Stuff from 2010
Posted by Antonio
8 months ago (Jan. 4, 2010)
There is no doubt that in the tech world, the combination of the shift to "cloud" computing (which to me means both the growing relegation of the desktop PC as nothing more than an intelligent cache that can power more responsive UIs, and the ability to leverage at-scale virtual compute environments run by the big web companies) plus the explosion of post-PC ubiquitously connected mobile devices, are going to be two most important ingredients in the cocktail that gets mixed up over the course of the coming year.
In the context of those two undeniable trends, here are three predictions for the coming year:
Privacy on the net is going to become a big deal. Facebook's recent snafu was just the start of this. Every year people do more important stuff online, and when combined with big companies whose emergent business models are predicated on targeted media accelerating attempts to ramp revenue, you get an explosive combination. This will only be exacerbated by mobile devices streaming all sorts of interesting metadata (starting with location) to these same web services. It will not take long for one of these location-based features to mix with lax privacy in a way that causes real harm in the physical world— theft, adultery, rape, or murder style— and when it does, it will create one of the big stories of 2010. It will also result in a groundswell movement on the part of normal users to take control over their information, be it what gets clicked on from their web browser, or emitted from a mobile.
And while on the subject of mobile, Android is poised to be the only alternative to the Apple juggernaut (goodbye RIM, goodbye Symbian, goodbye Maemo)— and in some key ways, it will surpass the iPhone this year. The obvious one is what is being repeated all throughout the tech blogosphere: that as everyone BUT Apple depends on Android, their installed base will quickly eclipse Apple. While I think this may be true, I am not sure that it matters all that much, as the installed base we should be talking about is that of the Webkit-derived mobile browsers that are common to both the iPhone and all of the Android devices. From a developer perspective, I think that this will increasingly become the relevant target (especially as the AppStore mania settles)— and will continue being so until the smartphone form factor settles down, x86 PC style (which I personally hope doesn't happen for a long time).
Where Android's ascendancy does matter is that as a more open system, it will enable hardware manufacturers and service providers to play with deep web service integration in much more interesting ways that any sandboxed developer environment ever will. Obvious choices will be things like data synchronization and content delivery— both of which a big company would see as ways of making users more "sticky." But there are other more interesting deep integration efforts along the "smartphone as a remote control for life" which innovative companies will be able to play with.
And finally (and I realize that this one is a geek aspiration and a stretch), I hope to see 2010 begin the process of turning regular users into programmers. Right now we are almost there without realizing it: every time someone sets a Google News alert, uses an eBay sniping program, or customizes a Pandora list, it is a form of programming. A few years ago, when millions of kids where learning rudimentary HTML and CSS to trick out their MySpace pages, I thought we were heading in this direction, but it didn't seem to catch on. This year, with the notion of APIs being front-and-center among web service developers, we may start to see something that goes beyond the geek efforts that were Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Already, I am amazed at how many regular folks seem to be interested in the Facebook API, and the other day, while helping a friend with a Wordpress installation, I was shocked to see how vibrant and turnkey its plug-in ecosystem has become.
The best part of anticipating the coming year is that, no matter how you cut it, it promises to be more exciting than the last one that just passed!
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Posted by Antonio
7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 11, 2010)
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has a fascinating and incredibly well-written editorial in the WSJ today called "World Wide Mush" where he looks at the dark side of what he calls "digital collectivism," or the ethos behind the platforms and projects that have most benefited from user contributions.
As a huge fan of open source over proprietary software, and insightful bloggers over established journalists, I was particularly taken by his claim that the era of digital collectivism is destroying the ability for the folks engaged in intellectual work to make a decent living. As he writes:
We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.
This is a bold claim— however it is one which he supports with a number of interesting arguments that make the piece a gem. Curious as to whether I could do some of my own quick research on the peasantization of the folks at the frontier of digital culture, I turned to Indeed's fantastic salary comparison search engine to try to tease out the differences in jobs available to folks playing in similar but distinct positions.
I started with my favorite: bloggers versus traditional journalists: according to Indeed, the average salaries for jobs listing "blogger," "reporter," and "journalist" in their title or descriptions are $34K, $44K, and $52K respectively. Ouch!
Turning then to software, where there is little doubt of the leverage and impact of open source, I was similarly surprised. I wanted to look at web developers according to technology of choice so I picked "PHP" (the most prevalent and totally open source), "Struts" (a Java-based middle ground between both worlds), and "ASP.NET" (Microsoft's completely proprietary stack) and came away with: $75K, $89K, and $83K respectively.
Now there are all sorts of problems with this type of quick-and-dirty analysis, but the pattern that emerges as you play out the types of job descriptions more aligned with this new era of digital collectivism against their predecessors is that Larnier is right— digital collectivism is no panacea for making a living.
A similar theme has emerged around the notion of "digital sharecroppers" or platform purveyors that leverage millions of small user contributions to build accrue most of the value for themselves. With the exception of eBay, and possibly Google (until now), this seems to be the case among all of the other "platforms" that have emerged in the last decade. So much so in fact, that I often tend to read the vision of many of these platforms, "X is going to democratize Y," as "X is going to really reap the investments of users who will do Y for next to nothing."
Examples:
Facebook is going to democratize communications and publishing = Facebook is going to reap the creative investment of users who will pour their lives into the largest privacy violation cesspool ever known to man.
Apple is democratizing mobile applications = Apple is going to reap the hundreds of millions of hours invested by developers for apps that are either free or sell for next to nothing so that they can maintain and possibly widen their lead selling expensive small computers.
The combination of these two trends makes Larnier's parting message in the piece something we should all be paying close attention to:
The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?
Certainly worth at least keeping in mind as we plow forward into this brave new world.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 12, 2010)
I am skeptical of people who claim to want touchscreen laptops for the simple reason that I detest smudgy screens and thus can't see myself ever wanting to dirty up my laptop.
That said, I find the new extra large trackpads on the aluminum Macbook Pros to be the single most upgrade worthy feature in the laptops. Along with Apple's new Magic Mouse, they really do represent a new kind of human interface peripheral.
Except that for the last few months, my three and four finger gestures have completely stopped working. I know it may sound like overkill to anyone from the Wintel side of the house, who is used to at most the two finger trackpad scroll, but 3 fingers to navigate forwards/backwards (this is mapped to 2 fingers on the magic mouse) and 4 fingers to toggle Exposé (a desktop-clearing UI thing) become incredibly useful to anyone who has bothered to train themselves to use them. Trust me.
In case you are among those Mac users afflicted by the trackpad gimping software upgrade that took away my 3/4 finger gestures, here is the solution:
1. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and click the "Repair permissions" button.
2. Reboot your Mac. Before it starts its reboot sequence hold down command-S (also known as Apple-S) to boot into single user mode. When you get a prompt, type in:
fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2s
3. When it finishes, type reboot. Voila, your third and fourth fingers just became useful as well.
I have no idea how disk permissions can affect the trackpad/mouse driver, but after some Googling and experimentation, I discovered that this fix did the trick for me.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 14, 2010)
The story of the clever Chinese hackers compromising Google's data center (along with 20 other companies) is almost too juicy to believe. Everyone likes the notion of a super smart hacker enemy who can, at a whim, bring crashing down the electronic infrastructure on which we are increasingly dependent. Especially if, along with the jingoistic fud, we can get a picture of a Chinese cyber cafe with scads of young men passionately pounding on computers (nevermind that they may be playing WoW).
All of which is why I think I might be more in the camp of Douglas Rushkoff, who suggested today that this might be Google's red herring for the fact that running all of your life from a server which you can only access through a leaky and insecure browser (HTTPS "fixes" notwithstanding) might not be the best plan— unless of course your entire engine for growth consists of getting more eyes to do just that.
I'm not sure that it is as stark as Rushkoff claims, but it certainly seems plausible that some brilliant PR person who has read a few too many Michael Crichton books giddy over the spin that could take care of two birds with one stone: the potential flaws with our favorite new mode of computing and the oopseys around making an "Evil" deal with the Chinese censors a few years ago.
And then again, may this is all just the Daemon just getting started...
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buddies
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 21, 2010)
Amazon opening up the Kindle with an SDK strikes me as an incredibly stupid move, or at the very least, one which is more based on the current wave of hype around SDKs or fear around the impending Apple tablet. Having been part of many "app platform" discussions over the last couple of years, I can't help but feel that most people need to stop reading the iPhone informercials that pass as "analysis" in the tech and business media and remember that most devices really are just appliances and don't need the overhead and potential instability of letting 3rd parties get up close and personal. And that most app efforts require developers, a generally non-bozo crowd that won't sink precious time into things that smell bad just because they looked good on a Powerpoint slide outlining the "stickiness strategy."
For instance, would you want your toilet to have an SDK so that third parties could build apps that listened for the onflush event and did fun things therein?
What really matters is that these connected appliances be extensible in ways that make sense, not that each one brings some new proprietary app environment that developers will have to learn. In the case of the Kindle, Amazon achieved this brilliantly with the "email to Kindle" feature that allowed anyone to send in a list of pre-approved document types for display on the device. I would even argue that for most smartphone platforms, the extensibility should come form the capable HTML5 mobile web browsers that allow for very specific app-like experiences without going down the SDK rathole.
It is app store mania continuing its mad rush, and I for one don't get why we are so ready to jump back into the days of developing with different libraries, toolkits, and operating systems like we did in the pre-web days.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 25, 2010)
Chris Anderson has a piece in the latest issue of Wired, "Atoms Are the New Bits" (not yet online) which chronicles the emergence of DIY hardware development. Covering the basics of prototyping tools like 3D printers and CNC machines, he goes on to make a connection to the newly emerging short-run Chinese manufacturing supply chain to explain how a new industrial revolution might take place, even going so far as to quote from my favorite fiction book of 2009, Cory Doctorow's Makers:
The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
As with his article on the Long Tail from five years ago, I think Anderson is on to something very big here even if he doesn't get all the causation correct. Short run manufacturing could be the basis for a whole new industrial base here, but not necessarily because of the democratization of prototyping tools (which as the story of Makerbot Industries shows is indeed happening along the same story arc as the PC revolution), but because of the powerful combination of the Internet as a collaboration channel (for ideas) and the Internet as a demand aggregation and distribution channel (for niche interests, passions, and ultimately sales).
This is the story of Threadless, a company which exists today because it is perfectly evolved to take advantage of these two forces in the apparel space. But increasingly it may also become the story of much more complex products. The Wired piece covers a local Boston startup called Local Motors which is trying the approach with cars— a complex multi-component electromechanical product that has all sorts of safety and regulatory challenges. If they can pull it off there is no reason not to wonder about other similarly complex products.
