Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

I though that shopping for clothes is tough…but picking a new template for a blog seems harder…

I am still not 100% sure about it…still trying to find the right one…

My few readers – any preference/comments?

• The mighty Santa Colomo is behind us and we are looking forward to the next round. I saw the highlights on TV and what impressed me the most were our fans. 15,000 fans in a game like this is a true evidence to the power of this club. I wish I was there.

• Bourne is back. I look forward for his Ultimatum.

• Blog day, initiated by Nir Oren from BlogTV, is coming soon (Aug 31st). Now it’s the time prepare – find five new blogs that you have never read before and share your discoveries with your readers. This great initiative is done in order to give blog readers the opporunity to get to know new blogs they have never read before and to create new waves of traffic in the blogesphere. I prmoise to focus on finding non-webby blogs.

Earlier today Apple released their Q2 ’07 numbers and announced that 270,000 iPhones were sold in the first 30 hours (!). As we approach the one month since the iPhone debut, I thought it would be a good time to post my own personal feedback based on the extensive usage I have had with this great device.

Overall, I am very pleased with my new 8GB iPhone. I find it to be a true next generation mobile multimedia device. The user interface is gorgeous and the operation is brilliant yet extremely intuitive (you should see how my 3.5 years old son zooms in/out or slips between photos).

BTW, the presence of the iPhone in my hands made me think of some the fascinating work I did together with a small group of Israeli geeks on the Galleo mobile-multimedia-communicator in the years 2000-2001 (back then there was no such thing as Blackberry or Trio). Similar to the iPhone, the Galleo was a Unix/Linux operated device with a wide variety of applications including a fully functional web browser (Opera), MP3 player, Camera, Email, Instant Messenger (Jabber) and more. The zooming application though was not as slick as the iPhone’s…anyway, enough with the nostalgia and back to the review.

As I use the iPhone I try to take notes (using the built in Notes application of course) of any missing/broken/limited feature I come across. Here?s the current state of that list. Hopefully someone at Apple will read this post and add the items below to their product roadmap:

• Phone
  • Voice-activated dialing (even my old Nokia 6102i supports this)
  • Ring tones & Video tones – turn the first 5-30 seconds of an MP3 file to a ring tone, turn recorded video clip (see Video below) to a video tone
  • Call log
    • Delete selected numbers from call logs (missed, made, received). The current functionality lets me delete all the records at once. This is too aggressive
    • Improve call time resolution. Currently calls made/received/missed get a week day resolution if they happened prior to today (Yesterday, Sunday, Friday, Thursday?). Only today?s calls show the exact time. So for example, if someone calls me at 10pm I will see ?Yesterday? if I look at the call look after midnight
    • Missed calls are colored in Red but there is no visual indicator to differentiate between calls made and received
• Contacts ? Add keyword search (with RAT – Refine As you Type)
• Camera ? Digital zoom, night mode, size & quality options
• Video- Capture video clips, make video conference calls if/when on a fast connection (Wi-Fi)
• Keyboard ? Improve the predictive text application (Apple should take a look at T9)
• Spell checker? Add to applications like SMS, email & notes
• Clipboard ? Add Copy, Cut and Paste capabilities (at least for text)
• MS Exchange support
  • Contacts and Calendar sync
  • Inbox sync – It?s a real waist of time to delete emails twice ? first on the iPhone and then on Outlook. Unfortunately, I have been doing that a lot lately
  • Push mail – Currently I have my iPhone set to auto-check every 15 minutes and this wastes the battery. Pushing mail only when there is a new message will help preserve the battery
• Photos
  • Create photo albums
  • Select multiple photos and email then together
• Games – Imagine playing Snake using your fingers
• Maps
  • Voice recognition & Text to speech – Both are key features to improve safety while driving. This functionality is pretty standard in GPS systems built into cars. I should be able to instruct the iPhone for new destinations. I should also be able to hear the directions instead of pressing on the little arrows that appear at the top of the Maps application and trying to read the little text
  • Add Highways/Avoid Highways modes
  • Add GPS – use Multilateration to estimate phone location based on signals received from cell towers
• Instant messaging? Web based IM applications such as eBuddy or Beejive developed special versions for the iPhone form factor and I would rate their experience as less than OK. However, it is essential to have a native Jabber/Trillian type of application fully integrated with other applications like Contacts, ring tones, camera and more. This way I could be constantly online even when my iPhone is in standby mode
• Hebrew support? This is one of the most critical problem for me. I read a lot of websites in Hebrew, I receive emails written in Hebrew and have a large library of songs with Hebrew ID3 tags. iPhone’s lack of Hebrew support prevents me from reading those websites and emails and forces me to go back to my PC to do that. Also, I can not imaging editing ID3 tags for my entire Hebrew iTunes library just to get them onto my iPhone (for my iPod I solved this using iPodHeb but they do not support iPhones). This is a real pain!

And the last one,

• Configuration via PC ? The activation process Apple & AT&T came up with is a true revolution from my perspective. It completely changes the way people buy and activate cell phones. When I bought my pervious Cingular phone over 3 years ago, I spent over an hour at the store filling paperwork, waiting for the sales rep to call the support center to activate my number and more. Getting the iPhone to work took me less than 10 minutes (3 minutes buying the device at the Apple store and another 5 minutes in front of my PC going through the simple activation wizard). Now, if iTunes is the place to setup, activate & synchronize the iPhone, why not make it also the place to configure it? After all, it would be much easier to configure email accounts or type Wi-Fi networks password using a regular keyboard…

That’s all for now, I will keep taking notes as I use the iPhone.

