world.

9)  PSP – I’m happy enough with the iPhone as a gaming platform to leave the PSP at home.

10) Nintendo DS – I gave this to my daughter after buying an iPhone.

11) Digital camera – I wouldn’t want to photograph my cousins wedding with the iPhone camera, but for out and about daily shots it works great.  I can also upload and email photos from the device on the go.

12)  Flip Video Camera – The iPhone 3GS replaces my Flip video camera with a larger capacity, built in editor, and ability to upload my videos to the Internet directly from the device.

13) WiFi signal locator – My iPhone can tell me which signals are nearby.

14) Amazon Kindle – For long trips, I’ll still bring the Kindle, but for day to day and short duration travel, the iPhone Kindle reader works just fine.

15) Police Scanner – Several iPhone applications allow you to listen to local police scanners.  My favorite is WunderRadio.  While you lose the proximity aspect of tuning in what is nearby, most major cities are well covered and can be listened to from the iPhone.

16)  Radio – With Internet streaming of most major radio stations available, there is no need for a separate radio unless you trying to pick up a specific signal.  I’m usually not and there is something glorious about listening to your favorite NYC radio station while in LA

17) Travel Alarm Clock – The iPhone built in alarm capability has you covered.  I don’t even use the alarms in hotel rooms any more.

18)  Portable TV – Honestly, I only carried this on a handful of trips, but with my iPhone and Slingbox application, I can watch TV anywhere I can get a WiFI signal.  In addition, I can watch shows recorded on my DVR at home.

19) Portable Voice Recorder – The iPhones built in application (or any of the dozens for sale in the App store) handle my voice recording needs.

20) Calculator – Until the iPhone I never could use my cell phone’s built in calculator without extreme frustration.

21) Compass – The battery to the digital compass I had attached to my laptop bag died and I just removed the compass and threw it in a drawer.

22)  White noise machine – I don’t personally travel with this device, but we do when traveling with the baby.  With the ambient noise application on my iPhone, we can leave this one at home.

23) USB Key – My iPhone works as a drive to share files wirelessly with my laptop when needed.

Devices that I wish my iPhone could replace:

1) Verizon MiFi – If tethering becomes available at a reasonable price, the MiFi could be left behind.  However, I love the MiFi so much, I’ll probably keep it around for a while.

2) Laptop – For some trips, I’d love to leave the laptop at home.  If I could get a portable bluetooth keyboard that dream would become a reality for short trips.  Unfortunately, the onscreen keyboard is just not sufficient for major tasks or SSH sessions.

Posted on Gridlink Labs.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about Second Life, but this article at Venture Beat sparked some thoughts:

The media narrative about Second Life and virtual worlds is starting to get past the hype stage, past the bashing stage, and is beginning to resemble reality. VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi has covered this shift in a thorough Q&A with parent company Linden Lab’s CEO Mark Kingdon.

Public misperception of Second Life and the virtual world landscape is beginning to change as we see what it means for the evolution a new global culture and economy. (Venture Beat)

Given that we do seem to be moving past the hype stage in SL media coverage and the environment seems to be growing slightly again, I’m curious as to what use cases will be persistent and what sort of communities will solidify in SL.

I still see it as platform for collaboration and expect that we will see additional tools for sharing data and creating 3D reference libraries. When I first posted about SL 3 years ago, I noted that using SL felt like using the first versions of the web. A bit clunky but with lots of potential. I’d still like to see better capabilities in rendering web objects in SL, but my guess is we will see lots of development in that area in the next 18 months.

The music community is also thriving in SL. I’ll admit that the few times I’ve logged on in the past months were simply to stream a live DJ or music performance. There are some really talented people in SL and it is a great platform for discovering new artists.

There still seems to be an active gaming community in SL as well. Games are not my thing, but some of the most active communities revolve around gaming.

Of course, the dark side of SL will also continue to thrive. I look forward to Linden Labs implementing some controls that will allow for searches against places and events to not always littered with promotions for the second life adult community.

