No, not how to take 5 strokes off your game...

The Golf Channel has a series called Fore Inventors Only where inventors of new golf products "sell" their products to a panel and customers.  The best product wins a contract with a major golf retailer and free production of an infomercial. 

Besides satisfying my need for competition, golf has a real technical side that I like.  The golf swing can be very technical to learn and teach.  The most technical part of the game, however, is the equipment and training devices.  There are some amazing, out of the box ideas that people think up and build products around. 

In the video below you will see the inventor of the GyroSwing attempting marketing pitches to various people.  He understands his product quite well but his attempts to describe why anyone should use it do not work because he lets his technical knowledge get in the way.

Even if you have no interest in golf I suggest trying to catch an episode of Fore Inventors Only.  I think some of the subjects covered in the show would prove helpful to many technology professionals. It covers in depth how you should approach discussing or marketing something technical to people who have no interest in technical details. 

The non-technical population is about 99.99 percent of humanity, so keep that in mind when discussing your technical ideas with others.

Oh and by the way, the GyroSwing looks like a great product.

The Mobile Connections conference at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino is coming up soon.  I will once again help Rob Tiffany from Microsoft at his merge replication booth.  If you are there and would like a chance to see a large number of Windows Mobile devices synchronizing with Sql Server then drop by.  We are re-teaming with Darren Shaffer from Connected Innovation. 

This will be the third time this year I helped out with the merge replication booth.  For those of you who have not seen it the booth, it is a first class demonstration setup.  Microsoft invested in a great server rack and servers to provide live demonstrations of merge replication and how it can scale to support a large number of mobile devices.  The amazing thing about merge replication is that the setup is mostly server configuration and very little code.

See you in Vegas...

Microsoft is hosting a mobile AJAX workshop in Santa Clara tomorrow.

The delivery of AJAX mobile applications to devices is desirable for most consumer oriented applications or those applications that can assume a stable connection.  I think, however, that here in the US the AJAX application technology will be far ahead of the wireless infrastructure needed to support these applications.  There are only two carriers that I know of who could customers enough bandwidth to make AJAX applications feasible.  This will definitely be a short term issue.

I do believe that as more useful mobile AJAX applications become available the wireless carriers with poor bandwidth will be forced to adapt or lose out. 

I  reviewed the position papers and noticed most read like brochureware, but I uncovered a few that were interesting.

Interesting insight from the Sun CEO Jonathan Schartz on their relationship with Microsoft.  They have not had many big splashes over the past few years but have worked hard on making that company work in the post dot bomb world. 

It may sound funny but I get an almost IBM feel from Sun.  I imagine this is because they are focusing more on total systems delivery for customers rather than fast boxes, java, and hyperbole. 


http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/are_you_serious_on_partnering