List of Windows Phone7 Apps & Popularity

I stumbled on this link and thought I would share. You can see the apps, and their popularity. So far, all my favorites are in good working order including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare. My hopes are high that the app market won't be flooded with crap like the Android and iPhone stores but I can already see the fart apps and others coming in.

As a former Android G1 user, I'm delighted with the user experience and ease of use that I'm finding with the apps. I'm spending less and less time navigating and I get in and out quickly in my phone. It really is a phone to save me from my phone. So far, I've converted three people into making the switch. Each were iPhone users who have what I describe as iFatigue. They were ready for a change and I see Windows Phone7 being a slow growing that is going to start catching the buzz in the next few months. I'm thinking it's going to be a good time to buy some Microsoft Stock. their stock has been downgraded often because they aren't sexy but between Phone7, Windows 7, and Kinect, I'm thinking it's a great time to buy.

What do you think? Have you seen it yet? I'm smitten and I keep making the joke that I keep playing with it so much that I'm going to go blind. #Love iT!

I've got my HD7!

w00t w00t! So, I got my phone today at 2pm from UPS. I had to wait a week after everyone else because I wanted to save a little money by ordering through Amazon Wireless instead of waiting on T-Mobile to open up their ordering. Instead of $199 for the phone through T-Mobile directly, I got it for $169 from Amazon. To my surprise and delight, I received an email from Amazon a few days before it shipped stating that the lowered the price to $149. Sweet!

So, I get the phone, and it's gorgeous. Despite people saying the screen wasn't that nice, they obviously are much more picky than I am. I've been happily using my Android G1 for the last two years and this is a HUGE step above. The phone feels study and as others have reported, fits nicely into my hand and isn't too big.

For the unboxing and setup, I've been running into some stumbling blocks that might hurt the experience for those less technical or patient. My brother used to work at T-Mobile and I know he would have his hands full over the last week with complaints. My issues are detailed below to help others and they aren't meant as a complaint. I know what I get into with being an early adopter and I am hard headed enough to love it.

1. To be honest, it took me a few minutes to even figure out how to turn it on. there is a piece of plastic over the battery connectors so despite clicking power and trying to charge it, I had to open up the back and remove it.
2. Adding emails and linking accounts was pretty simple. I couldn't auth to my Xbox Live ID and it was driving me crazy because my other Live ID worked just fine with the same exact password. This one is resolved as it turns out this ID has a non Microsoft suffix and when I logged in via a web browser, I needed to authorize my account. A click of "Send authorization email" and then clicking the "Yes, I want to authorize this account" in the email made the problem go away.
3. During the setup, the initial Facebook setup process was easy, the only problem was that it brought in the contacts and shocking amount of information for my over 700 friends into my phone. Under settings, then people I selected to not list contacts that were not linked to others in my phone. My word of caution is to not select this until you've linked all of them up properly. If you only have an email from someone and it doesn't match their name or email on Facebook you won't be able to link the account and it will go away.
4. There is no option for "GPS" and only "Location" on or off. I've selected on, but the maps app has me about a quarter away from my house. This is a result I would expect on my G1 if I was only using wifi for location. The same issue showed up in Foursquare as it didn't realized I got in my car and drove a few miles away. I'll keep digging.
5. Outlook seems to complain when I type in the wrong server with a "Cannot connect to mail.xxx.com" and when it's right, and the password is wrong it tells me. But then, it says it's syncing and can't finish. The error is below and this is still an outstanding one. Googling isn't helping so far. Any takers?

"Outlook error

Not updated

We're having a problem syncing your

information. Try again later.

Last tried 2 seconds ago

Error code: 8500201D"

As mentioned above, I realize when it's wrong information on the server, username, domain, or password based on the information that is coming back.

I'm sure that I'll find more to post about later but those are my first 5 issues. I was able to stream Netflix like a champ and download apps very well. I'm still grinning ear to ear and loving the phone. I am a satisfied customer and I'm confident this is a good phone and the issues are only software bugs that are resolvable.

