Friends doing cool things, like putting out an EP

I love when my friends do cool things, like raise money on Kickstarter and put out an EP.  My friend Sam Kornstein, a member of the "Sunday Spins",  just put out an album called "Bend when the sun moves" by Vanessa Kafka and the Sunday Spins.  It's available on iTunes, Amazon, Pandora, etc., go check it out! This was my first experience with Kickstarter and it was a pretty good one.  It was easy to use and made it financially feasible for this band to put out an EP, which previously would have been much more difficult to do on a shoe string budget.

Competition is awesome (see iPhone Google Maps saga)

Google released the much anticipated Google Maps iPhone app yesterday and the reviews so far are pretty good.  I personally didn't think that the Apple Maps were as bad as they were made out to be, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  What this whole saga shows is the importance of competition and why so much focus on monopolies is paid by governments around the world. First, a little background:  the original maps application on the iphone was developed at the very last minute before the original iPhone launch by an Apple/Google team back in 2008.  That just goes to show you how important maps have become, in  2008 it was an afterthought .  Four years later and nothing had changed, Google actually refused to license their maps data to Apple so that it could be enhanced with new features such as spoken driving directions.  For many reasons, this being one of them, Apple decided to venture out on their own.  We all know what happened next:  huge uproar, people almost dying in deserts in Australia, apple execs were fired, and a written apology was given from the Apple CEO.

Fast forward to today.  Customers now have the choice between Apple Maps (and their advantages) and the new Google maps application.  There is no doubt that what Google just deployed is significantly better than what was available in iOS 5, it includes a slicker UI, better transit map integration, and voice driving directions.  I'm willing to bet Google would not have created this app in such a quick timeline if Apple hadn't upped the anti by putting out their own app.

One of the things that doesn't seem to get any press is the neat stuff now supported by iOS 6 for transit directions.  Sure, Apple doesn't have them integrated, but they do provide a means for 3rd party app developers to tie into the iPhone maps.  When I use the Rover app (link), it not only gives me transit directions but also pulls in real-time transit data telling me when buses and subway cars are going to arrive in San Francisco (and I assume other cities as well, like Boston).  This is better than what I had in the iOS 5 Google maps and as far as I can tell it's better than what Google released yesterday in their new app.  Publishing a schedule of when buses are supposed to arrive is signficantly less useful than knowing when exactly they will actually arrive.

Bottom line:  yes, Apple has looked awful through this whole mess, but because they took a gamble and pushed for innovation, iPhone owners are no doubt in a better spot than they were previously.  There is now an all out war between these two companies to keep innovating.  For me, companies going at each other's throats is a good thing and is why capitalism has become THE economic system in the world today.

Startups versus the corporate world

2012 has been quite the year for my career:  I've quit two jobs, worked as a part time consultant/contractor, and started a company (we have yet to launch our first product yet).   In the past 8 months I've probably learned more than I did in the previous 3 years, it is exhilarating but also incredibly exciting to be learning once again.  I hope to write more at a later time about what I've learned,  but this blog post called "Corporateshit" by the founder of Speekapp (Danny Boice) is incredibly amusing and generally spot on with many of my own experiences.

What happens when you combine technology and politics?

This is not a normal political post, because it really has nothing to do with the political beliefs of either Romney or Obama.  But as the writer of a technology blog who followed the 2012 election very closely (I will admit to making myself feel physically sick the day of the election because of nervousness over the results), I found reading about the technology supporting both campaigns particularly fascinating. First, a summary of the "Orca" program built by the Romney campaign (in part by a large corporation - Microsoft) is here.  In a nutshell, Romney built a massive application that was hosted on servers physically located in Boston's TD Garden Arena, but unfortunately failed miserably in doing adequate stress testing, basic configurations (such as forwarding  http requests to https), and distributing passwords/instructions/training effectively to the thousands of users.  The night of the election was the first time it had been used, and it failed dismally.  My favorite quote from the article:

“The end result,” Ekdahl wrote, “was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.”

Now for the Obama campaign, which was summarized here.   There are not nearly as many details, but it sounds like he built a tool for his grass roots movement to effectively organize where they invested their efforts.  The technology supporting this was using modern web architecture: cloud based services supported by Amazon.

Clearly, Obama and team had a lot more time to build and deploy this than Romney, but I do think this is yet another interesting difference between the two campaigns.