Posted by Antonio
1 year, 6 months ago (Jan. 29, 2009)
Engineers, scientists, and artists create value. Everyone else just moves it around. —Robert Noyce, co-founder Intel
Thus begins Steve Hamm's light and fun read, "The Race for perfect: Inside the quest to design the ultimate portable computer." The story starts with Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook (incidentally inspired by a visit to our very own Seymour Papert here in Lexington) and traces first the development of the clamshell laptop and then the pda-turned-smartphone. Throughout it all we get to know a bunch of cowboy-entrepreneur engineers that spend many cycles cramming ever more powerful components into ever shrinking cases trying desperately the whole time to catch up with the hype that the vision of truly mobile computing had unleashed.
I loved this story. And to boot, I can't think of a better time to have read it.
It's been over a week, so I figure the presidential inauguration hype has died down enough for me to quote my absolute favorite part of the speech:
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
I was surprised that this one line was not picked up by more of the media, especially because $850 billion stimulus package or not, it is these kinds of folks that we are in desperate need of to pull us out of this financial bubble hangover we're suffering from.
We need more of those crazy entrepreneur-engineers that Hamm chronicles in The Race for Perfect. Folks like Edwin Land who invented instant photography by rolling up his shirtsleeves and getting to work. Or more importantly, as the man in the big white house says, all of those folks "obscure in their labour" but chronicled by Hamm in his book that spend countless years building real value.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 2, 2009)
Henry Ford once famously said that his customers could have any color car they liked as long as it was black. When playing with the various emerging "mass customized" versions of already popular products, I am often reminded of his statement. Thus far I've tried custom Nike running shoes, a custom bag from Timbuk2, and just this weekend, Lego's "Factory" product. In all three cases, I've been disappointed.
The reason is simple: for a mass customized/personalized product (by which I mean on that can be manufactured according to the enduser's design specifications) to justify its premium, it has to be measurably better than its off-the-shelf cousin. And note that when I say premium I don't just mean price (in fact one of the mistakes I think companies experimenting in this space are making is not charging a price premium), but also the cost in time as anything made-to-order is bound to take longer.
The case of Lego Factory is a good example of how a company can almost get it right. The idea is simple: after downloading a Legoized CAD program, users can design their own Lego set by picking from a catalog of bricks. After this design step Lego will custom build your un-assembled set and ship it directly to you from overseas in about 2 weeks. You can even customize the cover of the box with an image of your model set against a number of canned backgrounds. Overall the price is fairly decent (I paid $25 shipped for a set with 110 pieces) and the basic experience delivers on the promise of "making your own Lego set." However far too many edges are too rough for this to ever become a mass market experience.
The configurator: In the photo creative world this is what we call the online service/software that lets you assemble the photo book/card/product. In Lego's case, the downloadable CAD Lego Factory program is B-grade software at best, and that is for a truly committed user. There are plenty of bugs that riddle the experience, the catalog is tough to navigate, and the physics of snapping the virtual pieces together doesn't work consistently. But most importantly, the company forgets to provide enough partial starting points towards building a compelling model and offers little in the way of guided help to get people to feel creative. True you can start from a car or a plane, but these are finished products at different scales that don't even manage to combine well with each other. Partially finished consistently scaled models or better yet, the ability to "draw" out shapes and have the tool fill in with bricks would go a long way toward fixing most of the heinous issues.
The out-of-the-box experience: It turns out that after messaging that you could "customize the box" what actually comes with the set is a cheap generic box with an inkjet printed version of your model stuck behind a cellophane cover. I doubt that Lego would actually ship a product to a store with such a poor box. Similarly instead of the choke-proof sealed plastic bags, the bricks come jumbled together in what looks like the ziploc bag grandma used to give you cookies to take home with.
And worst of all, there is no manual! Instead there is a lame letter stating that the Factory kits don't come with manuals suggesting instead that you use the software to step through an arbitrary assembly process while the CAD program reverse-explodes the model you've built one step at a time in what seems like a truly random process.
Until my experience with Factory, I had no idea how much human editing went into making Lego build instructions (I had naively thought that most of it was automated by computer). And as it turns out, these highly edited guides are an integral part of the experience, especially if you are a kid who has been trained in the 3 rules of Lego (1. Never lose pieces, 2. The manual is always right, 3. Don't ever force it).
As with Nike and Timbuk2, I think Lego deserves praise for the Factory experiment. But unless they remember that mass customized goods need to be that much better and not actually worse than their factory-churned relatives, it's going to remain an interesting side project.
If I were in charge of that team, I'd work hard on the software— both during the design phase, and in the creation of a compelling and usable guide (two software problems which appear to me immanently more solvable than some of the others the team has already solved in the end-to-end experience)— in order to move this experience into the mainstream.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 6 months ago (Jan. 25, 2009)
I've spent the last couple of weeks noodling on a project at work which involves these cheap sub $500 laptops, also known as "netbooks," that are all the rage now. All of us in the business of making them vastly underestimated the demand for a cheap, resilient, very portable computer in 2008, and everyone is now furiously trying to figure out how to best capitalize on one of the few bright spots that currently exists in consumer tech spending.
But the fundamental question is simple: are these just cheaper laptops, or a new class of device worthy of new software, new user-experience paradigms, and best of all, new ways of getting people to relate to their computers?
If we are talking about the former and netbooks are just one step on a ruthless road to making ever cheaper electronics that are more disposable, then we might as well just bury the PC now and go on to multi-touching our way to content consumption nirvana— as dumb consumers of media, mediated experiences, and nothing that makes us think too hard.
But if indeed this solid-state, Internet-connected, portable computing experience can lead to something more compelling then we ought to follow it there. The OLPC, which arguably kicked off the interest in ultra-cheap laptops, is as good as D.O.A. but its spirit may still live on in the millions of netbooks that the industry will ship this year, and we owe it to Alan Kay, who first came up with the concept of the "Dynabook—" a small tablet-like networked portable computer for teaching kids, to chase this dream down.
Interestingly, on the 25th anniversary of the Mac— the computer for the rest of us— we might also want to remember Bill Atkinson's original vision for the project before it was co-opted by Steve Jobs: a sub $500 machine that would make computers accessible to new set of folks most in need of them— children and educators. Or the fact that most of the "revolutionary" parts of the original Mac's UI came from... you got it, Xerox PARC, home of the Dynabook.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 6 months ago (Jan. 1, 2009)
The barristas at my local coffee shop are jaded 20-somethings that think they have seen it all, which is why I was so pleased to delight them yesterday morning through my demo of Shazam, the wonderful music recognition application for the iPhone. Breaking for once from their affectations of ennui, they displayed a childlike sense of wonder that this joker with the jeejah (Stephenson speak for yuppie iPhone) could actually recognize their eclectic mix of tunes. As with others that I've shown Shazam to, after getting over the initial shock of the iPhone recognizing Yo La Tengo's "Mr. Tough," their next move was to let the line grow as one twiddled the stereo and the other tried mightily to confuse Shazam's algorithms.
Walking home I realized that Shazam, more than any of the other 10,000 applications in the iTunes App Store, points to the future for this next wave of always-connected, always-with-you, personal computers. Combining the power of a web service, local processing (including rich sensors), and the digitization of all manner of content, Shazam creates something that is truly unique: a computer assisted discovery, cataloguing, and commerce experience that feels like a real augmentation of our intellect.
And so, I figure it being the beginning of the year and all, my 2009 predictions are going to turn of the pattern that is beginning to emerge from use cases like what Shazam for music represents. In fact, let's call 2009 the year in which we implement Shazam for other things, and specifically, people, products, and places.
Shazam for people: I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to be able to snap a photo of someone and have a Shazam-like listing of everything that is relevant to me about the person come right back. Though it may be socially awkward to point the business end of a cellphone camera at a relative stranger, the general idea goes something like this: between Twitter, Facebook, and all manner of other social tools, there is plenty of useful metadata to mediate richer in-person interactions, so why not take advantage of that? And I'm not just talking about the amoeba bumping behavior of tech conferences (entrepreneurs bumping together aggressively in the hopes of recombining into higher life forms), but regular life as well. I'd love to know more about the other parents at my kids's schools, and I'm sure that if I could obtain that knowledge in-situ and unobtrusively (which is where the Shazam-like magic comes in), idiotic topics of conversation like the weather and the Red Sox would soon be buried by more interesting exchanges.
This has got to be the next step in social network evolution. As pioneers in the space have wrenched control of the "social graph" away from individual vendors and attempted to standardize its portability, it becomes only natural for all sorts of personal publishing/communications tools to emit valuable social metadata that could feed a giant Shazam for people.
Shazam for products: When I am in that "buying kind of mood" (something we will all occasionally feel despite the collapse of modern capitalism as we know it), it'd be great not to have to squeeze every expression of intent into a teeny little search box. While getting a great lead on the latest HP C7180-xd is child's play for Google, buying most of the non model numbered goods in our lives through the search interface is sort of like sucking a watermelon though a straw— eventually you can do it, but it makes a mess and most of the time, it leaves you dissatisfied. Amazon has taken a great step with the "remember it" service on its iPhone app; by combing the output of the camera with its Mechanical Turk service (read: people in 3rd world countries trying to identify the product in your blurry image), they've got a start. Unfortunately most of the products the service can currently identify could also be identified by a quick Google search. So we need to improve it.
I'm particularly looking forward to the evolution of Shazam for products because of the implications that exist when you combine it with another trend I track closely: mass customization, or custom manufacturing. Just as savvy clothing folks tend to rip out pages from magazines as grist for their tailor's mill, I can imagine doing the same for a class of products that can be either customized or made from scratch directly for me.
Shazam for places: while Shazam is the coolest application on my iPhone, it is far from the most useful one. That title may belong to the combination of the GPS, the iPhone Maps application, and Google. With it, I can find almost anything, leave the house without much less of an idea about how I'm going to accomplish what I set out to do, and just generally be far more productive. Earlier this year I was even floored by how powerful this combination of local processing and web service can be in totally foreign environments: I managed to get myself around Cologne purely through public transport with zero German and not even a subway map to my name.
But of course, a Shazam for places needs much improvement over the current offering. I want tailored web searches from authoritative sources woven seamlessly into my map view. I want alerts when I walk by something that I might enjoy. And most of all, I want to be able to integrate the GPS and camera with an overlay of the world that makes directed activities more efficient, and true digital serendipity possible. Collaborative filters and other wisdom of the crowds algorithms have only taken babysteps thus far— with Shazam for places, we're likely to see incredible opportunities for augmentation of our intellect.
I'll close my predictions (or are these more like wishes?) for 2009 with the best year-end post from 2008: Om's admonition that we should stop tolerating mediocrity in business, products, and in life. As technology products and services continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday existence, we are less likely to put up with the shitty user experiences and flakey services that tech companies have adopted as the standard for the consumer space. Om takes RIM to task on the Storm, but a year and a half into my present big company job, I can attest to the fact that they are not alone— most of us ship shit and expect that the razzle dazzle of the technology space will save us. It's why Apple is eating everyone's lunch in every product category they enter.
And no extension of the Shazam pattern in people, products, or places, is likely to make any serious headway without careful attention being paid to avoiding the creeping specter of mediocrity.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 6 months ago (Jan. 2, 2009)
A very sweet piece from a 17 year Apple veteran on working there, the implications of Steve's bailing on MacWorld, and best of all, some good career perspective for anyone looking to understand the real reasons why people stay at jobs.
With the collapse of the current Ponzi scheme that redefined career motivation as "speed to rich," perspectives like these are helpful.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 6, 2009)
An artist friend once told me that in painting class you learn to trust yourself with the mantra: "first stroke, best stroke" which is a paraphrase of something that Picasso apparently used to say. This blog post reminded me of that today— after a long week of reviewing "vintage charts" at work (multi-year masturbatory exercises in predicting the future)— and made me reconsider something I've learned about building products on the web.
At one end of the product development spectrum you've got what I'd call the "Apple myth:" a long slow slog to get every pixel perfect, every swipe just so, every transition amusing. At the other you've got the "build it quick, iterate like a madman and hope that they never catch you" attitude that has dominated Web 2.0 world since the launch of Flickr. This failed many a me-too startup, but the approach had its merits. The piece above reminds you that after enough experience, you too can become like "one take Frank," belting it out just so on the first try, especially in mediums that allow for that kind of pliability (like the web as opposed to say hardware).
Making stuff is hard, and no matter how much we may try to disguise the in-predictability of getting it right behind things like "ethnographic studies," or even— dare I say it— "usability tests," it's good to be reminded that sometimes it just pays to go with your gut. Oh yeah, and build up a lot of experience along the way.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 10, 2009)
I remember the first time I synced a PalmPilot to a computer 12 years ago being amazed at the way in which all of my contacts and calendar entries seemed to stay in tune with each other across both devices. Like many others I spent the obligatory 5 minutes trying to trick the sync process and then an hour or so wondering what this brave new world of possibilities this new capability would offer us. True device independence as our metadata (contacts, calendars, bookmarks) and data (all sorts of files) would get intelligently squirted between devices and kept up to date no matter what we did on each of our devices.
Boy how wrong we all turned out to be. Even after a dozen years, sync still sucks. Yesterday Google announced iPhone-Google Contacts-Google Calendar sync which I was excited to try because of how bad Apple's for pay Mobile Me service has turned out to be for keeping 3 computers and an iPhone up to date with each other. And after a few hours of screwing with it, I'm ready to conclude that Google's sync doesn't seem all that much better.
It may have seemed like magic a dozen years ago, but it's just not that hard of a problem to solve. What confuses me most is why the OS vendors haven't solved this problem all the way from metadata to data and offered it as a part of the OS. It's clear that Apple sort of tried (they still don't have a good story for keeping files current across computers— and using a WebDAV server is not adequate), but initial scaling issues and and to much of a focus on the Jobsian "one man, one shiny box" dictum seems to have kept them from truly embracing the cloud as a viable canonical store for the original copy of everything. And while I hear Microsoft has a nifty utility with Folder Share, true sync has only ever worked well in Outlook/Exchange environments (it's no surprise that Google emulates the Exchange protocol for its iPhone calendar/contact sync). Perhaps Mr Notes Ozzie can change this, but the evidence is not there today.
And so we're all left patching our own solutions out of offerings from vendors big and small: Dropbox for files, Foxmarks for bookmarks, and then some hodge-podge of MobileMe and Google for the rest. Until someone steps up and acquires a bunch of these point solutions (which should be cheap these days) and integrates the whole thing into a cohesive whole (maybe this is the GDrive promise), we'll continue the bad habit of confusing a long view for a short distance in the world of sync.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 12, 2009)
Last month I decided to find out what this netbook craze was all about and purchased an HP Mini 1000 running the HP/Canonical developed MIE (a stripped down Ubuntu 8.04 with an attractive coat of gloss on the surface). I gave it a fair shake, trying to use it at home, at work, and even on the road while on a trip to California last week.
And while I have to say that it is impressive that HP has managed to pack this much into a device which costs $400, the end result of my experiment was to conclude that netbooks are just cheap laptops and that all of the analyst/press/reviewer hoopla (Forrester recently called the Netbook the "third PC formfactor) is just marketing hype. What is more, unless your primary laptop is some huge boat which can't be moved around, or unless you've never been able to have a laptop— I can almost guarantee that the netbook performance will disappoint you to say nothing of the obvious screen/keyboard issues.
Prior to the popularization of smartphones, there might have been a role for these small machines as a new class of Internet access device. Unfortunately the space between the top of the smartphone range (or at least any smartphone that can run Webkit-derived browsers well) and a 12+ inch laptop that is portable is too small to squeeze a new product category into— especially one that doesn't deliver any new interface paradigms or real software innovation.
And on the subject of software (it always comes back to that), I am amazed that despite the apparent polish that HP and Canonical put into the MIE environment, they left such ridiculously obvious issues with the mobile experience unaddressed. The suspend/resume is still too slow and flakey (though this might be a Linux thing, I would imagine a customized kernel could have done a better job given that the hardware was known), and it still takes far too long for the machine to find and associate itself with a WIFI access point, even when it has been previously configured. In the world of 15-60 second "Internet snacking" these two bugs are deal killers.
[Come on guys, if you don't want to look as far as how quickly OSX latpops come out of sleep and on to the network, look no further than today's crop of smartphones and make that the target.]
Finally, back to the form factor issue for a second: though it is amazingly obvious in hindsight, unless you can put the device in a pocket (jacket or otherwise), its diminutive formfactor over other laptops just doesn't buy you anything other than a weaker battery that limits its use to about 2.5 hours (I got about a day of sporadic use assuming that the suspend cycle was working) and a screen which is bound to drive you to Advil after extended use.
[In this picture the devices top to bottom are: iPhone 3G, Nokia N800, HP 1000 Mini MIE, Macbook 13 inch]
It's too bad— I was really looking forward to using this machine all the time. But until suspend/resume and time-to-network are resolved (along with a number of other interface annoyances that have more to do with MIE's Linux legacy than anything else), it is destined for my graveyard of cool but useless devices.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 12, 2009)
James Dyson (of "sucks like a Dyson" vacuum cleaner fame) has a great piece in the Guardian calling on engineers to make Britain great again. In it he talks about how we all need to start making stuff again. Or as he puts it:
We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood. We've built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dotcom bubble. Now that's collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don't, we risk losing an already weakened position for good. Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.
As I've been looking at the profile of a number of different businesses inside of HP lately, I've been struck by how much profitability in almost always directly correlated with how much product invention the business happens to do. A long list of IP assignments in a given market is almost always a predictor of a very profitable business while all the PR, transactions, and buzz in the world can't keep a business very far from "banana handler" profits.
A great compliment to the new president's insistence that we need to bring the makers back to the center of this story.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 14, 2009)
This week Google lifted a number of annoying limits on my favorite project, AppEngine. With each release they are getting closer to providing something really interesting for developers truly interested in migrating their apps to the cloud.
I love the way AppEngine is giving developers the ability to start from a better point for apps that need to be designed to scale infinitely and don't think that asking folks to a) learn a new language, b) forget about the the SQL tier, and c) limit things like native code for the sake of sandboxing and scaling are big prices to pay in return— especially as it is clear that the team at Google continues to improve the offering. And though most of the attention goes to Amazon's EC2, from a "cloud perspective" most of their innovation came in changing the underlying startup economics for apps and not in fundamentally rewiring the way these apps are built.
That said, there is still something sorely missing from AppEngine's toolset: a way to run periodic tasks that are not tied to the request/response lifecycle. Anyone who has ever worked on any meaningful web application knows that 20-30% of the code runs in this mode: processing orders, generating static versions of things, vacuuming up email queues, parsing RSS feeds, or just doing general cleanup. Unfortunately, as of this writing, any of the methods used to get these periodic tasks to run on Google's compute cloud are kludgey at best.
I do hope AppEngine adds some sort of cron-like functionality soon as this seems to me to be the last major element required to write a real production application on it (for instance, between AppEngine+periodic and S3, we could rewrite all of Tabblo at a fraction of the startup cost and hopefully with a better performance profile).
But even if they don't, it strikes me as a good opportunity for Google to build another building block service like S3, EC2, SQS, etc. Except in doing it the "Google way" we might end up with something much more interesting than a scalable cron— a sort of metaverse for all of the bots now confined to the crontabs on individual virtual hosts everywhere. But more on that tomorrow...
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 15, 2009)
Yesterday I wrote about the need for a cron in the cloud and ended with the hope that someone builds a scalable way for periodic processes to run in much the same way that AppEngine allows for request-reponse interactions (turns out that it is already in the plan for AppEngine).
There are obvious reasons why a distributed scalable job manager is a great service, but today I want to pick up on why a common sandbox for all of the world's cron jobs might be a really interesting thing to develop.
My inspiration for my view of a cron in the cloud was really influenced by a recent talk I heard from my newest favorite author, Daniel Suarez (of Daemon fame) on "Bot Mediated Reality." Daniel is quickly coming to be regarded as someone who can pick out the faint outlines of the near future from existing technologies and in this talk he does not disappoint when he takes on the implications of the dangerous mix of society's ruthless quest for efficiency with automated programs deployed to take actions over a world whose interface is increasingly being standardized by web forms, APIs, and other such disinter-mediators of human judgment.
In his world, left unchecked, these bots will continue ruthlessly running on schedule taking first order actions that will cause the continued centralization of power in the hands of the few people capable of maintaining a semblance of control over the vast bot nets currently working for bad (DDOS style) and good (automated trading systems). Suarez's answer to avoiding the coming Judgement Day where the machines take over revolves around using richer interfaces to distinguish human from machine and forming committees of humans to control the types of bots we allow into a more secure and verifiable Internet (the "Dark Net" as he calls it).
But what if instead of doing that (or before getting there), someone like Google (or Amazon or anyone else who is credible in the cloud computing ecosystem) launches a platform for running bots that has built into it clear lines for distinguishing identity and (where appropriate) intent? I'm thinking of something a lot richer than "* * * * * run_me_every_minute.bin > email_errors—" something that encompasses identity, context, inter-job communication (with something a little richer than publish/subscribe), and maybe even some sort of a transaction system, just for starters.
Think about it. As the Web 2.0 lovefest melts down for real, one its true legacies is the legitimazation of the XML over HTTP API for inter application communication. At some conference last year I remember someone talking about how the inefficiency of the high volume polling that takes place to determine for instance whether a information source has been updated has a real and measurable impact on the carbon footprint of some of our largest web services. It might be worth doing Cloud Cron for just its green impact alone.
What I'm thinking is something like Second Life for processes with server farms partitioned and dedicated to all sorts of collaboration across processes. In Suarez's talk, he mentioned how deployed bots sometimes start working at cross purposes when one company acquires a competitor and the IT guys forget to turn off the competitive intelligence scrapers that have been looking at prices (or worse yet trading against) a former competitor. I have no doubt this more reality than fiction even today, and no matter how brittle these jobs may be enough of them running unchecked may bite us in the butt someday soon.
So who wants to go out and build this cron for the cloud already?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 16, 2009)
This crazy silliness of Twitter taking over a realtime version of what Google has done for webpages has got to stop. Yes it is a great service that has created a valuable layer abstraction between people's extended and overlapping addressbooks that can sometimes deliver an awesome level of serendipitous shared context in close to realtime. Yes it further lowers the bar for "publishing" by continuing to blur the distinction between communication and content creation.
But at the end of the day, it's just a very thin little app with a medium number of people on it— still far from crossing into the mainstream.
And most important of all, as my friend Andy recently wrote, disruptive innovation does not happen in isolation of the incumbents, and in this case Google would be absolutely idiotic not to be paying attention to the value of realtime indexing of status updates. And unfortunately for Twitter, once they do I think it will be easy for them to add realtime to search (or any of their other products) and suck the unique power of Twitter right out from under them.
Finally, on the $50MM incremental investment as proof that Twitter is going to be "something huge." Venture guys are not stupid and in this new climate most of the ones in the consumer online space have turned into momentum investors where ever deal that shows any real adoption traction is still getting bid up too much. In this case though, I'd be willing to bet that one of the new investors has a real strong "feeling" that Twitter is going to be bought, either by Google or Microsoft in the next 12 months. It won't be a homerun investment for them— but it will not be bad and also help to garner their fund more street cred in the consumer online space.
Because one thing is clear to me— Twitter is not a billion dollar business about to happen. It is an interesting tweak that belongs inside one of the big information portals and at this very moment I am sure there are people at each of these big companies tweaking their "Twitter killer" strategies (or getting their M&A ducks in a row).
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 17, 2009)
As the count of App Store applications climbs from 15,000 to 20,000, one of my favorite pass times has become going to look at the new types of applications being released. While all of the numbers are climbing in the right direction, there is one metric where we seem to be a little stuck: the types of innovation that new apps are introducing. And by innovation I mean new types of interactions, with Shazam being the perfect example of something so cool (and previously impossible) that people who see it are left with afterimages of the future bouncing in their vision.
Is this apparent lack of this type of innovation due to the straightjacket of what the SDK allows developers to do or is it just representative of the kinds of things that a mainstream market expects from a pocket computer?
Charles is keeping a good progress report on how the iPhone platform is growing over time, but looking at the big pie chart in the middle of his post, you'd think that the iPhone is all about games, entertainment, and various different kinds of verticalized todo lists. Where are the new Shazams? How about more applications that combine the GPS with the various sensors on the device to help people contextualize their activities with the net in a better way?
Another observation: as the platform attracts more developers, the overall quality and "snappiness" of the apps seems to be going down. This is to be expected, but the result is that I've seen a few native apps as of late that actually seem to take longer to get to functional than it does to load webpages in mobile Safari. If this trend continues, I'm sure that folks might get to the point where they become afraid of installing yet another gas tracking application.
Video capture. Background processing. Multi-tasking. API access to the Bluetooth radio. Notifications. I'm going to guess that opening up 50% or more of these avenues for interaction will unleash a new class of apps from developers. I just hope it happens soon.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 18, 2009)
I love my Kindle 1. It beats carrying a whole bunch of books around when traveling for work, and as many reviewers have noted, as soon as you start reading a book on it (and get used to the tricks required not to accidentally advance the pages) it just melts away and lets you focus on the content itself.
But having taken it on vacation for the first time this week, I've noticed something interesting about my own behavior. Rather than sitting by the pool reading the Kindle, I found myself spending time on Google's excellent version of Reader mobile, taking great pleasure in actually having the time to read what I mostly just skim.
After burning through two full battery charges while reading content on the iPhone's tiny 3.5 inch screen, I began to wonder whether I might be able to get the same experience from the Kindle, first by trialing a number of the magazine subscriptions available, and then by forwarding custom issues of Tabbloid to it. In neither case however, was I left satisfied, preferring instead to resort to the tiny phone screen despite how unpleasant it is to spend an hour reading off of it.
