I’m preparing to push my code for the new Infurious site into production so we can start selling our first application, Rickshaw.

The site’s not too pretty but It Works and our freshly recruited designer Jordan has some interesting ideas for the next iteration. All the important stuff is present: people can download Rickshaw, purchase a license and the license details will be generated and mailed out to them. I’ve just had a dry run of this scenario and it all looks good.

Thankfully Aidan has been at hand and steered me away from over-engineering the project and ending up with just a mess of unfinished code

Doing this and holding down a 9 to 5 I’ve found difficult and the progress has been painfully slow but it will all be worth it.

Watch this space!

James, the EirePreneur, is maintaining a map of Free (or cheap) WiFi hotspots in Ireland. Log into GMail and then you can add extras. I’ve added a few in the North, mostly centred around McDonalds (which explains why I look like I’ve been Supersized).

Add some more in? What about your own?

Direct Link Here

David Rice on NiMUG wrote up this little app:

Translink for iPhone

Every year we wait for the new and sparkly stuff from Apple and we often get it. The move to Intel. The iPhone. the 17″ and 12″ Powerbooks wayback when. This year is no different. We have a new subnotebook, software updates and a glimpse into Apple’s plans for everyone.

MacBook Air

Some correspondants on Damien’s blog don’t think it’s up to much (and this is before touching the device). One commenter wrote “Certainly it’s some kind of breakthrough, but then shit-flavoured ice cream would be, too.” I think that’s more than a bit harsh but then it explains why Apple always dips straight after MacWorld even if the product announcements have been insanely great. A lot of people were expecting Apple to go after the eee PC market and produce a subnote that was cheap. People, seriously. Subnotebooks are not cheap. If you don’t mind running a machine with a 7″ screen, that is light but bulky, only has a 2 hour battery and has barely enough storage for the OS plus any media files, then by all means run, don’t walk, and buy a eee PC. It’s ugly (and yes, I have one here).

The MacBook Air is aimed at people who would buy the Sony TZ series of subnotebooks. No-one would ever accuse Sony of being a cheap brand so I wonder why people expect Apple to suddenly, after years of being a premium brand, flood the market with £200 laptops. The Air would have to be beautiful, it would have to show something new and exciting and it would have to beat the best, not beat the cheapest. It’s thinner than the TZ and cheaper than the TZ.

My beefs with the MacBook air are simple. It’s only got one USB port. Though I seldom have more than one thing plugged into my MacBook Pro, there are times I have two. I might be charging my iPhone while playing Battlefield. And no, wireless mice are not good for the First Person Shooters. This happens infrequently enough that I’m not concerned about it. I’m also not worried about the lack of an ethernet port because, frankly, it’s been months since I plugged my laptop into ethernet and that was when I was at a client site. I usually carry a Airport Express with me if I’m unsure of wireless at the next location. I’m also not that concerned with the lack of RAM upgrades and the inability to remove the battery. 2 GB of RAM is a goodly amount for the target market for this device. I am curious that they didn’t bring out some sort of dock, I guess you plug in your USB hub, your power and your video out and just work on. It’s a sleek machine, underpowered for what I want (mostly in the graphics card department) but tempting. I don’t consider the multi-touch trackpad to be a big deal - if it’s not a touch laptop screen I don’t see the point. That said - touchscreens tend not to be thin if they are of any size.

In all, the MacBook Air is not for me. I’m not THAT much of a road warrior (heck, my laptop is 17″ and seldom leaves the house). It would serve a lot of people I know, probably more than they realise especially when they consider exactly how often do they plug anything into their laptop!

Lack of ethernet? Yes. I really wanted to drop over a grand on a laptop and then run wires all over my house, chaining me to certain parts of the room.

Scores 8/10 in my opinion. I’d have liked a 11″ machine.

iPhone update 1.1.3 (also for iPod touch)

We knew this was coming and it’s just like it said on the tin. Maps will now find your location pretty effectively using cell tower triangulation. You can move icons about. You can add bookmarks to the home screen for the bazillions of web apps out there. Texting to multiple persons doesn’t inspire me in the implementation but that’s a UI thing. Song lyrics? If I had any. iTunes rentals? If they were available in the UK I might care but I have Sky and more movies than I can watch anyway. And for iPod touch owners, $20 for the update isn’t a big deal. Sure, it’d be nice if you didn’t have to buy it but then 5 apps for $20 means apps are being targetted at around $4 each. Is Apple laying down expectations for pricing for iPhone apps bought through iTunes later this quarter?

