Tablet Comparison: Which one?

We’ve been running with an Apple iPad 1 since the day it launched in Australia about 12 months ago and on the whole, it’s great. However, I’ve been thinking if (when) I get a second tablet, I want an Android Honeycomb one, because I need Flash for websites and I like the integration with all things Google. Plus, I can write it off via work because we need an Android platform to test our mobile apps & website dev in.

Considering I have a Blackberry Bold 9700, it would be silly for me not to have a test run of the impending Playbook. I’m not really interested in games  (Angry Birds can keep its 200 million user minutes per day statistic without me contributing) just web browsing, and getting news Apps from BBC, CNN, NPR & being able to watch HD Movies/TV Series.

I’m also intrigued and going to have a close look at the HP TouchTab when it launches, because before I had a Blackberry, I had a multiplicity of Palm Pilots, Handsprings and Palm Tungstens and I was gutted that the the Palm Pre, which I wrote about 2 years ago in May 2009 never made it here to OZ.

The march against Apple’s dominance started earlier this week, with the release of the Motorola Xoom with Telstra and the Asus Eee PC Transformer locally.

Notes: May 26th 2011

• Motorola Xoom is currently only available via Telstra. JB HiFi tell me they are getting Xoom’s instore shortly.
• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1V is only available via Vodafone. No updates on whether this will be distributed more widely.
• Samsung has announced it is releasing updated Honeycomb 3.0 tablets in Q3 2011 -maybe wait?
  http://www.cnet.com.au/samsung-galaxy-tab-101v-339309234.htm
• Acer’s Iconia A500 at 10.1″ will soon be accompanied by the Iconia A100, which is a 7″ Android Honeycomb 3.0 device. Worth a look.
• Toshiba has indefinitely delayed release of its own Tablet (no reasons cited) – more testing no doubt
  http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home_Office/Notebooks_And_Tablets/D4V7X5R7
• HP with its recent acquisition of Palm, is releasing its own HP TouchPad Tablet with WebOS in the next few months. The Dark Horse?
  Register your interest here: http://www.palm.com/us/products/pads/touchpad/index.html
• Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry is entering the market with its Playbook concept, targeted at corporate users and heavily reliant on extended functionality from Blackberry phone owners. http://us.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet/
• Dell’s Streak, a 7″ tablet which is running Android Froyo 2.2 and been abysmal in sales has no updates on when it will get the Honeycomb 3.0 update.
• Asus eeePC Transformer is definitely worth a look, as it also comes with snap in keyboard, which going by Asus’ previous products will surely be of very high quality and capability.

The changing landscape of web content management

Every year, the Real Story Group (formerly CMS Watch) publishes a Content Management System (CMS) subway map which pictorially represents via a subway analogy the different CMS vendors and products around the world. It’s interesting to follow as it shows at enterprise level both the market perception as well as the complimentary/diverse nature of the philosophies of the different vendors and communities (Open Source) in questio and how they relate to each other.

Having worked with CMS & DMS since the days of Plumtree, Documentum, Stellant, Gauss, RedDot, Vignette, Insite and others having merged, seperated, split, scaled down, shut down, created, these maps pass on a good history of what emergent technologys are flavour of the year. Each year.

Read more and subscribe to the reports and updates at http://www.realstorygroup.com/

An alternate source of CMS information can be gained at http://www.cmswire.com

There’s an App for that: Apple

Today, we celebrated one of my work colleagues birthday’s in the usual fashion by off key singing – somewhat lacklustre, with the lack of alcohol to uninhibit the developer contingent in the audience – and a collection of delicious gourmet (pronounced: gore-met) cupcakes.

We found candles, which was useful, but we couldn’t find matches, nor a lighter to light said candles.

We’re a healthy bunch here, with none of us smoking.

So, living up to and exemplifying Apple’s publicised assertion that “there’s an app for that”, one of my colleagues hit the Apple App Store and within 30 seconds had dutifully downloaded a virtual candles and cake app, which actually works.

As in, you blow the (unlit) real candle and the virtual candles blow out, on the iPhone, via way of the decibel meter monitoring a change in ambient noise or shaking the phone using its inbuilt gyrometer.

Nerd alert.

Talk about servicing a niche requirement within the market!

