I have been using Smartphones since a long time and my last device for HTC HD2 was a great `first impression' phone but the fascination died in couple of months. More on that in my HD2 review. Since that experience I was hesitant to buy a similar device with Android OS but so far this device has everything I want and hasn't disappointed me once.
Display: The screen is amazingly clear and crisp. The included movie Avatar does a good job showing off the phone and the screen. No hesitation or flickering or pixilation whatsoever.
Quick and very responsive interface. The device boots up in 30+ seconds but once it's completely up and running (in 60+ seconds) after starting services like media scanner, it is quick in everything you do. Never experienced any lag.
The default buttons on the device bottom (Menu, Home, Back/Return, and Search) are very helpful. Specially in the case where you click on a link from and email and it opens in the browser, you can always click on the back button to go to the email. This is very useful for someone who is used to Windows devices where its difficult to go back to Email app once you open another app. The Back button works on the device across apps. Very cool.
When you are using the phone at night it might be difficult to find those four buttons at the bottom when the back light turns off, but you get used to it and slowly figure out where the buttons will be. Nothing major.
Pictures are very clear and crisp. Even when compared to HD2 in low light, these come out so much better.
Battery is slightly better than HD2 but pretty much at par when using 3G data or videos. It would need daily charging is you use good amount of 3G.
Android marketplace is a plus when compared with Windows Mobile 6.5 devices. But Windows Phone 7 is supposed to change that.
It comes with two back cases, not sure why. But would have preferred a leather or rubber case like HD2.
The T-Mobile version also comes with 16GB installed and 2GB card. The MicroUSB <-> USB cable comes with USB adapter charger so you carry only one cable.
Some issues or nice to have features:
Front camera for video calling would be nice.
No Flash light for the camera. So no flash light app as in HD2.
It comes with many apps which are either just a link or require you to register or will get you to sign-up for a subscription. So be careful about what you sign up for since some of these will give you a month free and then unless you call them, they'll keep charging.
-- After couple of weeks of usage --
Its still a great device so far. Few things worth mentioning:
* Really could use a front facing camera for video calling. The non-US version has one but it was removed for ATT and TMobile in US.
* The camera quality is amazing. Even the various built-in affects like action-shoot, panoramic shots are a great addition where you can shoot a 270 degree pictures and it stitches them all together. I lets you take 8 pictures while guiding you how to move and then creates a wonderful panoramic picture. Amazing.
* Battery life seems much better than that of HTC HD2
* The GPS is flaky. The applications like Four Square don't connect to it well unless you open the Google Navigation first to connect with GPS and then open other apps that use it. Samsung is supposed to come out with an updated software in Sept to fix it. But not a deal breaker.
* Still a great snappy interface.
* Android marketplace has some great free apps, but still not as good as Apple. I'm sure that will change overtime as android marketplace is 'free' as compared to Apple where they take a cut.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Friday, August 06, 2010
Social Media, Optimization (SMO), and Marketing (SMM)
What is social media? What is SMO?
Social Media refers to media and content generated for/from social interactions. It is generally used in the context of web based technologies in the creation and generation of user content. Think of it as the dialog or the text of communication between two people, on the internet. This also extends to a group of people and exchanging communication between them. Social Media is considered a foundation of Web2.0 when the technologies started leveraging this UGC (User Generated Content). The simplest form of social media is a Blog while the other forms can include social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, collaboration and knowledge sharing aspects of Wiki, Social Bookmarking (Delicious), user reviews like epinion/yelp, and discussion groups.
In shorts, Social Media is any form of UGC available on the net which is used for social interaction and sharing.
SMO (Social Media Optimization), on the other hand, is a process of using Social Media to attract attention to products and services on the Web. It is a collection of techniques to use social media to bring more customers to a website or to increase brand aware ness or to manage brand/product reputation on the internet.
Fewaspects SMO are viral marketing, online reputation management, brand building, customer satisfaction, knowledge management, business development, attracting visitors, and product development.
Some of the ways to perform SMO (or attract eyes to your website content) is by RSS Feeds, ‘Sharing buttons’, blogs, diverting people from other blogs/discussion groups to your official blog, and posting updates etc.
How does it differ from SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art solely dedicated to improving the website ranking (and visibility) for a search engine. The whole purpose of SEO is to get a website or a web page ranked higher in the search results so they show up ‘above the fold’ and hence potentially getting more traffic.
SEO is very specific and there are a laundry list of tasks and strategies which you do to achieve that. You can use the same strategy for different products/sites/pages to improve their visibility. While on the other hand, SMO may require a lot more knowledge and understanding about the client/product and at the same time would need active involvement and maintaining reputation. SMO is more closely tied to the brand reputation when compared to SEO.
Suppose I have a brand ‘Buzzolium’ which is a handbag line incorporating the use of hand-woven silk. The SEO task to promote the brand and the products will be to get my website to rank higher when someone searches on ‘silk handbags’, ‘hand woven silk bags’, ‘silk bags’ etc.
While the typical SMO activities will be to expose my brand in all the forums, blogs, facebook fan pages, discussions groups of ‘silk bags’. The goal being that all the places on the internet which talk about silk-bags, would get a reference to Buzzolium silk bags so I get the exposure in the right circle and then bring the users to my own website.
So you can see that they are very different activities and require different expertise and skill levels.
Do I need to use SMO?
Everyone or anyone looking to use internet to gain popularity and raise aware about themselves or their products. If you think you can benefit from more people knowing about your brand then you need it.
What do I need to do if I decide to engage in SMO?
Once you know that you want to extend your reach thing SMO, it’s a simple three step process to get SMO working for you: a) Discover, b) Strategize, and c) Optimize.
The Discover phase refers to understanding your environment, your assets, opportunities, market, potential clients/users, niche areas etc.
The Strategize phase defines the communication plan, defining KPIs (key performance indicators) and how the actions will generate results.
The last phase of Optimize puts the plan in action. It creates the engagements, deploys the plan, measures the actions against the goals, and finds new opportunities.
Typically an organization will put their Marketing Director or Manager in a similar role while many of the tasks can be done by a simpler role.
You can perform these activities yourself or completely outsource but making sure that the outside team understands your brand positioning and feels passionate to promote it. You can also have a mixed model where you use external tools to monitor your brand, competition, events and then take decisions internally to bring in the traffic to your official content (blog, facebook fan page, twitter stream, etc)
Can an SEO expert do SMO also?
SEO and SMO are different ways of achieving the same result and they both are important. SEO has been there for few years now and SMO is just getting started. We strongly believe that SMO will be huge in coming months/years and will need a platform for manage it for any brand. They are often mentioned together and everyone offering a SEO service has also started offering SMO. SMO requires different skills and more engagement for every brand. It needs a custom strategy for reaching out to the right demographics and customer base so its more involved as compared to SEO.
You also need a lot more tools to support SMO.
What differentiates a good SMO from a bad one?
Making social media work for you needs a custom strategy which suits your specific business. Although the channels might be same, they need custom editorial and strategy to make it successful. Some of the channels are:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, discussion forums, social bookmarking, Wiki pages, photo/video sharing, classifieds, directory submission, article writing, press releases, activities like Fourquare etc.
A good SMO strategy will not only improve your own content in the above networks, it’ll bring in more traffic and people to your content. While a not-so-good SMO might just charge you for writing X number of Facebook status updates or Y tweets per week. This will just put more content on the pages and will not proactively bring traffic from other sites and forums.
What should I not do with SMO?
Don’t engage in SMO without understand what you want from it. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it and then just pay someone hundreds of dollars a month to create a Facebook account, a fan page, 8 posts, 1 blog and 4 posts, 4 articles, 10 images and 4 video uploads.
What SMO offerings are out there?
Just search for social media optimization/marketing and there are many companies doing it. Pretty much every SEO is also doing SMO these days. Some of them are Radian6, Trackur, and Scoutlabs
How to evaluate if an SMO offering is good for me?
This is where it gets a little tricky. There’s no magic formula to find a good SMO product as it depends on your requirements and how much you want to be involved. I’ll list a set questions which, when answered, would tell you how to evaluate such a product.
a) How much do you already spend on SMO activities? Many companies have Marketing directors and manages spending an average of 6-8 hours per week which could get pricy.
b) Do you know what you want from SMO? Generate exposure, increase traffic, lead generation, increase search ranking, new business partnerships, sell products and services, reduce marketing expense or something else?
c) Where’s your market and where do they hangout on the internet?
d) What part of SMO you want to do in-house? Building the tools, configuration of tools to monitor relevant information, figuring out trends, generating reports, responding to feedback, editorial content, driving traffic from other websites and destinations, promotional events, identify influential consumers, groups and networks, understanding consumer behavior and motivations, etc.
e) How do I measure the effectiveness of a campaign or ROI ?
Social Media refers to media and content generated for/from social interactions. It is generally used in the context of web based technologies in the creation and generation of user content. Think of it as the dialog or the text of communication between two people, on the internet. This also extends to a group of people and exchanging communication between them. Social Media is considered a foundation of Web2.0 when the technologies started leveraging this UGC (User Generated Content). The simplest form of social media is a Blog while the other forms can include social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, collaboration and knowledge sharing aspects of Wiki, Social Bookmarking (Delicious), user reviews like epinion/yelp, and discussion groups.
In shorts, Social Media is any form of UGC available on the net which is used for social interaction and sharing.
SMO (Social Media Optimization), on the other hand, is a process of using Social Media to attract attention to products and services on the Web. It is a collection of techniques to use social media to bring more customers to a website or to increase brand aware ness or to manage brand/product reputation on the internet.