Overall,I still think there is a strong role for 3D immersive worlds like Second Life in technological future. I’ve downloaded but not installed Suns new virtual world platform and have watched with interest some of the Windows client only environments. What use cases, if any, do you see for 3D virtual worlds?

I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical about Gov20Camp when I heard that attendance was going to exceed 500 people.  While I am familiar and comfortable with the concept of a bar camp unconference, I just hard a hard time imaging how you organize such a large group.  I was one of the first sponsors of the event and did so with the expectation that 50-100 really smart people would get together and share ideas.   I had a hard time imagining what would happen when amplified by a power of 10x.  I’m happy to say I was wrong and this was a tremendous event.

Given that no agenda was set until the attendees arrived and proposed topics in the open introduction, the event had some incredibly rich content and discussions.  I was reminded of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference circa 1993-94 time frame where you had the right mix of brainpower, passion, and talent to allow big ideas and actions  to emerge.  Organizations like the EFF were just starting to get their legs and a lot of us were trying to figure out exactly what the implications of these emerging technologies were.  We had a lot of ideas and made a lot of predictions and while a lot came true (because we worked to make them true), I think most of the folks from that era would agree that we got a lot of things wrong and a lot of what we got wrong was based on an inherent bias to underestimate the potential that lay before us.  As Bruce Sterling noted a few months ago:

When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't
mean that nothing will change.  It means that things will change in
ways that are unimaginable. - Bruce Sterling

From the sessions I attended yesterday, I think the biggest challenge is not going to be “think different” but rather “think bigger”.  In his closing remarks during the Us Now film panel Mark Drapeau noted that despite being the number 2 trending term on Twitter all day, none of this matters without scale and engagement outside this community of enthusiasts.  This issue of engagement is the biggest challenge that the Gov20 community faces.

In several of the sessions I also noticed a tendency to focus too narrowly and drill down into the weeds on issues that matter to us immediately versus the long-term implications of the issues.  Gov20 privacy is not about how you set up your Twitter profile, it is how you create a construct that facilitates both privacy and participation across the spectrum of social media technologies.  To that same extent, setting up your organization on Twitter does not a social media strategy make.  While I realize that baby steps and technology adoption are important, we need to think bigger.  Everyone at that conference probably agrees that Twitter is a tremendously enabling technology, but the real question is not how we use Twitter, but what does Twitter 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 look like and how do we create strategies and change the dynamics of government to allow for the adoption of current and future enabling technologies?  If you are struggling with Twitter 1.0 implementation now, just Twitter about it on #Gov20Camp and I am sure you will get dozens of volunteers willing to help you out.

I was also incredibly happy to see such strong engagement by State and Local participants at the Camp.  I truly believe that the State/local environment will be the proving ground for a lot of these technologies as they can more easily handle the issues of scale and scope.  Social media volunteers should be looking to help these organizations engage and provide the proving ground for how Gov20 works.  I noticed participants from as far away as King county Washington.  Kudos to them for making the trip and being so thoroughly engaged.

I also hope our technologists and web 2.0 gurus were paying attention to the technology requirements emerging from the many panels.  I noted several opportunities for creating enabling technologies that are needed right now.  For example, a vetted directory of legitimate government users on Twitter was a requirement I heard emerging over and over.   If you want to follow King county, how do you know it is a trusted source and is the real King county?  A trusted directory would be easy to implement and score a home run right now.  A few smart techies pulling all-nighters and a handful of volunteers are all you need.  I’ll buy the pizza and mountain dew!

It will be interesting to see the splinter camps form that will also allow for deep diving on particular issues.  For example, I’ve already signed up to participate in the camp that looks at how technology can be used in emergency situations.    While I imagine that Gov20Camp will continue to be a successful event for years to come, these focused initiatives will also be essential.

Overall, this was an incredibly rewarding event and I am proud to have participated and sponsored it.  I regret I can’t make it to day two, but with three kids and a full Saturday agenda, I would need some family2.0 technologies to make that possible.  Good luck on day 2, I’ll be watching the stream and checking out the live blogging so please step-up and keep them up2date!

These posters starting emerging throughout the conference. I am not sure who was creating them, but they were outstanding. I'm secretly hoping it was our high school student volunteers.

