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September 24, 2005
Pre-show run up
Well as usual before a tradeshow, I've got 3 days worth of work to do before I leave in 24 hours. We are going to be announcing a new product on Monday so I have to have the website updated and write a press release on top of all the other things I need to do to get ready. Got a lot of stuff checked off the list though so I feel like I am cranking at a pretty good pace.
Still have to get a haircut, buy some new shoes, pack , and tie up the week's loose ends, then get to the airport an hour earlier than usual because some rocket scientist at Homeland Security (could they have come up with a more Orwellian name for that super-agency? Perhaps Ministry of Truth) put my name on a the airline no-fly list.
Looking forward to a week in San Francisco.
Posted by David Adams at 09:32 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
If you're going to San Francisco ...
We will be down in SF for the CTIA Wireless show at the Moscone center all week. We will be attending the iHollywood Mobile Entertainment Forum all day monday, then the conference Tue, Wed, and Thur. We've got a lot of meetings to go to but we will be at some of the parties and around town evenings. If you are someone that we've met at Seattle Mobile, Mobile Monday or just around and want to hang out, have a beer and talk about mobile; shoot me an email.
David.Adams@mobileresearch.com
I'm really looking forward to the show. Should be a lot of new phones announced this week.
Posted by David Adams at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2005
Mobile Startup/Mobile Research in the Seattle PI today
I was mentioned in the business section of today's Seattle Post Intelligencer. It's an interesting article on entrepreneurs who blog. It's hard to believe I've been doing this for 8 months. I am trying to find more time to blog daily. Russ was giving me grief on this today. Well we've got a big trade show coming up in a week and a lot is happening at Mobile Research so I shouldn't have any problem finding things to write about.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/240928_vc16.html
Posted by David Adams at 02:43 PM | Comments (1)
Motorola ROKR
There have been a lot of postings in various blogs and sites in the last week about the new Motorola ROKR iTunes phone. Most of them bad. We purchased this phone last week and I had a chance to play around with it before it went to the researchers to get profiled. I am going to have to break with the pack and say that I don't think this phone is that bad. Sure it isn't the iPhone from Apple that everyone has been speculating about, but as far as Motorola phones go, it's a pretty nice device. It's a mid-range phone, and I'm sure the $249 price tag will drop, just as the RAZR's did. (Although I am not a big fan of the name. Enough with the lame pseudo-acronym 4 letter names!)
The iTunes functionality worked like a charm. I plugged it into my Mac, dragged some songs into the little phone icon, and they transfered. Worked the first time without any hassle, just like I expect anything on my Mac to. Sure it only holds 100 songs (or 512k), but this is the first phone that supports iTunes. I'm sure the next one will be more. And l look at it as getting an apple shuffle bundled in with a nice mid-range Motorola phone. The size is nice and I think the phone is pretty cool looking. Frankly II would take one of these over the RAZR any day. I think this phone is getting a bad rap in the face of a LOT of speculation for a long time about an apple iPhone. This isn't it; but a cool phone that works with iTunes nicely. The sound is good, they give you an adapter so you can use REAL headphones with it, it handles incoming phone call handoff nicely, and it has a nice form factor.
The only downside to this phone is the USB 1 cable and associated SLOW transfer speed. I might not have noticed if I wasn't used to transfering tons of data to my iPod at lightning fast speeds via Firewire. Also, I haven't used it enough to say what the battery life is with the iTunes playing. However I am sure it is pretty good since it uses flash RAM instead of a drive.
I've got to wonder how many of the pundits out there who have bad mouthed this phone, have actually laid hands on one.
Posted by David Adams at 12:03 AM | Comments (3)
September 13, 2005
Cursed Force Majeur Clause!!!
"Do to extensive storm damage" our 1-877 number "may be unavailable for an extended period of time." I'm not complaining; certainly in the scheme of those who have been affected by hurricane Katrina, I am an irrelevant blip. I've just been doing a lot of contracts lately and this is the first time I have had a "Force Majeur" (or "Act of God" for those franco-challenged/non-legal tyypes among you) enforced against me vis-a-vis our carrier. Just goes to show you.
Posted by David Adams at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Seattle Mobile tonight
The September Seattle Mobile meeting is tonight. We are doing our first demo meet. We have about 7 people signed up to do demos. There are some really interesting mobile startups in Seattle as well as a lot of established mobile companies. Hopefully we will have some great demos. As always I am sure we will have a great group tonight. If you are in the PNW please come on by. It's free and there is beer and wine.
Posted by David Adams at 02:31 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2005
Startup Status
I thought I'd post a little about where we are as a company and what's going on since I haven't posted much in the last few weeks.
First off: We're hiring! We are looking for researchers. I guess I should probably put a "jobs" section up on the company web site. We're hiring people with testing experience in mobile wireless. Also we've just hired an in-house photographer to do all the device photos. With the number of devices we are profiling and the new markets, that is a full time job. He starts on Tuesday so I've got to get the new iMac all setup for the photo studio.
Since we launched a month ago we have had a really great response. We also have customers now which is a big step. It is not a suprise, but it is very interesting all the different companies from different parts of the industry that have the same needs when it comes to mobile devices. This is a really pervasive problem. Also in the last month there have been 15+ new devices hit the US market, so we have been aquiring them and funneling them into our device profiling process. This is going as planned which is nice. No hiccups so far. The only issue is going to be staffing up for new markets. Those initial devices are a sizeable hump to get over and take a lot of man-hours to get through in a timely manner.
We are starting to build out our offices. If you've seen the previous pictures, you can tell we've been operating in real startup mode for the last 8 months. Now that we've launched and we are starting to grow and mature as a company, I thought it was time we had some walls. So we have started framing the walls out in the office. Hopefully this will all be done in about a month. It will be nice to have an office, a conference room, and a kitchen.
We are also busy getting ready for CTIA Wireless IT in San Francisco. Getting meetings set up, trying to get invited to all the parties, and getting everything ready so Brad and myself can be gone for a week. It always feels like these things are way off in the future, then they have a way of sneaking up on you. We are flying out Two weeks from today. If you are interested in Mobile Research and want to meet us at CTIA, drop me a line. Or if you are one of the great people I've met in the last 8 months and would like to grab a beer, send me an email. We'll be there all week.
Posted by David Adams at 06:32 PM | Comments (0)
Blahg!
I haven't posted in a while because in my haste to clean up my server and make some space
Posted by David Adams at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)