Adobe Nitro for Portable Widgets
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:12 PM:

Today at Adobe MAX in San Francisco, my colleague Matt Snow did a sneak peak of a product I've been working on for some time now: Adobe "Nitro". Nitro is a framework that allows developers to design, build, distribute Flash widgets on multiple screens. Take your widget from the web and distribute it to desktop and to your mobile phone. Developers and designers can create widgets in Flash for many targets, widgetize their existing content and make them viral and portable.

Pretty cool, eh? Matt also showed a early build we had as a demo where he showed widgets staying in sync between your phone and your desktop and an RSS and YouTube widget running same binaries on both the phone and desktop. I'm pretty excited it all went off without a hitch. The demo gods were on our side, even more so given our dry run late last ran in to some hiccups.

Most of what we're working on I can't share now. The details we're releasing at the moment are basically what we showed in the sneak peek, but we'll have a great set of features and products in the coming year and I'm looking forward to sharing as it becomes available.

P.S. shout out to all other sneak peek presenters. As somebody on Twitter commented, some of the demos are like sci-fi, but real. Also, the production quality of the main hall at Moscone SF was out of this world. I'll post videos soon. You might also want to check out some of the live blogs of the event, too.

You Need to Vote
Monday, November 03, 2008 10:46 PM:

That's right. I said it. You need to vote. Who cares about work, who cares about school, or whatever obligation you may have. It can wait a day. Drop whatever it is you're doing tomorrow and go vote. I've got my preference of who you should vote for (Obama), but even if you don't share that opinion just get out to the polls tomorrow and vote.

Failed Financial Institutions
Friday, October 03, 2008 1:59 PM:

Here's a roll up of the current set of Wall Street failures and the aftermath. Thought I'd be amusing to put them in one place.

• WAMU - bankrupt, filed for FDIC protection, accounts bought by JPM
• Bear Stearns - sold to JPM with the backing of the Fed
• A.I.G. - propped up by the Fed under a special loan program
• Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae - under Federal conservatorship
• Lehman Brothers - filed for bankruptcy, most assets bought by Barclays
• Countrywide Financial - picked up by Bank of America right before it fell apart
• Merrill Lynch - picked up by Bank of America in anticipation of Merrill's collapse
• Fortis - nationalized by Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands
• Wachovia - first bought with an FDIC guarantee by Citi, but it looks like Wells Fargo is going to get it

I'm sure there are a few I'm missing in here, but ouch, that's a lot of death and destruction.

Two Days in Seoul
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:47 AM:

It's our last night in Seoul. Tonight for the first time we had a chance to go see a little bit on the "old Seoul", on the north side of the river. It seems we're staying in Gangnam, which is a more newly developed part of Seoul (although if you look it's just jam packed with people and amazing). In the part of Seoul we went to today, we got a chance to have a meeting in SK Telecom's T-Tower, their new office building that is phenomenally beautiful. It's a glass, steel and concrete building that has an amazing LCD that runs across the interior lobby and the actually reception area is a floor below the lobby which makes the lobby this flowing space where people are constantly moving. Very interesting design elements in play.

On the eating side I've been having bi-bim-bop for lunch most days and noodles or rice/soup for dinner. The bi-bim-bop here is so much better than what I've had in the states. There are tons of vegetarian options, which makes it great to keep trying different ones.

Overall, I've loved Korea and Seoul. It's right in the middle of a spectrum (if one did exist) between China and Japan in East Asia. I love how sophisticated technology here, but it feels like it has a great soul (no pun intended) and heart to it. It makes me want to thinking about living in Asia again. I'm heading to Tokyo (Gimpo to Haneda), where we'll continue customer meetings and end the week. Kamsamida!

Arrived in Korea
Sunday, September 21, 2008 6:21 AM:

I landed in Seoul today after a 12-ish hour non-stop flight from San Francisco. I'm here in Korea and later this week in Japan to test a couple product concepts we're working on with possible customers and partners before we begin to get way deep in the product development "cycle". It's a process called SyncDev, the premise of which is to test your product ideas before you build the product.

