Geeky Peek

On Friday, we were at the Engadget Reader Meetup party.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x9RwJxr_Dc  – that’s me for those of you wondering what I look like.

It was great fun, and fantastic to meet the Engadget readers.  There was a lot of buzz and interest around those at the Peek corner – which was fun and cool, especially since some of the Engadget readers of the past had been a little harsh towards us.

If you remember the little BlackBerry Storm stunt (where we shackled people to giant BBs for two years of ‘hardtime’), we raffled it off at the the end of the night, much to the delight of the crowd.  Come on how cool is it to own a lifesize BB Storm with shackles on it?

So I briefly met Phil Torrone from Make (http://blog.makezine.com/).  I love Make.  Last week, I started getting inspired about wanting to open our little Peek, and meeting Make put me over the edge.   I have now emailed our sourcecode to a few hackers I know, and a few promised to do something zany with it.  And I’m going to create a special Dan-version of Peek software as well.  So hopefully in the new year we’ll see some cool/weird versions of Peeks out there.

We’ve talked about business, attachments, IM, calendar and so on. What if we did nothing but improve the email experience and email functionality?  What if we just kept focusing on email and made it easier to use?  For instance, what if we just made emails arrive faster on the Peek and added search?

We love the idea of making emails arrive faster, its our #1 priority.  We’d make the whole system real-time so an email arrives on your Peek as soon as it hits your inbox… but unfortunately that requires us doing deals with Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.  They only make POP & IMAP available to the general public, and their real-time APIs are proprietary and typically cost $$$.  Then once you get the deal done you have to do a long certification process… argh.  The reality is they are friendly and not that big a pain to deal with, but dealing with the pervasive business philosophy of unopenness can be difficult.  I guess I can’t complain that much, its not like we’re really open yet (its coming, I promise!).

Anyways, we’ve finished coding the real-time interface for one of the big four email providers.  Early next year, one service will get much faster… but you’ll have to stay tuned to find out which one.  The others are on track to happen within a month or two as well.

I’ve been reading a book from one of our customers, Lewin Edwards.  He has written several books on embedded system design:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=lewin+edwards&x=0&y=0

What interested me the most is how several of the themes in his books were very square/central to our discussions a year and a bit ago when we picked our chipset and platform.  And his book is from 2003.  Its fascinating how much and how little has changed in embedded development in that period, especially in comparison to system/server development.

A year and a bit ago our device guru Tom was having a lot of discussions around:

-chicken/egg of choosing chipset/platform… basically how do you choose the lowest cost/most capable chipset while supporting a robust/open platform that allows you to develop FAST

-what tools are available to debug, which ones do you use, how much do they cost… embedded stuff can be expensive

Lewin talks to many of these points in his book and it was interesting to relive some of our decisions through him.  Historically you can see the choice we made:

-lower cost chipset, affordability is a big part of our brand

-purpose-built, proprietary, not open software platform

Well a year and a half later we’re thinking about future versions of Peek, new platforms and new chipsets.  If any of you know any cool technology/platforms/chipsets/trends I’d love to hear about it.  Maybe our next version should run on Android or stripped down mobile linux??? Or maybe you think we should use a dual core processor so we can run Doom???

-Dan

A wii!!!  I love wii.  www.12daysofpeekmas.com

I think a lot of you received some old emails today. Its completely my fault, super sorry to everybody for the inconvenience.  We had some database synch’ing issues.

Ho ho ho, we’ve got a very cool christmas promo going on – you can check it out here:

http://www.12daysofpeekmas.com/

Like many of you, we like (re: are obsessed) with gadgets.  We like a lot of the gadgets our brothers and sisters in the gadget making world produce.  So with that in mind we are giving away some of our favourites.

If you buy a Peek on one of the days of Peekxmas you will be entered to win an extremely cool gadget.  On day 1 we are giving away 1 gadget, day 2 two gadgets, day 3 three gadgets,…, day 12 twelve gadgets. The odds of winning seem better on day 12, but more people will know about it, so are they?  I’ll let you guys figure out how to best play the game.