*Update: 11/16/2010 6:40am CST - I was troubleshooting some more and unchecked to sync email leaving Calender and Contacts selected. This actually worked. Selecting email again, resulted in the same previous error. So I've definately got the right settings in place, I might need to get my IT team to look at something on their end as the issue might be a server side setting dealing with security, permissions, or policies. I found this post that I'll be discussing with my IT team on shortly.

Additionally, I was able see this morning that maps did show me in the right location. I don't think I made any changes and I'm worried that it's going to be that slow. I will keep you updated here too.

As a last update on this post. I found the ability to import my Gmail contacts into my LiveID account. This was pretty huge as I was dreading putting my contacts into the phone. Switching from Android meant that all my contact information was there. Despite connecting to Gmail and being able to read my emails, it doesn't pull the contacts. This ability to import from the web interface easily solved my issue. It even linked up the majority of the contacts to Facebook and my Outlook contacts where appropriate. Good stuff. :)

*Update: 11/16/2010 9:40am CST - At work we have a hidden SSID for our wireless connection. This is a missing feature in Windows Phone7. I hope they add it later, and I would hope that T-Mobile would want it too so they can save their bandwidth. This is pretty annoying considering I just bought two games in the market place and I can't download them over the air or tethered. It only supports downloading via wifi. That means I have to wait till I get home. :(

*Update: 11/16/2010 1:49pm CST - We have Outlook! Even tho I had only selected to download email from the last 3 days, it appears that the amount of email in my inbox was causing it to freak out. As I was troubleshooting with my IT team, they noticed that when I was tethered, it looked like my laptop was making the queries to the Exchange server instead of the phone directly. Since my laptop was on the VPN, I changed the mail server name to the internal name and unchecked the SSL option.

This was the magic combination and in a few minutes, I had all my email. After that initial sync and subsequent tests, I disconnected and tried again but it failed because it wasn't on the VPN. Then I changed it back to the external name with SSL as it was originally set and it worked. Now I'm getting my emails without a problem.

My co-worker with a Samsung Focus on AT&T was having a similar issue with a different error code. My fix didn't work for him but he did get it resolved. It turns out that it didn't like him having sub folders under his inbox. Removing them allowed him to connect and resolved his problems.

Hot for Windows Phone 7

If you know me, you know I'm a nerd and an early adopter. I like the pain of issues from adopting early because it helps me learn more about it and lets me get under the hood. I'm happy when new technology "just works," but when it doesn't, it often forces the inner dork in me come out to play.

I was a first-day early Android adopter, and I happily plunked down my money for the HTC G1 from T-Mobile, which I still have. I've been happy with it since that purchase and it was a great investment. I chose Android over the iPhone for several reasons. Being open to any carrier, any maker, and the ability for people to customize their experience is what drove me to the purchase, and it has excited me to see the Android's popularity grow since its release.

I always find it interesting when open standards challenge closed, proprietary platforms. Take Beta Max versus VHS. Sony was the company behind Beta Max and they lost to the VHS open standard, even though at the time everyone believed beta max was better. Another example again features Sony with their AIT proprietary tape format, developed for the then niche market of digital media. Seagate, HP & IBM initiated the LTO Consortium in the late 1990s as an open standards alternative to the proprietary magnetic tape formats available at the time, and LTO has been the best-selling "super tape" format since 2002.

So given the theory above, my money was on Android against the iPhone, which is turning out to have been a good bet, now that Android apps are rushing to the market in droves, and Android phones are selling over 100,000 units per day. A key component with Android was the huge number of professional java developers that could get to work on something they were already familiar with.

What can beat a winning open formula like this you might say? The great combination of Enterprise and openness. Make something for the Enterprise but open it up for competition and you have yourself a winning combination.

Enter Microsoft Windows Phone 7 to the party. Not only do you bring the biggest paying and highest quantity of buyers to the party, but you bring all the vendors looking to get at the money and market share. Take it a step further and sprinkle in the Xbox gaming community that is currently 25 million subscribers per month strong and you have yourself the making of a huge shift in the market.

