Young Turk's Ramble: Technology Trends

AT&T Tilt Setup and First Impressions (How Do Non-Techies Do This?)

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:04:31 GMT

As a holiday gift for myself, I recently purchased an AT&T Tilt, which is an operator version of HTC TyTN II also known as HTC Kaiser.

I am overall happy with the device, but I had several moments of --as Mike Torres puts it- "how do non techies do any of this?"

The setup for the device took a long time:

First, I had to call AT&T and activate the SIM card. I was renewing my plan with AT&T and keeping my number. After going through a smooth online purchasing and registration process, I was hoping that I would not spend too much time on activating my SIM card. AT&T somehow managed to "lose" the details of my purchase, so when I called to activate, they were not even aware of what plan I had purchased. I had to locate the name of the plans, as well as the amount of any business discounts, in order to go through purchasing all over again. Half an hour lost just to activate the SIM card to get started, and I do not even know if my first bill next month will double charge me. Nice.

Next, I had to go through a few installs of the Windows Mobile Device Center to get the latest 6.1 version on my Windows Vista and to have it recognize the device. After another hour, I finally had a sync setup with my corporate server to get my email, calendar, contacts, and task list. It took a few power cycles to get IRM working. So far so good. A little over an hour into the setup.

Now that I had a working phone, it took me a few minutes to discover all the annoying bugs. Microsoft requires the device to be password protected. Unfortunately, if the device goes into fast sleep during a call while password protected (and it does this by default to preserve battery and prevent accidental button mashing), it freezes its menus. I spent some time online to understand this issue and look into possible solutions. Finally, at Greg's recommendation, I installed Kaiser Tweak in order to hack the registry and modify the phone just the way I wanted it. Almost two hours into the setup.

This was my first Windows Mobile Professional (formerly known as PocketPC) device with a touch screen, as opposed to a SmartPhone. I soon discovered that dialing was much more difficult than it needed to be, especially one-handed. I discovered that, if I could increase the sensitivity of the TouchFlo in the registry, and install a cocktail of CABs, I could do the following TouchCube-like interface:

With some help from XDA-Developers and some from colleagues at Microsoft. I got this to work. This made the phone "usable," but I decided to add some voice dialing on top. The default voice dialing button was very hard to hit one-handed (or bare handed, as I often dial without a stylus). However, I was getting annoying prompts from the PTT button, which was very easy to hit. I had not signed up for PTT service, so it was constantly giving me prompts to sign up when I was accidentally touching it. I decided to remap this to voice dial. Of course, there was no easy way to do this. How do not techies do this again?

I spent some time on AT&T wireless forums and discovered one could hack the registry to take over PTT button from operator settings. This was great news. I used PHM Registry Editor to remap PTT (hold) to voice dial, and PTT to record audio reminders and notes for myself. Now the phone was getting easy to use one-handed. About three hours into the setup.

The default home screen on the phone was sub-optimal. After some research, I opted for HTC Home Customizer to customize it. Some more research led to good dark backgrounds and themes for the device. About four hours into the setup.

Setting up my Hotmail and Messenger accounts were a breeze, thanks to some express tools from AT&T. They were up and running in a few minutes. Since I did not want to pay for AT&T's GPS service, I opted for a great solution from Live Search, which also solved my voice-enabled mapping and yellow pages needs. For added measure, I included TellMe and Google411 into my dialer. About four and a half hours into the setup.

With all this hard work behind me, I then took my time with basic settings. I disabled sounds when dialing (as everyone should), tweaked notification sounds to my liking, customized the order and icons for various launchers, set my top 20 speed dial numbers. Pairing the Tilt to my Jawbone bluetooth was also pretty painless. Over five hours into the setup.

Testing and tweaking everything took me a little more time, so we can safely say that the setup for a clean AT&T Tilt took six hours! And I have not done anything fancy like ROM flashing. How do non techies do any of this?