For instance, just the other day I was commenting to someone that I'd love to have a smartphone that had an internal 3000 mAh (they mostly have 1/2 of that) and a cheap low-power 7-segment display for most of the notifications that it would normally power up the battery for— "the longest lasting smartphone in the world." One can argue whether such a monster might end up being the Spruce Goose of the category, but with Android we've got the software to be able to do just that, and looking through any of the iSuppli teardowns, you quickly realize that most of the internal components of these devices are increasingly as "standard" as what goes into your typical PC.
How far are we from the day when someone can start the Threadless of smartphones? Then we could go from custom cases and wallpapers to devices truly tailored to our specific needs.
There are many wrecked ships that have fallen victim to the siren song of mass customization, but given enough relevant customization in a product category that has enough demand and you may just have something here.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 26, 2010)
The humble and most underappreciated client of the RSS revolution, Google Reader, has just launched an interesting feature: the ability for a user to subscribe to a page that doesn't natively emit a syndication feed and still receive changes as a stream of events.
As RWW reports, this is not the first time a product has attempted to do this (and more significantly, geeks have been scraping webpages since the dawn of Perl), but the fact that it is Google, doing it at Google scale, is particularly relevant.
For a while now, we've had available both the page-oriented web that is best suited for humans to consume, and the stream-oriented publishing formats that blogs and RSS pioneered and that Facebook and Twitter popularized. In the middle, a few services have willing to take the step of translating the torrent of the stream into something page-oriented that people can consume in a page format (look at Techmeme or Tweetmeme for two great examples), but the promise of the programmable web is to lower the required investment in making a million such efforts not only possible, but easy.
And there lies the rub: Google providing any webpage's diffs as a stream is bound to lower the barriers to anyone looking to build on top of streams to create their own page aggregators. This was the promise of Yahoo Pipes (or Google Mash Editor), two products that couldn't overcome the complexity of incorporating content that was not readily digestible in one of a few syndication formats.
It's easy to imagine the possibilities, especially because we've got a good set of aggregators that scrape e-commerce, travel, and finance sites already. However I suspect the real promise of this particular Lego brick will come in scraping public data websites that have previously been ignored, either at the local level or around particular topics.
And I for one would much rather see Google spending engineering cycles in useful extensions to the web like this one than on bashing it out with Apple over the next dominant consumer computing device.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months ago (Feb. 2, 2010)
I wanted to wait a week to put down my preliminary thoughts on the iPad both because of the crazy outpouring of people venting some very real emotion on all sides of the debate, and because I've learned that when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs, it often pays to let the reality distortion field fade a bit.
I am not a fan of netbooks— as I've written before, they are nothing but cheap laptops. Thus I was sort of excited to see Apple try to reinvent the category with the iPad. After a week of reading reviews though, I'm sad to say that this seems like a fairly incremental product— taking the best parts of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone/iPod touch and hitting the 4x magnify button on the form factor. It'll be a fun and possibly lucrative product— and in the end I could see Apple selling 1/3 to 1/2 as many of these as they have iPod touches (which is about 40MM to date). But here is where they fell short:
1. New formats: the Kindle sucks not because of its screen or hospital ID but because despite the connection to the Amazon web service and the persistent data connection, it fails to be as good as a paper book and doesn't reinvent any of the parts of the book that could use some social/cloud juice. From what I could see, Apple is doing nothing better here (at least with version 1). They haven't defined a new format that would allow publishers to take advantage of video and audio and they didn't do anything to make the experience of finding, reading, and sharing books any more social. Could be that the publishers weren't hip to it, but if anyone could crack that particular cartel, I thought Apple could.
2. Ergonomics: Ned wrote this one up, and frankly, I can't believe the Reality Distortion Field has kept other people from noticing that the idea of a non-tactile keyboard without a place to rest one's palms renders this a piss poor input device. This is ironic as Apple was the first company to do the palm rest design for laptops with the Powerbook 100/140/170 series that was even shown during the keynote.
3. Closed ecosystem: I'm less worried about this one than the people who feel that Apple is starting us on the road to being like the bio-sacks that pass as humans in the movie Walle, because it does seem as though the combination of HTML5 and the A4 CPU will make webapps really sing on this machine, but it would have been nice to have given people some sort of mechanism for side-loading applications (even as "untrusted" like Android and S60 do). Again, this is ironic coming from the company that had its first hit product (the Apple ][) succeed because some crazy hackers in Boston wrote a killer app and distributed it with little involvement from Apple. That said, I do think if the iPad becomes ubiquitous enough, Apple will have to open up (or be subject to aggressive jailbreaking as the FUD around "messing with the carrier settings") doesn't exist for this type of device.
Finally, perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is that because of 1-3 the iPad seems to be primarily a content consumption device, a sort of modern-day version of the portable TVs that Sony and others started selling in the 1980s. That may be what the market wants, but I find it hard to muster the same level of excitement as I would have had for a more general computing type of device. In the case of the latter, creativity really is the upper limit on what can be done. With a closed, content consuming device, we'll end up where we are with the iPhone: with small widgets that all basically do the similar types of information retrieval and display. If this is the new world of personal computing, it looks a little boring.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months ago (Feb. 3, 2010)
One of the great things to come out of Apple's snub of Flash during the iPad launch has been the discussion around whether Flash is really needed for a first-class web browsing experience. In reading the various opinions, I came across a brilliant Safari plug-in, ClickToFlash, which shims the Flash player so that you have to explicitly approve any Flash widgets that are loaded on pages. The plug-in provides a whitelist so that certain domains will always load Flash (say Pandora and Hulu) widgets. Apparently there are also versions of this same general idea for Firefox and Chrome.
I've been using ClickToFlash for 4 days and there is no going back for me. Apple's claim that the Mac crashes most because of Flash seems well supported by the fact that I can now have 20-25 tabs open regularly without Safari hogging all of my machine's resources. It's awesome.
What is most nefarious about Flash is not all of the explicit video embeds that people use, but the fact that it has snuck into display advertising. If you install any of these plug-ins, you'll quickly realize how many of the standard IAB ad sizes are now actually being powered by Flash widgets— which do nothing but pulse in annoying ways— and perhaps more significantly— suck down system resources.
Just say no to Flash.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 11, 2010)
For a while I loved Twitter. Not because it was realtime. Not because it was easier than blogging. And not because it was cool.
Mostly because it was a quick way to get a feel for the things that were going on in the lives of folks one level beyond those who I interacted with every day. In having invented a new format (140 characters) and brought into mainstream the asymmetric follow relationship, Twitter brought into the world something really interesting.
But then the marketing people got on it. Or if they were already on it, they got super aggressive about polluting the Twitterverse. Link velocity increased by orders of magnitude, and what started out the types of interesting articles that you might share on Delicious, quickly became links to people's companies, blogs, or special "deals" (thin affiliate scams).
Sure, you could always curate the list of your followers and keep only that 0.01% of folks who had not started using Twitter as a new form of direct marketing. But as Twitter climbed to a billion updates per month something happened to the way in which everyone uses the medium such that even folks who were funny or insightful one third of the time spent the other two thirds plugging their blogs or the new startup they'd just gotten involved with.
And this, it seems to me, is how a new medium gets "typed" by its early adopters. So that now, no matter how many people get on Twitter (and I suspect it won't be many more), it will forever remain the place where the marketing people should have STFU.
Which is why I am excited about Google Buzz. Though in many ways it seems like a copy of the most social/sharing parts of Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed, I think its got a few key differences that may help it move adoption-wise beyond what these services pioneered. Chief among these attributes are the easy integration with existing communication patterns (Gmail), and the ability to create fine-grained groups and direct the stream of updates at say, just "family" or "college roommates" or whatever.
This last one is important and will be critical to Buzz's eventual success. During the first phase of the Internet, a lot of products struggled and crashed on the reef of privacy controls, and it wasn't until the 2004-2005 era of "default to public" that a lot of the same services started catching on in a meaningful way. The "default to public" era culminated with Facebook's claim that people needed to abandon the notion of privacy online and just get used to being public. For most of the non-tweeting, non-Silicon Valley crowd, this statement is about as alien as claiming that people needed to abandon breathing and get used to hypoxia.
If this right, and the Buzz team gets all of the small affordances right (no small feat despite an impressive 1.0 effort), this blend of email and status updates (in a controlled way) may create a new format— one which which I hope will not again be typed a new kind of weird direct marketing vehicle.
Here's hoping...
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digerati
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 12, 2010)
Chris Dixon had a provocative post on how young engineers choosing to join big companies like Google is bad for the startup ecosystem, a common sentiment among the folks that I have been meeting over the last few weeks here in the rekindled Boston startup scene.
But I'm not sure it is right for one simple reason: for the most part, young founders tend to breed stupid startup ideas. Not because they are themselves stupid, but because they lack the proper execution context.
And while there is a lot of merit to apprenticing at established (funded) startups, I'm not sure that most of these provide adequate execution context either.
So if context truly is king, what does the proper execution context look like? Ideally, the right context exposes one to a whole host of business problems that need solutions because the current ones are being provided by big dumb companies that have grown fat and complacent of the profits produced by innovations whose progenitors are long gone. This is even better when the problems can be solved through new innovation that is itself only possible as technology is shifting.
Let me take a local example: here in Boston we have an existing cluster around storage, anchored by one of the biggest, dumbest tech companies I've ever seen: EMC. If I were betting on disruptive startups, I'd much rather take the folks who have spent time selling billions of dollars worth of storage into big companies, government contracts, and just about everyone else. Certainly more so than the folks that have spent burned cycles trying to copy Dropbox or Carbonite because that is the context they understand.
One of my heroes, Alan Kay, said that the right perspective is worth 80 IQ points. In my experience, execution context is not dissimilar.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 17, 2010)
Liz Gannes over at Gigaom has a coined new term for what Google is doing now that it is back in the $3-15MM acquisition game for former Googlers that have left the nest: "acquiring," a mixture of acquiring and hiring. In the case of companies that have received external funding, this is a fast way to poison the well (after all no fund, no matter what the size, has its needle moved by such low dollar exits) so it's pretty clear that it is a bad thing for the ecosystem. In the case of bootstrapped companies however, I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
It is a good thing because the founders of these projects walk away with two really important things: some cash in the bank and the confidence that they can build something that is valuable to someone— valuable enough that the mighty Google is willing to pay an especially outsized hiring bonus for it.
It is a bad thing because it creates the feeling that shooting for feature on products is a viable (and relatively safer) way to achieve success. This is an illusion for two reasons: first, future real investors and employees are savvy enough to see these types of exits for what they are. And second it allows entrepreneurs to focus on incremental "pickoffs" from the guessable product roadmaps of mainstream products instead of completely disruptive ideas.