Google Voice is an interesting service and seems to work well. A couple of observations:

1)Voicemail is not forwarded as an attachment via email. Every other service I have tested does that.

2)SMS integration is very nice and is one area where Google is ahead of the curve.

3)Granularity in settings is severely lagging. For example, I can not pick whether to ring my phones in sequence or all at once. I also can’t set it ring a certain number of times. I can not disable voicemail on the service (e.g. to always get the voicemail on my iPhone with Visual Voicemail). All services I’ve become used to.

4)There is only one widget badge to use…take it, leave it, or design your own.

5)Transcription is a nice service, but spotty at best.

6) No ability to port numbers into the service.

7) I’m worried about my number for life changing. This already happened to me once when the service was GrandCentral. I hope Google has a better handle on things.

If you are looking for a neat solution backed by a big player, Google Voice is worth taking a look at. However, if you need an enterprise class or small business solution, I would still recommend FreedomVoice or RingCentral, with RingCentral being my preferred vendor these days.

I’ve been a DirectTV customer for over 6 years paying about $100.00 a month for services. I’ve recently switched to FiOS and called DirectTV to disconnect my account. Imagine my surprise when I was told that:

1) The replacement DVR I bought for $200.00 is considered “leased equipment” that must be returned to them. This is a tremendous rip-off. It was never disclosed to me that I purchasing “leased equipment” at the time and I certainly wouldn’t have paid $200.00 for something that I would not own.

2) When I replaced the DVR, they activated a two year agreement. Keep in mind, I’ve been a customer for 6 years at this point and have NEVER had an agreement with them. They said the agreement was disclosed to me on my next bill after the activation. We use online bill pay so we did not see, nor do I think I would have noticed it on a bill had they sent it (who reads the small print on every bill they get). Also, it is unethical business practices to disclose a new agreement to someone 30 days after the transaction and activation. I can promise you I would not have agreed to a 2 year contract for satellite TV services which I have always purchased on a month to month basis for 6 years.

The end result: I have have to ship them back a box I paid $200.00 for AND I have to pay a $360 cancellation fee. Even when talking to a supervisor I could not get them to budge on this.

I will never be a DirectTV customer. I would warn anyone considering them to stay far away.

UPDATE:  May 8, 2009 – It turns out that Directv never cancelled my service!  I had to call and go through the process and now I have an additional two months of charges to dispute!  This company is a fraud.  I’ve filed a better business bureau complaint.  I would encourage you to as well.

http://www.la.bbb.org/Home.aspx

I’m a big fan of the Kindle1 and decided to splurge for the second generation of the device.  Thus far, I’ve got to say I am happy with my purchase, but here’s my twenty-four hour review.

Software interface – The software interface is significantly improved in a few key areas.  The most drastic change is the fact that the menu can now be navigated via the four way joystick which makes it a bit more intuitive.  I also like the fact that the screen refreshes quicker making the menus a little less cumbersome to work with.

The reading process is the same with faster refreshes and now includes a handy report of how far you are into the book (offered up as a percentage).

I also like the addition of the archive as a way to park my read books in the cloud with the ability to re-download them at any time.  This is a nice way to reduce clutter, but allows you to re-download without visiting the Amazon web site.

Graphics a crisper and noticeably improved

The most significant improvement for me is the fact that periodicals (like newspapers) are only kept for seven days unless your choose to save them.  My biggest gripe with the earlier Kindle ws the fact that papers had to be manual deleted and it was a very labor intensive and time consuming process.  At one point, I was subscribed to the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Mecury News, and Investors Business Daily.  I cancelled them all simply because I got sick on manually managing the content.  Given I submitted a feature request to Amazon on this issue, I am pleased to see it got addressed.

The hardware is sexier and has the coveted “Apple” look.  Honestly, while I like the new look, I think the first Kindle felt better in my hands.  I would not want to use the Kindle2 without some sort of case as it is too slick to comfortably hold.  Also, while the old Next Page button was a pain, I got used to it and got in the habit of locking the screen as I put it away.  The new Next Page button requires just a little too much effort.  I am sure I will get used to it as well, but right now I’d have to admit to liking the old next page button better.  Sure if I handed it to someone, they would advance the page, but how often are you passing your Kindle around unless you are Robert Scoble at a SV party?

