It?s been almost a week since I have a new toy, Nokia 6230i, which replaced my old mobile. The latter was Nokia 3210, which got into so desperate shape that my colleagues started to hint that it became a shame of a phone. So I got myself a new one.

I?m not a gadget maniac, but when I eventually get my hands on a new gadget, I tend to play with it a lot. And so far I like my new Nokia:

At the very start I took a look at Motorola’s RAZR, but then decided to stick with Nokia; clamshells don’t look durable.

Then, having set on the brand, I was considering buying the cheapest model - looks the same for me, and I don’t care much about phone anyway - but then I thought that I could find the phone to be used as an audio player as well, in order to economize on number of devices I have to carry around. That was the reasoning behind choosing 6230i. (read more…)

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Wow, it?s been quite a break. I skipped the last weekend and didn?t write anything here.

I am studying Ulysses, which I always wanted to read, as part of my quest to get better in writing in English. Just before it, I went back to basics with “Old man and the sea” and it was fine, but with Ulysses, things are different.

I wanted to take a sample paragraph, retype it here and mark all the words I don?t understand in bold, because it would make a nice visualization of what I mean. But I forgot to bring the book today.

I was considering if I would be able to impress people with the fact that I finished reading; even better, I could say that I liked it so much that I’ve read it twice. But my friend told me noone would believe this; she, for example, endured only 20 pages, and not even the original version.

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What happens when people Google you? Samantha Grice has an interesting article in National Post:

Despite the search engine’s near-miraculous powers of information retrieval, it has a dark side. The Internet’s helpful librarian can become an embarrassing mom who insists on hanging your dorkiest kid photos above the mantle and incessantly gushing about your less-than-stellar achievements.

I hurried to do a Google lookup for myself, but luckily, no embarrassing photos showed up. However, I found one amusing item - an old advert from the time when I was a board member at student consulting association and I had an idea to promote ourselves on international online business boards. It seemed to make sense, since our core competence was to provide assistance to foreign companies interested in the Polish market.

The end result of the whole initiative was a significant number of inquiries, one small project for a Chinese exporter (who in the end didn’t pay the bill), and a ton of spam. I think it can be classified as a less-than-stellar achievement.

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Last week Google acquired Writely, an online wordprocessor created by company named Upstartle, triggering, as usual, wave of ?Google goes after Microsoft? noise. Almost immediately it was followed by the voices of skeptics, including Andrew Orlowski’s analysis in the Register and Nicholas Carr comment, scoring points for obvious, namely, that Writely is nowhere near replacing Word anytime soon.

I didn?t have a chance to play with Writely, but despite that, I am pretty much sure that it will not be replacing Word anytime soon.

Nevertheless, it would be disappointing if it ended up, as Register suggests following Jupiter Research, just as a beefed up text input box for Google?s email and blogging platform. Like Gmail is able to be preferred over Outlook despite lacking many of its features, the online wordprocessor could find a more prominent place by taking advantage of its inherent advantages: simplicity, collaboration facilities, and unrestricted accessibility from any place, just to name a few.

Although Writely would have a difficult time to gain traction as a standalone service, it would be a different story if it was introduced to wide range of users as a ?one click? alternative to offline editing. Google did a similar exercise with its chat, when it integrated it with Gmail, allowing any user to try it immediately, with no installations required. From my personal point of view it was a killer idea ? previously, when it was a standalone application, I found little incentive to bother with the chat, even if I installed it initially just to take a look; now, when it is one click away in the already open Gmail browser tab, I use it almost every day.

Gdrive could serve as a similar driver for Writely.

Gdrive would deliver immediate value to the users with little barriers for wide adoption, since free storage for user?s files, if security and privacy issues are left aside, is an easier sell than a entirely new way of document editing. Gdrive users will be able, of course, to download their documents from Gdrive, edit them locally and then upload again; but what if an option existed to avoid this hassle and make simple amendments directly online? A click on ?edit? and the user would find himself in the word of Writely.

Even if online wordprocessor would initially suffice only for a limited range of scenarios, from there, Writely could safely keep evolving, till one day, who knows, someone will discover that for his simple text editing needs, he doesn?t need a desktop application anymore.

Update: I just read article on Squash in which Writely role is being considered in a way close to this thinking; it paints a larger picture of Google’s vision of online/offline coexistence, and mentions also OpenOffice element, which I left out.

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Discussion with a friend, focused on real estate opportunities, inspired me to discover the city on the other side of the river, the city which, during my six years of living in Warsaw, I hardly ever visited. So, I went on a discovery mission.

