"I am, I am... Superman, and I can do anything... Superhuman software"
You all remember the great R5 ads, right? That multi-million dollar campaign back in 1999/2000 that we all regard as the heyday of Lotus marketing? (If you don't, check the ad here.)
Well, what did I come across as a full page ad in the Telegraph yesterday?
Any ideas? I'll give you a clue, it's a technology company... Click through to find out.
That's right folks an anonymous tipster has sent us shots of the highly anticipated BlackBerry Thunder. The Thunder also known as BlackBerry 9500 will feature a huge 360x480 touch display and will apparently run on OS 4.7. This device will be a great multimedia player and could bring CDMA carriers true iPhone competition. The Thunder will run a carrier music store which similar to the iPhone's iTunes store and will allow users to purchase songs from their device. The display on the Thunder most likely will be a glass surface similar to the iPhone.
I so want an iPhone 3G, but can't have one for a couple of reasons - first, cos' I really couldn't give up my Blackberry for email purposes, and secondly, I wouldn't touch O2 (the chosen iPhone carrier here in the UK) with a very long barge pole. This might just provide a very nice alternative - at least if Blackberry sort out their Mac syncing issues.
Decided to test the waters with our new product. As we found the Lotus Foundation Micro2 server not really practical for my clients, we decided to up the ante.
What if that micro2 was a little bigger, and had 2 drives, 4gb of RAM or more and a really fast processor? You could load Lotus Foundations, Linux, Windows or whatever else you want on it too! And it was preloaded with Domino with Sametime or Quickr or ... What if you could pick it up and take it ANYWHERE, ANYTIME? And what if it came in Yellow?
Now, this is a great idea, Keith, and one that I can see being very very popular. Nice one!
I'm sure most of you will be aware that I'm a bit of a Twitter nut these days, and am always on the lookout for good new folks to follow. Most of the time I find them via other contacts' replies, or else using some of the recommendation engines that are out there, but there is definitely a place for a new tool or two.
STOP DOING whatever you are doing and WATCH. I MEAN IT
I don't normally listen when folks tell me "you MUST watch this!", especially on YouTube, but this is well worth spending at least 10 minutes of your time to watch.
25 June 2008 at 06:35:55 by Stuart McIntyre | Comments [1] | Tags: energy
Yes, yet again, the BBC tears defeat from the jaws of victory...
Wimbledon 2008 (starting today) is offering full live online video coverage via their "(IBM hosted/managed)Wimbledon Live" site, and at the good value of 12.90GBP ($24.99) for the two weeks:
Wimbledon Live Video Service Information
Wimbledon LIVE Watch live action from Wimbledon 2008 on your PC with Wimbledon LIVE - a online subscription service offering unprecedented video coverage of The Championships.
High-Quality Live Streaming Video Watch live coverage of all matches from Centre Court and No.1 Court and up to six other courts throughout the Wimbledon Fortnight.
Video On Demand Library If you miss a match, you can download or watch it online later. We'll be recording every point, game and set we show live to our Video On Demand area. Choose the matches you want to see, when you want to see them.
Classic Wimbledon Moments For the 2008 Wimbledon Live service we have expanded our classic area. Re-live all the best historic moments!
Sounds good, doesn't it? And it's avaialable pretty much globally. Only, the following small print might just get in the way:
# Windows OS: 2000, XP (Preferred) or Vista - Unfortunately Apple Macintosh and Linux is NOT supported. This is due to the digital rights management and sharing technology used. # Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher with cookies enabled (default setting) and security settings set to "medium" # Windows Media Player 10 or 11
Yup, delivered via Windows Media to MS platform only. And I'd thought they'd learnt their lesson after the iPlayer debacle. Shame on you, BBC...
23 June 2008 at 12:35:10 by Stuart McIntyre | Comments [1] | Tags: wimbledon
You may remember that I raised an issue earlier this week regarding Connections 2.0 compatibility with the newly launched Firefox 3.0 and Flock 2.0 beta browsers, effectively causing the Home Page and Profiles modules to stop rendering. At the same time as posting the entry, I also emailed a number of members of the Connections team in IBM to make sure they were aware.
To their credit, the response was instant, with several comments on the blog post, plus a number of IMs, tweets and emails to discuss the problem. Adrian Spender has now responded formally on the Synch.rono.us blog:
Hopefully many of you are now exploring the features and capabilities of the newly released Lotus Connections 2.0. We are very proud of it and we think you'll like it too.
I suspect many of you are also enjoying the newly released Firefox 3 browser. I know I am. I have been very impressed with the speed of the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine in particular (I'm not so sure about the way it handles self-signed certificates though.)
Those of you at the bleeding edge have probably tried running Connections 2.0 in Firefox 3. If you have you may well have noticed that there are some problems, particularly with the new Home Page and when viewing people's profiles. In fact that is putting it mildly - Home Page in particular just won't render much of its content.
He goes on to admit that:
Yes, we knew about this before the product shipped.
and>So, guilty as charged. The good news however is that there will be an ifix to resolve this particular issue in the very near future. What we cannot promise is that every aspect of Connections 2.0 will work seamlessly on Firefox 3, because at the end of the day it hasn't had the level of testing we give the supported browsers. After all, we did actually ship before they did!So, on the positive, IBM have reacted very quickly this week, and are promising an ifix "in the very near future". Well done guys.
So what about the "we knew about this before the product shipped"... I personally hope that this relatively minor issue may have changed a few attitudes in IBM. In my opinion, it is no longer acceptable for this kind of problem to be kept quiet within the IBM walls, particularly when it relates to Web2.0 software such as Connections. This isn't a product that will sit entirely within a carefully managed customer network, with 100% locked down PCs running a set build of Windows XP Service Pack 2 with mandatory IE7 browsers - it will be accessed by users from home, on mobile devices, on hotel internet kiosks and far more places besides. It is a different ball game now.
As Adrian points out in his post, IBM has made great strides with their support for the other browsers (Firefox, Flock Safari etc.) and platforms including Linux and Mac OS X. However, sites such as Facebook, Del.icio.us, Wikia and Linked In aren't in a position to solely support a small number of browser devices, they must be continually on the lookout for the next one on the horizon and be dealing with whatever issues arise. More important than that however, is that sites like these look to be open to their users in identifying problems before they become an issue, informing them via blogs etc. and then fixing them ASAP. In short, they need to be one step ahead the whole time.
I don't think we can reasonably ask IBM to support every browser or platform that is out there, much less every new release and/or beta from the day they are available, and I'm not targeting the Connections team with this - I think that it relates to all the Lotus products and many more IBM SWG products besides. However, we can ask that they tell us as soon as they know of a problem (in this case as soon as they downloaded and used the first FF3 betas), and forewarn us of the likelyhood of issues that can be avoided or workarounds that can be used - in this case suggesting that regular users of Greenhouse, www-949 or internal Connections deployments hold off upgrading to FF3. This is the era of the collaborative vendor/partner/customer relationship, and we need IBM to lead the way.
1) To all those who hear that we home-educate (not 'home-school' - why ever would we want to replicate school at home!), and ask how we're qualified to do such a thing:
I just wish these folks would stop and think about what is REALLY bothering them, what their concerns really are. Usually, their objections are based on assumptions they have never seriously analyzed.
Like this one. If I had a nickel for every time someone has said to me, But youre not a scientist. How are you going to teach them biology, chemistry, trigonometry? I could pay my mortgage and have change left over. I always answer, quite seriously, Well, I took those classes in high school. Didnt you?
Of course, the skeptic will say, but its not like I REMEMBER any of it.
This cracks me up. Sometimes Ill say, if Im feeling snarky, Then surely I can do a better job than your teacher did!
2) Sometimes in the Lotus community we get a little introspective, and think how big we've got, how many readers we have, and how, like, "everyone who uses Notes must know about all these great blogs out there!" Well, sad to say that just isn't the case, and I know others have realised that and are taking steps to change this perception.
Well this brought it home to me... My wife is an avid reader of blogs herself, typically of "Moms" that home-educate or else just have interesting things to say on topics that she finds relevant. Well, you should see these blogs published by supposedly non-IT folks, using beautiful blog templates, clever widgets and web elements, and with huge readerships. Take this one, Rocks in My Dryer. It looks great, has super content, and oh boy, gets huge numbers of readers and comments.
For comparison, what's the most comments you've ever seen on a Lotus blog? 100, 120 maybe? Probably on Ed's or Nathan's blog? Well Rocks in My Dryer gets an average of 100 comments, and has been known to get more than 1000. And this isn't unusual for this kind of blog. They are hugely popular and really engage their audience even if you and I might find the topic of conversation a little... mundane?
So, as John and others have been suggesting... I think we need to all step it up a bit. How do we get our blogs up to that kind of readership and engagement by those out side the 'clique' we live and work in?
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