Merrily on Our Way

Mossberg Fans the Flames of My iPhone Fears

I just saw the first iPhone review written by Walt Mossberg and he's confirmed what I haven't wanted to think too long about: the iPhone and AT&T. I'm on my third carrier with my cell phone. Sprint: rotten coverage in the Bay area, and really rotten coverage at my house. AT&T/Cingular: Better than Sprint for overall coverage in my locale, but not great and still not great at my house. Now I'm with Verizon: Love their coverage everywhere, even when I travel, and especially at my house. Still not great at my house, but acceptable. Here in my NY hotel, my husband's AT&T phone has 0 to 1 bar. My Verizon phone has a strong 3 bars and works great. My Verizon data plan is also cheaper than my AT&T plan was.

Now, back to Walt:

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won’t come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can’t use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile’s network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T’s coverage is good...

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can’t run on AT&T’s fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

The iPhone compensates by being one of the few smart phones that can also use Wi-Fi wireless networks...

But this Wi-Fi capability doesn’t fully make up for the lack of a fast cellular data capability, because it is impractical to keep joining and dropping short-range Wi-Fi networks while taking a long walk, or riding in a cab through a city.

AT&T is offering special monthly calling plans for the iPhone, all of which include unlimited Internet and email usage. They range from $60 to $220, depending on the number of voice minutes included. In an unusual twist, iPhone buyers won’t choose their plans and activate their phones in the store. Instead, they will do so when they first connect the iPhone to the iTunes software.

That stopped me from even finishing reading the review. I'll go back and read it because I still think the iPhone is awesome. And here in NY, maybe I'll get to see it 3 hours before I might have seen it at home! But AT&T? Hopefully this phone will be such a hit that Verizon will make a deal with Apple. I remain optimistic.

Content Search Moves Beyond Text

I've loved me a site called Podzinger for some time. It was THE way to search for audio content within podcasts--which, as you know, often contain great nuggets of information but are rarely transcribed. Until Podzinger, finding specific phrases within a stack of podcasts was as likely as finding that proverbial needle.

And now Podzinger is even better: They've relaunched as EveryZing to better reflect the fact that they now not only search podcasts for audio content, but also search videos for audio content as well. It works just like a standard search engine, but the text that EveryZing is searching in the background is actually a transcript they've generated with their speech to text technology.

[Product request for the EveryZing guys: please make this speech-to-text tool available. I've been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 to create transcripts and it has lots of shortcomings. I'm ready to switch!]

With video content becoming so commonplace, EveryZing has its timing right. This will be increasingly important as ecommerce expands to video with click-to-buy links embedded. Like the product you're seeing in a YouTube video? Click now to send your PayPal payment. (Yeah, I know that Google owns YouTube and that you're likely to see a Google Checkout implementation of this, but I work for eBay so I'm cheering for PayPal!) Call it a micromercial (did I just coin a new phrase?!): infomercial in a shorter Web-based format with micropayment support.

With their relaunch last week, EveryZing also added channels and other ways to browse content. It's all a pretty nice package.

Transparency is a Snap

You may have noticed that the external links in this blog are followed by little bubbles that sort of look like empty speech bubbles, like this.

I'm using a cool little tool made by Snap.com called Snap Shots. It's an easy way to tell where a link is going to go if you click it. Why waste your time if the destination doesn't look compelling? Or worse yet, why get tricked into going somewhere you didn't want to go? (That wouldn't happen in this blog--I'm just saying...) Hover over the link to see the target destination.

Transparency is becoming increasingly important--especially for ecommerce--and Snap.com is making it easy to do. They have several types of shots, including product shots that I use on my EverythingLincoln.com site. For example, this is a screen shot of my bibliography page, which lists the hundreds of Lincoln books I use when writing something for my site. See something you like? Snap makes it easy to see the product information from Amazon.com, which is something a bit slicker than just being able to show you the Web site. This is a special type of Snap Shot called ProductShot. (Notice also that I can customize the little snap popup by adding my own EverythingLincoln.com logo to the bottom.)

 

Unfortunately, ProductShots only support products on Amazon.com (and not all of them at that). Hopefully they'll expand their product support and show a special version of the Item Description page for an eBay item.

All Right Already! First the Trees, THEN the Forest

The other day I attended a meeting with a consulting company who is in the business of keeping their clients aware of "consumer movements, trends and market facts." They showed some interesting Web sites that highlighted trends toward visualization of products and social shopping. No ah-ha moments, but they seemed grounded at least. And then I asked them to comment on how they thought multi-touch interfaces such as those on iPhone and Surface would affect visualization and social shopping.

