Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Tech-Surf-Blog.com (Page 19 of 43)

Surfrider Minnesota Chapter Starts to Take Shape

September 2, 2008 / / 6 Comments

As a followup to my blog post of earlier this month on the first, formative meeting of our Minnesota chapter of the Surfrider Foundaton, I wanted to post again about our second meeting, which was held August 26th and drew more than twice as many people! Big thanks to Stefan Rochetti, who again hosted the meeting, and everyone who came out, all pictured below. (Since I drove my woodie, we got that into the pic, too!) We had a great variety of people, some who came directly from work or school, and several other Lake Superior surfers were able to make it this time, too. Thanks also to everyone who brought the grub and the beer!

Mnsurfridermtg082608

We discussed topics ranging from what to call the chapter (Minnesota-Superior or Minnesota Headwaters were two great ideas), to one or more issues we will focus on as we build the chapter, such as beach and shoreline clean-ups and doing something about plastics polluting our waters, to education programs, to doing cooperative activities with other local clean-water environmental organizations. We talked again about how many of the group met each other at the Jack Johnson concert earlier this summer, where Surfrider Foundation had a presence. [Elizabeth Willes of the San Diego Chapter manned that booth and was the spark plug for us to form our chapter here! She was touring with Jack Johnson to raise awareness about the Rise Above Plastics campaign, which is a major new initiative of the Surfrider Foundation — one we discussed in our meeting as something we really want to support here in Minnesota. Here’s a cool post about that, on the Save Trestles blog. That’s another initiative all us California beach lovers support, too, and I’ll have to wear my Save Trestles t-shirt to the next meeting… 🙂 Elizabeth is featured as well in this Sept 1 post on the Surfrider on Tour blog. ]

Here’s another photo I shot the evening of August 26th, showing Stefan Ronchetti (left), chairman-elect of our chapter, explaining what’s going on in his "shaping room" (aka his roommate’s garage), where the two of them are getting ready to start glassing several boards.

Stefanshapingroom

I also want to give a shout-out to Ben Moren, who made the cover of our local Eden Prairie magazine’s August issue.  Ben (pictured at far right of front row in group photo above) surfs Lake Superior
and is a student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He’s agreed to serve our new chapter as webmaster of our soon-to-be-launched chapter web site.  How did the magazine cover come about?  Ben says it all started with this video he shot during the winter: Ice Cube Surfers. Check it out. Hey, what some people will do for the love of surfing…  🙂

Epmagcoverbenmoren

Interested in being invited to our next Surfrider chapter meeting?  Please email me at graeme (at) tech-surf-blog (dot) com, and we’ll get you on the list!

Or drop us a note by clicking on "Comments" below.

UPDATE (9/2/08): Just caught a great blog post by my friend Jim Moriatry, executive director of the Surfrider Foundation, dated Sept 1, called Jack and Surfrider.

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

August 28, 2008 / / 1 Comment

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

Ranting on Apple: Not All Developers Are Happy

August 9, 2008 / / 4 Comments

UPDATE 8/10/08:  Check out Apple’s Rotten Decision (via eWeek). It’s a report from the Black Hat Conference, where the writer says "Apple’s image was pilloried on the show floor."

A smart friend of mine, who’s the founder of a startup with a successful online application/platform — and a longtime Apple user and developer — told me recently he’s really unhappy with Apple of late. I must say I was taken aback!  Rant
What, with all the hoopla about Apple’s latest consumer hits: the iPhone 3G and the wildly successful iTunes App Store (which I’m sure is up to 50 million downloads by now)?  Can Apple actually do wrong?  (Okay, with the obvious exception being the recent MobileMe launch, which they’ve already admitted they flubbed, and I have no doubt will be fixed soon — Steve will make sure of that.)

So, this was a real surprise to me — that such a longtime Apple believer and supporter could say something like this. I had to probe: "What on earth do you mean?"  I wanted to get at what could possibly be behind his newfound negative feelings toward Apple. 

