Always Innovating have an interesting netbook that can be detached from it’s keyboard [1]. It provides features which are a close match for the tablet PC with optional keyboard that I advocated in my post about the Lenovo U1 [2]. Such devices are deemed to be in a new category of computer called the Smartbook – which is regarded as being like a cross between a Netbook and a smart-phone [3].

The AI system is always idling, so there is no boot up required – like a mobile phone it will respond immediately to input. It has no fans which will be a good improvement over the EeePC – my EeePC 701 is annoyingly loud at times. It is designed to replace Netbooks not desktops, the screen resolution of 1024*600 is reasonable by Netbook standards but is really poor by desktop standards, it also lacks a VGA port.

The company has a stated policy of being friendly to free software, so hopefully a community of developers will form around it. Of course this partly depends on how they develop their new systems. If they make new systems vastly incompatible with older systems then it will fracture the community and make things difficult for everyone. There have been problems in this regard in the past with ARM as the instruction set has changed.

One interesting thing about the Always Innovating “Touch Book” is that you can order the keyboard and extra battery part separately from the main computer/display unit. This means that if you break one part you can replace it without replacing the entire system (handy if you break the keyboard (the cheaper part). It’s interesting to note that their web site offers to sell me as many as 558 complete systems, as many as 896 tablets, or as many as 992 keyboards. So according to the web site anyone who wanted to buy more than 558 systems would have to order the tablets separately from the keyboards. This wouldn’t be a bad thing as the complete unit costs $399, the tablet costs $299, and the keyboard costs $99. So ordering the keyboard and tablet separately would save $1 per unit! Of course anyone who really wanted to buy 600 computers wouldn’t use a web site, they would call the sales people and get a discount that is significantly greater than $1 per unit. But these limits for the web sales seem strange enough to be worthy of comment.

It’s an interesting system, it would be handy for reading documents when on the move and for light sysadmin work (basic login to server and restart crashed daemon stuff). If I was after a new system I would probably buy one.

• [1] http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/10/lenovo-u1-hybrid-proprietary-os-suck/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartbook

BidRivals.com is an interesting new auction site, their business model is that you buy “bids” for $0.80 each. If you want to bid on an item it costs you $0.80, then if you win the auction you pay for it. Every bid increases the price by 2 cents. So if you see an auction with a current price of $2.00 that apparently means 100 bids have been placed – IE $80 have been spent.

Currently a Canon EOS 50D Digital SLR camera + a lens is on auction, it has a “buy it now” price of $2,499 (the same price that Harvey Norman advertises) and the bidding is at $163 and climbing – so the auction site has apparently made almost $6,500 in revenue and the product has not been sold yet! The auction also has no fixed end time, it seems that about 10 or 15 seconds are added to the clock every time someone bids, and the autobidder will kick in when 4 seconds remain. So there will probably be an autobid every 6-11 seconds – somewhere between 300 and 600 bids per hour at a cost of $0.80 each – every item that is running with autobids will generate something between $240 and $480 in revenue without being sold!

Now if you don’t win the auction (or give up trying to win) then you can buy it for the difference between the cost of your bids and the product price. In the case of the camera in question if you had made 500 bids (which would be quite easy with the autobid feature) then that would be $400 worth of bids, and given a choice between losing that $400 and using it as a down-payment on the regular retail price I think that most people would choose to buy the product. Of course if you buy it from Harvey Norman you save the delivery fee and probably get more options if you want to return it – I’ve never had to return something to Harvey Norman but I’m assuming that it would be a lot easier than returning an item to an online store!

I don’t consider this to be a real auction site. I believe that a real auction has genuine bids of a value that is determined by the bidder, the auctioneer (or auction software) may decline bids that are too low in value or which have too small an increment. Bidding in an auction generally costs the bidder nothing – the only exception I’ve personally seen is auctions which have a printed catalogue in which case you pay for the catelogue, a fixed fee which is small when compared to the auction prices. It seems to me that a significant portion of the revenue (possibly the majority of the revenue) of BidRivals is from the bidding fees, and the other significant portion of the revenue would be comprised of profits made from auction customers who opt to buy the item at it’s list price to avoid wasting the money that they have put in to bids. The actual prices of the items are small by comparison.

Note that I am not accusing BidRivals of doing anything illegal (such as running a gambling system), I am merely stating that I don’t believe that they offer a good deal for customers. While they aren’t strictly a gambling site, it seems that one could get lucky and make a single bid (costing $0.80) at the right time and get a $2,499 camera for $170 (or whatever it ends up selling for) while others may spend hundreds of dollars in bids and get nothing other than a potential down-payment on the full $2,499 price. That’s a lot more luck than I want in any of my purchases!

I recommend not doing business with them or anyone like them.

I bought the Bose QC15 noise canceling headphones for my trip back from the US. See my previous posts about Noise Canceling Headphones [1] and Testing Noise Canceling Headphones [2] for the details of my search.

I first tried my new headphones in my hotel room and they worked really well at blocking the noise from the nearby road (El Camino Real in Menlo Park) as well as the noise from the heater in my room. At the airport they entirely blocked the sound of the airport air conditioning system (which was surprisingly loud – I didn’t realise how loud until I tried the headphones).

On the flight the headphones worked really well. I used them for hours when they weren’t plugged in to any source, just stopping the noise was a huge benefit. I was also able to listen to music (both MP3s on my laptop and the plane sound system) at a relatively low volume with an apparent high quality. The Bose store I visited in Stanford mall has a sound system set up to emulate the noise you experience inside a jet to demonstrate what the headset can do. It really lives up to this demonstration! I recommend them to anyone who wants over-ear noise canceling headphones and can afford $US300 + tax.

But one thing to note is that not everyone likes such things – my wife didn’t like the sound that they generate (the least bad way to describe it is as a soft hiss). This is definitely not something you would want to buy based on reviews alone, it must be tested in-store.

The main technical suggestion I can make for improvement to the QC-15 is for it to have slightly softer and thicker padding where it contacts the sides of the wearer’s head. I find that my glasses prevent it from making as good contact as I would like, and that when wearing it while eating the contact is significantly broken with every jaw movement which is really annoying. A minor suggestion is that every pair of headphones should have the left and right ear pieces clearly marked, I really shouldn’t have to read an instruction manual to discover which way to wear it.

One thing that surprised me was the inclusion of business cards for the headset! Here is a picture:

The picture links to a larger picture that also shows the French version of the same text on the other side.

I was astonished by this, encouraging happy customers to help sell your products is a reasonable and effective form of product promotion (really this is what I’m doing for Bose with this blog post). But giving customers business cards is going too far – anyone who wants me to hand out their business cards can offer to pay me to do so (and I probably won’t accept). But if such things are considered to be a good idea then here are a few suggestions for other things that they could do:

1. Create a Bose dating site where one can meet people who like music and traveling (this does sound appealing). In about 10 years the children of people who meet that way would start buying audio gear…
2. Start a Bose fan club.
3. Create a template that be used by a tattoo parlor to make a Bose tattoo.
4. Sell Bose fan t-shirts to people who aren’t dedicated enough to get a tattoo.
5. Register Bose as a religion, that gets tax free status among other benefits.

It’s a pity that Bose doesn’t make any water-proof noise canceling headphones. It would be something for their marketing people to wear while jumping over a shark on water skis [3].

But seriously the best thing that Bose could do to have their products promoted would be to start by printing the web site for each product on the item, my headset has two patent numbers listed which seem unlikely to provide any benefit for anyone, in that space they could have printed the global.bose.com/qc URL that is on the business card. Of course providing the URL really doesn’t do any good when the URL actually is useless. It starts by giving me a page asking which country I am in – the correct thing to do is to use geoip to determine the country and then give the user the option of selecting another country if that one is not ideal. Then after I select a country it doesn’t take me to a specific page for the product! I could have typed in www.bose.com and got the same result (in terms of US shopping at least) while typing six fewer characters!

Next like most corporate web sites the Bose site doesn’t appear to be configured for longevity of URLs – URLs which are clearly designed for the computer rather than humans are expected to change without warning. This discourages linking to any page that one might discover through web searches or navigating the site, and causes them to lose a lot of potential links.

Having specific URLs for all the products (including the obsolete ones) that are designed firstly for humans to read and write would be a good idea. It would be really useful to be able to compare the features of new products with the ones that are going cheap on eBay. For someone who is considering buying a new product now the purchase decision would be easier if they knew that the company would provide resources to help them get a better price on eBay in a few years if they want to upgrade to a newer model. One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the reputation of a company (which makes a dramatic impact on the prices customers are prepared to pay) depends largely on a long history of making quality products. Telling customers about those historic products is one of the most sensible things that most corporations fail to do on the Internet.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/03/noise-canceling-headphones/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/12/04/testing-noise-canceling-headphones/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark