Nook Tablet Variations

We purchased a bunch of Nook Tablets to do some development on today. Something that the developers noticed is that there was a difference between some of the units we received. Specifically, it seems as if one of them has a GB of “Additional Storage Space”. That unit also has a screen that seems brighter and has whiter whites.

I’m not sure what caused the difference, but if you’re in the market for a Nook Tablet, you’re getting shortchanged if you get one without the additional memory and the dimmer screen.

Bonobos Website Is Down

I ran across this error on the Bonobos website.

I like a few things:

• It’s visually striking. It admits error while simultaneously referring to their core business.
• The layout stays close to David Ogilvy’s guidelines on effective advertising
• You can still sign up for their mailing list and take advantage of the offers. They’ve turned their error into an opportunity for you (and Bonobos).

Funky Android

My Android Virtual Device is acting all funky on Oneiric Ocelot.

McAfee and My MacBook

I was given a MacBook at work, and I decided to install Eclipse and the Android SDK to do some investigation around Android Mobile development.

I noticed that I had a 45 second delay in getting a Hello World function to compile and output to standard out. Loading up the Android Emulator tested my patience. I used to have a coworker who was incredibly impatient, and anytime there was a delay in getting a report or data, she would always yell “I can feel myself aging. I’m getting gray hairs just standing here…” or some variant of those phrases. This is exactly how I felt.

It turns out that although Java and Eclipse have a terrible reputation for speed, the actual culprit was the McAfee anti-malware software installed on the MacBook. Specifically, “McAfee on-access scan protects your Mac from threats in real-time.” There is a setting for “Maximum Scan Time” that you can set, the default for me was at 45 seconds. You can reduce that amount to 1 second, but I actually just disabled the virus scanner altogether to save time and prevent gray hairs.

Mobile App Publishing

In the past few months, I have looked at the mobile application space. One particular topic has piqued my interest. Before my research, I held the opinion that the market was a free-for-all, and that small and individual publishers had equal footing with large developers.

This is not completely true. With hundreds of thousands of apps, and with each category reaching saturation, it is necessary to differentiate yourself to get noticed. Sure, adding the appropriate description to your app and putting it in the right category will help, but what about offline marketing? How do you work with similar apps? How do you price your application? Large development houses and content providers have an upper hand when it comes to marketing applications, with their experience and scale.

The mobile app space adopted a familiar organizational structure or pattern. There are a number of app development houses that are branching into publishing services. For example, Bottle Rocket’s Thruster is essentially a publishing agency for mobile gaming apps. Everyone knows that Rovio and Angry Birds wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without teaming with Chillingo.

The business model is crystal clear. You partner with the publisher, they take a cut of the proceeds, and in return they provide marketing and development support. In a market filled with individual developers and authors, this seems to be a natural organization with an attractive value proposition for all participants. The new market resembles the old market.

About Controllers

After CES, I had the lofty ambition of writing about some of the new and cool electronic gadgets that I saw. I never did get that blog post published. There were tons of large, flat panel displays. 3D was a big topic. And there were dozens of tablets.

One meta-theme I interested me was the ever-expanding range of controllers and input methods. In the past few years, we have gone from keyboards and mice to capacitative and resistive touch screens. The popularity of the iPad is proof that touch screens are fantastic for lightweight computing.

There are two other technologies on the horizon that show a lot of promise. First, gestural controllers hold a lot of promise. Like touchscreens, gestural controllers have been around for a long time for musical applications, most notably the Theremin. Xbox Kinect has been a huge success, and already companies and hackers are using the technology to do other things.

Another technology on the upswing is speech recognition and input. Both iOS and Android, the dominant operating systems for smartphones, have rushed to embrace this technology. If you haven’t already tried the Vlingo app for Android, you should. Availability of 3G and 4G data connections makes it easier to put remote processing capacity against the uploaded commands.

Voice control is most useful in a hands-free setting, such as driving a car. It also seems crazy to use body motions to control your computer. However, both of these new technologies are quickly being adapted for laptops and other electronics. Because each controller type has advantages and disadvantages, I believe that the future lies in mixing and matching the controllers. In the same way that a keyboard is paired with a mouse, I would not be surprised to see the touchscreen paired with voice control.

Facebook to Open DC Plans

Facebook opened up its datacenter plans! It’s a really big contribution, and it is sure to change the way that Data Centers are designed. It could also prove to be disruptive for hardware manufacturers in the server space. Gigaom covers a lot of the details.

The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.

Some of the design details seem obvious to me. Unless you are standing in front of a server, the speaker is useless. Also, the beeps can be muffled by the fans and the hundreds of other servers in the vicinity. A visual indicator of server health is far more useful.

This reminds me of the time one of the marketing managers at Novell referred to the telecom closet in a branch office as a datacenter. Even IT geeks sometimes forget the scale at which some large corporations are running at. Minute energy savings, such as the ones found by Facebook, are a nerdy (but green) topic.

Industrial Design Fakeout

One of my coworkers, Peter Teichman, pointed out this interesting industrial design choice. He was disassembling a Zigbee-based home control unit when he noticed something odd.

Zigbee devices have tranceivers so that they can be (mesh) networked. This unit has an antenna on it, but it is smaller than a postage stamp and inside the unit. The plastic antenna is empty and serves no function.

Either there was a component change after the plastics were ordered or they added it to look more radio-like. Either way, this is pretty funny!

Analytics Software

One of my co-workers pointed me to this blog entry about the future of analytics software.

Speedtest Brought To You By DSCI

I was just trying to get a recap on the Bruins game last night, and I was having a hard time getting it to buffer. I am not sure why the NHL’s player doesn’t let the recaps buffer, it would really help when you have a poor connection. Out of curiousity, I went to speedtest.com to figure out how my connection was doing. I was happy to see that my speedtest was brought to me by DSCI! Thanks friends!

Here are the results of the speed test. This has to be the result of the snowstorm, and the countless people stuck indoors working from home and surfing the web. I think our packets are being carried to me by retarded turtles, through rain, sleet and snow.