The solar-powered gadget-recharging nomad bag

Sakku Bag
© All rights reserved.

I got an email from Andreas today letting me know that Sakku has been released and is now shipping to the US.

The Sakku is interesting because, unlike most other messenger/laptop bags on the market, it serves an excellent utilitarian purpose by charging your iPod, cellphone or digital camera while you’re out in the sun. The sakku akku features an integrated recharcheable battery for those foggy San Francisco days.

Besides that, Sakku also has a focus on general sustainability, first, relying on solar power, and second, using recycled sails from sail boats for the bag material.

From a design perspective, my biggest concern is size, as it appears much larger than the Timbuk2 bags I’ve had and now use. The FAQ is pretty comprehensive, though, and you can check out more photos in the Sakku Flickr group. Oh, and unfortunately, according to the FAQ, the solar cells don’t produce enough power to charge laptops. Bummer.

Though I probably won’t be ordering one just yet, if you’re interested, they have an online form for ordering. At 230€ for the akku and 180€ for the direct, it’s a bit out of my price range, but I can see how this technology could be extremely useful for hikers, bikers and other travelers who need power and can’t rely on their accommodations for juice.

As is the trend lately, I’ll disclose that I wasn’t paid to write this, won’t receive any compensation and have commercial interest in this product. It’s just interesting, uses solar power, and is worth letting people know about it to make up their own minds.

What dreams are made of: Pzizz 2.0 is out

Pzizz 2.0

As you might know, I’m a fan of Edward Laing’s Pzizz nap app.

Well, he’s finally launched version 2.0, offering new features, ways of customizing the soundtrack ending experience and a much improved interface, but apparently the launch process hasn’t gone perfectly.

Still, a hearty congrats to Edward and team — I’m eagerly looking forward continued improvements.

Gang warfare, Web 2.0 style

Golden Tamarin, Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle, WA -- (cc) by Michael Hanscom

Summary: Adobe + Mozilla + Google are ganging up to take down Microsoft to become the definitive future web platform.

I’ve been reading with great interest and intrigue about Adobe’s substantial contribution to Firefox’s codebase in the form of open sourcing Flash Player 9’s virtual machine.

On the one hand, I’m tempted to go and congratulate Adobe for their good will and desire to support “sustaining innovations“.

On the other, more cynical, hand, I know enough to read between the lines and see this for what it really is: business as usual, with the good grace of open source being used as a context for making this appear “nicer” than it really is.

But don’t get me wrong — this is a good thing for the web, for web denizens, for web developers, open source and for innovation. So that’s not what I’d like to point out here.

Instead, I’d like to offer a theory that this is a calculated move by at least Adobe (if not Mozilla and Google collectively) to go at Microsoft’s jugular just when it’s starting to regain its some of momentum as the dominant web platform after releasing IE7. (Note that my intimations are purely conjectural and not based on known fact. Whether intentional or not, this announcement spells out an alternative future, and it’s worth teasing out what it might look like, even as the story is developing.)

So let’s state some baseline assumptions and assertions:

  1. Adobe PDF is Adobe’s crown jewel. Their virtual monopoly on this rich format provides them a huge amount of business through their Acrobat product (now in version 8) — and they’ve moved to protect it before.
  2. Adobe Flash Players are installed in well over 90% of client browsers, making it the most widely deployed browser plugin anywhere (note the tie-in to Flash video — and who’s the biggest consumer here? YouTube much?)
  3. JavaScript and ActionScript (Flash’s programming language) are very close cousins — pushing EMCAScript and ActionScript closer through a faster virtual machine inches Flash ever-closer to subsuming the browser.
  4. Apollo offers to wed the best of Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax and PDF — hell, you can even build a browser with this stuff

Contrary to Liz Gannes’ take, I think Adobe might, somehow, be positioning itself very wisely to help shape the future of online publishing, data interchange and rich web experiences. In fact, by nuzzling up to Mozilla and offering more and more open betas (though still with obnoxiously unruly EULAs), Adobe is starting to have the sheen of an open source player.

So let’s think about this: Microsoft is set to release Vista soon — and just as the delineation between web and desktop is finally evaporating — Adobe and Mozilla strike out with a bold partnership that firmly implants Adobe’s engineering technologies into the core equation between browser and desktop. And, given the large number of XHTML and Flash gurus in the wild, this seems like the death nell for before the shrink wrap has even been removed. This isn’t about Flash becoming the web OS; this is about Adobe protecting and promoting it own delivery platforms and formats as it tag teams with Google to suck the “Live” out of Microsoft before it even has a chance to counter.

Adobe wants to be front and center in every browser; it’s smart enough to recognize however, that, like Google, the core threat to their position in the market is Microsoft’s Live platform technologies. An Adobe browser couldn’t dent Microsoft’s platform share, but two open source browsers can by creating the de facto web publishing environment and tools for the future of the web-centric desktop.

An interesting development indeed.

Introducing the GoogleBerry

Downloading Google Services
Let everyone else build the frames and the platforms… it’ll be Google Content thru and thru.

In fact now you can grab all four of Google’s mobile services, including:

  • Search
  • Maps
  • Gmail
  • Google News

… in one fell swoop (load on your mobile device, direct download).

This bundle includes the Gmail client that Google recently released, though with a set of four alternative icons. The set will also notify you when new versions are available.

Admittedly, these are some very useful and pretty well-designed applications for BlackBerry mobile users. The question is — where’s the competition?

iTunes 7.0.2 fixes VolumeLogic compatibility

VolumeLogic returns!

Sweet!! Today’s iTunes update restores compatibility with VolumeLogic, my most favoritest audio enhancer!

Sadly iTunes 7 broke the plugin and Plantronics has been working on a beta since then, but it looks like it’ll be no longer necessary!

Tip: If you want to get it to work without skipping, make sure that you disable iTunes’ Sound Enhancer (you won’t need it anyway) in the Playback preferences.

Last.fm adds support for hCalendar

Last.fm adds microformats

Guillermo Esteves has notified me that another site has added microformats under the hood — and, just like Apple’s dotMac Webmail, for password-protected content.

They don’t mention it, but this means that you can easily add concert listings on Last.fm, complete with recommended gigs to your calendar without breaking a sweat (or a finger).

They let you add gigs, but what’s missing is the ability to point at an Upcoming, Eventful or Yahoo! Local URL and pull in the microformatted content to create a subscription to the existing event.

Ya dig?

Jimbo Wales has left the building?

Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t it kind of significant that Jimmy Wales, one of the main drivers behind Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikia, has stepped down as chair of the Wikimedia Foundation? Or is this just normal board reorganization within a non-profit? According to Jimmy, he’s too busy. Okay, I could probably buy that.

Internet Explorer 8.0 will support microformats

Microformats + Internet ExplorerWe now have confirmation that something that many of us in the community have suspected for some time (owing to Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard demo): that upcoming versions of Internet Explorer, expected some time in the next 12-18 months, will include support for microformats.

This, apparently, is straight from Chris Wilson, the new platform architect for IE:

“Mash-ups will continue to drive innovation. Componentization and semantic tagging of data will be supported,” Wilson told the Ajax Experience crowd. Wilson touted the harnessing of microformats, like Microsoft has done with its Live Clipboard effort, as “real world stuff” that will “make the Web much more usable.”

“Microformats add meaning to content in HTML,” Wilson said.

With discussions around support for microformats in Firefox 3, and Apple showing strong support for microformats as well, it’s only a very short amount of time before we can move on from the “so who’s using microformats?” question to “okay, so now what can we do with them?”