Qik: Now live on BlackBerry

I’ve personally been asked hundreds of times when Qik would be available for BlackBerry devices. As any mobile or BlackBerry geek knows, this requires some hardcore magic. Well, we got there!
Like I’m constantly telling our developers, who are deeply clever and incredibly hardworking (both massive understatements), they make my job pretty easy. All I […]

Weekend in the OC

I’m now ready to give it all up to be a beach bum. (All photos here.)

Many thanks to the Webby Awards for footing the bill for my three nights at the Ritz-Carlton. It was an…interesting weekend.

Quote to remember

Withhold admiration from a narcissist and be disliked. Give it and be treated with indifference.
-Mason Cooley

There are worse places to be stranded for the weekend

Sunset over Laguna Niguel, California - taken at the Ritz-Carlton, where I’m speaking at the WebbyConnect conference.

Is intense, incessant curiosity the flipside of depression?

Sounds right to me. The real trick is retaining the benefits of the pathology while ridding oneself of the many crippling elements…
I think depression is examination you can’t turn off: Once you start the examination you can’t stop it, and it kind of settles on you. But if you can somehow change the spigot you […]

Missing Cincinnati

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love California life, but I pine for lots of places on various continents at all times (and probably always will). Mostly I miss my friends in Cincy. That said, autumn in the 513 is certainly the best part of the year there. (I also needed something vaguely happy to […]

Gordon Brown to “guarantee everything”

Anyone who might think this is over the top cannot have spent much time in the UK.
A government spokesman was keen to point out that the scheme does not cover just financial guarantees. “It’s really everything. In a trial in the midlands, we guaranteed everything from a senior citizen’s gall bladder operation to the […]

Cognitive dissonance rules the land

I am in the advertising industry and most of the ads for sub-prime loans had dried up before the recent bail-out bill. As soon as that went through the volume for these ads went up 10 times. Whatever the government did to “fix” the problem ain’t working because all they did was just give everyone […]

WebbyConnect

The Webby Awards’ annual conference, WebbyConnect, is coming up this week in Laguna Niguel. The line-up of presenters is really quite something - plus, I’ll be speaking on Friday about the future of the mobile web. Tickets cost $2350, but if you can’t make it to the Ritz-Carlton (it’s too late to register now), I’m […]

Quote of the day

To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one’s fingers against clay, or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But […]

Idea to remember

Guy Herbert, one of the brightest minds of my London circle (all of whom I really miss):
Corporate industrialists are frequently not keen on free markets. They are fond of order, safety, and “fairness” or “a level playing-field” - which means everybody doing things the same way they do. They like a managed world, because management […]

What would Cathy Seipp say?

I wonder this about so many stories that make a headline splash. I’m not the only one.
It’s hard for me to forget how keenly I felt the loss of Cathy in the weeks after she died. For some reason, it’s no more believable to me now that she’s really gone. From time to time, […]

No smartphone? No PDA? You can now Qik anyway!

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this! Qik is now the first live mobile video service to launch on non-smartphones and non-PDAs. These are mass market phones, the kind you get free with a lot of airtime contracts. It’s an unprecedented move for live mobile video, reaching outside the most sophisticated market […]

Quotes I can’t help but remember

No prizes for guessing why these have been rattling around my head of late.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
The GSE structure serves to privatize profits and […]