Another way to put it: I've met with a few folks in the Boston ecosystem recently who are trying to get this "Think Big" meme jumpstarted with entrepreneurs and investors. And sadly, these "acquhires" seem to be taking us all in exactly the opposite direction.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 19, 2010)
It's been 4 years since I left Emacs for Textmate for many of the same reasons that I left desktop Linux for OSX— I was just tired of configuring everything instead of having it just work.
That said, Textmate's slow development cycle has been bugging me as of late. It is a terrific text editor— fantastic even in some cases— but the fact that almost a half decade into its existence, you still can't split a window to see multiple files side-by-side is just ridiculous. In fact it makes it too hard to review code changes or take notes on a document that you are editing, or any of a number of other important tasks that text editors have been able to do.
I get the whole "opinionated software" thing, I really do. But being at a geek conference (Pycon) and seeing all of those Ubuntu desktops configured just so (some with Emacs and some with Vim), something just snapped. So I'm going back to Emacs. Eddie recommended Aquamacs which is supposed to be a nice Cocoa port, so we'll see if that works as a nice "tweener," If not, it's back to XWindows for me.
As a side note, I'm still blow away to see the developers at this Python conference running Eclipse to work in Python (and mostly on webapps). While it may be acceptable for the Java/C/C++ world, seeing Eclipse at Pycon is sort of like watching the soccer mom getting out of the mongo SUV at the local Starbucks— way too much of a tank for something that should just be lighter.
Finally, if you like this kind of geek rumination, I highly recommend the blog The Setup.
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 20, 2010)
During my last job at HP, I got a chance to get up close and personal with a few big partnerships with other tech companies which had similar goals with respect to specific product roadmaps. In all of these cases, the point of the relationships was to work together on projects that would result in a bunch of software that would ultimately be better for both companies.
Now hold that thought for a moment.
Over the last few days I've been having a blast at Pycon, the main annual conference behind the Python programming language. It's fantastic to see how far it has come over the last two decades, almost entirely on the back of committed volunteers who burn nights and weekends maintaining and building a high quality software project which is so critical to many industries, and especially for the future of the open Web OS.
And yet, there are still a few warts on Python that could benefit from the focused effort of sponsored work. Of all of the big companies, Google has done the best job to date here— sponsoring projects like Unladden Swallow, a needed speed boost. There are other big companies that occasionally sponsor Python work, but not as many as you would think— especially not given how strategically important the language is to them.
There are two things that hit me this conference that might provide a solution. The first is that as serious as these warts might be, it would take relatively little manpower to remove them. Specifically, paying for something like 2 engineers for a sustained year of 100% work could go a long way towards solving speed, packaging, or concurrency issues in a really deep way. The second observation is that by the standards of big company budgets— and specifically as applied to the kinds of partnerships I mentioned above— this is an insignificant rounding error when it comes to dollars spent— even for really senior folks.
Instead of spending the money on needlessly flying executives back and forth to regurgitate the same 20 slides over the "partnership possibilities," I wonder whether there isn't the possibility or reallocating these Steaks&Strippers budgets to fund open source wart removal as a kind of joint venture where each side dedicates a couple of engineers to something that would benefit both companies and allow meaningful longterm partnerships to develop.
It would take more thinking to see exactly how this could be fit into something like removing the Python GIL (a impedance to really good concurrency and multicore support), but I'm sure it could be done. Each big company usually has its cash cow business model: Google and web advertising, Intel and chips, HP and ink, etc. And each of these cash cows often generates a whole host of "ecosystem partnerships" that companies go into to ensure the long-term continued growth of X, where X is whatever makes the cash register continue to sing.
In effect, newer projects like Android may provide the perfect test for these types of partnerships. Except of course that a mobile OS is pretty strategic to most big tech companies which is usually code for more Steaks&Strippers and less meaningful partnering.
Something to think about.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 21, 2010)
I am doing the closing Pycon keynote this morning, so apologies to anyone who isn't there (feel free to skip this post, though I'll put up the notes and slides later today if you are interested).
To the other thousand of you, you are here because you're not listening. You've gone to The Google to figure out who this guy is and why he is so animated this early on a Sunday morning. Go back to listening and I promise by the end of the talk— agree or disagree— you'll know why.
Trust me, The Google will still bring you back here after the talk.
For those that just won't take no for an answer, who'd rather listen to frozen me talking to you from the bitstream of the Internet instead of live and in the flesh, I just have one more thing to say:
Python rocks because you do. As a community you do an amazing job of growing, maintaining, and evolving what I think is the greatest treasure that open source has delivered. Whether you agree or disagree with the argument in my talk, I hope at least you'll be entertained.
This talk is for you guys. Python works because you do.
Thank you.
Now go listen!
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 21, 2010)
Pycon has always been a fantastic conference— especially given that it is run entirely on the backs of volunteers. Much better than most paid for-profit conferences for sure.
I've posted the notes and slides from my closing keynote this morning— a small contribution to this excellent conference. If you are interested in reading how it was supposed to go (and I think I got close), feel free to go read it.
And for those that prefer to listen to it,
here is the video.
Looking forward to PyCon 2011.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 26, 2010)
Over the last 3.5 years I've logged almost 3,000 miles with my Nike+ system, a low-cost pedometer that uses the iPod/iTunes ecosystem to submit my runs to a site for online competitions and other interesting data-oriented tasks. I have come to rely on the Nike system so much that if I find myself without it, I won't run. By just collecting data and transparently uploading it to a place where I can go back and look at it, it has managed to alter my behavior.
This trend appears particularly powerful for health related issues. The Withings scale (WIFI and with the ability to broadcast your weight to various social networks) seems to be popular among the folks I follow on Twitter and the always "almost here" Fitbit promises to track all sorts of activity related stuff for subsequent analysis. As dorky as it sounds, it would appear that "what gets measured gets done" at least by a certain part of the population.
Today I ran into an ingenious mass market personal telemetry device that appears suited for children: simple, stylishly designed (but easy to to personalize), and best of all, cheap, the S2H Replay is essentially a low budget Fitbit/Nike+ system that fits inside of a color rubber wristband and tracks activity. What may make the Replay the Flip of personal telemetry devices though is that rather than relying on any sort of Wifi signal or a complex base station, it just emits a code that details the amount of work you've done to the site where you are then able to earn points.
Fans of the fully automatic will think of this as an ugly hack that disqualifies the Replay from the pantheon of early personal telemetry devices— after all, the user has to remember to go enter his code to claim credit for the exercise done. However, if my experience with the sometimes buggy Nike+iTunes combination is any indication, users will be very motivated to "get credit" for work done.
Which incidentally is where S2H performs its second great hack: getting users to compete for prizes in the forms of certificates to various different e-tailers. Think of it as a credit card reward program used for good.
I'll have more to say in a few weeks after I've used my own two guinea pigs for a test (boys, 7 & 4), but for now I sure am glad that there are so many creative approaches being taken towards kickstarting the personal telemetry revolution!
(And here is the Russell Davies's excellent review that tipped me off to the existence of this neat gizmo).
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 4 weeks ago (March 7, 2010)
It is a mystery to me how the hobbyist hacker community can make Android so much better than the stock images that Google ships, but if you've got a Nexus one, Cyanogen has just made things much much better. As an iPhone owner from day 1, I can tell you that the simple fact of moving from the stock 2.1 image that comes with your Nexus to the latest Cyanogen creates about the same feeling of improvement that moving from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS provided— except that in this case, you aren't changing your hardware. It is software's true magic!
If you've got a Nexus One, and are interested, read on.
Unfortunately, the process is far from simple and the Android mod community has a lot of new jargon that you have to get used to. If you've ever jailbroken an iPhone or iPod Touch, I'd say this is about 30-50% more involved, so get ready to rumble.
Fortunately, I had the benefit of Eddie's amazingly good notes to guide me through it all. I am reproducing them below, along with a mini glossary at the front, and some comments in places that I found tricky. Your mileage may vary on these, and be aware that you could in theory brick (or destroy) your phone, though practically speaking, I've found this to be almost impossible to do with how well the boot loading sequence has been thought out on Android.
--
Some basic terms:
In Android land, the equivalent of jailbreaking is "rooting" which refers to getting access to the root directory of the phone's ROM (which is not really Read Only since both Google/HTC and you overwrite this with every update). In the steps below, you will be using a command line program called "fastboot" to do the unlocking on that root directory and install custom software. Fastboot is also the name of a mode in the Nexus when you first boot up (it is actually available to all Android phones) that gives you a sort of minimalist OS/boot loader thing to take actions that affect the OS in the phone. It's not quite like a PC BIOS menu, but it can be helpful to think of it that way. Below you'll see the key combination required to get the phone to that which can vary a little by model.
Also, there are three basic software bundles you will be applying after the phone is "rooted:" the recovery image which basically provides a more powerful fastboot environment (to do things like unlocking and backing up), the baseband update (which is just like the iPhone one is that it updates the separate system that runs the radio), and the Cyanogen custom ROM which is the magic that will make your Nexus instantly better.
There is an additional step required which has to do with the crappy licensing around the proprietary Google apps (that you will definitely want on: Market, Gmail, Maps, etc.). Because Google asked the Cyanogen guy to stop including those with his mods, you'll have to apply them as a sort of patch when you are done. This is ok and is actually the easiest part of the update.
We did all of this on a Mac and the instructions below are for that platform— however, I am sure the Android SDK is good enough that it will be a relatively simple exercise to transpose the instructions for Linux and Windows. We did assume however that you are comfortable with the command line.
Finally one important note: in doing this, you will lose all of the data on the phone. Because of Google's phenomenal sync, this won't affect email, contacts, or calendars, and because the media (pictures) are stored on the SD card, you will be fine there, but depending on which apps you've installed, you may lose some local data. You will also have to reinstall all of your apps. You have been warned.
Let's get started:
1. Take a deep breath. It is just software and you are going to master it!
2. Download and install the Mac OSX Android SDK. I am going to assume for the purposes of this list that you have put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/ but it doesn't matter.
3. Get fastboot-mac from here. Rename it 'fastboot' and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
4. Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip AND gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
from here and put them in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
5. Get recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img from here and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/
6. Put Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip and gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
on the root of the SD card. You can do this by mounting the phone via a USB cable (this works just like any USB stick except you have to click a button on the phone's UI).
7. In your phone settings > applications > development, set usb
debugging to enabled.
8. Turn off your phone and put the SD card with the 3 files on it
into your phone.
9. Hook up the USB connection to your phone and your mac.
10. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
11. In Terminal on your mac, cd to /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools
12. Type ‘./fastboot devices‘ to make sure your phone is recognized
(it should list a device number rather than simply returning to
command prompt with no feedback).
