Author Archives: Elia Freedman

Building a Mobile Device Lab

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A lot happens in a week on vacation. The US government stays in business, Apple is apparently sucking up all the smartphone profits, and I joined the Board of Directors at Mobile Portland!

What’s Mobile Portland? From the site: “Mobile Portland is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating, promoting and supporting the mobile technology community in Portland, Oregon and the surrounding areas.”

Jason Grigsby has been running Mobile Portland with the help of a steering committee for the past three years, building it into one of the the largest user groups in the Portland area with over 1000 members. Our first act as a Board was to incorporate as a non-profit organization and set in action our plans for a device lab that people from all over the country can come and use. I’ll use Jason’s quote to ReadWrite Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick to introduce the concept to you:

One of the major challenges for [mobile] platform vendors, carriers, and handset manufacturers is how to make sure the best apps are available on their products. One of the biggest challenges for mobile developers and businesses is getting access to devices for testing. Not even the largest of companies can afford to purchase all of the possible devices on which their software or services may run on.

If you think about it, this is a major challenge. Even if you are developing for iOS only, you still have to support multiple versions of the operating system on iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2 and multiple generations of iPod touches. Add to the mix Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry alone and we are talking a mess of devices.

I’m excited to be involved and happy Jason asked me to join the Board! Great things ahead.

The Art of the Move

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It has been a crazy couple of months for me personally. We decided it was time to move. We had been in the previous house for 12 years and with my oldest daughter starting school this year and me doing more work in Portland, we decided the time was right.

We put the house on the market the end of April, sold it the end of May, found another house to purchase the following week. Getting a mortgage was interesting as Fannie Mae (and thus the banks since none think for themselves anymore) are really hostile toward people who own large percentages of companies, even if said company is a C corporation. We had a long close cycle as we didn’t know how long it would take us to find someplace new and finally closed and moved in this past weekend.

In the process I came up with four rules for how to handle a house move, depending on your wealth (whether actual or frame of mind). I’m an expert on this topic since I’ve moved over 16 times in my 38 years. You can figure out which category you fit into:

  1. Poor: pack all the boxes, rent a truck and/or get friends with trucks, load said truck yourself, move and unpack yourself.
  2. Moderate: pack all the boxes yourself but hire a moving company to move them and your furniture to the new location, unpack the boxes yourself.
  3. Wealthy: leave everything in the house, have the moving company pack up the house, move it and unpack it in the new location.
  4. Uber-Wealthy: give away everything in the old house, buy new stuff for the new house.
For the record, we picked #2.

Surprise! BlackBerry Playbook Struggles At Retail

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Apparently RIM’s shareholder meeting was yesterday. While I can’t find any direct confirmation of this, John Biggs over at TechCrunch reported the following:

RIM also admitted to failing to sell the PlayBook correctly at retail and admitted that it was their first “retail” product on the shelves and, as such, did not have the might of carriers behind it.

Where have I heard that before? Oh right. I said it!

Obsessing on Fame

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I’m a heavy reader. I used to read a number of weekly and monthly magazines but find that now I am focused more on reading blogs, news sites and other information. I am varied in my reading, too. I read venture capitalists and tech news, I read political news and information, I read about sports. I also read books, mostly history, and a single magazine (National Geographic), which gives me insights in anthropology, history and the natural world.

Even with all this reading I have found myself too narrowly focused, especially in technology reading. I am finding myself distracted by Silicon Valley. Sean Murphy pointed this out to me a couple of weeks ago. He questioned my plan for a new app, comparing it to certain “Valley” fanboy companies like DropBox and Evernote, and he pointed out that I am trying to make comparisons to outliers.

I have consistently struggled with my own desires for running a business. I have been conflicted between grow a large company well respected in the industry and being happy with a smaller business that gives me the flexibility to do what I want in life.

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I have two daughters, one five and the other three, and they have been obsessed with the idea of famous. “I’m famous” they’ll say, of which I or their mother responds, “Yes, in your head you are.” But they don’t really know what famous is, it is just a word they like. When they finally asked what it means my answer was as follows: “Famous is when people you don’t know know you. There are degrees of famous. For instance,” I explained, “I am more famous than your mother but Nemo is more famous than me.” (Hey, their 5 and 3. Who was I going to say, Lady Gaga?)

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The truth, though, is that I have been obsessed with famous myself and didn’t realize it until Sean pointed it out: I have been obsessed with being recognized for my business accomplishments, I have been obsessed with growing a company recognized as a world-class leader, I have been distracted by the desire to be better known than I am. Reading all those Valley rags, which focus on the outliers more than most, was contributing to my obsession. And to be honest, obsession really doesn’t suit me very well.

So I’m done with all that, or at least being obsessed by it. I just can’t control those things. And frankly it is hard enough controlling the things I can control let alone the ones I can’t.

The Fallacy of Mobile App Versus Web

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I go away for a week of vacation and come back to a new fight in the mobile space. This one isn’t Apple v. Google. This one is App v. Web. A number of people have chimed in after Flurry released their findings that app usage passed web usage for the first time (link).

The problem I have is that the entire argument is stupid. Most of the apps I use on a regular basis are just front-faces for the web anyway. Use Facebook app, a Twitter client, maps or weather? They are all just front ends to web apps. Even email clients are just a front face on data and information from the web. So where do you draw the line?

(A hint: there isn’t one. This is just another fabricated argument to give us tech nerds something to argue about.)