The Official Palm Blog: Palm webOS 1.1 enhances support for enterprise — and beyond

And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

Apple Blocks Palm Pre iTunes Syncing | PreCentral.net

No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones are the folks who suffer.

Who wins? doubleTwist is on that list. Check it out if you were counting on that iTunes sync. This may be a good alternative to managing your media.

The whole piece is, as usual, smart. But this is a sideline quotable moment from Gruber’s piece on Chrome this morning:

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.

Read the rest here.

There is a lot of gloom out there right now. Easy to let it get you down. Good thing there are people like Perry Gruber spreading a message of hope and strength. He has several talks up on his Vimeo page — this one is almost an hour long, a talk he gave at PMI Portland in May.

This, right here, is why the iPhone has succeeded as a platform in the ridiculously crowded handset space. From MacRumors:

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch:

– Trimming video clips on the iPhone 3GS now offers the ability to save the edited version as a copy rather than simply overwriting the original file.
– Voice Control over Bluetooth is now available, allowing users to Initiate calls and control music playback via Bluetooth headsets.
– MMS is now enabled by default, but still not supported by AT&T.
– iPhone vibrates when rearranging Home screen icons.
– A “Fraud Protection” toggle is now available in Safari settings.
– iPhone startup and shutdown and app launching times have improved.
– New APIs allow developers of third-party application to access and edit videos.
– OpenGL and Quartz have seen improvements.

Some of these simple bullets are a big deal. Non-destructive editing in the simply-fantastic video recorder? Voice control over Bluetooth? Speed improvements? This is a dot-release to a very recent major system update, and some of these features would be big enough to be part of yet another press event.

I’ve had a handset since 1994. Back then I upgraded once a year, a pace which increased over time. In 2003, I was upgrading once ever 3-5 months. I’ve been a happy iPhone user for over two years now and have no interest in changing platforms. I just don’t feel the same level of innovation in the handset market that I get from Apple.

Personally, I haven’t had trouble with AT&T’s handling of the 3GS launch. Days prior to the device hitting the market, the company announced that I would be eligible for the fully subsidized rate for the iPhone, saving me $200 to break my old contract as my plan had outlined when I agreed to it less than a year ago. I bought the phone, it was activated in seconds — not minutes, and hardly hours — and I was calling on it as I left the Apple store on Saturday, launch weekend.

It’s sad to read posts like this. But it’s important to take note when prolific bloggers close their sites. In an era when the vast majority of blogs now drop the intent of becoming a passionate user’s publishing platform, and are now focused on this ethereal drive for monetization and traffic building and [good lord] microblogging, there comes a time when it’s just too hard to keep pushing good content. I’m deeply saddened to see SpeakUp shutter, but completely understand the sentiment that drives the decision.

It’s just too demoralizing to see Speak Up not perform like it used to. And it never will again, because of the expectations I have put on it and the ones that you have all put on it. It’s just not the same. I really feel relieved that we are closing it. Its time has come. It served its purpose and it made its mark. Not many blogs can claim that and we are happy with what it’s done. Time to move on to other things.

Jump over and read the rest of the post, and browse the comments. Then read Byrony’s goodbye, too. It’s worth reading to remind us all the importance of good content and loyal readers. Good to see Armin and team has lots and lots to do to fill the days to come.

This is a great video of the presentation Polish designer Jacek Utko gave at TED this February.

I disagree with his premise that readers are only leaving because they don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news and advertisers are following them. I think the technological shift in publishing is far more pervasive than the disdain for old news. The truth appears to be that people want information when and where they want to consume it, and paper is a chronically inefficient method for satisfying that need.

But this video highlights a stopgap to the inevitable end for print, and I think portends a far more interesting future: whether on paper or online, designers should be given a bigger role in the presentation of information across publications. This is a great example of rethinking the role of design from scratch.

I started working for myself in August of 2007. Before that point — say, July — I had been working as a corporate wonk. The people I worked with, they really knew how to meet.

Things changed for me almost immediately when I went freelance, though, and there were suddenly real dollars associated with my time. Was it really useful having me in a client meeting, for example, when the client knew that it would cost them something just to have me sit there and look pretty? Sure, I would dress up and all, but was it important that I be there? Would I be a contributor?

Ninety-percent of the time, I wasn’t needed. Instead, I’d get an email or a Skype call from a contact with a list of things to think about, a list of things to respond to, and a list of things to actually do. Each of them easy to communicate in a quick call or an email, none of them specifically outcomes of the meeting itself.

I ran a test with a client recently testing this theory on project team meetings. These folks were meeting together twice weekly, two hours per meeting, for status updates. Four hours a week, by nine attendees, is 36 hours of meeting time in a week. My hypothesis was simply that a large part of that 36 hours per week could be put toward actual project work.

So I built a matrix of team members with their annualized hourly rate attached to it. At the end of each day, the meeting organizer — usually the project manager, but could have been anyone on the team — was asked to mark down on the matrix just how much they spent of company money having each attendee in the meeting.

At first, we didn’t tell the team members that their time was being measured this way. After the first week, the project manager had tallied over $1500 in meeting money that he’d spent on a week of status meetings.

The second week, we filled in the rest of the team.

OK, the results were pretty predictable. When team members are aware of their cost to the project, the cost of their time, they get creative with their activity. By the fifth week, status meetings were back to weekly, and down to a half hour each. Their Basecamp use went way up, email task assignment blossomed, and project work became the real work of the project — not just more meta-project meeting-filler.

