Nokia—Right now it looks like my e71 will be my first and last Nokia device.  While there are a few really good things about the device, its seems that Nokia’s next generation offerings (Symbian^3 and Meego) are simply evolutionary.  With Android looking better every day and WP7 looming, it will take a lot for any of their devices to break into my short list.  Honestly, I think they are done in the US unless they snap up Palm.  This seems pretty obvious to me…a company with great hardware and a so-so OS acquires a company with a great OS and so-so hardware.  Problem solved, right?  I just don’t see Nokia swallowing their pride and going this route.

Apple/HTC Lawsuit—This is such an odd lawsuit. To me, it seems like Apple really got pissed off about Android, but rather than suing Google decided to go after its smaller, weaker friend.  It will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out.  If Apple can successfully defend its multi-touch patent in court, what does that mean for the rest of the industry?  Will we not be able to see multi-touch on WP7, Android, and Palm?  Or, will these company’s be forced to license this tech?  My guess is that it will do little to deter Apple’s competitors.  And, most will just fine ways to circumvent the patent.   But whatever the outcome, I think most people agree that patenting a means to interact with an interface is ridiculous.  Apple should not be able to patent multi-touch.  Could you imagine what would have happened, if companies tried to enforce patents on the keyboard and mouse?  Hopefully, the continued criticism coming out of this lawsuit will finally cause the US patent office to change how it deals with IT patents.

This is a follow-up post to one I wrote  a month ago about selling my home by owner.  The outcome of the prior is now pretty obvious:  I was completely unsuccessful at selling my home by owner.  But given that there are 5 other homes that are still on the market that were up for sale by real estate agents in my neighborhood, I really do not feel too bad about that failure.  The truth is that the real estate market sucks.  And it is even worse for owners of condos and townhomes, because the only real differentiation they have is price.  It was particularly difficult in my neighborhood because one of the homes went up for a short sale and essentially undercut the prices of all the other sellers in the community.  But this is the reality of the market, and honestly, does not seem to be getting better any time soon.

Given this reality, I was left with a few options:  keep the house on the market and continue a price war with my neighbors or try my luck on renting the property.  Given that there were already two other properties on my street that were rentals and that I had enough equity to make it fiscally realistic, I decided to go the rental route.   Keep in mind that I was not flying blind into this decision.  Last year, I took a semester long real estate class as part of my MBA, so I had a pretty good list of prerequisites before making this decision.  I figure that I would share these before I started as it was pretty good advice when it was given to me.  The first prerequisite was that I had at 20% down on the home.  Apparently, this is a magic number for renting property.  At 20%, you are free of any PMI obligations that increase your monthly costs on the home.  Also as a good rule of thumb, you can rent your home for around the same cost of a mortgage on 80% of your home’s value.  The second prerequisite for me was that I had enough money set aside to maintain my mortgage if my renter defaulted on the property.  And, finally the third prerequisite was that I fully understood the laws around renting in my state.  Missouri really makes it easy, because they publish a guide called the Missouri Landlord/Tenant guide.  I gave this a quick read through prior to advertising my property to ensure that I knew what I was getting into.

After making the decision to rent the place out, I was really left with two key problems I needed to work out.  The first was how I would advertise the property.  And, the second problem was once I had found the renters, how would I do background checks to make sure they would be a good fit.  The first problem was actual quite an easy one to solve.  I called up a couple of my friends that were renting properties and asked them how they found their place.  The overwhelming response was that they used Craigslist to find their future home.  This really just reinforced what I had already known—if you want to rent a property in St. Louis, start at Craigslist.  The second problem was a bit more involved.  It is common sense to run a background check on potential tenants to screen them before they rent the property out.  But if you have never done this before, it is a bit overwhelming to get started.  Like with most decisions, I turned to the Internet to try to get some answers.  And believe me, I found a bunch of services willing to help.  What I found pretty amusing was how bad each of these service’s websites are.  As a web developer, I tend to judge a book by its cover, so it was pretty tough to trust financial information to a company that overlooked the design of the site.  In the end, I selected Transunion’s SmartMove service to do background checks.  I liked this service because it was from a reputable provider and they verified the prospective tenant online versus having to put the onus on me to collect the social security number and appropriate sign-offs.  With that said,  I never ended up using this service.  But, more on that later.  After selecting a service, it is extremely important to determine what your criteria is for selecting a qualified candidate.  Doing this ahead of time really makes the final decision easier, and it is actually pretty important if you run into any legal questions about how you select tenants.  My criteria was simple.  The rent could not be more than 35% of their monthly salary (preferably closer to 30%), they had to have clean credit, and had to have a good rental history with their previous landlords (no evictions, etc).

