W/the stock doing as well as it is, it just hit $240, up from $220 only 30 days ago…I wouldn’t want to burn any good will with the Apple community just to show off a dot release, unless it was pretty major…the running of multiple apps simultaneously would be the most sought after feature…

That said, maybe this is more of the dis-information strategy from the team out in Cupertino and knowing 4.0 will be a disappointment to end users and the street…Better to take the hit now while you’re running hot, giving APPL time to recoup from the potential damage…or turn shite into shineola…

I’m sure you’re all following this more closely than I, but depending on which cloak and dagger analyst you’re listening to, target is now $270-$300 for APPL – I’m calling this a HOLD medium term (hee hee, just fun to talk like an analyst) until they ship new a Verizon phone – at which point they very well may hit $300…seems fantastical as I recall the 1996 Wired Magazine cover w/the word “Pray” and a thorny crown around the rainbow Apple logo…moreover I wish I still had the email I sent to friends in 1998 telling them to buy APPL @ $9…*crying* if only I had taken my own advice! My $1,000 sell off from my vested shares of M100 would have been worth like $250K! *Sobbing*…

If for some reason, Verizon doesn’t happen…I would sell @ anything above or equaling $250 short term, …as all bets are off, but APPL will have passed it by then I’m reasonably certain…and if they do the dutch w/Verizon…and continue to drive the surface computing, web standards and mobile markets…who knows where APPL may land…and what is all this talk about APPL challenging GOOG/MSFT on search? I don’t see it…if GOOG were smart, they would stick to their core business…I don’t get a warm feeling when I think of Android OS devices…but truth be told I haven’t used one yet either…

Hum…maybe they’ll announce Verizon today? Would certainly keep the momentum going! Enjoy the show.

Haiti has one hell of a history of getting the short end of the stick from the international community…here’s a good and brief background from Christiane Amanpour:

I’m no foreign policy expert, but if I were Haitian, I’m sure I’d have trouble mustering faith in my country’s ability to pull itself up by its own boot straps. I’d also be busting my hump to provide for my wife and kids…One of the most tangible thoughts running through my head during my week in Port-au-Prince was how amazingly lucky I and my family are…and how distressing it is to realize that w/all we have and our country has that we still have to hear the partisan crap spew out of politician’s mouths day in and day out…blah…

Haiti occupies about 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola:

View Larger Map

Comparing the Haitian population’s per capita income (2008 estimates) to their neighbors, the Dominican Republic (DR), you see the DR doing something right, as a resident of the DR makes about $8,000 USD as the average Haitian who makes about $1300. My family and I spend roughly that amount each year on our Verizon bill…

One person I was speaking with, after I had spouted off about the dire state of the Haitian economy/recovery and how lucky I am/we are and such…(see above) said to me, “Ok, yah…but viscerally, what was the thing that struck you most…” and at the time, I think I pointed to a moment when we were driving through an intersection on the lower end of stretch of Delmas below the airport when the van slowed…and a crowd had formed around a semi w/trailer attached just to our left…turned out it was a food truck…and it was trying hard to pull away…and within about 30 seconds the entire crowd had swarmed the truck…literally climbing up on the back and sides while the driver was trying to move off…it turned out the truck had come to the wrong location to distribute its food.

I certainly remember thinking to myself…”Ok, you’re not in Cape Cod anymore Bouv…” and as the furious crowd pounded our van a bit and we continued on…you realize these people are frustrated by decades of inefficiency, by a huge lack of understanding with regard to their poverty level, by the insanity of western bureaucracy…and without much by way of recourse, on the ground it becomes Darwinian in the most basic sense in a Haitian hurry.

I was reading an article yesterday in this Magazine I’m enthralled with…called Monocle. An aside; I am a periodical/short print format whore…I love magazines/event catalogs/institutional publications…I love the photography, I love the design, I love the paper, I love the writing, I love the formats…IMHO, some of the best work done in print media happens in periodical/short form.

I’ve long since canceled all of my subscriptions, but used to voraciously read Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, W, MacWorld and anything else I could get my hands on…now a while back I’ve traded in some miles for subscriptions…which I won’t do again…but I was able to get the long sought after Economist, which was always simply too much cash to justify my infrequent reads…when I do get to read a whole issue, I feel like I’ve had a top flight global policy briefing coupled w/some interesting discussions with a recruiter for aid organizations.