13. Type ‘./fastboot oem unlock‘ to unlock the bootloader (wohoo, your phone is now rooted!)
14. Use volume keys on the phone to navigate to yes and press the
power button to confirm.
15. When the phone finishes booting, in your phone settings >
applications > development, set usb debugging to enabled, then power
it down.
16. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
17. (you're still in terminal in /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools)
Type ‘./fastboot flash recovery ./recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img‘. (Note
filename will change as recovery image is updated)
18. Type './fastboot flash radio ./Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img'
to also update your radio at this point
19. Once the Recovery flash is complete (should be almost instant),
press the Power Button. The highlighted blue text should now say
HBOOT. Use the volume down button to highlight "Recovery" and hit the
power button to reboot into recovery.
20. if this step fails, power down the phone, and try this: hold down
the VOLUME DOWN button and then hold the POWER button until you get to
the skateboard screen; use volume down to highlight RECOVERY and hit
the POWER button
21. You should now be in the Recovery screen after a reboot -- this
screen has 9 green text options at the top and an android x in the
center of the screen
22. Once in Recovery Mode, use the trackball to scroll down to
"Backup/Restore" and press the trackball three times, and wait until
the backup is complete.
23. Once backup is complete, wipe, since you're coming from stock
(even fastboot oem unlock may not fully wipe, do it just in case) many
users report the phone not booting properly without a wipe at this
point.
24. Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
25. Select the CyanogenMod update (update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip),
and press the trackball again to confirm. Wait until the flash is
complete. (Note: this will take a little while).
26. Once again, Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
27. This time, select the Google Apps File
(gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip), and press the trackball again to
confirm. Wait until the flash is complete.
28. Once you are back in the main menu, press the trackball select the
first option (Reboot system now) and reboot the phone.
29. If everything was done correctly, the phone should boot into CyanogenMod!
Eddie's extra bonus section— only for the adventurous (I have not tried this!)
Follow the instructions here to download your kernel and associated .ko module, your overclocking tool, and go
to town with undervolted and overclocked goodness!
Good luck. If it works correctly, it should take about 35-45 minutes to do it. And at the end of it, you will not only have one of the coolest hacker phones, but you will have done it! And trust me, it is worth it!
[A big thanks to Eddie, who both plied me with drinks last week to convince me that I should take this on, and then produced the first draft of this document so that I could not end up bricking my own iPhone]
REFERENCE
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=611829
http://androidandme.com/2010/01/hacks/video-how-to-unlock-and-root-a-nexus-one/
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=559
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/ADB
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=459830
http://andblogs.net/fastboot/
http://developer.htc.com/adp.html
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/Full_Update_Guide_-_Nexus_One_Firmware_to_CyanogenMod
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-hack-a-nexus-one#cite_note-4
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-5-0-nexus-one
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=633238&page=66
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (March 14, 2010)
Apple is doing douchey things with its app store policy and newly discovered offensive position on patents. For sure. And yet, I joined the masses of folks on Friday that made the company close to $100M of presales on a product none of us have seen. It hurts me to fork over money to such a closed ecosystem, but I did it anyway.
Not because I am a fanboy. Not because I want to watch video in bed. And certainly not because I want to replace my laptop with a new class of device.
But because I've got a really compelling usecase and am currently using a poor substitute.
The picture to the right is my ailing original iPhone running an app called Instapaper— a fantastic slim little app that lets you select content from any webpage for reading later. I have bookmarklets installed in all of my browsers and the app running on this crap old iPhone. I collect content throughout the day and (sometimes) read it at night while in bed. The iPhone lives by the bed (along with a charger) and occasionally doubles as a web access device for sending a reply to an email that I've forgotten or looking something up.
However, it is crappy and suboptimal because of how little the screen is. So much so, that I used to print out my Instapaper archive and take that to bed. Which would be okay were it not for the one-way trip to dead that content takes when it gets on paper— no sharing, no commenting, and no peripheral exploration of references within the content.
This convenience is worth the cost of entry for me. It may not sustain a runner product like the iPhone, but in aggregate, I think that looking for a way to place and device shift longer form reading is a killer app for the tablet form factor. The Kindle, while great for novels, is too close to paper to fulfill this role.
Apple ought to pay attention to apps like Instapaper in the event that it discovers that not all of us want to continue feeding on TV content after we've gone to bed.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (March 16, 2010)
I thought long and hard about this next step, and in the end chose to do it over what I've known to be a very fulfilling and exciting career as an entrepreneur for two reasons.
First, throughout my entire entrepreneurial career, things have been much more concrete: I saw things that I wanted to work on and just dove right in, come hell or high water. These last few months though, I've been primarily thinking about the entire Internet venture ecosystem, and specifically, what seems to be a worrisome trend here in Boston (thanks Bill Warner) , with fewer and fewer startups turning into big companies that can bolster tech entrepreneurship in the region. I want to see this ecosystem thrive for very selfish reasons: it makes living here, a much more interesting experience.
So I had two choices: take another swing at making another big company, or try my best to find as many possible nascent ones as possible and help them as much as I can through investment, strategy, recruiting, and general ecosystem reinforcement. I've chosen the latter for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is that I am ready to make a sector bet on this next phase of the Internet's evolution in a way that I never would have before.
What?
I am fairly confident about the following statement: the Internet will continue its rapacious pace of absorbing just about every facet of business, and more significantly, regular life. Advertising, media, entertainment, commerce, communications— even staid industries like manufacturing are all being transformed by open protocols, ubiquitous connectivity, and more efficient information exchange— in short, all that has made the Internet the best platform ever.
At the same time, everything else is up for grabs: UIs for access (Android, iPhone, iPad, TV?), models for computation (the client, the cloud, a hybrid?), business models, and even basic patterns for work and play. More than any other time in my career, has the map been so confusing towards such a clear long view.
And rather than be tied to one 7-10 year bet on how to make a big contribution to our ecosystem, I've decided to zoom out and bet more widely on the entire space. I am sure that we'll get some monster hits out of this primordial soup— and I hope I get a chance to help with a few of them.
The second reason why it was a hard decision to make was because I hate being a freshman, plain and simple. And when it comes to investing in tech companies, I've clearly got a lot to learn.
One of the possibilities that I considered was in the emergent models for seed/A funds built by former operating entrepreneurs. There are a few of these funds run by folks I've gotten to know and respect, and there might be just be an opportunity for them to carve out a permanent niche in the supporting environment that sustains startups.
In my case though, I wanted a chance to learn the business from folks who have been at it for a few decades and who have shown repeated success across industry changes in helping entrepreneurs get big. And there is little doubt that Matrix is the place to do that (as the freshman in the class, it's a little daunting).
For sure there is an element to be learned around identifying the right bets to make but I was more concerned with understanding how the best investors seem to be able to provide help all along the way, nurturing and guiding entrepreneurs until their small companies grow to fit their big visions.
I presume this stuff is not going to be easy but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (March 27, 2010)
In the last 2.5 years of heavy iPhone use, I've had a few cases where I've wanted to sit down to build an app that would make my life easier only to discover some iPhone SDK limitation that would make it impossible. The lack of background processing has been a chief culprit in a some of these cases, but in just about as many, the lack of true inter-app communication or even a decent plug-in system for the four most common apps (browser, messaging clients, camera, and maps application) has made writing multimodal glue impossible.
Multimodal glue? Let's take that mouthful in pieces.
Multimodal refers to the fact that the interface for computing should be able to move seamlessly throughout my day from my laptop at home to my mobile phone to my 24 inch desktop display at work, and even eventually, to my tablet of choice. This is one of two reasons for our collective move to clunkier web-based experiences instead of desktop apps (the other reason being the collaboration vector that is opened when the data is held on the server).
Some use cases have longstanding protocols that make this easy within the single application silo: IMAP for email being the best example. But others do not; for a great example of one app that is unnecessarily still stuck to the device, look no further than the SMS application on most phones (it's why I'll take the kludgey Google Voice solution to SMS (on any non Android device) any day over tapping out messages on a tiny screen while sitting at a huge monitor).
And glue refers to the interesting combinations that come out of being able to wire these applications together in new and unexpected ways. The web-as-platform is king here; a few years ago we called this class of interop "mashups" (thank God that term devolved into "smashups" before falling into cultural oblivion), but now we take it as given that you can plug your Twitter stream into your Facebook status, as a simple example, with a just a few clicks.
The glue apps are especially interesting in the context of a mobile device thanks to location information and the existence of a number of really interesting personal databases (call logs, addressbook, media library), and the fact that most platforms don't allow it (the iPhone is not alone here— RIM, Palm, and the forthcoming Windows 7 Mobile seem to be cargo culting their way to copying the wrong thing) is going be very good news for Android, and to a lesser extent Symbian Series 60.
But other than the platforms getting with the Android way of doing things, there is hope. Just as John Gilmore claimed that the Internet "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," it would seem that web-savvy developers are seeing SDK limitations in multimodal glue as damage to be routed around. Reading apps that can post to Twitter is a good first example, though in this case, the app developer is forced to write an entire Twitter client within his app. A more interesting example are websites that rely on cloud services to deposit data into other apps. For instance, I read HackerNews on Mobile Safari and can mark an article for download into my Instapaper app through a link that is served to me. It's kludgey that the data is sitting in my browser and has to roundtrip itself through the Instapaper servers to get to my application, but it is nice a pattern that other developers can use to inject a little cluefullness into broken platforms.
A good thing to consider as we sit here right before the release of the completely gorgeous but totally locked down Apple iPad.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months ago (March 31, 2010)
My iPad ship notification came early this morning, and I along with about a quarter million other overgrown little boys and girls started anticipating the early (late?) Christmas Day coming this Saturday.
I'm excited, but not because I have a portable TV to look forward to. I'm also not excited for the price inflation that app vendors (who have barely scraped by at $0.99 and $1.99) are going to try to foist upon us with the new form factor. In fact, I'm not excited to buy any apps at all.
What I'm most excited about is seeing how well an A4 optimized Mobile Safari can behave as a full featured application host— for the only type of apps that will actually matter long-term on the iPad outside of the mail client: fully native cloud apps.
Unlike the iPhone, we don't have to worry about the poor DOM support for things like the camera and the accelerometer, or the coarse and kludgey location support that the browser provides. Those things make a ton of sense for a device which is always with you and frequently needs to be used from hostile environments (at weird angles when you are not sure where you are). In the iPad's case what will matter is the ability to get near native speed and stability from the browser for the following things:
1. Multitouch. Mobile Safari for the iPhone has supported multitouch for a long time, albeit a bit too slowly especially when compared to the speed of the native app gestures. I sincerely hope that the A4 chip and the larger screen area (thus larger digitizer) closes this gap.
2. CSS3 transforms. Productivity style work doesn't need to be cinematic, but there is a certain amount of eye candy that can make a big difference. Dynamic highlights, accordion effects, etc.