After I had all the prerequisites and process questions out of the way, I set out to find a potential tenant.  I posted the ad in Craigslist and to my surprise I started to get serious inquiries right away.  Within the first week, I had two showings scheduled.  The first showing was a bit nerve wrecking at first.  Going into it, I had to prepare a rental application to hand out.  This turned out to be pretty simple.  I grabbed one of the Internet that matched up well to ones I had filled out in the past.  I then modified it so that it would describe the rental process that I had put into place and so that it collected all the information that I needed to put the SmartMove process in motion.  The showing itself was much different than what I had experienced when selling my home by owner.  Rather than rely on the other real estate agents to show the property, I had to do it myself.  Most of the questions centered around month-to-month costs and square footage questions.  Since I had done a lot of that ground work when I was selling my house, it was pretty easy to field these questions.  The most surprising part of the process was the willingness for potential tenants to give away personal financial information without me really even asking.  I would simply mention the need for a credit check in the process and I would get a life long credit history complete with long stories about how they ran a foul.  I ran this by a friend of mine who also rents properties and he said that this happens all the time.  He told me that you will get a lot of “sob” stories, but just to hold out because there are tenants out there that have good backgrounds.  I thought that this was the best piece of advice I got before renting a property.

One of the first people to contact me about the place was not a potential renter at all.  Her name was Diana from stlrentit.com.  She runs a website that connects landlords and tenants.  She said that she had a few tenants looking in the area and would like to have them come out and take a look at the rental.  I was of course a bit suspicious of the service to start, but her process was very straightforward and the agreement I had to sign put no risk and (most importantly) no costs on my end to show the place.  So, I agreed and showed the property to her clients.  I went through the same process that I had gone through before to show the place.  But this time, they were interested and filled out an application.  Rather than going through SmartMove, I opted to use Diana’s resource for credit checks.  This made the process a little easier, but did require a little bit of trust on my end.  After receiving the credit information, I read through the reports for about an hour.  I had gone through my own a couple times before, so I had a pretty good idea what to look for.  I then made a few phone calls to verify employment, call references, and confirm positive rental history.  This actually ended up taking a couple days because it was tough to get a hold of people and I really only called references that I could verify the phone number from a secondary source.  After a bunch of positive results from my screening, I then accepted the application.

The only stumbling block left was getting the lease signed.  For my lease, I decided to go with EZ Landlord Forms.  I chose this company because early on I used them as a resource to find out more information about renting the property.  They then allowed me to create a sample lease and I found that their wizard was not only very intuitive but it covered all the points that I had read about in the Missouri Landlord/Tenant Guide.  It was nice that it was not only easy-to-use, but also it was thorough and was reviewed by attorneys in the state.  The form ended up costing me $20.  I thought that this was a little expensive, but the quality was apparent.

As you can tell by this post, the process to rent a property and become a landlord is pretty involved.  In the end, I think that I did my due-diligence to find my new tenants.  But, it goes without saying that no process is 100% bullet proof.  In the end, I stuck with my criteria and made what I consider to be a sound decision.  But at the end of the day, I still worry a little about the decision and hope everything turns out for the best.

This weekend I finally got some time to sit down and play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer.  I played about 4 hours (not at once) and made it to a level 16 ranking.  I figure I would spend a couple minutes giving my impressions from the viewpoint of a casual player.

