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According to both CNN and USA Today, the FCC is expected to announce a nationwide system that sends major alerts to cellphones via text message. Rumor has it that these messages will initially be limited to the English language in 90 words or less and would warn users about events like terrorist attacks, major weather situations and Amber alerts. Participation is voluntary on the part of wireless carriers, but it is unlikely that any of the national providers will opt out.

-Gizmodo

As far as my personal opinion on the matter? I just find it said that the companies financial adviser has a far better grasp of what the company needs and has been doing wrong than any of the executive heads. Motorola hasn’t put out an innovative phone for a long time and personally, I wasn’t a big fan of the RAZR. After about a month of use I sent it back. Also, if any mobile company (other than perhaps Apple’s iPhone division) wants to be successful in the next 3-8 years then they need to endorse projects like Google’s Android platform. Anyways – on to more important things.

Last month we were contacted by the late Geoffrey Frost’s personal adviser at Motorola; until Frost’s death in 2005, Numair Faraz worked under the Motorola’s former CMO — the man widely regarded as the father of the RAZR. Like many (ourselves included), over the years Numair has become increasingly disenfranchised with the company’s direction — enough so that he compelled us to publish his letter to Motorola, its board of directors, and MOT investors everywhere regarding the company’s egregious missteps and mismanagement.

In researching the myriad claims raised in this letter — which we believe to be true — we also discovered a number of other unsettling things about Motorola’s corporate past in the last five years, such as certain gross corporate excesses demanded by Zander and his inner circle (like a small fleet of extravagant private jets, where most companies that size might only have one, if any), or the fact that Motorola’s current CEO, Greg Brown, is so technologically out of touch he refuses to use a computer for communications, and has all his email correspondences printed by his secretary and replied to by dictation.

There’s no doubt in our minds that Motorola is in dire straits. But today’s news of the company’s broken-off mobile division only serves to cement the fact that the company no longer knows how to conduct its core consumer business, and is squandering time and money as it flounders in a market that long since passed it by. Motorola did not comment on this story. Letter posted after the break.

Dear Greg Brown, and the rest of the executive team at Motorola,

As you may or may not recall, I worked with Geoffrey Frost as a personal adviser during his days as Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of the company. I was the one quoted in Forbes in 2003 as saying “Motorola’s biggest problem is that Samsung kicks ass,” and eventually came to spend nearly three years working with Geoffrey during his efforts to revamp the company’s mobile lineup, which eventually saw the launch of the RAZR. As I told the company’s senior designers at Motorola’s 75th anniversary meeting: create something cooler (and more expensive) than anything else out there, and everyone will want it.

After the success of the RAZR, while Geoffrey was tied up every which way in ROKR development, meetings, criscrossing travel, and so on, through his associates I implored the company to beef up their software expertise, and focus on creating socially networked devices (this was in the years before MySpace and Facebook became the juggernauts they are today). Your predecessor, Ed Zander, had little interest in this, and instead insisted on parlaying his relationship with Steve Jobs into the ill-fated ROKR effort in order to prop up Motorola’s stock price.

Zander, who seemed to care more about his golf score than running one of America’s greatest technology companies, left all of the hard work to Geoffrey; I’ve always considered it Motorola’s dirty little secret that the strategy for their entire profit machine was run by the company’s CMO — not the rest of the company’s executives, who are as inept now as they have ever been.

Many close to Geoffrey believed Ed Zander worked him to death, putting the pressure of the fate of the company in his hands. [That was certainly the buzz around the industry at the time. -Ed.] I took his untimely death in 2005 very hard, and knew that the company would head downhill in the aftermath. On a personal note, Lynne, his wife blamed the company for his passing. She committed suicide soon after.

Meanwhile, Ed Zander continued to reap the dividends of Geoffrey’s work as the company made billions in profit from overselling the RAZR for years. Instead of channeling that money into the obvious — further development of groundbreaking consumer devices — Zander purchased enterprise companies such as Symbol ($3.9b), and engineered billions of dollars in stock buybacks.

As I told Zander in a phone call in 2007, I felt that he was setting the company up for massive failure. He had the audacity to say, “Well, maybe Geoffrey should have come up with a better successor to the RAZR,” and told me to “Wait for big things in 2008.” I guess he was right — the golden parachute he got for his exit from the company was worth about 30 million dollars — and that doesn’t include his accumulated Motorola stock.

Your appointment to the position of chief executive gave me cause for hope, and I reached out to you; I knew you were one of the main drivers behind the enterprise acquisitions, and that you had zero expertise in consumer devices. Surely you could use some help in turning Motorola’s flagging cellphone business around?

