Zach Beauvais

I just watched the most unhelpful but beautifully-shot promotional video for the new Sony Ericsson XPERIA. I assume it’s a mobile phone from the five-second glimpse you get of it. The rest of the video is a bit of a mystery. It’s very enjoyable to watch, so I’d recommend it. It’s got lots of paper aeroplanes flying around NYC, with a Mystery Tour song going round.

In seriousness, I read a review on Last 100 about it, but they were baffled by the marketing speak too…

The EXPERIA X1, available in the second half of 2008, is a “premium experience of energized communication”, whatever that means.

It looks fun, and I can’t wait to see what it will do; but I can’t say I don’t feel a bit sad that it’s Windows Mobile. The limited experience I’ve had with WinMobiles has been poor, really. I don’t really want my mobile phone to pause and hang like my PC does… However, I love Sony’s hardware, and this looks rather fun…

After covering the Typeroom Light beta earlier, I sent a few questions over to the makers, and they’ve sent back some interesting answers. I should have mentioned that the Typeroom I tried out was a lite version (think 3.2 lager, but without the bubbles). The pro version seems like it will have more options, many of which seemed right in line with my questions…

1. How does Typeroom Lite work with CSS and site templates?

TypeRoom Lite does not actually work with templates. TypeRoom Professional however, does.

One of our most important design considerations when creating TypeRoom Lite was that it had to be instant. We needed a way to introduce people to this concept of "remote CMS", and instead of going through the explanations, we wanted to just show the view (using their own site as the subject of demonstration).

So while TypeRoom Lite is being released as a product in and of itself (with a free and paid version of TypeRoom Lite), it also has another and possibly even more important, role as a means to preview of the technology on which we are basing our complete CMS.

2. With the premium version, will the system be able to cope with RSS, Permalinks and other essential characteristics of Blogs and syndicated content?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is that we are planning on releasing a minimal version of the professional version to start with so we can iterate with the help of the community.

Typeroom is a content management system which takes a different approach to traditional Content Management. Instead of using databases and managing content directly, Typeroom works more like Adobe Contribute by allowing traditional html pages to be edited in real time. With the service due for public testing shortly, I have had a Beta test of the setup and have a few observations.

The editor is web-based, and a user simply enters a url into Typeroom’s site and navigates to content they wish to edit and selects ‘edit this page’. Typeroom then displays a copy of the page and opens a WYSIWYG editing environment. This is a multi-paned approach, with the editing at the bottom and a preview panel above that updates in real time. Text and images can be manipulated from the editing pane, and there are various formatting options. The look is not dissimilar to TinyMCE or other familiar WYSIWYG platforms. Impressively, they have a drag-and-drop interface for adding images, and an auto-align by simply dragging images around the editing area. This feature, if it works consistently, could be of major advantage to non-technical users, because it eliminates the need to assign either a style or an attribute to an image to make it flow consistently. 

Publishing makes use of either FTP or a Typeroom account, which presumably stores FTP information. An interesting feature, though, is the ability to ‘publish’ by sending a revised version by email to a webmaster.

The folks at Read/Write Web have published an article I wrote  for them about UK-based innovations company Talis.

Feel free to have a look over at the post, and feel free to leave comments either on Read/Write Web, or here on zachbeauvais.com.

I know this is behind the game, and that the bleeding edge of blog reviews has moved well beyond online streaming service Hulu (even though it’s not yet out to the public). But I received my beta invite last week and have had all this time to play around with it.

My initial thoughts: none.

No, not one initial thought. Hulu doesn’t work in the UK. They don’t tell you: "Hey, if you live in the UK, you will be able to access and begin your Hulu experience, but when you choose a show to stream, you’ll be disappointed. Have a nice day." You have to jump through all the Beta hoops to get there first.

Now, I know I should have known better, being a generally web-savvy chap. But after a few pre-reviews of the Hulu service, I decided not to read any more blogs about it until after I’d tried it out myself. I knew not to expect too much, after reading the last review over at Between the Lines , but I wanted my own experience.

Since then, I’ve found dozens of blogs about how bad it is that Hulu doesn’t work in Europe. Aside from whingeing about the lack of support, I can’t really think of anything more to write about Hulu (apart from its ridiculous, trying-too-hard-for-the-Web-2.0-market name).

But, doesn’t this kind of go against point of the web? The idea that we can make connections, share content, stream and connect?

Describing a company or concept as "Web 2.0" is so, last half-decade. Nevermind that most people still haven’t heard the phrase. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and poll your office or family: unless you’re not allowed out of the IT dungeon or your family all work as tech-bloggers, my guess is that they haven’t heard or don’t understand the term.

This isn’t really surprising. If you hear about a "new internet phenomenon" on mainstream news, the chances are it’s either on it’s way out or is so firmly entrenched as to be unremarkable. For a perfect example of this, look up ‘Facebook’ in a national publication and note the language used to describe it’s shiny-new cover–regardless of the fact that most people reading this blog will have been on Facebook (or gone off Facebook) at least a year ago!

It even now seems that there may be a financial impact on describing your new startup as "web 2.0". According to Mashable!, several VC’s are stating quite clearly that they won’t back Web 2.0. I have also noticed talk of bubbles breaking and ‘meteoric rises’ with the implication that it won’t last very much longer. So many potential break-throughs won’t see their funding if they’re too 2.0.

This phenomenon is firmly entrenched in ‘techy’ social networks like Digg. When I dugg a news story about the semantic web, I noticed the overwhelming majority of comments were along the lines of "semantic web is so cliche", or "Watch out, here comes Semantic Web 2.0, Run!".