One thing that you will notice early on is that you are playing against players of all different ranks.  This is in stark contrast to games like Halo where you play against players only that have the same rank as you.  At first I thought that this would really suck, but I honestly like it much better.  The game does a pretty good job of balancing the teams before each match.  So if you are brand new, you tend to get paired up with a bunch of really good teammates.  This helps a lot because they tend to hunt out the campers, and you can follow them around to learn about the level.  The downside to playing against really good players is that as a casual gamer, you are always at a disadvantage.  MW2 rewards experience with better guns and other perks that give higher ranked players a huge advantage.  So, it is often like you are “going into a gun fight with a knife”.  As a casual player, you can mitigate this advantage in a couple ways.  The first and probably most effective is that you have to crouch around and use stealth a lot more than other players.  In MW2, you really only need to put a couple rounds on an opponent to get a kill.  And I found that no matter what gun they have, if you get the first shot in and it is solid, you will get the kill 9 out of 10 times.  The second strategy I use a lot is that I take on a support role.  I find a player with a solid gun and some claymores and hold up in a bunker or building with them and essentially cover the back door.  This prevents you from being exposed to care packages and you get a lot of surprise kills when someone tries to come in through the back door.

Another thing that was pretty confusing early was all the gun and perk options you are given to upgrade your player.  Being new to Call of Duty multiplayer, this was a bit overwhelming.  It really took me a couple hours to get a grasp of all the options.  But honestly, it is this depth that really makes the game a lot more fun to play.  In Halo, you are always worried about your rank, because this is the only thing that your work to achieve.  In Call of Duty, the rank is really secondary to your perks and gun options.  So, I think this really makes the game fun for a casual player.  If you mute the other players, the game really feels kind of like a “career mode” to the single player story.  But the difference is that you have some really good AI to compete against.  For this game though, I really would like to see an option to purchase perks and guns with XBox points for casual players.  I know I will get a little flack for saying that.  But, honestly, as someone who can play maybe 5-10 hours a week, it would be nice to use some of the more advanced weapons in the multiplayer.  And, I most likely will never be able to earn them organically as I cannot put in 50 hours a week.

Overall, I really dig the multiplayer on MW2.  As a casual player (read: old guy), it provides a pretty good balance so that I can have a good time playing even if it just a couple hours a week.  With that said, I still think I would like to see a way to get better guns and perks without having to hire a 12 year old kid to play when I am at work.

When I saw the early press coming out this morning about Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7), I was absolutely stunned.  I expected a device that merged the current Windows Mobile platform (6.5) with a lot of concepts from the Zune HD and Xbox 360.   But, WP7 was actually a complete rewrite of the whole platform.  In every sense, it is a brand new mobile OS based on the Zune HD and XBox 360.  What is even more impressive, is that the new platform seems to borrow little from the current mobile market leaders—the Apple iPhone, Blackberry OS, and Android.  In fact, it eschews the current paradigm that a mobile OS is simply a gateway to your apps.  Rather than apps, WP7 focuses on hubs for content.  Each hub (people, pictures, media, games, marketplace, etc.) actively polls social media and pulls in content relevant to that hub.  For example, if I want to to view a contact on the device, I just click on their name and it automagically pulls in their recent Facebook, Twitter, and (hopefully) Flickr information and aggregates it into a single view.  And, based on the early walk-throughs, this works contextually for every hub.

Now that I have had a little time to digest all the news and watch a few videos, I am still pretty amazed that this product came from Microsoft.  Not because the UI is  so good (MS has recently came out with a number of good  UIs), but because the new UI is such a huge risk.  I honestly expected Microsoft to go the Bada route, and just come out with an iPhone clone.  This would have been a safe choice.  And, based on how bad Bada is getting panned, a fairly poor choice.  But, Microsoft decided to go the other direction and come out with a highly unique, very stylized creation of its own.  And, I think that this is going to really help differentiate them in the marketplace.

While there are a number of questions remaining about WP7, I think the initial showing was extremely positive.  I know that I personally am going to put off buying a new device until the fall to see how this platform plays out.

