In side by side comparison of EDGE and Wifi browsing on the T-Mobile’s new Blackberry 8320, The Boy Genius reports that EDGE is faster than wifi. That’s a big disappointment; interesting to see where the bottleneck lies and whether it can be improved by a software upgrade. The new 8320 also does not offer GPS; I think I’ll definite hold out for the 8820. Despite the disappointing Wifi throughput, I am still interested by the ability of the new Blackberries to support unlimited flat-rate voice calling over Wifi, since I’m often near a wifi connection at home, work, or a Starbucks.

No, it’s not my next venture, but the oPhone is is a very funny bit of self-parody by Microsoft.

(This is right up there with with Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging, which you should check out if you’re one of the three people on the planet who haven’t seen that earlier work.)

As has been publicly noted, I’ve decided to move on to my next opportunity after Jobster; my last day will be September 21st.

This change is exciting but of course bittersweet. I co-founded Jobster, and still feel a real sense of attachment to the team and its mission. I will be leaving behind many friends, though I hope to see a good number of them each Friday at our pick-up ultimate game (which will continue unabated through the fall and winter!)

I believe as much as ever in Jobster’s mission to provide employers a more targeted, cost-effective way to connect with job prospects wherever they are online.  Our affiliates network, Facebook application, and pay-for-performance job advertising are all expressions of this mission.

At the same time, I’m confident that it’s the right time to move on, and that this transition is a healthy thing for me and for Jobster as an organization.

My next opportunity is likely to be a very small mobile startup. I have a long standing interest in mobile, as seen by my work with MSN Mobile, Avogadro, Openwave, and Beyond411. This opportunity is a chance to deepen my experience in a technology-driven field I find fascinating, in the sort of early stage company that best suits me. 

It’s also a chance to assume a hands-on developer/architect role in the mainstream of product development, which is an important counterpoint to the things I’ve learned as CTO at Jobster. I don’t ever want to get too far away from writing code and building products.

For Jobster too, this change is healthy. 

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed at Jobster has been the chance to recruit colleagues who are better able than I am to contribute to long term growth and success of Jobster, and to help incorporate their strengths into the company culture.

One such person is Russell Williams, who will be assuming the dual role of CTO and VP of Engineering. His depth of management experience makes him the right leader for a company at our stage. Russell is both a thought leader and someone who can drive an engineering organization to accomplish our aspirations. His dual role will streamline decision making and enable Jobster to rapidly execute on ideas.

I wish the team well and will stay in touch.

I was excited to see with the iPod Touch that the vision of a phoneless iPhone with wifi has so quickly been realized.

Many have noted the lack of an email app, but for many folks the iPod is more about entertainment than email. 

Below are 5 key entertainment related apps that I hope will find their way on to the iPod, either from Apple or from less “official” channels.

1. Streaming music and photos from your Mac or PC: many folks have media collections larger than 16 gigabytes.  There’s no reason why the iPod couldn’t allow access to your full music and photo collection via streaming.  It could cache the song data so that you could browse remote music just as quickly as the music on your device; ditto for photos and thumbnails.
2. Offline web browsing and search: web content discovered on your PC or iPod could be saved for instant, offline access.  A built-in search engine would allow easy search and retrieval of all your cached content even when offline.  (The device is easily large enough to carry around a library of ebooks or the contents of our corporate internet, for example.)
3. Flash games: Adding Flash support to the browser would allow the wealth of flash based games to be played on the iPod touch.
4. DivX movies: DivX based movies could be either stream or stored on the device.
5. Skype:  add a microphone to the iPod Touch and it becomes a great WiFi Skype device.  The iPhone without the costs.  This one will require Apple’s help of course.

Below is an interesting paper and video on a technique for “retargeting” images to a new size.

Rather than simply stretching or cropping the image, this technique works by successively removing “uninteresting” seams from the image. (A seam is a connected path of pixels in the image; an uninteresting seam is one that minimizes the total difference in energy between itself and adjacent pixels.) The paper presents a simple dynamic programing algorithm that builds up the seam a pixel at a time, running in time proportional to the number of pixels. (Transforming a small image takes a couple of seconds.)

According to Arstechnica and Reuters:

Amid renewed rumors of an impending buyout by Microsoft, stock in Research In Motion (RIM), the company that produces the BlackBerry line of push e-mail devices, has surged up to an all-time high of $85. According to a story from Reuters, the two companies may be engaged in discussions that could see Microsoft grabbing up the Canadian-based company outright…

Some analysts are saying that the move is in response to Google’s announcement that it is developing a mobile phone running a Linux-based operating system. Others point to the success of the iPhone (and the interest, if not yet the actual software, in integrating it into business environments). These two players may make the smartphone industry much more competitive.