Which is to say, for magazine and online content, the Kindle is flawed mostly because the combination of screen refresh rate and overall device speed make it a real offline device. You can not credibly follow links, share content, or send a quick email— three actions that I now realize are more critical to consuming perishable (timely) content than are glossy layouts, displays that don't tire the eyes, or even a number of product compromises that I would have previously considered dealkillers for a Kindle-like device. [Funny to accuse a gadget that comes with a perpetual 3G data connection built in of that, eh?]
This new form of content consumption is why I'm fast becoming a believer in the 7-inch capacitive touchscreen form factor that Apple and others are rumored to be working on for release in the next year. Though a lot of things could be sacrificed on such a device, it would need three attributes to fit this new type of reading: 1. a killer web browser with as close to a ubiquitous Internet connection as can be arranged (either tethered to a mobile phone or directly wired into a 3G network), 2. battery life that is acceptable (2-3 hours would actually be ok so long as recharge time was 1 hour), and most importantly, 3. not too much weight on the device. Notice I said "too much" because I actually believe that a device that weighs say what my HP 1000 netbook weighs would actually be ok. Not great, but worth the compromise for the connectivity it would bring.
Note also that I didn't mention video, music, or any of the things that people clamor for their smartphones to be able to do. While I think that the ability to play back embedded Flash videos would be a nice feature) given how predominant embedded videos have become on web, it would not be essential. Nor would an "App Store" or any of the other things that the smartphone makers are now fighting to bring to market with new twists and turns.
Finally, I've recently become a big fan of the crude-but-effective "buckets of money" theory for consumer products. You buy an iPhone with money from the bucket for cellphone spending. You buy an LCD TV from the entertainment bucket, and so on. The challenge with a product like this is that the closest bucket is the PC spending one which could make it difficult to get a new toehold in the market. PC prices are plummeting and netbooks are quickly sucking up any new dollars there.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 23, 2009)
For a good long while now I've been pondering the differences between the coasts when it comes to the successful commercialization of new technologies. It still astounds me that after the prominence that Route 128 had in minicomputers, it missed not only the PC but two succeeding waves of the development of the Internet while the raging optimism of the west coast gave us Apple, Google, and Facebook, as well as sustaining big companies like HP and Intel.
Just by chance, I happened to run across two pieces of media this weekend that, while not taking the question on directly, do leave one with the impression that commercialization around trends brought about by innovation might be something that is just culturally the purview of the west coast.
The first was a talk given by Stanford president, former entrepreneur, and one of my favorite textbook authors, John Hennessy on innovation in academia and the private sector. Hennessy has seen the process from both startups and academia and it is worth listening to him balance the need for hardcore long term research along with fast-moving product development. This is a guy that gets that you need fundamental advances like the microprocessor or the Internet before you can have a vibrant ecosystem of startups commercializing it— and he's adamant that the Stanford ecosystem still has it going on.
Or to put it another way, as Marc Andreessen said to Charlie Rose: "each new platform enables a new layer of innovation, just like the pervasiveness of PCs with GUIs opened the door for the web browser and the commercialization of the Internet." Marc talks a mile a minute, a trait which I often associate with people trying to sound smarter than they are, but in his case he's got the goods— and his ridiculously opinionated views on just about everything (i.e., "the iPhone has been beamed in from five years in the future," or "Twitter is our new realtime electronic nervous system") make it one of the best Charlie Rose interviews ever.
In the middle of this absolute economic meltdown, what these two valley guys share that I think makes the west coast special in a way that the east coast just is not, is an unbridled sense of optimism that seems to make each almost manic when considering the sense of possibility engendered technology's march forward. I've been to far too many events as of late where people claim that the software industry is now "a mature business," or that the "Web 2.0 party is now officially over—" usually right before they start talking about some crazy shit like buying gold coins or getting a plot in Costa Rica to retire to, so it is particularly good to be reminded by these two of why we're all in this business to begin with.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 25, 2009)
In this month's Wired, Clive Thompson has the best single piece of analysis on the netbook phenomenon. While he makes the standard argument that this anemic but affordable low-end disruptor took the big PC vendors by surprise and threatens to eliminate the last bastion of attractive profits in the commodity PC business, the feature-laden laptop, where the piece really shines is in the way that he traces the confluence of factors that led a Taiwanese company, Asustek, to become a powerhouse in launching this new category.
For Thomspon it was the combination of the design work started at OLPC, the design muscle that Asustek had built up over a decade of making, and eventually designing, PCs for the big American companies, and the shift in computer use to the web browser for most everyday computing tasks that allowed the EeePC to explode on to the scene. It is worth considering the power of these overseas ODMs (as opposed to an Original Equipment Manafucturer, an Original Design Manufacturer can play a big role in the design of a product top-to-bottom).
Thompson's money quote:
What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base.
I can attest to the fact that every product we make these days has big contributions from the ODM even very early in the planning phases. For the most part this is a good thing, after all specialization and factor inputs tend to lead industries in this direction; however, as a non-hardware person, I've been surprised at how some design decisions seem to turn significantly on what the ODM can or can not do for a given project. More often than not American companies present specifications in the form of Word docs and not real engineering to companies like Asustek, Foxcom, and Quanta. It makes one wonder whether we have not opened ourselves up to a dependency that might be unhealthy for the types of R&D engineering innovations that made companies like HP in the first place.
Meanwhile the best analogy in the article is of the standard laptop to the SUV— a computer that is far too powerful and sold for the promise that one might actually do some simulated annealing work on it someday. And just like no momtank ever goes off road, most computer users (nongamers and nonprogrammers) barely venture off of the communications paved highway.
That said, it may just be that we are currently in a phase of personal computing where we are not delivering the software applications around experiences like immersive video or voice recognition that could really exercise local computing power in the client. Maybe, but as the power in a smartphone approaches that of a standard Atom netbook (and as these in turn start to adopt ARM cores for battery reasons), we might have just painted ourselves into a corner where those applications will either reside on server farms, or worse yet, not get invented at all.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 5 months ago (Feb. 27, 2009)
Apparently there was an article in the Globe last week about the need for the Boston technology scene to rebrand itself to attract attention to the local successes around here. Wade Roush takes this apart today as the wrong way to approach the problem of getting more innovation, investment dollars, and entrepreneurs around here.
I could not agree more.
When I clicked through to the original article, I felt as though I were reading something out of the Onion— with that exquisite feel of "almost real" while at the same time being totally ludicrous.
It is really simple: the only thing we need to "brand" ourselves as a technology powerhouse is more successes. We've got almost all of the ingredients in just about the right quantities. What we are missing is minor attitude shifts on the part of investors, startup service providers (lawyers, landlords, etc.), and even entrepreneurs (I will write about the attitude shift needed in the last bucket more later). Oh yeah, and maybe some more global warming to take care of this "winter thing."
But come on— a $150,000 study on branding? Come on guys, if this is how we are going to waste money, we deserve to become irrelevant.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 1, 2009)
Like Umair Haque, Bruce Sterling has always been one of those sharp commentators that is either much smarter than the rest of us or just plain batshit crazy— and maybe a bit of both. Perhaps it is because I am just about to finish his latest book, "The Caryatids" (a fantastic dystopian vision of the future of the world), but I found the transcript of his talk from Webstock 09 an amazing analysis of just what this whole "Web 2.0 thing" was all about.
Many people have tried to describe it in hindsight (usually with a fair dollop of cynicism), but having lived it, Sterling's summary strikes me as the most accurate:
Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined.
And as to the "next new thing," he writes:
So -- what does tomorrow's web look like? Well, the official version would be ubiquity. I've been seeing ubiquity theory for years now. I'm a notorious fan of this stuff. A zealot, even. I'm a snake-waving street-preacher about it. Finally the heavy operators are waking from their dogmatic slumbers; in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die. But it's too early for that to be the next stage of the web. We got nice cellphones, which are ubiquity in practice, we got GPS, geolocativity, but too much of the hardware just isn't there yet. The batteries aren't there, the bandwidth is not there, RFID does not work well at all, and there aren't any ubiquity pure-play companies.
[Which interestingly enough, is the main technological backdrop to all that happens in The Caryatids]
I could quote many more parts of the talk— but you should go read it instead. Dense and pithy at the same time, it is worth the slog, not just because he has nailed the cultural analysis of what has happened over the past 5 years, but because he leaves us with a glimmer of optimism for what it is that we need to do now.
I use three Mac Intel laptops: one from this past November, one from 17 months before that, and one from 17 months before that. I think the processor speeds are something like 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4 Ghz and I think there are a bunch of differences in RAM type, video cards, and HD speed.
But you know what?
The reality is that I use them all interchangeably and don't really notice the difference! Outside of their obvious form factor differences (overall size wise), the biggest difference between them has been the shift to glossy LED screens— and this hardly screams upgrade to me.
Sure global demand is in the tank, but the reality is that ever since laptops went to the Core Duo architecture, progress seems to have slowed to a crawl, and PC buyers are not dumb.
Even the one bright spot, the 9% anticipated growth in netbooks won't save us now. Until and unless the manufacturers get start getting significant battery life increases (and not cheaps like the 2 lb batteries), way more storage (TBs not GBs), or CPUs that get us back on the Moore's Law rollercoaster, I doubt we'll see any meaningful pickup in demand— global recession depression or not.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 6, 2009)
Via Kevin Kelly, I came across this fantastic short on the power of virtual reality by Bruce Branit. Kevin points out that the interface the protagonist uses is both compelling and extremely believable given the state of today's tools (i.e., Google Sketchup). As with those rare novels that brilliantly depict the future (Snowcrash, Neuromancer, Daemon), this short is worth watching to see where all of those CPU cycles are likely to come in handy:
Watching it also reminded me of both Richard Morgan's depiction of "virtuality" and even more of Greg Egan's fantastic (though tragically out of print) Permutation City where a set of embedded simulations drives the story forward.
There is no doubt we are heading towards this world, and whether it is 10 years or 25, it is going to ripple through everything: business, education, politics, how we socialize, etc. I for one hope that when we get there the interface is as good as what Branit portrays.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 6, 2009)
Supermarkets that stay open late are depressing places to be on Friday night to be sure. Just tonight I found myself walking into one and I was presented with the relic pictured here.
I was shocked because I remember using this very phone 15 years ago when I was in college and the world was so completely different. Can you spot the three things in this picture that the pace of technology has made completely obsolete in the last decade and a half? First, the web killed the phonebooks— both white and yellow— tucked in below. Then Craig's List and eBay killed the classified ad hanging to the right of the phone.
But it was the mobile phone that has most completely rendered this picture a quaint anachronism of a time long past. For years I remember having to have this 14 digit number in my head (my calling card), or worse yet scrounging for dimes and the quarters, to use phones like this one to coordinate life in a way that would seem completely foreign to the average college student today.
To that point, the Economist has an excellent piece this week on the exploding mobile phone landscape, one bright spot in an otherwise dim tech economy. As they so eloquently put the shift to smartphones:
But at the same time the industry is going through a transformation that promises to fuel rapid growth in the years to come. To draw a parallel from computing, it is as if the personal computer (PC), its graphical user-interface, high-speed internet access and open-source software had all taken off at the same time.
I'm not sure I am quite that optimistic but boy have we come a long way from the antique in that picture.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 7, 2009)
Wikipedia. It is an amazing phenomenon. It never would have flown as a business. For information it is second only to Google.
More importantly, I wonder what it will be like to have a generation of kids who have grown up on Google and Wikipedia and are used to looking things on the fly as an extension of their brains. A true outboard brain.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 8, 2009)
Interesting weekend that started with my feeling that the Internet has brought us a long way in just about a decade. There is probably no better place to see progress than in the way we can now shift the consumption of media to better suit our individual lives. And the best case study of that is the way people are getting educated on the current financial crisis.
First, a week ago I saw Twitter light up with a mention of how Jon Stewart had stuck it to CNBC over their ridiculously wrong calling on the bottom of the financial crisis. A little help from Hulu provided me with the most entertaining 7 minutes of my week.
Then at the office, Dave mentioned that he had heard a great episode of "This American Life" on the way to work that covered the whole financial mess in 59 minutes. I never listen to the radio but it was a cinch to download the podcast and queue it up for my weekend run.
I think of these two pieces of media, one produced for TV and one for the radio— neither consumed by me on their original channel— and I have to wonder whether this new ability to deliver information multimodaly won't end up being a much bigger deal than putting the means of production and distribution in the hands of everyone.
For sure it is likely to change the amount of sheer information the average worker/student/politician is capable of assimilating. Compare for instance what most anyone can tell you about the mortgage meltdown with respect to what that same person might have known about the savings&loans crisis of 15 years ago for a good example.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 9, 2009)
Om has a great piece on how Apple is for sure making a netbook that won't be like the Fischer-Price toys that vendors small and big are characterizing as the brightspot of the PC industry in 2008 (8 million units last year and expected to grow quickly).
His piece reminded me of having owned a Rio PMP500 way back before the iPod. It was amazing to replace the walkman I was using in much the same way that it is amazing to replace a Windows Vista luggable computer with a svelte laptop that just emanates portability. But as soon as you start using it for real you realize that the limitations far exceed the cool factor and quickly learn to supplement the device with a more traditional big sibling (in my case, I was doing a lot of cross continental travel and the PMP500 would only get me about an hour of music so I carried a Discman as well).
We are so desperate for volume in the PC industry during this global meltdown that we're not clearly applying the "bozo test" to this new segment (the bozo test states that only a bozo would back the business plan). In my case, I've now owned and tried to push 3 netbooks (if you count the OLPC) on my family only to have them prefer the iTouch form factor for most of the common computing activities.
More significantly, this weekend I went for a walk in Harvard Square, a fairly urban area full of students and young professionals alike, in search of spotting netbooks in the wild. The final tally: out of about 25 computers (and about the same number of smartphones), I spotted one Asus EeePC. I did however notice that about 35% of the laptops I saw were some form of MacBook (especially popular at Peet's), and more surprisingly still, plenty of iPhones. I even noticed one young woman waving an iPod touch around like a magic wand, trying to cast a spell to conjure some Internet.
Clearly this isn't a super empirical study but I'd love to see return rates on netbooks when they are purchased as primary computers. In the meanwhile, it is good news that Apple is trying to reinvent this category because once they do, there will be all sorts of vendors who will be fast followers and drive ubiquity for whatever that tweener formfactor ends up looking like. Unlike the MP3 case, there is no portable computer vendor that is asleep at the wheel on this transition to the second high volume post-PC device.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 14, 2009)
Realtime. Dynamic Privacy. The social graph. If cool-sounding terms that mean relatively little were business models, we could have saved Web 2.0!
Look, there is some very real world-changing stuff going on in the primordial soup of social networking and micropublishing. Stuff that will affect how we work, play, and communicate for the rest of time. But it's not as complicated as people seem to need to make it. Just fresh from a run during which I listened to the talking heads on the Gilmour Gang overcomplicate things unnecessarily, I decided I'd had enough, that it was time for a simple explanation (perhaps more for me than for anyone else!). In case you feel that way too, here goes...
All of this stuff can be traced back to the instinctive need for the social animal to communicate. As a species we do better when we communicate, so we are hard wired to do it as much as we can. The revolution in electronic communications, namely email, took this to a whole new level with anyone being able to send anything to anyone in the world instantaneously. I was part of the first generation of people to go to work as corporate America was rolling out cross-company open email to desktops, and let me tell you it was an awesome thing to watch. Not so much for the folks like me who had had it in college, but definitely to the people that were coming from the closed Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes systems and still depended on fax/Fedex/peons like me to get stuff to the partner/client/whoever.
And for the record, IM was only synchronous email, nothing more. All of the sociologists and cultural anthropologists who claim that it encourages more informal means of communicating have never seen two corporate drones flirting over a Blackberry-empowered network (I'll get back to how realtime is just an implementation detail in a moment, but the first time we saw it hailed as something different was in the email/IM faux distinction which is why I mention it here).
After the first dot-com collapse, there emerged this cool little standard called RSS for the syndication of published content. Anyone anywhere could author content and publish it— not as an email newsletter (which used to be popular if you remember) where you had to know, beg, borrow, or steal the exact list of recipients, but to the world who could then "pull" that content from you by subscribing to your stream of published items. It was a fantastic idea mostly because it provided a layer of indirection between writer and reader that was sorely missing from mediums like email and IM.
The problem: RSS never took off. It was too cumbersome to set up, explain, discover, and understand relative to the existing alternatives. I personally gave up evangelizing it to regular folks after years of getting "yeah, but why wouldn't I just go to the site?!?" and seeing that despite folks like Google (Reader) and FeedDemon (the thing in Outlook) getting the consuming implementation right, it just wasn't taking off.
Imagine my surprise then upon discovering that Twitter— an SMS app-turned-micropublishing service— has now evolved into RSS for the mainstream. Like many other people, I hate trying to follow conversations on Twitter— they most definitely feel like listening to half of an interesting conversation, or worse yet 1/25th of one— but I do love the quality of the links that I get from the dot-product of the people that I follow. I'm already a Google Reader convert but on weeks when I accumulate 4500+ items to go through, I find that Shift-A (the keyboard command to wipe them all away) is much easier to embrace because I've got a Twitter feed of content to summarize it all.
So, to repeat: what does Twitter give me? A layer of indirection between the people who are communicating interesting things with the world and me so that they can send great stuff my way without knowing or caring about who I am. This is powerful stuff because it allows me to take control of a torrent of communications that I find incredibly valuable but which I wouldn't be exposed to if I were just to have stuck to my parochial little address book. RSS publish-and-subscribe did it first, and arguably in a richer more open way, but it has turned out to be Betamax to Twitter's VHS.
What about all of those that claim that Twitter is "realtime" while everything else before it is not? Again, an implementation detail just like email and IM. There is no reason why RSS readers can not poll aggressively enough to simulate realtime especially in a world of distributed blogs where one service doesn't have to take all of the load. Google can (and is) updating selective parts of its index in close to realtime as well. Culturally, Twitter tries to enforce a difference with the 140 character limit (to borrow from evolution, an exaptation that came from the service's original desire to blend SMS and the web), but in reality there are plenty of valuable blogs that provide little more than title and link with each entry so that seems like a thin distinction.
Now, to close on Facebook. Unlike the one-way subscribe/follow relationship of Twitter, Facebook's roots come more from the standard addressbook/buddy list where relationships are bi-directionally approved. Friending is no different than adding someone to your buddy list in that it implies that you are now also in theirs except for the fact that the act is the used to filter a steady stream of communications on your behalf. The folks at Facebook are geniuses at doing this well once the relationship is established— both by rolling out a steady stream of really useful but lightweight applications (Photos for instance) and by encouraging "social signaling" behaviors (relationship status anyone?) on the part of their users that increase the volume of communication.
But where Facebook really hopes to innovate, and has in fact started to already, is in the process of discovering new bi-directional relationships on your behalf by stuff that can be as simple as exposing you to friends of your friends or finding your old school mates, and as complex as trying to match your "profile" with other people you might like.
Before the social networking craze of 2000+, there were many startups that died on the vine trying to tackle the more complex methods of forming new relationships automatically (Abuzz, Visible Path, etc.). All of these companies failed because they overthought the problem (certainly compared to Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook), but they were dead on about the fact that the evolution of the address book requires automatic updating with valuable contacts you may not yet know being added by using the power of electronic communications and good software.
I think that both of these innovations, the taking of publish/subscribe that RSS introduced into the mainstream and the growing of the dynamic address book are eventually going to be as big as email or the web itself. They will have to become open standards to truly thrive, and it will be tricky to find sustainable business models for all but the largest players (who can just monetize the eyeballs), but they are here to stay as permanent fixtures in the evolution of how we communicate.
The most important thing to keep in mind though is that both of these companies are playing on a continuum and not doing something that is so fundamentally new that we should go around inventing buzzwords and claiming we can not yet understand it. Jeff Bezos, while on Charlie Rose to pimp the new Kindle, told Charlie that the important thing to realize in technology companies taking the long view is that while the technology itself may change quickly, the core underlying customer need doesn't, and in fact tends to evolve slowly. We ought to keep this in mind when we consider all of these new communication platforms.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 16, 2009)
Back to my favorite punching bag topic for a moment: the cluelessness of laptop makers in the face on the iPhone-like interface onslaught. If this picture doesn't say it all, with the iPod Touch being favored over the "kid-friendly" OLPC by the 4 year-old, I don't know what does.
Except of course that according to the NYT this morning, now the PC makers want to get into the smartphone game which to me seems as far-fetched as the car companies getting into bicycles because they see how many people are buying them these days. The only remarkable thing about it is the fact that they might actually be able to put products in the marketâ but this speaks more to the power of the ODMs in getting almost anything built for those clipboard-wielding product managers.
Instead of that, or worse yet, jamming touch interface shells on standard laptops, why don't PC folks spend time thinking about the deep reasons why the iTouch devices have been successful? I continue to believe that the "touchability" is effect and not causeâ that the true reason of success for this new class of device is around the interface married closely to use cases of the mobile (small device) experience with great software-hardware integration.
After all, the Wii has shown us that we don't need touch to get to an intuitive and revolutionary interface. Come on PC guys, it's time to innovate!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 17, 2009)
24 is a great television concept and this season has been brilliantly executed. Occasionally though, even an ardent fan like me has to trip over the suspension of disbelief required to truly enjoy the show, and for whatever geeky reason, the portrayal of modern technology is always my own particular speed bump (I have a theory that geeks needs to point out the tech flaws to feel better about so whole-heartedly enjoying the larger plot issues like the terrorists that sneak into the White House through the sewers).
Last night, Jack Bauer escapes from custody in a hospital, Vulcan grips the security guard and runs off with the CD that contains all of the security video footage from the hospital (he is looking for a bad guy). He then smashes a car window where the owner happens to have left his Macbook in the passenger seat fully charged and ready for some counter-terrorist kungfu. As he rips away from the FBI at 55MPH down a 25MPH street, Jack nonchalantly opens the Macbook and pops the cd into the drive. And what is awesome is that instead of being some heinous Windows 3.1 security system with some crazy video format that was standardized in 1982 and abandoned in 1986, the security videos as conveniently archived as an iPhoto library which Jack is able to load up in mere seconds, proceeding to grab a frame and then use the awesome "terrorist face enhancing wand" to get a clear closeup from the grainy black and white video frame. (Almost done here, bear with me as I have a point) Because the Macbook's original owner is cheap and doesn't pay $80/month, Jack is then forced to take out his Sprint Novatel 3G modem which he pops into the laptop, and magically sans drivers, instantly establishes a strong EVDO signal to zip the picture of said bad guy to his accomplice in the FBI office.
As I was watching it happen, all I could do was think about how slow the real iPhoto is, how ridiculous it is that he's able to get the Sprint modem working without installation, and how awesome the fact that he doesn't have to know the FBI agent's email to send her stuff.
But as I thought about it more, I realized that we're really almost there today, and that this has been as a direct result of how fast the Internet has taken over our lives. In fact, iPhoto does act like a swiss army knife for many different types of video, Facebook and Twitter (and their inclusion into phones) are showing us the way which the address book can automagically find you recipients, and perhaps most impressively, 3G networks and their associated modems really do work the way they did in the show— and have become a totally normal and boring part of mobile computing. To say nothing of the progress of video conferencing, search engines, and all sorts of other technologies employed in 24 that are quickly becoming de rigeur for mainstream consumer users.
We do live in good times indeed.
And if you don't believe it, check out this hilarious sendup from Collegehumor.com on what 24 would have been like with 1994 technology.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 18, 2009)
Great companies polish their products until they are clear as glass, and great software companies do this despite the fact that it is often easier/more convenient/cooler to work on something completely new or to start over.
iPhone 3.0 is mostly polishing, with two game changers one one Achilles heel. And polishing is something Apple excels at. Sure, it is a little ridiculous to be heralding copy&paste but for the iPhone this feature, as well as universal search, MMS, multiple photo attachments, and landscape keyboard on all of the Apple apps, is a solid refinement of an already very polished user experience.
The first of the game changers is GameKit, a peer-to-peer library that works over the Bluetooth radio. Bonjour (mDNS) has always been on of the most exciting things about the iPhone platform but the 802.11 radio burns a lot of juice, and the need to have all of the peer devices on the same logical network (same SSID) has really held back the truly serendipitous mobile use cases. Get ready for all sorts of local social apps based on this feature. And to boot, GameKit also provides a set of objects for peer-to-peer voice chat— a great addition given how heinous the recording/playback sound APIs are and the fact that the device is optimized for this sort of stuff.
The micropayments system (StoreKit) is the second fantastic improvement. I can't believe that after 15 years of going at it, after Paypal and Amazon and Google Checkout— and even carrier billing— it's going to be Apple that is going to deliver us a truly flexible, ubiquitous, and affordable micropayment solution. While some developers for trial-to-pay capabilities, others for a "premium AppStore," and others still for subscription infrastructure, StoreKit seems like a great compromise that enables all of these modes of billing plus more. I'd expect to see that all of the real commercial efforts on the AppStore are soon going to move to a free download with all sorts of "pay up" toggles in-app that open more functionality.
Now for the ugly: no background processing? Seriously Apple WTF? For sure bad applications will trash the battery, but well behaved ones shouldn't and there is a well-known system of reviews and approval to police the overall ecosystem. What is even more ridiculous is that they are trying to pass off this XMPP push notification thing as a suitable substitute. Push notification is a nice thing and should be available on top of background processing, but it is not a good alternative.
Take the canonical example of an IM service app. With background notification, you need to establish a proxy process in the cloud that will log into your account and monitor it for incoming IMs, to then send a ping to Apple's notification router. Compare the moving pieces and overall complexity of this with a client on the device that stays connected while it can and falls off the network when it can thus terminating the session with the server. It seems much more prone to state errors to have that second proxy process in place. Now in the case of the big IM providers like AIM, this is already done for the IM-to-mobile gateway, but I fear that others may not have such an easy time wrapping network services in this two-tiered way, especially not ones which are built around a synchronous interaction model.