I've never been to Korea before so this it's pretty exciting to be out here. After we checked in, we went out to eat at a hotpot-ish place down the road from the hotel. We though we ordered a hotpot with veggies and stuff to put in to the pot, but instead came out a pile of sizzling meat. Not good. The waitress, who shared a glass of beer with us asked us were we were from in very broken English and it turns out she was from China.

Obviously, I took advantage of this and was able to explain to her in Chinese that I needed some veggies and rice and other good stuff. Who knew knowing some Chinese would come in handy in Korea? Instead of starving, I managed to get a good tasty meal in.

We start our customer meetings at 10am tomorrow, so I'm of to bed but I'm looking forward to seeing Seoul in the day light.

Federal Ownership
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 1:18 PM:

In the NYT piece today, David Leonhardt covers a bunch of Q&A on the latest round of government bail outs. This one seemed particularly interesting.

Fannie and Freddie are in a conservatorship; the government clearly controls them. A small part of the assets of Bear Stearns are owned outright by the Fed; it controls them.

The A.I.G. situation is a bit more complicated. It’s still a private company, not one technically controlled by the federal government. But the Fed does have the ability, clearly, to veto dividends, among other things.

And I think it’s safe to assume that the Fed also has a significant degree of power that hasn’t been fully spelled out. After all, the chief executive of A.I.G., Robert B. Willumstad, stepped down at the request of the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. That may have been a request that Mr. Willumstad couldn’t refuse.

Ouch.

QSF Airport Code
Friday, August 22, 2008 10:24 AM:

While this not a travel blog (yet), I just found that the Bay Area has an airport code that covers all three area airports: QSF!. Add that to the list like NYC (for New York area airports like LGA, EWR and JFK) or LON (for the London area airports). How cool is that?

Commute Options
Thursday, August 21, 2008 1:00 PM:

I've been exploring my commute options to work today in an effort to allow the most flexibility (read: laziness) in getting to work. It's 1.9 miles according to Google, and probably closer to 1.5 as the crow flies.

1. Drive - this is by far the quickest. I can make it door to door in about 10 minutes. After 9am, parking on the street is nearly impossible, so it somewhat limits the options unless I want to pay for the garage ($10) which I do sometimes.
2. Bus to Adobe Shuttle - my most common option. I take the 21-Hayes to Market Street, from where a shuttle takes us Adobe folk to the office. One way is about 25 minutes, but the shuttle stops running at 10am, which means I've got to be out of the house by about 9:30 for this option to work.
3. Bus to Bus - I tried this today, I took the 21 to the 47 and then walked from 8th and Byrant to the office. It was about 30 minutes all told. Not a bad option if you're going in late and the shuttle isn't available or if you don't want to drive.
4. Walk - there are two walking options. If I walk all the way from home, it's about 45 minutes so that's a bit much. On Monday I took the 21 to Market and walked, which put the total at about 25 minutes. It's nice to do if it's a nice day out.
5. Taxi - I've done this maybe twice and also takes about 10 minutes. The hardest part (and about 20 minutes of time) is finding a cab in my neighborhood. It costs about $10 one way, so if I do, I take a bus back home.

I can't think of any others, but overall I've been doing the bus to the shuttle more often than not.

Continental Upgrade and Standby Lists
Tuesday, August 05, 2008 3:52 PM:

Ever wondered where you stood on a standby list for a flight? How about what the inflight amenities were? Or where you were on the upgrade list? Well, if you fly Continental, look no further than their PDA (e.g. mobile) web site. I've never found this information elsewhere, but on this one specific Continental site, you can get all that information! Just plug in your flight number, the day of travel and you know where you stand. I can't believe they make that info available, but if you travel a ton it's super-useful. Yes, yes, two travel posts in a row but when you're on the road this stuff is invaluable.

Northwest Gold/Platinum Elite
Sunday, August 03, 2008 10:14 AM:

This year is the first time in two years that I've been a Silver Elite on Northwest WorldPerks. With all my Shanghai travel in the past years, I had managed to be either Gold or Platinum for a while. There are a ton of benefits for being any level of airline elite, the one that I've found that I miss the most is the dedicated phone number. Calling the Gold and Platinum line, you had a live person on the phone within 15 seconds. The Silver line? A phone menu, then a three or four minute wait to reach somebody. Alas, life is so hard.

<--Back Next -->