T-Mobile Just Launched A Smartphone Revolution. Did You Notice?

by Asif Khan

I love T-Mobile. For years, they have been my MOST favorite wireless carrier. Besides being the least expensive and having a great pre-paid plan, they were the only US carrier to deploy a feature called GSM UMA which allows you to make calls over WiFi when no GSM reception was available. If you live in a hilly area like I do with spotty cell reception or if you travel overseas and need to make calls in a pinch, UMA rocks!

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Cloud Computing, Milkshakes and the Future of IT

by Asif Khan

Last summer, the CIO of a large law firm I had once worked with wanted to meet for lunch to discuss cloud computing. He was worried that the increasing use of “shadow IT” at his firm could lead to a serious security breach. He figured that if the IT organization could develop and demonstrate a cloud computing proof of concept, that could buy him some time to transition to a Service-Based IT model over the long term in order to mitigate the threat of his firm’s intellectual property being exposed.

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Marketing 101: Jobs-To-Be-Done Theory

by Asif Khan

On a sweltering summer day a couple years ago, I took my aging Lexus to the dealer for scheduled service and to prepare it for trade-in. The A/C was blowing warm air so I asked them to check it out, hoping it would be a minor fix.

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Here is an awesome post I found which nicely ties together my two passions: music and technology. Enjoy! -Asif

Music Machinery

Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years,  rock drumming has changed.  Many drummers will now don headphones in the studio (and sometimes even for live performances)  and synchronize their playing to an electronic metronome – the click track.   This allows for easier digital editing of the recording.  Since all of the measures are of equal duration, it is easy to move measures or phrases around without worry that the timing may be off.  The click track has a down side – some say that songs recorded against a click track sound sterile,  that the missing tempo deviations added life to a song.

I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK ( remix is a Python library that allows you to  analyze and…

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2013 Must-Have Device: Smartphone? Tablet? Or Both?

By Asif Khan

Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places. I took the family to Thailand on holiday in December. I noticed one of our tour guides had a 7 inch Android tablet and a Nokia feature phone. I asked him why he didn’t have a smartphone. He said he has the tablet, which is better. Then I noticed that there were smartphone ads everywhere but smartphone users were few and far between in Thailand. But I saw lots of tourists with a tablet-plus-feature-phone combo like our tour guide had. It turns out you can get really nice Nokia feature phones for $50 or less throughout Asia and buy SIM cards in every country for next to nothing.

This got me thinking that this combination was so much smarter than having an expensive smartphone, as we tend to have in the US. Here’s why.

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Has Apple Finally Jumped the Shark? Um. No.

by Asif Khan

We’ve all read the doom and gloom articles on the fate of Apple since the passing of Steve Jobs. This article anointed Jobs the Ronald Reagan of Technology. Several others started asking “WWJD” (“what would Jobs do?”) every time the post-Jobs Apple had a misstep (like Apple Maps). And one can convincingly make the argument that Apple is not the same scrappy underdog we all used to root for.

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Van Halen Hates Brown M&Ms??

by Asif Khan

I first saw Van Halen in concert when I was about 15. We’re talking about the real Van Halen! Not Van Hagar and definitely not the lame Van Halen with that singer from Extreme. We’re talking about David Lee Roth! Spandex! Kung fu kicks! Pyrotechnics! 20 minute guitar solos! The sweet smell of chronic all around me–but not from me because that would be illegal 😉 THAT Van Halen!

All You Need Is Love…and an iPad

A Love Letter to Steve Jobs and John Lennon

by Asif Khan

Today, Sunday October 9, 2011, is an auspicious day for us Beatle fanatics. It is John Lennon’s 71st birthday: millions of us every year celebrate the life of the man on this day by swimming in his music. Interestingly, today is also the day that Sir Paul McCartney is marrying for the third time. I hope he got a prenup this time and I wish him better luck than he had with #2…that last one was a doozy!

I Love/Hate my iPad (and the promise of Windows 8)

by Asif Khan

I’m writing this from Seat 3F on Southwest, returning home from San Jose. The guy in 3E is encroaching on my personal space with his elbows and, um, wide stance. The guy in 2F just reclined his seat all the way back. No way I can pull out a laptop under these conditions. I love my iPad.