Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

In case you missed it (and space is filling up fast), this weekend is the (possibly world’s) first fully fledged Enterprise 2.0 Unconference. The roster is starting to look really good, and should be some great conversations. This one kindly hosted by the folks at Navantis with special recognition to Bryce.

official signup page is here

Am watching the excellent endgadget coverage of the Apple keynote. Apple phone so far vastly exceeding my expectations. Makes the Zune and the designers of just about every other phone to date look like retards. Massive highresolution screen, visual contact management, voicemail, itunes and iphoto synchronization that (seems to) Just Work. and wifi… and a fully featured webrowser (well, safari) with google maps and push email (like blackberry).

You have no idea how long i’ve been gritting my teeth waiting for a device like this for years as my pockets bulge over the years with phones, ipods, pocketpc’s, tablet pc’s… now if only it had a set of keys on it I’d only have to remember one thing leaving the house.

Gesture recognition, looks like a breakthrough UI.

fantastic. I think.

some reservations – Job’s keynotes make everything seem fantastic. Will it work as flawlessly off the demo stage. There’s no 3G (couldn’t fit chip/power requirements in the formfactor?). I guessing some of the fancier calling tricks may rely on proprietary carrier support? (gasp) only cingular? will it be unlockable? battery life? will it be ever in Canada? will it cost less than a whole iBook? Will it automatically cover itself in a milliard of fine scratches a femtosecond after you take it out of the box?

I dunno yet, but Mr Apple, I am ready for my review unit.

-photo by engadget

UPDATEThanks to Michele for pointing this out, check out the market reaction to the iPhone. Now that is how you give good demo. AAPL’s Market CAP is up just over 6 Billion today while the announcement shaved 222M off of the market cap just one competitor (RIM’s) today. Now that’s how you give good demo. I wonder how much value that is on a per-slide basis?

UPDATE 2I’ve made the front page of the Hamilton Spectator. A reporter gave me a call shortly after I posted this. I famous in Hamilton. (Appeared Jan 10, Hamilton Spectator, bottom of page 1 next to picture of Jobs at MacWorld)

Facebook opened itself up to non-academic emails a few months ago. And then suddenly, all in the last week, and in a blizzard of add-friend requests, my friends have discovered facebook. Finally we can see what all the kids have been on about all this time? for a social networking site, facebook seems to do a lot of things right, it’s engrossing and intensely social (the “feed” updates you on every minutia of your friends activities, who’s friends with who, who’s updated what etc.) and without been overbearing with advertising and without horrifying “personalization” features (a la MySpace) to assault the eyeballs of it’s users.

Most first-generation social networking sites (think friendster, linkedin) suffered from the “Now what?” problem. You’ve created a profile, added a few friends … and then now what?

facebook is one of the first i’ve seen that may have solved this problem with it’s fairly effective fresh content generation of the feed, Wall postings, photo albums, events etc. (esp for student demographics that haven’t adopted flickr, upcoming.org etc.). Will these stand-alone narrow and deep socially-enabled services (flickr, upcoming etc) continue to thrive in face of emergent and actually effective general purpose tool like facebook (or the “next” facebook)? we shall see.

One thing’s clear, there’s value in consolidation. I’m sick of maintaining 2 dozen buddy lists of the same 50 people across 2 dozen different online services. This problem will have to solve itself eventually.

are you on facebook yet?

Link to my profile

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