What will ultimately make or break the platform is developers. some say the new Palm Pre platform was pretty nice but the lack of apps at launch made it fall flat with very little success. Recently HP took a gamble and purchased Palm for 1.2 billion. Now they will be trying their hand into the tablet market but without developers, I don't predict much success. Windows Phone 7 is based on its popular Microsoft Zune device and hundreds of thousands of developers who already know how to program in Microsoft .Net, Silverlight, and XNA are off to the races. They don't have to learn a new language; they don't have to buy a new computer, pay additional fees or anything like Android of iOS development.

Given the technology demos and videos that have made it to light and the huge list of games, the platform doesn't seem lacking. The Xbox gaming integration, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare was enough to have me salivating and ready to go. If I was a betting man, my money would be on Microsoft for the win.

People have beaten on Microsoft for the last 2 years that they were late to the party and missed out. The same was said when the early versions of Windows launched and they had no developer tools or platform. Now they have .Net and are easily the most advanced, organized, and modern tools / platform in existence.

I don't have a date for launch, nor do I know what exact phone I want to get. I know my T-Mobile contract is up for renewal, and I've got a handful of cash ready to throw down for a Windows Phone 7 device. They may have been late to the party, but they are here now, and they brought a keg, shots, and some friends. Let's get it on!

Windows Phone 7 Complete Guide

Great Online Savings Programs

I was talking with someone the other day about how to get started saving for college as they have a new born baby and didn't have any clue on how to start or even how they would afford it. I told them about the programs below that we have been using for a while.

UPromise is an online program that you create a saving program with. Many retailers will give a percentage of your transaction with them back into the college fund. For example, every time I fill up my car at Exxon, I get a rebate of 1 cent per gallon of gas purchased. Some retailers offer up to 10% credits.

The way it works is that you create an account and tie your credit cards to it. Any purchases with those cards automatically trigger the rebate. This isn't limited to a single card or family either. So for example my mom, aunts, uncles, and others in the family can also add in their cards and participate in the donations.

New York 529 is the New York state college savings program that has the best terms, options, and features. My wife did quite a bit of research on this and while we live in Texas, we went with the New York plan. The link on the name is to the FAQ section where your questions may be answered. If you notice once you get there it's part of the UPromise framework so you can really take advantage of that program and grow things even further.

EBates is a program that doesn't help you save directly for college but it gives you cash rebates on your online purchases. Sometimes it's quite a lot and getting cash back for something you were going to do anyways is pretty nice. This isn't a pyramid scheme or multi-level marketing. You just go to the site, login, and then find the retailer you were going to purchase from, and go about your business. My wife and I have been using it with success for a while and it's been nice to get the rebates back in the form of gift cards.

There are so many scams and pyramid systems on the internet and it's hard to tell which is real and which isn't. I'll tell you we have been using these programs for years and have literally saved up thousands of dollars as we are also putting in my directly from our paycheck as well. It's nice to do what you were going to do and earn more for the kids. Getting gift cards of our choice back from EBates is fun too.

The purpose of my email is to just share the information as so many people I've talked to have no idea that these types of programs exist and their first response is an assumption that it's a scam or too hard. I'm a very happy user and have been for years sleeping well at night knowing I'm saving for my girls college.

Summit catches 3D gaming in upswing

I was reading this article about 3D gaming and it could not be any more dead on about the timing and readyness for 3D gaming.

Summit catches 3D gaming in upswing

When I was at CES in January I saw the huge amount of hype and push for 3D TV. I just have no desire to gear up to watch TV. That is when I relax and I don't want to put on battery powered glasses to do it in my own living room. I understand that porn watchers are going to ultimately drive the technology like most innovations.

I did get a chance to experience the Nvidia gaming booth and I was bown away. The games are computer generated so the natural depth perception isn't quite the same as looking at real people in a movie. I already sit down and gear up to play with my gaming mouse, keyboard, headphones, and microphone, so why not throw in some battery powered glasses too? After checking out a game hands on in Vegas, I'm ready for 3D and will be making a purchase soon to get there.

Ignite Dallas #2

I've been following the TED events for a few years and I've always wanted to go but haven't been able to get approved to attend. If you are not familiar with TED it is a gathering of people who give timed presentations on their big ideas. You have to be reviewed and your idea has to be pretty riveting or game changing to present.

