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Silver Mac > Cool things you can do on a Mac

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SlingPlayer on a Motorola Q

I need to get a Motorola Q!

Google Trends

The new Google Trends tool is pretty cool. You can use it to compare the relative popularity of competing services, products, teams, etc. Similar to Google Finance, the graphs include related news stories as reference points. Here are some examples:

Yankees versus Red Sox

Pepsi versus Coke

iTunes versus Napster

Yahoo versus Google

XM versus Sirius

Flickr vs Shutterfly vs Ofoto vs Snapfish

Sirius crosses 4 million subscriber mark

Sirius Satellite Radio announced yesterday that they crossed the 4 million subscriber mark. It took them a little over 3 months to grow from 2 million (September 15th, 2005) to 3 million (December 27th, 2005). It took less than 3 months for Sirius to go from 3 million to 4 million (March 20th, 2006). If they keep up this growth rate, Sirius would end the year with over 7 million subscribers. Sirius’ stock is up significantly over the last week on this news. XM reached 6 million on January 4th, so they will need to announce something about passing 7 million in the next week or so to keep pace with Sirius. I’ll be updating my XM vs Sirius total subscribers graph when I get the latest numbers from XM.

Introducing the iPod Macro

The iPod Macro, spotted in the window at Papenhausen Hardware in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco. It’s hard to tell in the photo but the screen is a small TV set.

Web 2.0 Innovation Map

I came across this cool Web 2.0 Innovation Map on Google Maps Mania. Zoom into your part of the country to find Web 2.0 sites/services in your area. A couple of weeks ago, I created something similar to this on a much, much smaller scale (SF Bay Area only) on Wayfaring.

eBay reports Skype revenue

In their earnings announement yesterday, eBay provided some very interesting revenue figures for their recently acquired Skype division. eBay acquired Skype on October 14, 2005 and since that time, the Skype unit has had $24.9 million in revenues. At the end of Q4 2005, they reported 74.7 million registered Skype users.This really is tremendous growth. I did some digging around and came up
with these data points for registered Skype users:

Date	Registered Users (millions)	Source
8/29/2003	0	Wikipedia (History section)
3/11/2005	29	Wikipedia (History section)
8/14/2005	50	Skype Journal
9/12/2005	54	Skype
10/25/2005	61	Skype
12/31/2005	75	eBay (1/18/06 earnings report)

Since August 2005 (5 months), that averages out to 178,000 new Skype users per
day! Below is a chart showing the growth since the first public beta
in August 2003:

Check out Om Malik’s blog and VoIPWiki for some interesting analysis on the Skype numbers.

Filed under: Skype, eBay, Earnings

SF Bay Area Tech Companies on a Google Map

I was thinking recently about the idea of a Google Maps mash-up with a job search site, such as Hot Jobs or Monster.com. The idea would be that you could enter in some kind of search filterting criteria – type of company, company size, public vs private, tag names, etc. The filtering would also include a commute radius – e.g. 30 miles. The search result would be a Google map showing the companies that met your search criteria. If you drill down on the map “balloons” you would get a brief description of the company, a link to the job postings, etc. I’ve used the excellent Wayfaring site to show an example of how the resulting map might look:1/17/05 Update:

One of the cool features of Warfaring is community maps. Any registered Wayfarer user can edit a community map, sort of like a Wiki. If you’d like to add your company to the SF Bay Area Tech Companies map, just follow these steps:

1. First, sign up for a new Wayfaring account if you don’t already have one
2. Go to the SF Bay Area Tech Companies map
3. Click on the Edit Map button (towards the bottom of the page)
4. Click on Add a Waypoint
5. Type in the company name in the Name field
6. Type in the Address for the company or click on the map.
   Make sure to use the map zoom function if you are clicking on the map.
7. Type in Tags (optional). For example, sanfrancisco, acmesoftware, companies, etc.
8. Type in a Description. HTML tags are supported on this.  Here’s the info that I’ve used for other companies:Short description of the company

   Jobs link. Use this html:

   <a
   href=“http://jobs.companyname.com/&#8221;
   target=“_blank”>Jobs</a>

9. Click Done
10. Click the Save Map button
11. If you scroll down the list of Waypoints, you should see the new company. You might need to refresh your browser if you don’t see it in the list.
12. To add a logo for your company, click on the company name in the Waypoint list
13. Next to Photos, click upload
14. Click Browse next to Photo 1 and select the logo file for the company. Click Submit.

Technorati tags: Google Maps, Wayfaring, Job Search, Bay Area

Spinal Tap reference in SlingPlayer help

Here’s one more reason why I’m loving my new Slingbox. They threw in a reference to This is Spinal Tap on the help page for audio settings:

“Also, if you’ve noticed that our volume control goes up to 11, that’s in case you need that extra push over the cliff, you can put it up to 11. Sure, we could have just made 10 louder and made 10 be the top number and make that a little louder, but this goes to 11.”

Filed under: slingbox, sling media, Spinal Tap

Slingbox

I’ve been seeing great reviews of Slingbox since it came out in the summer. It recently appeared in Time magazine’s best inventions of 2005 issue. And I love how the idea for Slingbox came from Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian’s frustration about not being able to watch San Francisco Giants games while he was on the road. Funny how so many good ideas are born out of frustration.

This weekend I finally broke down and bought one and I have to say, this is a very, very cool product. As soon as you start to use it, you wonder how you were able to get by without it. If you have any need for accessing your TiVo or cable system from anywhere (from work, from a hotel, from the airport, from a different room in your house, etc.), then you need to go out and get this product. The set-up is quick, it’s not too expensive, and there is no monthly service fee. Below is a screenshot showing the TiVo remote and the screen. All of the TiVo remote functions are available – you can watch recorded shows, watch live TV, record new shows, you can even do the hidden TiVo 30-second commercial skip feature.

12/17/05 Update:
My Slingbox image on Flickr was recently linked from one of my favorite sites – PVRBlog.

Filed under: slingbox, tivo, gadgets