My first impressions after using the device for a while are positive.

AT&T Tilt is larger and heavier than I would like my phone to be. That said, the keyboard and the nice screen make up for the size for the moment. I used my SmartPhone a lot for email and calendar management, and the Tilt excels at that. It is great to be able to open IRM mail, look at attached PPT, and type detailed comments back. It is great to be able to manage appointments and see conflicting meetings. It is nice to search my mailbox on the go, or to change my out-of-office message during the holidays.

The battery life is decent so far. I have had a few dropped calls over the last week (and even a single one is too many) but I am suspecting that this is an issue with AT&T rather than my phone, as several friends are observing the same. Hey, AT&T, a 3G network is not worth much if you cannot do voice-calls. Take note.

The final verdict is that AT&T Tilt is not a great phone, but it is a good PDA. For my use, which is very email heavy, it is a keeper based on my few days of experience. My biggest gripe was how counter-intuitive the UI is for certain easy items like, um, dialing a phone number. I am disappointed as a MSFT shareholder. Fortunately, like any Windows product (ahem), one can customize to great extent and tweak registry to force the phone to one's liking. But how do we expect non techies to do any of this?

To quote Mike once again, "as an industry, we need to do better than this."

Technorati Tags: AT&T Tilt,HTC Kaiser,TouchCube,TouchFlo

virtual economy? virtual advertising cannot be too far behind

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 20:44:37 GMT

Following on entries from the last three months on MMORPG virtual economies, I wanted to highlight a recent article: players can now purchase virtual advertising on virtual worlds to market virtual things. Interesting...

Wharton Technology Conference Addendum

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:41:20 GMT

I recently wrote about my trip to the Wharton Tecnology Conference 2006. Irvinf Wladawsky-Berger, the moderator at the social software panel, now has a recap. Putting my small smartphone pictures to shame, Sebastien from the panel also put some pictures up of on Flickr, including this one of me with Jon.

Wharton Technology Conference 2006 Recap

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:19:09 GMT

I finally get to blog about the Wharton Technology Conference, which I had written about attending towards the end of last month.

The reason for the tardy blog entry is that, immediately after the conference, I flew off to Asia for two weeks. I spent some time in Shanghai and some time in Tokyo. Before I post a few thoughts about the Asia trip (and a bunch of pictures), I wanted to recap the conference and keep things somewhat chronological.

It was great to visit Philadelphia again, after almost two years. The agenda for the conference looked as appetizing as the food near Rittenhouse: digital content, social networking, amateur content, and so on. I was happy to be there the night before the conference.

The day opened with a quite forgettable keynote by Dr. Sophie Vandebroek, which was basically a combination of Xerox videos and platitudes about innovation. She had one interesting slide to summarize Xerox’s strategy, as being the intersection of physical and digital worlds, where both on-ramps (e.g., scan) and off-ramps (e.g., print) can be monetized. She quickly moved into “dream with your customers,” “don’t be afraid” and “have fun” level of bullets. Yawn. This was followed by (also forgettable) “Technology Leadership” panel, where the focus was on leaders building other leaders and on maintaining innovation in larger organizations. Yawn.

People woke up around 11AM with the set of morning panels. I attended the social networking panel. Sebastien Paquet from SocialText shared his views on technology in the public internet making its way to the business world (e.g., enterprises sharing information through wikis) particularly when they are easy to deploy. He talked about every successful internet service feeling a human need, which may (but does not need to be) aligned with a business need. This “social networking is the new watercooler” argument was interesting. Sebastien was on when he described the traditional KM systems looking like “they were built by consultants who believed in the value of a knowledge architect;” lower barriers to contribution, folksonomies, people’s attention becoming visible are changing this view. He was more focused on technology rather than marketing and advertising, in contrast to the next speaker Jason Ford of Tocquigny. Jason talked about the shift of consumers’ relationships with brands and about social networking changing marketing.