Anyway, this article which is unfortunately available online to subscribers only, was talking about the best teams in the world for disaster recovery…and of course, they all are based in locations where extreme people blow themselves up or where wars are currently raging…the team cited as best in the world is Israeli, permanently based at that country’s main airport…they were on the ground in Haiti inside of 12 hours after the earthquake. Survival rates for those who survive the initial quake are best inside the first 24 hours…so they don’t wait for official sign off, they just find the best aircraft and go…they worry about where the team will sleep later…Made up of elite Israeli forces, there are interdisciplinary members who break out into functions…Medical, logistics, operations, supplies, and they set up in Port-au-Prince what the article referred to as the “Roles Royce of field hospitals.” Apparently they had ER, maternity, radiology, pediatric…they could handle 500 patients at any one time…

You read something like that, and working for a non-profit, you think…”yes, for sure…we could make some improvements…” but in the bigger picture section of the massive pin-up homasote wall that my brain has become, you find that dusty note where all the good human qualities are listed, and photographed and memorialized and say…”Why can’t we get there?”

I’ve had a lot of questions about “scary moments” on the ground in Haiti, and for sure, there were a couple…as I mentioned above…what may be scarier still is the idea that a cherubic caucasian guy like me gets a chance to work in a place like post-disaster Haiti, only to come home, fall back into business as usual consumption and partisan Sarah Palin bashing armchair fluffernutters…oops! I forgot, I have to go to Wal-Mart this afternoon…

Congratulations, that’s 1000 stolen strategic plans! Their customers may become confused when they accidentally wander into an Apple store looking for support for Microsoft products…oh well…Apple will probably still help them out…

Enjoy!

The Mashable team is streaming their conference in NYC today. Thanks guys…

• Who in their right mind breaks into their own home without taking a look around and thinking first…moreover…
• Who in their right mind, as a tenured professor at Harvard, can’t hide a spare key for themselves or find a key buddy?
• Who in their right mind and of any color or creed screams at a white cop in their own home when they know their rights?
• Who in their right mind…arrests an aggravated Harvard professor when he’s clearly in his own home?
• Who in their right mind…calculatingly takes the last question about Skip at a press conference on health care?
• Who in their right mind…gives a dodged Clinton-esque response on the President’s comments the night before?

Of course racial profiling exists, because there’s a disparity in the wealth of the white vs. all other races…and so the other races are more apt to commit crime, thus creating the profiling of people by race…vicious I know…

Clearly the Skip Gates incident doesn’t merit any of this coverage…moreover I think it’s a moronic wastes of everyone’s time…most importantly the President’s…friend or no friend…the calculation of taking the only question off the health care topic was tacky both on taking the question and in the use of the word “stupidly”. Skip should get a plastic rock or maybe a yard gnome with a spare key…and the state of California should heavily tax both gay and heterosexual marriage + the sale of weed and put the money back in early childhood education…and the rest of the country can follow suit…causing people to seriously think twice before they make foolish decisions that affect other people’s lives…I mean really…

Palm sent the folks who signed up to win a Pre an email letting them know they could buy it.

UPDATE: Here is a link to a NY Times story talking about demand…

Ok, I’ve been reading every damn note, article, tweet, and blog post re: PALMs new Pre smartphone. And have come to the conclusion that the Pre will not be an iPhone killer out of the gate. Here are my reasons:

1. The poor battery life will be the deal breaker.
2. People are_not_going to leave Verizon or AT&T for this device.
3. Apple will address the majority of the Pre’s competitive advantages in the iPhone 3.0 release, likely to hit on 6/8/09.
4. The gambit by Palm to sync the Pre with iTunes will only serve to highlight the Pre’s shortcomings.
5. By the time Verizion might offer the phone, sometime in 2010, another manufacturer will deliver a more intersting product…likely APPL.

Sprint’s decision to allow buyers to avoid paying full retail and take advantage of the instant rebate only at Best Buy stores speaks to another major issue for Sprint/Palm; namely the size and ability of their channel to sell this item through.

