uplink.to

I spent Friday at an Oracle technology briefing at their campus in Redwood Shores. These events are a great way to keep up with the roadmap. Oracle rarely blunders with their acquisitions, and the acquisition of Sun has lent to a slew of new synergies with actual meaning for the rest of us. Java is a forest of versions and acronyms, and Friday was an opportunity to have it all explained somewhat.

You heard it here first, I predict the Java App Store will re-emerge, with Oracle hosting, and billions of devices will connect to it. One outcome of the Google lawsuit is that it will end up on all Android phones; speculation is the suit won’t make it to the Supreme Court. The food as always was excellent, full breakfast, great lunch and afternoon tea. As many times as I go, I never grow weary reporting or photographing that part of it. This wasn’t as sumptuous as some of the C-level press events at the Sofitel in Palo Alto, but still, Oracle really knows how to treat its developers and customers. The grilled tri-tip alone was worth the trip!

Got a different view of the PhotoUpLink title page antenna, and the video turned out OK! The Droid X owners I’ve asked about the camera have panned it. I’m just amazed that a phone has an 8 megapixel camera, shoots HD, and has a flash!

I’ve started to add location and immediacy as photo quality determinants. Framing, lighting, resolution etc are all great but the fact that I can snap a photo here and NOW and send it to my wife or a pal, with a timestamp and a GPS tag is what matters to me the most these days. The rest of the set is from cruising around the Near East Bay with a friend late last night listening to “Friday” – the phone speakers really magnified and enhanced the auto-tuned vocals to poetic heights.

“(it) will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Like many other small developers, any legal action will shut down uplink.to Anywhere. Until I hear from Apple about the Lodsys patent issue, only the full versions of PhotoUpLink and VideoUpLink will be available. I’ve set the new live date for July 14th, Bastille Day. Hopefully it will be resolved by then. Thank you for your continued support.

Report: Apple looking into Lodsys IAP patent claim

A port I worked on back in 1989.

In the 90′s I had the incredible good fortune to live in Manhattan and write video games for a living. I had a twenty foot, 200 hp ski boat I used to blast around the island and up the Hudson with my colleagues and my girlfriend at the time. Every morning out of my Upper West Side sublet I beheld the World Trade Center and comfortably thought “I’ve made it!” Good times, formative years. Such an enormous weight lifted now. In the words of Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia – he’s gone.

The one that started it all….

Lots of setup recently. I’m side stepping the innovator’s dilemma, but no customer will be left behind!