Author Archives: tlianza

It's time to admit I actually use my cell phone

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I’ve always had the cheapest cell phone plan available – 200 daytime minutes per month, 1000 night and weekend minutes. I do most of my back home/family calling on weekends. It wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and joined Dodgeball that I made the slightest increase to my plan. I added 200 monthly text messages for $5, bringing my total monthly bill to $35. That may not sound like a lot to seasoned cell phone users, but it pained me to add $5 to something that I’d generally considered a “utility” that I needed but didn’t spend considerable time with.

A few months ago I started creeping over the plan limits, sometimes in daytime minutes, sometimes in text messages. I kept telling myself that “next month” I’d keep it under. Then November came and my bill made it painfully obvious that I actually use my cell phone. 637 daytime minutes, 440 text messages, and $235 later I’ve hit the harsh realization that my cell phone is actually an important part of my life.

Added on to that is the fact that I’ve really been envious of people with real internet access on their phones – an actual browser that you can actually do stuff with. So, it’s time for a change. The problem is: 1) Every provider offers internet access that I’d consider ‘too expensive’, and 2) I have yet to see a device that I actually want to use. The closest thing available is probably the Blackjack. I have my fingers crossed that Apple will announce something awesome, although that doesn’t solve the problem that internet access on the phone seems to be going for $40/month. Can someone do it for $20? I’m not talking about Cingular’s EDGE crap either – I want the good stuff.

NFL Playoff Predictions

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For some reason I feel compelled to jot down my predictions for the NFL playoffs, even though I find football very hard to predict. Part of the reason is that the football playoffs are one-and-done, so all it takes is one bad game, or even one bad play, and a whole team’s season can be over. It’s awesome.

  • Colts beat the Chiefs (should be a close one)
  • Cowboys beat the Seahawks (sorry Seattle)
  • Patriots beat the Jets (of course)
  • Eagles beat the Giants (the Giants are playing like crap)

I’m only predicting for round 1 right now, because the logic gets too complicated for future rounds based on who wins here.

TV on Cell phones

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Over at John Cook’s Venture blog there is a post about technology in 2007. When asked about technologies that will “hit the wall” in 2007, Robin Murdoch of Accenture said:

…streaming TV to cell phones is “overhyped completely,” adding that most people would choose to watch a live sporting event on a large Plasma TV screen rather than their handheld device.

I agree with Robin’s conclusion, but not his/her justification. The fact of the matter is, with the exception of sporting events and breaking news, streaming live TV to anything, including TVs themselves is on the decline. The vast majority of content is not terribly time-critical. Even the NBC Nightly News is available as a podcast download now. The acceptance of TiVos and DVRs has demonstrated that people don’t mind watching things later, and in fact they prefer to watch things on their own time. When you’re out and about, that’s even more true.

The statement that people would choose a large screen over a small one isn’t even interesting. The reason someone would choose a small screen is because they can take it everywhere – that’s the tradeoff they’re making. The question is how many people want to take their video with them, and I’d imagine people in the cell phone industry are keeping an eye on sales in the iPod video store to answer that.

Ignite Seattle

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For those of you in the Seattle area, I’d highly recommend attending Ignite Seattle next time they do it. The format is:

  • Every presenter gets to show 20 slides
  • Slides show for 15 seconds each and flip automatically – presenter doesn’t control them
  • Topics were some startups, some hobbies, some non-profits, social groups, etc.

The fact that the presentations were kept short meant that people had to get through their ideas quickly, which kept the pace up and made it that much more entertaining. Jonah’s talk went well about the Darfur Wall – people seemed to love it. Eric Benson gave a cool talk on how to get what you want involves balancing your level of desire against the difficulty in getting something, and the different ways people circumvent that balance. Jordan Schwartz’ talk about SMS touched on a little bit of one of the ideas we had for wishlisting.com and Dan Shapiro (founder of Ontela) gave a great inspirational talk on what it takes to start a company. The vast majority of the talks were quite good and interesting. If they have it again, I will definitely be there.

New home page

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I don’t think I’ve changed my home page in 5-10 years. Up until a few days ago, it featured long lists of quotes which I stopped collecting sometime in high school (although Google searchers did seem to stumble on them). It needed to be updated, and I didn’t want to spend time updating a web page that doesn’t serve much purpose.

It dawned on me that I actually do a lot of stuff online that’s publicly accessible – write in this blog, bookmark stuff with del.icio.us, mark stuff as public in my feed reader, etc. So, I updated my home page to be a rolling collection of the stuff I’ve most recently updated online in various areas. That way, the content never gets stale. I don’t really like how it looks, but I like it better than the old page, so it’s good enough for now.

It’s a single PHP page that uses the SimplePie RSS library. I was using MagpieRSS for a while, and I found it much easier to use than SimplePie (ironic?), but it threw too many errors and warnings that I didn’t feel like troubleshooting.