I just got done reading an op-ed by former Microsoft VP David Brass entitled Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.   The article was about why, in his view, Microsoft is no longer an innovator in the technology marketplace.  His end conclusion was that the company did not create an “environment” for innovation.  His arguments were based on his experiences with two technologies (ClearType and Tablets) that he helped pioneer.  And, he makes it clear in the first line of the op-ed, that this lack of innovation is in direct contrast with that of Apple.

Now, I know absolutely nothing about Microsoft’s internal workings.  So, I am not going to argue the premise of the article.  But, what I do find completely disparaging is how loosely Brass throws around the word “innovation”.  Is the iPad really innovative?  To me, it is a giant iPod touch.  I actually stopped watching Job’s keynote half way through because the device was so utterly unimaginative and boring that if you would have asked me to write its key features out 6 months ago, I would have been about 98% accurate.  Now, I am not saying it isn’t a cool device…but, it is far from innovative.  Now contrast this with a truly innovative device—Project Natal.  With Natal, you can actually move your body in front of the TV and the device senses the movement in 3D and maps it to the game in real-time.   This is Avatar-type stuff.  It is not coming out 10 years from now…it is coming out this year.  And, who is it coming from?  Yup, Microsoft.

Now, I am not (as the kids say) “hatin’ on Apple”.  I am just saying that not everything that has an “i” in front of it is innovative.  And, sometimes VP’s are better off doing what they do best—crashing yachts into Ferraris—than, speculating on what innovation is.

I honestly have spent very little time reading about the iPad.  As Dennis Green once eloquently put it “they are who we thought they were”.  Sure, the interface is a little different and it has a lot of new software, but at the end of the day, it is really just a big iPhone.  I think that is one of the reasons that this device has got a mixed reaction early on.  A lot of tech folks expected a little Apple magic to usher in the new category, and it never showed up.

Now that is not to say that the device will not sell.  Trust me, Apple will sell a bunch of these devices.  But, I will not be buying one.  Alex Payne said it best: “if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today”.  As a UI developer, who spends most of his time using a computer to create, a device like this seems strange to me.  But this is the new reality.  The iPad has ushered in the era of passive computing.  An era where the target audience of mass computing devices are people that aim to consume media, not create it.

I have had my home on the market for 90 days now, and I get a lot of questions about what it is like to sell your home by owner.  So, I thought I would take some time to talk about how it has been so far. As some background information, I decided to list my house for 6 months by owner before I hired a real estate agent.  The big justification for doing so is the 3% savings I could potentially see if I am successful.  At $150,000, that rounds out to $4,500—not a small chunk of change.

Marketing. I am going to start out with the most important part of the process—marketing.  My experience is from the St. Louis market, but I am pretty sure it would transfer to where you are at.  To date, I have considered several forms of marketing:  (1) craigslist, (2) word of mouth, (3) newspaper, (4) flat-fee MLS, and (5) signage.  Out of those, I have implemented 1, 2, 4, and 5.  I decided not to put my property up in the newspaper because my local paper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, is priced ridiculous.  Their  packages start at $300 for web and paper coverage.  And, honestly, when I looked around the listing, I saw very few FSBO homes.  I wonder why.  Out of the the four marketing avenues I have worked, to date I have only received responses from items 4 and 5—the flat-fee MLS and signage.  Both of these have been extremely effective.  This week alone I have gotten 1 walk through from signage, 1 walk through from the flat-fee MLS, and 1 call from the flat-fee MLS.  Surprisingly, I have received zero serious inquiries from craigslist.  I say “serious” because I do get emailed spammed left-and-right from local real estate agents every time I post there.  I attribute this to two reasons:  (1) most people buying a house have a buyer’s agent and they use the MLS and (2) craigslist is overwhelmed with listings in the real estate section.

By the way, if you are interested in going the flat-fee route, I recommend soldbyme.com in the St. Louis area.  They have been great.

Showings. Showing by far are the worst part of selling a home.  Before I started doing showings, I thought the 3% commission was outrageous.  Now, I am coming around a bit because when you are selling your home, you personally have to do all the work.  In terms of actually doing the showings, my lessons learned are pretty simple:  (1) keep your house clean, (2) protect yourself, (3) be honest about the situation, and (4) stay out of the other realtor’s way.  One is pretty self explanatory, so I will skip it.

