the webboy

A good portion of the technology industry has been left speechless by the one-two punch by Apple today. At the 2007 Macworld Conference and Expo, Steve Jobs accounced during his keynote speech new products from Apple namely the AppleTV (formerly iTV) and the iPhone. Serious speculation has been running through the tech world for over a year now about widescreen iPods and Apple phones but nothing solid. The major announcement in today’s keynote speech was the introduction of not only a new iPod and a phone but the addition of a 3rd (what apple calls) Internet communicator all in one device. I was not at the keynote speech but kept up with all the live blogging going on. I am getting ready to watch the archived video. More to come in later posts.

Maybe it’s just me but the more I hear about Windows Home Server, the less I like. According to Bill Gates, everyone needs one but can everyone handle one? Now to market this to the average consumer obviously you need a very simplistic device. A headless unit seems right; the plug and go architecture works; auto backups of every PC on your network (Windows Vista PC) is a small score. For some consumers this might be a valid option but wait…no RAID? Can’t stream to Media Center devices or any device from what I’m seeing? Embedded OEM systems only? This machine sounds like nothing more than a glorified NAS box that only works in the Microsoft environment and not a very good one at that. For your money I think there are several better alternatives to hit CES this week that you might want to put your money on. I’ll have to keep watching this…

Watched the live stream of Bill Gates keynote speech at CES last night. Personally for me it was largely a yawn. There were a few new things to look at as well as the whole connected home demos that Bill loves to throw out.

They began with a lot of Vista hype. There were demos of search within Vista (oh sorry it’s not search…it’s finding). There was a demo of Virtual Earth 3D as well as Office 2007 and a few other features but nothing real new and exciting.

From there they introduced a new product Windows Home Server. This is basically a headless box that stores all your media content for connectivity to your PCs, XBox, etc. I hope this is easy to setup and run. It sounds like nothing more than a glorified NAS but we’ll see what happens in the future.

It looks like Microsoft’s big push in the future is in the digital entertainment space and that future seems to revolve around XBox 360. XBox Live continues to experience huge growth (over 5 million members) and it is expanding with over 300 titles this year in gaming. You can already get many movie titles over XBox Live but now is expanding into IPTV. Now gaming, movies, TV are all available through XBox Live and all that is available now through Media Center.

Mark Fields from Ford talked about Sync available on Ford cars this year which will seamlessly integrate your devices all through the audio system using voice recognition for placing phone calls, creating playlists, and sending text messages. Is it to hard to make this an after-market system? Why only just a couple Ford vehicles?

Bill wrapped it up with a demo of the Connected Home. He walked into a bedroom setup with a display covering one whole wall and called it a ‘typical bedroom’. All in all the whole thing looked kind of funny and far-fetched but no doubt has some portents of the future.

I wasn’t expecting anything truly amazing from Microsoft this time and they delivered. As others have said…evolutionary…not revolutionary.

From Google Blogoscoped:

Blogger now supports custom domain names for your blog. Previously, you had to choose between using a *.blogspot.com address or allowing Blogger to FTP-upload to your domain.

Could Blogger be the next app to join Google Apps for Your Domain? For small businesses looking to blog, this would be a nice compliment to Google’s offering allowing a hosted blog platform customized to your domain much like wordpress.com - an area that Google is lagging behind in. I could see this service being much like the calendar application in Google Apps - a blog for each user configured in your organization as well as the ability to create multiple shared blogs.

Hey blogosphere. After working behind the scenes in the web for over 7 years (small change to some of you) I figured it’s time I join the community. I’ve built and maintained blogs, websites, etc for everyone else except myself. I don’t purpose to have any great new view on the tech world but simply to add my voice to the community and participate in this endless conversation taking place without boundaries. So without further ado lets begin this experiment and see where it takes us.