3. Clientside storage. This is good enough on the iPhone. All they need to do is not break it (and maybe move the default upper limit on SQLite above 5MB)
4. Offline support. App-cache works on the iPhone, but it is a little squirrely sometimes. In order for the iPad to replace a laptop it needs to be rock solid on planes, trains, and automobiles (in tunnels) which means this needs to work more reliably.
5. Websockets for true bidirectional communication with a server for all of those emerging realtime apps. Ok, this one is a total pipedream and the truth is long polling works pretty well on the iPhone, but one can hope.
There are rumors floating around the Internet that Apple is looking to break all of this stuff in Mobile Safari (in order to encourage developers through their tollgate), but I doubt it. More likely the worst case scenario is that like any big company, Apple is a multi-headed beast— albeit one that is often tamed by Jobs— and as such, there will be a pocket of cluefulls that will do the right open web thing and let Safari make the iPad the first truly novel cloud access device.
We can hope.
In the meanwhile, if you're going to hold an iPad hack party in the coming days, consider targeting the partial HTML5 implementation on its Mobile Safari instead of falling victim to the sirensong of Interface Builder and its jazzy drag-and-drop goodness. You'll be doing yourself a huge favor when the other large OEMs start pouring tens of millions of cheaper Linux and Windows-based tablets into the market over the coming years.
And Merry Christmas.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months ago (April 4, 2010)
Too many bytes being wasted on iPad reviews/impressions/complaints, so I am going to be brief and specific to people who care about the industries I've worked in. Just three simple initial observations:
First, it is a beautiful piece of hardware with amazing software, but my first impression upon holding it (and one which has just gotten more acute after a day of using it) was: man, this thing is heavy!
This almost doesn't bear mentioning, but it is nice to see that even Apple can not escape the laws of the physical world. If I had to guess, I'd say 40% of the weight is the battery, and an additional 30% is glass, which gives you an idea of what can come out of it in future versions (and what won't). And the weight is going to affect it negatively in two key ways: it won't be a device people can hold up over their heads lying down easily at all, and more importantly, it won't be a particularly rugged device, especially when dropped face down.
(Right now there is a very happy team at my former employer who couldn't for the life of them figure out how Apple might escape physics but were taken in enough by the Reality Distortion Field to believe they might have).
Second, I had written about how much I wanted the web browser to be first class, and it most certainly is. For some web pages it is as fast as anything on the desktop (which speaks to the fact that we're just about as there as we can be without more fiber when it comes to webpages and speed). But more importantly, the pinch and zoom is an absolute delight. And best of all, just about everything that doesn't rely on Flash or complex onDrag event handlers works. Yay open web!
Finally, and this will only be relevant to people in the photo space: photo sharing is about to change forever.
When I say photo sharing, I don't mean an online photo repository like Facebook's that just a feature of a bigger social app; I mean the full ecosystem in which the traditional photo sharing folks have existed. And what is key about this ecosystem is that output has proven to be the only scalable business model, be it the 4x6 prints of yesteryear or the photo books of today.
All of that revenue died today. Not in the going away immediately kind of dead, but in the Lotus Notes kind of way. There will be a generation of folks who will print photos and books for a little while longer, but for the bulk of people that have seen the power of a live slideshow on a bright IPS LED display of the iPad's size— one that can be passed around a living room or left rotating on a particular event— will never go back to keeping anything with ink and paper.
If I were still in that space, I'd be looking hard at the few players who have figured out how to make money with virtual-only products (which is really hard), because that is the only place where there is likely to be any significant growth.
Another way to put it: RIP photo book. You were awesome while you lasted and I'm sorry you never became truly mass market (only about 11% of the US population had made one last I checked), but there are just better ways to tell stories with pictures in a portable and human-scale way out there now.
More later after I work up the muscles to hold up the iPad better.
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Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (April 11, 2010)
Someone needs to do a case for the iPad that doubles as a physical keyboard of the sort that Apple is selling with that wedge thing that props up your iPad. Along with the forthcoming multitasking in OS 4.0, we might have something useful after that. But until then, unless your job consists of surfing the web and tweeting into the giant collective miasma of the link-passing masses, this is a device is best used to round out the fast growing collection of screens in your home.
Or at least that was my impression after a week of taking the machine with me everywhere where I would have previously brought a laptop, concluding in a couple of nights away without access to my trusty old clamshell. Lacking the option to escape to the laptop was the doozie, especially when I felt myself in need of editing a complex text file and discovered that without soft arrow keys you are reduced to being an angry pointing monkey, poking a finely tuned glass screen that shows your stubby homo sapien fingers little love and much smudge.
And to boot, if you have any semi-complex task that requires the use of any two applications concurrently, say something as simple as looking up instructions on a task and typing commands in, the "instant-on" claims quickly melt in the face of frustration every 4-5 second pause required to close one context and open the next.
As I gnashed my teeth trying to sort through these early challenges last night (while rushing to try to get something actually done), I realized that perhaps the worst feature in the iPad is the unrealistically high expectations that Apple and the rest of the world have set on the machine as the "next revolution" in personal computing. Much like I would never complain about the lack of control and missing features when paying $200 for a small point-and-shoot instead of $1000 for a DSLR, I think that properly evaluated in context— as a fancy peripheral for leaving the laptop out of the living room especially when there are others around— it will be an absolute monster hit. Laptop replacement? Not for geeks and not even for "normals," at least not for a while yet.
One final thought: showing the consistency of a two-year old, the TSA doesn't bat an eyelash when you leave the iPad inside the bag while clearing security. This is a monster bonus for the frequent travelers— however, I can only imagine that it is an ephemeral benefit at best (it can not be that our crack team of airport security geniuses are that fickle).
Somewhat related: Nick Carr has the best analysis of why the collective online consciousness is so up in arms about the question of whether the iPad is going to hijack computing as we know it.
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Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 17, 2010)
Not enticed by the additional cores and upgraded memory bus on the i7 laptops, I opted instead to finally make the plunge to solid state for my main laptop disk drive.
Man what a difference it makes!
I don't think that I've felt such a noticeable difference in the performance of a personal computer since Apple switched from PPC to Intel a few years back. Where there was latency in applications before, there is just instant gratification now. And more surprisingly, the apps that seem to benefit the most are the ones I would have thought were CPU bound due to all of the layers of abstraction: VMWare and Chrome/Firefox/Safari. If I were Intel, I'd be more worried about SSD storage these days than cramming cores into fixed dies.
It's not cheap— in fact, it is still atrociously expensive: on the order of $2.80/GB versus about $0.20/GB for the fastest possible spinning platter in the same 2.5 inch form factor. And what is more, at least on OSX, the operating system is horrendously not optimized for the different read/write characteristics of an SSD— and still you get this crazy performance boost (if you do take the plunge, and you are on a Mac, I'd highly recommend this atime hack before you swap your solid state disk in).
I'm sure SSDs as mainstream components are coming though, and to the degree that Apple still cares about their one open OS, I hope they make the investment in SSD filesystem support (like the TRIM command which Windows 7 supports out of the box).
And in the meanwhile it is funny to think that between smartphone, PC, iPad, iPod, etc, nary a platter is spinning in my life. In fact, magnetic platters have become the new tape— useful for backups and not much else.
Even if the price seems too steep to replace your main drive, I'd highly recommend getting a smaller one for the system, and if necessary dropping the DVD player. Even partitioning your data is worth it, given how much newer your computer will feel.
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Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 22, 2010)
Facebook's news yesterday at the F8 conference can be boiled down to one statement: the company wants to be the identity system for the web, but not just for people, but for every type of object that can be boiled down into a URL: restaurants, places, chunks of media— eventually just about anything physical or abstract that we can think of wiring into the net.
On the one hand this is great news for the semantic web geeks because we'll finally get the right combination of ease-of-use and incentives required for publishers to truly mark up their content appropriately for the coming semantic search engine that Facebook will be deploying (though they were too smart to use this stinker of a label yesterday). Publishers want to traffic and engagement they will likely get, users want the convenience of overlaying their friends on top of the web, developers want the power of playing with all of this newly exposed data, and Facebook just plain wants the data as their endrun on Google. Everybody wins. Right?
Except of course that, at scale, this is giving an inordinate amount of power to one company. The kind of power that would make IBM handing the keys to the PC over to Microsoft look like the Portuguese Air Force by comparison (all two planes).
Here is an interesting thought experiment: imagine if Microsoft had used their combination of Frontpage HTML authoring tool and Internet Explorer monopoly to inject metatags in every document created, and corresponding code in the browser to read the tags and collect the data in a master database in the sky for subsequent mining— all in the name of enhancing the user experience. People would then have the convenience of the semantic web at the expense of giving all of that power to Microsoft. Instinctively, wouldn't you recoil at this proposition?
And in fact people did— despite the fact that Microsoft's was a much less ambitious plan. The whole "Smart Tags" fiasco taught the company a lesson about the boundary between useful and creepy. And yet, now we are seeing the same movie again, albeit from a much more clueful and powerful competitor when it comes to the web.
What am I missing?
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (April 24, 2010)
Anyone with little boys knows that what passes for modern day crack cocaine with them is the combination of two great franchises: Lego and Star Wars. Whoever thought of that cross licensing deal deserved his marketing bonus for the year (which he's probably spending on endless Lego Star Wars sets for his kids).
Having spent the week chasing down misplaced Clone Troopers, I got to thinking about a potential equivalent big-boy combination of two great franchises: Apple's fantastic hardware & software design with Google's openness and Internet services DNA. Why is it that we're made to choose between fantastic devices with unparalleled fit and finish but totalitarian control points, or sloppy designed-by-committee but wonderfully generative platforms like Android or Chrome?
People of both sides of the open vs. closed debate have argued that each company's products result from their starting philosophies, that closed begets more finished products, and open requires tolerance of more "generic" experiences.
I call bullshit on that.
Instead of philosophies, I think we need to focus on a much simpler cause— one based on simple economics. It's been a long time since Apple has had to be open in their approach to a product for business reasons. At the launch of OS X, the alternative to being open (with an OS that was easy to port to, attractive to Linux/Unix developers, enticing to ISVs) was being broke. So the company was incented to do the right thing. Similarly, until the iPhone ran away from the pack, Google had little incentive to do anything but get a checkbox in the mobile OS category of their strategy slide— but as is clear with the Nexus (and likely with the Incredible and all future high end Android phones), they are now playing up to Apple's level on mobile fit and finish (at least to a couple of revs back).
