Rand Wacker

Last year I asked Santa for an Apple-built Blackberry/Treo. The iPhone is soon to be and I’m withholding judgement for a while (so they can shake the bugs out and see if there’s a huge developer upswell).

The next thing I want is a super-portable MacBook. The Palm Foleo has been getting a lot of chatter around work, but I know that I need a full laptop when I’m on the road. With flash-based hard drive replacements and LED-backlit or OLED screens it seems we’re close to a major shift in the way laptops are constructed…its now possible to build a laptop with zero moving parts (if they can get the cooling right).

I’m looking for something very solid, quite light, smaller than the 13″ Macbook probably (but not too small), standard built-in features and ports, but likely no DVD drive (external maybe?). Excellent battery life is a must, and I’m not even concerned about raw processing speed if we need to keep things cool. Ideally I could imagine a dock…or better yet a wireless “docking” option.

So a fully-featured Mac sub-notebook, more rugged, better battery life, and ultimately portable. You could definitely demand a premium from business road-warriors, but if you make it rugged enough and cheap enough I could see parents buying these by the boatload for their backpack wearing high school and college students.

Steve, are you listening?

Late-night discovery: Joost

IPTV with real content (from real TV channels), high quality software, and some potentially interesting interactivity tools. I’ve really enjoyed my Slingbox when I’m on the road, this will be a nice compliment.

It looks like everyone can signup now, click here.

I signed up on Twitter a while ago (username: randwacker) in order to stalk a good friend who just moved to NYC. Its fun to watch his head explode in near-real-time. However, Twitter utterly lacks any way to discover other friends I may know who are already on the system (I have a policy not to spam people with invites to new social networking services).

This is totally lame, these guys need to realize they are a social network, and their market cap will be a direct multiple of the size of their user base. If they don’t make it easy to find people, they won’t grow as fast as they could.

Facebook (which I’m also on) does an excellent job of this, making it trivial to find other people in their network you might know. Facebook then does an awesome job of adding cool new features on top of that network such as an excellent photo sharing tool, news feeds of interest to you, and even an elegant implementation of Twitter-like functionality.

Facebook needs to do more to market the fact they are no longer exclusive to .edu accounts, and try to market themselves to a wider audience. Of course, if they would combine with LinkedIn and Yelp! then I’d have my ultimate tool!

Oh yeah, so if you’re on Twitter please leave me your ID so I can stalk you. I’m making one last effort to prove its useful before I boycott it forever…