ian andrew bell

Have you read “The Tipping Point“? Many of us have. The growth of sales of the book itself is an example of the idea it attempts to illustrate: ideas can spread like wildfire when they capture a zeitgeist or purport to solve a common problem. It’s a book that contains many great ideas, and provides a pretty interesting layman’s summary of the concept of memetics. Memetics is a concept I spent way too much time studying in University, and which has moved from circles of furry-browed academics and into popular culture since the book’s publication because many people want to “get rich quick”, and almost as many have experienced failure when attempting to put the lessons of Tipping Point into practise. Read More

Apparently I’m one of the “People to Watch” on the Vancouver tech scene for 2008. As if it’s not easy enough to look into my townhouse from the street already, you people have to watch me working as well?

Kidding aside, it’s great to be listed among such folks as the RainCity crew, Danny Robinson, and Mozilla’s David Ascher. Missing from the list are folks like David Gratton, Boris Wertz, and Dick Hardt. Their enterprises are I think poised for big things this year, and success on their part will do much to bolster the tech scene in Vancouver in general.

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Readers of this blog and my old mailing list know that I am no big fan of Network Solutions and its long history of anti-competitive and generally dirty business practises. From YCombinator comes this nugget about Network Solutions, exploiting a loophole extended by ICANN to pre-register domain names you’ve searched for on their site, thus preventing other registrars from handling the transaction later. Network Solutions currently charges $35 for an annual domain name registration, while most of their competitors land squarely between $7 and $15.

The problem exhibits itself thus: A query at the Network Solutions web site via its whois service will cause the domain name to appear to be available via NetSol, but in performing the same search via a third-party registrar the domain name appears to have been registered via Network Solutions to a private registrant. This is evil.

The piece has since been picked up by eWeek and in some depth at DomainNameNews.

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I was pretty overjoyed to report a few months ago on Letterbox: a three-pane email plugin for Apple’s mail.app written by Aaron Harnly, which has made my email life blissful indeed.  With Leopard came some unexpected changes to mail.app that broke most of the plugins out there, so it was back to the drawing board for Aaron.Thing is, he’s been stuck on “any day now“ for releasing his update for two weeks or so, and the comments from others are turning from words of encouragement to sheer hair-pulling frustration. Read More

Telecom has, generally speaking, become a zero-sum game. In fact it probably always was, despite numerous attempts by governments at deregulation. The fact of the matter is that even today, full-duplex voice conversations between two parties is almost entirely controlled by a cabal of international telecom companies, both wireless and wireline, who manipulate and milk their effective monopolies with customer lock-in and draconian pricing. Furthermore third-party access to these networks is hugely restricted thanks to highly limited and uneconomical network-side interfaces, fundamentally incompetent internal provisioning and support, and of course the omnipresent threat of lawsuits, manipulation of regulators, and political pressure.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. Read More

I’m starting to think this subject warrants its own WordPress Category. As I previously disclosed, despite the fact that Apple is at war with its users on the iPhone and other platforms, iBought. I seriously love the thing. It has a great user interface, the applications are easy to use, and when unlocked and jailbroken, I can add my own applications. I now have a phone that runs BSD. Wow. At the Web 2.0 conference last week, I went completely without my MacBook Pro and relied solely on my iPhone to stay in touch, surf, etc.

Since I made my purchase, though, there have been three major developments: Read More

It’s a miracle that people running XP/Vista can ever get anything done.  As friends of mine will know our house is all Mac except for my girlfriend’s HP notebook (which, inexplicably, doesn’t shut down when you close it… but that’s another story).  Since I’m sharing a printer, my HP OfficeJet 6200 series, from an Apple Airport Extreme connected to my home network, one would think this would have been a piece of cake.  But oh-ho!

The networking stuff used to be the hard part, but Apple’s bonjour makes it easy.  But as for installing the correct drivers, the Windows world knows no delimiters of common sense..  Two hours later I had performed the correct sequence of incantations and solved the problem so I thought I’d share the misery with you here in the hopes of saving you an hour or so.

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None of us really knows how our cars work, which means that every trip to the auto mechanic is an act of faith. Even when we’re suspicious of the repairs or dubious diagnosis provided by the corner mechanic we often roll over anyway, throw open our wallets, and genuflect in the presence of their mystical wizardry.

So no surprise then that CBC Marketplace has taken the boilerplate “bust a mechanic” TV camera entrapment scheme and used it to go after the 21st century’s answer to the auto mechanic — Geeks. In this video they busted Geeks On Call Nerds on Site (thanks to the Geeks On Call pseudo-lawyers for clarifying this), Geek Squad, and the nerds in VW Beetles from a number of other smaller organizations making all kinds of wacky diagnoses of the planted problem (albeit a persnickety one) of a damaged RAM DIMM. Read More

“Information wants to be free..” or so said Marshall McLuhan. Steve Jobs should heed this as a warning, rather than just using McLuhan’s image as a marketing shill as Apple did during its “Think Different” campaign.

Apple’s customers, embracing the simplicity of its products, want to move their music and movies around (particularly ones they actually pay for) unfettered by DRM: Apple says no. With its market clout, Apple has the opportunity to take a stand against the music insultry and the movie biz. It has consciously chosen not to.

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Tonight at Vancouver’s Launch Party event, Lypp’s Erik Lagerway will be talking about their new service and API.  Earlier today I talked about MaxRoam and its game-changing technique to defeat mobile roaming and long-distance costs.  Both companies are founded by friends of mine, which represents an interesting conflict of interest for yours truly. 

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