Seth Godin has a quick rundown of meeting do’s and don’t’s that is pretty clever. Check it out and see if you can make your meetings irrelevant.

I’ve been having this on-going conversation with my dad — old news man that he is — about the galactic reset going on in the print news media. This morning, mom forwarded me this link to an op-ed from Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph. It’s an interesting read, illustrating in particular that we are not alone, and that UK media are just as strapped as we are when it comes to covering all the stories that really need covering.

Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP. When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what’s news.

If you haven’t seen it, head over to AcousticConversations.com and check it out. That is, if you like music. And if you have a pulse. This is the latest post from the blog on the show.

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I’m in San Jose right now. Did you see that coming? What with my clever title and all? To be fair, the tune I have in my head is actually from “Rent” — and let me say this about that: This show breaks me right the hell down. I’m not kidding.

There’s a new release of the show, I believe celebrating the final Broadway performance. It’s a taping of the current Broadway cast, on stage, doing their thing. You can rent it in iTunes now, and I just can’t recommend it highly enough. The current cast is absolutely stunning, and the show continues to inspire today.

As I was saying, San Jose. Yeah, this lame travel schedule has thrown my posting schedule a scooch, but there IS news here, so better late than never.

Acoustic Conversations with Matt Vrba live in the feed

The first time I caught Matt Vrba was some two years ago, singing in a parking lot next to an RV that was pumping out baked beans and burgers. It was a company picnic. A company picnic.

[Chinese monks are walking through the airport right now. In my head they are Shaolin and could kill me by looking at me. In reality, they cannot find their way out of the airport. Attempting to do a good deed by showing them out.]

So, two years ago, Matt Vrba was ingratiating himself by playing solo for the ungrateful unwashed at a company picnic. Now, two years later, he’s relocated to Nashville and we get to catch him on a tour of the Pac Northwest, witnessing him ingratiating himself on our show.

A lot can change in two years.

And yet, the music that originally stuck with me is here and better than ever. This guy has a fantastic story to tell, and he completely kicks it with the live tracks we’re giving away right now. So go, now, open iTunes and update your feed for the show. Watch those tracks trickle onto your computer. Drop them on your iPods and Sansas and … whatevers … and kick it with Matt Vrba.

Want more of Matt? Visit his site at MattVrba.com.

What’s more important than that? Buying music!

If you like Matt, or the other artists we’ve profiled, remember this: A GREAT way to support the show is to click right over on the “Store” link in the top-right corner of the site and buy their music! That’s right, live and in color, straight to you courtesy of Amazon.com, you can buy music, AND fund the show, AND support the artists all at the same time! So help us out, us creative types battling a flagging economy, and buy some great tunes. You won’t regret it. Neither will we.

As ever, thanks for your support, and stay tuned for more great musicians coming this month!

It’s about time.

I just finished recording a great discussion for the soon-to-be-launched, if not long-awaited, OutsourcedCMO show in which we not so much dissect, as gloss over, Amazon.com’s retail reign in spite of economic turmoil. It’s an interesting discussion that spans the history of online direct selling, including the online cambrian era in which the first macroscopic retailers emerged from the boom/crash sludge, to the phanerozoic era, in which abundant online retail life exists and many such life forms are trying to figure out whether or not they should actually kill one another.

I, for one, don’t think that they should. Kill one another, that is.

Whatever does this have to do with Amazon and the Kindle?

The Kindle is a brilliant platform — right, I said it, it’s a platform — because it greases the skids on a whole category of products that Amazon already owns outright: books. They have boatloads of them. They are known for books. They’ve been doing books forever. And other than Google, there is no other company making such hay about making books available electronically. You can’t underestimate this point: There is no cognitive leap required to go from thinking about Amazon the book seller, to Amazon the ebook seller.

But, platform? According to NYTimes, Amazon is working on making the Kindle format open to mobiles.

“We are excited to make Kindle books available on a range of mobile phones,” said Drew Herdener, a spokesman for Amazon. “We are working on that now.”

If the Kindle initiative was about channel and platform development more than just unit sales, they succeeded on many fronts. First, the device ain’t bad to hold and look at. Second, they throw in absolutely sexy always-on wireless from Sprint bundled in the cost of the device. Third, they give you access to a massive library of content, including the web, with no real strings attached. It’s hard not to be sucked into the Kindle movement, even if you don’t actually own a Kindle.

And there’s the rub. Opening up the platform to iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and so on, suddenly has greased the skids yet again, providing content to devices Amazon no longer has to support. Will Kindle on iPhone kill the Kindle device? Probably not, but who cares? Amazon has already won on the platform.

Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He’s a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn’t been posted yet, but stay tuned… it’ll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present.

This post isn’t about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I’ll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It’s about what it means to be successful, what it means to know you’ve made it.

Making it casts a broad net, and it’s a theme that continues to come up in the AcConvo shows as we talk to more artists — what is the general expectation of acceptance and success, and how will you know you’ve achieved it?

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star like everyone else,” Stenson told us. “I’ve grown up a bit since then.”

I know, I must have been like this as a kid. I remember getting my first Yamaha B600 keyboard from Santa when I was a kid. I think I passed out. But take a look at what product scarcity has done to 50 kids on Christmas morning: