The cat has at least started to come out of the bag with regards to the long-rumored "Google phone"; details about the Nexus One have been leaking for weeks.  It looks like the rest of the figurative feline will soon appear, too, as a T-Mobile announcement and invitation to a Google event were issued today.

Let's start with the T-Mobile announcement - which, it's important to note, was an internal one.  This morning, TmoNews published a document that in part read, "Google, with support from T-Mobile is scheduled to launch an Android device in early January. . . .  T-Mobile will offer service support including billing, coverage, features and rate plans."

Then here's the clincher: Google's asking journalists to attend an Android press gathering on January 5th.  This won't be a random meet-and-greet, either.  It'll take place in Mountain View at the Googleplex, and a press conference, presentation, Q&A session, and demo session are supposed to last for a not-inconsiderable three hours.

One more interesting detail: January 5th falls two days before the start of the Consumer Electronics Show, so it looks like Google's planned its announcement for maximum impact.

Unfortunately, a lot of other details remain unknown.  No one seems to have a clear idea of idea how much the Nexus One will cost, for example, or how rate plans will work or when the device will actually be available for purchase.

Still, one week from today, Google's likely to answer everybody's questions.

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Thu Dec 31, 2009 21:10 pm

You’re reading this on July 12th, but I wrote it back on July 4th, at a quiet moment during our family vacation (right before breakfast). In fact, I’ve had my posts ready about 9 days in advance for quite a while. Sometimes, I write something that’s timely or I change the order of things, but I have plenty of posts ready to go. It wasn’t that hard.

For every post I wrote two weeks before I went on vacation, I wrote two. Both were good and useful. Nothing was a junk post. Nothing was filler. I just did two instead of one.

What does it do? It affords me the chance to enjoy my vacation without worrying about blogging. It allows me to have time to think of really important posts, because I know that I’m not racing to beat the day’s clock. It allows me to keep up my relationship with you.

With just a little planning, that’s what I can do with this blog.

How about you? What could you accomplish with just a little bit of planning and forethought?

[...]

Mon Jul 12, 2010 02:00 am

As you may know, Black Friday is a pretty popular day for online shopping as well as offline. With that in mind, it is no surprise that a lot of people turned to eBay to find deals and work on their holiday gift buying.

eBay has created an interesting visualization of the site's Black Friday activity across the United States. This comes in the form of an animated map, which shows the areas of the country with the most shopping activity, and shows new areas as their first purchases were made. It's really easier to grasp if you just watch the short 2-minutes clip eBay provides:

On the eBay Holiday site, the company explains a little bit about the methodology and data execution that went into creating this animated map:

The visualization is based on raw data that includes eBay sales and purchases occurring in approximately 33,000 U.S. ZIP codes. To best represent large population areas and to condense data for a seamless display, ZIP codes were grouped to create 3,118 distinct areas. The methodology used to create these areas was based on the distance from the center of one ZIP code to adjacent ZIP codes. Those with a distance of less than .35 (latitude or longitude) between them were combined into an area.

The size of each point on the map corresponds to the number of ZIP codes encompassed withi/> [...]

Mon Nov 30, 2009 09:35 am