Too Late To Be First: May 2007

1GB MP3&4 Audio Video in Watch Form Factor

Can anyone explain to me WHY -- in the name of all thing extropic -- WHY is this STILL not a phone, as well? This is no longer rocket science, boys and girls. The absence of an affordable Dick Tracy wrist-phone with Bluetooth voice-dial interface is merely a matter of a missed perception of market size for the device. There is less than ZERO reason to have number keys on phones, these days. It requires merely a handful of bits for a cheap chip to be trained to recognize my intonation of the letters zero through nine; and yet, we still insist on 19th century input methods on our 21st century communicators. Go figure.

Build a Better Velcro

Engadget:

While others would likely suggest otherwise, [66-year old inventor Leonard Duffy] doesn't seem willing to budge on the name, insisting that "it's slidingly engaging... it's the slidingly engaging fastener."

Winner of a Popular Science invention award, SEF is able to support eight times the weight of velcro and is COMPLETELY SILENT. BTW, when you invent something better than SEF, you get to call it whatever you want; until then, STFU with even the slightest name critiques, deal? Oh yeah, and just be sure to remember that all old people have nothing to offer because they've lost all their creativity, initiative, focus, and ambition when you pay $200 for that first pair of arrogant punk-ass SEF shoes, right?

Yes, it's a rare cross-post, so relax already.

Bring IRC to Web 2.0; This time, 100% traceable

Yep, Twitter and a Ton of Twitter Tips and Tools have done it. A total free-for-all, IRC-style, complete with private messaging using the @username syntax. Obviously, I'm not implying that this is anything close to IRC, but for the new crop of net-chillens out there, it may keep them from ever discovering IRC; which, of course, THE MAN would simply love, right? I guess if you can't intimidate IRC out of existence, might as well try to distract and detract it into irrelevant oblivion; which shouldn't be too hard to do for anyone easily hypnotized by the likes of complementing mashups like TwitterVision and FlickrVision.

HyperLink 2.5e -- Document Viewer and Web Browser for the C64/128

An oldie but a goodie for Mother's Day on TLTBF. The 2003 edition of HyperLink 2.5e -- Document Viewer and Web Browser for the C64/128. All these years later and you STILL rant about how it was "your idea" first. Yeah, well, that's how much ideas are worth, my friend. It's all about execution or lack thereof.

Powercast and other Reasonably Responsible Rants on Wireless Power and Other Arcane Yet Ostensibly Achievable Eventualities

Powercast makes pretty good sense for TLSIADT/TLTBF as the "industry leader in the emerging technology of RF energy harvesting, [which] enables the [safe] transfer of power without wires." Additional thoughful consideration of this technology can be found it Backreaction's take on Wireless Power and Dale Wright's web log.

Make Every Cell Phone a Pocket-Sized Broadcast Station

This first goes to Kyte.TV, even if you really DID IT first; which you probably did, but they got the capital and street cred, so there you have it. Too late to be first, even when you really were first. "It's so unFAIR." - Dr. Gregory House

ID the Lackluster Omnivore Technology Market Segment

Missing Image Note: Hmmm, ImageShack apparently lost or killed access to http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/9301/ topographychart4974685sa8.png which was here in the original post. Not exactly clear why.

You gotta hand it to PEW for trying, but they still missed one segment ... the Lackluster Omnivore. Sure, this may be like .02% of the market, but it's also the .02% that will risk millions of dollars of it's own capital in order to make things better (yeah, yeah, a loaded term, yada-yada) for the both ourselves and our friends across the 99.98% side of the aisle. It's not that this tiny slice of society is any better than the rest, it's just DIFFERENT. Remember the old Apple Computer campaigns? Okay, maybe that makes Apple users a little better than the rest of the world; but this post isn't about that.

One of the whole points of this blog is to skewer my own inner technology "Omnivore, [those] who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages," while navel gazing in contemplation of the myriad and sundry inconsistencies, ironies, and even injustices involved in these peculiar little human practices we like to call: innovation and adoption.