I'm hoping that the take-over-the-world stuff we saw this week from Facebook (with Microsoft cheering on from the sidelines) will wake these guys up so some deeper economic motivation to stop fighting and figure out how to do the Lego/Lucas love dance. At the very least, I'm tired of having to choose.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (April 24, 2010)
This is my last bit on this whole Facebook thing (not quite sure why
this week's announcement has rubbed me so wrong):
I am currently waiting out a rainstorm at the Yunque national forest,
one of the only tropical rainforests in the US national park system.
What is amazing about this place is how heterogenous it is, from the
fauna to the flora. There are something like 225 species of trees alone!
It is really a sight to behold. Looking at it, I couldn't help but see
this interwoven set of animals, plants, and trees as a good metaphor
for the web as a whole. It thrives because of how diverse it is.
And yet asking one of the parks folks whether there was any common
element to the speed of development of the ecosystem as a whole, I got
an interesting answer: apparently the flow of water, from cloud to
rain to trees to the ground and back is the only thing that governs
the speed of growth, and it would seem that the biggest threats the
reserve has faced over time have come from global environmental
factors that affect this general flow (such as global warming).
Similarly on the web, it has been the flow of hyperlinks, from page to
page that I think has governed the speed of development. Between http
and HTML, we've gotten the same basic elements that have allowed for
the heterogeneity of the web: from amazon to wikipedia and millions of
smaller species that hav thrived.
If this Facebook thing takes off in a big way, it has the chance to
evolve the link in interesting and very powerful ways. No doubt. But
at the behest of one company. This can not possibly be a good thing.
Google was made possible because of the web. And today it is
incredibly powerful. But if it were to go away tomorrow, we'd still be
left with the web- it'd be like the National Park Service pulling out
of the Yunque- mostly because until recently they've sought to curate
the web and not evolve it in a way that makes it less rAinforest and
more zoo.
The park folks keep telling us that this is our park and that
protecting it is our responsibility to the future. It strikes me that
the same could be asked of us on behalf of the open web.
(Excuse the typos. Typed on an iPhone in the middle of a rainforest.
In the rain)
Tags:
OnTheGo
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (April 27, 2010)
I found this Dropbox presentation absolutely charming, not only because I am an avid user of the product, and a passionate fan of the product, but because it speaks so honestly about something that should be front and center for every single startup that uses the Internet to deliver its offering: your product matters— in fact it matters almost more than anything else.
As we fall in love with all sorts of new concepts around distribution: virality, social game dynamics, flash sales, etc., it is critical to remember that these are tactics to expose new potential users to your product (or service), and that no matter how well they work, at some point you will go splat if the product is not unique enough to delight some subset of your potential customer base.
Product, product, product. Say it 10 times and don't forget it. If you are a startup, this is the only way that you will build deep and sustainable value. While investors (like me) may ask you questions about distribution, these should only be coming after they already believe you've cleared the first threshold of having something people will actually want.
[And to those who might point to the failure of the Betamax in the 1980s or the Mac in the 1990s, I have good arguments for why these were both bad products for the markets where they lost. As is probably the case for many other counterexamples of great products losing to sales & marketing]
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 months ago (April 30, 2010)
[Note: these are my thoughts and not those of my former employer. I had zero visibility into a potential Palm acquisition and was as surprised as everyone else on Wednesday when I read the news]
As the case with most of the large tech companies, there is a lot of Apple jealousy inside the halls of the product side of the HP house. I used to play a game of reverse Buzzword Bingo, collecting one point for every meeting during a given week when Apple wasn't mentioned in some capacity ("we need to be as elegant/integrated/creative as the iPhone... we want this to be the iPhone of X"). Most weeks my score was 0— 1 on the weeks when I had meetings with the facility manager.
From that perspective, buying Palm makes a ton of sense for the world's largest tech supermarket: it gets the chance to bring a line of products to market that are fully integrated, it controls the software experience, and from what I've been told (because I've never owned a webOS device myself), it gets a very good copy of the iPhone OS which can be ported with little effort up and down the product line.
This is why it makes sense that the company would cancel the slate rumor that was rushed to announcement in January and I suspect that it will also be just a matter of time before all of the released Android products— and worse still— any of the on-deck Android products— get canceled or replaced by ones with webOS in their plan of record.
In fact, the fate of Android inside of HP is likely the greatest casualty of this whole deal, and given the recent pressure exerted on HTC by Apple's lawyers, it doesn't come at a good time. While it it hardly the case that HP was single handedly moving Android forward with its engagement with the OS, I think as one of 3 "tier one" players who had begun to embrace it (albeit apprehensively) with partners and the supply chain, the signaling power of the company's retreat will be felt.
It was never easy for HP to get its head around Android— between the open development model and Google's inconsistent messaging around Android versus Chrome and the different classes of devices (which seemed at times poorly thought out and at times just downright flakey), it was a bumpy takeoff every step of the way. HP is a company used to dealing with "vendors" who meet RFPs and charge license/support costs to deliver predictable help, not a community guided by a single company whose core business wasn't serving HP's needs.
In the end, I'm not sure whether HP can make webOS a commercial success (it may be too late), but I applaud their boldness in trying it. There is a lot a stake here if the world continues to go the route of app stores and platform dictators and I'd hate to play without full control of the stack (not to mention the glee at HP legal on the patent trove they're about to own).
What I do think is true is that we consumers ought to fast forward and think through whether we'll be better served with Apple, Google, RIM, and now HP all running this same playbook, or with the seemingly fading promise of a post-PC world that is as open as the desktop/browser one has been for the last decade.
Tags:
digerati
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books
Posted by Antonio
4 months ago (April 30, 2010)
Charlie Stross, one of my favorite living scifi writers has a prognostication piece on the future of the PC industry that is among best tech analysis I've seen anywhere. He starts with this:
I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ...
and ends here:
If you're using an iPad in 2015, my bet is that you won't bother to have home broadband; you'll just have data on demand wherever you are. You won't bother yourself about backups, because your data is stored in Apple's cloud. You won't need to bother about software updates because all that stuff will simply happen automatically in the background, without any fuss: nor will worms or viruses or malware be allowed. You will, of course, pay a lot more for the experience than your netbook-toting hardcore microsofties — but you won't have to worry about your antivirus software breaking your computer, either. Because you won't have a "computer" in the current sense of the word. You'll just be surrounded by a swarm of devices that give you access to your data whenever and however you need it.
In between he weaves a great story around Apple's ridiculous gestapo-esque policies regarding what software can run on their devices and what they do to people who reveal their secrets, why Flash is abhored on the iDevices, and what 4G data networks will really mean for the world at large. It's as good as any of his books and while he may not have all of the details quite right, I think he paints in broad strokes how the PC era will truly end for consumers, and what the cloud one will entail.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (May 17, 2010)
For a while now I've been noticing that Google's ability to deliver results that I care about in search slots 3-X seems to have decayed in the face of SEO spam, realtime clutter, and other distractions. Assuming I am like most people (who don't even look beyond the first page of results), this means that the Google product is now delivering about 20% of what it could. Seems like an astonishingly low hit rate for a brand that built on the premise of being a better mousetrap.
This might explain the attempt to add knobs with the latest redesign that might better target the rest of the results. And yet, the time filter, which I had thought would be really useful to surface out of the advanced query page, seems to be relatively weak in terms of making better use of slots 3-10 on the first page. And what is worse, the overall widget has given Google the feel of a Windows 95 control panel.
I'm not a big believer that search is dead by any stretch of the imagination. The social graph, app stores, Q&A services— you pick your favorite disruptor for the traditional method for discovery— I can come up with a whole mess of queries that just will not fit the model (some of which are among Google's most profitable). But I do think that the company needs to pay attention to this 20% hit rate and focus on that more than on the rest of the new shiny toys everyone keeps clamoring for them to build
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (May 20, 2010)
In the big companies just don't think category, Ned posted a ridiculous policy change at HP that curtails the ability to use phone bridges in order to save an insignificant amount of money on small groups making conference calls. It's a well balanced rant that will once again remind you that Scott Adams is more reporter than humorist when it comes to big company craziness.
The one ray of hope in all of this is that on the day that he posted it, I happened to attend two different events on enterprise software where bankers and analysts went to great pains to explain that along with virtualization and big data analytics, one of the big emerging trends in the world of big businesses is the "consumerization of enterprise IT."
Putting aside the butchering of the English language for a moment, the idea is simple: because worker bees carry an iPhone and use Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and YouTube at home, they've come to realize that they should expect more from IT. Apparently the way this story is playing out is that folks are coming into the office aware that byzantine IT practices to ration disk space with mailbox quotas are no longer supported by reality and either vigorously complaining, or better still, importing more modern technologies on the sly (along with all of the potential data security issues).
Having spent two years at HP in an environment where it was always 1997 when it came to anything to do with your computer, I am at best optimistically skeptical about the trend. Until someone comes up with a productivity metric that is as concrete as the ones around cost savings currently getting CIOs their big bonuses, it is hard to see how executives at the top will respond to this growing dissatisfaction (it was Hewlett after all who said "what gets measured gets done.")
If the peasant revolt does work though, there are going to be a pretty interesting opportunities bringing all sorts of modern technology offerings into the enterprise; from tying them into legacy systems to trying to understand how all of these web 2.0 "consumer" patterns of communication and collaboration can be put to productive purposes.
For the sake of all of the Neds out there, let's hope it works.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 24, 2010)
Lost ended last night in what will no doubt go down as the most talked about television event since Tony Soprano fuzzed out of existence a few years ago. It's too early for me to tell whether I really liked it, or simply really enjoyed the production values of the last few episodes. One is clear though: from JJ Abrams on down, everyone involved with the show showed an amazing command of their particular craft.
I remember writing about Lost five years ago on this blog right after the beginning of my last startup. Lost became company culture from the days when there were only 3 of us (and it was good to see that thanks to the rapid infusion technology known as 12 hours in front of a DVD boxset, even the laggards eventually got religion). The craftsmanship behind every facet of the show was something we all admired intensely (the other topic we'd talk about endlessly was Apple's product roadmap) as was the work that was put into slowly developing a really compelling story that wrapped itself around the particular talents of the actors. As I tried to so ineloquently express all those years ago, there is a really good parallel to the early days of a startup here.
[ For those that liked the show, or story-telling in general, there was a fantastic piece by JJ Abrams in Wired last year about the process and the "magic of mystery."]
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 28, 2010)
Lest people think this is becoming a television review blog, I promise that this is the last post to do with any series finale. It just so happened that the only two television shows I've watched as of late ended at the same time: Lost and 24.
I've already talked about Lost so here I will only say that I was sad to see 24 go, but happy that it did so with a fantastic series ender that harkened back to what made the show so great in season one.
Basically (for anyone that hasn't ever seen it) 24 is Tintin for adults. Federal agent Jack Bauer plays the moral CTU (read: FBI) agent who always has right on his side and needs to take the system on again and again to prove just how virtuous he really is. He is clever, has a geektastic crowd of friends that help him every step of the way, and best of all, has never run across odds he could not beat through sheer brains, balls, and just knowing that he was right.