Yeah, they were grounded all right. Buried even. Too deep to see the horizon.

Apple, they said, was taking a big chance by having a virtual keyboard on the iPhone. But this consulting company thought that it was a matter of necessity, since "Apple is working with a mobile device that has very limited screen space."

Are you kidding me? This isn't about what Apple is doing or why. It's about how.

To say that Apple's big gamble is the virtual keyboard, as even the NY Times said today, is to say that a phone with a physical keyboard is a sure bet. That must mean that my current phone, which has TWO keyboards/pads, is the cat's meow. Actually, a hyena's laugh is what comes to my mind.

If we must talk about the keyboard tree and totally miss the multi-touch forest, may I please make this request? Dear Steve, if you haven't thought of it already, would you please make the keyboard configurable? I would like to drag the backspace key and the return key to the spot where they make the most sense to me.

This is the phone I lived with for two years. In all that time, I never did get used to the location of the return key and constantly deleted the last character I'd typed every time I meant to start a new paragraph.

Now, I must admit that my jaw dropped upon hearing the response of this trend-watching consulting company, but I did put it back in place to give them a second chance. "So let's move away from a small screen, then. Can you please give me your opinion about the same question as it relates to Surface?"

Did they recover? Hardly. Microsoft, in their opinion, was essentially doing Surface because they could. There was no reason to grab a window with your fingers to resize it when a mouse could do that with no problem.

Maybe I should give them a break because they didn't see the same video I saw when I worked at Microsoft: time after time, users in a usability lab could not double-click. Dragging was a little more of a drag than you'd think. Mousin' ain't all that easy for some folks. But really, even the Times article that started off so poorly had a clue:

"It may teach a new generation of technology users to use their fingers rather than a mouse — a four-decade-old technology — as a pointing and command device."

My big gamble is to go out on a limb (pun intended, try the veal) and claim that most people have a reasonable command of their fingers. I bet they'll do just fine.

Storage is a BIG Deal

Yahoo will give email users unlimited storage later this month, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo says it caught up to Google in the mail storage race a while back, but this is a move to out-Google Google. Rather than a few measley gigabytes of space (which most users don't come close to using), Yahoo is effectively offering infinite space. In a similar move, WSJ reports (subscription required), Microsoft will move to "take storage off the table as an issue" with Hotmail.

Storage actually is a big deal because it affects longevity. For example, my Gmail account has hundreds of messages that are quite old. However, my work account--managed by my company (eBay)--automatically deletes messages older than 90 days because of storage issues. The same is true for eBay the product. I love to keep my watched items on my "My eBay" page because I get to gaze at the cool things I've collected there.

I appreciate things related to Abraham Lincoln, but I don't have to own every one of them. Instead, I set up my own little museum in My eBay. The problem is, the curator of that museum tosses my precious collection at the 90 day mark--again, because of storage space.

Lately, I've taken up the practice of emailing eBay items to myself...at my Gmail account. It takes a little work but, to me, it's worth the effort. I actually think Google likes it, too. Look what happens:

If I use the "email to a friend" link on eBay, eBay sends me a message that looks like this. It's not that compelling. (To be fair, eBay would have shown me a picture had the seller paid for the gallery feature.) In fact, the content of the email is such that it triggers Google to place ads in the sidebar like "Check Spam Blacklists" or, I kid you not, "Get Girls Number." (Note, though, that I have to horizontally scroll to see this since the email that eBay sends is so wide. Then again, I have my monitor rotated 90 degress so that it is taller than it is wide.)

Here's the email I created myself. I copied the relevant part of the seller's description so I'd be able to search on text (I don't care about the other text he includes about how I'm supposed to pay right away and please see his eBay Store). I also copied the item number for the same reason. Then I included a screen shot, which I easily capture with SnagIt.

The interesting part is the unintented consequence--which, of course, Google intended all along. I've inadvertently created a way to shop elsewhere for related items. Because this seller had such a terse description, Google could only tell me about "art prints." (For some reason Google ignored the repeated "Mt Rushmore" phrase.) But had the seller written a better description (which, BTW, would help Google direct buyers to his eBay listing), Google would also be able to scan this email and show higher-quality matches for shopping for related items off of eBay whenever I open this email again.

Bottom line: the storage thing is a bigger deal than it seems.