• Apple's iChat does not quite quack like the Adium duck just yet. Expanded with Yahoo! chat in the recent Lion release, iChat has difficulty reconnecting with many of its chat services (AOL, Yahoo!, Google and Facebook through Jabber) and fails to reconnect to Facebook's chat. Adium, with its open source code also offers connectivity to Skype's chat capability through a free extension. [Links: Adium]

Tags: Apple, iChat

Tags: Bose, Pioneer, Apple

• Quark, the leader of desktop publishing tools before Adobe took the reins has been taken over by Platinum Equity (financial terms undisclosed). Finally, because not its products lacked capability but Quark's macro approach remained unchanged to a market that has fundamentally changed in composition. It would be good for the marketplace if Adobe were to be given a run for its money. [Links: PEHub]

Tags: Quark, Adobe, Platinum Equity

• Palm’s former CEO Jon Rubenstein proves HP bought a bad apple, and worse he rebuts poor Touchpad reviews with correlation to the past. Poor strategy is once again married to bad PR. Success in technology is no longer dependent on just cool hardware, but a seamless user experience that blends the previously disparate components. And that emphasis does not only require a skill Palm does not have, it requires something HP does not have today either. HP needs to make harder calls to compete in this marketplace, self cannibalization would be an appropriate strategy for a company who’s customers have already voted against them. [Links: AppleInsider]

Tags: CalPERS, Palm

Tags: Photography

Tags: Ostendo, Apple

• I love how eBay started out with an electronic version of the Dutch auction free-market principles of selling. I have used eBay sporadically in the past and just recently tried it again by selling a fully maxed out built-to-order 2010 MacBook Pro that I had used for two weeks. My experience was not great: the first buyer was someone who used someone else's account without their approval, the second one was a new buyer from Latvia (even though the transaction restricted shipment to US only). So, rather than eBay swaying new transactions and launching 50 free-listings beginning the month of April perhaps it should ensure that the trust of its tenants is secured first. Because arguably, both of the above described fake transactions should not need to occur if eBay over the years had spent more time building software algorithms and protections to nail down those who inevitably try to abuse a free-market system. eBay's price reductions are a losing gambit if it does not protect the trust of those who enter its free-market system. If my third attempt does not reach a trusted buyer I will invoke the three-strikes-and-you're-out rule.
• I was an early adopter of the first iPad last summer and have since settled on a fully-loaded MacBook Air for work and passed my iPad to my eager six year old who now also enjoys watching Cable TV on it. The reason I am not buying the iPad2 is that there is no smooth migration strategy from the "old" way of computing to the new. Or perhaps more distinctly, the iPad is great for information consumption and not very suited for information creation. And once you find yourself switching those modes frequently, the iPad is not for you. Apple should focus more on the software support for iPad rather than trump the hardware specs, a "Rosetta"-like transparent migration to iPad would have been great. But then again, I can understand how chasing a massive greenfield of customers may just be too tempting for Apple. At least equip the Macbook Air with a 3G/4G antenna already, so we get parity on the connectivity side of things. [Links: Apple]

Tags: eBay, Free-market, iPad, Apple

• Everyone with loads of data collected on their computer over the last decade should buy a Drobo. Having daisy chained Firewire 800 external backup drives to a server for quite a while, I have seen the fragility of these commoditized (and sometimes low quality) drives with numerous failures. One such failure wiped out a set of original photographs of which only smaller digital replicas remained. No longer, Drobo can host a minimum of 4 standard SATA drives (one 2TB drive now costs around $79) and automatically and transparently protects against any single drive failure. Without any downtime the system reconfigures itself around one fewer drive, and a simple replacement (or upgrade) of the failing drive re-establishes the storage capacity. Drobo is a must have for anybody with a large iTunes, photography or business library of files and should really be built into many OEM computer strategies. Why VC investors Greylock, NEA, RRE and Sutter Hill have not been able to blow up this company in size and to an IPO already is a mystery to me, or is it? [Links: Drobo]
• Microsoft allegedly paid Nokia a $1B to play nice. Tells you who is the ugly rich guy in this marriage. Both companies need a pick-me-up, but not from each other. What do you think will happen when two losers collide? [Links: BusinessWeek, two losers don't make a winner]

Tags: Drobo, RAID, Storage, Microsoft, Nokia, Greylock, NEA, RRE, Sutter Hill

• Twitter is close to being valued at $5B but I do not believe Twitter is worth one more cent than it is making. I base that on my own experience in having deployed our well regarded blog entries over Twitter for quite a while know, only for those messages to be submerged in what I call the barking dog syndrome; excessive spamming of categories by people with less thoughtful content. What Twitter is missing is a reputation method, a way of letting people determine by virtue of their actions what content deserves exposure. Now Twitter is just a cesspool in which the frequent barking of the little dog drowns out the more thoughtful (yet less frequent) bark of the big dog. And a house full of barking dogs is an unpleasant place to be. I can think of many other spamming platforms that could similarly be valued at more than $1B, if we use sheer presence as the metric of valuing companies.
• Why closed is better than open, for end-users.
• Italian coffee maker Illy appears to make a run for scaling itself a-la Starbucks with more Italian style coffee bars in the U.S. and more restaurants serving Illy espresso after a great meal. But Illy better start making fully automatic machines that make the espresso the way it aught to be made real soon, to avoid waiters watering down the quality of what is served in that Illy branded cup. The unique experience and taste of Illy espresso can only be produced by a diligent barista (in person or as a machine), or put differently: the quality of an experience is highly dependent on the quality of distribution. Having experienced Illy espresso in quite a few restaurants now, Illy's current distribution quality is deflating its brand rather than expanding it.

