Om and Niall PodSessions

Everyone has their own productivity hacks and tools, the ways we each attempt to augment our own lifestyles and habits with technology and planning to become more efficient in our daily lives. In this week's PodSession Om and I share a few tips and tricks as they apply to the lean world of startups.

First up is the gear bag, the set of hardware we lug around to make sure we are always connected. Our mobile phones are data-enabled, never far from our mail servers or even a quick chat.

Om's gear bag:

• 15-inch MacBook Pro, glossy finish
• Nokia E61 as a primary mobile phone
• Nokia N73 as a backup phone
• Mobile phone hands-free wired headset
• USB phone charger
• EV-DO ExpressCard from Verizon
• T-Mobile Internet & E-mail plans for Blackberry workers

Niall's gear bag:

• Booq Boa.XM backback
• 15-inch MacBook Pro, matte finish
• Extra MacBook Pro power adapter
• Wireless Mighty Mouse
• Bose QuietComfort 3 noise cancelling headphones
• Samsung a920 mobile phone tethered for Sprint EV-DO access

I recommend ProCare for businesses with multiple computers as a way to skip lines and get better service from Apple for everything from logic board repairs to training new employees on productivity applications. Amazon Prime is a good way to share Internet shopping efficiency between up to 5 co-workers.

We also share typical daily schedules and daily efficiency hacks to help manage information overload.

This week's PodSession, Startup Tips and Tricks, is 25 minutes in length, a 11 MB download.

Posted by Niall Kennedy at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Remember when you used to wonder if anyone really needed 500 channels? Well how about a million channels available on demand? Combine all the channels produced professionally around the world, add historical archives, and make it all available through your cable provider's set-top box. We're also seeing new content available for paid subscription that might never make business sense as a stand-alone channel. Professional video options are changing, providing more choices and global reach from the comfort of your couch.

Download services

Apple introduced a movie store last week, selling 125,000 downloadable feature films in less than 7 days. iTunes users can subscribe to The Daily Show for $10 a month or download a Disney movie for about the same price. Amazon Unbox sells downloadable movies and TV shows for about the same price as DVDs, with a lower-priced rental option available.

Online streaming

Famous English soccer club Manchester United has its own television channel covering all its games. Fans can subscribe to MUTV and watch highlights and historical matches online. Spanish club Real Madrid offers live streaming of all matches over the web for 5 Euro a month. Fans all over the world can tune into matches and highlights from their favorite clubs, enabling new content not available via local operators.

Video on demand

As channel lineups become more crowded cable operators are looking to video-on-demand to tryout new content to a niche audience. Last year Comcast customers watched over 700 million hours of video on demand content.

A channel dedicated to Jewish culture might never be big enough for national distribution but over 50 new hours of professionally produced content is available on Shalom TV for $8 a month. World Wrestling Entertainment 24/7 is the most popular offering, helping wrestling fans get their historical and current fix for $8 a month.

Listen In

We cover these topics and more in this week's PodSession, Professional video distribution. The podcast is 19 minutes in length, a 9 MB download.

Posted by Niall Kennedy at 4:34 PM | Permalink

Every advance in web applications brings up new questions about the impending doom of the desktop computer. After over a decade of attempts to make the network the computer home and business PC sales are still strong, and new applications are taking advantage of local resources such as advanced CPU, GPU, memory, and hard drive space. Our computers are creating encrypted Skype connections, analyzing photos, organizing our music collection, and running more and more Flash and JavaScript at the request of online applications.

Om and I both agree the desktop is far from dead. New applications such as iTunes connect the desktop assets we already know with additional information and updates from the networked world of online music. Faster computers running the latest operating system and supporting software at home will only increase the speed and efficiency of web workers in the years to come.

New desktop technologies such as .Net Framework 3.0 and Apple's Core Image and animation libraries will give desktop application developers access to local resources such as the GPU and specialized instruction sets not available through web interfaces such as JavaScript. Desktop developers have less variables to worry about as they deploy their app and bind to local resources and OS abstractions such as local database storage, search, and privacy settings.

Desktop browser software is not sitting still. The upcoming releases of Internet Explorer 7 from Microsoft and Firefox 2 and 3 from Mozilla will enable new features for web developers and their users. These new browsers will have better support for offline viewing and will be more easily extensible for add-ons from your favorite web applications. JavaScript in the browser will get an upgrade, with increased programmability and features to help power the next generation of web apps.

This week's PodSession, Who says desktop apps are dead?, is 21 minutes in length, a 10 MB download.

Posted by Niall Kennedy at 5:08 PM | Permalink

We've seen two large user communities take to the virtual streets this week in protest over new and planned updates from Facebook and Digg. Facebook introduced a new way to keep up with your friends and later put up a blog post in an attempt to calm the site's community. Digg announced changes to how it handles story promotion and classifications of top users, causing at least one top user to resign in disgust.

The participatory web has created a two-way relationship between websites and their users. Social sites are reliant upon the contributions of individual nodes to add value to the total power of the network. The site must continue to introduce new features to keep users engaged and to stay ahead of the competition.

The Web is a place of constant change. Companies can either engage with their online communities or watch their brand and user base fall apart as users move to the next best solution. Many of the mini-revolts rapidly emerging in online concentrated communities can be prevented with better communication and adaptability of businesses.

This week's PodSession, User Generated Revolt, is 21 minutes in length, a 20 MB download.

Posted by Niall Kennedy at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)