But apparently different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola — except instead of merely being inept, you’re actually actively killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer side of Motorola doesn’t give you a valid reason for selling the handset business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence.

You clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mold Motorola into the market leader it can and should be. Taking control of the handset division, as you have recently announced, will accomplish very little except but to give you an ability to say, “We tried our best” — which you haven’t — when you finally do cart the business off to the highest bidder.

In order to turn the handset division around, you need to bring in another Frost; someone worldly and dynamic who is more interested in Motorola’s success than their own corporate career. You need to task the company’s designers with the same mantra that created the RAZR — make me a phone that looks, feels, and works like a symbol of wealth and privilege. Recognize the superiority of American software, and bring back those jobs so irresponsibly outsourced to China and Russia. Fully embrace embedded Linux and Google’s Android initiative, and take the phone operating system out of the stone age.

Recognize that, while rich people don’t really know what they want, the lower end of the market does — and fund the development of an online “crowdsourced” device design platform to take advantage of this fact. Get rid of all of your silly, useless marketing, including those overpriced and completely ineffective celebrity endorsements, and do one unified global campaign with Daft Punk (the only group whose global appeal extends from American hip hoppers to trendy Shanghai club kids to middle-aged Londoners). Understand that the next big feature in handsets isn’t a camera or a music player — it is social connectedness; build expertise in this area, and sell it down the entire value chain.

I was there when Motorola’s handset division was brought back from the brink of death 5 years ago. Follow my advice, and we can do it again.

Maybe it sounds like I take the downfall of Motorola personally; I do. It was my experience at Motorola, with people like Geoffrey and all of the loyal employees who still remain, that taught me what corporate America can and should be. But with people such as Zander and yourself, Motorola symbolizes the worst of our country’s corporate culture.

As an immigrant American, and someone who has traveled all over the world, I really do appreciate the uniqueness and importance of the American culture of creativity and ingenuity. Whereas other countries back their money on gold and commodities, we back ours on our ability to invent the future. The failure of Motorola as an American institution of creativity and innovation, should you let it happen, will now be entirely of your doing. Hopefully you’ll keep that in mind while the board has the accountants prepare your golden parachute.

Regards,
Numair Faraz

Dated Feb 5, 2008. Letter edited for form.

I’m only really into it so I can start messing around with Ruby on Rails – which I’ve liked so far programming-wise.

Annnnd – we’re done. Great successs.

Well – you can. Facebook has apparently included the ability for applications on it’s site to push info into the status area. Although it’s not quite as easy as checking a button in your profile settings, it’s simple enough. All you have to do is use the application TwitterSync. TwitterSync will take whatever update you post on Twitter and change your Facebook status accordingly. Furthermore, if you wish it can filter out certain commands so that it doesn’t pull certain tweets. For instance, if you’re blog updates your Twitter page with a link to the post and a notification that it’s been updated and you don’t want it to be posted on your status, you can enter a keyword and it won’t post any tweets containing that keyword.

In addition to that, I’m now using Google Talk to update my Twitter page, so I don’t even have to open up a browser. Simply send a message to the Twitter account on Gtalk and it sends it.

Nifty stuff. Get on board MySpace??

Then a game review company (Gamespot, actually) fires one of it’s lead reviewers for a brutally honest review that was critical of a handicapped game because it was advertising heavily on Gamespot. That’s right – Gamespot would prefer their employees lie for financial gain rather than give good, honest reviews as a review media outlet.

Well, the plot to the story of the web these days seems to be full of people that got knocked down, picked themselves up, dusted off, & trump their previous employees.

Those geeks that used to work at TechTV? Kevin Rose, Alex Albrecth, Patricmk Norton, Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, Dan Huard, Jessica Corbin and even past behind-the-scenes operators like segment producer David Prager are just a few of the major players you might remember from TechTV and they’re back to producing a new sort of media. It’s television for the internet and it’s getting huge. Revision3 -  with twelve shows updated weekly and another five joining the set in 2008, the site is pushing out content that is, in fact, in large demand and they’re producing it for the right audience. With shows ranging from the top news stories from Kevin Rose’s Digg being dicussed over a beer with previous The Screen Saver’s cohost Alex Albrecht to a talk show with Martin Sargent where he interviews all sorts of odd personalities from the web – it’s television for a new generation.

They have the Totally Rad Show which is a mixture of reviewing new television shows, movies, and video games while also reminiscing about and comparing to older flicks and games.