According to the quiz, I'm about as hard core an omnivore as you can find (but if you look at the charts, it helps explain the very frustrating and discriminatory experience of encountering 99.9% of Omnivores who also come with an equally hardcore PREJUDICE against people like me because I break the "age rule" by about 20 years); hence, I wonder why I might bring a Lackluster Veteran's perspective, "those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it" according to the latest survey that claims to 'shatter technology assumptions'?

Now is where this post crosses over into the All Old People Suck blog category. The blatant overlap doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's always ugly. So the squeamish may want to click away from the page, right away.

It's not the technology that's a problem for me, it's the Workplace Discrimination and dismissive and condescending guffaw's from many younger omnivores whom I'd probably eat for lunch when it comes to configuring an OpenBSD firewall rule set, or configuring AMPS on FreeBSD. On the other hand, of course, are my demographic cohorts who simply seem to be too damned tired and lazy to RTFM, or too impatient to learn new and FAR BETTER ways to do things.

So, what the study fails to address is WHY some otherwise enthusiastic and successful technology innovators might become equal parts enthusiast, grizzled veteran innovator, early adopter, and simultaneously skeptical as hell. One suspicions is that for those who pursue the leading edge, the coercive market power of the middle of the bell curve can often hang like a dead weight around the neck of truly creative, breakthrough innovation. Finding a balance amidst the opposing forces of anthropological, technological, and financial vectors isn't exactly an exercise for the feint of heart. All too often, it seems, an innovator either has a rich uncle (or VC who thinks you're kinda cute) or not; and that's the deciding factor of what gets built to scale and what does not. Yeah, that could pretty much lay a foundation for "lackluster" probably.

So, unless you can point me elsewhere to prove me wrong, I'll now pompously and unceremoniously proclaim myself the the First Self-Identified Lackluster Omnivore in the Pew Internet segmentation model. Ah, the lengths we creatures of reason will go to just to feel more-or-less differentiated. What's up with that, anyway? I guess we'll have to find out in the next study.

In the meantime, you too can still take the quiz yourself, even though like myself, you are WAAAY TOO LATE to be first to this particularly swanky sardonic soiree; unless, of course, you can explain to me why you too are some statistically insignificant variety of under-appreciated, underpaid, under-recognized unholy half-breed or multi-dimensional freak-consumer that somehow defies the deistic power of "The Typology Groups," as they're proclaimed in the impeccably presented and authoritatively entitled table of findings, above.

MY RESULTS (FWIW):
------------------
Based on your answers to the questionnaire, you most closely resemble survey respondents within the Omnivores typology group. This does not mean that you necessarily fit every group characteristic.

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.

Basic Description
Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

Defining Characteristics
You might see them watching video on an iPod. They might talk about their video games or their participation in virtual worlds the way their parents talked about their favorite TV episode a generation ago. Much of this chatter will take place via instant messages, texting on a cell phone, or on personal blogs. Omnivores are particularly active in dealing with video content. Most have video or digital cameras, and most have tried watching TV on a non-television device, such as a laptop or a cell phone.

Omnivores embrace all this connectivity, feeling confident in how they manage information and their many devices. This puts information technology at the center of how they express themselves, do their jobs, and connect to their friends.

Who They Are
"They" are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28 [so if you're in your 40's, you suck and you should act your lame age, despite your intellectual interests and capabilities]; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population [so clearly, you are some kind of a CREEP if you're just as accomplished and interested in technology at the age of 50]. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students. [So surprising, living off the WAGE SLAVE income of their parents and student loans, they have TIME AND ATTENTION to devote to embracing novel technologies -- how impressive of "them!"]

Build On-the-Fly Drag-n-Drop Web 2.0 Mashup Applications

If you've seen anything that can meet or beat Synthasite (when it emerges from stealth mode in a few weeks) please let me know. Until then, this seems to qualify as another great idea for which you are TOO LATE, loser.

Booster Blades

Sure, you claim that you THOUGHT of this long before "they" did; but once again "they" stole "your" idea by actually getting off their assess and BUILDING IT.