I am giving my son a remote control helicopter (nothing fancy, he’s only 4 1/2) for Christmas. What’s interesting is that when I was a child (or when I was a young version of a child) something like this would be a toy. Today I look at it entirely differently, much in the same way that I would a computer. It’s not a gadget or toy but rather something that could prepare him with skills that could be valuable as he gets older.

The X-47 was designed to be adept at long-range surveillance because of its large range and high flight ceiling. And despite being a beast—it will have a 62-ft wingspan and weigh around 45,000 pounds at takeoff—the X-47B is designed for stealth. This aircraft shows the Navy’s growing embrace of unmanned technology, including both unmanned underwater vehicles and aerial vehicles. But the X-47B would be a technological step forward—besides carrying stealth features, it is supposed to have the ability to execute some maneuvers, such as refueling in midflight, autonomously.

[From Northrop Grumman Unveils X-47B Navy UAV - Fighter Plane-Size UAV from Northrop Grumman Unveiled - Popular Mechanics]

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Phoneflix has completely changed my interactions with Netflix. Now, wherever I am I can open it on my iPhone and manage my Netflix queue. It’s as random as while watching television or at the car wash or even sitting is a movie theatre watching previews.

TweetDeck (and Thwirl before it) accelerated my twitter usage. Yammer’s desktop AIR client is universally regarded as compelling within our company, contributing to our usage rates.

The Evernote iPhone app is not only handy for putting my notes on my mobile device, but it also serves as notetaker itself when nothing else is available. My connection to Evernote is stronger than just with web and desktop experiences.

For all of the benefits that web-based applications provide, user experience alone is generally not one of them. Small, high performance, persistent desktop apps can intensify usage which can then lead to broader adoption and with mobile apps, specifically the iPhone but eventually more mobile platforms, this goes to a whole new level.

When I talk with companies, big and small, I am struck by the “we’ll do that eventually” attitude that the majority have. The view that these satellite interfaces are somehow optional or just extra is a miscalculation.

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I love observing how data is presented for maximum effectiveness. Today I saw a slide that came out of the Congressman Roy Blunt’s office detailing how competing policy proposals would impact the price of gasoline.

I am NOT posting this to highlight partisan issues but simply to highlight how the presentation takes advantage of a graphic that is contextual to the topic at hand, the gas station price sign. This is a really effective slide that presents a lot of information in a form that is easily digestible and has good context to the subject matter.

Although I rather like Windows Vista — I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted — there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disapponting than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal. It’s arguably the worst of any operating system Microsoft has ever released.

[From Coding Horror: Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?]

I am using MS Office on my Mac and one of the things that I find really irritating is that the preferences panel in Word, Powerpoint, and Excel are all dramatically different. Granted they have wildly different application functions which drives preferences but to do something as simple as set the default file format for saving documents one would think they could just adopt a single unified approach.

Here’s a rundown on the 3 main apps and setting the default file format. Interestingly, I had to do this because I was tired of people emailing me to tell me they could not “open that pptx file” and lacking any awareness of why I need the new file formats I just switched back to the old ones.

Click on the Save panel in Word “output and sharing”:

Save button in Powerpoint, which isn’t that much different from Word, but it is a really different layout:

And my favorite, the Compatibility panel under “Sharing and Privacy” in Excel because the Save panel doesn’t actually have save file format options. Also note that the other apps have compatibility options but in both Word and Powerpoint they are completely different options than in Excel:

I like Brady quite a bit, I met him down at the WeMedia event in Miami. Smart guy and pretty well tuned to the requirements to win in online. Having said that, I’ll give up my right to be anonymous when the WaPo gives up it’s right to quote anonymous sources.

Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post’s online division, said during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference here that he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards–and if need be–automatically kick them off for good.

[From Washingtonpost.com wants identities of readers who post comments | Tech news blog - CNET News.com]

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

- Sir Winston Churchill

Whenever I complain about email I am reminded of that quote from the eminently quotable Sir Winston Churchill. Think about it for a second, what would you do without email? The power of email lies in it’s complete pervasiveness and total interoperability, which is far more than anything one could say about any other communication tool except the telephone.

Having said that, the inbox is certainly not without faults. I don’t think anyone would ever say that they don’t get enough email or that it’s even close to be efficient for high volumes. Products have been promised for this but I doubt it’s anything that is solvable within the current email model. Sam Lawrence notices that a lot of social software seems destined for the same problems that plague email, overload:

Even the people who develop email software like Microsoft, Google and IBM know that the inbox sucks. We don’t need a new email inbox we need something completely new. The problem is that Social Software seems to headed into the same problems as email and we certainly don’t need another dump zone.

[From Go Big Always - We need a social software inbox]

It’s hard to disagree with Sam but at the same time to throw the “baby out with the bath water” would be equally hazardous. Part of the solution will be found in our human ability to adapt and filter, which at the end of the day outstrips any software by light years, and the other part will be enhancing the venerable inbox with social graph features the serve to collapse down all the networks we participate in.

FriendFeed has done this to some degree and while it is not email it is also not a stretch to consider that email is just another lifestream that can get pumped into FriendFeed based on predetermined qualifiers. Companies like Xobni are working on unlocking the social graph that is represented in everyone’s inbox, something that a great many of us are anxious to do.

Bringing application function to the lowly email is something else that is really interesting. I’m tempted to say this would be like the old Firedrop stuff or even Zimbra’s email widgets, but I think it’s something different, maybe adding semantic tags and/or microformats with handler apps to email messages. I saw the potential for this when I upgraded to Leopard and saw how email, ical, and address book could be integrated at the message level by simply interpreting that “next wednesday” meant a date that was a week from this wednesday in ical, or that a phone number in a message could be added to the address book with a simple drop down. It’s startling how much you come to rely on this functionality when you have it.