Overall, it looks like a solid incremental improvement though, and I expect that it will keep Apple firmly in the smartphone innovation lead.
Am not sure I think the conclusions apply to every application type, but certainly for the stuff we've been building on the web, alternatives to the handicap of the traditional RDBMs and disks are worth thinking through.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 19, 2009)
The Economist has a pair of articles on the most recent tech boom/bust that reaffirm why it is such a good periodical (sharp, to the point, and painfully unemotional).
The first describes the end of the free web service boom by comparing it to the end of the dot-com era with a quote that is from 2001 but works just as well today:
IN RECENT years, consumers have become used to feasting on online freebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, e-mail and even speedy internet access. These days, however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but with lay-offs—and with announcements that they are to start charging for their services.
The piece goes on to argue that it's time to stop relying on ad business models that can not get to scale, and focus instead on having services that cause money to directly change hands. Amazon and Netflix style in the consumer space or even Salesforce.com if you want to look to the business market.
It is the second piece that truly shines though. In it, the Economist's outgoing Silicon Valley correspondent gives a perspective on the period he covered: 2003-2009, and traces all of the historical foundations of what became Web 2.0. From the hangover-induced depression of 2002 to the glimmer-of-hope-turned-boom that Google brought to the world with its IPO, all the way to the Web 2.0 collapse.
What really makes the piece great though, is that it points to a number of supporting factors that enabled the relatively short period of optimism which we now take for granted, but which took years to get to their own tipping point in 2004-2005: ubiquitous Wi-fi (who remembers not surfing the Internet from anywhere in your house?), the iPod (which contrary to popular belief took a half a decade to become the juggernaut that it is today), and the digitization and webification of media (culminating in the $1B purchase of YouTube).
All of these trends were the province of the geeks in 2004 but thanks to the past few years, they have become as mainstream as appliances and services that took decades before them.
And in the process they gave us that crazy sense of wonder that anything is possible, even the temporary suspension of disbelief about the laws of gravity (and business). Even if we have to look forward to a decade of not suspending disbelief, I sure hope we take a moment to acknowledge how much better technology has made things over the last 6 years, and get back to dreaming big real soon.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 30, 2009)
I so enjoyed reading John Carmack's notes on porting Wolf 3D (id software's 1992 remake of the classic Apple ][ game Castle Wolfenstein) that I was eagerly anticipating the release of the $5 commercial version on the AppStore. While I never played Wolf 3D when it came out, I did spend countless hours in the original— bumping into the SSs with the bulletproof vests and making them hold their hands up while you liberated them of their gear.
What struck me most about the port/release notes though was Carmack's direct style for describing the challenges of the port, and more significantly, the differences between the iPhone and the 286 DOS machines that were the game's first target platform (hint: the iPhone is a much much more powerful piece of hardware).
In fact I so enjoyed it that I went looking for more background of this famous video game legend and found David Kushner's awesome book, "Masters of Doom," which traces the development of id from the beginnings of the Carmack-Romero relationship, through the drama of their break-up and seeming implosion of what made the company great.
In some ways, the book is a classic startup tale: young hotshot programmers hacking 24x7 to take control of their own destinies. But it also covers plenty of details about the constant technical leaps that Carmack kept making in succeeding generations of his game engines as well as the innovative tricks that the company played with the then emerging distribution channel of "shareware" to get really viral before the term was applied anywhere outside of hospitals.
It's a great read for anyone interested in the history of the computer industry, and a particularly great one for all of the folks looking to make their fortunes on iPhone games and casual applications.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 20, 2009)
I was talking to another entrepreneur this week about Cisco's acquisition of Pure Digital, and we both agreed that contrary to popular belief, the acquisition makes a ton of sense, and not just for the obvious reason that more video on the net means more Cisco gear pushing the bits around.
The real reason why it makes so much sense for Cisco to spend a half a billion dollars on these guys is because Pure Digital has demonstrated that it is possible to pose a credible threat to the consumer electronics giants by surfing along the grain of the most valuable axiom in technology since VHS versus beta: in any consumer horse race, convenience will beat fidelity every time.
The Flip series of cameras is far from being the high quality option, but building the USB jack into the camera and putting a modicum of effort into the software that uploads the clips to the net makes the gizmos the most convenient way to publish videos in the market.
It happened when the web beat client server in the enterprise. It happened when MP3 beat high quality CDs. It's happening now as netbooks spank laptops and iPhones destroy more powerful and complex smartphones. It's why Google Apps will eventually kill Microsoft Office and why storing data in the cloud will also trump local storage even as the latter migrates from platters to RAM. And I'd be willing to bet that it's going to happen as H.264, Flash video, and Hulu blow high definition television back into the laserdisc era.
In fact as I type this post on my netbook, I'm listening to Pandora on its tinny speaker because my main iTunes library is not accessible via my in-home audio distribution system (my main Mac is asleep). And you know what, it's perfectly fine for Friday night around the kitchen table.
But if the essence of the strategy is to take it on faith that convenience will always beat fidelity, why bother paying such a large chunk of change for a company? Because big companies— especially ones that have gotten rich selling fidelity to corporate customers on the back of explosive demand— find it impossible to act to deliver convenience over quality.
An example: here at HP, the mantra that when it comes to printers, "it's not about feeds and speeds anymore," is something you'll hear over and over in meetings to mean that the race for fidelity is over in the inkjet printer business. And yet, we're still bringing out better and better printers instead of figuring out how to make ones that print in under a second and take spent coffee grinds for ink.
I suspect that there are a ton of IP video codec engineers at Cisco that feel the same way which is why the purchase of Pure Digital may be just what they need to turn their heads sideways and finally accept that, for consumers, convenience beats fidelity every time.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 2, 2009)
As RIM launches its app store to lukewarm reviews and Palm seeds its dev kit to a ho-hum response, I'm left wondering: why don't big companies get that the best way to disrupt a market leader is with simplicity and polish and not feature copy-and-paste and bad integration?
Recently I ran across a term in the blogosphere which I like very much: "Minimum Viable Product." The concept is particularly useful to web offerings where the MVP can be as limited as a Google AdWords campaign testing the appeal, but I think the approach is worth porting to hardware products, especially these days when most CE companies are leveraging the Lego-like bricks that the big ODMs provide to snap together bad copies of market successes.
My two favorite examples of hardware MVPs are the Flip video camcorder and the Peek messaging device. Both pass the test that the marketing department of any big company would have flunked them during the planning phase for "not being differentiated enough," and yet Flip (now Cisco) is well on the way to being a video camera powerhouse and Peek seems to have a good head of steam.
Hardware is often complicated by the challenges of the channel: because it is made of atoms that require transport and selling, product designers often have to be sensitive to a series of retailer/carrier requests that can border on the insane wishes of an inbred king. I don't quite know how to solve this one, but continuing to do so in an era where companies are increasingly learning to go direct (and consumers as well) seems to be a recipe for disaster.
In the meanwhile, I'd like to spend some time thinking about what an MVP would be for an "information display device" (think small tablet or photo frame) that people could use to truly extend the Internet into their kitchens. But that is for a later post.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 4, 2009)
The dead spaces in my life have been completely consumed by a diet of information snacking that may end up making my "2 Big Mac at 2am" habit from college look downright healthy. And I am not sure there is anything I can do about it.
It used to be the case that waiting in line at the grocery store provided an opportunity to press pause on the day and think a little bit. Not necessarily the Big Thoughts either— but just about anything that might have happened throughout the day that might be worthy of a few extra CPU cycles. Ditto for commuting. Taking the dog for a walk. Waiting at the dentist. In fact, if you look at our lives outside of work, they resemble fragmented databases: tons of seemingly blank spots between a few really meaningful records, all of which used to afford us little slices for out of band thinking.
But those were the days when I was just as likely to take my cellphone with me on errands as I was to take a paperback book. That is, those days are long gone. These days I am more likely to forget my wallet than my iPhone (and I'd prefer it that way).
The recently published data on people's usage of the G1 smartphone's data plan (5ox more likely to surf the web than regular users, 80% go online at least 1/day) reminded me of just how all-consuming this really small, instant-on, web-capable computer can be. Having it with you all the time means that any piece of information, entertainment, or social interaction is just a one idle CPU cycle away.
I remember when Blackberries first became prevalent, how many spouses learned the "Forget it Face—" that angry, scowling look that meant "it's the weekend, put it away." But those devices were much less dangerous— after all they provided only one vector for distraction: work email (which at some point anyone will tire of).
But today's smartphones are different. From Twitter to Facebook to just about any piece of content on the web, the distractions are endless. People worry about Google making us dumber, or at the very least changing the way in which we think. But it strikes me that the smartphone, with its constant ability to immerse us in the flow of the Metaverse (albeit in a limited way, today) is likely to play a much bigger role in how our neocortex changes the way in which we think, from the basic "processing" we do about the mundane details of our day to the very way in which insight happens.
And like all great disruptors, it's going to start by doing it first in the dead spaces of our lives where we might not care or even notice. But just wait until we get to a place where you are out to dinner with another couple on a Friday night and it becomes totally acceptable for four smartphones to be out on the table to grease the slow parts of the evening and then ask yourself: is this really worth it?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 4, 2009)
The Register has a piece on the iPhone's camera aspirations for this summer that makes me wonder why all of the tea leaf readers that prognosticate on what Apple will or won't do seem to be missing one of the best predictions for 2009.
[And yes I realize that in this post I am joining them, but it is for a good cause (a product I really want). And I should preface this by saying that outside of my macro Apple prediction from 2002 (the will become the < 6lbs company), I am almost always wrong]
All of Apple's post Mac growth has come from disrupting products and industries that were delivering tenuous value to their customers. The iMac. Airport wireless home networking. The iPod. The iTunes Music Store. The iPhone.
In some cases, the existing product was just crappy, as was the case with all of the existing MP3 players before the iPod. In others, the industry incumbents were just greedy and stupid as was the case with the iTunes store. But in all cases, it has been advancing technology and the Internet that has given Apple the chance to go in and disrupt.
When I read the rumor that Apple has ordered a 5MP CMOS sensor for an unspecified product, it screamed to me of another coming disruption, this time around the point-and-shoot slice of the digital camera market. Because while the market for digicams is still growing at a healthy clip, the fat belly of point-and-shoot cameras has been relatively stalled since 2007 and shows signs of becoming a segment dominated by price and share wars— in other words, ripe for an Apple-like disruption.
A lot of the industry analysts that cover the emerging mobile space have been saying for a long time that better cellphone cameras would eventually kill the point-and-shoot, but I'm not sure that it is quite that simple. Or that is, before we get to this cellphone-as-camera nirvana, we may still have room for the iPod Touch of cameras (one that is connected but without a data plan). This would allow for all sorts of neat use cases around the concept of the "Social Camera, " some similar to what Eye-Fi allows today, albeit with richer, more mass-market integration.
And best of all, if such a device was based on the iPhone platform, we'd benefit from the same Precambrian-like explosion of apps to explore every corner of the programable camera universe in a much more rich way than any one company could.
I was going to go back and pull some IDC data to back this claim, but have decided instead to cite a personal data point: when I travel, I often take one of my two Canon cameras with me, an SD400 or a G10. But for the last dozen trips or so I've found that I leave the cameras languishing in the bag only to curse myself for settling for the blurry iPhone images and their associated networkable convenience.
They've got the platform, the ID, and the consumer savvy— and unfortunately, I think it would take all three to pull this off successfully. Still, we can hope, right?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 8, 2009)
If you've ever doubted that Skynet is here, and that it is being built by Google, you need to go see the twovideos the web powerhouse has just released on how their data centers are built. The second video, a tour of their "container based" data centers, is particularly worth watching as it shows just how much thought they've put into doing a data center their own way.
I have visited quite a few data centers over the last few years, including some with more than 45,000 nodes in them, but I've never seen one that looks like this one. In fact, were in not for the transformers and UPSs (and their associated cables snaking throughout), I'd be hard pressed to identify this as a data center at all. That is until you get shown what goes inside one of these containers:
That is the densest gnarliest concentration of computing power that I've seen.
It's interesting to think that despite the fact that we use a nice fluffy term like "cloud computing," the reality for service providers is that they've got to solve a whole bunch of engineering and operations problems to give us that "webtone" that we're all used to. And I suspect that those that do are not only inventing the next major architecture of computing, but also building a formidable advantage over those of us still blundering about with data centers that look like they came out of the dotcom party.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 17, 2009)
Peter Rip (whose VC blog is the best in its category) has an interesting piece in the latest Businessweek that basically argues that the old VC playbook is done due to the lack of constantly available public market exits, and that VCs need to learn from their PE cousins (Private Equity: late-stage/buyout investors) in order to be successful in this new world.
While I think he is spot on that most good VCs are going to have to start learning to invest funds such that singles/doubles/triples make the overall fund economics work (when the return is 2-5x and not 10x+), his conclusion about the method for doing this being taking a page from the book of the PE folks worries me.
Later stage/buyout investors add their value through what is often called "financial engineering," or as Rip describes it: a focus "on metrics, comparables, terms, and cost of capital—more so than innovation, market selection, and team development." While this may be fun for some, it is intensely boring to those of us that like the notion of creating something from nothing— of finding new ways to use technology to change the way people do things.
And more importantly, what I've learned from working at Mark Hurd's HP, is that in financially well-run companies, all of these PE tricks are mostly useless because the job of the business manager (and his 12 counterparts in the horizontal finance organization) is to squeeze every drop of return on equity out of the business. Spend a couple of quarters in a business unit that is well run (again financially speaking) and you quickly realize that most of these PE geniuses are little more than glorified accountants— and not like the early swashbuckling engineers who ferreted out semiconductors, software, and biotech as fields to go build with capital and entrepreneurs.
If the cost of the closed public markets is that this is going to become the new modus operandi of the investors that gave us Apple and Google and FedEx and Genentech, it may be time for us to get really worried about getting those IPOs going again.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 18, 2009)
This week's Lost has Hurley rewriting The Empire Strikes Back (a true moment of genius in an already excellent show) so that he can catch Lucas before he gets around to making it to give him a better version of the script (for those that don't follow the show, part of the cast has been transported back to 1977).
Anyway, it got me to thinking about the other momentous geek event from 1977: the launch of the Apple ][. If instead of being a movie junkie, Hurley had been an engineer, how might he have tried to find the two Steves to improve upon their sequel?
Taking a pass on the IIc, IIgs, and Apple III? An open architecture Mac? No Newton?
Oh, I know— a computer small enough to fit in your pocket, with all of the world's information just a few clicks (touches) away, and a wide-open onramp for third party innovation?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 19, 2009)
In the very entertaining Scalzi sci-fi novel "Old Man's War," all of the soldiers are equipped with an embedded computer in their brains (fittingly called the "BrainPal") which allows them to communicate with each other, seek information from the Internet, plan out tactical scenarios— in short get all their "soldier work" done and more.
We're not quite there yet but this week's Newsweek semi-puff piece on the iPod Touch being the handheld of choice for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is a good reminder of how close we're getting. The use cases described by the writer are totally believable (with the exception of video capture... for now) and speak to the utility of a general purpose, connected, handheld computer with a very high resolution screen.
What is more amazing though is that Apple, a consumer company, is building devices that are considered rugged enough to be used in those kinds of environments. As the writer notes, devices built not with taxpayer dollars but with the power of a large scale consumer franchise running at high volumes— churning out devices that need to sustain the impact of small hands, large purses, sudden drops, and even unexpected baths. As consumers arm themselves with the latest technologies and put them through their paces in real world environments, this is just another data point that enterprises— be they large companies, hospitals, or even the military— are no longer at the leading edge of the commercialization of new technology.
The thing I've got to wonder though: when some of these devices come back broken from Afghanistan, do the Geniuses check the red dots for moisture damage?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 3 months ago (April 19, 2009)
Proving once again that he is a true master of his craft, J.J. Abrams has a wonderful essay in this month's Wired on the purpose of mystery in life. And in the process, the most well written attack on the current need for content snacking and instant gratification:
Perhaps that's why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it's the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider— or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It's a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.
Can not wait to see what this guy has done with the Star Trek franchise.
Go and get the paper version and slow down enough to read it. Or as he says: dig in.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 3, 2009)
Over at Gigaom there is a piece called "Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?" which led me to wonder why Mark Sigal (the author) thinks that there is still a for-pay software industry outside of professional niches (development, design, etc.) that is capable of being disrupted.
It would seem that the Internet killed both the channel for (CompUSA, trade pubs, tradeshows), and the reason for packaged software in the first place. You can now get from a blog review to a hosted web service, or even a downloadable app in just a couple of clicks, and increasingly people expect to be able to use what would have previously been considered "features" to products in a stand-alone (albeit connected) way. Case in point: the Picnik photo editor) .
And this is all a Good Thing because it allows us to tailor our computing experiences to specific needs instead of making big investments in money and time to get a full program which needs to justify its $20-100 price point by larding on features that some product manager feels are appropriate justifications for dollars.
So instead of looking at the AppStore today as a marketplace for applications, isn't it better to think of it as the "Customize" menu option of say Microsoft Office where any power user can choose to turn on and off features? In this model, $1-3 (or even free) might be just the right amount to charge per feature, and all of the griping that app developers are doing about the downward trend in prices might be more as a result of mismatched expectations than anything else.
Ever since Google and Amazon led the way in the monetization of increasingly smaller bits of functionality (AdSense and Amazon Affiliates being good ways for small sites/webapps to make money), we've entered an era where the traditional model for delivering functionality in big semi-independent programs is over, as well as the opportunity for reaping Lotus or Intuit-like returns on the back of someone else's platform. And in fact, despite rumors of casual gaming sites making eight figures with micropayments, I imagine that the Facebook F8 platform is probably an even more extreme case of exactly this dynamic.
To date Apple has done a poor job of treating its apps like features: they don't allow any form of rich interapp communication a la REST APIs, OLE, or even because they are Apple, OpenDoc, and they don't expose enough of the phone's interesting data in common frameworks. But this may change as the dynamic of small dollar/free transactions becomes the norm in the AppStore.
In the meanwhile, if I were an app developer, I'd either be thinking in terms of delivering monetizable features or just using the App Store as a way to driving traffic to features that increasingly live outside on the wild open web.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 7, 2009)
Futurist/forecaster Paul Saffo makes a really compelling argument that just like the 1980s was the decade of processing power, the 1990s the decade of the laser (primarily fiber optics for communication), the 2000s is the decade of the sensor, or as he puts it, the decade of giving eyes and ears to the web.
It is an intriguing idea, particularly now that almost everyone knows what an "accelerometer" is (thanks to the iPhone). As we move towards blending the real world we inhabit (analog) with the artificial one we create online (digital), sensors, and eventually actuators, come to play a critical gatekeeper function. And as sensor technology improves (think MEMs that you can swallow), the opportunity space is limitless.
Star Trek's omniscient computer with its vast sensor arrays won't hold a candle to what combining the sensors and the web (think the emerging sensorweb) will allow.
I am sure that the recent hobby interest in physical computing, and specifically in the open source Arduino microcontroller comes from this trend; after all, I've got 4 Arduino projects under my belt now— and much like the rest of the rest of the Internet, 3 of 4 involve some sort of sensor (light/sound/temp) sending data into the computer for publication to a web service. It's like that coffee pot net cam of 15 years ago— except in more web-friendly scalar values.
Here is a practical application with loads of business value: of the 7 million recreational runners in the US, assume 50% actually run consistently enough to need to worry about upgrading their running shoes. I am in that camp and for the last decade I've used a real low-tech algorithm to determine when to buy new shoes: I run on a particular pair until they either come undone, or more likely, until my knees start to hurt.
However, in the last two years, I've made two changes that would allow the sensorweb to help me out of this bind. First, I started exclusively buying all of my running shoes from Zappos.com (the Amazon of apparel). And second, I started running with a Nike+ sensor, which transmits the telemetry of my run back to my iPod which then itself syncs it to the Nike+ web service.
So now I've got the two key pieces of data needed to make the upgrade calculation: the date of my last running shoe purchase, and the number of miles I've run since then. Unfortunately today they are both ghettoed in their respective sites, but with the web world moving towards more open, one can hope.
If Saffo is right and we can expect the emerging sensorweb to be the defining trend of this decade, the key question will be: who will be the Google of it? Who will make the connection like the one I laid out above, along with many many other more high value ones, all with the users at the center?
Update: Wow how prescient— a related piece on my employer that I didn't know about!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 9, 2009)
David sent me a fantastic survey that provides a whole lot of good data about the who, how, where, and why of smartphone usage in the US. The most intriguing part of the study is that they dig into the "why" behind the various different choices people make and discover that iPhone owners are overwhelmingly choosing a portable web surfing experience while Blackberry owners are picking a portable email/messaging experience. By contrast the G1 phone (which I have been disappointed with) does some of everything but nothing exceptionally well and is thus hard to choose.
It's good to stop for a second while we are in the middle of AppStore mania and think about this: according to this survey, the iPhone is the best hardware representation of a web browser that you can put in your pocket out there, and this, more than any of the hype around the 3rd party ecosystem, is what drives the massive adoption.
One outstanding feature.
As we get more sophisticated in what we buy (thanks to the information tidalwave the web enables), I think that the "one outstanding feature" approach to building products and services is going to become more and more important. Think of Asus and its diminutive and cheap laptops unseating Dell and HP. Or the Flip's ease of use crushing Sony and Canon.
Another way to put it is that one amazing feature is what makes the beachhead and that everything else just solidifies that position. This is a good mental model for the apps in the AppStore— as the 3rd most important feature, they can still contribute to stickiness, but they just aren't in and of themselves that one killer thing you've gotta have.
In a related post, Mike Speiser has a nice post of diversification of products and entrepreneurs which gets at the same dynamic. In a nutshell, his post argues that being awesome at one thing demands incredible focus, and focus is the friend of success, while the opposite leads to mediocre mush. It's true of design-by-committee in big companies, but increasingly, even among the startup crowd, I've noticed this new trend for previously successful entrepreneurs to claim to want to "diversify" by taking on multiple projects at the same time. I totally get the intellectual appeal of the diversification, but at a gut level it just doesn't feel right, and Mike nails exactly why in his post.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 10, 2009)
To fulfill what seems to be a minimum quota of Twitter pieces (and proving once again that the Nytimes prefers to lead from the rear by picking up on timely web events a month after they happen), Miguel Helft has a piece on Doug Bowman's very public break with Google and subsequent escape to Twitter, a fairer place not dominated by the drudgery of data-driven interface design.
While it seemed like a fun argument to have (data versus art and instinct), it's overly simplistic as any great interface designer will use a full spectrum of tools to push the man-machine interface in creative and interesting new ways.
Interestingly enough, it has been a recently renewed interest in gaming (reignited by the iPhone and games like Rolando and Doodle Jump) that has gotten me thinking about interfaces again. Most of us have spent far too long locked in the relatively limited box model of the standards-based web for information display, and it's good every once in a while to pause and reconsider what that and the relatively crude forms-based way of interacting with the computer via a thin HTTP-powered straw have done to hold us back.
If you feel that way as well, I'd highly recommend reading Bret Victor's "Magic Ink," a long essay on the challenges in software interface design. Victor works at Apple which should give him some street cred in most people's eyes, but more significantly, he comes to the problem of interface design as a systems engineer turned design aficionado. As a result he does more to advance the thinking on interaction and interface design in the 75 pages of his essay than all of the hoopla over whether A/B tests are good for making decisions on interface elements.
Essentially, Victor calls for an end to thinking of the problem from the perspective of interactivity first and foremost, drawing a distinction between "manipulative" software, that the user uses to make something, and "information" software which is is mostly employed by users to acquire knowledge. He argues that most of the software out there today falls into this latter camp and that as a result we should invest more time, energy, and tooling into building what he calls "context-sensitive information graphics" which you can think of as Tufte on steroids— or at the very least, infoporn that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of computer displays. As he writes:
I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user’s eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it.
It's a great piece with a wealth of footnotes embedded throughout. More importantly, as computer companies everywhere race to build their visions of a "fourth computing screen" a.k.a., a tablet (the first 3 being the PC, the TV, and the smartphone), we ought to all stop to consider the ways in which we might better be able to move towards Victor's proposed information software design discipline.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 11, 2009)
There is tons of speculation about what Apple intends to do with PA Semi, the chip company they paid $300 million for last year. Though it varies wildly, one thing that people do agree on is that this means the fruit company is going to push more into CPU design and all of the associated accoutrements (GPUs, custom motherboard chips, compilers, deep OS tweaks, etc.)
In the words of J.J. Abrams's Scotty in Star Trek "that's essitin'" mostly because it puts a company with very deep pockets in a place where fundamental innovation can take place. Back when I was living in California and Steve had recently come back to Apple (and killed the clone business), I remember someone saying that Jobs wanted to be so vertically integrated that trucks full of sand would pull into one end of the building, and full computers would come out the other. With PA Semi they are now practically set to turn sand into chips directly!
In a related note, this past weekend, I saw an Alan Kay talk (at Intel of all places) about how the x86 straightjacket has kept software big, complex, and slow. He seems fascinated with FPGAs, going deep into how it's important for the chip to be able to adapt to the software so that it needs to run more efficiently and with fewer levels of abstraction on top of the hardware. Thanks to an NSF grant, Kay has undertaken a "grand challenge" project of implementing an entire system from the applications to the CPU instructions in 20,000 lines of code which is why he is so obsessed about having control over the individual gates.
The most amazing to me about the prospects of PA Semi inside of Apple products is how this evolution has happened. Steve might have always wanted to pound sand into chips but he started from a bunch of commonly available components glued together with great software (for both the iPhone and the iPod) and only after building a big enough business to justify this kind of vertical integration, has this move taken place. And if it works, it won't matter how many other people can buy capacitive touch displays at Foxconn. With the level of integration that Apple might achieve, they could crack something fundamental enough to stand out in terms of power management, performance, or even programmability in a way that might truly stand out.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 15, 2009)
Having recently run into a table of profit per employee at different technology companies, I was floored to see the difference between the top (Google, $210k/employee) and the not-so-top (HP, $26K/employee).
