I just purchased 3 (yep 3) of the new Nest Thermostats, which I’ll be taking for a test drive in the coming weeks.  I learned about Nest in this great Wired Article.  If you’re unfamiliar with Nest, it’s an amazing new thermostat that was designed by the creator of the iPod.  Nest is intelligent, learning what you like as you use it… It remembers when you wake up, when you go to sleep, and more. Best of all, you can control it remotely from your mobile phone – either iOS or Android, and it looks easy to install (more…)

Attention Social media enthusiasts: It’s time to prepare yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse…

On Thursday, October 20th, 2009 SXSW Festival winners, Rob Oshima, Skot Leach, and Ryan Leach will be signing their (soon to be) best selling crowd-sourced Lost Zombies book “Dead Inside: Do Not Enter: Notes from the Zombie Apocalypse” at Books Inc. in Alameda, California:

What: Lost Zombies Book Signing

When: Thursday, October 20th at 7pm

Where: Books Inc., 1344 Park Street, Alameda, CA

If you’re a social media enthusiast or a zombie movie fan, this is a must attend event.

Lost Zombies is a social network for Zombie movie enthusiasts, and winner of the “People’s Choice” and “Community” Awards at SXSW in 2009.  Members of the Lost Zombies social network contribute letters, artwork, video clips, etc. that follow the spine of a story line presented by the Lost Zombies team on Lostzombies.com. The Lost Zombies curators have stitched that content into a creative scrapbook published by Chronicle Books called “Dead Inside: Do Not Enter: Notes from the Zombie Apocalypse”.  The LZ team is editing the clips its receives from Lost Zombies’ community members into a full length feature film.

Apparently – MFZAR…. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Today GigaOM launched a report entitled, “The future of mobile: a segment analysis.”  Among many other things, the report summarizes 11 critical lessons learned by the mobile industry, many of which I discussed in my recent post: “Waging the Mobile Patent War and the Future of Mobile Innovation…”

1. “Avoid channel conflict” There have been several examples over the years of mobile companies struggling to make/maintain meaningful partnerships because they’re playing both sides of mobile – hardware and software. As GigaOM points out, Nokia had difficulty getting other OEMs to adopt Symbian because it had a head start on developing hardware for it. Google may have the same issue now that it’s acquired Motorola Mobility.  I talked about this one a lot in the above mentioned post. (more…)

For the past several months, I’ve been consulting for one of the biggest mobile companies you may never have heard of, if you live in North America, Movile.  If you live in Latin America, you will likely know Movile, as one of the largest mobile value added services companies in the region.  Movile is a diversified company with a portfolio of mobile products ranging from old-skool (wallpapers, alerts, ring tones, etc.) to incredibly progressive… Among Movile’s more progressive products are Mozca and Zeewe

Mozca is the leading mPayments platform and #1 processor of virtual goods payments on mobile in Latin America. (more…)

As I mentioned in my last post, my biggest complaint about the Motorola Atrix 4G was AT&T’s requirement of a $40/month tethering plan to use it with the Motorola Laptop Dock.  Fortunately, I’ve found an easy to circumvent… (more…)

Looking at the emerging tablet market, it’s difficult to decide which product to buy… For starters, there’s already the Apple iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the RIM PlayBook coming soon.  Then, there are the e-reader devices (i.e. Kindle, NOOK, etc.), which I suspect will evolve quickly to become more like tablet computers rather than uni-dimensional e-readers.  In addition, today, HP’s (formerly Palm’s) Jon Rubinstein told attendees at today’s Web 2.0 conference that HP has a “great tablet” running WebOS coming soon.  With so much untapped potential in the tablet ecosystem, I’m not ready to commit yet.

The tablet market is evolving quickly, and 2011 is sure to bring even more great options.  A good example of the tablet evolution can be seen in the comparison between the Apple iPad and the RIM PlayBook. There are a lot of factors to consider when buying a tablet: (more…)

I recently stumbled across a visual map of the web 2.0 landscape, created by John Battelle and team, called Points of Control.  (Note: If you’re interested in social media and you’re not familiar with John Battelle, check him out… He’s the Program Chair of the Web 2.0 Summit, and his nearly 40,000 followers on Twitter -including me- are a good indication that he regularly has interesting things to say.) (more…)

Today, RIM launched its first touch screen smartphone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, the BlackBerry Torch 9800 on AT&T.  The Torch is the first RIM device to run the Blackberry 6 operating system, and it is the first RIM device with the Blackberry App World (app store) pre-installed (supporting Carrier billing on AT&T). (more…)

When I read Sonos‘ claim on their website that the wireless music player “works like magic,” I was more than a little suspect… I mean really… magic? These days, so much home technology is overly complicated and practically requires an engineering degree to figure out. So, I was incredibly surprised and impressed when I tried the Sonos S5 Multi Room Music System… It was actually EASY! (more…)

Today, I started a new consulting project with a mobile app discovery start-up called, Chomp, Inc.  I’m excited to be working with a team of smart, motivated, and fun people.  I’ll be leading mobile business development for Chomp – evaluating opportunities for growth.  I’d love to tell you about but can’t.  Here’s what I can tell you… (more…)