*michael parekh on IT*

ON A MUST-HAVE iPHONE APP

THRILLING READ

The single best third-party App on the iPhone (or the iPod Touch) showed up today, at least in the view of this avowed book geek.  As a long-time fan and user of Amazon's Kindle (and now Kindle 2), and now an eager user of the new free Kindle iPhone app from Amazon, I heartily recommend people try this new App out, whether they own a Kindle or not. 
Walter Mossberg describes all of this well in detail in this review today:

"As I predicted in my review of Amazon.com’s Kindle 2 e-book reader last week, the giant bookseller has moved quickly to make the 240,000 book Kindle catalog available on other devices. On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app.
Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog."

He goes on to add:

"...it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does.
It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone."

CNET has another review of the software worth reading with some additional details.

I'd add that Kindle books, at least for now, are generally less expensive to buy than their physical counterparts, partly due to Amazon subsidizing many titles.  Most of them are available for $9.99, with many paperbacks available for far less.
In addition, since the iPhone is generally with me at all times, it's very convenient for a quick access to any book in my library I'd like to peruse at will.
With free samples of many books available for download on to an iPhone/iTouch, I'd recommend giving the free Kindle App a try.

ON THE FORCE OF FARCE

BLURRY LINES

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a tongue-in-cheek letter to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, purportedly written by the Head of Iranian Intelligence. 

It's a hypothetical and farcical take on what such a correspondence would report about U.S. policies and directions. 

Most of it was just ho-hum until it came to this little bit:

"We have to note that obtaining open-source intelligence in America has become more difficult, because traditional news shows have become more comedic and more comedic news shows more authoritative.

For instance, CNN’s nightly business report is hosted by a man named “Dobbs.”

Real journalists come on his show and present transparently propagandistic stories about immigration and trade and then he fulminates about them, much the way our ayatollahs used to do about “Satanic Americans” on late-night Iranian TV.

So viewers have no real idea what’s happening in the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, at 11 p.m., something called “The Daily Show,” which appears on Comedy Central, has fake journalists presenting what turns out to be the real news."

Ironic that an op-ed piece written in jest also hits the nail on the head when it comes to the state of our news media.

ON TED 2007 AND SOME MICROSOFT SURPRISES

SOME CREDIT DUE

Day Two at TED 2007 was as over-stimulating as regular "Tedsters" might expect.  Josh Spear has a good run-down on the highlights from the day.

The one take-away I'd add in addition to my post on John Doerr's presentation yesterday, is how much Microsoft seems to have become the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet. 

They absolutely, positively get no respect.  Generally, the expectations of what Microsoft may deliver just don't seem that high.  As a result, it surprises folks when they do something new and different.

Case in point is a TED presentation by Microsoft that did seem to positively surprise a number of observers.  As Austin Hill puts it:

"Two different Microsoft employees just showcased some new research coming from Microsoft including Virtual Earth with rich 3D models with hi-res photo’s to help build richer textured models, Photosynth and their Seadragon projects."

This stuff is groundbreaking and visually stunning. They are showed a Flickr mash up that grabbed all pictures on Flickr for the Notre-Damn catherderal and automatically mapped it to a digital model with point of view references to create a collaborative photo mash-up of the building by analyzing point of view and pasting the right pictures to the proper part of the 3-D model."

I've talked about my enthusiasm for Photosynth project in a post this past November.  So it's great to see how much progress they seem to have made.

The Seadragon demo was particularly impressive, a technology recently acquired by Microsoft.  As this excerpt from the Microsoft site explains:

"Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February.

Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network."

In the demo, one could zoom down from a 200,000 ft. view of a range of documents down into the footnotes of a car ad in one of the pages.  Then continue down to examine the curlicues of a specific font. 

Very, very cool indeed.

And it's from Microsoft.

It's great to see it.

ON POINT: SEGWAY WHEELCHAIR AS PROOF OF CONCEPT

HOT WHEELS

I'm a big fan of the Segway, in all of it's forms to date. 