While this may not be a super meaningful ratio for Wall Street (it it were mega mergers might be less popular), it does strike me as a pretty good way to gauge how much money the company has as a "cushion" to support the things that are most relevant to employees in tech companies: long term research on high risk projects, working environment spending (both IT and real estate), etc. It stands to reason that a company with high profits per employee has more to spend to keep that employee happy.
Given the large discrepancy between tech superstars, I decided to dig in a little and look across industries. The table to the left shows a random sampling of large companies in other industries which range from basic retail to other intellectual property-heavy industries like big pharma. The results are interesting.
While the bottom of the tech range doesn't quite qualify for burger flipping status, we're right around telephone repairman and significantly lower than the folks who dress up in fuzzy suits or sell sugared water.
This may give me pause the next time I wonder why I work in a veal pen and eat in a cafeteria that finds vintage a perfectly good metric to apply to milk.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 22, 2009)
In a recent blog post "Why the Arduino Matters," Greg argues that the open source Arduino platform is on the cusp of doing for physical computing what the Altair did for PCs 30 years ago— effectively opening up a wealth of grassroots innovation that will serve as the substrate for major industries.
I love Arduino mainly because it serves as a really nice bridge between the Internet and the world of atoms we inhabit. It is trivial to program sensor-based projects with it and it really does work "out of the box" for most applications. And what is more, loads of people are really excited about the platform's prospects for hacking the physical world and are thus contributing all sorts of how-tos to wire up just about anything.
However, I have trouble seeing this really charming microcontroller-on-a-board sparking a huge revolution due to the fact that it's still too far from the network. Any Arduino project that wants to get/send data over the Internet still requires that it be tethered to a PC or that it be complemented with a ridiculously expensive Ethernet, Bluetooth, or WIFI shield which brings the cost of the total package above what a low-end PC would cost and thus limits the scope of applications significantly.
Until someone solves this networking problem in a cost-effective manner, the Arduino platform is going to remain ghettoed to the land of Lego Mindstorms (cute to learn and play but not really useful).
The great news though is that there is all sorts of hardware innovation taking place in the Arduino community; for instance, my favorite form factor for projects is called "Stickduino" because it provides all of the guts of the Arduino in something that is not much bigger than a thumbdrive.
So get hacking you network nerds, and get us a WIFI-capable Arduino board for less than $50. Then we'll have something worth making a run at the Altair.
(And no, the BugLabs stuff is too expensive and "blocky" and the Chumby is too expensive and built around the wrong assumptions. If anyone else had any other kits to mention, please leave them in the comments)
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 months ago (May 24, 2009)
For a few months now, one of my favorite weekend activities has been to spend some time at Apple's AppStore, looking around for cool new apps to put in my pocket. Lately though I suspect I am not alone in feeling "AppStore fatigue" by which I mean that it is beginning to sense that most new apps are not that interesting, or in the best of cases, little more than a native interface for something that should have probably been left as an iPhone-optimized website (casual games at the AppStore are the one exception).
I've heard the argument that this sameness is being driven by the limitations of Apple's sandbox, and that with the coming of OS 3.0, we're going to see a whole bunch of new innovation. Outside of the rumored video recording capabilities, beefier hardware, and Bonjour over Bluetooth though, I'm not sure that this is right.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that until true multi-tasking comes to the iPhone platform, as well as multiple hardware form factors, it's going to fail to reach the true potential of the kind of pocket computer that could kill PC use for most regular folks.
Why? Because it takes too long to get to most tasks when what you've got is a pull-based model for information that is relevant to a particular context. Whenever a use case is just a bit more complex than getting a restaurant review nearby, checking your email, or catching up on the latest headlines, the iPhone's obligatory 15 second time-to-info is fast becoming a deal breaker (how quickly we become spoiled!). And forget about actually authoring content, not so much because of the time it takes to get started, but because any type of rich asset upload without background processing is just an exercise in watching the grass grow.
Having upgraded my G1 to "Cupcake" (Android 1.5), I've recently had a chance to rediscover the importance of multi-tasking. Cupcake should really be called Android 1.0 (because it is what they should have shipped) or 2.0 (because it is so much better than what they did ship). Overall the OS is much snappier, and apps seem to crash much less when they are backgrounded. The battery still gets crushed but fetching data in the background makes a huge difference and automatic YouTube integration is one of those technology-as-magic things worthy of seeing.
Interestingly enough, the Android team had its own host of issues to solve with the sub-60 second use case that had more to do with the G1 hardware than with software. Because the G1 has a Sidekick-like slide-out keyboard, most entry-based tasks required two hands and an awful context switch (having the screen rotate and hoping that app elements stay more or less in place). With Cupcake's new soft keyboard (which is just as good as the iPhone's, many tasks can now be performed one-handed and much more quickly.
Finally, I hate to admit this, but my recent experience with Android and the G1 is making me sort of excited for the Palm Pre which— at least of paper— seems to address both the software (a truly modern muli-tasking OS built for a mobile phone) and the hardware (a physical keyboard that is aligned with the most common phone orientation, plus a willingness to vary the form factor model to model) challenges that handicap the current crop of pocket computers. On paper though, it is easy for anything to be better than reality, so we'll have to wait until June 6 to see!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (May 31, 2009)
Spanish chorizo is among my favorite foods in the world. And this is despite the fact that during my last trip to Spain I visited someone who showed me how it is made. And trust me, if you are a fan of chorizo, this is one sausage you just don't want to see getting made.
I felt similarly this week while attending talks at at Google's developer conference, I/O, and specifically those around the company's hosted web platform, AppEngine, and the ones around its browser-based UI toolkit GWT. In neither set of talks did Google engineers seek to sugarcoat the fact that working on a performant web application is messy and ugly, especially when you've got scaling ambitions similar to Google's.
Most of the talks I saw on either topic were worth watching (as they come out on video), and especially all of the ones titled "advanced X." During those I felt that Google was doing its best to give webapp developers a good best practices cheat sheet that will save you lots and lots of time.
What is good for the web is good for Google, and nowhere was this more obvious than at I/O this week. Unlike other developer conferences where vendors line up to tell you how everything is as simple as click-click-poof!, the Google folks seem to take great pleasure in marinading in the web's complex, organic, and most importantly, open nature. All of the technologies showcased seem to take the long view which implies a sort of patience that probably only Google could muster. Betting on HTML 5? Letting Android cook slowly while everyone declares it "dead?" These are all good things for all of us.
Oh and did I mention that they gave us all Ion phones (G2 Android)? 5,000 phones hoping that a few result in killer apps. Now that is investing in the future.
Next up, my first impressions of Wave (having digested it for a few days).
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 6, 2009)
Google's giveaway of the "G2" (officially called the Google Ion), preloaded with Android 1.5, was a generous and thoughtful way to engage developers in building apps for the Android platform. And in any world that didn't have the juggernaut that is the iPhone and the AppStore, it may have worked.
Sadly though the overall Android experience still lacks polish and leaves something to be desired, especially in the realm of small devices that come out of a pocket and need to be usable for short bursts. The software is coming along nicely, and the soft keyboard is a welcome addition, but either the OS's broadcasting touch events, the capacitive screen driver, or the hardware itself is weak because most times you get going with the new keyboard and hit the space bar it fails to register, as well as random slowdowns in event processing on any user action (I blame the JVM's garbage collector and not as people have written, the multiple apps in the background which is perhaps the best thing about Android as opposed to the iPhone). Furthermore, the "notifications" system where you have to hit a terrifically small area on the top toolbar to see what's happened as well as the "app tab" metaphor both seem like they were not designed at all—or at very least, not polished enough.
But alas, Android is the open option so I'll keep rooting for it and using every new release. In the meanwhile I hope that the Android-on-post-PC-devices push yields some interesting new alternatives in a world less defined by the iPhone (even Palm's Pre is getting compared primarily to the iPhone on its launch weekend).
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 9, 2009)
It may be a sign of the times, but the most striking feature of the 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is that it would be hard to assemble this many people that are that familiar with all of the different layers of the computing stack under one roof were it any other company running this conference.
And it shows. From the low level tools like LLVM and their own compiler front end and the Open CL stuff to make a general purpose computing platform out of the gates on the GPU to the high level improvements to Finder and the native apps, these guys seem to have it all covered.
Snow Leopard and iPhone OS apparently share 85% of the same codebase which is a bit nutty given that the former runs basically super computers and the latter is made to fit in pockets. Grand Central provides new ways to enable multicore threads-based programming while Bonjour proxies allow peripherals on your home network to remain asleep for the 99% of the time they are not in use. Lithium polymer is the new black when it comes to integrated laptop battery technologies (that are supposedly greener) while the ARM 7 instruction set is the new jacks-to-enter for mobile instruction sets. The XCode debugger now can step backwards while at the same time allowing source level variable inspection. And to boot we're also getting 1,000 new improvements to the speed, stability, and look & feel of the applications we've come to depend on thanks to this new build toolset.
I'm droning on to make the point that the sheer breath of stack traversal from silicon to tooling to enduser applications and even web services that power new forms of micropayments is all being covered here. By one computer company— albeit one that stands on the shoulders of open source and the power of the Internet.
And while I'm on that topic, the new iPhone 3GS looks fantastic— a worthwhile upgrade for anyone who has come to depend on it as a key piece of their personal technology. AT&T is going to make no bones of the fact that this is an honest-to-goodness $700 mobile computer they are arming you with, which is why this is the new unlocked price of the high end unit— or $500 for the folks who rolled their hardware last year for the iPhone 3G and who don't want to wait until December to upgrade.
But you know what? This is actually not a bad thing. Subsidized business models are evil and it's time we consumers put a stop to them. They misalign the interests of the end users, the sales channel, and the folks who slave all day to make the products. I've seen it first hand in the printer industry, and I imagine that it's not much better when it comes to nickel-and-diming wireless carriers with their roach motel plans and inability to execute on behalf of the user.
So before folks start complaining, let's stop to consider that these are real honest-to-goodness computers being put in our pockets by what is perhaps the world's last standing Real Computer Company.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 10, 2009)
Despite people complaining that Apple didn't introduce cold fusion this time around (talk about winner's curse), I found my brief attendance at WWDC this year well worth it, and came away with a better understanding of how what Apple is doing with the iPhone serves as a harbinger of a trend that will likely redefine all of the consumer electronics industry.
I started the day by attending the "iPhone OS networking" session which laid out all of the incremental improvements that Apple has made to the TCP/IP routing algorithms in 3.0 so as to allow a seamless experience between the various radios in the device. Now the iPhone is not the first device I've had with both a cell modem and a Wi-fi radio, but it certainly was the first that attempted (and mostly succeeded) in doing the right thing switching between one and the other during truly mobile scenarios.
And it looks like this is about to get even better. Publicly announced was the whole "captive network" thing around hotspots at public places (think AT&T wifi at Starbucks) that require authentication which is likely to be a huge boon to folks that use these networks and have thus been trapped in authentication hell while walking by a Starbucks. But there are many other problems that follow from chatty network protocols that are suddenly hoisted from one IP address (the WAN) to another (the Wifi LAN). It's clear that the Apple team has thought through this (read the stupid NDAed docs to see how), especially along the theme of the entire conference: "refinement."
While there were many great sessions and meetings in between, my day was bookended with another networky session: an introduction to developing with the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS). Thanks to the stupid NDA again, I'm going to just make two high level observations about APNS: first, it smells of a highly efficient implementation that was likely the result of Apple still smarting from last year's MobileMe fiasco, which is to say, binary protocols are cool again.
Second, the implication of the implementation is that each of the 40MM iPhone devices out there is going to maintain a persistent TCP connection to an Apple service at all times. Seen in this light, the investment in the network stack refinements from the morning makes even more sense.
But more significantly, think about what this means for the consumer electronics industry as a whole. As it sometimes does, Apple is showing us what I think will become an increasingly common design pattern: devices that are "phoning home" via the Internet to their makers's servers in order to receive/send new information that is relevant to their overall use. This is no different than what we saw with last week's Air France's speed sensors reporting realtime telemetry back to Airbus— but instead of talking about a $35MM plane, we are going to start seeing this in all sorts of low cost consumer electronics devices.
Could this substantiate the rumors about Apple building a billion dollar data center in North Carolina? Maintaining persistent connections to that many devices alone certainly wouldn't require that level of investment— after all, large IM networks have done this for years— but it might if APNS is just the beginning and in time Apple hopes to use the connection for much richer forms of data exchange.
Two last points on this: first, every other device manufacturer is now going to have to get their heads wrapped around this type of deployment model— something which may be quite painful to the folks that have spent their entire careers "shipping boxes" and building business models that stop when the customer pays you for that box.
And second, it is interesting to see that APNS is being offered by Apple and not by the wireless carriers in each of the countries the iPhone is sold. It has got to be obvious to AT&T that APNS is the beginning of the end for SMS charges for iPhone customers, and more importantly, the continuation of something much much better (if you are an enduser): Apple wresting control of the non commodity parts of the pipe from carriers who are more addicted to their own business models than pleasing users.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 11, 2009)
It's not been a good week for AT&T with all of the ire the company has taken from frustrated iPhone users who can not MMS or tether and who will not get a nice subsidy discount on Apple's shiny new product. To top things off, Saul Hansell is now using the megaphone of the NYTimes to take the carrier to task for its privacy policy, or more specifically for its ability to use our location information to its own ends:
But the company [AT&T] is saying more clearly than most other big companies that it knows a lot about you, that it will use that information to help it make more money in any number of ways, that it will keep the data for as long as you remain a customer, and that it can be forced to give all that information to the government without giving you the chance to object
I suspect that all current telcos are buying themselves options here given how unpopular wireless carriers are with their subscribers in the first place, I'd think that they might want to keep a close ear to how users might react the first time they are interrupted with a pushed ad that uses information the carrier has obtained and sold by virtue of the privacy policy.
Who knows? Now that Sprint is selling bandwidth to other types of devices, we might have an opening for an MVNO that is more worried about end users than protecting its own business model. It didn't work the first time around but with the increasing amount of power that device manufacturers have with their branded smartphones, should the carriers get too egregious, it might work next time.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 12, 2009)
At the office today, we were having a conversation at lunch about startups and how to make them successful. The discussion reminded me of a question folks have been asking me a lot over the last year as the economy has been cratering and B rounds have been all but nonexistent: how can you get your startup to a successful exit?
I've been saving this quote since before we were acquired by HP in 2007 but now seems like a fitting time for it:
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the same with startups: the main principle to grasp is that building value for the enduser is the best way to be successful. There are far too many gyrations to do anything but, despite what all of the entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors who are fooled by randomness might claim about how to win.
Build something people love that solves a hard technical problem in the process and something good is likely to happen most of the time. Outside of that it doesn't matter which development methodology you use, which viral loops you bake into your service, or even what your customer acquisition economics look like. These are but methods to be tweaked once you know you've built real value.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 13, 2009)
Something I've heard recently was that Twitter's silver bullet when it comes to a business model will be a sort of Paypal 2.0 that blends universal login with a payments system that they can skim pennies off of. And while I think Paypal is more ready for a 2.0 disruption than any other legacy web service (it is appalling how bad it still is), I think it would be a dumb and dangerous thing for us as users to expect to rely on another vendorâ and specifically a startup that has had trouble scaling from day 1â for something as critical to the next phase of the evolution of the consumer Internet as a payment system.
Ideally I'd love to see OpenID (which finally seems to be gaining traction) extended to allow many providers to offer payment clearing services on top of many providers already providing authentication services. Now I know this may be a bit of a pipe dreamâ after all, it has taken OpenID more than 5 years to come close to the required ease-of-use for a simple username/password challenge, but when it comes to payments, it is much much more critical to keep it open.
Think of the power of an open ecosystem like this: first and foremost, the payment handlers that could migrate to it like the merchant account folks or credit card companies already have tons of experience reliably clearing payments, maintaining security, etc (and sure while they have an innovator's dilemma type of issue, I am confident they would eventually see the light of day). And more importantly, competition would be a very good thing indeed if our goal is to avoid the stagnation that Paypal has suffered at the hands of eBay.
A related example: today Facebook opened up its public page user registration system for picking usernames and people rushed to make sure to get their favorite handles. To me this makes Facebook smell a lot like a DNS registrarâ which again, seems like a really dumb responsibility to hand over to startup that has yet to make money, no matter how many users they have (here is a nice suggestion for avoiding the Facebook as the people's DNS problem, a least a little bit).
Finally if the open standards approach doesn't work with payments, I sure hope we standardize on a vendor like Amazon or even Apple that already has proven experience running billions of transactions through their shopping cart.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 15, 2009)
Economists have this concept called path dependence for explaining how non-market driven equilibrium can result from past historical decisions that keep the market from developing to a more efficient point. VHS, sewers, and most natural resource-rich Latin American economies are prime "victims" of path dependence. It's an interesting concept that Tomi Ahonen has recently applied to the development of the smartphone market in the US versus the rest of the world in a rambling but insightful post.
Ahonen, a former Nokia employee and mobile consultant argues that the US has a very warped view of what constitutes a smartphone due to the path dependence of the smartphone being born in this country out of the PDA (or pocket computer) vision which sacrifices hard keyboards for screen size, and more importantly, efficient text input for application flexibility and real estate. European and Asian usage, he argues, has always been driven by the prevalence of SMS (something we didn't wake up to here until just last year) and as such, fast typing rules the roost.
However his most controversial point to do with the unique American view of the smartphone is around the future of the smartphone as a type of PC with the user customizing its functionality via AppStores:
By far the most of those 160 million buyers did not for one second consider "what operating system does this have, what apps can I download to it". You and I may have done so. You and I care. The mass market is not like you and me. And the Apple iPhone customer today is not a typical mass market customer. Do not kid yourself. Those who bought an average smartphone last year wanted a certain high-end phone with certain abilities and that given smartphone happened to match that need. Its operating system and any applications had ZERO bearing on the decision. Not for mass market consumers. ... We do not buy - and the mass market will not ever buy - smartphones so that they could install some apps to it. The vast majority of users will be contented with the apps that come pre-loaded, and then they go to web based services to get their additional benefits.
I'm not sure he is right here. Just as we were blind to the addictive power of SMS in the US until recently, it seems that the European/Asian analysts seem blind to the power of user customized mobile computers. Perhaps our path dependence is in a different direction overall— that is assuming that it becomes economically viable to survive as a mobile applications developer.
And then again, maybe we're all in the Apple marketing vortex and at some point down the road we'll wonder why we thought that loading native 3rd party apps was such a big opportunity.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 19, 2009)
We need a GPL equivalent for websites that accrue user generated content as their main source of value. The way that it would work is that sites could adopt this license, a la Creative Commons, and be able to visibly display a logo that says they are compliant. Then in the event that the TOS (terms of service) of the site changed in any way (for instance, because the site was trying to institute some sort of a paywall), they would have to provide a suitable means of download for all of the data, much like Wikipedia does today.
This wouldn't keep entrepreneurs from building the next YouTube and it wouldn't prevent Google from paying billions of dollars for the value aggregated. It would however protect the content from dumb business model experiments. And more importantly, it would protect the users who contributed the work and effort under a different set of assumptions about the potential impact of their contributions.
I've been thinking about this ever since discovering earlier this week that Instructables.comâ one of my favorite sites on the Internetâ has decided to hobble their user-contributed database with a clumsily implemented paywall that blocks users from seeing alternative/hi-res images (and a few other things) to the projects written up on the site. This is a terrible moveâ not because I think Instructables shouldn't try to make money (more on that below), and certainly not because I am against paywalls per se (the Wall St Journal and Zagat are just fine)â but for the simple reason that in making this move now, Instructables has destroyed value contributed by its users under a different set of starting assumptions about what the site was going to do with the content they put up. In so doing, they changed the rules mid-game to the detriment of everyone involved.
While it is true that most regular consumers of content wouldn't care about the GPL equivalent for content much in the same way that most folks who use a Linksys router don't care about the GPLed code provided on the Cisco site, content authors wouldâ especially the ones who spend painstaking hours documenting how to make a continuously rotating servo for the betterment of mankind only to discover that their work has become the pawn of some business model chess game most startups have already lost.
Now, back to making money. I think it is a great thing to do especially for a site as rich in possibilities for monetization as Instructables. How about the site sell a premium print magazine of the best projects every month? How about t-shirts? How about seminars with the "experts"? A conference like Maker Faire but on a smaller scale with Meetup-like distributed dynamics?
Now I'm sure that the guys there have thought of all of these possibilities and many more so my point here isn't really to come up with a new business model for them, but to suggest that there may be some out there that are not quite as corrosive to the mission of becoming the public documentation tool for the DIY generationâ a very worthwhile oneâ that they initially set out upon.
And in the meanwhile, who's going to get this GPL for user-generated content thing going? Because we're going to need itâ especially mobile devices empower all sorts of very valuable location-aware content authoring over the next decade.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 20, 2009)
I am happy to see Joe Hewitt writing positively about the hardware improvements in the new iPhone because this is a guy that has been there since the very beginning. His iUI framework make stuff happen on the webapp-only iPhone and his subsequent Facebook native app taught us that we didn't have to settle for UITextField as the only way to enter text on our devices.
So when he says that the "S" should stand for "smooth" I feel like we ought to chalk one up for the Internet— as we've come to know it and love it with all of its AJAX goodness— as it gets ready to come to our mobile devices. The future is not, as Tomi Ahonen likes to write, one of the "legacy Internet" and the "mobile Internet," but one where the same experience you get on your laptop gets translated into a truly mobile one thanks to Moore's law and the magic of the free market working its way through the smartphone battle of the 2000s.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 22, 2009)
This is a hilarious story about a guy who got his iPhone stolen and used Apple's new "Find my iPhone" feature to recover it directly from the thiefâ Jack Bauer style.
Outside of the persistent connection between the phone and the Apple service (is it via XMPP?), this new location broadcast stuff is the most exciting part of OS 3.0 for me. Because while location awareness has been a part of all of the future vision stuff that Nokia and mobile social network sites have shown for years, with "Find my iPhone" we now have a big vendor pushing it as a platform-level feature, and more specifically, one which is likely to start advertising it to the masses in their usual effective manner.
I suspect that the democratization of this technology is going to have broad ranging implications on privacy, terms-of-service, and just about every part of the "personal" in personal computing in the years to come. And as usual, we'll discover we didn't think enough about the implications of being locatable anywhere at any time via a web service before the feature became as prevalent as say, SMS or voicemail.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 23, 2009)
Having been the media darlings of 2008, I can tell that netbooks are entering the phase of the media hype cycle where everyone asks just what the big deal was in the first place and wonders how they ever let themselves get carried away with pronouncing the netbook the "computer for the cloud age."
I was intrigued by the whole phenomenon enough to try two different devices (an HP 2133 and an HP 1000) but after some serious attempts at using each as my main portable device, I gave up and declared them to be nothing more than cheap laptops.
But before we get carried away, we should take a moment to consider that "just cheap laptops" is a dumb statement to make. The laptop is a transformative device that opens up whole worlds of opportunity, especially for people who don't have regular access to computers, and making it possible for someone to get that much portable computing power for $300-500 is really quite a feat. We owe a lot of the OLPC and the subsequent race between the Taiwanese manufacturers to get component and enclosure prices down. Sadly, software makers didn't jump at the chance to redefine the experience as well— with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the best viable experiment to date in creating netbook-specific software— but is is still early days here.
And finally, it's important to realize that to first time computer owners who aren't stepping down from 15 inch screens are Core2 Duos, there is a lot of magic in being able to call a general purpose computing device "personal."
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 1 month ago (June 28, 2009)
The NYTimes has a nice piece on the success of Acer, a Taiwanese computer maker, in becoming the #2 laptop/netbook supplier behind HP. The piece is worth reading for all of the digs that the more established players take at the underdog alone, but it makes two things very clear:
1. If I was betting in this sector, I'd say that Acer, Asus, and any of the other Taiwanese makers are going to take over both the laptop and the netbook market in the next 3-5 years. The key statistic here is that Acer is willing to survive in the market with as little as 2% margins across its product line— which is sometimes less than what the channel makes. More importantly, a 2% net margin business is not something that big American companies like HP are going to play seriously in.
2. It's amazing to see how much all of these laptops and netbooks look like each other— across manufacturers. I guess this is what you get as the ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) like Foxconn and Quanta take on more of the basic product engineering. When you've got the same engineers working on things like thermal envelope and clamshell design and working with the same raw materials (CPU, SSD, etc.), it's no wonder everything starts looking the same after just a few iterations.
If I were trying to compete with these Taiwanese companies, I'd try very hard to get out of banana handling— simply speccing and branding these machines— to more substantial sources of value-add through software and service differentiation. Investing serious resources in this area is very challenging to do, especially as the price premium of these portable computers plummets— but the only real alternative at this point seems to be to exit the business, or get ready for the bumpy 2% banana handler's ride.
And it can't just be about slapping Android on these machines either— real differentiation in software and services needs to start from the most common emergent use cases for the portable clamshell computing devices of today. These use cases then need to be used to rethink the computing experience from the ground up. Efforts like Jolicloud (a startup trying to put some real meat behind the term "netbook") or Ubuntu One seem like a step in the right direction, albeit bite-sized ones.
In the short term though, the one thing that is for sure is that consumers will benefit from the plummeting prices for what used to be a premium computing experience.
BGR had a very good piece yesterday on the future of RIM with a subtle but important point that few people seem to get: if you don't have a solid software stack underneath your products that you can invest in for the long haul and which will grow to fit new functionality and third party innovation, you're going to get screwed— even if your end users aren't clamoring for it and are still flocking to your devices in droves.
