Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

With heavy guitar music and much fanfare the first Google Android handset has been released by T-Mobile.

The device looks pretty nice (but not iPhone sexy) and has a ton of features. It will go on sale on the 22 October and retail for $179 US.

Initial reviews are mixed but I suspect that this New York Times article hits close to the truth:

“If the HTC’s new G1 cellphone, featuring Google’s Android software, were introduced two years ago, jaws would drop. But Apple’s iPhone already won the wows that go to the first small phone that is truly good at Web browsing.”

and

“my initial take is that the G1 is the PC to the iPhone’s Macintosh…“

Playing with the Android emulator I always suspected that that last quote would be true, still it will be interesting to see how it all goes on the 22nd.

Also released is the final 1.0 SDK and a hint that the beta Android Market will go live on the 22nd when the G1 goes on sale. Guess I’ll have to get cracking with finishing off Bubbles!

Update: Gizmoda has a very good hands on review of the G1 with lots of pictures and video. Check it out.

Ooooooo, Just found a link to the new Google Chrome browser on my Google home page.

Its pretty cool, very lightweight and very very fast. It even has as “stats for nerds” link on it’s task manager which gives heaps of detail on memory and CPU usage. The internals of the browser are pretty interesting as are the reasons for building a new browser.

Had a couple of issues with some sites and a few pages that seemed to be showing old content! Also gmail doesn’t work it seems to hangup when redirecting to the login page and it doesn’t remember my user name and password for my corporate proxy. Still not bad for a beta.

Check out http://www.google.com/chrome

Wow I certainly scored a lot of great birthday goodies this year. I’m very impressed with my reticulating saw, sonic tape measure and carpenter’s pencils (real man’s pencils, you need to sharpen them with a knife).

My sisters-in-law made me this fantastic pac-man cake:

I was also given a cool mini Bluetooth based keyboard for my media center. Its a Logitech diNovo Mini, it has a full keyboard a bunch of special function keys and a track pad. Very cool and very very tiny.

Currently the keyboard works fine with Ubuntu but the track pad doesn’t. Apparently Ubuntu doesn’t like the USB Bluetooth dongle that ships with the diNovo but will work with others. I have one at work that I will try out and see how it goes.

My folks bought me a one hour session in a real flight simulator for 737-800 which is awesome

All these presents and a long weekend, what more could I want.

Very very cool.

We won the e-Commerce category (the ISIS booking engine), the experimental category (for How Far Can I Go) and “The Best of The Best !” award for the How Far Can I Go application.

Checkout the TUANZ site for more info and the other winners.

This is pretty cool. For the last 3 years I’ve been working as the architect with the Innovations and Ventures department at Air New Zealand.

Yesterday we found out that three of our projects are finalists in the TUANZ Business Internet Awards for 2007 !

The projects are:

Grabaseat (Advertising & Marketing category)

For those of you who haven’t seen grabaseat (GAS) it is a site that has daily discounted fares sometimes as low as a dollar.

This site has been very successful, in May this year we hit 1.9 million visitors a month and the latest “grabaseat on tour” promotion run in October saw a further 30% increase in the number of visitors !

The Air New Zealand ISIS online booking engine (e-Commerce category)

This is the one I am most proud of. Its the cornerstone application developed by Innovations and Ventures.

Its the most complicated system I have every worked on, not such much the user interface (which is very cool with AJAX and the like) but the quoting and pricing engine behind it.

Coming up with a price for a plane ticket is horrendously complicated and mathematically, an unsolvable problem. ISIS not only does it but it does it incredibly fast and smoothly which is what you want in a $1billion sales channel :)

How far can I go? (Experimentation category)

One of first ideas we came up with when we started working on the ISIS engine was to turn the usual conversion with a booking engine on its head: rather then picking flights and get a price, wouldn’t it be better to pick a price and get told what was available ?

That is what How far can I go? does. Even better it has very very cool user interface where you move a price slider up and it shows you everywhere you can go for that price on a cool map zooming map and the price points for the next 6 months. Love it.

I’ll keep you posted on how we do. Hopefully we win em all !

A cool time lapsed video of an Air New Zealand plane getting a new paint job to promote their holiday stores rebranding.

And they have a neat gallery of holidays to :)

Here is a quick vid I put together covering some of the neat things I saw at SIGGRAPH. Did it for a couple of presentations at work. Figured you all might like to see it…

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1969648082235084593

Its very cool. Check out http://travelgremlins.blogspot.com/

Just added the finishing touches to my Facebook application. Its called ticktock and basically displays a clock on your Facebook page.

But its no ordinary clock; it shows the local time AND Internet time. The Internet time is measured in units called tocks which are the same regardless of where in the world you are. So for instance 234tocks in Auckland is the same time as 234tocks in London.

Great if you need to set up an IM chat or meeting with someone on the other side of the world.

If you have a Facebook account then check out the ticktock application

Just uploaded my first video clip on YouTube !

Its a bunch of 360 degree pans of European cities that we took on our recent trip. Because of the fast pace of change the compression really messes up the video :(

The actual footage looks very much better….