Manhattan Scavenger Hunt

Yesterday, we had a scavenger hunt across Manhattan. The prize was a ton of Pocky, so we called our group Pockystan. There were like 140 things on the list, so we licked street signs and got Starbucks baristas to sign coffee cups and proposed to strangers and pole-danced on street poles and rapped with strangers and got an egg from an old lady in a townhouse and yelled through central park until we found a guy named Steve and played limbo with kids and futterwacked at the Alice in Wonderland statue and argued with crazy Jesus people and raped a church and burned a woman and sang Disney songs in a drugstore and high fived cops and Mr. Softee truck guys and a guy with an awesome mustache and staged public breakups and rode the carousel and walked piggyback into a parking garage making cars noises asking for the cost to park for a day and serenaded with Shakespeare and sang the prince of bel air theme with a guy on the street and beatboxed with strangers and got free macarons and impersonated elvis in grand central station and screamed "STELLAAAA!" in a subway car and hugged another crazy Jesus person who smelled like manure. Then we did kareoke.

In other words, yesterday was awesome.

Google Voice's Future

I was talking with a few people about Google Voice, and it seems that many people are worried about the future of Google Voice. According to a few sources, Google will be opening up GV to the public within a few weeks. There is concern that Google will make GV a pay service, making certain people (well, me) unhappy.

Here are my thought on what should happen with Google Voice.

1. Keep it free.
Seriously, Google: you've set the standard for a company which turns out free products yet makes an outrageous profit. Google bought GrandCentral in 2007 for 95 million US dollars. How can Google recoup that cost? The answer lies in looking to another product which Gogole bought but released as free: Google Earth. After Google acquired Keyhole, they were smart enough to release Google Earth as free, but they still made profit b creating advanced versions. This leads to my second thought:

2. Make a pro version.
More specifically, a business version. A quick search on Google (duh) shows that there are a few features GV does not currently have, but would not be impossible for them to add on -- for a nominal fee. If Google released a Google Voice Business Edition, they could market it the same way they sell Google Earth Pro: throw in some extra juicy pieces businesses can't live without. Some ideas include:

• There's a lot of interest in making people's pre-existing phone numbers GV numbers. If Google makes that available for some amount, people will line up for GV.
• GV does not currently support extensions (e.g. (555) 555-5555 #1234). Finish this thought for yourself.
• More than 4-way conference call support, adding and dropping callers, increased bandwidth for conference calls

I'm sure the guys over in Mountain View can churn out a few more selling points, and GV will be practically self-sufficient -- whatever GV loses can be balanced by online advertisements.

3. Team up with Skype
Google, eBay. eBay, Google. Now that you're acquainted, consider your cards. Google, you are an internet-based company with a phone proxy service which makes calling people locally, domestically, or internationally very easy and cheap, but you lack the ability to place calls directly from your computer.

eBay, you own Skype, which allows people to place calls through the internet (thank you VoIP), but your internet-to-real-world calling rates are rather steep.

Seriously, Skype and GV make natural allies. GV provides the Skype user with a phone number. When people call the GV#, it will forward to their Skype account, letting people answer their calls from their computers. conversely, when Skype people SkypeOut, Skype will run the call through GV, saving Skype and the Skype user money. Either way, it also cuts out the middle man: if eBay ad Google aren't connected, users must SkypeOut or SkypeIn, travel on the phone networks, get to GV, go onto the internet, VoIP, and go back down again to the connection. It's much more effective for everyone if the call doesn't make that extra hop.

4. Don't Team Up with Skype
...are the Skype-lovers gone? They are? Good. Google, listen: you don't need a partnership. The only thing you'd get out of Skype would be computer-phone capabilities, something you're totally capable of building on your own. eBay. Who needs 'em?

5. Be smartphone-friendly
I want to see a Google Voice iPhone app and a Google Voice Android app. You'll do even better if you can make it look seamless.

6. Weld it in with the rest of Google's products
Speaking of seamless, here are some things which would make Google Voice even more amazing:

• Google Earth, Google Maps: you have phone numbers in business info listings. If the person's logged in and is accessing the page from a computer, prompt them and ask if they wan to use GV.
• Gmail: you've already released a neat video chat feature. Merge that with GV! Add in the transcriptions, recording capabilities, etc. and you'll have a wonderful UI on your hands. Plus, can you say "call-in memos and to-do lists"?
  
• Google Desktop: transcriptions in archived index. 'Nuff said.
• GOOG-411: Unlikely, but it would be awesome if you could dial into your GV account through GOOG-411, and even place calls. Hooray for free calls!

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Google Voice is an excellent product. Google: keep GV free, integrate it, and blow the pants off of the telecommunications company.

Happy happy happy happy

It's snowing! Huzzah! Woo hoo!

Sure, it's been too warm for it to stick in any measurable amount, but...it's still snow! Yay!

I think my favorite part about snow in NYC is how the combination of a blanketing white surface and total cloud cover causes all of the street lights to reflect off the ground onto the clouds. It's awesome.

And I had hot cocoa this morning!

In other news, I'm going skiing next week, so that's also awesome! Smuggs has been getting lots of snow, so it'll be awesome.

Thank You, Time Warner!

Usually I'm not one to support a company with a stranglehold on its customers, but I just found the most useful thing. Channel 1000 is well-known as the movies-on-demand channel, where Time Warner will stream your movies to your TV, and charge your TV bill for the movie. It's insanely simple.

However, I just found that channel 1008 is FREE movies-on-demand. Sure, there a re far less and more crappy movies, but I just found that TNT was providing "Groundhog Day"! I love that movie! It's wonderful when you watch a movie that you didn't pay a cent for.

The best part: TNT added commercials in the movie, but someone goofed at Time Warner and made it possible to fast forward through the commercials. Woo hoo!

Flash Work

I've created a Flash app that realistically bounces a ball on a line which you make. It's pretty cool. I've also made a Newtonian physics engine, which is downright awesome. It's built directly from Newton and Kepler's formulae, and it works beautifully. I actually cheered when I got a sun-planet-moon system working.

User interface is in production, and hopefully it will be uploaded soon.