Now I know why I didn't by IPhone - I've been waiting for Android!

Now it's all clear to me - I didn't by an Iphone because I was waiting for the Google Phone. The phone itself seems really fun with GPS, compass, accelerometer, Wifi, 3g and all, but IPhone has almost the same features. But what I really like about the Android is it's openess! Since I'm a developer I've been waiting for the day when I'll be able to program everything around me - lamps, owen, fridge, tv, lock, phone and my car. This is suddenly a little bit closer since I'll be in control over my mobile!
I've done some Java applets for my SonyEricsson, and though it was pretty fun, it is a pretty tightly locked programming environment. With the IPhone it's the same: An extensive SDK but all the fun stuff locked up out of my reach.

The Android platform is all different. Change whatever you want, use camera, other programs, API's as much as you like, it just isn't a closed environment.

I'm no Mac person, and even though I was impressed with the IPhone (primarily for the touch interface and the nice screen), I must say I simply don't like Apple that much. I'm a PC guy, I've enjoyed putting together my own hardware playing around with Windows or Linux. I want to be able to choose freely what hardware to use.
Mac's are good looking and they seem to be great employers, but for some reason they can't reach my inner geek. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo can! I even liked the Seinfeld/Microsoft-commercial.

Now since I'm swedish I'm really hoping for a platform as open as Android for SonyEricsson.

Kaskado - Mobile coupons made easy

Imagine walking into a shop and your mobile beeps. You look at it, and it's a coupon for some clothes matching your personal taste in the same store, and hence increasing the sales of the store.

We're not quite there yet, but the scenario presented above just got a bit closer.
I've tried Kaskado which gives you mobile coupons for real world purchases. It's easy to install the java app (enter your mobile number and follow a link) and I was up and running in no time.

When starting I had to choose my location, and then a couple of offers in my city was presented to me. The interface is good and I might even try one of the offers later today. The number of offers where a tad bit low, only four of them in a city of more than one million (Stockhom), one from a coffee chain having 5+ locations to choose from.

So what does it take to make this service a success? The installation process was easy enough, but I still think it's hard to get the main stream audience to install the application with that few coupons. I guess that can be explained by the fact that the service is pretty new, but that needs to be improved.
I also would like to have it automatically positioning me, so that I get offers only really close to my location. That probably isn't very interesting until they've got far more offers.
It would also be nifty to have it running in the background, maybe as a cell phone provider service to keep the users costs low, and simply signaling me when I'm close to an offer that really interests me.

I don't have any insight in Kaskado's plans, since I just heard of them, but I'd say that a great idea would be to go for the operators and have the service preinstalled or at least having the link as a predefined shortcut. Operators are always looking for ways to get new ways of income as well as advantages over their competitors, so it should be pretty easy to make such a deal.

The future of video is... Animoto!

We've played around with video for a while here at 49lights. We've tried quite a few different video editors for our very simple material and after what I've seen I must say that Animoto is very, very impressive!

What's Animoto?
Animoto is a very simple online tool for creating videos from images. You select which images to use, select (or upload) music and hit "render". Animoto then analyze your media and creates a video. Pretty nifty effects suiting the music are used on your images as well as syncronized to the music. The outcome is a pretty nice video that you easily can download, embed or upload to Youtube.

I'd say that this is what I expect from future video editing. Select videos, images and music and get a nice little video. Add some interview parts or something, clip the things together and you've produced a somewhat "professional" video. It's obvious that tools like this will reduce the gap between professional video and amateur video.

Add some stock video footage to the show and at least news shows will have a couple of hundred thousand competitors. (Large parts of news shows are just expounded views on a Reuters telegram).

What really makes a difference when comparing Animoto to many other online tools for creating video footage or advanced slideshows is that they have extreamly good looking effects on Animoto.

Shoppinggatan - English video

Here's the English video for those who prefer that over Swedish ;)

Shoppinggatan goes Animoto!

Animoto is as you know a great tool for easy video creation that actually looks good.
We just tried it for a short presentation of Shoppinggatan, and here's the result:

I love Chrome but I got it to freeze

I tried Google Chrome today and I must say I love it. A big part of the Google Chrome Comic that we've all read today focused on its stability. However, I got it to freeze. Playing one of my favorite online games, Desktop Tower Defence, it sometimes froze when on keypresses. Keypress, long pause, and the game continued. When I got to the point where it froze for a couple of minutes I killed the process.

So google guys, please fix this so that I can enjoy my favorite online game in my brand new favorite browser! :)

Shoppinggatan.se enters beta...

Finally, Shoppinggatan.se enters beta mode. Shoppinggatan is a website for a more inspired shopping experience. It's all in Swedish, but please come and visit the site.

Hitta kläder, inredning och webbshoppar och inspireras av shoppinggatans guider och bloggar