I bet this very observation is keeping our keyboard-obssesed nanucks to the north up at night. Along with Nokia, these guys basically invented the smartphone, and yet, the cost of being first seems to be that their rickety OS— designed for the CPUs and networks of yesteryear— may now keep them from staying in front of the onslaught from Apple and Google.
I've been carrying a Blackberry 8900 for the last month and have to admit that when it comes to messaging and calendaring, neither the iPhone nor the Ion can touch it. But step outside of email/mms/Exchange calendar mode and you'll feel like you've time traveled back and Windows 3.1. The browser sucks, the device itself is laggy, and most task flows feel... well sort of retro.
If I were a RIM executive, I'd be rooting for some skunkworks team putting the Blackberry's messaging magic into Android. Those guys should be getting loads of pizza and Red Bull and plenty of encouragement about how they represent the future.
After two years at a big company, I think I've come to understand the way in which people work here. I've come to know it as the 20-20-60 rule.
20% of the people in a big company are operating above their skill/will level. These are the folks who make up the Peter principle bucket— promoted beyond their abilities. They are also the folks who are living true to the famous jazz edict: always be the worst guy in the ensemble. God love them for taking that risk— and that is despite how miserable they may make the rest of us.
20% of the folks are the real A players. When you read about Microsoft stealing XYZ away from Google or Amazon, these are the folks they are talking about. They have the skills to get things done, the passion, and perhaps most importantly, the patience required to make elephants dance (big companies get stuff done). Every time I meet one of these gems, I walk away believing a little more in the human condition.
The other 60% of folks are what most people mean when they talk about the "fat" in corporate America. They generally only good at producing and consuming meetings and at looking good in front of their bosses. They don't take risks, but not because they are to limited (these are not Peter principle folks), but because they are optimizing for a different outcome: their own career advancement. Knowing that most products and services fail, these folks prefer to be "in" with some senior exec that will always take care of them. And when the shit hits the fan they've got their story down pat as to why everything that was outside of their purview was what "went wrong."
I hate these people.*
They are what makes working in a big company completely intolerable. The are what has given Powerpoint a bad name. And perhaps most importantly, they are the detritus that has to be cleaned out if we are to get our economy to a good place again.
I've just finished reading Alain De Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a somewhat lyrical description of 10 "professions" that range from transportation logistics to electric transmission to airplane manufacture. It's a fun read because at its best, the book provides a very candid look at how the folks in these industries find meaning in their work, no matter how mundane.
My favorite bit happens to be the "biscuit manufacturing" chapter (for us Americans, crackers & cookies) where we get to meet a couple of people that are passionate about getting just the right mix of dough, packaging, and marketing around one of the most basic experiences we humans share. It is in describing this quest for the perfect biscuit that De Botton shows us why it's important to never get caught in that fat 60% belly of the workplace: because if you are there, you will never get more than a paycheck, and certainly not the meaning that most of us deserve from what will be the single biggest time investment of our lives.
* Not personally per se but certainly in the work context.
If he does launch it, and it doesn't tank, the following two implications are likely to redefine the landscape of the consumer computing industry forever:
1. It means that most of the hardware "value add" really does take place outside of the big companies like HP and Dell and inside the ODMs in Taiwan and the supporting ecosystem of far east software/services companies (TechCrunch it would seem is using one in Singapore for both bringing up the hardware and getting the bits to run). If a non-VC funded startup can pull this off, all of the big companies with their leagues of non-engineer program managers should take a moment to be horribly embarrassed.
2. It also means that what will be increasingly relevant in this new world is access to an audience who is willing to buy based on the media relationship you've established with them. TechCrunch probably has 5-10,000 really passionate folks who would take a risk on a gadget like this (out of the million and a half that come to the site), and in the end, that may be all that is needed to jump start a hardware product with these kind of build economics.
I don't know if this project will succeed in the end but I applaud Arrington for taking the risk. If he does pull it off (by which I mean if he manages to sell 5,000 of these), you can bet that everyone will take notice— both big and small— and we may yet see a new era of hardware-led innovation born.
Alex Payne has a thoughtful post on the future of feed readers where he argues that the current model (as best exemplified by Google Reader) is dying, and that all of the social replacements (Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) don't quite get us back to the same place.
I agree; back in 2001 I was convinced that RSS, pub/sub, and feed readers were a chocolate and peanut butter technology combination that would someday be as mainstream as IM. People have argued that their failure to attain mass market status was a result of the geekiness and complexity of "subscribing" to new content, but having turned a bunch of people on to Google Reader only to see them abandon it in short order, I have a different take: to me, the failure in feed readers has been all around content curation. And more importantly, since the atomization of feeds in feed reading, brought about by the aforementioned social replacements, that curation task has shifted to the "wisdom of the crowds," which— while hardly perfect— does take a step forward from what we were getting from the feed reading ecosystem.
Let's take an example from a related space, photo sharing: when Flickr first upended the traditional photo sharing category, people were quick to claim that it was their social dimension or their "default to public" attitude that made all the difference. And while these features were important to its success, I think the real innovation of Flickr was the atomization of the traditional "photo album" metaphor that everyone until them had taken for sharing photos online. By allowing and expecting people to share one photo at a time (and then making most of the other "open" feature differences), Flickr made itself a much more dynamic system for discovering and consuming relevant photo content quickly.
This is the same thing that a social news site like Hacker News achieve with feeds. Most of the content exposed in the top 10 list is actually pumped out in RSS by individual bloggers, but by atomizing it and using the community to curate the day's best content, the general user doesn't have to bother managing relationships with the individual subscriptions.
And if if that was good enough, I'd be the first one to let classic feed readers like Google Reader fade into the sunset. But all of these social aggregators seem good at getting me the B/B+ content that overlaps sufficiently with everyone else's interest— just not the A content that really makes me think. For that I think the right approach requires knowing too much about me and my particular tastes and reading habits.
Which by the way, a properly instrumented version of Google Reader could do more easily than any social app. If you've ever looked at the metrics page of Reader, you'll get a glimpse of the power of collecting this type of data: what you read, when, and for how long. If I were the PM on Reader, I would forget about all of this social sauce they are trying to port over from Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed, and focus instead on algorithmic curation of the atomized feeds in a given subscriber's account. Some of these tasks would be basic, such as intelligent de-duplication or time-based views of the newest content ("when I am at work, I only want to read 4-hour work week-ish stuff"), but others would require the level energy being applied to things like the Netflix recommendation algorithm with its associated $1MM prize.
Because one thing is very true: Google Reader with 200 subscriptions takes way too long to get through, and about 30% of the time is wasted on tasks that algorithms could cut out of the process for us.
When everyone zigs you should zag. As the rest of the web descends to a least common denominator social orgy for surfacing good content, Google would do well to remember its strengths and double down on making machine curated feed reading suck less.
Jonathan Zittrain, of "The Future of the Internet and how to stop it" fame, had a great op-ed piece in the Times this Monday, hot on the heels of Amazon pulling a 1984 by remotely wiping purchased copies of Orwell's books from users's Kindles. In it he cautions us the get our heads out of the clouds and stop thinking about cloud computing as necessarily an improvement on what we have today. He finishes the piece with a warning that echoes the main theme of his thoughtful book:
The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
While the Platform as Service providers like Facebook, Apple, Google, and soon to be Microsoft, will continue to push their integrated siloed stacks for hosting code and data in their proprietary runtimes, I believe most developers are smart enough to realize that they are giving up a tremendous amount of independence for the benefits of virally leveraging the social graph, tighter integration with other Google services, or the AppStore effect. As many Facebook application developers have already learned, building in these silos is at best a Faustian bargain which will someday come due.
To me the only way cloud computing works in the long term is with full portability of both data and execution context. And ironically, despite the bonehead Kindle move, Amazon's use of generic x86 instances as the unit of computation for hire is a great first step in this direction. In theory anyone with enough Xen skills could compete by the CPU hour with EC2— an quite a few folks already claim that they do!
Assuming we continue along this model in the development for the open (or as Zittrain calls it "generative") cloud, we need to then move to moving this computation around from virtualized servers to any device we want, be it the old PC connected to your cable modem, your dual core laptop, or even some future version of a mobile computing device.
In a sense this was the promise of the JVM— write the code for one virtual machine and run it on anything from a Java ring to an enterprise class server. Unfortunately the JVM ecosystem did not bring with it three decades of rich UNIX tools, millions of man years of expertise in networked OSes, and a thriving open source ecosystem upon which to build. Perhaps as projects like LLVM get tailwinds due to the aggressive move to multi-core, we'll finally get a VM-like experience that allows us to bring the whole turtle's shell of stuff that Linux and OS X make suck brilliant use of with us— a la ubiquitous EC2 instances.
I'm not sure how this is all going to turn out in the end but what continues to amaze me is that I don't think we've ever been at a point in computing where there are just so many execution context choices facing people looking to bring new functionality into the world. This week on the 40th anniversary of the moon missions, Google publicized the Virtual AGC project which contains all of the Apollo lander code and an emulator as open source. This was the state of the art in 1969— running on some proprietary computer that I'm sure cost millions in taxpayer dollars. And yet from my little Arduino board to the EC2 instance I rent from Amazon, there is not a single computational execution context in my life that couldn't run this thousands of time faster than it did when those guys bounced around on the moon thanks to it.
Paul Graham has a short and insightful essay on the true cost of the meeting-obssessed cultures of big companies, "Maker's schedule, Managers Schedule," where he points to the fundamental impedance mismatch in the working rhythms of engineers/creative folk and their business/managerial counterparts. The money quote:
For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.
After two years of drowning in meetings, I've come to my own conclusion on this topic. Unfortunately meetings are unavoidable, especially when trying to coordinate large group efforts. However, I think the following three changes could boost the productivity of every hardware/software/services company in the Fortune 1000 by 2x, and in some cases maybe even 10x:
1. Have Microsoft Exchange schedule the default meeting length at 15 minutes. Require manager authorization for scheduling meetings that last more than 30 minutes— or 60 minutes more than once per week.
2. Have all virtual collaboration systems (conference call-ins, video conferencing) time out and lock if the meeting is not started on time. Lock all new participants out 1 minute after the start of the meeting. If anyone has "computer trouble" because of not preparing early enough, lock them out of the meeting as well.
3. Have an eBay-like rating system on all meetings that participants can optionally use. If a meeting organizer gets below a certain rating threshold, require manager approval for this person scheduling any further meetings.
I'm sure people would find all sorts of creative ways to game these three rules, but over enough interactions, and with enough participants, I think the overall system would weed out a lot of the crap meetings that suck up time and interrupt the rhythm of folks in maker roles.
On the other hand, Graham doesn't consider the other giant problem affecting "makers" at work these days— the constant self-imposed interruptions to "twitter this," or "check Reddit," or IM or take a peruse through Google Reader. In some ways, these continuous partial attention helpers are more insidious as they tend to draw little bits of focus down throughout the day while not actually feeling like real interruptions.
Bob Metcalfe, while reminiscing about his days at Xerox PARC, and the specific passions of each of the researchers there once told me: "When it comes to what you are interested in doing, just remember that every one gets stuck on to something... and when you do, you should hope that you get stuck on something like Ethernet and not something like X" where X was a relatively obscure PARC technology.
I can't help but think of his advice that day every time that I see people from Boston area startups trying to "Web 2.0"-ize the latest version of their Lotus Notes-esque vision. And now it would seem that even Google is catching this particular disease.
Let me back up; broadly speaking (code for: huge generalization about to come), the evolution of personal computing seems to be split in three major phases:
1. The productivity revolution: incited first by the PC and then by the mainstream adoption of the GUI, this was the era of the spreadsheet and the word processor. These were the halcyon years when people realized that computers could have a tremendous impact on workplace productivity.
2. The networked productivity evolution: starts with Lotus Notes (the PC embodiment of all that people who'd had access to networked workstations had learned) and ends with Google's contributions to dynamic browser applications. Most of the Internet's killer apps fall into this bucket, and if you squint just so, even search and e-commerce belong in this broad bucket.
3. The social twist: though most of today's social Internet apps had their roots in networked productivity, they've since evolved socializing as a purpose of their very own. People go to Facebook "to facebook" not because they are hoping to get a particular task done. Similarly, despite all the exhortations about how Twitter is "the next step" in search, the reality is that it is first and foremost an interesting milieu for social interaction.
Now, here is where Metcalfe's advice comes in: when folks that grew up in phase 1 tried to build web companies in the mid 90s, we got productivity apps in the browser that failed to recognize that it was the network that really changed things (by enabling collaboration and server-held state, a.k.a. "the cloud").
I could start listing Boston companies that fell into this trap, both during the one-to-two transition and during the two-to-three but ultimately I am not sure whether there are more of them per capita than in any other tech hub except Silicon Valley. Perhaps what we should be wondering is why the folks in the Valley have managed to avoid these competency traps whereas those in Silicon Alley, Research Triangle, and Route 128 have not.
Except that now even my favorite networked productivity company, Google, seems to be trying to get all jiggy with social features. And the results are sort of gross. For instance, you get this heinous fly + man in transporter creation like "Google Reader + social" which leaves those of us who used Reader happily for years scratching our heads.
Perhaps we all ought to remember that, as Metcalfe says, the thing that matters is getting stuck on to something meaty and meaningful. And since I believe there is still so much untapped potential to the "networked productivity" phase, this seems like a good place to park. Maybe once we've done with the euphoria of tweeterbookspacing, some more folks around here will remember that.
I have zero doubt that all of the rumors about Apple doing a tabletesque device are true and that it will be the company's answer to netbooks and the explosion of demand for general purpose computing devices in the sub $500 range (and no, the iPod Touch, great though it is, is not the answer here).
If I am wishing for one feature though, it is that the aforementioned device does not in fact run iPhone OS, but instead some form of their desktop OS X. Given the company's preference for closed-and-controlled environments, I find it unlikely, but here are two good reasons why:
1. Having a device that has a different display size and other hardware will muddle a relatively nice developer story on the iPhone (Symbian anyone?). You can already see this beginning to happen in the 3G/3GS split and that is for CPU reasons alone; for instance, we've got this application that we've been testing at work that runs 4x faster on the 3GS than on the 3G. This basically makes the difference between usable and complete garbage. And this is just the beginning of the pain that we'd face if we had to be checking for other hardware differences, or worse still, designing "scalable GUIs" that somehow always end up looking shitty.
2. A general purpose computing device depends on a lot of two-decades old infrastructure that a new OS like iPhone OS just doesn't have. Printing. An ecosystem of 3rd party applications. Other input peripherals. By leveraging desktop OS X, the tablet would get all of these out of the box.
Incidentally, even mighty Google seems to have realized this with Chrome OS— after a year of everyone trying to shoehorn Android into a general purpose form factor, they just came out and said "whoops!, we really just want a regular Linux distro in there after all."
One final note: several folks have argued that the desktop model for computing is broken and that consumers need something simple like the iPhone OS but I don't buy this at all. While the PC OSes may be challenged (especially on the Windows side) when it comes to usability and maintainability, they have been incredible platforms on which to build for two decades— as Zittrain would say, "truly generative," and to throw them out now seems both pedantic towards the users who we all supposedly serve and very short-sighted.
Fresh upon arriving in Spain this week, someone stole my iPhone (after a long flight and in the blink of an eye) which has left me to explore the vastly more fascinating world of European carriers, unlocked phones, and prepaid SIMs. As with most travel to foreign lands, the net result has been a much better appreciation for differences in the culture of mobile computing here.
And if you're about to travel to Spain, Portugal, or some parts of Asia, read on for some good advice on how not to return with astronomical cellphone bills.
First off, I was lucky to be traveling with an old iPhone 2G, a.k.a. the "portable babysitter," which could function as a replacement phone. Thanks to the allure of Rolando 2, I had recently updated its firmware to 3.0 which initially left me feeling as though unlocking the phone was going to be impossible.
Enter redsn0w, the best and simplest iPhone unlock program I have ever used. I don't think that getting the phone jailbroken and baseband unlocked will ever be a single click experience, but after doing this with 3 other devices, I have to say the folks behind redsn0w deserve a lot of credit for returning the full power of our devices to us.
Unlocked iPhone in hand, I headed down to a shady looking mobile phone retailer called "The Phone House." Or perhaps it just looked shady to me because I am not used to seeing every carrier's wares and every phone ever made both new and used (probably including my swiped iPhone 3G) in a tiny retail storefront that looks like a cross between a 42nd St. camera store and a Sunglasses Hut.
At the store I was able to buy a prepaid SIM card for 20 Euros with 20 Euros worth of credit on it from a carrier called Yoigo. The way it works is like this: every day of day costs approximately 3 EUR for all the data you can use; however, after 100MB of data use, the bandwidth goes from almost acceptable to totally unacceptable (EDGE to something resembling a 12 kbps 1985 modem). Phone calls and SMSes have some nominal charge, and the whole system is constantly telling you how much of your alloted spend (which I doubled by adding another 20 EUR) you've consumed with these popup messages that I didn't even know the iPhone was capable of.
So how is this native mobile experience? It's reliable though a bit slow. However, I can't tell if this is just having to get used to the old iPhone with its pre-3G roots or if the Yoigo network is really just not up to it. The other drawback seems to be that some non HTTP services don't work at all, like secure SMTP and secure IMAP. Overall though, the fact that I can go to a strange country and get a provisioned phone card with minutes and data on it to last me just over a week with nothing more than a credit card and a passport should put the US carriers to shame.
[ Incidentally on the crappy AT&T meme, when I called them to report my phone stolen and ask that they port my number to the other (still AT&T) SIM in my old phone, I was told that that SIM had been "permanently deactivated" (because apparently no one at AT&T has heard of "UPDATE from sim_card SET active='YES' WHERE serial_no=") and that I'd have to have a new SIM shipped to two different places to reactivate my phone. Great job guys, maybe next time you could just send me a flock of carrier pigeons! ]
The final thing I'll say about the experience was how smooth it is to lose and replace a device for which most of the critical data lives on some cloud-based service. This is the default orientation for most email accounts, but the combination of Mobile Me and iTunes made it a piece of cake to restore every piece of data on the phone that I cared about. A few password changes on some servers and I'm not even worried that my newly iPhoned Spanish thief has got anything more than some photos and an iTunes library which will only take him to the point of first sync (and no, Find My Phone did nothing for me).
It's an interesting comparison to something like having a laptop stolen, and may indeed point to one of the greatest benefits of the cloud when it comes to mobile computing.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 3 weeks ago (Aug. 7, 2009)
In the, "I didn't know they could do that department:"
1. Wolfenstein 3D done with a pretty decent framerate inside of a browser without new-fangled HTML5 stuff. Having recently bought a native port of this game for my iPhone, I can say that a finished version of this JS one would rival it in every way.
2 Skulpt, the beginnings of a Python implementation in Javascript. It doesn't import and seems to just support the basic built-ins, but you get the idea.
What amazing things people are doing with Javascript these days! At Google IO this year, someone from the GWT community declared that it had become the new assembly language— the machine instruction set of the browser— and that we should now get ready to see all of the high level languages and frameworks that will be able to compile down into it. Though at the time I thought it was an interesting justification for the weird mongrel that GWT seems to be, seeing demos like these makes me wonder whether there isn't a kernel of truth to it.
One thing is for sure: Javascript and JS VMs are going to be really important over the next 5 years. More than Win 32, Cocoa, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, and all of the other junk that just clogs up the application development circulatory system of the Internet.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 3 weeks ago (Aug. 8, 2009)
While I, along with the rest of the world, am as excited as a teenage girl at a Hannah Montana concert for the famous Apple tablet to get to market, in trying to puzzle out how the interface for a new class of device might work, I've gotten a little worried about something that we may be about to face during this Precambrian explosion of "post PC" devices: interface fatigue.
Though we're just now coming to grips with the new fat finger, small screen (sounds like a Cake song no?) way of touching our way through smartphones, I wonder how many other classes of devices people will be willing to put up with learning. And especially a class of device that is functionally equivalent to what either a laptop or a smartphone can already do.
The worst of it may actually be that just as Apple readies its tablet, a number of other competitors are doing so as well— each with its own special value-add on the interface metaphor, most based on Android's incomplete user experience guidelines.
Think of it another way: you learn your new car's crappy electronic interface (especially bad it seems with in-car GPS systems) because there is no other way to accomplish the same task. Ditto for a few other appliances that are increasingly presenting richer and more complex interfaces. Each of these devices takes up a limited area of "interface RAM" in your head, and while smart companies may try to copy market leaders (like the iPhone), copyright law and the challenges of execution may hinder this attempt to get some interface leverage. In this world won't we quickly get to the point where we'll turn down the next shiny device, just so as not to have to learn another interface?
(Which may be why an Apple tablet running standard Mac OS may be just what the doctor ordered...)
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 3 weeks ago (Aug. 12, 2009)
Jeff Atwood picks up on Nick Carr's original concept of "digital sharecroppers," a term that applies to any contributor to these user-generated content sites popularized by Web 2.0. From YouTube to Facebook, the general gist is that users add the value and site owners derive all of the profit. And more importantly, they keep all of the control over the asset the community helps to create.
My most recent run-in with this was when one of my favorite UGC sites, Instructables.com, changed the access policy for the contributed instruction manuals they host, but as the last vestiges of Web 2.0 begin to crater, we've got almost weekly examples:
Tr.im, the URL-shortening service, announced that they were shutting down due to bad economics, but not before loads of folks became dependent on their hosted database of URLs (though it would seem that the announcement was one of the lamest ploys to get acquisition offers that I have ever seen). Friendfeed, one of the best aggregators for social activity on the net, sold its people to Facebook, and relegated all of us users to a slow death by irrelevance.
Some of the problem is caused by launching these services as media businesses without any real hope of attaining sustainable economics (these were all of the "AdSense until we get bought" plans). But we've also got an education problem— most users don't even realize what it is they are handing over in their rush past the Ts and Cs until it is too late. More cratering Web 2.0 companies ought to help here.
And finally, perhaps some of the thought leaders in our industry might want to get involved one level higher in the stack than projects like Creative Commons (which are great additions to the landscape), creating some sort of data portability certification to users get their stuff out should their favorite landlord crater or sell out.
Any way you cut it, this is going to be one of the great online arguments of the coming years.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (Aug. 13, 2009)
Everyone's favorite topic these days is speculating about supposedly forthcoming Apple tablet, an activity that has picked up steam now that we are in the doldrums of summer when the only tech announcements revolve around even douchier bluetooth ear rigs or yet another dozen Android-powered phones that will ship in 2012 right behind Jabberwocky.
However this morning Brian Lam (of Gizmodo fame) had a typical writeup that contained q golden nugget about what this new-fangled Apple toy might do:
To make up for that cost and make the device more than just a big iPod there was, this person claimed, there was talk of making the device act as a secondary screen/touchpad for iMacs and MacBooks, much like a few of the USB screens that have come out in recent months from Chinese companies. Very interesting.
A 10 inch secondary screen seems like a stupid thing in a world where 20 inch screens can be had for less than $200. But the idea of a new kind of HID (Human Interface Device, like your keyboard or mouse) that combines the best part of direct manipulation and live displays sounds absolutely fantastic to me.
Imagine the possibility of using multi-touch gestures to directly manipulate objects projected on the touch surface by a given PC application. From CAD tools to games, I have trouble thinking of any class of application that would not benefit tremendously from this type of device.
Of course, no one will pay $800 for a computer peripheral. But as a secondary use, it seems like a fantastic selling proposition.
I am convinced that there is a multi billion dollar industry ready to be rejuvenated around new HIDs for the post-PC era— from devices that augment the diminutive screens and keyboards on smartphones to much more expressive controllers that aid traditional computing (think of the Wii mote or Microsoft's "Project Natale" as leading the way here). So maybe the fabled Apple tablet can play here too.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (Aug. 15, 2009)
I'm still trying to figure out whether the call to distribute realtime social updates (think Twitter or Facebook) with the technical approaches proposed by Anil Dash in his Pushbutton Web post is a real big deal or just an attempt for the other blog engine/CMS folks to remain relevant in a world that is quickly converging on Twitter and Facebook as the main messge buses for social activity.
On the one hand, it is ridiculous that the same Internet that gave us SMTP and IMAP4 to achieve both distributed messaging and offline sync has now been reduced to its pre-web AOL/Compuserve days by the walled gardens known as Twitter and Facebook. When angry Russians targeting a pro-Georgian blogger can take down the messaging fabric with a 1980s DDOS attack we ought to stop and think about how we ever messed up the fault tolerance of this Internet this badly. We need to do better if the realtime web is really something new and distinct (in fact this is why I started using Friendfeed, because prior to being assimilated by Facebook, they seemed to get this need for open realtime).
And yet, as with the iPhone ecosystem, the convenience of these walled gardens is hard to beat. Facebook people search, Twitter's universal message bus, or even Amazon's tightly coupled ecommerce experience each benefit from the way their closed and siloed nature.
Ideally, I think we'd need to go back and figure out how email became standardized, and follow the same footprints for the realtime web protocols. Instead of Wave and PubSubHub and RssCloud we might then get one process for figuring out how vendors might interoperate in a way that benefits us all. I'm not sure that it is possible— sadly, commercial interests are much more relevant now than they were in the pre-commercial Unix culture of the Internet. But it would seem that this is still a worthwhile goal.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (Aug. 15, 2009)
From the fiction that I read in July:
If you like futuristic tales of what the world might look like, here are three books not to miss:
Ian Banks writes a whole sci-fi series, often called the "Culture series," on what the world looks like in a Star Trek Next Generation Replicator life where humans have transcended scarcity of resources and the need to work. In "The Player of Games" he covers a great story of a super advanced civilization having to deal with a new race whose very existence turns around conquest and material wealth (sound familiar?) If you like replicator life, DNA improvements, and sentient artificial lifeforms that float around in Roomba-like casings, this is a very fun read.
