LinkedIn - Search Errors

Have been getting "Search is currently unavailable" error for several hours on LinkedIn today.

Netflix on Xbox 360 Live

A small Xbox live gold membership fee aside, Netflix on Xbox is a great service. Finally, Netflix on TV w/o additional appliances!

The way things are right now, you have to jump back to your Netflix account in a regular browser to manage your queue before you can view movies on the Xbox. Netflix should offer a queue management API to allow for a tighter integration with Xbox, TiVo and other consoles/DVRs.

New favorite iPhone App -- Chess with Friends

I've tried several iPhone chess apps so far and they all seem decent. However, Chess with Friends kicks it up a notch by allowing players to take as much time as they want to make a move and to keep multiple games open. You can play with friends or random people.



It would be great if they could add SMS support for move notifications to keep the usage up.

The Black Swan

Having read The Black Swan earlier this year, it was interesting to see the author of the book, Nassem Taleb, talking about the economy on CNBC recently. However, it was a shame that Nassem wasn't able to express himself as eloquently about the recent Black Swan events as he has in his book.

Loopt Jumps Ahead Of Facebook And MySpace On iPhone

Downloads metrics are misleading. Most apps in this category are not actively used. The geo-aware app fun factor wears off rather quickly for ONE reason:
Apple's iPhone apps cannot run in the background! You have to manually launch all the apps and manually make updates... one app at a time.




90% of all the social iPhone apps, especially the geo-aware social apps, are USELESS until the iPhone can run them in the background & let the user multitask.

Imagine an iPhone alerting you when your geo-aware social network buddies are in your area w/o you having to log in to check anything -- NOW THAT'S A REAL APP (privacy & battery issues aside).




This is not Loopt's fault of course but things could be so much more interesting if the iPhone supported multitasking & background apps out of the box. The way things are right now, you can't even listen to your own music while running the apps -- what a mess.

Now RIM's BBs & Loopt that's another story...

'08 Election Day

--
Sent from my iPhone

Salesforce Automation (SFA): My beef with SugarCRM

Over the years, I've done several Salesforce automation vendor evaluations. So, when it was time to do this for my current company, I've quickly rounded up the usual SFA suspects, narrowed down the options, ran a pilot with the sales team in-house and settled on a vendor. Cake, right? Sure, but here's something that I've realized in the process about SugarCRM, one the the vendors.

There has been a lot of buzz around SugarCRM in the recent years. They have open-source roots, low per seat licensing fees when compared to other competitors i.e. Salesforce, and robust functionality with pretty dashboards & sales pipelines that are sure to dazzle most executives.

The following are some of the issues that had made an impact on the decision making process for SugarCRM:

1. SugarCRM evaluation server is a shared environment. Things were slow most of the time with frequent timeouts. Times are tough but if sugar is trying to win over business they can't let the server performance get in the way.

2. SugarCRM's recent releases are unpolished and not fully QA'd. We've tried to import contact records and either got SQL errors or blank screens. SugarCRM's sales engineers have told us that there is "a problem with the data" and didn't have a good explanation for why their software doesn't handle errors gracefully.

3. Technically, SugarCRM Open Source edition is free but we really needed to use the on-demand version to avoid hosting yet another system. SugarCRM's on-demand hosting pricing model is too rigid for most SMBs due to a one year contract lock in where a business has to commit to thousands of dollars.

Using virtualization, it shouldn't cost SugarCRM much to maintain on-demand hosting profiles for customers with month-to-month pricing which would open the doors for a much bigger number of customers who don't want to commit for the whole year. The important thing is that once customers import data and build on that by generating extra data they are usually hooked and will renew their contracts. Again, SugarCRM could just outsource hosting altogether by putting the whole thing into a could which shouldn't cost them much.

SugarCRM needs to be more more competitive, especially in this market. Hope they'll catch on before it's too late.

Last Presidential Debate

Don't recall seeing this during the last debate but apparently this is an unaltered still photo, go figure : )

Your Tax Money Paid to Investment Banks and Hedge Funds via AIG

Apparently, AIG is using the federal bailout loans to pay the investment banks. From the tax-payer pockets straight to the invetment banks and hedge funds -- that's rich. My better half doubled her money a few weeks ago by day trading AIG in a volatile market -- pure luck & good timing.

Odd former boss news coverage

Recent news coverage on two of my former bosses...

ONE:

Capsule carrying US space tourist docks with ISS
Richard spent $30M on 10days @ IIS (hope they have enough to fix the IIS toilet now)



TWO:

The Secret Pleasures of Dr. Doom
Apparently, people are surprised to learn that Nouriel has a fun side.

Ten years later, Yahoo Finally updates its Calendar

The Outlook look-alike is based on Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo last year) and features the following:

1. Drag & drop interface.
2. Layering (view multiple calendars in different colors or subscribe to someone else’s calendar)
3. Zoom in when adding an event or appointment
4. Integration with Flickr
5. Can set email, IM or SMS reminders.
6. To-Do list.

The stock is trading low, employees are jumping ship but I must admit that it's good to see Yahoo trying to outdo Google Calendar. You can sign up for Yahoo Calendar beta @ http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com/m/landing.php

Now if they could just give the rest of the site a face lift i.e. see the 1990's style http://dir.yahoo.com and get their ad technology to work properly.

The Market

My former boss, Nouriel Roubini a.k.a. Dr Doom says that Dow will hit 7000 before the economy rebounds.

The tech stocks are dropping faster than Dow and are now at or near their 52 week lows: GOOG -51% YTD, AAPL - 50% YTD, and just forget about poor YHOO (trading @ $13!)

Google Analytics Acting Up

Google Analytics is falling behind on data processing, reports came in over 12 hours late and no data is available for today.

Blogging Redux - What I was blogging about ten years ago

It's been over a decade since I've made my last blog post. Back in 1998, I ran an MMO community site (before joining NcSoft), which eventually generated over a million uniques. Apparently, this was before the term "blog" was coined.

In 1998, the Internet was still in it's infancy so things, as you recall (or can imagine), were quite different:

Google in 1998:


Yahoo in 1998:


My Blog in 1998 (dug up from the WayBack machine):


The purpose of this blog is to keep track of my tech-related ramblings. Let's see what the next decade of blogging will bring.