If you're unfamiliar with this technology marvel from founder Dean Kamen, check out the Segway site, and the Wikipedia entry. 

I loved this Segway wheelchair designed by Josef Mora, a designer from Barcelona.  It's a one-minute video clip from YouTube.

It'd be great to see something like this officially from Segway; it'd be a great alternative and/or complement for the millions of people using traditional wheelchairs.

ON POINT: "LOCKED VS. UNLOCKED PHONES"

CNET has a good overview article on how closed our wireless market is vs. the rest of the world.  Here's the crux of the matter:

"Worldwide, the cell phone market is split about 50-50 between phones sold through carriers and phones sold through other channels directly to consumers, says Lin.

In Asia, about 80 percent of cell phones are sold independently of a carrier. And in Europe, roughly 70 percent of cell phones are sold unlocked.

But in the U.S., between 90 percent and 95 percent of cell phones are sold through a mobile service provider" (image source).

This of course has resulted in a market that offers far greater array of wireless software and services in overseas wireless markets as compared to ours.

Of course the recent Apple iPhone multi-year exclusive deal with AT&T (the wireless carrier formerly known as Cingular) perpetuates the culture of locked phones in the U.S. market in 2007 and beyond.  Therein lies the rub for many folks.

P.S.  I'm using a new service called Cite Bite in the "crux" link above that takes you directly to the quote in question in the two page article on CNET, and highlights it in yellow. 

Hat-tip to Fred Wilson for pointing out the cool, new service.

ON POINT: "OF COTTON AND COLONIALISM"

SepiaMutiny has a great post on the role cotton has played in the relationship between India and the west for almost six thousand years. 

And why cotton is indelibly tied into how every Indian thinks of Mahatma Gandhi (image source).

It's a metaphor for the relationship between the developed and developing world, taking lessons from the past and applying them to the future.

It ends with a tough ironical question, that makes one uneasy, especially if you're a supporter of Globalization like yours truly.

ON POINT: A NEW FEATURE

I'd like to introduce a new feature on this blog that I'm calling "ON POINT". 

These will be very short, "bursty" posts on some days that'll point to some article, post, video, or other item of timely interest.  Sometimes it may just be a cool site, tool, or feature of a web-site.

It could be something that ticks me off no end, making a point with which I disagree.

They'll mostly be inspired by things I encounter either online or off that I find noteworthy enough to bring to your attention. 

But they won't be full-formed posts.  Just a pointer to something that you may find of interest to check out on your own.

Hopefully, more often than not, they'll be things that you won't find through the normal "front-page" sites on the web.

The format I'll use is the phrase "ON POINT" in the main title, followed by title of the article or post in question presented in quotation marks.

These mini-posts will not have the usual sub-titles in italics that accompany regular posts.

More often than not, there'll just be a link in the single, opening sentence in the post introducing the subject and/or question and pointing to it.  And that's all.

I'll tag them with various categories as usual, so that they may be found through category searches on the site.  I'm also introducing a new category titled "ON POINT", so all of these short posts can be called up at once if so desired.

I'd love to be able to incorporate the link to the relevant item in the main title of these mini-posts.  But the standard templates in Typepad don't seem to allow me to do this.  If anyone knows how to do this without jumping off using the main Typepad templates, do drop me a line.

That's it.

Hope you find these new short posts of interest. 

As always, feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

So, without further ado, I'll kick it off with the following great question that leads off Thomas Friedman's latest op-ed piece in the New York Times:

He asks a question I've often wondered about myself for many months:

"It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing: the barbaric sectarian murders by Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, or the deafening silence with which these mass murders are received in the Muslim world.

How could it be that Danish cartoons of Muhammad led to mass violent protests, while unspeakable violence by Muslims against Muslims in Iraq every day evokes about as much reaction in the Arab-Muslim world as the weather report?

Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King? Where is the “Million Muslim March” under the banner: “No Shiites, No Sunnis: We are all children of the Prophet Muhammad.”