Jamie Thingelstad

The other morning I pulled into SuperAmerica [link removed] on my way into work to fill up the tank. I got out and started to fill up and was greeted to a marketing experience.

The image originally associated with this post was lost when I deleted my Flickr account. I’ve searched but I do not have a copy of the photo in any of my archives. I believe I took it with the Flickr app on my iPhone and it didn’t save a copy to the Camera Roll. I deleted my Flickr account when Yahoo! bought them and didn’t realize I was “hot linking” some of those photos on my blog. My last hope was Internet Archive, but the Wayback Machine excluded Flickr photos from archival. 😞

Yes, that’s right. There is 89 cent coffee inside! Not only was I treated to several marketing experiences they even had sound and audio tracks going with it. It seems I can’t even simply get gas anymore without having something thrown at me. I need to find a new gas station.

The iTunes ecosystem is pretty amazing. It spans my exercise routine (iPod Nano), entertainment on a flight (my iPhone and kicking back on the sofa for a movie (Apple TV). But there is another frontier that remains unserved. A frontier that is a prime media opportunity. The car.

There were some rumors a couple months ago about iCar. Apparently Apple met with Volkswagen to discuss who knows what. Perhaps we’ll see a black and silver VW bug coming out in future years that matches the iPhone aesthetic. (Just kidding, that’s ridiculous.) But the car is a media platform, and there are few good options.

I’ve had a Phatbox in my Audi A6 for a while now. I love it, but it’s a bit quirky. It also lacks two key features that really make it suffer. There is no WiFi so you have to undock it’s hard drive to add music, and no ability to integrate with iTunes. In fact, it doesn’t even have a Mac loader. A huge shout out to Cameron Silver though for creating PhatMac for us Mac users. PhatMac even integrates with iTunes Smart Playlists which is a start.

My proposal is simple. Take the guts of the Apple TV and shove it into a DIN unit for installation into a car. Then, on the front of the panel put a touch interface with coverflow like the iPhone and iPod Touch. Voila! Done. Really, there isn’t much more to it than that. This is what it could look like.

The Apple TV has the hard drive brains to sync with iTunes via WiFi. The only thing it lacks in a car is an interface. The touch interface of the iPhone is an ideal solution for the car. Fling, press, listen. Awesome. You can even have the touch interface itself easily snap off to protect from theft and maybe it could have 8G of storage locally to listen to something while your running an errand. How beautiful would this be? Pull into your garage and your car would show up in iTunes and get the latest podcasts and purchases copied to it. iTunes would also get new information to update play counts and last play times. I get excited just typing this stuff.

I know what your thinking, just dock your iPod with your car. That’s a hack. Seriously. When I shut my car off it’s crazy that I should then have to manually stop my music. The car platform is different and needs a couple of specific functions.

Apple has all the ingredients. It seems like a simple weekend project to tie it all together. But the market may not be big enough to care. I’d line up for this product myself.

Technology has the promise of being the great equalizer, or a great divider. I don’t think enough is being done to make sure that the benefits that the “technological have’s” enjoy are available to all. I think this is going to be a big problem in the US particularly. In developing countries it’s even more basic. One Laptop Per Child has the mission of bringing technology to kids in an affordable package to help bridge this gap. They have been working on developing a $100 laptop for a while now that could be given to kids in developing countries (they didn’t quiet get to $100 on this one). I’d suggest they send a few million around the US too! They’ve just released their first computer, the XO-1. I think it’s pretty cool looking!

The goal of this machine is to make something that is cheap, rugged and very usable for kids in developing countries. It has WiFi and a basic web browser to hop on the Internet. In fact, it forms it’s own mesh network whenever more than one is present, allowing kids to collaborate in ad hoc settings. It’s power use is very modest, and a solar panel can be attached to the back of it to allow for permanent off-grid use. I’m also ecstatic that they include a number of different development environments. Hit a few buttons and your writing your own programs for it. Great! David Pogue did a really good video review about the XO-1. It’s worth watching.

OLPC is running a limited time special where you get one, and give one. The only way to buy one is to buy two, and one goes to a kid. I’ve ordered mine up and am looking forward to playing with it. A friend also ordered one so it will be fun to play with the networking features. I even noticed a CTO acquaintance of mine has purchased one. My friend Chris suggested that this may be the new status symbol. Like owning a Prius. Go hang out at the coffee shop with your XO-1. Can’t wait. Offer ends soon, go order one!

After I get mine I’ll post some reaction to it.