To be able to attend an event in person you have to write an essay and be pretty important. I do appreciate being able to watch all the videos on www.TED.com. I find them very inspirational and they continue to give me hope for the future of humanity.

Recently other groups have been working to emulate TED such as SMU with their TEDxSMU event which I also tried to get into and was not accepted. I stumbled on another group which I was able to get into and I'm looking forward to seeing what the event holds. This group is called Ignite Dallas. I registered on EventBright for only $20 here and there is a Facebook page here. I'll attend and report back on how it goes. It's Wednesday June 2nd from 6pm till 10pm at the Granada Theatre.

Brightcove - B2B Marketing with Video

I was sent this video by someone and I have to say that it's a good way to think about video. I've never seen this type of cohesive approach to video before and I wanted to share it with others. This is probably only interesting to you if you are in marketing but I could be wrong.

Brightcove - B2B Marketing with Video

View more presentations from Brightcove.

TetriTherapy?

A friend of mine sent me this link which discusses the output of some research on the positive benefits of playing Tetris to reduce the incidents of traumatic flashbacks. I have to admit that after a hard day at work or when I am particularly stressed out I find myself wanting to play a game. For me it's always been a way to de-stress and unwind where others might turn to more harmful vices such as smoking, drinking, or drugs.

One of the drawbacks I've found is going too far down and playing too much. This has caused me to have the reverse effect where I can't sleep and I toss and turn with thoughts consumed from the game. I can play whole games in my dreams and wake up frustrated with very little deep sleep. On the other hand if I find myself not having played games for a few weeks I'll end up with nightmares where my brain goes into overdrive and so I balance things out with a little gaming every few days keeps me emotionally and mentally on an even playing field.

I'd love to hear others and what their stress outlets are as I suspect this type of conditioning and self treatment isn't segmented to me or gaming. Am I alone and a freak on this or can others ratify my realizations?

Blog Format

I've been talking with my co-worker Chris Ebbeson (@ebbynezer) about his blog and our common situation. We want to blog more but we don't have enough to say to justify sitting down and writing something formal. We agreed that Twitter is far too small and Blogging is often too big. I am going to start writing smaller blogs as a matter of practice and not let size of the article prevent me from sharing my thoughts.

Chris on the other hand is giving Tumblr a try. I have to admit I've not actually gone to Tumblr before so I created me an account (solarcurve.tumblr.com) and will be checking it out. I am impressed with all these sites and their ability to post to one another and seamlessly get your information out there. I am also afraid of overkill and duplicate postings. What are your thoughts?

A new look at the old password

In this day and age it's important to have a strong password and most organizations are doing a good job of requiring a password with higher degrees of strength. More importantly more and more organizations and even your operating system are opening up to much longer passwords that support special characters such as spaces.

If you are like me you have different passwords for different things and you probably have a hard time remembering the cryptic codes of mixed numbers, letters, and special characters. A few years ago I switched over to pass phrases which have eliminated a lot of issues but also helped me with my attitude and self-confidence. You might be thinking what?

Microsoft Windows for example will support passwords up to 128 characters in length including spaces and special characters such as exclamation points (! also known as bang), asterisks (* also known as splat), and even question marks. Many other sites are supporting moderately long passwords which open up more possibilities. Rather than a password of “abcd1234!” or something similar to fulfill the complexity requirements consider to switching to something more fun, easier to remember, more secure, and possible self supporting.

For example I was using a variation on "I am organized!" which is pretty easy to remember and helped me think about wanting to stay organized when I was doing my work. This is much easier to remember and is 15 characters instead of the traditional 6 or 8 characters which means it's MUCH more difficult to crack. The spaces and punctuation are keys to a tough-to-crack password and ways to make it unique to you to avoid easy guesses.

With that being said it's important to not have something so obvious that it becomes part of the standard password guessing and hacking attempts. A bad example would be "I am sexy" or "I am smart". Both of which might be helpful but you need to customize it in some form or fashion such as "I! am very smart" which supports that need as well as pushes the affirmation to another level. I do not suggest that you have to start with an "I am" prefix as you can and should create a variation that supports your personality and needs such as "On time is how I roll."