Fewaspects SMO are viral marketing, online reputation management, brand building, customer satisfaction, knowledge management, business development, attracting visitors, and product development.
Some of the ways to perform SMO (or attract eyes to your website content) is by RSS Feeds, ‘Sharing buttons’, blogs, diverting people from other blogs/discussion groups to your official blog, and posting updates etc.
How does it differ from SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art solely dedicated to improving the website ranking (and visibility) for a search engine. The whole purpose of SEO is to get a website or a web page ranked higher in the search results so they show up ‘above the fold’ and hence potentially getting more traffic.
SEO is very specific and there are a laundry list of tasks and strategies which you do to achieve that. You can use the same strategy for different products/sites/pages to improve their visibility. While on the other hand, SMO may require a lot more knowledge and understanding about the client/product and at the same time would need active involvement and maintaining reputation. SMO is more closely tied to the brand reputation when compared to SEO.
Suppose I have a brand ‘Buzzolium’ which is a handbag line incorporating the use of hand-woven silk. The SEO task to promote the brand and the products will be to get my website to rank higher when someone searches on ‘silk handbags’, ‘hand woven silk bags’, ‘silk bags’ etc.
While the typical SMO activities will be to expose my brand in all the forums, blogs, facebook fan pages, discussions groups of ‘silk bags’. The goal being that all the places on the internet which talk about silk-bags, would get a reference to Buzzolium silk bags so I get the exposure in the right circle and then bring the users to my own website.
So you can see that they are very different activities and require different expertise and skill levels.
Do I need to use SMO?
Everyone or anyone looking to use internet to gain popularity and raise aware about themselves or their products. If you think you can benefit from more people knowing about your brand then you need it.
What do I need to do if I decide to engage in SMO?
Once you know that you want to extend your reach thing SMO, it’s a simple three step process to get SMO working for you: a) Discover, b) Strategize, and c) Optimize.
The Discover phase refers to understanding your environment, your assets, opportunities, market, potential clients/users, niche areas etc.
The Strategize phase defines the communication plan, defining KPIs (key performance indicators) and how the actions will generate results.
The last phase of Optimize puts the plan in action. It creates the engagements, deploys the plan, measures the actions against the goals, and finds new opportunities.
Typically an organization will put their Marketing Director or Manager in a similar role while many of the tasks can be done by a simpler role.
You can perform these activities yourself or completely outsource but making sure that the outside team understands your brand positioning and feels passionate to promote it. You can also have a mixed model where you use external tools to monitor your brand, competition, events and then take decisions internally to bring in the traffic to your official content (blog, facebook fan page, twitter stream, etc)
Can an SEO expert do SMO also?
SEO and SMO are different ways of achieving the same result and they both are important. SEO has been there for few years now and SMO is just getting started. We strongly believe that SMO will be huge in coming months/years and will need a platform for manage it for any brand. They are often mentioned together and everyone offering a SEO service has also started offering SMO. SMO requires different skills and more engagement for every brand. It needs a custom strategy for reaching out to the right demographics and customer base so its more involved as compared to SEO.
You also need a lot more tools to support SMO.
What differentiates a good SMO from a bad one?
Making social media work for you needs a custom strategy which suits your specific business. Although the channels might be same, they need custom editorial and strategy to make it successful. Some of the channels are:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, discussion forums, social bookmarking, Wiki pages, photo/video sharing, classifieds, directory submission, article writing, press releases, activities like Fourquare etc.
A good SMO strategy will not only improve your own content in the above networks, it’ll bring in more traffic and people to your content. While a not-so-good SMO might just charge you for writing X number of Facebook status updates or Y tweets per week. This will just put more content on the pages and will not proactively bring traffic from other sites and forums.
What should I not do with SMO?
Don’t engage in SMO without understand what you want from it. Don’t do it for the sake of doing it and then just pay someone hundreds of dollars a month to create a Facebook account, a fan page, 8 posts, 1 blog and 4 posts, 4 articles, 10 images and 4 video uploads.
What SMO offerings are out there?
Just search for social media optimization/marketing and there are many companies doing it. Pretty much every SEO is also doing SMO these days. Some of them are Radian6, Trackur, and Scoutlabs
How to evaluate if an SMO offering is good for me?
This is where it gets a little tricky. There’s no magic formula to find a good SMO product as it depends on your requirements and how much you want to be involved. I’ll list a set questions which, when answered, would tell you how to evaluate such a product.
a) How much do you already spend on SMO activities? Many companies have Marketing directors and manages spending an average of 6-8 hours per week which could get pricy.
b) Do you know what you want from SMO? Generate exposure, increase traffic, lead generation, increase search ranking, new business partnerships, sell products and services, reduce marketing expense or something else?
c) Where’s your market and where do they hangout on the internet?
d) What part of SMO you want to do in-house? Building the tools, configuration of tools to monitor relevant information, figuring out trends, generating reports, responding to feedback, editorial content, driving traffic from other websites and destinations, promotional events, identify influential consumers, groups and networks, understanding consumer behavior and motivations, etc.
e) How do I measure the effectiveness of a campaign or ROI ?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Text mining resources.
