Technology

I've been waiting with bated breath for this here piece of equipment to come on the market and it's DEAD? How can this happen? How can this be?

I can't ... wow!

After all that work and effort!?!?!

The End Of The CrunchPad

On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”

But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”Read more

From The Media Is Dying's twitterstream  comes this bit of news about universities rejecting the Kindle due to acessibility issues: Universities reject Kindle DX as a textbook replacement | Tech Gear News - Betanews:Read more

The Myth Behind Craigslist: It's Not Maximizing Revenue Potential | Techdirt

While it may seem paradoxical, Craigslist actually is being much smarter (on purpose or not) in how it "maximizes profits." It's doing it by not pissing off users and not trying to squeeze them for every possible penny today, knowing correctly that doing so is a horrible long-term strategy. But it's difficult to think of many companies that throw off the sort of profits that Craigslist does on a regular basis. It employs 30 people and most estimates suggest in brings in $100 million in revenue per year. What other companies of that size bring in that much in revenue?

Wed Aug 26 2009 09:26:54 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

The thing is, Craig could tell people til he gets blue in the face that he's a "Customer Service Manager" and CEOs and business gurus still wouldn't get that he's not being cute but dead serious about that title.

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I can't believe the ‎Image‎ has such a huge usability oversight. I just uploaded some old images that got mangled in the upgrade. Something happened between Drupal4.7 and Drupal6 that basically killed my image galleries. So I decided to move these out and redo them.

Well ...

There a major usability flaw: you cannot set the workflow for the images you are importing. This is a major faux-pas. Image import may be a fast way to create image nodes, yet they do not necessarily have to be image nodes about "the now". For people porting from older sites or different platforms, the need for a massive upload of "old content" is just practical. To which, may I add that it would be nice to also for back-date the imports. There should be a field that allows for a "imported on this day" label and then another field with a "first posted on" label.

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