To protect myself, I do three things.  The first is that I reverse phone lookup anyone that calls me.  90% of the time it will trace back to a real estate office, so you know that the call is valid.  The second thing I do is I look up the person on Google.  It is a good validation check, and often you get match a name with a face.  The third thing that I do is when I am showing the house, I get a card and often get the license plate of the realtor.  This is easy if you follow step #4.  This all might be overkill, but I don’t think you can be too careful when dealing with strangers.

The next two lessons-learned are related and can be really grouped into one tenant:  respect the other realtor.  When I get a call, I am always upfront and explain that my house is for sale by owner, I listed it on the MLS using a flat-fee broker, and that I will (and am obligated) to pay their commission.  Believe it or not, most realtors do not run into this situation on a daily basis.  In fact, I have gotten a number of questions about how I listed my house on the MLS.  So, this upfront honesty is important.  The next piece of advice is from HGTV, but I think it holds true:  stay out of the other realtor’s way.  I let the other realtor show the house.  In fact, I go outside for every showing.  It is 10 degrees outside right now, so believe me, it is tough.  But, the worst thing you can do when you show a house is to walk around with the other realtor.  Of course, it goes without saying, to not keep anything small of value laying around your house.  I figure I should be able to notice if someone walks out with my HDTV.

Frustrations. I think the biggest frustration I have had when showing the house, is that lack of notice you often get.  I often get a call in the morning for an afternoon showing.  I am not sure if this is the industry standard, but I think that this would be pretty tough for families even if you went the traditional route of selling your home.  The second big frustration is the lack of background research other realtors do before showing a house.  I have a two story town home, and I have gotten a couple walk throughs where the biggest complaint was that people did not like steps.  I think the realtor probably should have eliminated this earlier in the process.  These incidents are pretty isolated, but when it happens, it is a bit annoying.

Conclusion. Overall, I am really trying to be positive about the process.  Of course, if I sell the property, it will be worth the time and effort.  But, if I come out empty handed, I am not sure I will feel the same way.  In the end, the process provided a good life lesson and really gave me a lot of insight into the process of buying and selling a home.

Quick Take. In my opinion, the Google Phone is the most technologically advanced phone on the market right now.  If I bought a phone today, it would be from Google.  There are phones that compare in specs (HTC HD2) and phones the compare in UX (iPhone), but nothing is as complete as the Google N1.

A new approach to buying a mobile phone? In the press conference yesterday, Google announced that they would sell the N1 directly to consumers and allow for the option to purchase the phone unlocked.  They described this as a new approach to buying a mobile phone.  As someone who has been using unlocked phones for 2+ years now, I can tell you that Google’s approach is far from novel.  What is mind boggling about the announcement is that the unlocked phone still only works with 3G on 1 carrier.  But, honestly, the blame for this lies with the FCC, not with Google.  Because the 3G spectrum is unregulated, it is pretty much impossible to sell a true unlocked phone in the US.  Hopefully this changes with 4G.

What I really like. I think I like the concept of Android as much as I do the device itself.  Android has taken everything that people like about the iPhone—an easy-to-use interface, access to a bunch of apps, and a great browser—and ported it to an open platform.  In addition, they have added best-of-breed access to all their services.

On the shortcomings of the Google N1. I think Walt Mossberg always provides the best reviews.  And, his N1 review follows suit.  As his negatives, he mentions some UX issues, a fewer amount of available Apps, and a lack of cohesive media software like iTunes.  In terms of UX issues, what I like about Android is that no one iterates as fast as they have.  There has been 4 major releases of Android in the last year, compared to 1 each from the other major mobile devices.  In terms of apps, they already have 20,000+ and a ton more coming with market share.  I personally can only think of about 5 apps that I would want, and their app store covers the bases on that.  In terms of media applications, I really expect this to be dominated by third parties on the N1.  I believe that next year is the year services like spotify will take hold.  And, we will start thinking of storing MP3s on your own hard drive as being last decade tech.