Resources for Semantic searches, entity extraction, classification, and other NLP oriented approaches.
This is just a reference for various approaches I came across while working on my semantic mining projects. Some of these are full fledged software platforms while others are APIs or small specific algorithms.
1. Yahoo Term Extractor APIs
Yahoo has an API which you can use for term extractions. It does an ok job but seems like there’s no new development on it. http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html
There are projects on github which wrap this api and can be used from within Rails or other languages, although the use of the API is very straight forward
2. Git hub projects
Github has many projects for term extraction, classification etc
a. Term-Extractor http://github.com/DRMacIver/term-extractor
b. Bayes_motel for multi-variate classification http://github.com/mperham/bayes_motel
3. Rubyforge projects
These projects do classification, stemming etc.
a. Classifier
b. Stemmer
http://rubyforge.org/projects/classifier/
4. WEKA (collection of machine learning algos) http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
There’s also a JRuby wrapper in github http://github.com/bmaland/Eureka
5. WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ )
6. GATE (NLP tools) http://gate.ac.uk/
7. LingPipe A not so open source version of linguistic analysis libraries
8. Topia_termextractor http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/
9. Open Calais. This does a lot more than entity extraction. It also does classification.
10. KEA (Keyphrase Extraction Algorithm)
11. Maui Indexer (Google code project)
12. Other references
a. http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/web/competition.html
b. http://www.searchenginecaffe.com/2007/03/java-open-source-text-mining-and.html
c. Ruby related NLP: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dustin/rubyai.html
This is just a reference for various approaches I came across while working on my semantic mining projects. Some of these are full fledged software platforms while others are APIs or small specific algorithms.
1. Yahoo Term Extractor APIs
Yahoo has an API which you can use for term extractions. It does an ok job but seems like there’s no new development on it. http://developer.yahoo.com/search/content/V1/termExtraction.html
There are projects on github which wrap this api and can be used from within Rails or other languages, although the use of the API is very straight forward
2. Git hub projects
Github has many projects for term extraction, classification etc
a. Term-Extractor http://github.com/DRMacIver/term-extractor
b. Bayes_motel for multi-variate classification http://github.com/mperham/bayes_motel
3. Rubyforge projects
These projects do classification, stemming etc.
a. Classifier
b. Stemmer
http://rubyforge.org/projects/classifier/
4. WEKA (collection of machine learning algos) http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
There’s also a JRuby wrapper in github http://github.com/bmaland/Eureka
5. WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ )
6. GATE (NLP tools) http://gate.ac.uk/
7. LingPipe A not so open source version of linguistic analysis libraries
8. Topia_termextractor http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/
9. Open Calais. This does a lot more than entity extraction. It also does classification.
10. KEA (Keyphrase Extraction Algorithm)
11. Maui Indexer (Google code project)
12. Other references
a. http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/web/competition.html
b. http://www.searchenginecaffe.com/2007/03/java-open-source-text-mining-and.html
c. Ruby related NLP: http://web.media.mit.edu/~dustin/rubyai.html
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Ruby on Rail and Heroku
How cool is Heroku !
Recently I was playing around with Ruby on Rails and learned about various hosting platforms which can be used to deploy an ROR application. After looking at a few out there, they were just consuming too much time in setting up public keys, copying the configurations, or managing other aspects like Capistrano etc. But when I signed up for heroku the deployment was as simple as “git push heroku master” and I was done.
Heroku is be an example of how the services should work seamlessly without having to worry about the network and cloud. That provides a clear benefit in using a hosting platform as supposed to hosting it yourself.
Recently I was playing around with Ruby on Rails and learned about various hosting platforms which can be used to deploy an ROR application. After looking at a few out there, they were just consuming too much time in setting up public keys, copying the configurations, or managing other aspects like Capistrano etc. But when I signed up for heroku the deployment was as simple as “git push heroku master” and I was done.
Heroku is be an example of how the services should work seamlessly without having to worry about the network and cloud. That provides a clear benefit in using a hosting platform as supposed to hosting it yourself.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Nissan Leaf and battery life
A recent review I read while researching for Nissan Leaf and how often would I need to replace the batteries. Its a totally new concept for the mass production and as the sample size is much bigger now there's a chance of more things going wrong.
All in all, I would expect the Leaf to have comparable, if not lower, total cost of ownership when you factor all these lifetime costs in. You'll be buying a new battery when most folks will be buying a new car (and maybe some seat covers). Of course, since batteries are getting twice as good every five years for the last two decades, you may replace the battery with a cheaper one for the same range or get more range for the same price. There is a good chance that we may trade in batteries sooner if a secondary market for old batteries for UPS or power shifting develops.From Old.Nabble.Com
Saturday, April 17, 2010
love at first sight with HTC HD2
I've long been waiting for this phone. I looked at everything in the market and the main reason to wait for this was the snapdragon processor (1 GHz) combined with the amazing capacitive screen touch screen, resolution (480x800) and the operating system and the everything else.