But we’re keeping the gadget a secret until the day of.  You gotta go the above website the day of to find out what we’re giving away on that day.  In fact, I don’t even know whats coming next, all though I hope and pray one day we give this away, its sooo rad – http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/lasonic-and-rap-up-team-for-the-limited-edition-i931-boombox/

Today’s is my absolute personal favourite.  I got one last September and read… err, I mean use… it all the time.  Go to the link above to check out what it is (or guess from my lame clue).

We’ve also been busy working on something new, we launched a new version of www.getpeek.com.  You now have the ability to buy airtime as a gift when you buy a Peek,  i.e. you can buy three month’s of service for somebody, when you buy the Peek.

This article that appeared in New Zealand gave me a chuckle, but also made me ask the titled question. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/C14CFCFB65E3B76DCC2575160003C15D

This is also an oft-heard, water tap conversation within Peek.  We are trying to build around a category we call “Personal Mobile Email”; which we envision as being distinct from the RIM-dominated “Business Mobile Email” category.

A lot of our customers have distinct domain addresses such as joe@joesfishingandbaitshop.com… so we are definitely getting some business users.

A few facts for some of you:

1. Exchange – you can integrate our Peek service to your exchange server, read here for more details – http://blog.getpeek.com/2008/11/microsoft-exchange-and-peek-it-can-be-done/

2.  Security – if your email service provider or email server supports SSL on POP & SMTP (e.g. gmail) than your Peek email service never exists on the public internet.  It is always within a secure environment.

3. Availability of support – I think support is huge for businesses.  In the world of BB you have to pay for gold/platinum support, in the world of Peek you can use the boards, email Gabe or I, phone care, etc.

So, that is my sales pitch.  I’ll let you guys give your honest feedback to a few questions:

1.  Are we a product for businesses?

2.  Are we a product for big businesses or small business or everything?

3.  What features would we need to be for small business?  What about for big business?

-Dan

Not sure if some of you picked up on this, but I thought it was kind of funny and have been meaning to talk about it.

When the Storm launched we did a little stunt.  We dressed up a few people in prisoner’s garbs and chained them to giant blackberry’s, giving them a 2 year sentence to paying too much!  I thought it was pretty funny. Unfortunately the folks at Verizon did not agree with us and asked us (via the police) to leave.

You can all check out the stunt footage here – http://www.youtube.com/peekinc

Gabe has also recently changed jobs to “Chief Mischief Officer” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvm0z-OgOZU

One more callout – we have a ‘ning’.  Go here to join it – http://peeksters.ning.com.  You can meet the people you talk to at Peek.

-Dan

While all of you pay a nice flat rate of $20/month, we annoyingly have to pay a per MB rate to our carrier partner.  What does this mean?  The more services we offer, the more we pay.  But fear not, we have a goal of not making you guys pay more than $20/month no matter what we do.. in fact if we could we’d reduce price!  Hence my post about compression, compression is super duper important to us.

So we are hoping that some of you could think about how you use your Peek and how we could send less data.

I’ll start with one idea to get the ball rolling.

Many emails might be ‘low value’ emails.  Things like newsletters or updates from fresh direct, etc.  We could try to recognize some of these low value emails and if we did recognize them we could not send the email body unless you explicity open the email.

How many of you receive a high volumes of said ‘low value’ emails?  Do you think this idea is possible, or would the experience of the lag of waiting to get the body be terrible?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this idea, and any other zany ideas you have to help us out!

Hope everybody enjoyed their turkeys.

Thanks to a friendly developer who responded to our need, we have a tool to upgrade software versions on the Peek in the works.  It will be available imminently if all goes to plan.

I won’t give away all the fun secrets, but there is also a new version of Peek software coming.  One cool improvement I will leak… we found a way to make the software much more responsive to typing, i.e. when you type a letter it shows up almost immediately on the screen, even if you bang away at it super fast.

There’s some other stuff coming on the server-side to meet alot of your requests as well, I’ll post more about them shortly.