Given that I lock my work station every time I get up at work and I have to log back in I've found this approach to be quite a positive and helpful change. Since I have different passwords for different things I am bombarded with positive messages throughout the day as I log into various systems and sites because I think it as I type it. I hope that you will give it a try and that it will work for you too.

Windows 7 and Xbox Media Center Extender

I've been tinkering for about a year trying to get my Microsoft Xbox 360's (Yes, more than 1) to be able to stream music and media from my computer to my TV's and this has been a constant struggle with no success and no idea how to get it working. I even tried on the other computers running Windows 7 and had the same issues but I couldn't even get it to work on XP either.

I was convinced at some point along the way that it had to be a network issue because perhaps I didn't have Multicast and Universal Plug and Play (uPnP) working right. I am running a Cisco Pix 501 for my Firewall and Router and a Netgear GS724T for my switch. Those are both non-home devices and maybe they were part of the problem.

After exhausting efforts there I decided to take another look at my computer itself. I am running a licensed business edition of AVG because I am a big fan and most things online point to the problem being a firewall configuration for it. I am however NOT running their firewall because I am running my network behind the strict pix configuration. This means I am running the stock Microsoft Windows Firewall that comes built into Windows. I had been trying to get the communication between the Xbox and the computer to work with it both enabled and disabled with no luck and I kept getting the same error of "Cannot Configure Extender".

I decided to enable the Windows Firewall again and check the program settings for enabled apps which revealed that the "Media Center Extenders" and "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service" was not checked. Checking them and clicking "OK" made communication work instantly and the problem was resolved.



I followed all the instructions I could find and even went to http://www.xbox.com/pcsetup like the Xbox screen says to do but this bit of instructions wasn't mentioned so I am posting it for others in case they are beating their heads in on the same issue.

New Apple iPad

Many people were like me today and glued to their computers all around the world in their respective time zone looking to hear the news of the much rumored iPad. We were not confused as it really was called the iPad and it included many of the heavily rumored features that people were lusting over.. but not all.

Hype!
The hype surrounding this launch and the mystery lead to many rumors such as the ability for the device to bend time and space lead to such insanity as drinking games designed to be played around the launch which detailed out all the features and if included you had to drink.

Arrival Day
I was one of the many glued to my computer and eating at my desk as it occurred at 12:00pm CST. I was frustrated but not mad that I couldn't follow anything at all on www.apple.com or any of their subsidiary sites that I was aware of. Twitter didn't yield much more, no streaming video that I could find other than some silliness going on with the folks at Crunch Gear. I found the best source of information was the blogging which included great pictures and comments from Engadget.

The Device
I am not an Apple, Google, or Microsoft Fanboy and I consider myself omni-tech-ual? I have programing (Shell Scripting, Perl, PHP), Unix (SGI Irix, Sun Solaris), and Microsoft certifications as well as a background using and supporting Macs since 1994 not to mention that I happily own an Android phone. I am just a nerd and use the best tool available for the job at hand.

There are many sites including those names above that will cover in extreme detail what the iPad costs, contains, and promises so I won't get into that. I realize that we as a greedy never satisfied culture are never satisfied but I was not very impressed. In short I feel like this is a huge iPod Touch with a 3G upgrade if you want it. The following list of things are missing and to me are deal breakers that I expected to be fixed before I pull out my wallet (Which I was excited and ready to do).

• No Flash (really? still?)
• No Camera (Barcode reading, video conference, etc)
• No GPS (Isn't the purpose to be mobile?)
• No USB (I can't plug anything in like a GPS or Camera, or Mouse and Keyboard?)
• No SD or Memory Slots? (I can't upload anything via sneaker net?)
• No Multi-tasking? (I am way too ADHD to only be able to do 1 thing at a time)
• Still stuck with AT&T (What is the purpose of defining the iPad as unlocked if it still only works with AT&T?)
  