Emily Melton of Draper Fisher Jurvetson built on his comments by saying that social networking and social search are just getting started (I think most of the Spaces team would agree) and that personas in these networks will be essential to communication (ditto). She talked about using social networking to improve other services, and had some insightful comments, but did not tie her views together in a framework I would have expected from an investor. I think that our thinking of business models at Microsoft was more fleshed out (and I will perhaps share it with you one day) despite probably seeing much fewer business plans than she does. She however had some good points about social networks becoming more specialized: she did not believe that this would mean 100 players, but a few large players allowing for personas.

Tom Cox of AOL struck me as keeping things close to his vest. He talked about harvesting conversations that occur naturally within the social network in order to derive branding and marketing decisions. He also touched briefly on trends such as people moving from sites that are “too big to be useful” (no MySpace representatives in the room at the time) or business models/valuations that need to be rationalized.

My main question to the panel was around content contribution: what compels users to contribute? “Need for attention” was a quick and human answer, but I do not think anyone had dug deep into content creation problems yet, which are the linchpins of most business models. This has been touched upon in a few blogs recently (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) so I will not further elongate this post. I walked away from the panel with few new insights, but with good anecdotes to further fuel my own thinking in this landscape.

Our lunch speaker decided to put a Moore’s law slide on the projector, so I slid out to meet Jon Turow, one of the guys behind Minority Rapport. Jon is doing some research on social communications and networking technologies, which seemed really interesting. He is mining ComScore data to determine social network “stickiness.” Cool. I am really looking forward to seeing this research once complete. At the bottom of this entry is a quick (and poor) picture of Sebastien and Jon on my cell phone.

In the afternoon, I stuck to the amateur content panel which was decked with “media” experts like Mindy Herman of Wobo Media, formerly of E! Networks. The panel addressed really interesting questions like “what is amateur content and when does it cease to be amateur?” They also boarded terminology like narrowcasting (versus broadcasting) and micro-micro. The quick summary is that niche is going smaller. I do not disagree, but the panel had such a media hat on that they did not even consider implicit and explicit social relationships that people are identifying as user-generated content. This is somewhat limiting, I believe.

My last panel of the day was a group of venture capitalists. This was an amusing panel: the panelists seemed most comfortable with vertical focus on enterprise software solutions; yet pushed by the moderator, they all found themselves mentioning “Web 2.0” once. I felt compelled to ask at the end for a definition. The answers ranged from “semantic web” to one guy who tossed four acronyms in a row to avoid a real answer (let us just say that one of the acronyms was UDDI and leave it at that). I have been using Web 2.0 myself to categorize blog entries, but I will offend Dare no more: I have been pretty good in replacing the term with what I mean at Microsoft. Maybe, I’ll carve out time to do the same in my blog but confusion is OK at this point (hey, I cannot make every business idea public here, right?) and besides, Technorati picks up tags going with the flow a good deal easier. Going back to the VC panel, the key takeaway was that money is –again- abundant.

By the end of day, my enthusiasm from the previous night had disappeared. I think my main reservation was panels treating the audience as a homogeneous group of students, either to recruit from or to talk simply to. Yet there were several people in the audience who would have liked deeper –if necessary, more complex- insights. A reunion of Wharton alumni in technology would have been nice (and may have provided these insights with some networking), but the organizers did not have the appetite or bandwidth for it. This does not mean that I got nothing out of my day, but I will probably save myself the trip next year.

The day after the conference, I had brunch with friends from Yale, including Vlad Cole of Joystiq fame. Café Habana near Rittenhouse has a great brunch menu, and you can probably dig into social software deeper than at a Wharton conference.

Wharton Tech Conference, Philadelphia, February 24

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:16:45 GMT

I am excited to fly back to my alma mater for the Wharton Tech Conference. Will you be in Philadelphia? Let me know. I don't know how much free time I will have between the conference and Lauder love, but I would love to meet you.