And for the record, Blackberry’s App Store is far too sensible for such frivolous code to be there. Blackberry devs are just reinforcing their view of being boring folk, more concerned about data protection and security.

Getting people to visit my website

Increase website traffic.

Increase website visitors.

Get more people.

Those 9 (nine) words plus the 6 (six) in the subject line are enough to guarantee this blog will get slammed by visitors in the next few days.

How do I know?

I’ve been experimenting. Alot.

Rewind back 3 years ago when I first started this particular  blog – it was the trendy thing to do here in Melbourne, Australia, because people were  expecting that if you knew what you were talking about in digital, you would put your money where your mouth was and write it up for all to see – and shoot at.

Like most blog writers I follow, I started this particular blog for a couple of reasons: a place to crystallise random thoughts; somewhere to park some business concepts and ideas I had been nurturing and not least of all, to play around with the key words and meta whatsits that live within these pages to see what effect they would have on traffic. Ostensibly this was for the benefit of my clients and to ensure ongoing continuity in my viable employment.

In recent months, I haven’t really touched this platform, because I’ve been busy playing dad to my 1  & 3 year olds, trying my best to be a good husband to my wonderful wife, selling the  family home and starting a new job. Been a bit busy really. However courtesy of my Blackberry, I’ve noticed my hosting traffic going into orbit, due in now small part to the  3 articles on:

1. The up and coming new McClaren MP412C car http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/07/mclaren-f1-reborn-2/
2. Cannondale Mountain Bikes http://www.theculturemind.com/2009/04/mountain-bike-cannondale/
3. Request for Tender (RFT) process. http://www.theculturemind.com/2011/02/the-perils-of-the-rft-rfp-rfq-eoi-pitch-process-for-business/

Now in all seriousness, these articles have absolutely nothing to do with each other aside from being within the same blog location/address. I won’t probably ever be able to afford a new McLaren (costing somewhere north of AUD $500,000), I actually ride Cannondale’s arch nemesis in a Specialized and RFT’s – well they can go blow – I hate them, as they are on the whole a ridiculous waste of time, not withstanding the fact I’m quite good at responding to them.

What twigged the traffic increase exponentially, was the fact I had to login and remove the pictures off the McClaren post, which I wrote 22+ months ago, because the visitor load was pinging my upper bandwidth. I logged in, removed the pictures and republished. The WordPress Platform, which I use to run this site, in its wisdom duly archived off my previous post and I got a brand new URL, which was annotated with a #2.

Curious, I Googled the article and lo and behold it pops up in the search results. Now here it gets interesting. The previous post was annoted “mclaren-f1-reborn” where as the new post was mclaren-f1-reborn-2/ . Within about 3 hours of me publishing the new post, sans pictures and with the #2, I thought, cool, I’ll drop the bandwidth from people finding the post, because its got a new URL. Wrong. My bandwidth trebled. Not pesky spider traffic either, but proper clicking visitors.

Fascinated, I changed the now pictureless post and re-added the original YouTube Video and republished. Further Increased traffic load.

Additional, basic things to add relevance and increase the site load for this post, which will guarantee extra traffic:

• post tags, correctly referencing search type terms
• cross links within the post to articles of note and reference articles
• cross links to external 3rd party websites, again of relevance
• actually writing an article that has relevance
• ensuring your URL is human readable and has hyphens/dashes – separating words and not spaces or %20 characters
• Using a title for the post which is relevant easily digestible

How Interesting.

Lamborghini Aventador TVC

Woohoo!

What a cracker of a TVC.

Not withstanding the Hollywood budget and special effects this new advertisement for the up and coming Lamborgini Aventador obviously has, this advert is exciting for me to watch, because the local laws here in Australia prevent such exciting adverts as this hitting our screens and have been in play  since 1st July 2004.

Don’t believe me? Look here at the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) “Voluntary Code of Practice for Motor Vehicle Advertising”

It does say it’s a “voluntary” code. I wander what would happen if everyone spontaneously did adverts with cars sliding about. The recent Ford Ute flying down a tunnel to get a delivery of beers I thought was pushing the boundaries and the fact that I saw it only once only reinforces that a bunch of wowsers with nothing better to do complained and the advert got pulled off the air.

Lamborghini Aventador from Sehsucht™ on Vimeo.