The Name
The most surprising thing to me was the weak name for this which is being laughed at and jokes are being told at it's expense. Twitter is now trending on several variations on the hash tags to poke fun such as #ipadjokes. My personal favorites are:

• A larger version will be available this summer called the MaxiPad
• Why did they call it the iPad? Because Sham-wow was already taken
• With AT&T and the iPad you know the network will be down at least 5 days a month

Alternatives
As I mentioned above, I am ready to put out my money for something new. I am ready to invest in something that lets me indulge more in my ever increasing content and social addictions. I am extremely interested in the rumored Microsoft Courier but it's still too good to be true and more focused on productivity than the iPad. I already have and still love my original Kindle but for now I might have to just stick with my normal laptop and my Andoid G1 handset.

My coworker Chris (@ebbynezer) wrote a pretty interesting blog post which was optimistic and very forward looking into what the iPad could have meant. After the announcement he acknowledged to me in the hall that he might have reached a bit given the outcome from the announcement.

What did you think about the announcement and will you buy an iPad?

Haiti

I have been very impressed with the world’s response to the Haiti earthquake, with aide coming from all over the globe. Monetary donations have poured in via a wide range of means, but most notably from social media. The Red Cross has their text campaign, where you can send $10 straight to the cause by SMS messaging the word "Haiti" to 90999¹, which I was happy to do.

I was listening to NPR the day after it happened, and I was moved by Bill Clinton's interview about the situation, as he has been going to Haiti doing humanitarian work there with his family for 35 years. I thought to myself, “Wow, he's been going there for 35 years; Haiti gets huge amounts of donations and charity to subsidize them and still they remain that poor with diseases and have such problems.”

At the time of the earthquake, there were an estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti who were there doing charity work to help the area. I was honestly impressed that so many of my fellow countrymen and women would be doing such work, but I thought perhaps we have been going about it the wrong way.

One thing America is really good at is capitalism, and when it comes to capitalism, we do it better than anyone in the world in the history of the world. Why not take that same skill-set and deploy it to assist Haiti? You can read the Wiki page for Haiti¹ and realize they no longer have any natural resources to help drive their economy due to deforestation. Because the country is so poor, they do not have any realistic source of knowledge power either (fewer than 30% of Haiti’s inhabitants reach 6^th grade¹).

If we can turn the deserts of Las Vegas into a huge thriving vacation and entertainment location that is green and a churning gear in the American economy why not work with Haiti to turn them into a vacation destination which would fuel more than enough jobs, economics, geographic revitalization, and self sustainability for the future? Dubai can build an entire city such as this from their desert and even palm tree-shaped islands so why not this area as well?

The old adage of give a man a fish and he eats for a day (charity) but teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime (education and enterprise) comes to mind. I'm sure I am out of my mind and more research on my part will most likely prove there are plenty of political, economic, geographic, cultural issues which make it not feasible, but I would love to go on vacation to Haiti and help their country recover. I'm willing to bet most of the global world at large would be willing to "help" with a much bigger economic impact. Knowing business and capitalism, if there was a full scale plan laid out, I'm sure the companies of the world would be willing to invest and probably get some good will (and transactions) from their existing client base in the meantime.

What do you think? Am I crazy? Would you go? Would you support companies who invested towards the recovery?

¹http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.94aae335470e233f6cf911df43181aa0/?vgnextoid=15c0c5a210826210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD Retrieved 01-17-2010

²http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti Retrieved 01-17-2010

Welcome to the House of Flamp!

SolarCurve is a term that I first learned in Photoshop which is used to help find blemishes and faults in your pitcures by using extreme variances to detect them. It's pretty nerdy and I know it has other meanings. I was an image re-toucher for a few years in the mid to late nineties so when I was trying to find a gaming name for playing Quake online I used it and it stuck with me. So it's been SolarCurve with everything since.

What in the world is Flamp or Flampy? There are various definitions but I've always used it in a way to mean when something is funny, off, weak, silly, not quite right etc.

In short what the House of Flamp promises to bring you is my thoughts which are not expert nor are they expected to be awesome, credible, or even noteworthy. Ultimately the judging of the content is up to you but at the end of the day you are here reading it and can choose to return or not.