Google in radio business... how about newspapers? how about TV next?

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:08:42 GMT

Scoble says that Google is an advertising company buying into the radio business. He might have missed that they are in the newspaper business, too. Watch the advertising market evolve over the next year.

I recently read a book labeled "The Future of Advertising" by Joe Cappo. It was published in 2003, but Mr. Cappo was late by about a decade to call the book anything starting with "The Future of..." Watch Web 2.0 for insights into the future and read the history of agencies for, well, history.

virtual world, real economy... real taxes?

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 02:46:55 GMT

I have previously touched upon the real economies of virtual worlds. An article in Legal Affairs now discusses whether gamers should pay taxes on all that MMORPG gold, which has real value.

virtual world, real economy

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 02:02:41 GMT

Virtual economies have been a growing trend for a while, particularly with the increasing popularity of MMORPGs. Academics analyzed the issue, which also gave fodder to some journalism (example). Listening to Eckart Walther talking about an ecosystem at a panel of search experts, I wondered how ahead "game experts" were in thinking about (or experiencing) the complexities. I started digging, and this was my first well-written read. I'll ramble on the issue some more later, but if you have an economics degree (check) and are a gamer (check), you'll probably enjoy noodling on this stuff.

a dinner with search experts

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 01:46:18 GMT

Two nights ago, I attended a dinner organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest.

The topic was search.

A panel, moderated by Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray, comprised Gary Flake of Microsoft, Urs Hoelzle of Google, Eckart Walther of Yahoo, and Oren Etzioni of University of Washington. Here is my recollection of the interesting snippets –my apologies for inaccurate paraphrases:

All experts underlined how the search users’ expectations are increasing. Gary likened this to a strengthening dialogue, where the engines provide new features, customers quickly learn and use those features, driving the engines to provide more. All experts observed that the search queries were getting longer and longer, as users grasped broader possibilities with search. However, they also agreed that --while forms, tags, and prefixes would improve their algorithms- the quick “lazy” single box entry would remain the norm for some time.

Urs underlined that content creators were on the rise, even for the “long tail” of obscure terms. He envisaged a world where content flourishes and search empowers people to find experts on everything. Blogs were mentioned as part of this trend (but you all knew that, now that even InfoWorld harps on it). He described Google Base as an experiment in getting the big amount of structured information that is not on the web into this world.

Similarly, Gary predicted more utilization of the “long tail” and more emergence of consumers as creators, leading to an even longer tail. Gary mentioned the “democratization of content” from movie creation (e.g., RedvsBlue) to character recognition.

Eckart described the search engine as a marketplace between people who desire information and people who have it, in this world. He saw Yahoo as greatly positioned to create an ecology of knowledge (a “giant eBay of knowledge” I believe he said) and talked about creating virtual economies and incentive systems to keep it running. In addition to the navigational and informational searches, he spent some time talking about “subjective search” queries (e.g., “cool lamp”) and the panel discussed how we are still at the “stone age of search.” Eckart was talking about this to start with, but thinking beyond is not hard.

I would have loved to hear more about Yahoo's vision, given this Knowledge@Wharton article from last week.

Vertical search was a big topic. Specialized searches (e.g., match.com) and proprietary information sources (e.g., amazon.com) meant that verticals are not going away. Local search was also brought up to Gary’s delight, who talked about the next days’ launch of Windows Live Local.

An interesting incident during the Q&A was a business owner who harshly criticized Urs for not being responsive: this gentleman’s company was apparently kicked off the search results for violating some rule they did not understand. The gentleman was not upset for being kicked off, but for not knowing why and for not being able to find someone (a consultant, a partner, or a Google employee) who could tell him. Unfortunately, the panel moved on and we never got to hear its take on white-hat versus black-hat practices and on fraud.

A growing tail of content creators interacting with local content seekers on an intelligent ecosystem? We better fasten our seat belts.