Looks like Microsoft finally got around to launching their market place for WinMo:  http://marketplace.windowsphone.com/Default.aspx.

Better late than never I guess.  I really hope they have a lot of success with it.

Android is just too friggin cool to pass up.  I’ve really not found anything wrong with it and in fact the more I play the better it gets.

Right now this is the coolest thing ever: TrackMaster by Trackaroo

The application is a simple GPS data logger that uses the phone’s builtin GPS to keep track of your vehicle’s position and speed.  Unfortunately it is only 1hz sampling (1 data point every second) so the data has limitations.  However, for basic trackday timing it will get you close enough.

Oh, and it costs a whopping $5!  A MaxQData Traqr will set you back $289. 

Anyway, TrackMaster is a great example of the potential for mobile devices.  Connected to the internet all the time, lots of storage, good screen resolution, GPS and a good application platform to build on.  What’s not to like?  And they have a marketplace to advertise and get your application distributed!  Win!

Lucky me I know Java.  I’m just not as fluent in it as C#.  So time to do some learning.  First thing: get a development environment.  Getting Setup for Android Development will get you started.  He even provides links to the download stuff.

In my case I created a Virtual PC image with Windows Server 2008R2 to host my environment.  One caveat if you go this route: turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security. 

After you finish the above instructions you should be ready to go.  However, at this point I did not have any target platforms to use.  I had to go in to “Android SDK and AVD Manager” under the Windows menu, select “Available Packages” and pull down everything.  You probably don’t have to get everything but it’s just diskspace.

So now that you have a development environment it is time to do the “Hello World” routine.

That time of year again.  Gyms fill up full of people, grocery stores sell tons of organic produce, Wal-Mart and Target excercise equipment shelves empty out and B&N and Amazon sell out of “7 Habits” and “GTD” books.  Yup – time for New Years resolutions.  Yeeehaw!

Who am I to fight the tide:

• Be able to do a flying lap around ECR in 119.99 seconds (just under 2 minutes)
• Pay off the last of our credit card debt
• Get myself in to excellent shape (weigh 180lbs, run 3 miles in 28 minutes, 80 situps in 2 minutes, 20 pullups, Bench 200lbs squat 400lbs)
  • Buy my wife a ‘new’ car (she wants *gags* a minivan)
  • Build and launch 3 web-sites and get 1 of them to exceed 1K visitors a day
  Simple enough goals and all achievable.  Actually, the only one out of my control is the web-site.  Doing a sub 2minute lap around ECR will be hard (that would be mid-pack in CMRA Supersport class). 
  That is what I’m going to achieve next year.

My gear head friends have be talking about the iPhone on our forum lately and this link came up: “A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T”.  I thought it was really funny, but at the same time toward the end it got all too real.

Seems to be time for the prognosticators to post up there stuff about next year and given my current project I’m paying a little attention.   During the startup weekend I was surprised there were not more ideas around using location aware internet connected devices with cameras to build stuff.

It seems that John Jantsch is of the same mind:  5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010.

As a consultant I spend all my time building big IT projects with big budgets.  Looking at this stuff really gets me excited and depressed.  Excited because all of these web API are being made available to do cool things and depressed that unless I go off on my own I’ll never get to touch them.

Cool thing for me is that I’ve gotten a team together to build some stuff.  We just have to decide what projects we’ll pursue. 

I’ve wanted to learn how to write desktop gadgets for a while and decided to write my own Flickr slideshow gadget.  Nothing fancy, but it was fun to write.

You can download the results here: GPFlickr gadget (34.9 KB)

After you install it just set the account to yours and change the timeout to what you want.  Right now it only shows the first 100 images.  I’m still learning my way around Flickr’s API.  Figuring out how to get all of my images was a pain.  It took a while before I figured out to just use the search API.

I have submitted the gadget to the live gallery, but as of now it has not shown up.  I need to go back and read the directions and make sure I did all the right stuff.

I’ll probably do another version in a while that will get all of the images associated with a user and put them all in a slide show.  It might also be cool if instead of just showing them in the order returned I could randomly skip around or show them based on when they were uploaded.

Just got invited to Google Wave.  Whatever that is.

I generally hate having my picture taken, but this is an exception to that:

My friend’s wife came out to ECR a few weekend ago and took pictures.  She got on the inside of turn 10 and took this and a bunch of others.

I’m going to see if we can use this for my drivers license and passport.

Few things I need to spend some time learning:

1. Microformats
2. JQuery
3. PHP – ewww
4. Eclipse for Andriod
5. Bitly
6. OpenID

The big things on the list are JQuery, OpenID and Microformats in my opinion.

PHP gets used for cheap trash, ASP.NET is more flexible, but there seems to be a lot of stuff that could be quickly customized to achieve simple goals.  Only problem is that I hate wasting effort on something I’m going to rewrite later.

After startup weekend and looking at shopsavvy, I started thinking about image recognition.  shopsavvy uses a cell phone’s camera to read barcodes.  cool.  There is a lot that could be done with that.  But how about something more useful?

I’d like to take a netbook (like the Asus EEE) and a web-cam (or maybe more than 1) and see what could be done.  For instance: put it in a car.  Have 2 cameras, one facing forward and one facing backward.  What could be done?  Can we grab license plates, recognize the numbers and then get information?  There are already products for this that the police use.  But for private citizens it might not be bad.  For instance a pull from the DMV might tell you the driver has a lot of accidents and DWIs.  Perhaps you should give them some space.

Or privacy: how many cameras are pointed at you right now?  Wear the rig with the cameras facing forward and backward.  As you walk it tells you where the cameras are.  Probably great for bank robbers.  But criminals aren’t the only people that value their privacy.

You also have the simple application of knowing who you are talking to.  If you can recognize a person’s face and know whether or not you’ve encountered this person before would be nice.  Perhaps it’s PRM instead of CRM.  But no more stammering around as you search your memory.

Right now I’m not concerned about the display device.  Just being able to have a single application be able to recognize stuff in real time should be challenging enough.  I won’t even touch on speech and sound recognition.