The show writers's right-wing politics notwithstanding, Jack took us on eight years of rollicking edge-of-your-seat drama with comic book gamut. And no matter how ridiculous the predicaments became, or overt the messages (or product placement) were, I always found myself rooting for Jack, part MacGyver and part Dick Marcinko to pull through for one more adventure.
It's interesting to think that season one started right around September 11th 2001, and for nine years CTU and Jack have carried us through multiple invasions and thwarted terrorist plots, all the while remaining optimistic about the effect that a few folks who believe there is true black and white when it comes to right and wrong can have on large bureaucratic systems that can sometimes forget it.
Most of all though, I'll miss the high jinx and tech tomfoolery of Jack and Chloe (remember when they played back the AOL modem tones in season one?) and the inevitable man-against-the-world dilemmas that he somehow always managed to escape.
If you haven't seen it, you've got 192 hours of plain unadulterated fun waiting for you!
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 4 weeks ago (June 7, 2010)
The NY Times has a scary piece today on the way interrupt-driven life works for the modern family with everyone checking a raft of bleeping gadgets channeling the torrent of messages and interruptions that the digital age spawns. It is particularly poignant because most people will recognize some part of themselves in it, whether it is the multitasking of media consumption, or the complete inability to linearly perform tasks without self-imposed interruptions.
The piece comes on the heels of Nick Carr's latest book, "The Shallows" (which I am actually looking forward to reading in an uninterrupted manner), a treatise about how our brains are literally being rewired by the new type of stimuli provided by the connected age. In my own case, I've definitely noticed this trend: as Twitter, Facebook and their ilk have gained steam over the last few years, I've found myself taking up all of the white space in my life "catching up" with the duplicate streams of links, updates, and other meaningless junk. I thought at first I picked up this bad habit during my tenure at the world's largest tech supermarket, but I've come to realize that it has just as much to do with the combination of the smartphone and the new constantly updating web services whose primary metaphor is "the stream."
As much as I may worry about it in my case, I worry about it much more in the case of my kids whose brains are just being wired to learn now. While it is possible that this constantly shrinking attention span will lead to new modalities for learning and generally coping with the world, it's too early to tell, and what is more, deep thinking provides advantages we've got a few millennia of evidence for.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 3 weeks ago (June 12, 2010)
Despite months of seemingly random iPhone policy decisions on the part of Apple, it was the decision to kick AdMob out of the AppStore this week that finally put me over the edge on the ability to suspend disbelief about Apple actually caring about users and not "control points," market dominance, and other corporate strategy bullshit that can often get misaligned with doing what is right for the user (and note that this is despite the fact that I abhor any kind of in-app advertising).
As such, I've decided that I'm done listening to Steve and team on how I should use their devices. I'm done with his vision of curated computing and I'm starting by importing real multitasking into my iPad through the Spirit jailbreak (at least until I can buy a decent Android tablet, as I've actually gotten to like the form factor quite a bit).
It's by far the easiest jailbreak you will ever do— it is non-destructive to your existing applications, your use of the AppStore, etc.— just about everything except for your iPad warranty. In short, I think it is highly worth it.
In the past I've jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches but that has always felt like much more of a science project than an actual useful improvement. Tethering, the main advantage of a jailbroken iPhone, actually burns the crap out of the battery, and since lasting the full day is already the Achilles heel of the device, it just wasn't worth it.
Not so with the iPad: in my experience, the apps I used the most on it are Kindle, Instapaper, Evernote, Newsrack, and iSSH— all of which benefit tremendously from being able to run in the background (mostly to sync content from the cloud or keep connections to servers open).
The one slight disappointment thus far is that a lot of these apps have been explicitly written for the iPhone app lifecycle model, syncing mainly on application initialization and a few other explicit actions (return to homescreen, or worse still, actually pressing the sync button). While this makes total sense in today's controlled environment, I would love to do see developers detecting the use of popular jailbreaks and supporting true multitasking, especially for sync operations.
This is a pipe dream of course— most of these apps being supported by small teams makes it cost prohibitive to support unofficial environments like jailbreaks. But one can dream. And in the meanwhile, I think I'll say goodbye to the curated environment. Turns out I'm probably better at knowing what is good for me than the guys fighting the Great War of the Platforms in 2010.
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 2 weeks ago (June 19, 2010)
In the past two months there have been a bunch of articles about how touch is the future of all computing, and how the launch of the iPad has given the rest of the industry the blueprint to follow. As much as I might want a new Macbook Air to ship, it would seem that Apple is only interested in single surface devices. Even pokey HP is betting a billion dollars on Palm as its option for the future.
Despite this, I don't know that I agree that I want to poke everything with my fat finger instead of using a pixel-accurate pointing device. More importantly, I am not sure that I'm ready to say goodbye to overlapping windows, perhaps the single most productive feature of the GUI. Multitasking is nice (and I suspect it will eventually come to all of these new devices in a good form), but so is the ability to keep several windows open on the screen at the same time. Browser, text editor, shell, IM client, etc.
Am I the only one who thinks that doing away with this in favor of the single canvas application is a mistake? Even for the mainstream user?
I agree with this: in the era of the Google box and multiple devices, files and folders rooted in a local spindle have got to go. I'm just not sure that it makes sense to throw the rest of it away. Hell, even in Minority Report, the MIT Media Lab inspired interface of the future had multiple overlaid contexts up on one screen.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 21, 2010)
If you are running a giant lottery, the most important thing you can do is give people faith to keep buying tickets. You put up signs along the side of the road that say things like: "Wanda won!" and picture an average looking woman in a normal kitchen pumping fistfuls of hundreds into the air.
Equally important is having lots of little bits of evidence along the way: little payouts for people whose tickets end in the right digits. As the lottery runner, most of this money will come back in more ticket fees anyway but the real reason to do it is to give the rank-and-file hope.
This is exactly the game that Apple is playing with the AppStore. Very few people are making a living at it; and yet Steve got up on stage last week to tell us they've paid a billion dollars out. A few developers are often featured as the guys that can move millions of dollars of apps. Pure Wanda tactics at play.
But if you are in the bulk of the developers, making $10-100/day from your paid apps, you need those small rewards to keep you going. Which is exactly where this iAds nonsense comes in. Today the AppStore is such a novelty that people will download almost anything. And when it comes to most of the categories, all else being equal, folks will pick off the top of the "Free" top 20 more often than they will off the "Paid" list.
But no matter how much hype exists around the promise of location-based advertising, reality is setting in. There is a ton of inventory on the publisher side— which as with the web, is driving CPMs to the floor. More importantly, the recent bandwidth caps imposed by AT&T (and others will follow) are about to turn consumers into bandwidth pinching cheapskates which means that extra payload is going to be scrutinized much more aggressively (this BTW is also likely to affect games built on platforms that "stream" assets in at runtime).
This last point is a biggie: if Apple were really serious about the long-term prospects and scalability of in-app advertising, I doubt they'd be that happy about the end of the all-you-can-eat data phase of the smartphone. Especially as Steve takes the stage to display rich interactive ads based on HTML5 blobs sucking up precious bytes on the wire.
Finally though, at a gut level, it just doesn't make sense. The smartphone screen is very constrained real estate. Most of the usecases are for quick in-and-out activities, and for those that aren't (games), a rotating banner or immersive ad is like a stick in the eye of the overall user experience.
Location aware coupons delivered through an appropriate messaging channel? I can see that. But the web experience ported to a smaller form factor that is used completely differently? Come on.
Just because Google got hot and bothered and paid up for the promise of AdMob didn't make it all of the sudden a sensible strategy for building a big business.
Selling hardware based in part on the energy and work of hundreds of thousands of ticket buyers hoping to win the lottery? Now that is a good business.
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (July 16, 2010)
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Steve Jobs
Despite how easy it is to write the story of how this iPhone 4 antenna snafu has to do with the esthetes at Apple being obsessed with the look of the device, I suspect that the motivation for the design change is much deeper, and likely speaks to Apple's strategy for staying ahead of the rest of the smartphone players.
On the 3GS, 3G, and original iPhones, the antenna was coiled around the bottom of the back of the phone— where you now have a smooth glass surface that seems remarkably similar to the front one. In fact, outside of the hard edges, it is this symmetry that you first notice on the device after coming from the more rounded predecessors: the back feels exactly like the front, so much so that it is sometimes a pain to figure out what the front of the device is when you are fishing for it in your pocket.
Now why would a company that seldom sacrifices function for pure looks do this, both when it is less convenient for the user and when it resulted in this controversial antenna issue (especially if the rumors are true that Apple was aware of the likely problems)?
My brother was the person who suggested the right answer to me after hearing me complain about it: because Apple is getting us ready to introduce a multi-touch panel on the back of the device, likely for simple gestures at first (think Mighty/Magic mouse) to be followed by more complex interactions most of which we can't even conceive of at this point.
Think about it: every time any of the keyboards have to come up, you've automatically lost 45% of the screen (this was the last remaining benefit of hardware keyboards on mobile devices). More importantly, imagine all of the new types of on-the-go interactions that having a touch-sensitive back would enable. Try this: if you've got an iPhone 4, hold it in the death grip position and try some swipes over the back glass with your index and middle fingers. Pretty natural right?
And yes, because Apple fans so obsessively try to read the leaves of the patent database, the obligatory proof that someone in Cupertino has thought of this.
It is precisely because this is a credible hypothesis that the smartphone platforms are so exciting. We are still so early in this type of fundamental interface/interaction innovation that there is no telling where this might go. As Steve Cheney wrote, at the hardware layer, mobile innovation is just blowing away anything that came before it in personal computing.
[One final note: despite the fact that it runs totally counter to the way Apple does things, this is exactly what I would highlight in this morning's "Antenna Gate" press release: by letting folks know why they had to suffer through an untested and novel antenna design, the company would earn back a lot of the goodwill they've lost over the past few weeks]
Tags:
hackers
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digerati
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (July 23, 2010)
Lately it seems that I'm seeing iPhones everywhere. And if not iPhones, ham handed attempts at "improving" the iPhone by jacking the screen size up 130%— thus making a mongrel device that looks like the product of an iPhone and an iPad.
It just can not be that this is the one form factor to rule all of going forward in smartphone technology. And yet, outside of RIM* and the much ridiculed HTC G1, who is trying to do anything with real buttons anymore? Who remembers that not that long ago we all ridiculed a future filled with consumers stroking glass all day, unable to feel the satisfying poggle of a well-built physical button?
