gPhone?

Google may be coming out with a big announcement in the next couple of weeks according to a Wall Street Journal report... will Goggle slap Apple silly in the mobile phone market?

Portland a blog mecca

Oregon Public Radio reports that Portlanders love blogs, second only to Austin, TX. Here at Nineball Media's west coast office (based in... Portland), we're committed to making Portland eke out the last percentage point or two to topple the mighty Austinites (Austiners?). Read more blogs in PDX!

Hat tip to Mike for pointing this out... hat tip to my under-caffeinated brain for ironically posting a story about Oregon blog readership for the Nineball Oregon office... on a blog. Hat tip to the man or woman who came up with the concept of hat tipping.

Customer service

I'm realizing how much this blog leans towards Apple products... a true tech blog should spend a little time away from the fruited tech giant. Maybe tomorrow...

Nineball Media's latest acquisition, a pimped out new iMac has been feeling a little sad lately. It doesn't like speaking with the great tubes known as the Internets. After running every diagnostic and even reinstalling OS X (yes, one day before the new one comes out, I have to install the old one again), I came to the conclusion that I had to call tech support.

Now, tech support gets hammered all across the computer industry, and for good reason. It's hard enough to figure out computer issues over the phone, but it's even worse when there's very little talent and it's spread very thin (and often, across time zones and oceans). The experience with Apple was, all things considered, pretty good. Thankfully, I had pretty much exhuasted their checklist, so my supposition of a fried Airport card was confirmed by Andrew (from now on referred to as "my boy Andrew"). We got a doctor's appointment set with the not-overstated at all genius tomorrow at 1. Nineball shall not have to rely on its older equipment for more than a day. My boy Andrew made it so.

One note... I'm not sure how long the process would have taken if I hadn't taken an hour before the call to my boy Andrew to do a fresh reinstall of OS X... I think even he would have made me do it and then call back if it hadn't worked. Word to the wise... before calling tech support, exhaust all options you can think of, even the ones that border on really annoying (like, say... reinstalling an operating system one day before the new one comes out).

One other bit of Nineball news... I just signed up for the Blogworld and New Media Expo in Vegas in a couple of weeks. Since I missed out on the Portable and New Media Expo in California last month, I thought it would be good to check this one out. If you're heading to Vegas and want to meet up to chat about podcasting or whatever, feel free to drop me a line...

iPod turns 6

Hard to believe how much has changed in 6 years... just check out the quaint notions of price, size and how big someone's "entire music collection" was back then...

Apple surpasses IBM

Based on earnings reports released yesterday, Apple's officially a bigger company than IBM. Really, we already knew that... what we get from these reports is confirmation that Big Blue is slowly slipping behind the pack. It's amazing that 25 years ago, the personal computing marketing wars pitted the Apple II versus the IBM PC... how things have changed. What never changed was how IBM always used old imagery for new technology... I mean, Charlie Chaplin hawking a computer? That would get some ad exec fired these days...

Apple taketh away and then giveth

Apple has announced it's releasing a toolkit for developers to create 3rd party applications for the iPhone. The kit should be out in February... not sure if the folks who hacked their phones with AppTap will be happy with waiting that long. Apple took a bit of a hit over it's 1.1.1 firmware release, since it bricked a bunch of phones and also rendered the AppTap apps useless. I suspect the February release will probably include a lot of changes (like a frieking to-do list... helloo!?). I'm quite sure there will be a slew of apps created by Apple that Jobs will unveil at the MacWorld keynote in January. Also, there's rumors that the iPhone will be enhanced when Leopard (OS 10.5) hits store shelves on October 26th... we shall see...

Back to the future

I'm back where it all started. The very first podcast I ever produced was for my former employer, Alliance for Justice... Today, I'm returning to kick off the new version of a revamped podcast for their judicial program. It's fun to be back as a part of Nineball Media. Funny how you actually CAN go back "home" sometimes!

Zune dump

It's been all over the Internet... Zunes for $99 on Woot. It's a good thing from a podcasting perspective, since they support podcasts about as well as iTunes, but considering Zunes have - so far - made nary a ripple in terms of social or industry impact, I'd say the flood of Zunes entering the marketplace at bargain-basement prices won't register too terribly much in podcasting stats. Still, you can't sneeze at any device that makes it easier to subscribe and listen...

I love the Internets

So, I've been suffering all day doing audio editing with an Apple Mighty Mouse that suddenly decided not to scroll down. Frustration mounted until, in a pique of anger, I googled "mighty mouse wont scroll" (I couldn't be bothered to use actual punctuation). The result? This blog post... which solved everything... all I had to do was press real hard. Who knew!?

It's times like this that I love the Internets.

iTunes podcast category pages

I was just on iTunes to check in on some client podcast rankings, and it looks like the category pages are all down... it used to be that clicking on "Government and Organizations" or "Health" (for instance) would bring one to a nicely laid out page that included featured podcasts and a top 20 list for that category... some subcategories got the same treatment. Now, it just takes clickers to a verrrrry bland three window text-based page. Hopefully this is just temporary (I suspect it is)... if not, that's a huge loss for podcasters.

UPDATE: Sigh of relief... three hours later, and some of the pages are back. I suspect the ITMS team is doing some page updating, so I suspect everything will be back up in due time.

Friday flashback: Star Wars trumpet woman

After a busy week, I reluctantly hit the email box this morning and found the pefect Friday post thanks to an early Nineball client. May I present to you the talent phase of a Nebraska beauty pagent... keywords here are trumpet, Star Wars, 80s hair and hysterical.

Have a great weekend!

Whirlwind

As you may have notice from the dearth of posts, it's been a bit of a crazy week here at Nineball Media. I'm currently working on a major recording project that I hope to finish up by the end of the week, plus I'm off to Boston today to do some work with one of Nineball's newer clients, Boston University. Thankfully, the news on new media and tech has been pretty slow lately (comparatively), unless you want to read more stories about iPhones bricking, or AOL's massive layoffs (coming Friday, allegedly).

Anyone in the DC area interested in supporting a good cause... I'm on the board of the Tranquil Space Foundation, and we're holding our first gala tomorrow night. Come on down and support a great cause... details at tranquilspacefoundation.org.

Friday ouch: iPod catches fire in dude's pants

WSB in Atlanta reports an unfortunate case of the dreaded "pants on fire" variety... apparently his Nano caught fire for 15 seconds in his jeans pocket. The good news is, glossy paper is now a serious shield to burnage. Good to know.

Apple is going to replace the unit as soon as possible... file that under "duh." I'm kinda bummed the guy didn't take a picture of his newly crispy nano, as it forces me to use a picture of some other nano that went all Human Torch on someone. Thankfully, it took .0003 seconds to find.

Have a good weekend!

Wifi iTunes Store and PME

I just had an interesting experience with the iPhone... One of my clients sells CDs through iTunes, so I plugged her name into the wifi store search on the phone. Within 2 seconds her entire library (minus podcasts alas) popped up, complete with samples. Very cool... If you've got an iPhone or an iPod touch, give it a whirl!

I'm hearing some interesting things fromthis year's PME (the podcast expo)... I'll read up some more and post thoughts later this week...

Light blogging this week

I'm on another bandwidth-limited excursion, so posting might be light this week. Always goodyo see changing foliage from someplace other than a computer screen!