Well, it turns out my friend has some very real concerns, and he makes a lot of sense — particularly because he speaks as someone who really understands the SaaS (software-as-a-service) business. So, here — unedited, in the raw — is his response to me:

BEGINNING OF APPLE RANT:

Graeme, I think part of the issue is that Apple’s culture is now at a mismatch with the SaaS and developer worlds. There certainly is a pattern here: arrogance and secrecy. Namely, SaaS and developer communities require transparency; Apple is more secretive than the CIA.

Ringtones
Apple tried damn hard to prevent people from making Ringtones of music they legitimately own. And you still have no mechanism for making Ringtones out of DRM’ed iTMS purchases without paying again for the song. And it is hard.

iPhone 3G Activation
In my opinion, the downfall of Apple (no, I am not really about to add myself to the legion of idiots predicting Apple’s doom over the years!) began with acquiescing to AT&T on the activation issue. I understand the legitimate business concerns involved, but the reality is that Apple re-invented the way a cell phone works with the original iPhone, and they gave away one of the coolest things about it with the iPhone 3G (the activation process). You can’t buy iPhones as presents any more!

But that was a nuisance.

MobileMe
So many things. One, the fiasco illustrates that Apple does not know a damn thing about web-based application hosting. They have iTunes working (more or less) right because it is so narrow in focus and so tightly controlled. But the MobileMe fiasco should not happen with any SaaS based system, ever.

And then their silence. They were silent for so long. When we finally heard from Apple, it was really just a note saying how Steve was forcing some dude who would give only his first name to blog about it every day or so. Contrast that with Amazon’s recent S3 fiasco. Amazon had updates every half hour for the duration of the outage, even if only to say we still don’t know any more than we did a half hour ago. For our online platform, we have a Twitter feed dedicated to system status so that our customers have ready access to what we know is wrong.

Every day or so? And saying nothing at all really in those communications. Inexcusable. The technical issues were about hard problems. The communication issues were easily fixed and never should happen in any scenario.

DNS Vulnerability
So, Apple knows about this vulnerability long before the rest of the world. The work of patching it is done for them. All of the major vendors of the world coordinate the announcement of the vulnerability and sending out patches.

Apple does nothing.

Weeks go by. Apple does nothing.

Exploits appear in the wild. Apple does nothing.

Eventually, Apple sends out a patch with the version of bind that is supposed to have the vulnerability patch. Somehow or another, it does not actually include port randomization features that protect against the vulnerability.

Apple does not send out the patch to non-server versions of OS X.

Apple never bothers to explain what it is up to or why it is failing to deliver timely patches.

I move my DNS off OS X for good. This was the final straw in the back that breaks OS X Server for me. I have been learning slowly over time that Apple is way too untrustworthy as a vendor of business services. This proved it.

In the meantime, Apple still has the vulnerability out there.

The App Store
Apple has proven the App Store concept is screwed up beyond belief. No ability to reasonably allow for trial use. No ability to reasonably have beta programs (the ad hoc deployment stuff is a fiasco in itself). But those are just feature complaints.

No one company should ever control what you can put on a device you own. If I want to pay $1,000 for "I am Rich", that’s my own damn prerogative. But even if we grant that right, the idea that they can remove apps from the store and tell no one anything about why it was removed? And what about if Apple corrupts my iTunes library and I need to re-install an app that I bought, but Apple later determined is not appropriate for their store? This is unacceptable.

———

END OF APPLE RANT.  What do you think?  Please speak your piece in the comments below.

Surfrider MN Chapter Holds First Official Formative Meeting

August 6, 2008 / / 2 Comments

I’m delighted to report that, last evening in Minneapolis, I was lucky enough to be part of a group of charged-up volunteers that held our first formal get-together to plan a local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. Surfridermasthead

This is a wonderful, worldwide volunteer organization, with more than 50,000 members — here’s the home page, www.surfrider.org, and here’s what it’s all about. As a lifelong member since it all started in 1984, I’m really, really stoked that we now have so many interested potential volunteers here in the Twin Cities and Duluth, especially — considering there’s a growing clan of surfers now active on Lake Superior! A new crop of volunteers, along with many existing Surfrider members already living in our state who have not previously had a local chapter affiliation, are now coming together to form a great nucleus that will become what we hope will be called the "Minnesota Chapter" (once we get officially set up with the headquarters folk in Southern California).

