Odd Concepts

CNET interviews Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies, about the buying frenzy kicked off by the $99 price tag on the HP TouchPad. Kay believes that this challenge to the iPad market dominance should give Apple pause:

Kay explained. “If you were a big company like HP and you were doing a new category product launch, it would not be weird to have a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions,” he said in a phone interview. “So, you could have used that money to subsidize the price of the TouchPad and you can flood the market with these devices that are worth way more than you have to pay for them. And get them in everybody’s hands. Get everybody talking about it. That could have been the loss leader entry into the market,” he said.

“So, it wasn’t really a product failure, it was a pricing failure.”

Fascinating point, and not unprecedented. Remember that the PS3 is sold at a less-than-cost price point because Sony makes much more off the games and subscriptions. Another tablet manufacturer may just take the hint.

If so, I would certainly be tempted to buy one. The Apple is pretty, but far too expensive for a toy. And the screen is just too small to be  anything but an extension of the dual monitor setup of today’s knowledge worker.

On the left, a 2.50 GHz quad-core computer with 8 GB of memory running 64-bit Windows 7. That’s the computer I use.

On the right, a computer with a 50 MHz 80486 chip with 20 MB of RAM running Windows 95. Most recent file is dated 1997.

That’s a 6-inch ruler sitting below the screen which, by the way, is a giant 9.5 inches. Note that the iPad 2 has a 9.7 inch screen.

I can’t find drivers for the wireless PMCIA card that I have sitting around here somewhere, but it’s clean and works fine. So I just don’t know what to do with it. Hate to toss it. Hate to insult Disabled American Vets with something so useless.

Of course, to the extreme right is Mountain Dew, which is timeless … thanks to the support and continuous consumption by geeks the world over.

From Mashable: How AT&T and Verizon iPhone Users Compare [STATS]

Strangely enough, customer satisfaction for iPhone users on each network are almost identical.

Hey AT&T, put me down in the “dissatisfied” column.

Via Engadget comes one of the most fascinating geeky videos ever created. YouTuber Andrew Tait (aka “TheRasteri”) installed DOS 5.0 and Windows 1.0 on a VMWare instance and then proceeded to upgrade it through every Windows version right up to Windows 7 (except for Windows ME, because it couldn’t be upgraded to Win2K). On every version he examines things like whether or not color settings were carried forward and  tests Doom II.

Yes, it’s a little long. But I swear it felt like only 3 minutes to me. ‘Cause it’s so fascinating.

I wonder what that ways about me.

NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory caught a solar flare on film. While not as large as the Valentine’s Day X-class flare, the picture angle on this M-class flare gives us a spectacular view of the eruption:

Now that’s awesome.

Citibank’s stock was over $55 a share just three years ago before starting its historic slide into the toilet. Today, it stands at less than $5 a share. Sad.

How are they trying to bounce back? Better money management? Innovative bank services? Lower fees?

No. They have opened the “bank of the future” in New York City:

Customers can access free Wi-Fi (in a private seating lounge if they are Citigold customers), and “media walls” display news, weather, and information about Citibank. Atmosphere Proximity, Citi’s digital agency, also designed a chip with the bank’s social media team that accesses a special Foursquare feed. Whenever a certain amount of people check in to the branch, an “internal marketing screen” shows which users are inside the branch at that very moment.

“We want this branch to be more than just a bank,” Brad Dinsmore, Citigroup’s head of retail banking in North America, said in a speech at the opening ceremony. “We want this branch to be a place where customers view it as a hub, a center of the community, if you will. A place where they feel warm and welcome, that they can come in and experience our free Wi-Fi access.”

This would make sense if it was a Starbucks. I don’t know about you, but I don’t (and won’t) plan a trip to the bank for WiFi hookup and to meet up with my Foursquare friends.

How is this better banking?

Mashable posts a few rather nice suggestions for leveraging LinkedIn by Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile and using some of the “value added” applications that are available.

I’m a little intrigued by My Travel from TripIt. I think I’ll give that one a try. See you on the road!

A PC World analysis claims that the Chrome OS netbook will be a “radical departure from techniques of recent years.”

If you were around the computer industry 10 or 15 years ago, you may recall Larry Ellison’s infatuation with the concept of a thin client: a minimalist chunk of hardware that sits on a desk, inextricably tethered to a server. The server provides all of the brains and most of the storage; the thin client only exists to interact with the server.

I tend to think of Chrome OS as implementing a gaunt client — thin to the point of cadaverous — tethered to the Web. No desktop applications. No backup programs. No UI tweaks. No tuning. No utilities. Just the Web, the browser, and the Web, and the browser.

And that’s the beauty. A slick but powerful interface (e.g., application tabs, dockable pop-up panels) with everything stored in the cloud. This will lower cost of ownership and facilitate sharing at the same time — an attractive combination for enterprises and consumers alike.

Radical? Yeah. So much so that I’m willing to wait another 3 months for mine. So much so that I am planning on being an early adopter, sight unseen.

You should believe the menu when it says “tiny burger.”

Instead of popping pills, you could soon be toking your vitamins.

The creation of Harvard biomedical engineer David Edwards, inventor of inhalable insulin, inhalable chocolate and inhalable coffee, LeWhif Vitamin is a lipstick-like delivery device that works a lot like a miniature pipe, only instead of inhaling smoke with each toke, you inhale a fine powder of healing supplements (a sort of anti-smoke) that dissolves in your mouth. By skipping the digestive system, which breaks down pills and diverts many of their active ingredients to the liver, LeWhif Vitamins claims to deliver more concentrated doses of nutrients into the bloodstream. Eight hits supplies 100 percent of the daily recommended amount of A, B1, B2, B3 and B5.

Outrageously expensive for now, but new tech always is. Then again, I’m still wanting to buy the virtually calorie free inhalable chocolate.

Technorati Tags: LeWhif Vitamin, ArtScience Labs, David Edwards, Inhalable Vitamin