My previous laptop — besides being old and rickety — was also large (17″) and heavy (5 lbs).  Coupled with the other stuff I have to lug around, I was looking for something small and light, recognizing that my needs were very modest.  Light emailing, blogging, and hooking into the virtual office to update patient files.

I ended up going with the MSI Wind for my purposes.  I tried the Asus EEE, but found that amongst the various models available in Toronto, the keyboards were tiny.  Miniscule, in fact.  The HP 2133 was another one I looked at, but it was a little more expensive ($700+) and came with Vista. Boo.  Dell came out with their own super light sub-notebook, but it came out before I picked up the Wind, which does come with Windows XP.

If you want specs, you can check out this website, but subjectively I’ll just say that it has done the trick.  Its about 2lbs and the size of a largish softcover novel.  The size of the keyboard is just large enough to accomodate adequate sized keys for my clumsy fingers, and doesn’t make many compromises for the sake of a form factor. 

One of the biggest problems that I just recently solved, however, was the touchpad that comes with it.  It was far too sensitive.  I’d be writing, and then the cursor would go to another position based on a phantom (or what would seem like a phantom) touchpad-click.  It was so bad that at one point I was considering returning the item.  

The MSI Wind, luckily, has some active boards that pointed me to the solution, which was an updated driver which I will be happy to host here –> Wind MSI Touchpad Driver, in case the original site goes down.

The updated drivers, I think, natively make the touchpad less sensitive, and also, thank goodness, allow me to disable it automatically when I’m using the keyboard.  

I’ve found the MSI Wind good value for money ($500) which is quite modest in its specs, but adequate for what I need to do.  If I had any gripes now, it would be in its battery life, which, for the 3 cell version that I have, can’t seem to eek out any more than a couple hours.  Perhaps there are other ways to squeeze out another hour, but I haven’t found them yet.

In particular, they’re offering two important features

• Unlimited Storage — while you’re paying how much for how much space at that other place?
• Marketplace – users will be able to sell their photos and keep 90% of the sale

The official launch will be heading out within the next 12-24 hours, but Kris has released a “Launch Video” that shows a lot of the newer features.

Which is over here at Vimeo:: Zooomr Mark III Launch Demo! from Kristopher on Vimeo

Unfortunately it isn’t really annotated so here are some notes that I took that might help it go down a little easier

• Logins: You can now login with a proper email / password process that is familiar to everyone — in addition to openID
• Smart Search: you can search with some unusual features like “most awesome” and “near location” (such as “near starbucks”)
• World Through Photos: this is a feature that Kris spent a *lot* of time talking about, in that you’ll be able to use a mashup of GoogleMaps to search for place names, using their proper names. For example, hitting in “Eiffel Tower” will take you to where it is on GoogleMaps (and presumably some photos as well)
• Discover: Best Hundred — you can discover the best one hundred photos over a given time period, whether it be over the past year, past month or what have you at a glance
• Groups: Think Google groups, but centered around photos, allowing you to create messages and what not around specific photos.
• You: There a lot of slick Ajax to create a rich user interface with respect to viewing your own photos and profile
• Widgets Within Photos: Even though Kris demonstrated this, I still had a hard time understanding what he meant — perhaps that you would be able to syndicate information *within* photos through different media as widgets, such as tags, and so on. In fact …
• People Tagging: You can tag people in photos, like what is already offered in Facebook, and then send a message to them about the photo that you took … a viral feature for photos.
• Instantaneous search: Through the magic of Ajax, things look fast without loading times
• Marketplace: Kris didn’t share to many details other than it will be easy, you can charge ridiculous amounts (if the market will bear it), and there’s 90% share for users
• Comments / Messaging / Dialogue: There is a sophisticated messaging system for each photograph allowing you to have a conversation with different people underneath each photograph — it will also let the photographer know so as to include him the conversation:
• Search by color / palette: You can add in hexadecimal colors to search for different photos
• Portals: Creating a photographic link to another photograph on someone else’s photograph (a “portal”)
• Zipline: You’ll be able to see at a glance, and in reverse chronological order what your friends are doing, saying, and their photos

It looks like a fairly awesome product so I’m really looking forward to it as it looks to be entirely free. There are over 250 new features as well.

Watching the video, it looks like there are three big themes involved with Zooomr Mark III:

1. Context — being able to place photographs in context, with respect to who shot them, why they shot them, and having conversations around them
2. Network — Zooomr really looks to create a real social network for photographers and their photographs, coupled with messaging, profiles, and an easy way to share their love for this hobby
3. Rich Interface – Ajax is used aplenty to create a rich environment with quick loading times, eye catching animation and a whole lot more

Anyway, with the official release its something we’ll be able to see all for ourselves. Congratulations Kris and Thomas — this looks like one helluva product!

Geni is super easy to use, and makes geneology something that any one can do and can make anyone *interested* in doing.  It has a slick Flash interface, so you can add family members to your tree, and moreover, can click and drag your way around the maps you create.  The best thing, really, is to check it out yourself (go on — I’ll wait).

I think its easy to get excited over Geni.  In my mind its ease of use and its topic (geneology) has the *potential* to be the MySpace or Facebook for the baby boomer set; or, or do for baby boomers (and older!) what Facebook has done for Generation X/Y’ers who had no inkling about social networks: be so successful and prevalent that it crosses the “chasm” to every day folk who are casual users at best of the Internet.

Why?  Well, it basically creates a slick framework for the creation of a social network for families.  And for folks who aren’t as familiar with fast moving trends in web applications (I’m careful not to sound agist here and I think I’m losing), who basically use their computers for word processing and email, this could be big.  After all, what easier and better way to get engaged, and enroll people into your social network than the most trusted people you know?

And you know that “hey that’s awesome” feeling when you finally get in touch with your best friend in Kindergaren through Facebook?  I can forsee the same thing happening for other folk who are using Geni, when they start seeing relatives they haven’t seen from or heard from in *ages*.

Currently they do have some elements of what constitutes a social network.  You can leave messages and update your own profile, but right now you can’t actually write or leave messages on your own profile (like a blog).  You can check out profiles of other relatives on your own blog and the like as well. 

The real issues, however, will be two fold:

i) creating enough stickiness: the average number of pageviews for a facebook visit is 20 — I have no idea what they are for Geni, but for me the novelty of the site wore off pretty fast after I created all my relatives that I knew and invited.  Since that time I know that I haven’t really been back.  Perhaps this is a function of the size of families, or, how interested you can get family members to start adding their own extended families in. 

ii) creating a real business model: so, other than selling ads, Geni hasn’t yet found any other way to monetize themselves.  Will they extend their revenue model to include things like selling swag with your family information on it?  Or go to a freemium model with some features going at a price (or a la carte)?  Who knows?

Geni has a lot going for it, but it has a few issues that it needs to take care of before it earnes the $100M valuation in my eyes.  In the mean time, go on and check it out — and I dare you to not start adding your own family while you’re at it! :)