I'm a longtime user of smart phones and you can say that I'm a heavy user. I typically have multiple email accounts, use GPS for occasional driving or just for walking tours during travel, WiFi regularly during international roaming and Skype on 3G/Wifi for calls. Plus watching some videos, listening to live internet radios and pod-casts as well as use it as a media player.
All the websites provide the specs, so I'll get into the plusses and minuses of the phone and my experience with them.
Plusses:
+ great capacitive touch screen. Very responsive. 480x800 resolution for crystal clear colors and videos
+ Included Transformer movies (1&2) do a great job showing off the screen and the processor power. It's just HD video without any lags or hazy-ness. Very impressive
+ comes with 16GB with only movies on it so you have ample of room for other media.
+ plays live audio and video flawlessly over 3G
+ HTC Sense is amazing and does a great job of hiding those Microsoft screens which you rarely get to. All the apps like email, messaging etc look much better with Sense.
+ Comes with a great animated weather screen
+ very slim though a little on the heavy side
+ 5.0mp Camera comes with flash which is good for close up photos.
+ charges thru PC USP port as well and has an option to be connected as a hard-drive, which is much better and faster compared to the Media Sync feature
+ good battery life, lasts up a day and a half with regular 3g usage and video watching
+ can be used as a WiFi Router/Access Point.
+ comes with FM when you plus the head set as an antenna
+ Swype app (included) as a replacement for keyboard rocks.. much faster to type with that.
Minuses:
- Huge screen is a plus but then you can't keep it in your Jeans pocket as it might put strain on the screen or device
- even though camera is a 5.0 MP, some pictures do tend to be grainy due to low light
- Skype hs removed its support for WinMo 6.5 but the older version of apps can be found on the internet
- Doesn't come with the "Wifi Router" app which basically turns your phone into a Wifi Access Point.. So you can have many people connect to your phone thru wifi and the phone provides the internet thru 3G.
- Microsoft says that it won't provide Windows Mobile 7 on this device which could be a bummer since you might see new Windows Mobile 7 devices in next few months. I'm sure you can go to XDA developer website and get yourself a WM7 rom.
Other Notes:
o This phone will only get 3G on the TMobile and you won't be use it with AT&T or any other network, for that matter, in Europe as TMO uses 1700 as one of the band which is not used any where else. Although the Aussie version of this phone will work on AT&T
o The above is true only for 3G while GPRS and EDGE are quad band which will work everywhere in the world.
I've been using this for few days now and am very impressed with it. Haven't found any deal breaker issue so far, but will keep you guys updated.
*** After few weeks, the love affair has sort of died down when the realities kicked in ..
- Lot of issues with getting flash player to work seemlessly with the browsers. I ended up installing flash player, plash player 10, flash lite 3.1, windows .NET compact framework to make it work and then installed the latest Opera browse, opera mini browser, Skyfire browser only to find that Flash now works in Skyfire.
- Many people have stopped supporting windows 6.5 and are prepping for Windows Mobile 7 so difficult to get it working on this device. (e.g. Adobe flash player and Skype)
- Different browser have different zoom in / zoom out settings which is frustrating.
-- The Opera browser which comes installed has the pinch in and pinch out (expand) to zoom in /out.
-- Opera 10 (new download) has click zoom in and out.
-- Skyfire has its own icon where you can click on + and -
-- IE also has click (tap the screen) and then a slider on the right side to zoo in and out.
I'd like all the browsers to support pinch in and out or atleast a common method.
- Very less applications on 6.5 marketplace, for example kids learning apps are not available easily (at all?). This is due to lack of marketplace when this launched to they are scattered everywhere. The problem might be addressed with the launch of Windows Mobile 7 marketplace.
I'm a longtime user of smart phones and you can say that I'm a heavy user. I typically have multiple email accounts, use GPS for occasional driving or just for walking tours during travel, WiFi regularly during international roaming and Skype on 3G/Wifi for calls. Plus watching some videos, listening to live internet radios and pod-casts as well as use it as a media player.
All the websites provide the specs, so I'll get into the plusses and minuses of the phone and my experience with them.
Plusses:
+ great capacitive touch screen. Very responsive. 480x800 resolution for crystal clear colors and videos
+ Included Transformer movies (1&2) do a great job showing off the screen and the processor power. It's just HD video without any lags or hazy-ness. Very impressive
+ comes with 16GB with only movies on it so you have ample of room for other media.
+ plays live audio and video flawlessly over 3G
+ HTC Sense is amazing and does a great job of hiding those Microsoft screens which you rarely get to. All the apps like email, messaging etc look much better with Sense.