I will end with a good news and a bad one. The bad news ? there is no software update yet. The good news ? all of the above (and more) can be fixed via a software update. I look forward to it.

I received today an invitation to join Jaiku from Jason. Considering Twitter’s latest outages I though I’d give a try despite the pain in setting up a new online-mobile friends’ network. So, I began the sign up process & immediately liked it:

• First, Jaiku comes out of Finland, a pioneer in mobile technologies and services and the homeland of Nokia, my favorite handset manufacture
• The UI of the signup process is very clean and minimalist
• Super simple account setup process built as a 3 step wizard

But then I received the txt message with the activation code and was surprised to see that it came from the number 011467374940501. I then realized that Jaiku currently offers a short code that works only in Finland (17273). Users from all other countries would have to use an international SMS number (cost would be about $0.20 per message). To me this is a major adoption barrier. True, Jaiku offers a J2ME version for Nokia Series 60 phones that uses data plans and not SMS, but how many users have these types of phones?
Beyond the signup process, the Jaiku web site has a few neat features and overall I find the Jaiku product offering much more complete than Twitter. Two things that I like most:

• The ability to add different feeds (RSS feed of your blog, flickr page, video, bookmarks and more) under you account. Once you do that your contacts will automatically receive notification whenever a new item is being posted to any of those feeds, meaning that activity level on the site compared to Twitter is much higher. This feature could get improved if Jaiku would integrate with TinyURL to automatically convert long URLS of any of these feeds to TinyURL ones and send those out. When they will do that this would turn from a good feature to a killer one.
• The power of Previews – being able to preview the latest message sent by people just by rolling over their thumbnail. Did someone say Snap Shots!

Bottom line - A good looking product with some strong features but a pricey way to broadcast status from mobile & no built-in ability to use an IM client to broadcast status (to do that I would have to use a 3rd party product like Anothr or IMified).

Until Jaiku would offer a US short code I do not see this becoming my main status notification service (and probably this would prevent them from becoming a serious competitor to Twitter in the north-american market), which means I would still have to keep seeing the cat making thingz better.

Or maybe I should use both and monitor them together using Twitku.

I will be there tonight between 7pm-midnight. Snap will be presenting and giving out schwags.

http://www.twiistup.com

What seems to be THE fastest growing services in the history of the internet is now (only) one of the fastest growing services.

Another source posted a very interesting graph with # of daily Twitter messages. I wonder if these numbers are accurate, and if so what led to yesterday’s spike? I have a feeling it is related to Paris (option A, option B)

1:47 A.M.
Jack trains his gun when Nadia and the agents enter. He demands a guarantee that Audrey will be safe. Suddenly, Audrey mumbles the word “Bloomfield.” Jack explains that she’s answering where she was held. Dr. Bradley tells Nadia that the word could mean nothing. (24, Episode Guide: 1:00 – 2:00 AM)

I never imagined Bloomfield will break into prime time TV in the US, a country where Baseball is religion and Football is a game played using the hands. The creators of 24 picked a fine place for the last 3 episods.

If you want to experience the real thing you’d have to visit Tel Aviv on a Saturday night, when Maccabi plays. Make sure you sit in gate 11 or 13. 

Till then, Go Jack!

You could spend over $25K on a Prius or change your home’s lights to Energy Saving Light Bulbs for a few hundreds $. But if you are looking for a free energy saver try out CO2 Saver, a lightweight program that makes it super easy to reduce electricity usage and to save on your electricity and cooling biils.

When your computer is idle CO2 Saver gets into action. It turns off the display, the hard-disk and the CPU. The less electricity produced, the fewer harmful emissions and greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) are released into the atmosphere.

One neat feature is the ability to see how much CO2 you’ve saved since installed (I will post from time to time updated stats), and how much everyone saved. If you are part of a ‘green group’ and using a group version (like Earth911 or Oceana) you will see how much CO2 was saved by all group’s members.

Organizations who would like to create a custom version should contact Snap and ask for one.

Check it out.

Ideacodes (Emily Chang) released a new project called Twitterverse. It lets you explore what people twitter about in a time frame (1, 5, 10, 24 hours) and display a tag cloud of the most interesting words. Once you see the list you could zoom in and see the full context inside the messages and the members who sent them.

Twitter is an amazing social phenomenon. It is also a business that I can not really figure out (how are they planning to make money if they have to buy huge amounts of bulk text messages?).

I find the Twitterverse mashup interesting as it provides a unique point of view on the lives of those who use the service especially on thier language:

• Vocabulary is fairly limited. Only 1049 words were used by the community in the last 24 hours. One caveat – not all words sent are added to the index.
• “Twitter”, “Going” and “Work” were the most popular in the last 24 hours. Does it mean people twitter a lot when they are going to work?!
• Twitter is more than just a site/product/brand. It is at the point that it turned to a verb (embody verb potential) and have spawned words like: tweet, tweets, twit, twitter, twittering, twitterrific, twitters, twittervision

I am sure one day someone will make this the topic of his Linguistic thesis.

The tag line says it all…