I’ll bet the sales of this device will peak in the next 72 hours never to see the same spike in demand over time…they’re simply not enough people who will seek the phone out…or trust the slickster hawkers at mall kiosks to drop their existing plans to sign up w/Sprint for a smartphone they need to come some $300+ out of pocket for…and then only to find 20 apps and less than a days useful life in the battery…it’s going to take interest over the long tail for this device to catch on…if it catches on at all.

Anyway, as a former Palm loyalist and gadget hound, I’m interested to see this device…if I find myself at the mall and Palm has done its job supplying the aformentioned channel, then maybe I will see it. I’ll be sure to post an update w/my thoughts on the device itself if I do.

So my son put me on the hook for the creation of cup cakes a couple of weekends ago…and later that day we’re in the store…after making my way to the aisle w/the baking goods…I find the box…and I’m in no hurry, Although Oskar, my son, clearly is.

I’m looking the box over…I see the picture…beautiful frosted cups of moist cake waiting to be snarfed by my son and his willing accomplices, my wife and daughter…while I’m out toiling and sweating and fighting off the inequities of the world…including the ones foisted by Mr. Duncan and Ms. Hines or whomever is behind that evil faceless corporate monster!

On the box, it says one will need…

1. 1/2 cup of water
2. At least 1 egg…(I can’t remember exactly)
3. Butter or some butter-ish substance

And that’s all…it says nothing about needing the little cups…nor does it say anything about needing, the key ingredient, frosting.

Now, I get home, and my wife assures me there is no frosting in the box. My daughter finds cups from some previoius cup-caking adventure…but sure as shit, no frosting. WTF!

Ok, now I’m peeved, more over…I feel discriminated against. Why the double standard? Because I’m a man?

Listen here Mr. Duncan Hines people…in a world full of disclaimers…would a simple “Frosting and cups sold seperately” be too much to ask? My son was ready to spit…the only upshot of course being that my loving wife made the frosting from scratch…

Still, it makes no logical sense that you would put the picture of the completed item on the box when in fact, the complete item would, in fact be NAKED! Sans the joi de vivre of the sucrose blanket it so deserved…end of rant.

Ok, the NYT is saying the indicators are that Blu-ray is on the upswing…personally, I don’t buy it…I don’t know anyone w/a Blu-ray player that didn’t come as a by-product in a game console and I don’t know anyone buying any discs? Do you?

Disc sales may be up…now that there’s only one format…that makes sense…and the need for a physical disc…that’s pucky…tell it to the music business…optical media in my opinion is a dying creature…and as soon as the FCC get’s its head out of its arse and mandates that cable companies allow consumers to purchase content a la carte, you’ll see just how dead it is.

"Oh we'll be doing applications, don't you remember? We had lots of them..."

Ok, so believe it or not…there were smartphones before the iPhone…in fact, PALM had made quite a few of them…prior to my owning an iPhone, I owned no less than 4 Palm devices…2 of which were smartphones…the Treo 600 and the 650…both of which were handy devices…in fact, for note taking, IMHO, they were better devices than my iPhone…which I still can’t import those notes into w/out a mod…that said…the iPhone blows the Treo away on almost all other counts…as soon as APPL made their phone available…and I managed to get my hands on one…I sold both the iPod and the Treo…because I was sick of having to carry around mulitple devices…

Fast forward to ah…yesterday. As soon as Palm announced their Pre product…I signed up for the mailing list…wanting to make sure I could understand what the product might bring to the table…so far it seems to be mostly marketing promises…Palm has a talented team…I believe they do get mobile and touchscreen usability…and IMHO competition for the iPhone is healthy…will provide for better products all around…but these situational videos that Palm has created just hit me the wrong way…They’re attempting to be aspirational…but they strike me as stiff…the feature set, apart from the true multitasking isn’t that sexy…and if I had to put a wager down today…I’d say that Apple won’t be waiting by the sidelines to see what Palm’s next play will be…I suspect on June 8 @ WWDC, in a hail of a possible Jobsian glory, SJ may rise from the dead and reclaim his seat on the throne as King Geek, delivering a thunderclap revision to the iPhone product that leaves the Pre stillborn. Or maybe they’ll just ship iPhone OS 3.0…either way…Pre is going to have a hill to climb…