Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time and now that Louis Gray asked, I really need to listen and post about it. First of all, at the moment I put my account private again. I am still torn whether I should keep it public or private but for now, keeping it private makes it just this little bit more free to say stuff. It’s probably just because I am chicken

Above that, I have to say that I only subscribe to @olivert posts on my mobile, nothing else. I would not want to get the gazillions of SMS from all the posts from friends, especially because there are some people that are syndicating their blog posts on there, which I personally think is a clear don’t. You can post your blog post if you think your friends should know, but don’t make it a default.

I am moving further away from answering the question though… ok. I learn stuff. It’s trivial things like two of my friends getting a MacBook Air, or being live with Jason Calacanis forgot his passport at the hotel on his trip back from Paris, or just now David Sifry wondering why all major travel sites have downward trending traffic … I learned about the Sun-MySQL deal first via Twitter; I learned about Qik.com and got my Seesmic invite from Loic. I just answered a friends question about how Google does the Geolocation on the iPod Touch update. It’s weird, but stuff happens on there and as it is a bit like a very very slow IRC channel, you can handle the load and be part of the communication.

It does take a little bit of getting used too, but with something like Twitteriffic, it gets really easy to post and react. And as you have to be short, it is not really something that takes up a lot of time. This post probably took more time now than all the twitter posts I will do today.

So yes Louis, I think you should sign up. It’s not a drag on your performance like IRC (I entered a channel with 150 people yesterday and wondered how I ever managed to keep up :)), so that worry should not be there. Just be selective with your friends. It’s like reading RSS feeds. You might have too many at one point and then you learn to scale down. Slowly you can’t live without it anymore.

Now that would be a killer MacWorld announcement wouldn’t it? Just imagine Apple owning Quicktime and Flash. Just imagine them owning Photoshop. Just imagine them being content creation and distribution. That’s Cringely’s idea in his latest article entitled: End Game: Why Apple will buy Adobe.

The thing is that Apple has $15 billion in cash (as Cringely pointed out). That is not enough for Adobe’s $22 billion valuation, but they could throw in some cash. Let’s say they need to pay a 20-30% premium, then they need something like $30 billion to get Adobe. A few billion in cash and the rest in stock. With Apple’s valuation at $152 billion that might be doable.

The thing is that I do not currently know what else they could do that would really rock our world. Sure an ultra-thin laptop with  touchscreen might be nice, but without some added things it will not change the world. IT will not lead to soo much more profit, manely because the market isn’t that huge. They might do a package system with a desktop and laptop and things. I am pretty sure that they will do something great. Buying Adobe would be one possible thing.

Lots of people are doing their yearly predictions at the moment and two that really caught me, which I would like to share here.

First is Louis Gray, a blog I have started reading some time ago. His 10 Predictions for 2008 rock, especially as they are really clear, and sometimes weird.

First of all, Google will trump TechMeme and FeedHeads and I agree with him in the sense that Google Reader is really powerful.  Second, Facebook will buy Digg … fitting. But he argues an all stock transaction, which I somehow do not believe because Microsofts investment was something where they did not care for the valuation. Of course it could be that Digg just sells for something like a billion, which sounds cool on paper. He argues that Twitter will add video and photo support, which I don’t buy into, based on what Evan Williams said at Le Web 3, meaning to keep it simple. Number 6 is cool in that one browser will embed ad-blocking, which would lead to a major shift in internet advertising. But yeah, things that are possible will be done.

The other one is Cringely with Always Certain, Sometimes Correct. He always has some great ones. First of all, I just got a Fujitsu Siemens Activity Media Center for a kick ass price and yes, it’s a PC, but it sits at your TV and doesn’t feel like one. Stuff like this is the future. Google will bid billions on the 700-Mhz spectrum and then trade the rights to Sprint or much cooler, buy Sprint :). Steve Ballmer will quit! Apple will launch the replacement of the mouse and a sub-notebook. Wow. Also Apple will start licensing OS X (the thing running on the iPhone) to others. Not Mac OS X, so not the desktop version mind you. His biggest is number 13. He argues that Apple will build into OS X the Windows API, with a license from Microsoft, meaning Windows apps run inside OS X, not virtual ala Parallels or something. Really.

You will find a lot more predictions online but these are some really interesting one. Have a good 2008

Amazon has a press release out with some interesting numbers for 2007, for those interested in them. It’s already been going around the web, but here are some I really like and a few further links at the end. (Data seems to include .com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp, .ca)

1. Busiest Day December 10th: 5.4 million items ordered, 62,5 per second!
2. On peek day their fulfillment network shipped 3.9 million units!
3. COMMENT: Kind of means that the average person buys something like 2 items per order right? Roughly. Interesting.
4. They shipped something to Borrow, Alaska

Following are some amazon.com numbers (with hotsellers being nov 15th until dec 19th):

1. When in stock, Wiis sold at 17/sec … but they are rarely in stock I think
2. In video games top seller was the Wii!
3. In DVDs Harry Potter and “Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series” among others
4. In consumer electronics Garmin GPS, Canon Powershop and Samsung LCDs
5. In PCs MacBook, Nokia Internet Tablet! (two shares I hold and items I have ;))

Gizmodo has a further list with mosted wished for and the like. Very nice.

Yesterday I got my new Wacom Bamboo, a tablet that is ment to be a mouse replacement and I have to admit that it actually is. The biggest switch seems to be that I need to get used to holding a pen in the left hand and moving around on the screens with my left hand, instead of with my mouse on the right. At the moment I actually have both sitting at my laptop which is cool. I am missing the scroll wheel a little bit which is kind of there on the tablet but still a bit weird.

There are actually two settings you will have on the Mac if you plug it in and install the driver. One is for Ink and the other one for the Wacom Bamboo configuration. There you can configure the 4 special buttons on the tablet and the two buttons on the pen. The cool thing is that you can set these buttons to full keystrokes, meaning that the buttons FN1 and FN2 on the tablet are copy and paste (Applekey + C or V) and the top button on the pen is Apple+W which closes the active window, cool for using the browser. I might come up with other wonderful key compinations. The other keys on the tablet are TAB and Ink On/Off and right click for the second key on the pen. It is working pretty well with these kind of keys.

Another important setting is whether you want to use the tablet as a mouse or pen. I am using it as a pen meaning that the surface of my tablet kind of is the surface of my two monitors together. Tapping top left, will put the mouse top left on the left monitor, then top right on the top of the right monitor. The cool thing here is that you will get used to the Bamboo and the size ratios and slowly but surely know where to move the pen to have the mouse where you want it to be and that is a real time saver.

There are also some nice smaller things. I open GMail, click a mail, tab the one key on the tablet to enable ink, draw a Y on the screen and boom the mail is archived. Now that is wonderfully easy. I will have to play a bit more with Ink to really get used to using that one.

All in all I am starting to get really happy with using a pen instead of a mouse. That’s really what the tablet is built for. I having drawn with it yet but it might actually be too small for that. But more posts on playing with Ink will likely follow.