+ Comes with a great animated weather screen
+ very slim though a little on the heavy side
+ 5.0mp Camera comes with flash which is good for close up photos.
+ charges thru PC USP port as well and has an option to be connected as a hard-drive, which is much better and faster compared to the Media Sync feature
+ good battery life, lasts up a day and a half with regular 3g usage and video watching
+ can be used as a WiFi Router/Access Point.
+ comes with FM when you plus the head set as an antenna
+ Swype app (included) as a replacement for keyboard rocks.. much faster to type with that.
Minuses:
- Huge screen is a plus but then you can't keep it in your Jeans pocket as it might put strain on the screen or device
- even though camera is a 5.0 MP, some pictures do tend to be grainy due to low light
- Skype hs removed its support for WinMo 6.5 but the older version of apps can be found on the internet
- Doesn't come with the "Wifi Router" app which basically turns your phone into a Wifi Access Point.. So you can have many people connect to your phone thru wifi and the phone provides the internet thru 3G.
- Microsoft says that it won't provide Windows Mobile 7 on this device which could be a bummer since you might see new Windows Mobile 7 devices in next few months. I'm sure you can go to XDA developer website and get yourself a WM7 rom.
Other Notes:
o This phone will only get 3G on the TMobile and you won't be use it with AT&T or any other network, for that matter, in Europe as TMO uses 1700 as one of the band which is not used any where else. Although the Aussie version of this phone will work on AT&T
o The above is true only for 3G while GPRS and EDGE are quad band which will work everywhere in the world.
I've been using this for few days now and am very impressed with it. Haven't found any deal breaker issue so far, but will keep you guys updated.
*** After few weeks, the love affair has sort of died down when the realities kicked in ..
- Lot of issues with getting flash player to work seemlessly with the browsers. I ended up installing flash player, plash player 10, flash lite 3.1, windows .NET compact framework to make it work and then installed the latest Opera browse, opera mini browser, Skyfire browser only to find that Flash now works in Skyfire.
- Many people have stopped supporting windows 6.5 and are prepping for Windows Mobile 7 so difficult to get it working on this device. (e.g. Adobe flash player and Skype)
- Different browser have different zoom in / zoom out settings which is frustrating.
-- The Opera browser which comes installed has the pinch in and pinch out (expand) to zoom in /out.
-- Opera 10 (new download) has click zoom in and out.
-- Skyfire has its own icon where you can click on + and -
-- IE also has click (tap the screen) and then a slider on the right side to zoo in and out.
I'd like all the browsers to support pinch in and out or atleast a common method.
- Very less applications on 6.5 marketplace, for example kids learning apps are not available easily (at all?). This is due to lack of marketplace when this launched to they are scattered everywhere. The problem might be addressed with the launch of Windows Mobile 7 marketplace.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Perpetual debate about the tax entities (Sole Proprietorship, LLC, C Corp, S Corp)
Even though there’s so much information out there (blogs, articles, books, references, discussion forums) to help people choose from different legal entities, it’s a difficult decision and it ultimately comes down to their personal situation and preferences.
I’ll simplify the different options and their impact:
- Sole Proprietorship : Simplest and Easiest. No forms needed except any filings with your state government like WA State needs you to acquire a Master Business License from the Business and Occupation (B&O) department. There’s no other paper work needed and no other administrative requirements except some accounting and reporting requirements from the tax filing perspective. You have all the control over how it functions, but the liability is all personal and similarly the taxes also flow to you and the individual needs to file a Schedule C for the sole prop taxes. You are also required to pay the self employment taxes which is a bummer.
- LLC : Little bit more complicated and time-consuming as it has more filing requirements. Similar to Sole Prop, the income is passed to the members of the LLC but the liability is not with the members, and hence the name Limited Liability Company. Participating members can choose the management aspects and the member salary is subject to self employment taxes. For partnerships LLCs, you’d need to file 1065 and K-1 forms.
- C Corp : More paperwork for filing and needs election of BoD (board of directors), and officers of the company. Also requires share distribution, annual meetings with MoMs (minutes of the meetings registered), stock holder meetings and annual report filings. Since the corporation is taxed at corp rate and the dividends are taxable for individuals, there is a possibility of double taxation. No corporation self employment tax but the salaries are subjected to self employment tax.
- S Corp : Similar to C Corp, except that the income is passed directly to individuals involved. The income can be split as salary and distribution and the salary is subject to self employment taxes. S corp eliminates double taxation
- 1 member LLC can also be a Disregarded Entity
- Multi member LLC cannot be a Disregarded Entity and pays taxes as a partnership. The partnership files 1065 which generates a K-1 for each member. The K-1 is filed with individuals's 1040. In this case LLC acts as a pass-thru.