Across the river there are two districts called Praga, a northern and a southern one. Perhaps it was not a perfect choice, but I started with Praga South (map courtesy Wikipedia):

Praga South contains a section that I already know, kind of, which is called Saska Kepa - this one I skipped this time. Saska Kepa is nowadays regarded as a prestigious villa area, even if a lot of buildings are neglected, often still in hands of the old people without means to renovate them.

In order to get to know the rest of the district, I decided to take Grochowska street, follow it to Wiatraczna roundabout, then come back to the bridge with Washington alley. I got out of the tram and Grochowska started:

(read more…)

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Dustin Hubbard, Microsoft’s Mobile PC team Group Manager, gives some background for the buzz generated around “Origami” project:

http://origamiproject.com/blogs/team_blog/archive/2006/03/09/19.aspx

The buzz started when the “leaked” video featuring device was discovered, however, Microsoft claims this was not staged:

Myth #2, we leaked the Origami video to create more hype. I can guarantee you that the discovery of the Origami video created by Digital Kitchen was completely unexpected. No one at Microsoft even knew that video was publicly available until someone posted it after finding it by doing an Internet search.

Anyway, the story makes an interesting case study of the viral marketing.

When the device was finally unveiled at Cebit, it turned out to be a smaller version of Tablet PC:

In the meantime, quite interesting “Origami” turned into a dull, but not unexpected given Microsoft’s record in (un)inspiring naming, “UMPC” for “Ultra Mobile PC”.

Not that the product itself is much more exciting than the name - it is reported to have a battery life up to 3 hours and cost around 1000$; why it would be better than the smartphones, PDAs and portable game consoles already on the market is anyone’s guess.

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People in Poland often regard the Post as one of the institutions still halfway between communist and capitalist era. Even though it tries to adapt to the new for-profit times in some places, it maintains its old way of doing things elsewhere. The resulting mixture is quite peculiar for those not accustomed to it.

My contacts with the Post are quite rare, but last Tuesday I had the opportunity to enjoy one of them. In that day the legal relations with my developer got so messy that I had to send them an official letter, which, in order to have the expected legal power, had to have Tuesday?s stamp on it.

When at around 10 pm I was approaching the post office, which happened to be Warsaw?s main one, I had already in mind that it was the last day for sending tax declarations by the employers; however, only when I was getting really close, it became clear what this meant in practice.

There was a huge queue of people standing outside the building, which in itself surprised me, since the premises are very large. But after I entered the building it turned out that there were two more queues, one standing just after the entrance and before the main hall, and one in the main hall itself. The last one was supposed to be governed by the automatic number system, but it failed to cope with the situation ? when I tried to print a number, it just spat the paper with a helpless message: ?too many people waiting?.

Consequently, I took the queue next to the entrance, in which I could see how many people are waiting in front of me:

(When I reached for the camera the people standing next to me took notice: ?Oh, at least we will be in the press!?) (read more…)

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Sanaz Ahari is a program manager at Microsoft, working on live.com portal; originally it started as start.com but then was included in “Windows Live” branding push. Nowadays, as far as I can understand, start.com is supposed to be a testing groud for components to be included in live.com, which is, however, still called “beta”.

Anyway, I just read an entry on her blog, with some comments comparing her today’s work to the start.com days:

one thing i would say is:
during start.com it was all about: experiment, iterate and improve a concept and make customers happy by listening to them. and who did everything: a few ppl, end-to-end for design, pm, dev, test, planning, marketing - everyone basically wore all the hats.

live.com: it’s different. there are many more stakeholders, some justifiably so and some maybe not. so many stakeholders that it’s hard to keep track. some are stakeholders and some think they are. the biggest challenge is making sure the right ppl are involved - the more ppl the longer it takes to just get shit done. and that is hard - very hard, but absolutely crucial. it’s the balance of how do i keep the project going, while keeping everyone happy. and keeping everyone, or at least most folks :) , happy is crucial if you actually want to succeed in the corporate world…

it’s almost like start.com had one set of customers: our users, live.com has two, the internal teams/stakeholders and our users :) so my rule of thumb is, if the teams/stakeholders can help us build a better prodcut for our customers then that’s great! if not, let’s not waste eachother’s time.

It reminded me an interview with Marissa Mayer of Google, in which she elaborated on how it works in her camp. I read the article half a year ago, but one or two search queries located it in Businessweek: (read more…)

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