I had to re-partition a hard disk recently.

If you don’t know what that is, you’ll appreciate the whole point of this article.

The deal about “partitioning” a hard disk is to define how it is to be used.

In my case, I had a computer with Windows 7 on it. I wanted to install Linux (another operating system) on that same computer. So I wanted to create some space on the hard disk for Linux. The task of creating this space is the task of “re-partitioning’ the hard disk.

By now you will probably appreciate the fact that re-partitioning a hard disk is not something you’ll do everyday.

This is something that the folks at Paragon Software Group seem to understand well. They sell a software tool, the Paragon Partition Manager, to help you re-partition your hard disk. Price: $39.95.

They also sell a version that has a single-use license for a mere $9.95.

Think about it. How often would anyone need to repartition a hard disk? Mostly never. But when you do, you’ll probably just do it once. Like me.

So a low-cost single-use license for this kind of product makes absolute sense. It caters to someone who knows that he needs to partition his hard disk just once and doesn’t want to pay too much for a full-blown partitioning tool.

You might argue that Paragon doesn’t have to create such a product: I would have had to pay $39.95 for the full product and still just use it once. They would have made four times the revenue.

But then, at $39.95 would I still choose Paragon’s Partition Manager? Probably not.

There are a several competing products out there with varying capabilities and cost. Windows 7 itself includes a (free) partitioning tool, which unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are Paragon) doesn’t work well in all cases.

By creating this low-cost, single-use version of its partitioning tool, Paragon has a very well positioned product that neatly balances price with capabilities.

Or the need thereof…

Seriously, when was the last time you used a GPS?

By GPS, I am referring to a Garmin, TomTom, Magellan etc device that you either “stick” to your car’s windshield or pop on the dashboard.

I have not used my ancient Garmin in a long time. Not since I got my first Android phone.

Today, when I need to go anywhere new, I just pull out my T-Mobile G2 Android phone, launch the Maps app, search for the address, tap on the banner of the destination address on the map, tap on the “navigate” icon, choose “Driving Navigation”, and I’m on the way! If the address was sent in an email, I can just hold my finger over the text containing said address. Android automagically figures out that it is an address, and launches the Maps app.

Hello smart phone, good bye dedicated GPS device!

Google Maps is still not perfect for navigation in the sense that the map and direction data is not stored on the device. You still need some connectivity for the device to get the maps and directions. I found this out the hard way when I went to some place where there was no network connection. While the G2 was able to get all the navigation data to go to that place when I left home, it could not get the data to help me navigate home: there was zero cellphone or network access.

Here is where GPS manufacturers can avoid being made obsolete by smartphones: be able to provide products that allow offline navigation or complement the functionality of the built-in navigation apps.

Garmin tried shipping a GPS+smartphone device with Asus, the nuvifone (sold in some places as the Garminfone). This device combined a full-fledge Garmin GPS device with an Android phone. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a commercial success and Garmin and Asus terminated their partnership.

Garmin hasn’t given up (this is an existential issue) and is now selling the Garmin StreetPilot app for Apple iDevices. It is available on the iTunes app store at $40. Garmin currently doesn’t have a similar offering for Android.

Will Garmin’s approach of “cooperating with the competition” help prevent its GPS markets from being eaten by smartphones? That remains to be seen. There are a number of negative comments on the app.

Meanwhile, in a case of “your competitor is my competitor” cooperation, Nike and TomTom have come together to launch the Nike+ SportWatch. This combines Nike’s Nike+ shoe sensor watch technologies with TomTom’s expertise in GPS devices. This is clearly an attempt to roll back Garmin’s lead in GPS-equiped sport watches.

What’s wrong with the following picture?

This screenshot of CNN.com was taken in the early afternoon PST on Friday, January 14th, 2011.

When this screenshot was taken, almost all my favorite news websites (LA Times, Washington Post, New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, BBC News), feature news from Tunisia: the “president for life”, Ben Ali, had quit as a result of mass protests. The only other news site that I frequent that did not mention news from Tunisia was the Detroit News.