Last night Tammy and I joined some friends and attended the launch party for MinnPost.com. MinnPost is an interesting new non-profit trying to bring the public radio model online to produce quality journalism (more). It is founded by Joel Kramer and has a cadre of writers signed on. The site just launched this last Thursday. I’m hoping they do some great stuff.

MinnPost is still very early. They just passed 400 members and the momentum is good. Good luck to the crew! And give it a read… and become a founding member.

PS - The site has already been parodied at MinnToast.com. Funny stuff.

I’ve been yearning for native IMAP for a long time now. Essentially since the day I got my iPhone. It got much worse as Leopard approached and the great features in Mail 3.0 were making me drool.

It wasn’t a simple decision though. I moved to GMail for really good reasons and I refuse to go back to running my own mail server. The result was to look at paid IMAP solutions but none of them offered the complete bevy of features I wanted. I finally identified both Fastmail and Tuffmail as having great services.

I was days away from switching to Tuffmail when GMail announced IMAP support. I eagerly awaited my account to be activated and started using it immediately. However, it’s a mixed bag unfortunately.

GMail has some concepts that make IMAP hard. Like labels versus folders. Like not really liking to delete email. Starred emails. They’ve accommodated that in the IMAP solution, but also complicated things in a bad way.

For example, GMail IMAP has to expose a folder called “All Mail” that is the catch all for email that doesn’t have any label. The unfortunate part of this is that mail clients will see two copies of everything, the one in a “folder” and the other one if the fake “All Mail” folder. This wreaks havoc with things like Smart Folders in Mail.

GMail also has some gnarly non-standard behavior. For example, when you send an email via it’s SMTP service it automatically puts a copy in your Sent Items “label”. This isn’t normal, and requires that you configure your Mail client in somewhat non-standard way.

On top of this, the service is a bit slow and has had some hiccups for me. I may still end up signing up for Tuffmail but I’ll give GMail IMAP a try since the price is right and the webmail client is so nice.

I just took a trip to San Francisco. The hotel I stayed in had some odd mixed messages related to green issues. They encouraged me to forego daily washing of my linens and towels so that I could help them help the environment. This always makes sense to me. Who changes there sheets every night at home. Why would you need to at a hotel? And the amount of water and energy this saves is significant. Kudos.

But then, when I came into my room they insisted on having the TV turned on playing soothing music with videos of waterfalls and flowers cycling through. It’s pretty normal that nicer hotels will turn your clock radio on to a classical radio station, a practice that I dislike as it is, but this seemed just crazy. They were running a TV for hours and hours with nobody at all in the room. To make matters worse it wasn’t some high-efficiency LCD panel, it was an old CRT-based tube television just sucking down the watts.

What’s the point of having this TV on all hours of the day? I can only imagine if a visitor from Europe or Japan comes they must be stunned. Lights on, TV on with soothing waterfall videos – for nobody. Just wasting energy. But meanwhile, I’ll make sure to reuse my towels. What a mixed message.

I’ve become a huge fan of iTunes. I’m pretty sure this is the biggest about face that I’ve ever done on a piece of software. For years I eschewed iTunes. I even insisted on using 3rd party applications to load music on my iPod. I resisted because I didn’t like the idea of being locked in with a lot of metadata with one application. For years I insisted on manual management of ID3 tags and stuck to a simple file system based model. This gave me ultimate flexibility, but also minimal capability. I’ve been really amazed with how powerful iTunes really is. It’s the rare type of application that seems really simple, yet as I want to push it there is almost always a way to do what I want to do. Except when it comes to sharing my music with my wife. We need an iTunes Social Edition.

iTunes is great for me, but there is a gaping hole in the application when it comes to sharing with friends. Some of this has been actively discouraged due to sharing of copyrighted music, but that the legitimate use cases need to be handled better. Let’s look at some examples.

Even on a single computer, there is no easy way to share one iTunes library between different accounts. Of course we all have different accounts in our house, and iTunes really only works with one of them. iTunes needs to understand that some metadata has multiple users (song ratings, play statistics) and other metadata is universal (genre, album art). I should then be able to easily share this library across multiple users and still have the capability for different views.

Of course this needs to extend to other computers. It’s totally lame that iTunes can “authorize” up to 5 computers but does absolutely nothing, zilch, to help me put that music on those 5 computers. Ugh!

And then what about my friends? I “publish” my home movies out of iMovie into iTunes and I’d like to share those movies with friends and family. iTunes should allow me to do this as well.

There have been rumblings about a P2P-enabled iTunes (BitTorrent DNA anyone?) that would be used to facilitate HD content. I dream of a day that the same functionality is used to keep libraries in sync and share non-copyrighted materials with friends.