How could I forget to mention the bicycle is a good invention?*

Posted on Friday, April 5, 2013 by Rex Hammock

BicycleBus NashvilleThere was no way I could NOT be a backer when I saw the Kickstarter Project, The Nashville Bicycle Bus, conceived by Nashville “bikepreneur” Austin Bauman.

How could I not support a cooperative venture of a creative, civic-minded small business, a local artist, bike-friendly city officials, a business and arts group, and bike- and art-loving volunteers on a project that’s crowd-funded through Kickstarter?

And that’s in Nashville, a city not yet among the top 50 bicycle-friendly cities in the U.S.**

The bicycle bus is a collaborative art project between local artist Andee Rudloff, Green Fleet Bicycle Tours & Rentals (Austin Bauman), the Metro Parks Department, and the Arts and Business Council of Greater Nashville.

It was made possible by Kickstarter backers who will get some cool things, including the one I’m looking forward to: a poster of the Nashville Bicycle Bus that will be a part of Joel Anderson’s wonderful Spirit of Nashville collection.

I try to bike to and from work 2-3 times a week, and it was a beautiful day for doing that today. (I’ve discovered, however, that some of my best rides are when the weather is rotten.) So I left the office a little early and before heading home, I biked by Day 1 of the community painting of the bus. (More information about the bus and the community painting can be found on the Green Fleet blog.)

Embedded below are some photos I took and posted on Flickr. I hope to get by there today during a cross-city ride (on my road bike, not my Ford F-150 of a commuter bicycle) and will add some more photos.

Great project. Great city. And like any day on a bike, a great day.

*Lyrics from The Bicycle Song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

**Is Nashville bicycle-friendly? On at least one list, Nashville is said to be a bike-friendly place, but I’m partial to the Bicycling magazine list created by the folks at Rodale. For those of you who are reading this who live in Tennessee, Chattanooga is on the Bicycling magazine list and Memphis is making impressive strides to get on it. Also, see: Nashville Business Journal’s tech blog regarding my recommendation for how to get more you techies to come to Nashville after graduating from college.

Related posts:

  1. Bicycle sight-seeing in Washington, DC, is the way to flow
  2. Bikes, Bars and Nashville Techies
  3. Hints for creating small business and non-profit Twitter Lists
  4. links for 2007-10-26
Posted in bicycling, Nashville | 1 Comment

Great Idea: Don’t just sell cookware when customers want you to help them become a better cook

Posted on Thursday, April 4, 2013 by Rex Hammock

hammock idea emailOn the Hammock Blog, there’s a post that’s a web-version of the current edition of The Idea Email. It’s inspired by all the ways the retailer Williams-Sonoma uses different forms of customer media and content that demonstrates the company’s understanding that “buying more pots and pans” is not what their customers are seeking — becoming better cooks is.

Side pitch about The Idea Email: If you don’t subscribe to the “one bright idea, every two weeks,” you should. Here’s where: http://www.hammock.com/idea-email/

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Posted in content, Content Marketing, Custom Media, Customer Media, Hammock Inc., marketing, media, publishing | Leave a comment

Can you hear me now?

Posted on Wednesday, April 3, 2013 by Rex Hammock
notable_phone_sizes_004

Link: “The first mobile phone call was made 40 years ago today.” (QZ.com)

Here’s one of those anniversary news items that makes you realize two things: A length of time (in this case, 40 years) can seem like both a long time, and a short time.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first cell-phone call.

Here’s a quote from an article appearing this morning on the news website, Quartz (QZ.com):

The first mobile phone call was made 40 years today, on April 3, 1973, by Motorola employee Martin Cooper. Using a prototype of what would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, the world’s first commercial cell phone, Cooper stood near a 900 MHz base station on Sixth Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets, in New York City and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey.

As I looked at the graphic accompanying the story, I realized I have owned a  version of mobile phone (or, as we call them here in the US of A, “cell phone”) from each of the major generations represented in the art. That’s the part that makes me think, gee,  I’m old. But then, I look at the graphic again, and I realize that it took about 15 years for that Motorola Brick he’s holding to fall in price enough to get into my hands. And I think, gee, that’s not such a long time ago.

And then I started thinking about how long it takes the technology we believe is moving rapidly to get from promise to reality, and how reality never is the same as what we imagined it would be when we first heard its promise.

Take the cell phone, for example. I feel pretty certain that my iPhone can place and receive calls, but the “phone” is one of its features I use the least. And does Motorola even make phones anymore? Google owns them for some reason having to do with patents, right? And I’m not quite sure, but I don’t think Google makes mobile phones either (not counting the ones it soon will be selling that look like a really bad pair of safety glasses you buy at the hardware store), but it gives away the Android operating system for free to anyone who wants to sell a phone, say Samsung or Facebook?

And who would have guessed 40 years ago, today, that the mobile phone would primarily be used as a device that enables you send a message to people with whom you are sharing a physical space (“You’re boring and I’m rude.”) while simultaneously sending a message to those with whom you are sharing a virtual space (“Where r u?”)

Aren’t we lucky to be living through such amazing times?