I can understand why the Detroit News does not talk about Tunisia: it is a regional newspaper. I go to that website to read automotive news.

CNN.com, on the other hand, had (deliberate use of past tense) a reputation of being a great source of up-to-date news. If you are old enough to remember the first gulf war, CNN was the TV channel to tune into to learn the latest on what was happening on the ground in Kuwait/Iraq. That was how CNN built its brand reputation.

Today, when an authoritarian government is toppled by mass protests, which may result in either a domino effect or more oppression in the Middle-East/North Africa, CNN.com refers to the event in a single line news item hidden among everything else.

Granted that I am looking at the “domestic” edition of CNN.com whereas none of the other news sites differentiate between a “domestic” versus “international” audiences.

However, I think this is unfortunate, for it basically tells me that I can no longer trust CNN to be a good source of news. CNN has lost sight of what made it successful in the first place: delivery of news that matters.

Maybe not, but the camera industry appears to be one where new technology tends to keep manufacturers on their toes.

Witness the demise of complicated aim-and-adjust cameras when inexpensive point-and-shoot autofocus came along, and then the demise of film cameras when digital cameras came along.

Now the competition is more indirect (my “strategic competitor” concept): the smartphone.

If you are an iPhone user, when was the last time you picked up your camera?

You can’t remember?

Neither can I. In fact, I probably haven’t used my camera (a 12-megapixel, widescreen Panasonic) since I started using an Android phone.

Advanced camera plus phone combos are not new. I used to have a Sony Ericsson K750i which had a better camera than most digital cameras of the era.

But today’s smartphone have a better ecosystem than the old Sony Ericssons: real Internet connectivity and compelling Internet/cloud tools like Facebook, Dropbox etc for sharing pictures.

So today, you can snap a picture with your trusty iPhone/Android and with a few taps, share the picture with your friends/family and the world. You also no longer need to mess with cables or SD Card adaptors: just use Dropbox (and to a more complicated extent, ZumoDrive) to transfer the picture to your PC.

It looks like the camera manufacturers are starting to take notice. So Samsung just announced the SH100 at CES. It comes with Wi-Fi and can share pictures with your PC, Android device, Facebook, Picassa, Photobucket etc. Read the press release here. Adding WiFi to digital cameras is not new, but this is the first time I see WiFi being integrated into the camera experience along with Facebook and PC sharing capability.

Should other camera manufacturers follow suit?

There’s no easy answer. If they don’t, they risk being overtaken by the smartphone tide; at least, in the casual point-and-shoot segment. On the other hand, that segment may still go to the smartphones anyway: for casual point-and-shoot, you are not going to carry another gadget if your smartphone suffices…

But first of all, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

2010 was a very interesting year.

We saw Apple launch the iPad, which quickly showed the world what the tablet PC experience should be like, and consequently sent Microsoft back to the drawing board.

We also witnessed Google’s Android evolve into a very good competitor to the Apple iPhone and consequently take market share away from smartphone stalwart RIM/Blackberry, sending it into a downward spiral from which it will probably not recover.

So it looks like 2011 continue to be interesting (or should I say “exciting”?).

The tablet wars will spin up fully in 2011, with Apple (and iOS) on one hand, and Google’s Android on the other. There will be other players like RIM, Ubuntu and Microsoft, but they will remain bit players, at least initially.

An “alternative PC operating system” war will brew with more vigor in the background. Google Chrome OS will finally ship on systems that you can buy at the store. Alternatives will be Intel/Nokia’s MeeGo and the various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu, Jolicloud).

Hopefully, we will also get better clarity in how Google will position Chrome OS, particularly vis à vis Android. Google is not infallible, as we have seen with Google TV here and here. So some of the big questions of 2011 will be (a) whether a cloud computing device powered by Chrome OS makes sense and (b) whether Google will continue to support two operating systems.

Social media will continue to be HUGE. On Dec 29th 2010, Hitwise reported that in the US, Facebook beat Google as the most visited site in 2010. This can mean many things. For example, Bing may be grabbing market share or eyeballs from Google, resulting in fewer visits to google.com. But we cannot deny the fact that Facebook will be incredibly influential in 2011.