- When LLC needs to taxed as a corporation, they would file 8832 for Entity Classification Election
- LLC as a corporation : help on Pub 542 / 587
Friday, March 19, 2010
Phones, Operators and Frequency bands
When you are traveling internationally and trying to use the same phone everywhere (whether with the local sim or thru the roaming), it becomes difficult to keep track of what frequencies are used by what operators in which region of the country. Now with 3G (UMTS), the matrix is even more convoluted.
I’m listing the details before for my own convenience, but if you need additional information let me know.
GSM/GPRS/EDGE Bands (2G)
There are four different frequency bands which are used by the phone operators:
T-Mobile GSM in US: 1900 MHz
T-Mobile 3G (UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+) in US: AWS 1700(uplink)/2100(downlink) MHz
Roger Canada UMTS: 850 MHz
Wind Mobile Canada: UMTS 1700
Devices:
The 2100 UMTS is there to be friendly with Europe which operates on 1900/2100
India:
Hutch Delhi : 900/1800
Idea Delhi: 1800
Bharti Airtel Delhi: 900
MTNL Delhi: 900
Vodafone Delhi: 900/1800
Idea Haryana: 900
Hutch Haryana: 900
Hutch UP East/West: 900
Idea UP West: 900
I’m listing the details before for my own convenience, but if you need additional information let me know.
GSM/GPRS/EDGE Bands (2G)
There are four different frequency bands which are used by the phone operators:
- 850 MHz
- 900 MHz
- 1800 MHz
- 1900 MHz
US generally operates on 1900 MHz but AT&T still uses 850 MHz for some areas. T-Mobile uses only 1900 MHz but in some cases it provides roaming with AT&T using 850 MHz band. While internationally, you would need 900 MHz and 1800 MHz for GSM/GPRS.
ATT GSM in US: 850 MHz and 1900 MHz (850 mainly for rural coverage)
ATT 3G in US: 850/1900 MHz T-Mobile GSM in US: 1900 MHz
T-Mobile 3G (UMTS/HSPA/HSPA+) in US: AWS 1700(uplink)/2100(downlink) MHz
Roger Canada UMTS: 850 MHz
Wind Mobile Canada: UMTS 1700
Europe: O2/Vodafone/Orange : 2100 UMTS
Devices:
- iPhone : quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900). And HSDPA/UMTS : 850/1900/2100
- TMobile US Nexus One: Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE. UMTS: 1900/1700/2100
- TMobile US HTC HD2 : Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE. UMTS: 1900/1700/2100
- TMobile AT&T Nexus One: Quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE. UMTS: 850/1900/2100
The 2100 UMTS is there to be friendly with Europe which operates on 1900/2100
India:
Hutch Delhi : 900/1800
Idea Delhi: 1800
Bharti Airtel Delhi: 900
MTNL Delhi: 900
Vodafone Delhi: 900/1800
Idea Haryana: 900
Hutch Haryana: 900
Hutch UP East/West: 900
Idea UP West: 900
Clean Energy 2010 Trending Up
China is churning out the low cost infrastrucutre for Wind and Solar which in part is fueling the greater adoption of clean energy. Although people are sckeptical is China can continue that given their attitude and difficult framework for fostering entrepreneurship and innovation.
The global trend for investing in Renewables is looking good and some VC's will continue to make money while other's gamble on less 'cleaner' initiatives like ethanol.
[Source]
The report can be downloaded from http://www.cleanedge.com/reports/reports-trends2010.php
The global trend for investing in Renewables is looking good and some VC's will continue to make money while other's gamble on less 'cleaner' initiatives like ethanol.
[Source]
U.S. Venture and Global Clean-Energy Investments:
In 2009, U.S.-based venture capital investments in energy technologies declined from $3.2 billion in 2008 to $2.2 billion in 2009, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. However, as a percent of total VC investments, energy tech grew from 11.4 percent in 2008 to 12.5 percent in 2009. This represented the largest share in the history of the clean-energy asset class.
The report can be downloaded from http://www.cleanedge.com/reports/reports-trends2010.php
Digital Earth launched their website on Search4Oil
Tradable RECs Come to California
Its a good start but as you can see that its only circumventing the problem and not really solving anything. As another blogger pointed out that it'll just enable Colorado sell their RECs to them since they bought too much too soon.
According to the law firm Stoel Rives, "Under the CPUC's decision, the utility can simply purchase the TRECs from the renewable generator, without having to purchase the associated power. The delivery requirement still remains, however. The RECs must be associated with the delivery of some power to California in order to be counted toward a utility's RPS requirement."
Would be nicer too see this extend to individual trading instead of paying the utiliites companies to buying in on consumer's behalf.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Cheat sheet on Plantronics Voyager (510)
I started this off as writing about the vairous light combinations, but then ended up writing the whole thing for my reference...
So, the section below covers all the lights I've come across specifically on Voyager 510:
So, the section below covers all the lights I've come across specifically on Voyager 510:
- Constant Red : When the Voyager is plugged in and is being charged.
