The One Laptop Per Child initiative ships. Very cool… It’ll be interesting to see how they perform in real life.

I want one of these…

Check out this Engadget video profile of the Sansa Connect MP3 player.

This is the type of innovation that can occur with the use and support of open systems. The Sansa uses Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET to implement some features, that on the surface at least, look pretty amazing.

Things like - sharing music between Sansa’s using wifi, internet radio integration and more.

Contrast this approach with Apple’s closed systems on the iPod and iPhone. Apple claims to be innovative - and they are. But if they opened the system others could innovate on their platform, increasing the value for the platform, and ultimately their customers.

Eco-geek reports: $100 Laptop for You and Me Too!:

While the OLPC people are still focusing on making the laptops available to less developed countries, there has been some discussion about selling the laptop in developed countries. However, anyone buying an OLPC in America would have to buy a minimum of two. One for themselves, and one for a child in the third world. Sounds like a fantastic idea to me.

I have to agree - a great idea!

Geothermal Power Plant Triggers Earthquake in Switzerland. I’ve always been a bit dubious about this technology - it just strikes me that we don’t know enough about the Earth’s processes to be messing with transfer of heat energy from under the surface of the Earth for our own purposes. This article highlights the risks:

The engineers and officials of Geopower did inform the authorities and the public that the proposed Deep Heat Mining project posed a risk of triggering small tremors. Quakes of the magnitude actually experienced, however, were not anticipated.

It makes me worry even more about carbon sequestration plans.

Scott Rosenberg: Lessons from MySpace: Success is a bug:

Here we have the state of Web development today: Your site’s massive success gets treated as a bug by your server; and the feature your users love best is something your programmers forgot to block.

I like the sound of this.

Jason Kottke pretty much says it all here and here.

I too share Jason’s concerns about text input. I noticed that Steve never used his thumbs on the keypad…

I’m in the market for a new phone at the moment, and none (I mean none) of the existing crop of phones does what I want. So I watched the keynote announcement (the first time I’ve done so - much to the surprise of Ang…) to see what it was like.

In the back of my mind, all I could think was “when is it going to be available in Australia?” If we remember, it took Apple Australia over two years to organise iTunes Australia Store. I expect this will take them even longer, especially given both the music industry and telcos here are similar in as much as they’re pretty much an oligopoly.

At the end of the keynote Jobs says that “Asia” is slated for 2008. Asia’s a big place Steve. Is Australia included in that grouping? At least Australian customers should be able to avoid Apple’s “first model” issues - by 2008 I would expect Apple would have at least a second revision on the market.

Apple have put together an interesting and ground-breaking device. They haven’t “reinvented the phone” as they claim. But perhaps it will shake a few trees and open up the market a little bit…

It was interesting that Google was talking about the open standards and systems that their services are built on, and how that enabled the iPhone integration.

Apple’s is a walled garden - they are leveraging the open systems, but still tightly control anything they can (note the 200+ patents for the device - and iTunes “FairPlay” digital rights management system).

Jobs is quoted in Time (see the Kottke piece) as lamenting the lack of innovation in telcos - one cause of this is the lock-in created by the telcos’ “walled garden” approach. Innovation on the iPod and iPhone will always be held back if Apple continues it’s current practices.

I also had very big doubts about the claim that the phone ran OS X (hearing, of course, Mac OS X). The John Gruber quote in Kottke’s article, and this cheeky screenshot pretty much sum it up. B.S.

Tangential link: Seth Godin on Cingular’s part of the presentation. I agree completely, although I think Yahoo’s Jerry Yang could equally be criticised for not really saying anything too…

Bonus links: Leisa has some great posts on mobile usability posted before and after the iPhone announcement - 1, 2, 3.

Evan points to a Windows-based power management app, Local Cooling. Apart from providing some useful settings, it shows the theoretical energy savings and also “phones home” to show the aggregate saving of all Local Cooling users.

Great idea! Nice work - plus I learnt these little factoids (I’m yet to verify):

More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we could just improve the efficiency of how we use our PCs, the savings in energy costs would be over $3 billion dollars! The CO2 emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car.

I decided to move my del.icio.us bookmarks to a more “business like” username. I exported from del.icio.us, then imported into the new username, but it marks everything as “not shared”, and there’s no “share all” function.

I suspect this is an anti-spam measure, but it was a real pain. Anyways, a bit of digging and I found this blog entry that contains a script that allows you to, albeit slowly, automate much of the process. A tip though - don’t open multiple tabs and run this script as del.icio.us might lock you out…