This year will also be critical for Facebook’s competitor (I am tempted to use the word “former”), MySpace. The latter was the 7th most visited US website in 2010, but it may lay off up to 50% of its staff.

So there we go: my first blog for 2011. Again, wishing y’all a Happy New Year!

I wrote a blog on Dec 2nd wondering what happened to Chrome OS. Lo and behold, on Dec 7th, Google held a special event (live feed from Sean Hollister of Engadget) where Chrome OS was revealed, along with details of a pre-production/production-level, limited-edition Chrome OS netbook, the Cr-48.

The mass market version of a Chrome OS system would ship only mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung.

The folks at “The Register” got their hands one of the units and came out with a review.

Chrome OS also has its detractors

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, thinks that not having your own data on your own property is akin to losing your legal rights to your data. The example he gives is that in the US, the police require a search warrant to get access your property, but don’t necessarily need to when trying to get to your data on some one else’s property e.g. Google’s servers. In some ways, Stallman is right:  look at the amount of influence members of the US government has over corporations when it comes to WikiLeaks. This means that corporations running cloud services can block access to your own data if you offend the wrong people.

The creator of Gmail, Paul Buchheit, thinks that Chrome OS will be “killed next year” or “merged” with Android. In this case, I think Buchheit is basically channeling the confusion surrounding the positioning of Chrome OS with respect to Google’s other operating systems, Android. The announcement on Dec 7th and the delivery of the Cr-48 onto users’ hands have not dispelled that confusion.

Part of this comes from our mental association linking larger, physical devices with larger, more full-function software. In contrast, Google is targeting a full-function operating system (Android) at physically smaller, mobile devices while leaving Chrome OS, a browser-only-single-application operating system, to power physically larger and presumably more powerful devices like netbooks.

Perhaps we will get more clarity when the mass market Chrome OS devices are released next year. At the least, their price points will give an indication of how Google is positioning them.

In a previous article, I have postulated that perhaps the ideal device for Chrome OS will be a very low cost, full Internet experience tablet; basically, an iPad without the complexity of on-device applications and with support for Adobe Flash.

I still think that this is the ideal scenario. At the least, Google should created an embedded version of Chrome OS for use in devices like printers etc. For example, I just bought an HP D110a printer. This printer represents a whole new generation of smart, Internet-savvy devices that can connect to the Internet and even download firmware upgrades for themselves. One key promise of the D110a is that you can access “applications” on the Internet and print content without using a computer. The promise fails on the D110a because it has a tiny screen, resulting in a very poor user interface. With a more complex operating system like Chrome OS integrated with the D110a, the user will have a more complete Internet experience, and hence a higher tendency to print content directly from the printer (which obviously would drive the sale of printer cartridges…). HP has said that they will be leveraging webOS for this end in the future. I think Google should also explore that possibility.

Finally, Brad Pitt-lookalike and founder and CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, is confused about the Chrome app store. An app store of websites is not a new concept. When Splashtop 2.0 was launched earlier this year and shipped with Lenovo on their netbooks, one feature was an app catalog that contained a list of popular websites. Users used this to customize their Splashtop experience by making their favorite websites more easily available on the operating system launchbar.

What is new with the Chrome app store is the availability of web sites that have integrated with the various Google APIs. Some of the web pages of these web sites are then still available even when the Chrome OS device is offline i.e. not connected to the Internet.

This, in my opinion, is a very important factor for the success of Chrome OS, if Google continues targeting it as the sole operating system on devices like netbooks and notebooks. Without an offline capability, Chrome OS devices will have zero value (other than as paperweight) in markets where Internet access is either intermittent or costly. This applies to most of the third world and much of the developed world.

In the mean time, some folks have installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a Cr-48 and you can see the video with the link below

Ubuntu on the Cr-48.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Splashtop Inc (formerly DeviceVM, Inc), which developed the Splashtop product.

