Category: Web/Tech

Road Trip and how I will use Twitter

Duke and I are leaving Sunday for a three week road trip through Idaho, Yellowstone, Bismarck, North Dakota, Manitoba, Ontario, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Manchester, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado. I'll be blogging while I'm gone but I will also be using my phone to post regular updates to Twitter.

For those who have never heard of Twitter, Twitter.com is a service that lets you post 140 character updates about what you are doing. I haven't found it all that useful because none of my friends use it.

One thing I have found nice is that I can have my Twitter updates show up on the right side of my blog.  So even when I don't have time to write a blog post I can do a quick Twitter update and then people who read my blog will know what I am up to. Plus I can update Twitter via a text message from my phone.

Another nice thing is that I can follow the Reno Gazette Journal on Twitter and be aware of what is happening in Reno while I am gone.

Anyway the bottom line is that if you are interested in where we are on our trip just watch the top right hand corner of this blog.

The Future of Computing

Digital Rules by Rich Karlgaard is almost always thought provoking. Recently he pointed to a fascinating article by George Gilder titled The Information Factories.  Gilder talks about how  we are moving towards massive centralized computing and what this means in terms of power consumption and  computer design. He estimates that "the total of electricity consumed by major search engines in 2006 approaches 5 gigawatts…..   Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area… on the hottest day of the year."   

Gilder who is known as a futurist says that "For the moment, at least, the power of massive parallelism has far outstripped the promise of alternative computing architectures" but he anticipates that just as centralized computing gave way to the PC revolution the pendulum will swing again. New technologies and the next wave of innovation "will compress today’s parallel solutions…. and transform the calculus of storage, bandwidth, and power that gives centralization its current advantage."

I think it is prescient that when he is talking about the future of computing he  quotes Andy Bechtolsheim who is one of Sun’s founders and is currently Sun’s Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Network Systems. I predict and, in fact, hope that Sun will manage to lead the way into this new future.

Shopping for a New Computer

Since my Compaq desktop computer died several months ago I have been using my work laptop as my home computer too. But now that I only have 6 more days of work left before I retire 🙂 I need to buy a new home computer. Since I am planning to do a lot of traveling and blogging as I travel I want to buy a laptop. I already have a good monitor and keyboard for home use. I am just starting the shopping/ research process. I would be very interested in any suggestions or advice that people might have about what to buy and how to buy it.

PDAs

A few weeks ago I took the time management class that Intuit offers. My main reason for taking the class was to improve my effectiveness using Outlook. Before I started at Intuit I had never used Outlook. I came out of the class with a great Outlook based system. It allows me to focus on what I need to do as opposed to letting my email manage me.

Anyway the purpose of this post is not to talk about Outlook or time management. The class got me interested in using a PDA again.  I had a couple of Palm Pilots a few years ago buy syncing them on  a Sun system was a difficult exercise and after I lost all my data a couple of times and then had the last one stolen out of the office where I was charging it I decided to go back to a paper based system. Currently I carry an address book, a calendar and a little Moleskine notebook in my purse. I like how easy it is to access them. The class made me think I’d like to have everything synced up and current in one place, especially my to do list.  So I thought I would take advantage of the fact that I am due for a new phone. I had decided to buy an integrated phone / PDA. A guy in the class said he liked his Palm PC.  And I have some Christmas money to spend.

I went to the Verizon store a couple of weeks ago and found out that they won’t sell you a integrated phone / PDA unless you subscribe to wireless Internet. I have a personal aversion to monthly fees. I already pay monthly fees for for cable TV, DSL,  telephone, cell phone,  utilities, and home owners dues. Why would I want to pay another $60 per month ($60 per month at 8% interest over 10 years comes to $10,976) for wireless Internet). I’m sure it is nice to have but I’m not convinced it is worth it.

So the question is… and I would love your input. Do I stay with the paper based system? Or do I buy a new PDA without the cell phone and wireless Internet? If I do get a PDA what kind should I get?

Zipingo

It is bugging me that I can’t remember who first articulated the relationship between the number of participants in a community like ebay and its usefulness. The bottom line is that the bigger the community the more valuable the service. I know I have read this somewhere and it is one of the basic tenets of the Internet economics. As the number of people who use the  Internet increases so does the rate of attachment because the Internet becomes more and more useful. I can’t even figure  out how to Google this to find what I am looking for. If someone can point me to a link I’d appreciate it.
I remember that the principal was described much more clearly than I am describing it.

UPDATE: Thanks to  atthecrux for answering my question. The law I am looking for is Metcalfe’s Law , aka the "network effect".

But that is not exactly what I want to talk about here.  The purpose of this posting is to talk about Zipingo.com. It is a new service that Intuit has launched into beta test this week.  We are building a database of business ratings. The site describes itself as the "yellow pages with ratings."  Obviously a site like this isn’t useful unless what you are interested in has been rated. So for now we are trying to get a lot of ratings. By the way I am not working on this project at Intuit. When I say we I am saying we as in Intuit.  Anyway Zipingo is only going to be really useful when it has millions of ratings so Intuit has added a link to Zipingo from Quicken 2006 and a link from Quickbooks. This should make it really easy for people to rate their transactions. It is also really easy to rate a business or your optometrist or your chiropractor from the site itself. Give it at try! I am really enjoying watching the growth of the number of rankings on the site. I’ve done 27 so far and the number this week is up to  41,777. It will be fascinating to me to see how it grows.