In addition to the increased local interest in surfing on the Big Lake (and, of course, the already strong communities we have in our state in windsurfing and wakeboarding), you might wonder, so what was the spark that ignited the recent coming together of Minnesotans interested in forming a local chapter?  Well, it was none other than…the recent Jack Johnson concert! That’s right — where the Surfrider Foundation had a strong presence as one of the sponsors of Jack’s current tour.  Many people signed up to show interest and support of the Surfrider’s cause at a booth they set up at the concert. And every single person at last night’s formative session had attended the concert…but me! 🙁  I did blog about it, though, just after the fact (see Jack Johnson Made Me Do a Post About Surfing).

In the photo below, here’s the crew that gathered last night at Stefan Ronchetti’s residence in Richfield. From left to right, it’s me, Amanda Jansen, Nate Clark, Keely Gerhold, Stefan Ronchetti, and Ryan Buus. Not pictured are Ryan Schroeder, who had to leave just before this, and a whole bunch of others who I know were there in spririt. Surfridermnchaptermtg

(A particular hat tip to Dr. Jim Perry, a fellow Surfrider member who had previously helped form the Connecticut chapter before moving here, and who met with Stefan and myself last year in what was really our first meeting to discuss…what if? Jim charged us up and convinced us it could be done. I know Jim was also at the Jack Johnson concert and would have enjoyed being with us last night if he could have. Thanks, bro! And another hat tip to all our brothers who surf the Big Lake, including Greg Isaacson, Bob Tema, Brian Stabinger, and, well, you know who you are….we salute you all!)

The group you see pictured here is just the beginning — the core or nucleus — of what I’m convinced will become a strong local, grassroots organization that will work toward monitoring and taking action on local issues relating to the quality of our water resources, shorelines, and beaches. And, here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes — and home to the largest freshwater lake in the world — everyone will benefit.

Rock on, Surfrider — here’s to a great future in Minnesota! 

And to all of you out there: to indicate your interest in becoming an early "charter" member of our local chapter, please say so in the comments section below, or email Keely at gerh0039@umn.edu.  You don’t have to be a surfer, windsurfer, or wakeboarder, you just have to like us 🙂 …no, seriously, you just have to believe in the causes of Surfrider, and that individuals taking action together can make a real difference in this world!  Everyone is welcome.  Cheers!

My Day in the Sun – I Mean, the StarTribune

July 23, 2008 / / 5 Comments

Or I really should say, our day in the sun — meaning our whole team at DoApp (my new gig). What a bunch of great guys, and I tip my hat to every one of ’em! Especially our illustrious founder, Joe ("Google guy") Sriver, and our crack team of talented developers.

It isn’t every day you wake up and find yourself at the top of page one of your local daily’s Business section. I was even quoted there, before the jump. Here’s the story: Apple Shines on Minneapolis Firm’s iPhone App (Minneapolis StarTribune).  But wait, there’s more: another great piece on us appeared late Monday: Minnesota Keeps Feeding the iPhone Habit (Minnov8.com).

Doappstartrib

Having our myLite Color Strobe and Flashlight app break into the top ten of *all* free apps on the iTunes App Store, surging past many big-name apps — like Facebook, AOL, MySpace, Google, and the NY Times — has been a humbling and amazing experience. (We topped out at #8, after a wild ride up the charts.) We’re even ranked higher than all the apps featured on "What’s Hot" on the App Store front page! (Apple’s a little behind in updating that list, it seems…)

Go grab any or all of our apps on iTunes — just type "DoApp" in the search box. And reviews are always appreciated once you download ’em!  (Our apps are getting high ratings by consumers, which you can see via the independent ranking service, Medialets. For example, myLite is currently #25 of all apps — paid and free! — with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5.)

Our other apps are myTo-Dos with Email Support and Magic 8 Ball (it’s mystical, man!).  And DoApp has many more iPhone/iPod Touch apps on the way, in a variety of categories.  We’re even updating our first three apps with cool, new features. (One you get an app, you automatically get the updates — so sweet.)

Apple said yesterday the number of iTunes App Store downloads is now up to 25 million! Got an iPhone or iPod Touch yet?  Downloading apps like mad?  Tell us your experiences in the comments…

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