The big news of the week is “cablegate” aka the thousands of confidential US diplomatic documents that are being made public by WikiLeaks.

While the contents of the leaked cables range from the bizarre (Gaddafi’s blonde companion) to evidence of illegal behavior (spying on UN officials), the outcome of all this is that diplomacy will go on as before. There is no alternative to diplomacy. Even war, after all, is diplomacy by other means…

The impact of the leak on the culture and values of Western democratic societies will be more serious.

Western politicians of all stripes have called various actions on Julian Assange (WikiLeaks’ founder), ranging from hunting him down like Osama Bin Laden to assassination by drone.

What ever happened to Western concepts of judicial due process and the assumption of innocence?

While politicians can be forgiven for acting like politicians, after all, they have their constituents to answer to (in theory at least; in practice, US politicians answer to their campaign donors), the actions of companies like Amazon and EveryDNS are more worrisome.

When WikiLeaks came under intense denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, the website was moved to Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. On Wednesday, Amazon cut off WikiLeaks, citing pressure from US Senator Joe Lieberman.

On Friday, EveryDNS.net took down the wikileaks.org domain name, citing WikiLeaks’ violation of EveryDNS’s acceptable use policy.

Another company, Tableau Software, bowing to pressure from Senator Lieberman, “removed from the Internet visualisations of the US Embassy cables”.

This is all very worrisome because it shows how it easy it is shut down a website. All you need is a little bit of political pressure. And all this is achieved without judicial review and due process.

Is that what Western freedoms and liberties have come to? What happened to freedom of speech?

The problem is not whether what WikiLeaks did was legal or acceptable. There are processes in the system for dealing with cases like these, including a potential grand jury indictment against Julian Assange.

Resorting to what is essentially censorship is absolutely not the way to deal with WikiLeaks.

Believe me when I say I know what censorship is. The general perception is that China started the art of Internet censorship with its “great firewall”.

The reality is that in 1996, as the Internet became popular in Singapore (a country that has NOTHING to do with China), the government there started considering ways to control what its citizens had access to on the Internet. The primary target was online pornography but free and unfettered political expression was also a concern. As a start, all private Internet traffic had to pass through government-controlled proxy servers. Unapproved websites were blocked. At some point, the government considered requiring local website owners to register with the government, in the same way that printed media publishers had to obtain government licenses. I don’t know if this was ever put into practice because I had left Singapore by then.

I know this because I organized a petition drive to oppose the Singapore government’s move to censor and control the Internet. There have even been articles written about that petition.

What I see happening to WikiLeaks is more of the same: attempts at control and censorship. And it is scary. When politicians call the shots, who is next? After all, as the maxim goes: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (members of the Irgun/Haganah who later became Israeli leaders and Nelson Mandela/ANC come to mind). If your website upsets a politician or political party, will it be shutdown through direct and indirect political pressure? If that happens and you lack the technical skills of the WikiLeaks crew, what is your recourse?

The fact is that Western countries don’t need this. The system in place is robust enough to handle WikiLeaks, Al Qaeda terrorism and more. After all, this same system survived a 44-year cold war with the Soviet Union with most of our freedoms intact.

It was widely reported (or rumored) back in August (see my “Much ado about Chrome OS” blog) that Google would be shipping a Chrome OS notebook or tablet by Black Friday (aka November 26th 2010).

Well, that day has come and gone and there’s still no sign of Chrome OS shipping.

It looks like, based on this report by Engadget, that Chrome OS systems will be generally available in 2011, but that units will be available  this year for internal use à la Nexus One.

My earlier blog also suggested that perhaps Chrome OS would be positioned as a tablet OS for low cost, always-connected Internet devices whereas a richer OS like Android would make more sense for feature-rich devices. However, Eric Schmidt, at Web 2.0, made it clear that Chrome OS would be for devices with keyboards while Android would primarily be for touch (tell that to my T-Mobile G2).

Unfortunately, that clarification still doesn’t tell me why one would buy a Chrome OS device over an Android one. Google has some work to do to differentiate and position its two operating systems.

