That's one way to handle the problem of how do you license codecs for a free browser: Buy the company that makes them.
It's not H.264, but it's good enough. And now presumably it won't cost Google anything more to distribute it.
I love emergent behaviour.
Real estate agents are expensive. They typically take 5-7% of the sale price of your home. (The seller pays both the buyer's agent and the seller's agent). A lot of people these days are selling privately, because the process of connecting a buyer and seller has been made much simpler through the Internet, so we thought we'd give this a try for our house sale.
There's a local company called Grapevine that many people in the area use. A few houses sold on our street in the spring through Grapevine, and they always have a lot of listings. So we listed with them.
Instead of taking a percentage of the house sale price, they take a fixed price - a few hundred dollars - in exchange for a sign for your lawn, the listing, forms for negotiating with buyers, and some tips about selling your house privately. Everything you need to sell privately.
So we put the sign on the lawn and waited for the phone to ring.
And boy did it ring! At least once or twice a day for the first week. And most of those calls were from real estate agents who wanted us to sell the house through them.
We did get a few potential buyers, and gladly showed them the house, but traffic was slow.
And we started realizing some of the benefits of having a real estate agent showing the house. A big one, for us, is that the people who were seeing our house weren't giving us any feedback. They came, they saw, they left. They all said nice things and seemed interested, but nobody said "I'm sorry, we wanted something with this" or even "your price is too high".
Selling real estate, like anything else, is about finding the right buyer. Any house is worth something to every buyer, but to certain buyers, for whom the house exactly matches what they're looking for and who find the style appealing, it's worth even more. The goal is to find those people, and that's about exposure. That's one thing real estate agents can bring you.
They do this primarily through two means: The MLS (the Multiple Listings Service, a directory of homes for sale) and the fact that most buyers use an agent.
First time home purchasers (the group most likely to buy our place), naturally use a real estate agent. Why wouldn't they? The buyer doesn't pay anything to use an agent; the seller pays that cost.
There are some agents that will let you list on the MLS and provide no other services, for a small fee. $195 is the lowest I've heard. But while this may get you exposure, you're still going to be paying 2.5% to the buyers agent when you list on the MLS, and while I'm not speaking from experience here because we didn't go this route, I expect that most buyers agents wouldn't encourage their buyers to look at these listings, because agents prefer dealing with agents.
Another bit of experience that I picked up is that Grapevine and the FSBO route works better in a busy market. There are just more buyers looking around and more traffic at certain times of the year, and July is not a busy month. If we had listed with Grapevine in March, we may have had better results.
We've already bought the house we're moving into. If we hadn't, we might have stuck it out with Grapevine or tried the MLS listing route just to see how it works, but we really need to be out of here by the end of September, so we're listing with an agent today.
(Maybe our buyers didn't like our Virtual Tour. Or maybe I'm just not clear on the concept. :)).
We were just about to buy an episode of a show we're following on the Apple TV. The screen where you make the purchase lets you choose between HD for $3.49, or standard for $2.49.
My wife was convinced that she wouldn't notice the difference, and believed I wouldn't notice the difference either. We came up with a plan: She'd pick one while I wasn't looking, and then I'd have to guess if it was HD or not.
So the show comes on and within a second, I say it's not HD. And of course I'm right. I love HD content, and the idea that I'd be watching SD and not realize it is just silly.
But wife sees the difference too! In fact, she was begging to go back and purchase the HD episode even though we'd just purchased the SD one.
I guess I married the right woman.
A friend of mine contacted me a few weeks ago with information on a "new mobile phone company", Buzzirk Mobile. The pitch was that they are launching July 1st with UNLIMITED service for a flat $79.95 taxes in. I was skeptical.
He sent me a link to this audio conversation and after listening to it, I have a guess as to what's going on.
It's an interview with Ben Piilani of Unified Technologies Group. There were a few things he said that just didn't make sense - like that their calls were going to sound better because they're all.digital. Every GSM or CDMA phone (like the one you have now) is all-digital. Not sure what he's talking about there.
I googled Unified Technologies Group and found their website. I get suspicious when a site has a picture of a big building, but the Contact Us page doesn't list an address. The domain registration lists an address for utg-inc.net, but I don't see any office buildings on the map at that location.
Anyway, Zer01 is a "mobile virtual network operator" or MVNO.
What MVNO's do is buy bandwidth from one of the existing telcos and then resell it. They're not putting up their own cell towers, and based on the coverage map, it looks like they're reselling AT&T's service:
Zer01 coverage:
AT&T coverage:
Look similar?
They're running a VoIP app similar to Skype on a Windows Mobile phone and leasing the bandwidth from AT&T.
That's a reasonable business model, except that AT&T isn't giving them flat rate data. Let's say AT&T sells them wireless bandwidth at $20 per gigabyte. Zer01 is betting that on average people will use less than 4 gigabytes per month, and that's where the $80/month price comes from.