Will I buy it? Maybe.  I think I almost talked myself into while writing this article.  But, I still want to wait and see what Windows Mobile 7 looks like before I make a decision.  As I said at the beginning of the article, the Google N1 is at the top of my list.

Given that most people have written off Windows Mobile, I figure I would give Microsoft a quick three step plan to make Windows Mobile relevant into 2010.

1.  Great Hardware and an improved UI. This is pretty obvious.  To compete in the smart phone market you need these two components.  Given that they already have a small screen device with great hardware and one of the best UIs on the market (the Zune HD), you would not think this would be too hard.  But, you never know.

2.  Zune. The Zune ecosystem needs to be completely integrated with the device….both music and movies.  The experience needs to be seamless.  Finally, I think the Zune service needs to be expanded to support both free (ad supported) and premium streaming.  I think 2010 is the year where your personal catalog of music becomes obsolete as music moves to the cloud.  If this was baked-in to the mobile Zune experience, Windows Mobile would have some additional appeal.

3.  Halo (and Xbox). Where Microsoft (and Sony too) still have an advantage over Apple is in IP.  And, the biggest untapped resource is the XBox IP.  I guarantee that if Windows Mobile launches with XBox branded gaming support, it would immediately be relevant again.  And, if you throw the Halo title in there, you would have converts jumping from both the Android and iPhone camp.

So, there you have it…a simple, and completely achievable road map for making Windows Mobile relevant into 2010.  Someone send this to Balmer.

It looks more-and-more like Google is going to offer a Google branded (HTC made) phone in January.  If you don’t keep up on tech, it is going to look pretty much like an iphone. A lot of people are asking what does this mean for the mobile segment, the iPhone, and especially the Android platform.  Here are my thoughts.

First off, I think this is a classic example of market segmentation.  There is no question in my mind that device has its cross hairs firmly fixed on the iPhone.  Google sees a segment, lets call it the high-end smart phone segment, with a single competitor.  Now, I know a lot of people think that this segment has more than one player.  But, lets be honest, there is really only one phone on the market right now that people are willing to consistently shell out $199 for, and that is the iPhone 3GS.  Back to the Google phone.  One thing is apparent in this segment, brand matters.  Google knows this and that is why they are throwing their name behind a new phone in this segment.

So, lets assume what I said above is true:  Google aims to compete directly with the iPhone 3Gs (and the iPhone 4) in the high-end smartphone segment.  How exactly will they compete and, more importantly, how well will they do?  I think at the beginning Google is going to compete on features and on cost-of-ownership.  The Google phone is going to feature a lot of what the Droid already does:  multi-tasking, built-in navigation, apps, etc.  Google knows that on a feature-for-feature basis, they will fair pretty well.  But, lets be honest, the iPhone 4 will probably match most of these on its release.  I think the killer feature for the Google phone will be built-in, fully integrated Google Voice with free wi-fi calling, free SMS, and host of other features that I don’t think any mobile OS has an answer for, not even Apple.  This is such a huge advantage because it will probably lower most phone bills by at least $10-20 per month giving the Google phone a huge advantage in lifetime cost-of-ownership.

How well will the phone do?  I think the wild card here is the iPhone UX.  Most people that have an iPhone are pretty passionate about this aspect of the phone.  And, honestly, I don’t see a whole lot of people switching.  People that have the iPhone already pay a ton of money to own one, so cost-of-ownership probably will not be a big deal to them.  I do think that a new Google phone will get a large percentage of new smart phone owners, and a large percentage of budget conscious smart phone owners.  Honestly, I would not be surprised if it gobbles up 1-3% of smart phone sales in its first year.

What does this mean for HTC, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and other smart phone manufacturers?   I do not necessarily look at this as a death blow to the Android platform.  In fact, I think it could be a boon for the low to medium end segments of the market.  A successful Google phone would bring tons of developers to the platform, and make the free to $150 Android phones pretty appealing to a large number of consumers.  I also think that this is a blessing in disguise for Microsoft Phone OS.  Staying out of the branded phone business could make them seem pretty appealing as long as Windows Mobile 7 is not a flop.

What are your thoughts?