Back in 2005, I sat in the back row of a cross country flight with a guy who had just gotten a Nokia e70, the coolest cellphone I had ever seen, both because it had a numeric keypad and the greatest full keyboard implementation I have ever seen on any mobile computer. Where is that sort of form factor innovation today?
Despite the fact that everyone loves to write Nokia off, I'm hoping that they go back to their roots and start building products like the e70 again. When combined with their moving to Android (as opposed to their confused Symbian/Meego story on the OS side), this could be the genesis of a real formidable world wide attack on the open face sandwich form factor that Apple and all of its competitors are foisting on us over and over.
Diversity is good— especially in something as personal as a mobile computer.
* And while RIM nailed the email use case, they've not done anything in terms of hardware diversity since 2001. And what is more, their software sucks the big one for anything that is outside of the sweet spot app.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (July 24, 2010)
This iPhone antenna thing is insane, both because of how much airtime it has gotten (this is my last iPhone/Apple post for a long while) and because of how ridiculously careless Apple has been about wasting all of the accumulated trust it has collected with its customers over the years. The whole thing makes me remember Phil Schiller who claimed that Apple's comeback strategy was predicated on their becoming the "Sony of personal computers" while he was trying to recruit a bunch of us out of grad school in 1999.
Back in the 1980s, I (and just about everyone I knew) bought Sony stuff just because it was Sony. VCRs, walkmen, headphones, and even totally commodity products like media. Then Sony bought content companies and got its head completely turned around on how its devices would relate to digital content. But in a much worse move, to justify their own stupid strategies, they started lying to their customers. They lied about the superiority of the DRMed formats, the performance of their proprietary flash storage, even about the relatively high costs of repairing one of their VAIO laptops (which were built with mostly standard components).
The result? They destroyed all of the accumulated trust that allowed them to charge a premium to their customers, even on products like blank CDs. A child of the 1970s when the Sony brand stood for the pinnacle of consumer electronics, there is almost nothing that they could sell me these days that didn't have a rock bottom price attached to it.
Apple is getting dangerously close to the edge of the same mistake. The press conference last week was a joke, and having their PR department grinding out videos to knock the better radios Motorola is shipping in the Droid phones just looks desperate. We may all keep buying their products, but increasingly it will be only in categories where the competitors are so weak (i.e., HP/Dell craptops running Windows). And once that trust is gone, they will be forever sailing against the wind with every new product introduction.
If I were them, I'd think hard about that before letting this get papered over via free rubber cases and attack videos aimed at the competition.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (July 26, 2010)
Back in the 90s, I was a huge fan of Mercata (during its fleeting existence), the predecessor to all of today's group buying sites. And it doesn't take long these days in any conversation about the consumer internet for Groupon to come up, at which point anyone who has been around a while will usually point to Mercata and say something like "clearly it was too early for the concept."
Outside of how much information people are willing to publish about themselves, I find this to be a poor excuse for why something didn't work before. And as it happens in the case of Mercata/Groupon, I've finally discovered why. Listening to Andrew Mason (the Groupon founder) on Mixergy over the weekend, it becomes clear quickly that he was applying a key lesson from his failed attempt at a "collective action platform" (The Point): getting the audience super-focused by providing limited choice. More importantly, he did this in the local space— where unlike Mercata's attempts in electronics— it was fairly easy to overwhelm a local merchant with a relatively small user base. This online/offline lever quickly proved the concept both to themselves and to the merchants upon which they relied to drive the "deals" that grew the site.
In these heydays of lean startup mania, everyone talks about focus as the key way to find your initial product/market fit, but this kind of "limited features that please a small number of people across the Internet" is a bit different from Groupon's leveraged approach for early traction. For sure the early merchants were underserved when it came to performance marketing channels which is most likely what has helped the category explode both in the US and abroad. But the better early lesson for small startups might be that finding the right source of overwhelming leverage to prove out a an early business model (i.e., send your 400 Facebook friends to your local coffee shop on a given Saturday morning) might provide some interesting avenues for getting started.
Especially as mobile and location seem to be the race du jour, it would seem that thinking through applying this online/offline leverage might yield better early outcomes that obsessing about the first million users and being stuck with fundamental user density challenges.
Tags:
buddies
,
embahs
Posted by Antonio
1 month ago (July 29, 2010)
I recently came across one of my favorite books from the last century: "Fire in the Valley," a tome about the history of personal computing. In the book, there are chapters that go back to the Altair, a machine which was heralded as democratizing computing even though it was programmed by flipping switches. The 40 column"toy computers" followed and set the stage for Apple's HGR graphics (a whopping resolution of 280x193) which shocked the industry with its cutting edge visual appeal and caused thousands of aspiring programmers the world over to learn to PEEK and POKE.
These machines were toys by today's standards, and yet we find ourselves these days whining these days about how much all of the new tablet computers seem to trap us into "content consumption" instead of "content creation." I wonder though whether this is not more about our state of mind— something along the lines of only bad carpenters blaming their tools.
Just tonight I came home to my kids— who spend their lives swimming in the types of hand-me-down gadgets that are supposed to turn them into content consuming zombies, using two 1G iPhones and a Nintendo DS to play different music on each of the iPhones to then record it and tweak it on the DS. In total, three content consumption devices redeployed for the sake of creating something. And to them it was all about discovery and magic.
I think we are hard-wired for it no matter what the form factor.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month ago (Aug. 2, 2010)
My partner Josh had a great blog post this weekend that went straight to one of my recent peeves with the world of Internet startups: the almost religious adherence to a particular methodology for developing your product. In this case, he takes on A/B testing, wondering whether relying heavily on this type of iterative optimization can ever come close to achieving what product vision can.
These days a lot of folks seem to like the idea of "12 simple recipes for a successful Internet startup." The reality is that there is no such certainty— and certainly not in any one easily repeatable process. For every Zynga that has supposedly risen via A/B tests and constant tweaking, there is a Facebook that almost got burned at the stake by introducing a controversial feature which would have never resulted from iterative development but which later went on to redefine the entire core experience (anyone remember the outcries around the newsfeed's introduction?)
One of the commenters on Josh's post points to the classic "local minima" problem with iterative optimization: getting stuck at a less than ideal outcome because your testing approach doesn't accommodate large discontinuous jumps on how UI/messaging/calls-to-action are presented. And while true that good testing hygiene can help overcome some of this, the reality is that with any relatively complex app, the interdependencies between the various different parts of a flow can quickly cause a combinatorial explosion of things to test absent some sort of very coherent product vision.
For instance, at my last company, Tabblo, we had broken the entire lifecycle of a user of our application into an acronym we affectionately referred to as M.E.E.M. (Marketing, Engagement, Experience, Merchandising). Each of the elements contained a set of key actions we were hoping to guide our users through and had a set of associated metrics which were owned at times by the same folks, and at times by different people.
Had we put all of our eggs in the iterative testing school of thought, I think the overall experience would have greatly suffered, eventually becoming a set of disjointed gates held together by little more than suspension of disbelief and blind hope that it all still made sense. Even with judicious use of it, when considered in the context of cohorts who sometimes took months to move from one phase to the next, our A/B test results often caused some fantastically heated arguments among the product owners.
To me A/B tests and other iterative product development practices are like a good writing fundamentals: just because you know to use active verbs, avoid adjectives, and keep sentences short doesn't mean you are going to start turning out Hemingway novels. For that you need great inspiration and tons of hard work— and even then, there is no sure thing.
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buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 6 days ago (Aug. 13, 2010)
When I was growing up in Venezuela, there were two companies that represented everything that marked the US as the place to be: Apple Computer and Hewlett Packard. Each company was the epitome of the creative energy of engineers building the future with little care for the status quo. As I would learn years later from Alan Kay, they were employing the practice of "predicting the future by inventing it."
Imagine then how thrilled I was a couple of decades later when HP decided to buy my company. Sure, the company no longer had the luster of its Bill & Dave days but it was still the place that had invented the garage culture, put Silicon Valley on the map, and taught generations of engineers that hard work and creative work eventually paid off. I remember showing up to the closing day of the transaction with a decades-old HP 35 calculator that my father had given me after a trip to the company's Corvallis plant during my college tour. "If you can help do something like this," he had said to me, "then we'll know that bringing you here was the right thing to do." I repeated the story to the guy who bought us and told him I was ready to try.
The results of my efforts on that front are the subject for another post; here I'm just going to talk about the two types of executives I met during my two years there.
The first represented the Bill & Dave world: they believed that everyone in the company had to constantly evaluate their own "contribution" to HP, put their head down, and make a difference. Most had Bill & Dave stories of their own, whether it was driving either of the founders to the airport when they were busy visiting one of the company's outposts in Colorado or Idaho, or sitting through a review where Hewlett would encourage a feat of engineering prowess or Packard would explode about "not being able to make a dime" on some engineering breakthrough.
The second had been teleported in from the central casting departments of other big tech companies that Hurd respected. They used terms like "value add," and "thinking ahead a few chess moves," relished the abstract concept "competitive advantage" and attached totemic reverie to the "P&L reviews" even when it was clear that this was an exercise in cargo cult management. They were also often quite a bit more concerned about managing their "brands" in the face of their SVP, EVP, and eventually Hurd reviews.
I spent most of my time with my fellow HP executives telling the first kind of folks that the transplants weren't playing the same game as them— that no matter how much it sounded like they were trying to achieve the same goals, there were other motives at work.
One good thing about the post-Hurd HP is that the company has a chance now to get back to being the place that was run by the first kind of executives. I am not sure that it is possible, but one can hope.
There is no denying that Mark was a Wall Street dream of a CEO. He delivered predictable results and pushed his people really hard to get them. In some ways everyone was made a better business person because of that discipline. However there was a cost to his method and I'm not sure that anyone ever really accounted for it correctly— despite his obsession with numbers.
For instance, in a company full of engineers, the IT organization did everything possible to stymie innovation and put people in endless meetings instead of in the lab. The organization was quick to measure the cost in the reduction of data centers, or the license savings from creating a procurement process that was more complicated than the entire canon of Roman law, but no one bothered to measure the drag coefficient of these various corporate initiatives.
Now they have a chance to get a leader who will.
In talking to a few HP alums over the last week, I've heard people claim that it is too late— that after too many big acquisitions of loser companies with nothing to offer beyond awesome cost-cutting opportunities, the company has begun to resemble the supermarket it inherited as its first corporate office— except in this case, it sells generic computing gear to the Fortune 500 along with coupons for budget PCs and printers.
I don't buy it though. I'm hopeful that the board knew we are entering a new phase of predicting the future by inventing it with the combination of the shift to mobile compute form factors that are going to change radically over the next 5 years and the weaving of the web into all facets of personal and corporate computing, and as such knew they had the wrong captain piloting the ship.
Let's hope I'm right.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
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.