The "Unincorporated Man" takes the opposite view; in a near-future that's been polluted by VR that is so real it makes people stop working, the only way to survive is with an interventionist government that makes Obama-care look "light-touch." So much so that the government takes a percentage ownership of everyone born— and for this you get the benefits of reanimation after death, the user of avatar-like software agents, and much much more. The "incorporated" spend their entire lives trying to achieve majority and control their own destinies, and in this mix you get a 20th century reanimated entrepreneur who hopes to teach everyone about individual freedom. It's a fun read that would be much better with a little less polemic and a little more action, but still, worth reading if you like Stephensonesque VR of even the new "Augmented Reality" views.
Finally, "One Second After" is a right-wing treatise on what the US would look like if an EMP took out most of modern civilization (in the form of electronics). The book is a fun read because it is short and presents a Stephen King-like world where humans devolve quickly to the Hobbesian view that life is really "nasty, brutish, and short." I might not recommend it at all (after all Newt Gingrich writes the foreword) if it wasn't because the scenario described in the first few pages of the book strikes me as much more likely than hijacked airliners being used as human-guided missiles.
All fun and all worth reading if you've got beach time coming up in the next couple of weeks.
For a company that is so secretive, this is a bold move that probably no one would have expected. Sadly I think that it signals the coming of the post-Jobs era, as he has been noticeably absent from the debate. However, the silver lining may be a more open, transparent Apple— something that will become increasingly more important as they get closer to the center of most people's digital lives.
Sleeping, eating, working, and watching television make up about two-thirds of the average day
but that barely scratches the surface of what you can glean from the data, especially after you start playing with their demographic and psychographic filtering options.
The graph also proves half of Shirky's "cognitive surplus" hypothesis regarding the amount of television time that could be cannibalized for more productive "lean-forward" Internet-enabled activities (such as editing Wikipedia pages). Unfortunately what the it also seems to show is that "time at the computer" is still dwarfed by television for most of America. In fact it is quite amazing to see how many other activities: family time, socializing, traveling, are also miniscule from a time perspective compared to television.
Seeing this interactive graph, it is hard for me to think that television won't be remembered as the great time sucking parasite of the 20th century.
(Incidentally, I think that these interactive Flash graphs and charts are the best "content" the New York Times has going for it these days. I'd dump half of the written sections for interactive charts if I were the editors there and wanted to survive the Great Newspaper Meltdown of 2009)
Though I am only a part-time Krugman fan, I do find him quite insightful, and when combined with Stross's great imagination, you get something that is part economics, part sociology, and part future prognosticating.
My favorite part: hearing Stross telling Krugman about the novel he is currently working on which is all about the future of desktop 3-D replicators. Also entertaining: listening to the two of them talk about the shift from wealth creation to wealth concentration over the last twenty-five years, and Krugman explaining to Stross that the excessive compensation in the finance sector can be traced back to the start of the televised Monday Night Football era (listen to the Q&A to hear why).
Universities and conferences should put on more of the interdisciplinary sessions— they are a blast.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 1 week ago (Aug. 24, 2009)
Renting compute cycles and storage from the cloud looks so good these days, it's got to be bad. Or at least worse than all of its proponents argue these days. Yesterday I came across an interesting observation in "The Hosting Provider Time Machine: Paying 2006 prices in 2009." The author uses the Wayback machine to discover that the "slice size," effectively how much CPU, RAM, and storage you get for your monthly bill has remained relatively constant since 2006 despite huge advances in Moore's Law and whatever we call the equivalent thing in storage.
Now when a vendor is going to hide price increases in front of the ruthless cost plummeting machines that are Intel, Hitachi, and a host of Asian ODMs, they better bring with that effective price hike a tremendous amount of value. Apple, for instance, keeps margins high by always dropping prices slightly more slowly than the component costs (which has become obvious now that they are on a standard Intel platform). But in return you get $600MM annually spent on software R&D, industrial design, and great integration.
Even the best of the VPS providers, Amazon with EC2 and S3, hasn't aggressively dropped prices along with component costs. And when they do, as with the new reserved instance pre-pays, it seems to be more for marketing reasons than for passing on cost savings.
If this dynamic doesn't change, the cloud providers face an even bigger problem in their lack of network effects. There are goods and services where the per-unit price can remain relatively stable in the face of dropping costs because additional value comes from the growth of the underlying network. eBay is the classic example: fees remained relatively constant (even went up) despite a scaling infrastructure because the network effects made each auction more valuable. To take another example from outside technology: JetBlue has kept its ticket prices relatively stable despite bettering economics on the fleet (financing from Airbus, deals with the airports, etc.) because the value of the ever-expanding route network offsets their having to pass on cost savings to remain competitive.
As far as I can see, none of the cloud providers have yet figured out how to exploit these network effects. Even Amazon offering free bandwidth from/to S3 is relatively minor compared to say, transaction volume in a marketplace.
And unless they do, keeping prices artificially above component costs is just going to open a huge hole for large vendors who 1. must "be" in this business (Microsoft, IBM, HP), 2. can run break-even even at huge scales for a very long time, and 3. already have the commoditizing dynamic they need in the form of the x86 instance as the unit of computation and the GB/month as the unit of storage.
If I were playing in this space, this is one trend I'd be paying very close attention to.
Virtualization is the new black in the tech industry. What a handful of nerds reconstituted from the IBM 360 days at VMware, everyone wants to do now, whether it is Xen at EC2 (and all of their competitors), or KVM extensions or even Wine. Today, Eddie sent me a link to a company that looks a lot like VMware in the cloud— Xenocode— except that it's 2009 and not 1999, and people are still having pissing matches over whether the desktop is truly over and AJAX goodness is the only path forward.
Xenocode seems to be able to do per-application virtualization, wrapping your exe into a file which extracts itself into a sort of chroot for Windows. With it developers can run fully isolated Windows apps from their disks or from USB sticks, while the apps themselves think that they are running on a full host.
That's a neat trick, but the company will do you one better, as they can also stream these apps-in-a-file to a browser plug-in effectively giving you desktop-application-from-the-cloud for free.
Now I haven't used Xenocode enough to know whether it actually works as advertised, but the one thing that is clear is that we're heading into this totally virtualized Zen Zone where compute cycles will just exist in our personal fabric ready to run our various VMs for us. And whether it is an NES image on an iPhone, or a Win32 one running WoW split between that same iPhone and an EC2 instance in the cloud will not matter in a few years time when we've got enough LTE (4G wireless) to make up for our crappy networks, and seamless compute cycles for rent from many providers.
One thing is for sure: compute architectures are a-changing, probably more so than any time since x86 won. And it will be up to us to figure out what to do with them.
O'Reilly Radar has a piece echoing a common sense of excitement for the collection of standards now traveling under the moniker HTML5. The piece argues that we can "finally" be excited about the web again due to all of the new possibilities that features like canvas, local storage, CSS3, and multi-threaded Javascript engines bring us.
While I too am excited for the promise of HTML5, it seems like the fervor is too much too soon at this point. First of all, it will take a few years to get consistent implementations across all of the browsers, especially when you consider a bear like CSS3 (or even what Microsoft might do). Second, while canvas and the video tags are great ways to finally kill off Flash, they aren't delivering new capabilities per se, since we've had Flash, Silverlight, and Java for years now.
And finally, while I love the idea of HTML5 as the default dev environment for the emerging smartphone ecosystem, it seems hard to believe, when even very prominent open web developers have moved over to the native dev kit for their work projects. Sandboxed though it may be, the iPhone SDK is still a lot more powerful than any approximation from Mobile Safari, and, unlike the desktop, there aren't spare CPU cycles and gigabytes of RAM to spend on a mushrooming web browser process.
Instead of hailing HTML5 as the cure-all, I wonder whether we might not be about to revisit the X-Windows system in a major way. That is, native applications that run virtualized processes on some server when they need to do compute and memory intesive stuff, but which receive a pixel-rich interface over the wire and send back clicks/gestures/keyboard entries. Google's Chrome OS is using an X-Windows replacement which is supposed to be faster and more efficient over the wire, so this may point the way forward.
Then we could have a gradual adoption of HTML5 features for the functionality that is mostly form-driven (looking up restaurants), native apps for games and other interactivity-rich or resource-constrained applications, and this new kind of native shim for running virtual blobs in the cloud for everything else.
While this approach seems like a bit of a throwback, it is worth noting that there are main grey-haired beards from the mainframe era running around (especially where I now work) talking about how the web with it's textual interface and request/response paradigm is really not that different from their VT3270 terminals. So maybe it's time we advanced from the 1950s into the glorious X-Windows 1970s!
I am getting tired of all of the economic prognosticators coming out to claim that we are "through the worst of it," that the US economy is seeing "signs of health," and that we should get ready to see a much better couple of years ahead. I get that it sells magazines and newspapers to make people feel good, but it seems like snake oil salesmanship at its best.
Now I may not be a financial whizz, but to me it seems obvious that to get out of this mess, we don't just need to de-leverage the economy, stop stupid spending, and stimulate specific sectors with government money.
To get to a good place again, we need to start inventing shit again.
And not just trivial twists on personal publishing, social interaction, and alternative e-commerce models. These things are fine for startups to try as they chase dollars that are moving from offline to online, but they won't create the 15-17 million new jobs we need in this country to get back on a healthy growth trajectory. They won't offset the fact that over the 130MM jobs in America today, only 20% of them pay more than $60,000 annually.
So says Adrian Slywotzky in a fantastic piece on big company R&D labs called "Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?" that just came out in Businessweek. Slywotzky does a great job of laying out the troubling dynamic: big companies looking to meet shareholder expectations, are more likely to fund incremental stuff that can come out of the labs "pre-baked" to fit into some business unit's sales pipe than fundamental new research that might take a decade to bear fruit, if it ever does at all. Stuff like the transistor at Bell Labs. Or the myriad of innovations at Xerox PARC (most of which went to help create the tech giants of today). Or even, dare I say it, the thermal inkjet breakthroughs that have been a fundamental economic engine for growth at HP for the last 25 years (but which took 10 years in the lab to bear any fruit).
There is a companion piece in the issue about the new ways in which corporate R&D labs are adjusting which seems like complete spin to try to cover up the fact that this research is just not getting done anymore. Open, distributed, and collaborative will never beat long-term, focused, and committed work in some types of fundamental breakthroughs— and in fact, these hackneyed terms seem to be used defensively these days by big companies to hide the fact that basic R&D budgets are simply being cut with little more than rhetoric to replace them.
We need to fix this as shareholders of these companies, or we risk turning all of America's great tech companies into banana handling commodity providers. And to do that we need a new set of metrics to hold executive comp to that reflect long-term impact of R&D dollars spent as well as the belief in our guts that without this type of long-term thinking, we'll all ultimately end up paying far more than we have during this credit crisis.
This is a really boring topic that is overblogged by and large, but here goes anyway. I was struck today by two pieces of news which make the death of the AppStores as a concept seem like a real possibility. The first was Larva Labs's excellent post on how poorly they've done with their game in the Android App Market. While most people are using this data as evidence that we need to keep putting up with Apple's BS when it comes to their walled garden, I think the real story is slightly different.
The second piece of data was the release of JQTouch, a jQuery plug-in that does a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of a webapp so that it feels more native. I have not used it (yet), and it's probably not until the 3GS and 3.0 that you could really pull something like this off, but the promise of coding for the browser (albeit an HTML5-enhanced one) is alluring.
Taken together, here is a possible way to connect the dots: in classic "cargo cult product management," every big tech company and carrier now wants to have their own AppStore. All of us will fail. We will fail mainly because of our own app stores' siloed nature and because we will end up fracturing the potential audience. First to fail will be all of the Android-derived app stores where the vendor adds little value and fails to get Google's approval (which will be most of us). But all the rest will fail as well: Pre, Symbian, etc. None of them will be able to withstand the onslaught of the open web. In short, we are building today's Compuserves, Prodigies, and AOLs because it seems that walling up the apps gives us a new business model. Consider it the tech company equivalent of the newspaper industry's attempt to just now charge for content.
Meanwhile the Apple AppStore will continue with its impressive American Idol dynamic. That is, a few developers will become rock stars and cause everyone else to line up around the block waiting for their chance. But for most of them, it's not going to happen. Sure, a few mom and poppers will emerge and lots of "eff the man, eff the VCs!" blog posts will be written, but in the end, the Apple AppStore ecosystem of the next decade will look a lot like the VB ecosystem of the 1990s: a lot of small players enriching the ecosystem for Apple who will reap the bulk of the rents. The one exception will be startups, seeking distribution, who will put out free apps that do useful stuff as a way to get users to their sites. This is a good strategy.
In the meanwhile though, two things will happen. The open web will become stronger. And hopefully, everyone will learn about the power of side-loading, or letting users put whatever software they want on their devices. You can do this on Android today (assuming the vendor allows it) and you've been able to do it on the non-Apple platforms since the start. Then we'll be back to the same PC dynamic of ubiquity versus native integration and software developers will be able to make their own choices.
Generative platforms people, generative platforms! That is where the real Awesome happens.
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 4 weeks ago (Sept. 2, 2009)
Everyone stops what they are doing to freak out about Gmail going down for two hours yesterday (it even becomes national news). To be honest, I missed it because I was in the middle of the ginormous multi-gigabyte upgrade to Snow Leopard, Apple's latest ode to local computing power. 64 bit. True multicore support. A new compiler pipeline. General purpose GPU programming. All sorts of things that you can only do if you've got cycles to burn on the client.
But back to the cloud woes: Cory Doctorow published a nice piece in The Guardian today that speaks the ugly truth about the cloud: that one of its foremost advantages is the business model benefit that it provides to vendors who get to turn a one-time purchase into an annuity.
As consumers we're just beginning to realize this given that we get incredible cloud-based services "for free" due to the advertising subsidy, but I think as the Internet matures, we will see more and more direct value capture on the part of the vendors who hold our data.
The Personal Computer revolution began from the desire to put computing power in the hands of The People. Reading Ted Nelson or Alan Kay on the topic makes one feel like it was a revolution that was about a lot more than just "collaborating on documents," or "accessing data from anywhere." Generally speaking it was about constantly inventing the future by predicting it with only one rule of thumb: almost anything can benefit from additional computing power.
For some things along than theme, the shift to computation on vendor-controlled servers in the cloud is great. But not for all, and we should keep that in mind— and not only on they days that Gmail burps!
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 3 weeks ago (Sept. 5, 2009)
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has a fantastic piece called "Snakes on the Web" about the future of web frameworks which provides a wonderful blueprint of what we need to build the next stage of the web.
As someone who made a big company-size bet on Django, I can say that almost everything he says about the current state of web frameworks, and Django especially, rings absolutely true.
The truth is that developing for the web has always been a "what kind of crap do I have to put up with," instead of "wow, look at this new shiny thing I can do." Having recently spent a vacation dabbling with the iPhone SDK, I was reminded of the latterâ because despite their one vendor ecosystem and the AppStore annoyances, Apple does get developer joy when it comes to well-dcoumented and well-though-out frameworks that leave you (the developer) thinking there are some pretty big brains out there greasing the skids for the rest of us... for years to come.
Jakob is absolutely right when he says that we need those big brains on the web to think about framework interop and concurrency. The open web is going to win, be what mayâ so the only question we're going to have to ask ourselves going forward is whether we are looking at the equivalent of Windows and COM (but on the web), or whether we'll actually get it together and invent a new way to build the fabric of the web with better tooling. Craftman's tooling.
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 2 weeks ago (Sept. 11, 2009)
Apple's announcement that it was jamming a video camera into the Nano reminded me of that overcrowded hall at CES where Asian vendors would line up to sell all sorts of weird electronics in the late 90s/early 2000s— from MP3 players that incorporated still cameras to external laptop batteries with built-in fans and mosquito zappers. The idea of a video camera in an iPod designed for exercising seemed... well, sort of random.
But then I thought back to Vernon Vinge's "The Peace War," a sci-fi novel where wireless video cameras the size and shape of burs are left in the forest for animals and straying people to pick up inadvertenly. The idea of a ubiquitous video camera seems foreign to us, but only because we've yet to find a good way for machines to take on the dull task of scanning video on our behalf, looking to highlight the interesting parts.
For instance: imagine using one of these new iPods to record a video of every run, from start to finish (with 640x480 video and 16GB of space, it seems quite possible). Then upon syncing to iTunes, you could get the much beefier processor on your laptop scanning all of the video while looking for interesting bits— where interesting is defined by recognizable objects or people (now possible thanks to interesting projects like Intel's OpenCV) that you might have encountered along the way, along with some time codes and, soon enough, GPS coordinates that might hint at something interesting happening.
Now imagine millions of such "runs" having their index files uploaded to some sort of Global Eye that might be able to perform crude searches when looking for patterns or movements of people or things (think of all of those "24" sequences where Chloe follows the terrorists on the traffic cams).
All of the sudden the inclusion of video capture modules becomes a little less random than say, garage door openers.
And you know what is more interesting? An iPod Nano is really nothing more than a glorified USB stick. How long until the cute little 2GB sticks you can buy for $10 while at checkout at Staples offer the same capabilities? Sure, you'd need a battery and a bit of processing power— but imagine being able to use the billions of USB sticks churned out every year to see.
It is true that privacy is completely screwed in the not-too-distant future. But I wonder what sorts of things we might gain in return when just about every gadget has one of the global brain's passive eyes attached to it?
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 2 weeks ago (Sept. 17, 2009)
This week's Atlantic has a fantastic piece, "The Kindle Problem," on a fundamental tension that affects anyone trying to build a product or service. In it, Kevin Maney argues that any new offering must pick between one of two axes of differentiation: convenience or experience, where the former is defined by making something much easier, and the latter much better. In a nutshell, he argues that the Kindle falls into some dead space in the middle— not as convenient as reading books on a mobile phone and nowhere near as good as a real book.
On the Internet, we've forgotten about this age-old tension because for a long time now we've been so far over on the experience side of the house— poking at the opportunities that were simply not possible before a ubiquitous high speed digital network that anyone could get on existed— that users, developers, and business folks have been willing to give up on delivering solutions focused around the convenience axis. Take eBay as the prototypical example: what it enables, person-to-person trade of almost anything irrespective of geographic limitations, is so amazing that we've put up with a horrendous user experience for 15 years now. Ditto for Craig's List. In fact, it is hard not to think of a really popular web service (save perhaps Amazon's original bookstore) and not see an example of this.
There are signs that this is changing though. As a recent article on the TC50 conference argued, industry pundits are shifting from "wow, I didn't know you could do that!" to "show me how this is useful." Part of this is endemic to the economic boom and bust cycles. But it may also be that as a technology, the web has now left its infant phase, and as a result, all of us working in it ought to internalize Maney's advice to Amazon about the Kindle.
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 1 week ago (Sept. 22, 2009)
Maker Faire Rhode Island was awesome, plain and simple. No matter what the Twitter haters say about it not being as well attended or there not being as many interesting booths, it was well worth attending.
The most impressive thing we got to see was an assembled RepRap which at the very least means that it is possible to make one of these bears (though at the time, it wasn't running due to ambient temperature challenges). Better still, some local folks from Willoughby and Baltic and Dorkbot-Boston had a fully assembled kit from Makerbot Industries which is based on the Rep Rap design but seemed quite a bit more robust (and "assemblable").
We got a chance to see it running and I felt as though we were at the Homebrew Computer Club watching the first Apple Is running Basic. The "product" that they were "printing" was a case for throwable LEDs which didn't exactly make for an awesome demo, but it was still awesome to see each of the layers being laid down.
It was also really nice to meet some of the FIRST contestants, the Lego robotics competition for high school kids that aims to make "geek jocks" out of science, math, and engineering kids in the same way that organized sports build confidence and poise in others. Both at their booth and throughout the entire fair, the nicest thing to see was how outgoing and confident all of the geeky kids were (including, much to my surprise, my two)— whether they were behind a booth or in the crowd, explaining what they were demoing, or simply asking questions.
I was really struck by this last point— as kid after kid talked at me with that twinkle that you see in someone's eye when confidence, skill, and passion come together in the right mix. Clearly Maker Faire (and FIRST and other programs) create environments that really foster this, and for that alone, it was awesome for the organizers to bring it to the east coast.
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 1 week ago (Sept. 24, 2009)
Cory Doctorow's Makers is quite simply the type of book that deserves to be filed in the category MindBomb. It doesn't come out until November (though you can get a sneak peek at Tor's site where it is being serialized), so I'll only mention it here so that you go and preorder it now.
For those that remember, Dan Suarez's Daemon was the last book I put in this category, mostly because it was so forward-looking and yet so plausible.
This book equals Daemon on that score but also includes a very sweet story about love and passion— of people, pursuits, and most importantly, work. The two heroes of the book are the 3D printers that drive all of the action and cool technology, and the dynamic between the two main characters, both makers who keep bumping into businesses in spite of themselves. But surrounding these are a great cast of characters you will no doubt recognize immediately if you have worked around startups, awesome depictions of near-future technologies (including the most humanistic and real view of the future of the social web that I have seen), and a really compelling story that just does not let up.
In looking at who else might have read the book ahead of publishing, I found this bit by Hal Stern that I think says it all:
So what's the book about? It's about love. It's about how (and why) others love us, or don't. It's about economics and corporations, and at the same time economics and corporations don't behave the way you'd expect at all times. It's about rights - not just copyrights and rights to use, but rights of expression and relation as well. Every time you think the book is taking a financial detour, it snaps you back to a personal future that is (in William Gibson's words) just not evenly distributed.
Get it now. Reading it will make your holiday this year.
While a lot of ink is being spilled on how Twitter is raising factory-building amounts of capital despite less revenue than a six-year old's tooth fairy business plan, I think there is much more interesting stuff happening at the other end of the spectrum.
First, it's easy to understand the Twitter thing, which coming out of the Ning playbook seems to go like this: as Chris Dixon writes, investors need to look like they are doing something to earn their 2% management fees, and entrepreneurs— especially fiercely independent ones who have no interest in selling any time soon (and who can surely use some of that $100M to take some money off the table)— are always well served to take as much money as possible when the hype is at or near its crest. If anything, this huge round is probably a leading indicator that some critical Twitter metric is about to fall off a cliff.
The explosion of tiny mammals scurrying about under the stomps of the dinosaurs is a much more interesting phenomenon to watch though— and not just because we all know what those little mammals evolved to. Back when YC and all of its derivatives started funding young hackers, the model looked like a great way to develop the farm league, training talent just out of school in just about every facet of building a company on shoestring budgets. The best of the teams (like Loopt) would go on to be just as big and meaningful as any traditionally funded startup, but for the most part, it just seemed like a much more efficient way for a would-be entrepreneur to spend his first couple of years out of school (certainly more efficient than mine).
However something really interesting seems to be happening now. More and more I'm meeting with entrepreneurs in their mid-thirties that have taken notice and begun to emulate the shoestring approach themselves. For the most part these are folks who have had successes with the old model before (and therefore would have a relatively easy time going back for capital) but who either a) want to develop the concept further before going back to the monthly board meetings or b) want to be able to "parallelize" their opportunity exploration in a way that just isn't possible if you've got a few million dollars on your back from traditional VCs.
Of course this wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. As many people have said before, cloud computing, open source, and the great flat world of contractors have radically lowered the cost of getting a web-based product out the door (20x is not too conservative a factor to apply). And for the most part, the folks in their mid-thirties who are doing this have put enough cash away to not need a steady income during the time it takes to explore.
This may just be an Internet thing that comes about due to the low capital requirements, and the ability to quickly experiment with real users/customers. In fact, this new type of entrepreneurship may be to the more traditional model what blogging is to newspapers.
However I have a feeling that this model may soon apply well beyond the web to other industries, whether they be related to manufacturing (hello 3D printers) or entertainment (movies in 48 hours) or even health care and education.
Engadget has the scoop about a project called "Light Peak" which seems to be a single connector for all of the input/output needs of computers that Apple is trying to get Intel to push.
While this may seem like a Jobsean obsession with fewer plugs being equal to more elegance, I suspect it has just as much to do with the future of the most important peripherals market over the coming decade: new HIDs for smartphones.
Unless you've been living under a rock, it is clear that the smartphone is going to be the primary computing device for regular people— and real soon now. Before we get there though, these pocket computers need to somehow grow their interfaces for times when people sit down to interact with a lot of data. Half of that is the output side which we can already get to through the GPUs being increasingly packed into iPhones, GPhones, and Pres. But the component 1/8 inch video cable is a terrible choice for anything other than low-res video, unlike this proposed 10Gbps optical interface that Light Peak promises.
And more importantly, we're going to need all sorts of input devices. Keyboards and mice seem to be a good starting point, but as interfaces take advantage of silicon for processing multimedia, we'll probably need enough bandwidth for audio and video as well.
It's great to see Apple and Intel engaged in a new type of peripheral interface. Interestingly enough, USB, the last such standard, was also something that Apple helped Intel evangelize by getting on board before any of the PC manufacturers. Hopefully, if Light Peak sees the light of day, it will help get us closer to that Star Trek scenario of just walking into a room and setting the tricorder to get it running all the equipment in the room.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 4 weeks ago (Oct. 4, 2009)
Had dinner with some friend from other big companies tonight. Microsoft. Adobe. Etc. All hackers.
We discussed how lousy it was that we've gotten so far from what users want, whether it is office suites, PCs, or e-readers. How it is so impossible to get anything done when you work at a big company that has taken mediocrity to be the given for what the big system outputs. Sort of like the episode of the Simpsons where the food court outputs "chicken paste" for any of foods, no matter how ethnic they might be. Least common denominator flavor and we're all just OK with it.
During the spirited dinner debate, I mentioned the guy from the fruit company who said that committee product design got us all here. In his eyes, the problem was the dozens of PMs high tech companies apply to all new products. "When are you going to learn?" he said to me in the middle of his big once-a-year conference, "that the way to deal to with all of those Program Managers looking for interlock is to remind them that they are nothing more... than... note...taking...bitches!"