Tags: Illy, Scaling, Starbucks, Twitter, Valuation, Open Computing

• AT&T’s chief wants cross-platform mobile apps sales through standardization of store programming methods (through the carrier). Oh please Randall Stephenson, now that your iPhone cartel ride has evaporated you want standardization. Like Java? Remember the damage that did to my DVD player at home? I prefer the rat race on completely proprietary, yet ultimate computing experiences that earn their merit based on authentic customer adoption, rather than complex developer collusions that break so easily.
• With Adium on a Mac you can now connect directly to Facebook chat, without a Facebook page open. Simply add a Jabber account with your Facebook username (not your email address, can be found under the account profile menu) composed as follows: username@chat.facebook.com and enter your Facebook password, and that’s it (do not add a Jabber server etc.).

Tags: Economy, Budget, Government, AT&T, iPhone, Facebook

Tags: iPad, Apple, Walt Mossberg

• Verizon beats AT&T in voice calls for iPhones, according to Walt Mossberg at All Things Digital, unless you travel to many other countries frequently (except for China) where Verizon phones are rendered useless. AT&T’s network averaged 46% faster at download speeds and 24% faster at upload speeds he concludes.

Tags: Walt Mossberg, All Things Digital, AT&T, Verizon, iPhone, Visas, Venture Capital, Unemployment, Netherlands, Economy

• Driving a (rented) Jaguar is a treat, except for the deplorable built-in GPS. It is a driving experience all right, just not ultimate. But their external styling is amazing.
• Skype Access saved my few hours layover in Washington airport (IAD), it delivered flawless wireless experience on a per minute basis (directly taken out of my reserve) where a multitude of wireless providers struggled to compete for the attention of a block of time charged to my credit card. I will give Skype Access a try more often. You can find it at the bottom of the File menu in Skype.

Tags: Jaguar, Location Based Services

• No official word from Apple, but I am expecting iTunes to run in the cloud real soon, with reduced tethering dependency on the PC.
• I love my Bose 901s, but a recent visit to their stores demonstrates that their best speakers will not work with any recent home theater amplifiers that support HDMI. So I guess buying 7(.1) of them is no longer an option. Time to look around.
• With flawed Venture economics as the main reason why Venture Capital cannot perform and 95% of VC being posers with no performance to back up the merit they claim, why does Mark Suster of GRP Partners keep hammering on how entrepreneurs need to meet GP expectations? Isn’t that the world upside-down? Instead, VCs need to learn how to locate real entrepreneurs who know how to make VCs big bucks. General Partners need help, not entrepreneurs.
• The Canon 5D mark II is a great camera but suffers from BMW’s iDrive menu control complexity and redundancy, the Rebel XT user-interface was better. Nothing I can’t master, but hard for technology novices with a good eye. With professional optics the camera lacks sufficient controls to balance aperture with speed.
• Philips gave up on their powerful, but cumbersome to program Pronto Universal remotes last summer, and I switched to Harmony’s Universal remotes (now Logitech) with cloud based configuration. Not perfect, but not bad at all. But which genius at Harmony decided that when the battery runs out, docking or hooking up USB charger disables all capabilities. Yet when it is charged it passes “the girl test” in our house. Check out the fantastic channel resources on RemoteCentral.
• After a bit of searching the most crisp font for the new MacBook Air - for now - is embarrassingly (to Apple) the Android font available from Google. Download for free and select Droid Serif in Mac Mail and notice a newfound clarity. Hope Apple’s new quality control guy picks up on this one, and that he fixes some anti-aliasing that is broken on the Air and in Safari.
• Time Warner has released an impressive beta version for online scheduling of DVR recording, for a PC web experience that is. Manages multiple DVRs as well. But who needs multiple DVR’s with their new one DVR-in-the-home service. Better internet upload speeds for consumers (Roadrunner +) are coming, apparently driven by World of Warcraft latencies experienced by many Time Warner users. The power of gaming.
• BMW’s second to last iDrive (still in some of today’s models) explains the main issue in User Interface Design vendors struggle with, where not its consistency but the language is the problem. The new one on the brand new BMW 5 series is slightly better.

Tags: Time Warner, BMW, DVR, Logitech, Apple, Android, Google, Apple, Safari, GRP Partners, Philips, Macbook Air

• Apple launches the AppStore for Mac OSX, don’t buy the suggested update to iWork just yet, it’s a bug. And what about transferring purchases to a new computer? But found some great new pieces of software, including a vital one that cleans up the address book.
• Puzzled about what traditional media is thinking comes from the 30-second ads that accompanies every video on CNN you want to watch. The same Google Chrome ad every time makes me want to use Internet Explorer first. Even worse are the new ad curtains, whose advertisers have become the spammers of a new age. Pay attention to your brand experience guys!
• Why this blog is not on Tumblr, 20 second load time of a reference site is unacceptable. Nor would I trust “giving my content” to technologists who have taken subprime money, without a solid export strategy.
• Fantastic parental new years resolutions from family psychologist John Rosemond.
• Bose releases the first in-ear headset that stays in my ear while running, make sure to order the MIE2i headset for iPod/iPhone control. Wonder what marketing genius came up with that name.

Tags: VCs, Apple, Google, CNN, Ads, Tumblr, Parents, Bose, iPhone, Flybridge Capital, NVCA

Tags: Apple, ITunes, Amazon, Marketplace, Free-market

Tags: iPad, Apple, IPhone, ITunes, OS X