So while Sam isn’t wrong in suggesting that the inbox paradigm is wrong for social software, I think the answer is found in enhancing the social features in email and building interoperability to non-email systems. Inboxes are here to stay, let’s figure out how to get the most of them, I say.

There’s really so much good commentary on the game business in this one post, it’s not only worth a click but also a bookmark.

“The game business quantifies critical reviews and assigns scores. Metacritic.com, which also aggregates reviews for film, television, books, DVDs and music, is the game industry Q rating. The value of the property you are trying sell, as well as the ability to sell at all, is directly related to the Metacritic score of your last title. The Godfather is the only film with a perfect 100 on Metacritic. Today, GTA IV joins The Godfather in the 100 club (The 100 was for the PlayStation 3 version, the Xbox 360 scored slightly lower at 99). This is significant for a lot of reasons. First, GTA IV will have the critical praise of The Godfather, but it will have the box office of Titanic. While the direct relationship is not as unusual as film, it is still somewhat unusual in our business. In terms of the score, to give you a better idea of what a 100 really means, the highest average score for a publisher in 2007 was Nintendo’s 75.

[From Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily » GTA IV: Is The Game Really That Good?]

So eBay sues Craigslist for what appears to be a legitimate shareholder rights issue, and Craigslist responds by saying they won’t talk about the specifics except to say this:

Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflicted shareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating online classifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.

[From craigslist blog » Blog Archive » Complaint Department]

Kedrosky more or less nailed the narrative on this, as confirmed by the Craigslist blog today. Craigslist is basically saying that it doesn’t matter what agreements they were obligated to, that their only obligation, legal or otherwise, is to their mission.

The seeds for this dispute go back to 2004 when it was a former Craigslist executive who sold his shares to eBay, as opposed to the company itself. This no doubt has been a thorn in their side since then, as Newmark himself said then:

“I made a gift of some equity in craigslist to a guy who was working with me at the time,” Mr. Newmark wrote on his Internet blog (www.cnewmark.com). “I figured it didn’t matter, since everyone agreed that the equity had only symbolic value, not dollar value.”

While no one will ever confuse Newmark for a “greedy rat bastard capitalist” (as I was called the other day in the parking lot at Bucks, well not the rat bastard part but called a capitalist, really), the degree of naiveté that started with the assumption that the stock would never have any value to the circumstances that led up to this lawsuit is kind of shocking.

It may well be that Kijiji is at the heart of the dispute and that the recently launched eBay classifieds service could have violated a section of the shareholder agreement. It may also be that eBay had nefarious objectives when they bought the stake in Craigslist originally. All of these factors may be in Craigslist’s favor, but if it’s true that the Craigslist Board of Directors met in secret and engaged in a sham stock reorganization where the sole purpose was to dilute eBay’s stake in the company and trigger a provision that prevented eBay from electing a Director to the Board, and then inserted a poison pill into the bylaws, well then Craigslist is wrong.

If Craigslist asserted the Kijiji violated their agreement, then they should have disputed that in public and through the appropriate legal channels. While Craigslist will certainly win the PR battle, if the facts are as eBay asserts well Craigslist will lose the legal battle.

Shareholder agreements are contracts that determine what rights various parties have and the process through which disputes are defined and then resolved. These agreements matter and while the public may discount them based on biases they hold, but in a court of law it is black letter law.

Yeah, I don’t doubt that LinkedIn is selling such a high CPM, but the problem for them is that I just don’t spend a lot of time in LinkedIn so the opportunity to lever up that CPM is limited. I’d bet that the average time spent when compared to other social networks is low, which means there is less ad inventory. This is something they should be concerned about because I’m right in their sweet spot for a target market and I rarely spend but more than 10 minutes a month in LinkedIn. How much you want to bet that LinkedIn acquires a social networking company in the next year?

Having said all that a $75 CPM is really impressive.

Since LinkedIn knows the professional histories of its users, and can target sales execs, c-level managers, or certain industries, we can imagine high ad rates for advertisers looking for a business niche. Still, we have a hard time believing this is an average CPM for LInkedIn. But we don’t have a hard time believing that LinkedIn’s average CPM crushes that of Facebook, MySpace and other social networks who routinely struggle to get CPMS above a buck.

[From LinkedIn: We're Selling Ads For $75 CPM - Silicon Alley Insider]

Here’s a good account of the games vs. movies debate:

“We can also look from the standpoint of gross mischaracterization of fact. Most of the articles are qualified by the ‘box office’ limitation. Games sales are bigger than box office receipts. As my law professors used to say, ‘true but trivial.’ How many of those articles explain box office receipts are 8%, or less, of total revenue arising from an investment in a film property. The box office, at best, is nothing more than an indicator of the downstream revenue. A film makes money in the theater, then it makes more money in the pay per view window, then on DVDs, then on cable and on down the line. This is why movie studios refer to the launch of a film as the launch of an ‘equity.’ The same can be said of the music industry

I’ve made the statement at times that games are bigger than movies, all the while fully aware that it wasn’t a totally fair comparison given the fact that a game is a $50 ticket vs. $8 for a movie ticket. I’m not sure that this alone makes the market for movies that much bigger because movies are constrained by several factors, the biggest of which is that a feature film has a relatively short shelf life in big money distribution (theatres, international, DVD) while games can go on for several years.

Even taking into account the fact that the trendline is far more telling than the snapshot of the market size at any one point, I’ll refrain from making this comparison in the future.