AppleTV A Dud.

Fortune's Brent Schlender calls AppleTV a dud. While I'm normally a huge Apple fan, I'd have to agree in this case. I pre-ordered my AppleTV so I could get one as soon as they became available in February. After hooking it up and admiring the screen saver, I haven't used it since.

This is not to say that it isn't a fantastic piece of engineering. The box and the interface is sleek and elegant. The graphics are super sharp, because of the HDTV output. To bad it's next to impossible to get decent content - None of the TV or movie content you see on the US iTunes site is available to us Canadians.

Apple has built a TV appliance that is superior to anything else on the market, yet, is almost useless because of the restrictions on the content you can view on it. Let's hope this isn't a repeat of Betamax. (Link for my younger viewers, the older folks will know this reference!)

15% of Calgary on Facebook?

Like almost all my friends and business associates, I've been spending too much time on Facebook lately. Here's a crazy factoid: Facebook says there are 155,267 members in Calgary. Considering the fact that there are about 1,000,000 people in Calgary, that's about 15% of our population. Can that be right? If so, Calgarians must be amongst the most connected social networkers in the world.

As a comparison, Facebook has about 24 million members. The world population is about 6.6 billion, according to the CIA Factbook. If my calculations are correct, that is just 0.36%.

Rick Moranis 2.0

Canadian comedian/video blogger/DJ Mark McKay filmed this hilarious introduction to Mesh, and the response by the 500 or so Mesh attendees was resounding. If you're a SCTV fan, you'll chuckle when Mark mentions his uncanny resemblance to Rick Moranis.

After a little research, I see that Mark was the DJ behind Len, the Canadian band that brought us Steal my Sunshine. To highlight this fact, he does what every good comedian would do, and produces a hilarious, self-deprecating video.

Mark was filming all the sessions at Mesh, and I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with!