When I repeated this story tonight, it drew quite the chuckles from the crowd of engineers gathered. But you know what? It's cheap humor. Because the real problem isn't all of those note-taking-bitches, but the lack of passion and belief that there is someone who cares about what the enduser sees.
For instance:
I've got a NTB who emailed me this weekend because we can't get a new piece of hardware hooked up to a common home wireless network.
And I've got another one who emailed me to say that customers aren't getting their custom newspapers on-schedule as we promised them they would.
Meanwhile, others are painting their house. Or having quality time. Or watching TV. Or doing God-knows-what outside of delighting users with what technology has to offer.
And executives telling me to "manage the warts."
Come on people, as Arthur C. Clarke said, "the difference between any suitably advanced technology and magic is completely indistinguishable to any one looking at things from a current perspective." Let's get out there and delight. And if you are not into that, move on— there are plenty of meter maid jobs still out there for you...
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 4 weeks ago (Oct. 4, 2009)
Joe has a fun post this weekend that includes a terrific video of the new Lego Augmented Reality kiosk:
Giving the customer the ability to see the assembled sets by simply holding the box up to a mirror is a terrific idea and a wonderful use of the promise of AR. In fact it is so good, that I was left wondering why all of the emerging mobile apps that employ AR feel so gimmicky by comparison.
At first, I thought it might be the fact that the retail form factor of a kiosk makes the overall experience less cumbersome, both because of the large size of the display, and because one is used to looking at all sorts of merchandising in retail displays. As opposed to having to hold up a very small screen at an arm's length to see even smaller "tags" overlaying information on the real world.
But then I saw this BMW concept for goggles that use AR to help mechanics do repairs and it occurred to me that it's less about any one particular form factor and more about the information being overlaid being displayed at the correct scale and in as unobtrusive manner as possible:
AR applications like these remind me of how much closer we are getting to the "Minority Reportish" interfaces that do a much better job of letting us relate to data. However, it would seem that due to the stagnant nature of the PC where "innovation" comes in the form of aluminum cases and negligible bumps in performance, it strikes me that we might first see credible versions of these types of interfaces in retail displays and other non-general PC computers. Sad, especially when companies like Microsoft have so much to gain from reminding us of why we might want all of that local processing power.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 3 weeks ago (Oct. 6, 2009)
GigaOm is reporting on the Verizon-Android announcement today. To take a very North American perspective for a moment, if this means that there will be no iPhone on Verizon, I'm fairly sure we'll look back on this in two years and consider this Apple's second "Windows moment." Or basically, the point at which Apple's integrated and proprietary strategy backfired and inferior products won through a more open ecosystem approach.
It is more than ironic that this is happening with Verizon, the most closed of all of the wireless carriers, but such must be the fear that the iPhone must have put into them. And to that end, the wireless giant couldn't have found a better partner in Google who is only interested in making sure that the retain the search box in the overall shift in personal computing to smartphones.
This is going to be win-win for quite a while, and in the meanwhile, I think we'll see the first credible competitor to the Apple ecosystem that we've seen. With a low cost smartphone handset (which Moto might just be able to pull off) that doesn't suck, and a tiered pricing model that lets some people get reduced service in the $50/month range, combined with Verizon's retail footprint and their superior network, I bet there are quite a few folks choking on their frothy lattes in Cupertino.
Unless of course, Apple doesn't make the same mistake again and remain closed and proprietary. After all, old dogs can learn new tricks, right?
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 3 weeks ago (Oct. 11, 2009)
The irascible Ted Dziuba, who I'd been reading for a while for his incisive commentary on the echo chamber of the blogotwittersphere, falls into the trap himself with his latest post on why he doesn't code in his free time, and why he finds people who make that part of the hiring criteria misguided.
First of all, I suspect he is not telling the truth. Not having met him it's hard to know, but Ted smells like the real deal, and in the era of open source software where you can easily peek under the covers of just about anything you might be using, anyone who hasn't had a side project at some point or another is probably heading for a QA job in India, or just plain took a wrong turn in the "suits and hackers" line freshman year (and is now bitterly rueing that day.)
But more importantly, everyone knows that interviewing programmers is more art than science, and that most of the big-ego style questions that the swinging dicks at Google like to ask to remind themselves of just how smart they were when they got hired ("Oh really, I couldn't clear 1580 on my SATs no matter how hard I tried!") are at best poor proxies for one of the many skills required in a great engineer. Which is why having the background of a side project to talk about (ideally one which is a real open source project that more than one person uses) provides a really rich context for assessing all of the other parts of an engineer's craft.
And I'm not saying this as some arrogant twenty-year old who is looking for a way to build a tribe of equally arrogant and uni-dimensional people, but as middle-aged overhead whose main interest is finding those rare gems that are 5x or maybe 10x better as hackers than the run-of-the-mill folks who worry about work-life balance and fixing their hogs on the weekend.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 2 weeks ago (Oct. 11, 2009)
Microsoft losing the Danger customers' data in such an irrecoverable and catastrophic way has reminded me of something that I've been thinking about ever since HP bought Tabblo and put the future of our own users' data in doubt.
On the one hand, who is to say that a little startup is any more reliable than a monster tech company when it comes to keeping data safe? After all, don't most startups die anyway? And when they do, you the user don't usually end up doing better than an announcement that says something like "In 30 days we're shutting everything off; have at it!" which does little to help transition anything.
On the other hand, startups— and particularly those that rely on user-generated content— have an alignment of incentives to the death with their users that usually counts for more than executive reorgs and organizational recharters when it comes to keeping that data safe and online. Data loss does happen (after all, competence handling a server falls into a normal distribution like any other skill), but the reality is that I feel much safer trusting the preservation of my data to a little company ten times out of ten provided I understand the little company's business model well enough to know that my data won't ever be used in a way I don't like.
Of course, big companies are going to keep buying little companies— this is, after all, the very definition of success in our ecosystem. But what we may need to do as an industry is come up with some sort of GPL-like contract with our users that allow them to reasonably port their data away should the company experience a "change of control" event. I've written about a similar issue around the business model inspired paywalls like the one Instructables threw up last year, and in some ways this case quite similar.
What is the downside to this approach? Acquirers might not be too fond of the fact that they'd have to open up their servers and work towards giving users a path out. In fact, in some cases I could see such a term being used to try to argue for a discount on the acquisition price (this used to be pretty common for instance, when startups used certain open source software components).
But I'd imagine that if you were a Sidekick user today and had lost half of your contacts because the JV team has been doing your SAN migration due to a "corporate re-prioritization," you might think twice about sticking around for the next service you put your data into once it migrates to a different corporate entity. It's why I stopped using Friendfeed the moment Facebook bought them (despite liking the service and having nothing against Facebook). It's why I was glad never to have jumped on the Mint.com bandwagon once I saw they were going to Intuit. In each of these cases, I may be on the leading edge, but I think people will clue in.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 2 weeks ago (Oct. 14, 2009)
As we all get barraged by the fight that is shaking out in the media between Verizon and AT&T, there is only one thing that I think should matter to folks that really make use of their 3G smartphone as an all-purpose portable computer:
On the Verizon (or Sprint) EVDO networks, you can not talk on the phone AND use data services at the same time. I'm not sure if this is due to the EVDO implementations that the US carriers have chosen, or something more specific to EVDO technology as opposed to HSDPA (what AT&T uses), but either way, if you are on the phone, your new-fangled smartphone is reduced to an adult-sized portable gaming machine. That is: no network access for you.
I know people hate the AT&T network and that Verizon is supposed to have more coverage. I know AT&T customer service sucks and that customers feel nickel-and-dimed all the time. But to me (a formerly loyal Verizon customer), no data and voice at the same time is an absolute deal killer. And what is more, I suspect that this is increasingly true for everyone who is really aggressively using their smartphones.
How could all of the advertising and compare wars be missing this?
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 2 weeks ago (Oct. 16, 2009)
Dave and I went to see the Gutenborg today, a robot that can print and bind a softcover book in some reasonable amount of time without human hands touching it. They've got it installed at the Harvard Bookstore (in Cambridge), and if you like books and robots, it is worth checking out.
As it happened, the machine was getting serviced when we showed up. But we were treated to a nice chat with John, one of the hardware engineers who has been working on the printer part of it. Talking to him was a good reminder that even in the realm of hardware, small focused teams can make a huge difference in the product development process.
As for the machine itself, it's not clear to me that this particular invention will be solving the book world's backlist problems any time soon. Much like the Roomba, this is one robot that seems to still be straddling the line between novelty and usefulness in a way that indicates we're a few years away from the Star Trek replicator fantasy coming true.
What was fun to see however, was how many pieces of the Gutenborg are now available to hobbyists everywhere. Its brains for instance, were composed of a Mac Mini with a USB hub that drives something that looks like a big boy version of one of the Arduino motor shields. And most of the robot's structure is built from an aluminum skeleton that Andy has been raving about called the "80/20 Aluminum Industrial Erector set." Even the perfect binding system the robot was using seemed to be lifted from most of the low-tech, low-cost binders I've seen in my days in the digital photo book business.
As more of this knowledge gets spread broadly, I am sure that entrepreneurs and hackers will find better ways to bring useful robots into new domains of our daily lives. And I for one welcome our coming Cylon overlords.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 1 week ago (Oct. 23, 2009)
I've recently told a couple of first-time entrepreneurs that a venture backed startup is like throwing the parts of an airplane off a cliff and hoping that you've got a tall enough cliff and a good enough team to assemble the aircraft before you hit the ground. It's a bit dramatic, but it generally gets the point across.
Last night though I came across a better analogy in the form of the Wikipedia article on the "Gimli Glider," an Air Canada 767 that, due to a series of small errors by people on the ground and in the cockpit, managed to run completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet mid-flight (the article is a gripping read). The pilots, experienced with gliders, managed to find a runway and glide several miles to a crash landing such that everyone survived.
A venture backed startup, or the ecosystem around it, is quite similar to the one that caused the Gimli mistake. Your board, advisors, and team are responsible for making hundreds of small decisions, some based on analysis, some experience, and a whole bunch of just gut alone, that are usually only tested "system-wide" along the trip when you go to raise money. And when enough of those decisions compound in the wrong direction, you can find yourself at 41,000 feet without any fuel and not a runway in sight. In those situations, the best entrepreneurs are able to calculate glide ratios that land the company either at another funding event, or often times, at a suitable corporate acquirer— but this too, has a huge element of luck.
To continue the analogy with Gimli, the scariest thing is how often it is not about one big decision, but a whole bunch of little ones along the way, which add up to one big bad outcome. This is why I am such a huge fan of what Eric Ries has been proselytizing in the form of the "lean startup," a very effective way to test the validity of all sorts of small decisions, from business ones to technical/architecture ones, along the way. When I think back to my last startup, Tabblo, I think of of the things we did right were right out of the lean startup playbook, without knowing that is what we were doing.
Bootstrapped startups often do this sort of thing out of necessity— but increasingly, the better venture backed startups are doing it as a way to avoid the Gimli situation. And that is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 1 week ago (Oct. 24, 2009)
The "App economy" is all over the place, even gracing the cover of Businessweek in the latest issue. Loads of attention, and as of late, seemingly lots of dollars, with Apple and Facebook being the two app hosting platforms that get the most airtime.
Of course, the only real innovation in these so-called "apps" (to me they are much more like traditional application features that user can then assemble themselves) is the fact that they bring a business model for content and software that goes beyond advertising to the consumer Internet. Both initial purchase and the subsequent in-app purchase represent the micro-transaction model that everyone has been dying to have for almost two decades now.
When Apple kicked this off with the iTunes Music Store, I was convinced that the trick had been to take the consumption of the paid-for digital goods off of the traditional PC environment and into a proprietary device like the iPod. I felt that across device boundaries, consumer expectations for what is for-pay and for-free can be reset, whether it is for MP3s, news readers, or just about anything else that is presumed to be free on the most prevalent device for accessing this stuff today, the PC. On that device, we've already screwed the pooch, and consumers expect to get it all for free and ad-supported.
Then I read about Zynga, whose CEO spoke at the Web 2.0 conference this week and who seems to be bucking that trend, with millions of users paying real money for the virtual goods and currencies that power their PC-based, Facebook-distributed casual games. They don't have a closed ecosystem or a new device with which to reset consumer expectations about what is for pay. Except of course that on the Internet, people have always expected to pay for the high-end gaming experience (look at the success of WoW), so perhaps Zynga's real magic has been extending that expectation downwards into realm of the free ad-supported casual games that have been prevalent on the Internet over the last 15 years.
I'd still bet on this "device resets payment expectations" theory which explains why the race is on for content providers to bring out as many new form-factor e-readers as possible. Or why, for instance, the exploding smartphone market may be the most interesting playground for consumer Internet startups that we've seen in quite a while.
The first tech conference I ever attended where there were other entrepreneurs around was PC Forum a dozen years ago. It cost about $5,000 to walk in the door, and most of the entrepreneurs there were well packaged and keenly aware of how much they had to make every minute count. Contrast that to all of the great resources available online for free today; from honestly penned blogs on dos and don'ts, to sample termsheets, to the wealth of videos available from all of the keynotes given throughout the conferences that have replaced PC Forum.
This weekend I ran across two great videos worth watching. The first is Evan Williams's interview with John at Web 2.0. In it, he flat out states that he had no idea of just what Twitter would become when they launched it. The humility of getting up on stage an admitting that is great, especially because this is coming one of the first guys who pioneered blogging a decade ago. It would have been so easy for him to "connect the dots looking backwards" about how micro-messaging was just the natural extension of what they were trying to do in blogging. Kudos to him that he didn't.
The other piece of media worth watching is the Zuckerberg interview at Startup School (an event which looks amazing to anyone interested in startups). Though I read the transcript here instead of watching the video (Zuckerberg's awkward stage presence generally leaves me cringing), the content is fantastic: the only real risk is not taking risk, especially as you begin to succeed. Oh yeah, and if you are a "tech company," make sure you have technical people actually doing technical work, and not just cranking Powerpoint. And as with Ev, he's really open about just how unexpected and organic Facebook's success has been.
I am really looking forward to seeing what happens when a whole generation of kids comes of age with role models like these two. Combined with the increasing democratization of everything, and the major way in which big corporations and other "too big to fail" institutions have let us down, this ought to provide for a very interesting cocktail indeed.
Coders at Work is a fantastic book worth reading for anyone who does software development. Like the old classic, Programmers at Work, it takes you on tour inside the heads of some of real giants in the field of software development including Dan Ingalls, Ken Thompson, Donald Knuth, and a guy who was previously unknown to me but who gives the most thought-provoking interview in the book, L. Peter Deutsch.
Peter Seibel, the author of the book, does a tremendous job interviewing these guys. It sort of makes you wonder whether the combination of the Internet (with its "email me your questions and I'll shoot you something back" interview style) and made-for-Youtube video interviews (with their constant attempts at generating soundbites) have destroyed the art of good interviewing (maybe Peter ought to do a sequel, "Interviewers at Work.")
There are plenty of really interesting technical nuggets delivered by what in the case of the folks in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, I think is the last generation of software engineers who truly understood the whole enchilada top-to-bottom, from how the chip behaves in great detail to the user interface and developer APIs. But what struck me most about the personalities in the book was how many of them thought that people in the field today (which is remarkably young by the standards of most branches of engineering) don't pay enough attention to prior art. This comes up again and again— in fact I've heard Alan Kay bemoan this very fact on the couple of occasions I've gotten to see him live.
And yet when Seibel asks some of these luminaries why they've become disillusioned with software as a whole, a common theme emerges that it's no longer interesting because the systems have become too large and layered for them to be able to make fully understood and self-contained contributions they were used to making earlier in their careers. One definitely gets the feeling that back in those days, had there been more prior art, these guys might have also blithely ignored it for the sake of whatever implementation was consuming them at the time.
The book is long, but well worth the time invested in reading it, if only to remind you just how incredibly insightful a really good software engineer can be.
The other day I ran across a post by Rafe Furst which I found incredibly provocative on the possibility of investing in individuals as annuities. That is, rather than backing a particular startup because of the individuals within it, why not just back those individuals directly by investing in them in return for a lifetime percentage of their income?
At first glance, the idea seems wacky, a bit like the dystopian vision described in one of the novels I read this summer, "Unincorporated Man," where individuals spend the bulk of their time stressing about their own personal stock price in their sisyphean task to buy a "controlling share" of themselves.
However, isn't this type of arrangement what millions of 18 year-olds do today when signing for up a crushing amount of debt in the service of their education? Wouldn't most of these folks be better off with a contractual obligation of say, 2% of their income at any point in time (it would at least be more sensitive to material life changes)?
I'm not sure that I've gotten to a place where I feel comfortable with the concept, though it may have more to do with the poor cultural legacy of contracts that look like indentured servitude, and not cold economic thinking. What is true though is that we seem to be looking at all sorts of creative new funding models— from the much more benign patronage-based model behind Kickstarter, to investing in increasingly smaller chunks (and even different vehicles)— all powered by the Internet and fueled by the general disillusionment with current economic institutions, be they banks, large companies, or even traditional startups.
Whether any of these new experiments will prove durable is questionable; what is not, however, is that we are undertaking them.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 5, 2009)
Boston's airport is run by a bunch of incompetent castoffs from all of the other state agencies that seem to relish applying maximum manpower to minimize anything decent about a modern airport. The other day upon returning to my car from a trip away, I found one of those baggage trolleys trying to eat the rear of my car, sort of like a big English wrench clamped between the undercarriage and the top of the trunk (how a cart like this can wedge in this way probably has something to do with Mayor Menino's third cousin twice removed who gave up a career in carburetor repair to design a better Smart Cart and ended up using the jacks at his garage for inspiration).
After a long wait for one of the 15 roving tow trucks which seem to prize cruising slowly around the parking lot above say, helping motorists, I decided to take my Skeletool to the cart in the hopes of disassembling enough of it to get out. As I got underneath the car I realized that a part of the cart (again designed after garage equipment) seemed to be poking into what I thought was the car's gas tank thus making for a much more fun evening at the airport.
In the end the puncture wasn't really deep enough (and further research has revealed that it was not in fact the gas tank), so off I went. But as I was driving home, I was reminded of how proud I had been that in the case of this particular car everything is "sealed," meaning that from the day I drove it off the lot two years ago, it's been to the dealer once, precisely when the car's computer told me to take it in, a stark contrast to every other car I've had where intimacy with the various parts of the drivetrain or heating system became a necessary survival skill.
The car experience is not unlike those I've had with several other "sealed" devices as of late: my Tivo HD's 2-year service recently expired, and when I realized I couldn't purchase another 2-year contract but had to instead go on a ghastly month-to-month plan that cost more for the EPG than I pay for cable, I decided to let it lapse. Except that now I've got a brick: I can't manually record, and every time I change the channel, I get a popup that tells me to go pay for the month-to-month to use my very own piece of hardware. Ditto for all of the old iPhones in my life— each of them is only mistaken firmware update away from the "Connect to iTunes" bricking that only a painful jailbreak process can fix (and thank God we have that option).
As consumers we love these set-and-forget seamless experiences— be they cars, Tivos, or cellphones. With these type of experiences being every product designer's foremost goal, and companies obsessed with service (or annuity) business models, we're trading something important for all of that convenience— the ability to control our own hardware beyond the life of the original service contract. Or more importantly, the ability to know anything more than the most elemental operating guidelines for the things that surround us, and may in time come to suffocate us.
I'm not looking forward to the increasing amounts of product detritus accumulating throughout my life because of this phenomenon and would prefer more open systems that give these things second lives beyond their initial service period. Sort of like the utopian vision laid out in Makers, where tinkering with old gadgets becomes second hand to the a whole bunch of people tired of this sealed product life.
And I may never again want to know where my car's gas tank is by the way, but I might want someone other than the dealer to be able to patch up the little hickie Boston airport gave it.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 6, 2009)
He isn't motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned -- proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.
Lately, I've been wondering whether the rhetoric of "top and bottom line growth" that pervades almost all corporate discussions in large companies isn't not only misguided when it comes at the exclusion of all else in technology companies, instead bordering on the downright destructive of what made these tech titans giants in the first place.
Only time will tell whether these behemouths driven to delight fund managers the world over won't end up smoldering craters of indistinguishable products and services.
Recently though I've realized that in two such companies, it didn't always use to be this way. Having just finished "The HP Phenomenon," I finally discovered that the term "make a contribution," which we today use as a synonym for "revenue and profit" was first coined by David Packard to mean: employ great engineering to make products that no else can build and that make the world a better place. Similarly, Craig Barrett from Intel recently talked at Stanford about how continuous investment in great engineers solving hard technical problems (like say, doubling transistor density every 18 months) is the only proven way to build sustaining value.
For sure, making money is awesome. A healthy business and balance sheet affords a company great opportunities for investment in all sorts of cool new projects, it brings with it independence, and best of all, if used wisely, it can go a long way towards creating a fantastic working environment. But to have that as the sole end— the only meaningful mission that gets repeated and internalized (as opposed to the crap on the Powerpoint slide that gets shown once for 30 seconds at the beginning of the year)— that seems to me to be a bit short-sighted.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 7, 2009)
A little while ago when the Twitter docs leaked out on the Internet, those poor guys were raked over the coals for writing (in an internal-only document) that their vision was to become "the pulse of the planet."
While I applaud the grand nature of it, I think it is highly unlikely if only because it would require everyone, and a lot of "things" as well, to start actively entering these little status updates as more than marketing signals or social gestures.
I do think though that the Internet is going to eventually bring us "the pulse of the planet—" it's just that that pulse won't be generated actively by humans any more than we consciously generate our own internal heartbeat. Instead, we're probably looking at billions of network-connected sensors, each passively monitoring some very narrow metric, and streaming its data over the Internet.
And right at the center of this sensor soup I think we'll find MEMS technology. The acronym stands for "Micro Electrical Mechanical System" which is a fancy way of describing a silicon-based motion sensor that is so accurate that it can sense your heartbeat just by sitting on the tip of your finger.
Think of a backyard trampoline with a giant level (of the sort you use to hang paintings) right in the center of it. Now shrink that down by several orders of magnitude and connect the level to a digital output and you've got the gist for how MEMS work. Oh, and did I mention that because they are made by the same process that Intel uses to make chips, they are cheap and on a joyride called Moore's law?
Surprisingly, MEMS manufacturing has a lot in common with inkjet manufacturing (the topic of a much longer blog post), which means that we've got some of the deepest pool of expertise in how to do it right, as the Register reported yesterday. Of all of the technologies I've seen in my two years here, none is as mind-blowingly exciting as what the engineers working on it, or as potentially world-changing.
It's funny to think that when it comes, the "pulse of the planet" is likely to be a close relative of the inkjet printer!
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 2 weeks ago (Nov. 13, 2009)
This morning's XKCD really struck a chord with me, not because it is a criticism of Apple's approval process, but because it reminded me of two things I find horribly wrong with this whole "smartphone explosion:"
1. Carriers have replaced banks as the retail presence that is destroying urban areas, and their gross commercialism around getting people to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone (and associated $100/month plan) is even more obnoxious than all of the mortgage advertising. Where I live in Cambridge (Harvard Square), the one benefit of the mortgage collapse was the clearing out of all of the banks that seemed to have no trouble paying the jacked up rents that landlords were seeking. But just as quickly as they moved out, Sprint, AT&T, and now Verizon are moving in with giant human-sized replicas of their latest toys, flashy billboards, and sales people handing out flyers to unsuspecting pedestrians on the sidewalk (people they are smartphones not raves!). And no matter where I travel: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, the same blight is visible everywhere.
2. If these devices really are the future of personal computing, it's a little sad to see how much of the positioning is around consumption: listening to music, downloading movies, playing games, reading reviews— and how little of the value expressed seems to be around creating or producing interesting content and data from a mobile device. I love the line in the comic about the stick man who wants to spend life "restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming" for this very reason, because it gets right to the heart of what seems to be just off about putting so much computing power and possibility into users' pockets only to expect them to never again miss "Desperate Housewives" while on the move.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 1 week ago (Nov. 21, 2009)
I've not downloaded or attempted the early release of Chrome OS yet, but having read through the docs, I can't help but feel that Google attempting to launch two post-PC operating systems at the same time is only going to confuse partners, consumers, and even developers.
Unless Google gets into the hardware business, it's going to have to depend on large OEMs to ship Chrome OS preinstalled. These are the same folks that took their limited software resources (because even though you might ship billions of dollars of hardware, the razor thin margins mean that you just don't have that much money for software R&D) and bet "big" on Android for everything from phones to slates to netbooks. Now two years later along comes Google saying "Whoops, we didn't really mean that we were excited about you using Android, instead check out this shiny happy new toy!" That one is gonna sting.
Also, no matter how many cute videos Google puts out, consumers are going to be really confused by Chrome OS. Will it have an AppStore? Will it run iTunes? Can it see the shared printer? Share files with the other machines on the network? The smartphone doesn't have any of these affordances (it is, after all, the grandchild of the telephone) so it doesn't disappoint in the same way. And what of the connection to Chrome the browser? The first time someone sees a netbook that runs both Chrome the browser (a fantastic product) and iTunes and then makes the mistake of buying the "webtop only" Chrome OS version, I suspect the Google brand will suffer. Repeat a million times and Google may have to start worrying about its unassailable brand in search.
Finally, developers. The story here is simpler, but not obvious by any means. Chrome OS runs Chrome the browser which means that we're talking about HTML5 applications. But what if we want access to the camera on the bezel (and not through the flash plug-in)? Will the DOM API be extended? Supposedly this is how developers will get access to really important things like the power meter. So now we've got to test for a series of DOM elements that may or may not be present across Chrome runtimes? When you're talking about tens of millions of Chrome the browser instances, do we really want to do this? And the alternative, which is changing Chrome the browser to behave like Chrome the OS from an API perspective seems like a mistake in a world where Firefox, Safari, and IE are still relevant.