Companies have tried this before, and it's always failed. If you push "unlimited data" then customers will take advantage of it. It doesn't take many customers downloading 100 gig/month to destroy any profit you made from the users who used less.
The Flash Platform team at Adobe announced yesterday that they're open-sourcing the Text Layout Framework that they've been working on on top of the text foundation built into Flash 10.
This is Kind of a Big Deal, because as far as I'm aware open-source code that handles text editing and display of Unicode text that supports right-to-left layout and editing is very rare.
I work on LiveCycle Designer, and because we made a commitment to a partner to support it, our XML editor lets you edit XML source that has HATV (Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese) text embedded in it. If you're not familiar with these languages, in a nutshell, they're read from right to left instead of left to right the way English is read. A text editor that supports these languages will understand that they're edited from right to left as well, which changes how the editor behaves when the caret is in an RTL text run. For example:
<Button id="לחצן"/>
This is some XML that might represent a button whose ID is "Button" in Hebrew. Drag-select over that text. Does your browser treat the Hebrew text differently than the surrounding English characters? It probably does.
When you're editing, the typical behaviour is if the caret were on the equal sign and you hit right arrow a few times, the caret would move to the quote, then to the last character of the Hebrew text, then left, left, left, left, then jump to the closing quote. This is because the right arrow key is interpreted as "move to the next character", not "move right".
The TLF that Adobe is giving away comes with a TextEditor class that knows about all this. Copy that text and paste it into the TLF Sample and try editing it yourself.
The TLF supports a lot of other cool text features. Here's a list:
But the RTL text support is the one that affects me most since we've been looking for a replacement for what we currently use in Designer, and this might be it.
There are a lot of open-source text editors, but as far as I know the only one that supports this is the code editor in Eclipse, which is written in Java. The text input widgets on the major OS platforms support it, and now, so does Flash.
On the one hand, I appreciate the job that Facebook has done in building a great multiplayer casual gaming platform, and drawing people into the experience by making players activity in games a part of the regular Facebook experience.
But the constant spam from friends in my newsfeed is annoying, and about 20% of the time I spend playing games is spent figuring out how to play without spamming my friends.
One popular (and typical) game is Mafia Wars.
Mafia Wars is a gangster role playing game. You have jobs to do, like taking out thugs or robbing progressively more difficult targets, and you can make investments that pay out money every hour. It's time based - you get more energy and health every few minutes, so it encourages you to check back frequently. It's fun.
Mafia Wars uses your friends that are also playing as your Mafia. The more friends you have playing, the stronger you are. And the game constantly encourages you to invite your friends.
Unfortunately, people who get into the games enough will start inviting people who they don't know, just to get better at the game. This wrecks the rest of your Facebook experience, as you can easily end up with hundreds of "friends" you don't know cluttering up your newsfeed and everwhere else.
These games are making money in two ways: Ads, obviously, but also by selling in-game materials for real-world cash. You can buy Godfather Points in Mafia Wars that you can spend on skill upgrades, cash, and so on. That's fine, I have no problem with how they're monetizing the games.
But Facebook needs to come up with some guidelines for these applications to follow, and enforce them, or they are going to start driving people away.
Apple's iTunes 8.2.1 update broke syncing with the Palm Pre.
Normally when companies do this sort of thing - make changes that break another company's product - they don't brag about it. They say that it's not a supported configuration and you're left to wonder if it broke as a natural consequence of some changes they were making, when in fact they probably broke it on purpose.
But not this time. Apple specifically stated that the iTunes 8.2.1 update "addresses an issue with the verification of Apple devices".
I don't feel right about this one. On the one hand Apple is probably within it's rights to do this. iTunes is free, supported by the money that the iTunes Music Store makes and some of the device revenues. Before the store, iTunes was completely supported by device revenues, and software tying itself to a hardware purchase is nothing new. CD Burner software, for example, has often checked that the manufacturer of the drive is the one that the software came bundled with.
What makes this feel different is that iTunes is middleware between my music and my device. I'm paying Apple for the music, so I feel like I should have the right to use iTunes to get that music onto my music player, whatever that player may be.
I support Apple's right to do this, but I don't think it's very nice of them to do it.
I like Flash video because I hate this:
I'm sitting in my car in downtown Ottawa listening to streaming Internet radio on the iPhone. 64 kilobit streaming and it sounds great. I've also got the Mac connected via Bluetooth tethering, and surfing the Internet over the same wireless Internet connection.
The Internet feels fast. Fast enough that if I didn't know it was wireless I wouldn't be thinking "hey this is slow". It's low latency enough that surfing is pleasant. The Rogers speed check page rates my connection at 831kbps.
And the speed check didn't mess up my Internet Radio. I'm impressed.