Archive - July, 2008

So Long Manny Ramirez

July 31, 2008 in Boston, Sports with 1 Comment

I’ve always been a big Manny Ramirez fan, so seeing Manny get shipped to the Dodgers is a real bummer for me. I can’t really stand up for his actions of late, and he certainly has made it hard to be a Manny fan lately, but this kind of sucks.

Manny Ramirez

Manny Ramirez Sighting

I Love Manny Ramirez

Manny On Leno

Manny

Worst iPhone App Ever

July 29, 2008 in Business, The Internet with 9 Comments

While kicking around app ideas here at the office, I had an idea for what I think could be the worst iPhone app ever. It’d be dead simple to build, and I’d call it “iPhone Discus”. Basically it would use the phone’s built in GPS to see how far you could throw your iPhone. Enter a location, throw, record location. That’s it.

Twitter Food Diary

July 29, 2008 in Miscellaneous with 1 Comment

This little idea comes from two random thoughts/bits of information that collided last night randomly. While migrating some stuff from old laptop to new, I was thinking about how I haven’t really been fully bitten by the twitter bug (but I have tried) while simultaneously reading a snippet about how those who keep food diaries eat much healthier than those that don’t.

Being someone who has softened up a bit since college due to a dramatic decrease in physical activity (I played on the men’s soccer team in college and therefore worked out at least 2 hours per day, now I work out maybe an hour per week), and increase in appetite and access to tasty foods, it struck me that twitter might make for a great way to keep a food diary. Easy and quick posting, right at the time of consumption, right to a chronologically sorted storage area online.

Twitter Food Diary

I’m sure someone has done this before, but now so am I. You can follow my progress (thrilling I know), and mock my food intake, at http://twitter.com/whatamieating

The Application Market…Where Is It Going?

July 22, 2008 in Business, The Internet with 0 Comments

Not much of a post, but just an open question.

I get why facebook, apple, and others open their platforms to developers, it makes total sense. But what is in it long term for the app developers? What is the end game? Who is making this work from the developer side?

We have one foot in the iPhone application game, as do hundreds of others, but only a few companies seem to be making money from their applications…namely the ones that sell the app outright to the user.

Paid downloads right now are the dominant way that developers are going to make money. There are other ways to make money with an application. But the market is still very, very young, and we still need to be very, very careful. The iPhone is a beautifully designed device, and it would be a shame if advertising [on the iPhone] became like a lot of the Flash, interactive, interruptive, crap ads we see on the Web, quite frankly. If that happens, we’ve failed. I know some ad agencies aren’t going to like this, but quite frankly, we have to keep the interests of the user and developer in mind. (Via here)

And lately, it seems that the once white hot facebook app market is cooling way down. Big guys like Slide and RockYou are getting slapped by facebook, the once super-cool hack-athons are now totally lame, and even those companies brokering the application ads are struggling to make ends meet.

So where is this all going?

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