Is There a Sub-Subnotebook in Your Future?, NYTimes, 12/1992 :)

Dell's tiny-footprint Netbooks seem to be selling nicely... This, despite concerns as to whether a full set of traditional corporate standard software (including anti-virus, anti-malware etc.) can run and be managed efficiently on a relatively modestly powered machine. Some say the Netbook's success to date, is partially due to the current economic situation ( see for example, CNet's "Faltering economy boosting Netbooks" ). Hopefully for Dell, the success of the Netbook will continue regardless of the economy.

In case there was any doubt however, this is definitely not the first attempt at making a popular "Sub-Subnotebook"... One example was written up nicely by Peter H. Lewis of the New York Times in December of 1992:

Is There a Sub-Subnotebook in Your Future?:

"... Taking advantage of recent advances in miniaturization, computer makers are creating portable computation and communications devices that can easily be carried in one hand or tucked into a coat pocket. But at some point the usefulness of small systems comes into question: Most information is still entered by typing, and no one has yet managed to miniaturize executive fingers.

That hasn't stopped some companies... from creating personal computers that are about the size of a calculator..."

Official Gmail Blog: Tasks Continue to Evolve ( + iPhone demo)

An interesting update to Google's Tasks, focusing helpful improvements to mobile access*: Official Gmail Blog: Tasks: Paper vs. iPhone

A major step was already announced on the Official Gmail Blog in December , which explained the simple and intuitive capability to copy a Gmail message to a Task .

Still apparently not mentioned, are the wishlist features I had suggested last year, namely:

Will Google Labs provide something analogous to Microsoft Office Tasks, including workflow, assignment, tracking, prioritizing, alerting etc.

?

In any case, it is nice to see Google working on the Tasks mobile interfaces, which are clearly critical for making it easy for users to ensure their Tasks are kept up to date. Easy maintenance of one's "todo list" of activities and tasks is a basic concept of the GTD philosophy (see e.g. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ).

**at least for iPhone and Android, though apparently not with the same full Task edit capability for other "xhtml-enabled" devices such as Windows Mobile... Here is Google's 46-second YouTube demo of the new iPhone Task interface, courtesy of the aforementioned Official Gmail Blog:

New Gmail Labs Offline Feature: How will it handle collisions?

Excellent, great to see the Gmail labs have added the offline capability via Google Gears:

Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Offline Gmail

Now it will be interesting to see how this mechanism will handle "collisions": e.g.

Suppose while working offline on computer A, I tag a particular gmail message with tag X, and then (before going back online from that computer A), I inadvertently access the same message from computer B [or perhaps SmartPhone B using mobile gmail] while online, and tag it with tag Y:

Will the Gears-based synchronization interactively detect the discrepancy (data "collision") when I go online again from computer A, and offer me the choice to accept either tag X or tag Y?

Or will it silently choose tag X or Y (and if so, which?)

Does IT really serve *internal* customers? [David Wright via Better Projects]

Thanks to http://www.betterprojects.net/2009/01/serving-your-customers.html for this excellent quote, a new approach to an old question:

"Don't buy into... that IT is a business within a business serving internal customers. There are no internal customers... Everyone within the enterprise is a part of a team that should be working together to satisfy customers and stay in business."

-- as explained by David Wright, in his book "Cascade: Better practices for effective delivery of information systems in a multi project environment"

Implementing Business Process Management: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

A nice common-sense summary of 5 factors, one or more of which "almost always" causes "failure to achieve results after attempting to implement a business process management (BPM) initiative":

Implementing Business Process Management: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

My favorite (and the factor which I have noticed most often is the true culprit when these types of process improvement initiatives fail), is the last of the 5 items:

"5. Either shortchanging, or entirely skipping, the all-important task of documenting and analyzing the AS-IS process before designing the TO-BE process. I touched upon this in Reason No. 1, but it deserves its own bullet, because most enterprises have never fully documented their current processes. Typically, many things are done on a daily basis simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done. But without capturing and understanding the “why” for each of these, you are flying blind in determining what your future processes should look like. And take due caution regarding your new path: Often, as we fix one problem, we create another. Even if you’re clear on where you want to go, you need to know where you are to determine the best route."

Why BlackBerry users will love the Storm (and iPhone users won't) - DVICE

A common-sense and informative summary of what to expect (and not to expect) from RIM's new Storm blackberry device [available in US, but still a ways off in Canada].

DVICE: Why BlackBerry users will love the Storm (and iPhone users won't)

"We've had a couple of days to play with the BlackBerry Storm, Research in Motion's answer to the iPhone. It's the first all-touchscreen, no-keyboard BlackBerry. And let's be clear: It's no iPhone. Its web browser is slow, and you can't pinch to zoom (as with the T-Mobile G1, the Storm doesn't have multi-touch). It doesn't work with Macs (though it does have an application that lets it talk to iTunes for non-DRM songs on PCs). And though it may have some great games to download when its app store opens sometime in the future, it doesn't strike us as the kind of device that you'll use to drink an iBeer.

But that doesn't mean this phone won't be a huge success. The now-cliched term "crackberry" got coined for a reason, and we've found the BlackBerry Storm to be just as addictive as RIM intended. <...> within months, this phone will be in the pocket of every lawyer in the country.

It's All About Typing

iPhones are hard to type on. They just are. That's why the first Android phone has a slide-out, Sidekick-style keypad. Instead imitating a Sidekick or having a haptic feedback (that's when a touchscreen vibrates back at you when you press it), RIM has done one better: The BlackBerry Storm's entire touch screen is a button. It feels just like the mouse button on any laptop

If you're used to a BlackBerry already, the typing experience on the Storm is the closeSt you'll get to having a keypad with real buttons on a touchscreen phone.

Why would BlackBerry addicts want to give up buttons for a touchscreen typing system that is almost, but not quite as good? The trade-off is for the big, beautiful screen that you get when you're not using the keypad. It's far better for reading emails, using GPS or playing BrickBreaker than any BlackBerry that's come before

If you've used a BlackBerry before, you'll get the Storm's menus, symbols and buttons immediately.

Instead of comparing the Storm to the iPhone and whining grumpilly about the Storm's lack of multi-touch, consumers will compare it to other BlackBerries. And when they do, they may find that they like what they see: A big, fun to use touchscreen, a 3.2MP camera that takes video and has a bright flash, a respectable Web browser and a typing system that really works."

The Numerati by Stephen Baker + Google Tracking flu trends etc.

Interesting timing... The ambitious (and potentially life-saving) Google.org new initiative to help track flu as per Official Google Blog: Tracking flu trends has been announced within all of about 9 days after the New York Times Book Review covered The Numerati by Stephen Baker .

Seems the google Flu Tracking project fits right in to The Numerati's concepts, but in a much more altruistic way... Here is an excerpt from the aforementioned NYT review by Rob Walker:


'...the most interesting information comes from us, particularly by way of our online activities. Baker’s savants monitor our collective (if anonymous) Web surfing patterns for “behavioral clues” that, for example, help advertisers decide when to hit us with what pitch.

You probably already have a sense that this sort of thing is going on, but Baker uncovers some surprising details. A chapter on efforts to convert the information disclosed by bloggers and users of social networks is among the most interesting. Baker offers an anecdote about a firm called Umbria helping a cellphone company that’s decided to charge more for Bluetooth data connections, a move that “sent bloggers into a fury.” Umbria, which studies bloggers and divides them into tribes, concluded that all the spleen-venting was coming from the “power users,” whereas “the fashionistas, the music lovers, the cheapskates” did not care. “With this intelligence,” Baker writes, the company could placate the power users by offering them “free” service (while raising the prices on headsets) and “continue charging everyone else.” He goes on to describe Umbria’s efforts to teach its computers to interpret blogs and draw conclusions from different phrases, font choices, background colors and even emoticons.

On one level, this is just the low comedy of the profit motive: our finest techno-­wizards and their beautiful machines wrestling with the meaning of “:)” so that some cellphone company can micro-target its fee increases. But Baker also, in effect, offers a counternarrative to the usual story about the digital revolution. While millions of ordinary citizens have been em­powered to express their individuality with a panoply of new tools, a smaller number of people have been working out the most efficient ways to convert those individuals into numbers on a spreadsheet.

We used to go about our business and let marketers try to catch up with us. “Today,” he writes, “we spy on ourselves and send electronic updates minute by minute.” '