In the mean time, Jolicloud has beaten Google to the punch by launching the Jolibook, a netbook running the Jolicloud OS (based on Ubuntu). It is currently available only in the UK.

I have tried out Jolicloud version 1.0 and find it easy to use, but nothing spectacular. It has a very good integration with cloud storage services like Dropbox and Zumodrive. This allows you to share data between the Jolibook and your regular PC, making the former a great companion device.

Jolibook also includes a number of social features including a tie-in with Facebook log-in and its own social network that allows you to find out what other Jolicloud users are doing e.g. which are the popular applications etc. This secondary social network creates some level of stickiness: when you have invested some time/effort into setting this up, you will be less likely to switch to another environment.

My former employer, DeviceVM (now called Splashtop Inc), has also jumped into the fray, but in the reverse direction: whereas you are able to buy notebooks from HP, Dell, Sony and others, with Splashtop already installed, you were previously not able to download a version of Splashtop and install it on a system that you already have. To remedy that, Splashtop OS is now available for download, in beta form, from the Splashtop Inc website. In a “one up” to Google, Splashtop comes with Bing (thanks to moi) as the default Internet search engine.

At the end of the day, the big question is how these non-Windows operating systems will change the way we use computers or the Internet. With Splashtop, DeviceVM was successful in changing boot time expectations: Windows 7 boots much faster than Vista, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that the new MacBook Airs had this new feature called “Instant-On”, and there is a bunch of new technology (described here) to allow super fast “boot” with Linux. DeviceVM was also the first to realize that users really want to use the Internet most of the time and had a product to cater to that expectation.

The next step will be a change in user behavior aided by all this new technology and the increasingly social nature of the Internet. 2011 is definitely going to be an interesting year.

My previous article, “Diaspora, Facebook alternative, goes live“, seems to have set some minds ticking.

Brad Pitt-lookalike and founder-CEO of Mashable, Pete Cashmore, wrote an article on CNN.com that repeated essentially the same key points that I made:

• How Facebook became better than MySpace: “This new feature wasn’t just a “better MySpace” but a completely different approach to social interaction that replaced static pages with streams of constantly updated information.“
• Switching costs: “There are plenty of ways for a social network to fail; the fact that your friends are already on Facebook and not Diaspora is the most obvious issue.“
• That Diaspora and other social networks have to offer a better social experience than Facebook in order to gain market share: “So, if recent history is a guide, Facebook need not worry about Diaspora. Such incremental improvements almost never create new market leaders. Instead, it takes a completely different approach to unseat incumbents.“

I am not claiming that Pete Cashmore copied my article. Instead, I’m rather flattered by the validation of the key concepts of my article.

That’s Thought Leadership!

It’s in open alpha and you can sign up for their mailing list at joindiaspora.com

These guys have a lot of publicity. It remains to be seen how well they will do as a Facebook alternative/replacement. It is not impossible, as Facebook was able to wrest the social media crown from MySpace. But the former is now more entrenched than MySpace was and Diaspora must offer something unique to users that will make the user switching cost (described in my previous post) worth absorbing.

Diaspora’s current user value proposition is privacy and ownership. This is a poke (pun not intended) at Facebook which has a bad reputation (deserved or undeserved) in those areas.

The question is whether users care about that. I suspect that they do, but not enough to switch.

Diaspora and other Facebook alternatives out there (Appleseed, OneSocialWeb, Elgg) have to offer a better social experience in order to gain share from Facebook.

An example is the Facebook status/news feed. This feature was launched a few years after Facebook started. Before that, Facebook had a MySpace-like landing page. As a Facebook user, I find that the feed holds the key value of Facebook: it gives the impression that the user is engaged with friends.

Diaspora needs to identify a similar key feature. When that happens, the trick is to hold on to that as a Diaspora-exclusive experience. That is also not easy as Facebook now has the size and resources to quickly duplicate anything that an upstart can come up with.

Hopefully, I’ll get my Diaspora invitation soon and will be able to try it out and “share” my impressions.