- Constant Blue: When the Voyager is plugged in and is finished charging.
- Red Blue blinnking/flashing: Voyager is ready for pairing. This happens when you keep the + VOL and CALL button on the boom pressed.
- Blue blinking/flashing: Voyager is working, paired and online
- Red blinking/flashing: Battery low
- Turn on: keep the black power button pressed for three seconds. Blinks blue once and that is the indication that its turned on.
- Turn off: keep the black power button pressed for three seconds. Blinks red once and that is the indication that its turned off.
- Disable blue blinking when paired/online: Turn off and then turn on by keeping the +VOL and black POWER button pressed for three seconds. (apparently this doesn't work in my case, so I might be returning it)
- Enable blue blinking then paired/online: Repeat the above process (#3)
- Reset the headphone if keys stop responding: Press - VOL and POWER button together for three seconds.
- Redial last number: quick double click on the CALL button
- Accept the call: when the headset is ringing, press the CALL button to accept it
- Pass the call to the phone from the headset: Long press on the call button until you hear two beeps
- Take back the call from the phone to the headset: Press the CALL button
- Cancel/End the call: Press on the CALL button
- Reject the call: When the headset is ringing because of an incoming call, long press the CALL button to reject the call.
Getting Plantronics Voyager 510 to work with Windows 7
This applies to many other bluetooth headsets out there who have trouble working with Vista or Windows 7.
One of the main problem that show up is that the pairing is successful (with Bluetooth Perepheral Device), but it doesn't find any drivers. Here's a snippet from the windows support website to get this working.
The CSR drivers are mentioned on the above referenced website or can be downloaded from
•Download CSR Bluetooth Driver v1.0.0.376 for Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 x86 (32-bit) as a 216 kB (221,687 bytes) CAB file which should extract to 674 kB (691,122 bytes)
•Download CSR Bluetooth Driver v1.0.0.376 for Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 x64 (64-bit) as a 232 kB (237,897 bytes) CAB file which should extract to 773 kB (792,118 bytes)
To get Skype working with the headset, you need to make sure that you are able to select "Bluetooth Hand-free Audio" as a Playback Device when you right click on the "volume" icon in the lower right corner of the screen.
You will also need to change the Audio Settings in Skype so it uses Bluetooth device for both recording and playback.
Hope this works for everyone having such issues.
One of the main problem that show up is that the pairing is successful (with Bluetooth Perepheral Device), but it doesn't find any drivers. Here's a snippet from the windows support website to get this working.
Due to the fact that Windows Vista doesn’t support Bluetooth headset profile, if you want to use a Bluetooth headset with your adapter, you’ll need a little creative workaround to add the headset profile to the default Microsoft stack. Download either of the x86 or x64 compilations of the CSR Bluetooth driver and extract its contents to a folder. When you try to pair your headset to your computer, Windows will ask for drivers for the headset since it doesn’t find the appropriate headset profile. Point Windows to the folder where you have extracted the CSR drivers to make it work. Make sure you go into the device in the Bluetooth Devices panel and check off the boxes for headset, etc. [Source]There are many people suggesting various approaches which haven't worked for me or for many others.
The CSR drivers are mentioned on the above referenced website or can be downloaded from
•Download CSR Bluetooth Driver v1.0.0.376 for Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 x86 (32-bit) as a 216 kB (221,687 bytes) CAB file which should extract to 674 kB (691,122 bytes)
•Download CSR Bluetooth Driver v1.0.0.376 for Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 x64 (64-bit) as a 232 kB (237,897 bytes) CAB file which should extract to 773 kB (792,118 bytes)
To get Skype working with the headset, you need to make sure that you are able to select "Bluetooth Hand-free Audio" as a Playback Device when you right click on the "volume" icon in the lower right corner of the screen.
Hope this works for everyone having such issues.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Understanding startup-VC deals
A good blog I came across to understand the economics of a startup funding.
This relationship between option pool size and price isn’t always understood by entrepreneurs, but is well-understood by VCs. I learned it the hard way in the first term sheet that I put forward to an entrepreneur. I was competing with another firm. We put forward a “6 on 7” deal with a 20% option pool. In other words, we would invest (alongside another VC) $6 million at a $7 million pre-money valuation to own 46% of the company. The founders would own 34% and we would set aside a stock option pool of 20% for future hires. One of my competitors put forward a “6 on 9” deal, in other words $6 million invested at a $9 million pre-money valuation to own 40% of the company. But my competitor inserted a larger option pool than I did – 30% – so the founders would only receive 30% of the company as compared to my deal that gave them 34%. The entrepreneur chose the competing deal. When I asked why he looked me in the eye and said, “Jeff – their price was better. My company is worth more than $7 million”.http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2009/07/in-vc-deals-price-doesnt-matter-but-the-promote-does.html
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