Technology blog Techcrunch.com has long held the banner that there will one day come a “Google Phone” — a phone branded by Google itself, bearing the Android operating system, not offered in partnership with a wireless provider.
This is sort of big news. See, currently, in the United States, if you want a cell phone, you start at a wireless provider, like AT&T or Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile, and you pick out a phone that works for you. That phone will be locked to that provider, meaning that the wireless company will be subsidizing the cost of the phone to you, making it a cheaper purchase, in exchange for your 1 or 2-year commitment to wireless service.
This model was shaken with the release of Apple’s iPhone two years ago, which was offered in partnership with AT&T, but was initially sold unsubsidized — meaning that early adopters paid the full price for the phone, $599 for the high end model back then — and then paid for service with AT&T on top of it. Today, the iPhone is like most other phones, subsidized through AT&T to bring the price down for end users in exchange for the 2-year commitment on service.
When Google launched their Android operating system for handhelds, they did it with the promise that they were not in the hardware business, that they were in the OS business to make phones better across the board. From Android chief Andy Rubin, “‘We’re not making hardware,’ Rubin said. ‘We’re enabling other people to build hardware.'”
Technically, that may still be true. What came out of Mountain View this weekend is a report that Google has handed out a new handset dubbed the “Nexus One” to employees at the Google holiday party. It runs the latest unreleased version of the Android operating system and is manufactured by HTC, long-time manufacturing partner to big wireless. Note, it’s not manufactured by Google.
Subtle. Very subtle.
What Google said publicly is this:

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

But reporters being who they are, we now know the news seems to be somewhat different. We’re hearing that this new phone will hit the market in January of 2010, on the heels of Verizon’s foray into the Android smartphone market with the Droid, and that the phone would be unlocked for a GSM network. That means customers would be able to choose their wireless provider, compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. Unfortunately for Verizon, early pics of the new Google phone seem to indicate that it is much better looking, and there appears to be no battery door to fall off. Tumultuous times indeed.
Buying advice? January 2010 is right around the corner. If you’re hot for a smartphone and can’t switch to AT&T for an iPhone, wait. What Google is hopefully doing with their Google phone is fixing what’s wrong with the iPhone ecosystem. The Google phone will allow customers to buy closer to the center of the ecosystem, with access to an application store not mired by the hotly debated approval process employed by Apple. As long as you’re diving into the Googleverse, you might as well dive into the deep end.

Tiger Woods lay down his clubs today. From TigerWoods.com:

I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding. What’s most important now is that my family has the time, privacy, and safe haven we will need for personal healing.

After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.

Again, I ask for privacy for my family and I am especially grateful for all those who have offered compassion and concern during this difficult period.

As much as I’d love to talk gossip, there’s just so much about Tiger I don’t care about. I don’t actually like golf. I detest the sport. It’s designed more to enrage than challenge whenever I play. But there are a few points in here worth noting for posterity.

First, the PGA is crying in their big fancy beers. Sure, it generally sucks that Tiger was playing around. But this guy has made a lot of people rich. When he shows up in his fancy black golf sneakers and vertigo-enducing striped shirt on Sunday afternoons, Nike, PGA, Accenture, and his other sponsors just see dollar signs. That he’s taking this break is likely frustrating and humiliating to those who pay the bills. Let’s be clear: this is the era of Tiger. No one watches golf without him.

Speaking of Accenture, they’ve since pulled the plug on their relationship with Woods. He’s somewhat less useful as a non-golfer.

Second, Tiger Woods and his management have proved time and again to be savvy media managers. Yes, it was likely a misstep to avoid talking about this situation in a non-trivial fashion. His silence so far has been deafening in comparison to the statements of his associated lady friends. When the women come out of the woodwork first, you’ve waited too long to speak up.

But, as if we need a reminder of dethroned pro-atheletes on the comeback trail, Michael Vick is playing football again. And he was involved with dogs.

Woods will be back, sooner rather than later. Because, if there’s a moral in this for handling scandal in the media it’s this: the public has a notoriously short memory for illicit affairs. We want our winners, and will take them battered and bloodied if we have to. Tiger Woods has been a role model and teacher for years, but the comeback from self-destruction may be his biggest triumph yet.

I’ve never really worked on the whole “time-to-market” thing with my photography. It’s always just been slogging along there, coming up the rear as I’ve taken on other creative projects for clients.

Case in point this picture from a recent family portrait session. The three shots of this sweet little girl came from the first lighting test shots of the session, but somehow unlocked her inner model. She knocked out the “Three Monkeys” poses in succession and, with photoshop magic, we suddenly have triplets.

But the inspiration for a shot like this is pretty easy to track down. Apart from being an iconic original image of the maxim “do no evil”, it’s a tepid fever on iStockPhoto.com, where a quick search for “Hear no evil” uncovers 179 images riffing on exactly the same theme.

And yet, as with all things artistic, a riff is just a riff, and what matters is your ability to capture an idea in a new way, unique to your vision and principle. For me, this picture is fun and frivolous. It’s unpretentious. Most importantly, it captures exactly the vision I had in my head as I was snapping away in our session together.

For me, this such a photography thing. There are very few pictures that truly have yet to be taken. But with each setting and subject comes an infinite number of combinations of photographers with an equally infinite number of ideas and concepts for capture. And then I think about my friends Curt and Sam and Justin and Tyler and Matt and so on and so on, all musicians working to capture the same images through music, with the same challenges, and the same rich bed of opportunity. Stephen King, Cormac Macarthy, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, all documentarians of the unoriginal in uncannily unique voice.

The challenge I work toward beating, then, is not to struggle to find the best idea. It’s to find my uncannily unique voice, and apply it to the old, the broken, and to build new connections where none existed before.

The last year has brought a flurry of activity in the project productivity circles around the concept of Social Media. It’s buzzword-heavy discussion, rife with recommendations on using so-called Web 2.0 tools to streamline information sharing, centralize data storage, and build communities online. To be sure, the latest suite of net tools in this basket range from revolutionary, all the way to downright nifty. But the question remains: will your projects benefit by simply embracing fancy new tools?
It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.
Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.