As mentioned above, the joystick is a great improvement and I like the addition of a big and easy to locate home button.  I’d have loved to have a dedicated screen lock button, but I am sure I will get in the habit of hitting the power switch to put the device in screensaver mode.

The loss of the SD slot does not concern me.  I never used the old one and with the ability to archive to the Amazon cloud, I don’t think I will ever be concerned about storage space.

The text to speech capability is nice, but I don’t see myself ever using it.  If I wanted to listen to the book, I’d get it on Audible.  I suppose it would do in a pinch and for those times when I don’t want to stop reading, but need to get in the car, but so far I see a very limited use case for it.

All the other features are comparable to what I had with the Kindle 1.  Store still works great, etc.  Not much improvement there, but none was expected.

If your new to the Kindle, this is a great device as far as I am concerned.  If you already have a Kindle, I’m not sure the improvements justify an upgrade.

Saw this interesting list and decided to come up with four additional books to add to it.

The first four SF books you should read if you’re working in social media

My additions:

Eastern Standard Tribe – Cory Doctorow

Great story with a backdrop of feeling connected via what time zone you are online.

Global Frequency – Warren Ellis

What happens with average citizens try to change the world as part of a real-time reactive global network that can handle any challenge. This is a graphic novel, but exceptionally done. You can also find a pilot for the failed TV project if you search in the right places.

Interface – Neal Stephenson
What if our political candidates reacted to our Twitter feeds? I’m Cool enough to have a copy of this published under the name Stephen Bury, the pen name Stephenson originally used until he was outed.

Gridlinked – Neal Asher
Trying to save a civilization with extreme grid withdrawal.

If you enjoy them or have any additional recommendations, comment below.

My favorite independent musician and friend Scott Albert Johnson has given me permission to release this live track on my blog for free.   The track is for sale at Scott’s site along with his debut album which is highly recommended.

Scott is a very talented musician who, along the lines of Jonathan Coultan and Geoff Smith, is working to make his music passion a full-time endeavor.   I’ve written about his debut album here on my blog in the past (Umbrella Man review).  I’m a big fan and happy to hear that Scott is working on a follow-up album (which I’ve already pre-ordered).  I’ve seen Scott perform live a few times in DC and the shows are always excellent.  I love Scott’s original portfolio of songs and I’m a huge fan of his cover of Peter Gabriel’s “I don’t remember”, which exceeds the original on so many levels.  I was pleased to hear from Scott that, based on my feedback, he’ll be including that cover track on his forthcoming album!

Magnolia Road is off Scott’s debut album.  It is not my favorite song on the album but it is a crowd favorite and will give you a good exposure to his vocal and harmonica talents.  If you can find someone that is better on harmonica than Scott (excluding John Popper of Blues Traveller), please let me know!

If you like the track, please go and buy the album.  If you aren’t happy with your purchase, I’ll buy you a drink the next time I see you. If you want to sample a few more tracks visit Scott’s MySpace page.

In the meantime, enjoy your free download of Magnolia Road live:

DOWNLOAD MAGNOLIA ROAD (via Amazon S3)

For some reason, this attack made me laugh. An interesting blending of meatspace and cyberspace.

Hackers in Grand Forks, North Dakota of all places have hit on a clever Trojan Horse: using a fraudulent parking ticket to direct unsuspecting motorists to their virus laden websites.

The scam works like this: You come back to your parked car and there’s a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Everything looks official so you go home, and, being a law abiding citizen you visit the website on the ticket as directed. In order to make sure it was your car, you have to flip through a gallery of evidence and find your car. In order to do this, you have to download a toolbar and that’s how they get you. The toolbar is loaded up with an executable file. When the computer restarts is when the fun begins. Your computer becomes a nightmare of pop-up windows talking about downloadable antivirus software and all hell breaks loose from there. (Jalopnik)