Wow! It's taken me a day to get over the exhaustion of Podcamp Atlanta 2007. Kudos to Amber, Rusty, and Penny and everyone else involved for pulling off such a great event.

So I sit down and sort through all the new business cards I collected, and it occurs to me that I can't remember half the people I spoke to by business card (the good news is I did remember the other half!) Which is when it hit me; why don't people start putting a photo URL on their business card? For example, here's mine (notice the Well Designed URL :-), but of course it's not yet on my business card:

Photo: http://www.mikeschinkel.com/photo/

Of course, that begs the question of a Personal URL on a business card. A person's personal URL is a URL that points to their personal "About" page, and I think everyone should get one. Of course that URL should also have a photo:

About: http://www.mikeschinkel.com/about/

Note My "about" page points to the "About Me" category on my blog, but I plan to write a good concise "about" page in the near future. And my next business cards will have my photo and my about URLs listed.

technorati tags: business cards, photo url, personal url, about pages, podcampatlanta2007, podcampatlanta, podcamp, atlanta

I just learned that Microsoft has decided to make the Visual Studio Express tools free forever. This to me shows Microsoft's acknowledgment that people are not willing to invest their time learning a product that they will eventually have to pay more for then they have funds available or earmarked, especially young people. I greatly applaud this move, and I wish more software vendors would do this with their products (and I'm thinking of component and tools vendors for .NET developers.)

But how can companies make money giving away their software? I believe software has a lot more value to someone once they've learned it and can concretely understand it's value after which they would be more then happy to spend their money to upgrade to more advanced features.However, to those software vendors who think they can release a free but essentially crippled product, don't.  No one will waste their time learning to use a crippled product. 

We are in a new era, one where software is not so much viewed because it offers value to a user but instead viewed by whether it is worth someone's time to learn. This because of the plethora of software (and information) available and because most people won't realize there is value is software until after they have learned it.  A software vendor's job today needs to be to convince someone that their product is worth that person's time to learn.

News.com has a clip about a system which BMW is developing (see photo):

BMW is working on a communication system that will let one car convey information about road conditions to those behind it. In this photo, the LCD screen on the dashboard flashes up a warning to a moving car that the road is slippery ahead. Minutes before, another car did a power slide through a wet patch on the same path.

Talk about the need for (de-facto) standards! 

This is a really cool use of peer-to-peer technology; let's hope that short-sighted greed doesn't get in the way and have BMW and other automakers try and make such systems proprietary.

P.S. Let's also hope that they design the UI well enough so that people don't crash when sending out warnings!