A solid enough upgrade I guess - I don’t get lost very often though. 6/10

Apple TV update

This makes the Apple TV into an interactive device rather than just something to view media with. It becomes a realistic option for people who have broadband and don’t want to pay for cable or satellite TV or on-demand services. Of course, you can’t buy movies on iTunes in the UK and neither can we rent them via Apple TV. So if you’re in the UK, this is a useless update and another example of how if you’re in the UK, Apple doesn’t really care. Just keep buying their stuff. This is pretty much a 1/10

Time Capsule

The Airport Extreme with built-in hard drive is the only thing that really impressed her-indoors. Everyone should be backing up and with having to plug in disks, it can be a pain having to do so. This removes that pain. This I would place as the most impressive release in the show.

What does this tell me? Apple wants people to have more than one Mac. That seems obvious but Time Capsule is designed to back up multiple Macs. The MacBook Air is not designed as a standalone machine but rather as a portable machine which provides you with a companion to your powerful desktop at home. Leopard options like “Back to my Mac” show that being able to access one Mac from another Mac is an important part of their strategy. They’ve convinced a lot of people to buy one Mac so far and when you’ve managed that, getting them to buy another Mac is a no-brainer.

Time Capsule gets a rather spiffy 10/10 from me. Would have been 11 if it had AirTunes too.

Next?

We’re now counting down to the release of the iPhone SDK.

In most cases, every customer is already empowered. They can choose whether or not to do business with you. In some cases, as in the case of a monopoly holding, a company may not have a choice about whether to do business with you. For example, any business operating in the late 90s would have had to think long and hard without giving some money to Microsoft as their monopoly hold on the market was such that there were few realistic options. These days almost the opposite is true - giving money to Microsoft, especially considering their hash of a release of Windows Vista - is considered a sign of poor judgement. Yes, there are some businesses who will always depend on them, but for a greenfield site it’s not so clear. The writing was on the wall in 2002 when the Alpha Geeks started to move to Mac OS X, now that transition is almost complete. If you’re not running Mac OS X or Linux then you deserve a funny look. (Why do I lump Linux in there? Consider the Nokia N-series of Internet Tablets, the Chumby, the ASUS eee PC).

If you have customers you can then empower them further by giving them choices. Allow them to tailor your offering to their needs. Give them visibility of the options.

This is something we are developing currently for Mac-Sys. Customers will be able to look at their current status for every piece of work. They will be able to add hours, remove features, request additional support, change the terms of the contract and also view trends in their support needs so they can better estimate their IT budget for the coming year. Mac-Sys had previously tried to do this using open source software but nothing managed to fulfill the specific needs of their business. As a result, they brought in software developers to provide what they could not.

This sort of empowerment begs the question about why so many company web sites are so opaque. Okay - the Infurious web site is nothing to write home about because it’s currently being developed but we maintain a degree of transparency through the blog and through our dealings with contract clients.

That said, don’t just provide choices and think you are empowering the customer. Too much choice can be a much worse thing than too little - consider the problems Microsoft has experienced with the various SKUs and price points of Vista. In comparison, the XP Home and XP Pro SKUs were just about right. Separating these into six different products just meant they confused and segregated their market.

Pay attention to the desires of the people paying you more money. They’re valuing your services higher than others and don’t be afraid to go the extra yard for them. One client of ours told me last year that they deal with several very large companies as suppliers. Their own company is huge as well and the paperwork to get something simple done is often prohibitive. Therefore their client manager asks them to do it and charge it to them, with a premium, in their normal bill. The big client is happy. The smaller supplier has a little extra work to do but gets rewarded for it and at the same time builds a better relationship with the bigger company.

About the worst thing you can say to a good client is: No, we don’t do that.

Tom Raftery rips Nokia a new one with his review of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Last summer there was a huge amount of interest in the Nokia tablets after the 770 was available for a knockdown price. I was about to go on holiday for a week and couldn’t wait for the 770 to arrive and so I bought an N800 model (which I reviewed earlier). I’ve not yet upgraded to Internet Tablet OS 2008 but that’s because I’ve been using my iPhone pretty much 90% of the time (and the other 10% has been with this laptop).

First off the maps for the GPS are terrible. … and the GPS application doesn’t plot routes either.

Next is the low memory of the device. I only had around 3 applications running at the time so I was surprised that this consumed all the RAM on the device.

The UI is really clunky. I mean really clunky! In this regard I have been spoilt by my iPod Touch experience.

It is slow opening/running applications and the browsing experience is painful compared to Safari on the iPod.

The display doesn’t change orientation if you turn the device through 90 degrees.