So I don't get it. To me it seems like a great example of the netbook distortion effect (NDE): netbooks are so cool looking to fans of Star Trek, Batman, and 24, that they completely obscure their essence as cheap laptops for those that can't afford better and paperweight toys for the rest of us. Meanwhile some IDC clown put out numbers saying that a gazillion netbooks will be sold and boom! You've got folks at Google scheming to kill Windows on this new dark horse.
Sort of like the guys with the cornseed engine for this new killer car called the Edsel.
This past weekend I saw a story on Hacker News about something that has been bothering me more and more over the last two years: our perpetually receding attention span in the digital era.
As I think about my own dwindling attention span over the last couple of years, I can find three main culprits:
1. A big company corporate job: this is a recipe for carving your day into thinner slices than tuna at a cheap sushi bar. I don't come from many meeting heavy work environments so the past two years have been sort of boiling frog phenomenon in that respect. By the time you subtract the meeting time and the context-switching 5-10 minutes on either end, you've sliced your typical 8 hour day into the following array of potentially productive chunks of minutes: (15, 5, 20, 15). And what is worse, you have made yourself into an interrupt-driven machine.
2. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit (stream-based micropublishing): The torrent of "realtime" updates was really cool a couple of years ago when it was new, but lately I've come to realize that it is now the greatest excuse for distraction that was ever created. Linda Stone first wrote about "continual partial attention" a few years ago, mostly in reference to email, IMs, and SMS, but it applies even more so to all of these micropublished updates. The constant barrage preys upon our scarcity-tuned primate brains which convince us that we should never turn away for fear of missing that "next meal."
3. The smartphone: This last one is the most insidious because it slowly but surely takes over all of the white spaces in your life, from waiting at the doctor's office to sitting in line at the grocery store. In my case, I've found that the iPhone has had a great amplifying effect on 1-2 above in that it allows for those activities to be extended to moments when I'm away from the desktop and ostensibly not "at work."
It's too early to tell whether this is all necessarily bad, though it certainly doesn't feel healthy when it comes to intense concentration. Also, the cognitive load exerted by 2-3 is undeniable and makes me wonder the analogy of a PC, ground down by a bunch of background processes, doesn't equally apply to us.
There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you." — Steve Jobs
I've got a similar aim, though I want to go further back— quite a bit further back to a time when Steve was not the king of the industry that he is today, but instead, a cocky 29 year old that hadn't been booted from the company he started, hadn't failed publicly, come back, almost died, and given (re)birth to the last remaining big tech company I know which is still truly innovative.
1984 was the year, and Playboy magazine was the venue. The interview is long but well worth reading for two main reasons. First, it is a great picture of the computer industry before consumers had been touched by it, and as such, a fantastic lesson for anyone who has ever struggled to pitch new technology to a mainstream audience. Sort of like watching Obi Wan in movies 1-3— you see the raw talent there without the years of refinement, and as such, it almost looks attainable.
The more important reason why the interview is so good though is because underneath it all, you can still see a beautiful consistency with the same core values that still lead Apple today. Here is the money quote:
PLAYBOY: What's the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?
JOBS: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
What you see in the Apple of today is the continued adherence to this core belief that by building products for themselves which they would consider "insanely great," the employees at Apple have managed not only to define a nascent industry (personal computing), but increasingly to redefine existing but borked industries. And inspiring us all in the process.
There are all sorts of other great nuggets in this rather long interview for Apple fans, entrepreneurs, and just about anyone who might resonate with the notion of "making a dent in the universe."
Chrome is browser is a terrific addition to the Internet operating system. It's put Safari and IE on notice and showed the world what a pig Firefox has become in middle age. Google Chrome OS however, is at best a really dumb idea from a team that wanted to get some of that Android OEM love— or at worst, proof that Google is not immune to the big company-itis that causes successful franchises to start warping reality to better fit their business models (I know, I've been living this!)
I've spent the past few days thinking about what it is that really bothers me about the notion of a stripped down Ubuntu that boots into a super secure browser and here it is: in an era when the access devices are getting more and more powerful, be they smartphones or netbooks (which Intel is supposed to be taking over the multicore threshold soon enough), the notion that we are going to hobble that client side processing for the sake of security or simplicity is just ass backwards.
And the notion that it is being made secure for my mom to use? Gimme a break! This smells like the kind of paternalistic thinking that got us the first rev of the OLPC with its hobbled software and bad assumptions about how stupid most of those peasants were going to be.
Computing is on an unstoppable march towards more and more processing in smaller and smaller devices. The cloud is really interesting for all sorts of synchronization, collaboration, and "living software" reasons, but pushing us all back into the mainframe stone age seems... well like a very unGoogly thing to do.
Love it or hate it, Wave is disruptive. Android is disruptive. Bidding to keep spectrum open is disruptive. Even Chrome the browser and all of the associated HTML5 goodies that Google is spitting out are disruptive.
But locking us out of the real power of portable and affordable computing? Come on.
To close off on the Google Chrome OS thoughts, I decided to go back to my favorite whipping boy, the netbook. Over the last two years I've had a couple of HP models which have showcased good hardware build quality and features (especially for sub $400 devices) but piss poor software (at the office we've even joked that all netbooks are good for are constantly installing OSes on them to try to make them useful).
This time though I wanted to try the latest Netbook Remix based on the 9.10 Ubuntu release and I have to say that it is an amazing feat of engineering on the part of the Canonical folks. Gone are the days of compiling custom kernels for two weeks and incessant fiddling with /etc/X11/XF86Config to get the display to look right. In fact, having recently installed Windows 7 on the same machine, I can attest that outside of a couple of wireless network issues, the installation experience is just as good.
But that is not the real news here. The important stuff happens when you've got a working base configuration and then load the Chromium browser on it (Chromium is the name of the open source project based on the Chrome browser Google is building). Whereas Firefox 3.5 remains a complete pig on the Atom processor, Chromium screams, running at almost the same clip on the Google family of Javascript intensive apps as Safari 4 on my 5x as expensive Core2 Duo Macbook Pro.
And to boot, the minimalistic UI of the Chrome browser, along with its sane fullscreen performance, are the best things to have happened to the DVD player-like squished screens on these netbooks since they first started showing up 2 years ago.
I remain skeptical about Chrome OS (after all with UNR you get text editors, a local filesystem, and a whole host of useful client apps to drive the various peripherals you may want to use), but for the first time since the inception of the netbook, I've can claim that if you want an affordable and super portable laptop that you can beat up while traveling, Chrome the browser and UNR 9.10 may have finally gotten us here.
Note: The machine that runs this so well is a first generation HP Mini MIE 1000, possible the nicest hardware to ship with the shittiest software (an HP badged Ubuntu custom distro) since the Apple Lisa. It has a 1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB solid state drive, and I believe it cost about $350 when new.
I am a fan of conspiracy theories. Whether it is the "Tintin for adults" simplistic plots of 24, or the "Goldman Sachs is the epicenter for a new kind of white-collar mob," I lap them all up for the color they inject into life.
Which is why I have been enjoying Greg Pfistegr's blog, "The Perils of Parallel" so much. Greg writes about a lot of interesting stuff, especially if like me, you grew up feet firmly planted in software land expecting the hardware guys to do their Moore's Law dance and just keep ponying up the cycles for us to burn. One of the central themes of his posts— the one which is wet with the conspiracy paint— is that the shift to multicore processors has far-reaching implications on how we humans interact with computers, from developers trying to write performant applications to users looking for that "new computer high" that you used to get every couple of years when a hardware upgrade gave you a 10x perceived performance boost. As he himself writes in an early post:
It particularly bugs me that people still blather on about how Moore's Law will keep on trucking for decades. Maybe it will, interpreted literally. But the Moore's Law that will keep on trucking has been castrated. It lacks a key element (frequency scaling) that drove the computing industry for the last four or more decades. This is a classic case of experts focussing on the veins in the leaves on the trees and ignoring the ravine they're about to fall into. More. I have this suspicion that many people who really understand how deep into the doodoo we're going are weasel-wording it deliberately. No point in frightening the hoi polloi, now, is there? Maybe there's a cure, who knows, we're not there yet, hm? Horsepuckey.
I think there may be something to what Greg is talking about here. A few months ago, I was visiting with some folks in Labs and mentioned that it seemed that we had sort of given up on running the clock up on CPUs and that "multicore" seemed as buzzworthy as "cloud" in that people seem to use this one-word incantation without further explanation to quiet the naysayers, and I got that glass-eyed look from the researchers I was talking that just made me want to crawl down from the clouds of pure R&D into my product development hole.
Later that day I saw Craig Barrett at Stanford speaking to students talking about how much hair Intel engineers have on their chest after decades of keeping Moore's train on the tracks (and more importantly, how we had at least a couple of more decades to go) and decided that perhaps I was just not getting that there was no problem here, and that the MultiCoreCloud would save us all. Or, at the very least, create a great runtime for the AIs that will rule us like organic batteries not worth recycling.
Thanks to Greg though, I now know that the Dharma initiative is behind this all, and that we all ought to wonder why those fancy new computers don't feel so new and fancy anymore!
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 3 weeks ago (Dec. 9, 2009)
So the news is out: two and a half years after having been acquired, I am leaving HP. It is with mixed emotions that I do so— as there are still great folks from Tabblo I'll no longer get to see (as well as a host of other solid people I've met while at HP).
HP itself has treated me very well over the last couple of years, seemingly able to head off any incipient complacency by giving me a new challenge every six months. While here I've had the good fortune to work on large-scale web services, all manner of smartphone projects, platform architectures, and perhaps best of all, to see the Tabblo team never meet a challenge they couldn't overcome, whether it was ridiculous deadlines, moving-target deliverables, or the crushing weight of a very large bear that "just wants a hug."
I've also learned something incredibly valuable about how new technologies are perceived and adopted across big companies, thanks to the CTO opportunity I got to have this last year. At $112B and 300K employees, HP is as big as they get in technology, thus facing a set of challenges when entering any market or absorbing any sort of new technology into their product lines that would baffle the most sophisticated of systems thinkers. Having experienced this first hand has made me much more aware of the role of startups in an ecosystem that contains both them and giants like HP, IBM, Apple, and even eventually Google, as well as some of the misconceptions (both positive and negative) that even experienced entrepreneurs who haven't spent the time in the guts of one of these aircraft carriers can fall prey to (I'll be writing more on that in coming posts).
Why am I leaving? The timing just feels right. In last two and a half years we've seen the launch of the next major wave in personal computing (with the iPhone and associated devices), the broad-based acceptance of the cloud as a true platform (with everything from data APIs to compute cycles available to programmers big and small), and an accelerating rate of acceptance around all sorts of facets of personal publishing and personal commerce that astounds even me. It's time to dive back into that stream— if for no other reason than because it just looks too damned fun.
And finally, what am I doing? Enjoying the holiday break for starters. Relaxing a little while I put some thought into what this next chapter looks like. And hopefully, blogging more.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 19, 2009)
During the first professional meeting I ever had with anyone at Apple in the summer of 2001, a senior designer named John G. took one look at the Sony Vaio Z505 laptop I was presenting from and said something that stuck with me ever since. "Look at the cheap antics in the design of that laptop," he said with the disgust thick enough to spread on a cracker, "you can tell it's not lasting design by how much that thing already looks like last year's model."
That meeting came whipping back in my memory tonight as I saw Francesco Mugnai's collection of Mac OS screenshots dating all the way back to System 1. If you've spent any time on the Mac OS train, it is worth scrolling through to see what John was talking about. Unlike the already pastel-infused Web 2.0 design aesthetic, there is a beautiful timeless coherence which goes back all the way to the days when the displays on the machines were less capable than what I've got on my voltmeter today.
I used to think that it was too difficult to see this type of timeless design without the benefit of hindsight, but I've come around on that one. You can spot it— it's just a matter of looking for the "cheap antics." And here's a hint: they're usually totally divorced from function.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 21, 2009)
IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating piece on the failure of automated systems that use sensors, actuators, and software to drive all sorts of transportation equipment on behalf of the humans who become simply passive "gauge watchers." The piece is great for airplane junkies, but it makes a much more fundamental point about the way that supposedly foolproof systems are designed incorrectly, often because the engineers involved forget to take into account the human nature of the operators:
”We draw a system’s boundary in the wrong place,” Thomas states. ”There is an assumption that the system boundary that the engineer should be interested in [sits] at the boundary of the sensors and actuators of the box that is being designed by the engineers. The humans who are interrelating with these systems are outside it. Whether they are operators, pilots, controllers, or clinicians, they are not part of the system.
The part of the piece I found more applicable to general product design for regular people comes at the end though:
Parasuraman explains that ”if you deliberately engineer anomalies into the automation, people rely less on it and will perform a little bit better in monitoring the system. For example, if the system is 90 percent reliable, operators will be better at picking up the 10 percent of the errors than if the system is 99 percent reliable.”
[Sort of like Desmond on Lost pushing the button, right?]
Something about this statement made me think about driving engagement with users in web applications. It's not often the apps that are most completely baked— nor, as is the conventional wisdom today, those that are as simple as Google to use, that spark the imagination or win the hearts and minds of users. Instead the web apps that users seem to really engage deeply with, are the ones that do just enough to make a task easier or more enjoyable, but leave enough fuzziness in their design so as to make the operator want to lean forward and explore the space of possibilities.
A concrete example: the first generation photo sites (Shutterfly, Ofoto) were completely baked to make people slip down the 4x6 slide of print ordering, with each of the experience flows targeted at the handful of tasks that supposedly would lead to more of that. Along came Flickr with its dead-dumb simple metaphor of "one photo in a stream" and drove mass adoption of photo sharing by a group of folks who previously had little interest in photos online. In the third phase, when we set out to improve on that at Tabblo, we gave people a half-formed page editor to create stories in a fairly open-ended way that combined photos and words with a little bit of software assist. The concept was harder to grasp than the previous two iterations, but its open-ended nature led to some pretty engaged, "lean forward" types of users.
The piece just continues to remind me that the future of computing is really all about cyborgs— or the intelligent design of systems that use both machines and humans (with our flawed and sloppy analog brains) to obtain results which neither can achieve alone. Or, more succinctly put, the future belongs to the giant Human Computing Platform that the Internet is helping to create.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 21, 2009)
The single biggest thing I miss about my pre-iPhone Nokia e61 is the way that great applications like Shozu let you perform a network-related content authoring action, and then faded gracefully into the background to slowly bang on the Inter Tubes and get the bits across. I was reminded of that earlier today when in the process of messing around with an HDR iPhone application, I tried to reply to a text and ended up dropping the phone into a snowbank. Much like this chap over here.
I've had the discussions over and over about how the iPhone doesn't need background processing, that it is not a general purpose computer, that it would slow down the phone with bloated apps, and that would ruin its magic. Frankly though at this point all of these Apple apologist arguments are ringing about as false as those around how the battery is "good enough" and doesn't need to be removable.
These are general purpose computers, and what is more, they represent the next stage of all sorts of rich content publishing for most of us. And that means that you need to be able to go from start to finish in a little as 15-60 seconds— a virtual impossibility once you move beyond meaningless tweets about who you've just run into.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 23, 2009)
The FT has one of these mostly wrong pieces today on the Android Market versus the iPhone AppStore that makes you glad old media is dying. Usually the province of the mail-it-in NYT writers, the article makes a few spurious arguments, including that it is really easy to port an iPhone app to the Android platform (it is absolutely not), and that what users really want is quality apps instead of overwhelming amounts of quantity.
What users really want is mobile computing, full stop. This means a first-rate web browser, an email client that works well, a maps application that is usable walking and driving, the best possible camera software for cleaning up the deficiencies of a small form factor, and maybe, just maybe, a media player that can fill some white spaces. The AppStore mania, partly fueled by Apple fanboy fervor, and partly fueled by Apple's fantastic marketing machine, keeps making it such that this gets lost in the mix.
What developers want is the ability to deliver their increasingly cloud-based applications into as broad of a mobile device footprint as possible, along with— in a few narrow verticals— the ability to monetize at point of install through a micropayment system that works. Apple is off to a great start on the last point, but let's face it, the carrier/consumer billing relationship is much stronger (ringtones have proven that), and also a more natural place for micropayments to happen.
We are so tied up in AppStore mania (one of the great themes of 2009) that we've lost the real story: the twin forces of the move of computing happening in the cloud with really compelling mobile browsers that should, over the medium term, subsume all of the more important native platform capabilities. That is the real story I wish these big guys were writing about.
Carriers today are all aflutter about the prospect of non-mobile phone devices. For instance, as a large OEM, you are likely to get a meeting with the top brass at any of the world's largest carriers so long as you are touting a netbook device or an ereader. At the same time, the smartphones are being starved for 3G data connectivity throughout the world. What gives?
Well the reality is that the all-you-can-eat, general purpose device is more than most carriers can handle. The iPhone has definitely proved that in the United States with AT&T. Give people a decent general purpose browser and a few specialized applications (namely around media streaming) and they will go nuts, or at least more nuts than current T1 backhaul and cell radio stations can accommodate.
The ereaders are easy to understand: with the e-ink displays gating any meaningful use of the network, and the tollbooth that is the bookstore on the backend, carriers see Kindle clones as easy money (at least until the Apple tablet ships). But the bigger question is: why netbooks?
One theory is that people will expect to use netbooks mostly where they already use laptops, around wi-fi halos that will give them 3-10x the speed they can expect to get from a 3G network. And as such, the ability to charge $60-80 USD/month is just free gravy to the carrier.
But I think it goes beyond that. I think that most carriers love the idea of getting consumers hooked on the idea of ubiquitous access to the network— so much so that they are willing to "forward price" access to the the 3G bits (forward pricing implies taking a loss now that will be made up later when the cost of manufacturing supply catches up with stimulated demand and has been common in semiconductor driven industries for a long time). You may not spend a lot of time listening to Pandora on your 3G netbook, but the sheer fact that you can is likely to get you hooked to the ubiquitous service. For those rare moments when you might want to.
Unwittingly this business decision to collect marginal revenue with little marginal cost is training a marketplace of ubiquitously connected consumers who will begin to measure devices not on megahertz and gigabytes, but on how "connected" they are. And my suspicion is that once the mainstream flips into this mode of thinking, no one will dare ship a device without the ubiqconn feature box checked. Good times.
But this is Jeff Bezos we're talking about, and fantastic though he may be as an entrepreneur, he does not (yet) have the Jobsean "Reality Distortion Field" powers, so before we all get carried away, let's remember that we are just at the start of ebooks— and more importantly that this first inning is pretty ugly.
E-Ink sucks. Its refresh rate is pathetic. On the device front, you can either go with the medical instrument inspired ID of the Kindle, or the crappy firmware of the Nook (the Sony being the book version of their MP3 player). The storefronts have a really limited selection and the lack of marking, lending, and dropping into the pool are marked limitations, to say nothing of the fact that contrast rates still leave a lot to be desired when compared to paper.
In my mind, eBook readers don't get significant until they help to reinvent the format. Yes the book is popular (with 400-500 years of installed base), but so was the map before the connected mobile device put a pin that marks your location and follows you around on it. I loved maps before but absolutely would never go back to them given the opportunity to see myself on it, and watch the map spinning around me as I turn 360 degrees around. And I suspect Amerigo Vespucci would agree.
Similarly, until we've got embedded videos in our books (a la YouTube) and a "Choose your own adventure" level of interactivity, we're just going to be aping old formats with plastic devices that will remain inferior in every way except traveling weight. There is hope yet— after all TV started as radio shows with faces.
I have a feeling that 2010 is going to be good to us on this front.
As we move towards the era of "appliance computing" with iPhones and Kindles and Droids and Nooks, one downside that people rarely talk about is that we are losing visibility into the components that make up our devices. This trend is not helped by the way OEM/ODM contracts are cut, where Asian manufacturers often make on-the-line component changes because someone else's WIFI chip seems to be cheaper for that quarter.
Ever notice for instance how Apple never talks about the CPU in the iPhone? Sure, the 3GS brought marketing claims around "50-100% faster" but we were never told that the ARM core had changed on that the clock had gone up by 50%.
An even better example of how this trend can bite you in the butt is what has recently happened to the Kindle. A true believer from day one, I helped to make the Kindle Amazon's #1 product this Christmas by giving it as a present. However, one of the folks I gave it to wanted to use it in rural New Hampshire, a place where my own Kindle 2 had previously worked flawlessly. Assuming this bode well for its "Whispernet" 3G service up there, I didn't think that Amazon might itself switch service providers (from Sprint to AT&T) without announcing it anywhere, thereby rendering the "same" model (Kindle 2) totally useless where previous units had worked flawlessly.
At the end of the first season of Mad Men, the good folks at Sterling Cooper get the Kodak carousel slide projector as a product to pitch. One of the copywriters extolling the virtues of Kodak as a technology-led compare (this is 1960) says "they are so proud of their technology, they even mention R&D in their ads!" thus giving you the feeling that this was the start of technology as a selling proposition.
Consumers aren't stupid, and in a day and age where the web makes the space available for marketing copy of infinite length, we might want to get back to a little more R&D and a little less "wow," "amazing," and "boom" on the side of the box.
Now that the word is out that Google is going to launch a phone, and that it is not going to use whitespaces and flux capacitors to obviate the need for a carrier, we can all breathe a little easier. In fact, the general reaction should be "ho-hum," but not because you are going to have to pony up $530 for an unlocked version of the device, because for all intents and purposes, this is just another T-Mobile phone.
I've had two of the three major Android phones that have come out thus far: the G1, and the HTC Ion (or MyTouch as Sprint calls it). And while they (and the Droid) have fallen short in ways that the Nexus doesn't (specifically around something as simple as the diminished proportion of the on-screen keyboard), their true Achilles heel has been the lack of 3G functionality when operating with an AT&T SIM. Once you've had 3G EDGE just blows for web surfing— which is after all the killer app of these new devices.
And let's face it, T-Mobile in the US sucks— or at least in sucks anywhere I've ever lived in or traveled to. Their 3G network is okay— when you have coverage, which is hit and miss, and mostly miss if you are in any kind of a fast-moving vehicle (by which I mean anything that travels faster than a rickshaw).
But that is not the real reason why a phone that doesn't work on the AT&T 3G frequencies is a bonehead move. The real reason is because the only people that are likely to pay up for a phone sold through a new channel like www.google.com are likely to already have an iPhone and an AT&T SIM just begging to be set free. We are the folks who are likely to be vocal, we are the Eloi who are currently fielding the questions from the fat belly of mainstream adopters who see 2010 as the year they will move to some sort of smartphone.
The only thing I can think of is that there is something hard or expensive about the 3G AT&T frequencies. After all, Nokia made the same mistake with the N900 which I would have happily bought if I could run it on my regular SIM. But this is Google we're talking about. If I were them, I would have worried less about the koi-pond wallpaper and more about getting full GSM 3G frequencies in the US models, and maybe even a dual device like the Frankesteins RIM sells under the moniker "World Phone."
Otherwise let's face it— this is yet another T-Mobile Android phone made by HTC running Google software.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 4 weeks ago (Dec. 31, 2009)
As we close the decade in tech, I've been reading the "2000s in summary" style articles and blog posts, amazed at how much we've gotten out of this decade. Wifi and broadband hitting a tipping point. Peer to peer. Amazon as a global powerhouse. The cloud as a viable platform. The iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's phoenix-like emergence as the dominant computer company of the 21st century. The Android alternative. The Nintendo Wii and other types of HID devices all leading to more touch, more direct manipulation, and a more seamless integration of man and machine. The AppStore, ebooks, and alternative business models for content online. OLPC and the netbook craze that it ignited. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Google as the fastest growing brand of all time and the future creche for our AI overlords.
It is hard to look at all of these products, services, and trends that have come into being over the last ten years and not be overawed. And yet, if I had to pick the vector that will have the longest lasting influence on the world, it wouldn't be any of these. Sure they are they adorn the pages of Geek People every day, and we all love to spill tons of virtual ink on them.
But at the end of the decade, the greatest single trend to emerge in the last ten years is the way in which the Internet has enabled mass scale changes in new forms of collaborative work. Of course, the poster boy for this trend is Wikipedia which has now bested both Microsoft's Encarta, and the much more venerable Britanica. But the real impact of this new style of work is much more apparent in the effects of a globally connected swarm of human minds working, not for the almighty dollar and all of the associated external incentives, but for the intrinsic rewards of mastering a craft and belonging to a community.
Its name is "Open Source—" coined at the beginning of the decade by people who were trying to differentiate this new style of working on software from the ideological free software movement. From it we have gotten Linux and Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Today a software engineer working in one of the two platforms that actually matters (cloud and mobile) does so with the richest toolset ever available; from languages like the Perl/Python/Ruby family of dynamic languages to tons of high quality libraries to do just about everything imaginable. All because a whole load of hackers were early to this party and have spent the last 10 years showing everyone else how it is possible to work, collaborate, and belong without the explicit motivation of material wealth, the very grease of modern capitalism.
It may started in software, but as Wikipedia has shown, it will not stop there. To try to understand why, pick up my last book recommendation of the year: Daniel Pink's new brand book, "Drive," which delves much more deeply into why this new form of organized value creation works. Or subscribe to Umair Haque in your blog reader for 2010.
Happy new decade. In the midst of the economic cataclysms of the last couple years, of multiple wars of the last decade, it pays to pause for a moment and realize that there is no better time to be alive than now.
Here is a practical application with loads of business value: of the 7 million recreational runners in the US, assume 50% actually run consistently enough to need to worry about upgrading their running shoes. I am in that camp and for the last decade I've used a real low-tech algorithm to determine when to buy new shoes: I run on a particular pair until they either come undone, or more likely, until my knees start to hurt.
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.