Related posts:

  1. My first voice-recognition question for Google’s new iPhone App
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  3. Who uses communications gadgets?
  4. I don’t want to hear this
Posted in gizmos, google, history, iphone, observation | Leave a comment

I believe the reason Apple acquired indoor location technology is to prepare for the launch of iSocks

Posted on Sunday, March 24, 2013 by Rex Hammock

sonar screenAccording to a report on a Wall Street Journal blog (so it must be true), Apple has acquired an “indoor-GPS company” called WifiSLAM. In this case, I assume “GPS” is being used metaphorically, as the blog post explains the technology uses Wifi signals to discover the location of an iPhone inside a building, within a few feet of where it may be lost under your sofa.

While there is nothing new about using Wifi to augment GPS  in determining ones location, earlier approaches that I’ve blogged about focused on network routers, not mobile devices. (And using “anonymous” cell-phone signals provides Google with the data necessary to augment GPS data to show you the exact location where you’re stuck in traffic.)

Perhaps that’s why the initial tech-media coverage of the acquisition speculates that the technology being acquired by Apple is so it can compete with Google’s dominance in maps. (Despite the rather obvious logic that a $20 million acquisition can’t help Apple catch up with the billions Google has invested in maps.)

Competing with Google maps may have something to do with it, but a more obvious reason to me (just a humble user) is the way in which the technology could be used as part of Apple’s rumored development of a smart watch. As a longtime user of GPS devices for bicycling and as an early user of the Pebble watch, a kinda smart watch that links to my iPhone via bluetooth, it seems obvious from my experience that wifi-location technology would be great not only for an iWatch, but for all sorts of smart iStuff. I’d love an iWallet and iKeyChain, for example. Oh, yes, and an iMissingSock.

As the 12 readers of this blog know, I am a seasoned user of  the “Find my iPhone” feature (now, of iCloud) to locate my mobile devices. I even tracked down a stolen iPhone once. If Apple could tell me what sofa cushion my iPhone is under without me having to send out a loud Find my iPhone sonar signal to it, that would be pretty nifty. And while I’d much prefer Apple to announce an iFlyingCar, I’ll be eager to see all the things a truly smart watch with in-door location awareness can do.

But, I’ll admit. I will completely understand why most people are going to react negatively to news that Apple can locate where iPhone users are, even when they are indoors. It’s the same way panic-junkies always react whenever they’ve found a new source of panic-crack. But in this case, even I’ve discovered some “geo-aware” apps that are so creepy, I’ve disabled location-related features on all iPhone things that don’t relate specifically to my need to check-in, find things or to let those I choose, find me. Do I really want the Walgreens app to automatically launch when I walk into one of their locations? No — that’s creepy.

So, bottom line: I want to use my phone’s ability to know where I am in ways that show me where I can find what I need, when I need them — inside, or out.

However, it will take a lot for me to give any company, even the ones I like, permission to target me in ways that remind me how creepy it is to be stalked if I don’t understand the benefit.

 

Related posts:

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  4. Apple’s magic
Posted in apple, internet, iphone | Leave a comment

Google Reader was a Google Pigpen product

Posted on Thursday, March 14, 2013 by Rex Hammock

pigpengoogle-20101112-053824(Note: This blog post rated G, for “Geeky”)

While I’ve used Google Reader to catch and organize content syndicated via RSS, I’ve never used Google Reader as a news reader. (I’ll explain how in just a second.)

To understand why I’ve never been a fan of Google Reader as a reader, it might be helpful to read a long-ago post I wrote about Lucy Google Products vs. Pigpen Google Products. My point in that post was (and still is), you can usually tell when Google is very committed to a new product (when you can connect dots from the product to something that competes with  Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon) and when it isn’t (it usually has the term “labs” associated with it).

And, unfortunately for everyone who could have been better served by a great RSS newsreader, Google Reader has always been as “Pigpen” as it gets. It just never felt like it had a champion inside Google with enough clout to make it anything more than mediocre.

But because it was from Google, other developers chose to create veneers to wrap over Google Reader’s Pigpen-ness, rather than to actually compete with it. For most of the past couple of years, for instance, I’ve used some such, uh, veneer-ware, called Reeder, a “client” that hides Google Reader while using it with a better interface. However, RSS syndication can be used in so many ways, it is something different for everyone, so what’s good for me, doesn’t work for others.

Yesterday, Google did what it ultimately does with most of its Pigpen projects: It announced Google Reader’s mercy killing.

While it may seem like that’s a bad thing (my Twitter stream seems to think it is), it isn’t. As Instapaper creator Marco Arment blogged yesterday, “We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.”

In other words, maybe people who use RSS everyday without knowing it, will be able to understand how to use it to make their lives simpler. And maybe otherwise seemingly smart people will get over their ridiculous notion that RSS is dead or that it can be replaced by Twitter feeds.

And maybe people who use stealth RSS readers like Flipboard, will finally understand how RSS is hidden throughout the internet’s tubes.

I used to attempt to get my friends to use a newsreader. For whatever reason, most never quite got it. It’s one of the few things I use that I consider a competitive advantage and a tool I couldn’t operate professionally without. I decided to stop wasting time trying to give that secret away.

 

Related posts:

  1. The Google reader makes me feel illiterate (or, Why can’t Rex read?)
  2. There are 2 Googles: Lucy Google and Pigpen Google
  3. The Tumblr-fication of Google Reader
  4. Maybe an RSS reader is better than FriendFeed after all
Posted in blogging, google, history, internet | 2 Comments