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I got this email this morning from Advanced Circuits (I fiddle with electronics stuff in my “spare time”, and one of these days I’ll do a custom PCB):

For our Printed Circuit Board customers using Chinese vendors, please be aware of the following air quality policy announcement from Chinese authorities:

In preparation for the Olympics, China has announced a factory shutdown for 9 weeks to clear smog and improve air quality in a 200 kilometer radius of Beijing. The shutdown begins July 17th and will extend until September 20th. Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shandong provinces are affected by the shutdown.

If air quality does not improve before the start of the Olympics, there may be an expansion of the shutdown. There are concerns there could also be a bottleneck at two main ports.

All this to say that if you have a PCB vendor in the affected area, we are available to take care of your printed circuit board requirements. In addition to our large fabrication facility here in Aurora, we also have offshore partners in other non-affected countries that are available to handle the larger volumes.

We are currently offering “Half Time” Specials (142 and 244), and we will turn your board orders in half the time at no extra cost. If you have expedited needs, we specialize in quick turns and can even supply boards over the weekend, if required.

It was pretty amusing to see the third and fourth-order global implications of the Olympics in China.

There’s a lot of chatter on the iPhone SDK mailing list about Apple’s approval process for the app store.  And Bijan Sabet writes:

I’ve been hearing more and more about apps that are still waiting for approval mode from apple. Some of those developers are friends of mine. These apps are somewhat competitive with iTunes I guess. Maybe that is the reason for the hold up. Or maybe it’s because apple is simply swamped.

(From Say it Ain’t So)

The mobile/wireless community has referred to on-device content and apps as a “walled garden“, because of the constraints and restrictions imposed by the old-line carriers.  The iPhone raised everyone’s hopes that the walls were coming down.

However, the process and criteria for getting App store approval from Apple is still unclear. Will Apple approve apps that are competitive with it’s own apps and businesses? Will they approve free apps that compete with paid apps (where Apple gets a rev share)?

Maybe the wall is still around the garden, but it’s now a knee wall.

I can only hope that the iPhone app store is wildly successful, and serves as a wakeup call to the old-school wireless providers.  I’m tired of being stuck with the hardware, firmware, applications, and features that Verizon dictates.

Have you ever looked at developing for BREW and getting “on deck” with Verizon?  What a disaster.

If you equate money and brains, Mark Cuban should be a pretty smart guy.  But then he writes this:

Rather than Hulu sending its video directly across the net to your PC, and let the end user figure out how to watch and distribute from there, it should send it to a box hosted by your cable/telco and possibly even satellite provider, which then transcodes the video and places it on the existing TV distribution system and sends it across a channel branded with your name and the name of the file to your TV.

From:  The Way to Save Internet Video

(Please ignore the suggestion that Internet video needs “saving”).

Video is just another data stream, and there’s absolutely no reason why this data stream needs or deserves a specialized distribution infrastructure.  Historically, it’s had a specialized infrastructure because analog video distribution pre-dated the Internet.  That arrangement will continue for a  while, because of entrenched vested interests in doing things the “old way”.

When the core infrastructure and last-mile bandwidth became sufficiently fast, the Internet happily absorbed the task of audio (MP3) distribution.  Accordingly, CD sales declined and on-line sales of audio content rose (and iTunes is now the #1 music retailer).

As bandwidths continue to increase, the exact same thing is happening right now with standard definition (SD)  video, and will happen soon with high definition video.

What’s the killer app for the iPhone?  Most hardware platforms have had one:  the app so great you go buy the hardware just to get it.   But it occurred to me in a recent conversation:  there might not be a killer app for the iPhone (and it might not need one).

With the App Store, Apple’s done the expected exceptional job of app distribution, including enabling small dollar payments.  Can you name another mainstream system where you can seamlessly buy, install, and run $1 apps?  It’s no surprise the first batch of apps are “narrow apps”, that do one specific thing, (in most cases) do that thing well, and don’t cost much.

When combined with Springboard’s ability to customize the launch screen icon layout, it’s entirely possible that the “killer app” for each user is not a single distinct application, but a personalized selection of a dozen or so narrow apps chosen by that user.

In other words, the killer app for each user is a sort of “app mix tape”.

I wish operating systems had native document scanning support.

I bought a scanner years ago in an attempt to manage paper load:  scan to PDF, electronically file, and shred the original.   It’s a great feeling to find an important document electronically, instead of sorting through reams of paper (and then having to scan it).

I just want simple “scan to PDF” — why are the tools so bad?  The software supplied with my scanner stopped working one day (on Windows — it just went to permanent hourglass).  I gave up trying to fix it, and turned to the world of $20 scan-to-PDF applications, most of which are pretty crappy.

Am I missing some easy solution?

I remember the days when sound cards were add-ons:  driver hell, version conflicts, limited app support, etc.  Apple and Microsoft:  please provide bundled, well-designed, and well-integrated document scanning!

Compare Joost and Hulu.   Which one is more compelling?

Joost came out first, generated a bunch of buzz, and has a novel/interesting user interface. It’s also technically interesting, using peer-to-peer for distribution.

In contrast, Hulu came later and has a decent, sort-of-generic UI, but works entirely through the Web (no client, no peer-to-peer).

Why is Hulu so compelling?  It’s content:  they have stuff people actually want to watch.

Well this is interesting:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts says it will become the first health insurer to participate in Google Health, a medical records initiative by the online search engine.(from this article).   

(I’m an HMO Blue of MA subscriber.) 

I’ve wondered for a while why, with all of the technology available, someone hasn’t finally figured out how to make health care and health insurance more efficient.  (And I’m sorry to say that I’ve developed a small set of forms my family uses to streamline replies to incoming HMO paperwork).

I’ve got mixed feelings about Google handling medical records, but if they can help stop my HMO premiums from going up 10-25%/year, I’m interested in learning more. 

Well, I’ve now got three decent options for video on demand:  Hulu, iTunes movie rentals, and the Netflix/Roku set-top box (which just arrived a few days ago).  

Hulu is free, ad-supported, with mostly TV content.  Netflix’s “watch instantly” has old-run DVD content (movies and TV shows) with no ads, free for existing subscribers.  And iTunes has newer movies and content for a pay-per-view (err, “rental”) model.

I think we now officially have a competitive market for on-demand TV and movie content.

I’m starting to choose (or avoid) hotels based on the broadband speed.

Between Web apps (like Gmail) and streaming-only content (like Hulu), hotels with crappy bandwidth are downright painful.