It is a brick - big and heavy. Am I likely to carry this and my N95 with me when I am traveling? I don’t think so!

I have most of the same functionality with the combination of the iPod Touch and the N95 as I do with the N810 and the N95 for a fraction the pocket real estate!

Ouch!

Admittedly I didn’t find the N800 to be as much hassle as Tom describes and there are some times I wish it had had the hardware keyboard of the N810 model (Nokia needs to talk to Apple about onscreen soft keyboards). But it did save my geekness while I was in Skegness.

I guess we’ll have to wait until February to see if the iTouch and iPhone really start to challenge the Nokia internet tablets in terms of available software. We’ve already heard that SAP is building their native application for iPhone and there’s the recent news that Sling Media were also building for the iPhone/iTouch too.

The Nokia wouldn’t be enough for me to ditch a laptop and frankly neither is the iPhone or iPod touch. The issues with the iPhone/touch are 90% in software. I need more and better apps. But it’s getting close that these small devices could change our lives.

The other issues with these devices is also their strength. There’s something nice, something essential about using a proper keyboard. Finding a keyboard for the N800 was difficult enough that I eventually gave up after buying one and finding it wouldn’t work. If someone made an external keyboard for the iPhone, even a wired model, I think they’d be onto a winner.

I can’t wait to see what Nokia and Apple are going to bring out next.

Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
4. Good design helps us to understand a product.
5. Good design is unobtrusive.
6. Good design is honest.
7. Good design is durable.
8. Good design is consequent to the last detail.
9. Good design is concerned with the environment.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

When you look pictures hosted on Gizmodo you can see that Jonathan Ive is heavily influenced by Rams’ designs.

We now have to see what other household products Apple will reinvent.

I’d have to add that

• Good design affords usability
• Good design reduces confusion
• Good design sees no need to conceal
• Good design reinforces clarity of purpose
• Good design has no need to shout
• Good design shapes focus naturally

I’m no design guru but I think there’s room for improvement.

Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about the twice-shy entrepreneur.

In the article he writes more about the difference between entrepreneurs from Bubble 1.0 who watched everything disappear down the pan…

The intense pressure entrepreneurs were under to get revenue at any cost led them to make decisions that, with hindsight, were blatantly foolish. And when the market crashed on April 14, 2000, those same entrepreneurs had to lay off most or all of their employees after making those decisions. And face outright humiliation on FuckedCompany, the site that chronicled the downfall of the Internet bubble.

It left a bit of a scar.

…and current entrepreneurs who may not carry the same sort of baggage.

But what if you were not directly affected by the Bubble? I was in Nortel and yes, the bubble was responsible for thousands of layoffs but I took voluntary redundancy in 2003, much later than the bubble. Nortel was still in it’s death spiral (which hasn’t changed, the curve just got asymptotic).

Setting up MacSys took blood, money, sweat, tears and friends. It used them up pretty much in equal quantity. The sacrifices I made are not sacrifices I would make again lightly. That’s why, even though I have a successful, profitable business under my belt, I’m still ultra-conservative.

But I’m interested in how to break out of this rut. My SO thinks I could do so much more with Mac-Sys. I’d like to do heaps more with Infurious (as well as with wow4kids, macheads, ukwifi) but time is definitely limited.

Winston Churchill - Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm

This is what I’m concerned about. I have heaps of energy for ideas but I’m currently too busy worrying to actually go through with any of them (plus the holding down a day job that I’m loathing doesn’t help).

Nick Corcodilos writes for Infoworld:

Companies are madly trying to hire skills, not talent. They want to harvest fruit overnight. Give a smart IT worker some manuals, a workstation, an objective, and a little time, and they’ll come up to speed every time. That requires strong leadership.

But if you leave it to some personnel jockey who relies on buzzwords and resumes, you’ll never hire real talent — and it will always seem there is a talent shortage. What’s difficult to understand about that?

Or alternatively, don’t hire new people at all while you’re haemorrhaging personnel and watch the good people walk out the door while you keep the shareholders happy.

I’ve been here before.

Don Reisinger, a freelance technology journalist, writes for MacNN:

Once it hits a critical level, the cell phone carriers may mobilize and we’ll realize just how ridiculous cell phone contracts and AT&T really are.

Enjoy your iPhone now. But soon enough, you may be wishing you bought that Treo.

Nope.

I love my iPhone. I’ve hated every other device and with every passing day, my loathing does nothing but grow.

Everyone who doesn’t have one is jealous. And I share a knowing grin with every one I know who also has one.

This ain’t no cargo cult. This is gnosticism.