Flag day again
Originally uploaded by schickr.
New
What the heck? Ford Schick? In a game?
Following a string of cognections, set off by twitters from Matt Jones on game god Warren Spector, led me to Spector’s Wikipedia page and this photo below.
I rarely see my name not connected to someone I know or a box of razors.
Ford Schick (from Wikipedia)
* D&D Trivia: One of the game developers was called Lawrence Schick.
links for 2007-03-17
-
Microsoft officially announced Wednesday its intentions to acquire Tellme Networks and that it plans to integrate the Mountain View, Calif., company’s speech-recognition technology into some of Microsoft’s best-known applications.
-
Cisco Systems, the biggest maker of gear for the Internet, said Thursday it agreed to buy WebEx, a maker of online collaborative software that went public during the dot-com boom, for $3.2 billion.
How to find a trainee, by: Eurovision Song Contest 2007
Interesting way of finding a trainee – mixing mobile marketing, mobile contest, and other interesting things.
Too bad the event makes my head hurt.
Link: Sonera – Trainee: Eurovision Song Contest 2007:
Application opens Tuesday 13 March at 8.00 am
The first selection phase is an sms competition during two weeks, where you respond to questions sent to your phone. The best candidates after this phase will proceed to phase two. The first sms question will be sent to you on March 19th.
Chirrup
Chirrup
Even minor moments
Are full of possibilities.The signal bursts,
Calling from hiding,
Interruptive,
Compelling,
Propelling me onto another branch of my Flow.‘This is good’,
And I follow the ripples of myself,
Telemetry coming in,
From farther and farther away.I skip over a seam,
The mutual grooming,
Over my people-scape,
Done.Previous gait,
Returned.by Charlie Schick,
once again inspired by Phil Lindberg
Espoo – 08mar07cross posted on Lifeblog
Why can’t we make things easier?
OK. So sometimes we shouldn’t make things too easy. But other times, we make things too goddamned hard when the process should be simple.
I was telling you about the 20-year old with the Nokia N93i I lent her. She loved making videos and was keen on posting them onto YouTube.
Making the videos was easy. Uploading them was not.
First, it was a challenge to get them onto our Mac – cable, browsing folders, dragging things over, managing it all.
Ugh.
Next, she was having the darnedest time getting them onto YouTube. There were constant failures. The FAQ told her mpeg4 wasn’t supported (it is).
Nokia recently cut a deal with YouTube, but it’s only for browsing, as far as I can tell. We couldn’t figure out how to upload via the Nokia.YouTube mobile pages.
She tried uploading from her phone. We searched a bit and saw ShoZu could do it. Well, not really, since it wouldn’t upload anything over 4MB, which is a really really short video on the N93i. We tried making the video smaller, but no luck.
Not to be dissuaded, she tried and tried until the videos started to properly upload onto YouTube.
To me, the story illustrates a few key things.
1) Unless the person is determined to do something, it can be really easy to lose a potential user if any part of the process is not smooth.
2) With all these moving parts, someone can make a killing by making this work smoothly and intelligently. YouTube tried, but 60MB files can’t be uploaded via email. Also, the apparently have poor error feedback during their upload process. ShoZu tried, but failed for me (though I bet 4MB is sufficient for most folk).
Has Nokia tried. I\m not sure. I need to walk over to the video guys and see what we can do to make this easier.
It’s the least I could do.
What do you think?