My Internet Notebook

Finally ending a painful three-year decline, worldwide PDA (personal digital assistant) shipment grew in the first three month of 2005 to 3.4 million, a 25 percent from the same period last year. Research firm Gartner said in a report tracking PDA sales.

This is certainly good news for us as there will be more customers we can sell our mobile solutions to.

Another highlight in the report is that RIM became the No.1 PDA vendor as BlackBerry shipments grew 75.6 percent in the first quarter. This is a great news for our upcoming Mobile Sales for BlackBerry product.

Do This, Get Rich! Try to met these unmet software needs, you may get rich in the process, that is according to Business 2.o editors: Michael V Copeland, Om Malik and Erick Schonfeld. They proposed the following ideas and got actual feedback from veteran Venture Capitalists. Pretty cool!

Web Services:

PeoplesChoice – extracts data from online retailers like Amazon.com, eBay and others to create a virtual map of what’s selling on the Web …
NurseSwap – online service connects freelance nurses with short-staffed health care facilities.
CelebrityDigs – sells hotels web-based software that lets visitors tailor their stay online and takes a cut of in-room luxury goods sales.
Let’s Make a Deal – web service aimed at reducing your subscription and monthly service bills.

Software

SpotCaster – software to insert ads in podcast and other audio files.
MedTrack – RFID software system to track drugs and supplies in hospital to reduce medical errors.
EnMiser – software to enable energy savings
G Mob – a special MVNO just for video gamers thru a fast 3G network.
HeavyCE Systems – boat control software and hardware

General wisdom is that a family should not spend more than 30 percent of its income on housing.

According to California Association of Realtors’ Housing Affordability Index, only 13 percent of the households in the Bay Area in February (2005) had at least the minimum income of $157,210 to buy a home at the median price of $667,850.

For renters, the Center for Housing Policy found that a worker needs to earn $15.21 an hour in 2003 to have a two-bedroom apartment that did not exceed more than 30% of income.

An interesting post from Nick Malik on Feature Driven Development and its advantages (benefits) when compared with traditional waterfall based system.

It seems to me from the author’s analysis that small projects that are more suitable for Agile will benefit the most from Feature Driven Development. However, for large projects (e.g. require a team to work for more than a year), it probably makes more sense to use a combination of T-WBS and FFD. In other words, the big project can be broken into a couple of smaller FDD projects.

Full article: http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik/archive/2005/04/10/406965.aspx

I noticed that more people were referred to my site by Yahoo! than Google in the past few days. Was it because they put this clever float search bar on the my.yahoo.com home page?

With hundreds of millions of My Yahoo users, this could easily stole search users away from Google. Interesting fight to watch!