But all of these shows are not just shot on hand held consumer video cameras. They’re professional shot and edited on sets in a studio. They’re actual segments ranging from daily shorts to full 30-45 minute (and occasionally longer) shows that you can stream from Revision3′s website or download in a variety of formats.

And it’s free. . .

Just like standard television, the shows are all ad-supported. Unlike standard cable, however, you don’t pay an access fee. “Commercials are typically at the beginning and end of a show and presented by the host – usually with a code that grants you discounts for things like GoDaddy.com or Netflix online movie rentals. Sponsors range from Sony’s Playstation Network to the Microsoft Zune. Even IBM and Adobe Systems understand the potential for advertising revenue and have jumped on board in the past.

So head over to Revision3 and check out the show schedule.

Oh. . . And in case you’re wondering – that reviewer from Gamespot? He’s teamed up with a buddy and formed his own review company. Look for updates on that as summer approaches.

If Facebook and MySpace would open up a little bit, imagine how nice it would be to send your status across multiple services. For instance, I like having Twitter for it’s stand-alone “what am I doing” style status. It would be nice if I could tell Facebook and MySpace to import a status RSS feed from Twitter, which it already has available for anyone to use. For you still not quite up to speed on web trends, that would basically pull anything I posted on twitter to be displayed on Facebook and MySpace so I didn’t have to login to multiple networks.

Why isn’t this happening now? Probably stubborness to keep you on one social network and not drift to others. Most of these sites make the majority of their revenue serving adverts on your pages – just like TV commercials but the majority of them have content and services you don’t have to pay for. Now I honestly don’t think it really would have a huge impact on revenue to add this – infact, I know I’d rather use a service that was more open to making it easier for their users.

Unfortunately, services like Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us and more aren’t being utilized by average internet users. Don’t get me wrong – these sites have a large database of users, but they’re still not touching your average teenage to adolescent userbase in areas like the midwest – and while I know few users in my area taking advantages of these services, almost everyone has both a Facebook and a MySpace. If the demand was there, I’m sure we’d see even more support across websites and services.

There’s so many ideas that would be very neat if implemented to provide support and data across networks. Unforunately, data always has a price and everyone wants it, no matter how mundane it seems to you.

And one last thing, as a side note. Facebook and MySpace are virtually the same anymore – including both having applications which you’ll see rolling out on MySpace very soon. I’ve been tinkering with the opensocial API (I signed up for the dev program after writing my last post on API) and it’s easy enough to use that I’d put a pretty good wager on you’ll start getting those invites you hate on Facebook in your MySpace inbox any day here.

API’s are all over the place and you’re most likely using one. Why am I talking about API’s? Because there are some websites that either don’t have them in place, they’re not easily accessable, or they’re handicapped in performance and don’t allow you to do much. Facebook’s API is wonderful. You can very easily, with little programming knowledge at all, create a very simple application.

MySpace on the other hand, I’m not so sure of. Google developed something called opensocial, which MySpace jumped on board for. Typically anything Google touches turns to gold and I’m a huge fan of the company – hell, they turned a search box into one of the biggest companies on the internet. (Yes, I’m using the term search box and of course know that’s a bit of an understatement.)

I haven’t taken the time to delve into the API much yet, and I’m a little concerned about doing so. While the idea is good, opensocial is, as the name might imply, very open. And the more open you are on the internet, the more vulnerable you are. One of the first sites to use opensocial was cracked within 20 minutes of going live with the API and allowed attackers to view private information. I would have prefered that MySpace had developed it’s own API with a bit more limits. Had they done so, I would have liked to have seen the following features.

*Pulling content from blog posts.

*Pulling content from bulletin posts, in a similar fashion.

*Pulling content from events and calendars.

*Providing a means to pull albums and specific pictures from a users profile.

These are very basic requests and would only be allowed on public profiles. Why would this work well? Because beyond the standard users of MySpace, there is a large amount of musician, comedian, commercial, and soon celebrity profiles. While I could care less about most of these, a solid API would simplify things for smaller bands on the web.

I’m currently doing the coding for a website for a local band in my area. If I had access to these tools, they could post news/events/photos on their MySpace page and have them appear on their website. They’re still allowed a professional web prescense of their own while being able to keep their fans & friends on MySpace updated at all times and able to communicate with them via that platform.

Anyways – I don’t know. I felt it was time for a good rant, but it’s becoming obvious I’m out of practice as my hands are starting to cramp up and this has been an unbelievably nerdy post of no worth. Until next time.