The FuNK Blog

The blog has been moved to Kanjhan.com

Brooke Cothers formerly at CNET and now as WSJ has written a post detailing AMD and Intel’s thoughts on the netbook market. Stu Pann, VP Sales & Marketing doesn’t see the netbook as a device that can be used ‘all day’ but more like ‘an hour’. I think I would have to disagree. Much like tablets and UMPCs, Netbooks have definitely appealed to a niche market, however this niche market is growing at an increasing pace.

The netbook is and has always been a product complimentary to the notebook and will never replace it. The problem exists is the requirement of a light, portable laptop for non-intensive tasks such as office tasks and web browsing. Laptops such as the MSI Wind have provided a solution almost perfectly. A decent keyboard, enough hardware capability to run Vista and a 1024×600 screen has served quite well. The only problem that lies is the one that has plagued the notebook market too and that is of a longer battery life.

I have, and continue to, use my Wind as an all day device when I take it to university for notetaking in lectures with having to charge it in between lectures. The people that are dissatisfied with the netbook are those that have unrealistic expectations of it. These machines aren’t meant to be used for Video Production or Adobe Photoshop. As for those talking about the price ($300-$600) bordering and even beating the prices of regular notebooks fail to realise it’s not a question of ‘Either or‘ but instead of ‘Whether or not‘ a person’s use case warrants the requirement of a netbook.

News has spilt over about a failed acquisition of Twitter by Facebook. Kara Swisher of Boom Town tells us that Facebook offered $500 million of Facebook Stock (at Microsoft’s valuation) to acquire Twitter which it rejected. Reasons? The first of course of whether the $500 million of stock represented $500 million or a more realistic $150 million. And more importantly, Twitter execs’ belief that they can eventually come up with a revenue model and take advantage of their exponentially growing user base.

Despite Facebook’s application certification programme, it is far from solving its own revenue problem and picking up Twitter would mean picking up its costs too.

However, the biggest worry for Twitter users is its fit in the Facebook platform and network. The Twitter API is a lot less restrictive than Facebook’s which has allowed users to use the service in a wide variety of ways. Think Twibble, Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Twitterfox to start up with. Any curtailment of this is sure to piss off a lot of users.

Besides the way I see it, there is not a lot Facebook stands to gain from Twitter apart from its large user base. Updates and commenting is already part of the functionality. So I’d say good call by the folks at Twitter. Forget acquisitions and focus on your scaling and revenue issues and all will be fine and dandy.

Don’t you love it when you’re listening to your music - whether it’s in the car, when walking around, or on a run - and the perfect song comes on. I was at the Gym yesterday and twice the perfect song came on; Rabba (Techno Mix) from Musafir when I was on the treadmill. Perfect because it starts off slow for a slower pace on the treadmill and then builds up to a high BPM track ideal for running and building up your heart rate. Secondly, as soon as I stepped out of the gym, the Norwegian Recycling mashup 8 Become 1 came on which if you listen to is perfect to chill you out a bit, perfect for a walk back home in chilly weather.

This got me thinking what if we had mp3 players that would play and/or recommend music intelligently. Music could be played either from a defined playlist, the entire library or even online libraries. Maybe even from last.fm. The track selection could be based on a variety of factors.

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Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.

Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.

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