Posted by Antonio
3 days, 8 hours 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.
Posted by Antonio
5 days, 19 hours 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.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 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.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week 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.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 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.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 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.
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!
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.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week 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.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week 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
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 4 weeks 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.
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]
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.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 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.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks 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.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 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.
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!
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week 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.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week 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.
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.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week 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.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 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...
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 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.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 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.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks 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!
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 4 weeks ago (Dec. 31, 2009)
As we close the decade in tech, I've been reading the "2000s in summary" style articles and blog posts, amazed at how much we've gotten out of this decade. Wifi and broadband hitting a tipping point. Peer to peer. Amazon as a global powerhouse. The cloud as a viable platform. The iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's phoenix-like emergence as the dominant computer company of the 21st century. The Android alternative. The Nintendo Wii and other types of HID devices all leading to more touch, more direct manipulation, and a more seamless integration of man and machine. The AppStore, ebooks, and alternative business models for content online. OLPC and the netbook craze that it ignited. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Google as the fastest growing brand of all time and the future creche for our AI overlords.
It is hard to look at all of these products, services, and trends that have come into being over the last ten years and not be overawed. And yet, if I had to pick the vector that will have the longest lasting influence on the world, it wouldn't be any of these. Sure they are they adorn the pages of Geek People every day, and we all love to spill tons of virtual ink on them.
But at the end of the decade, the greatest single trend to emerge in the last ten years is the way in which the Internet has enabled mass scale changes in new forms of collaborative work. Of course, the poster boy for this trend is Wikipedia which has now bested both Microsoft's Encarta, and the much more venerable Britanica. But the real impact of this new style of work is much more apparent in the effects of a globally connected swarm of human minds working, not for the almighty dollar and all of the associated external incentives, but for the intrinsic rewards of mastering a craft and belonging to a community.
Its name is "Open Source—" coined at the beginning of the decade by people who were trying to differentiate this new style of working on software from the ideological free software movement. From it we have gotten Linux and Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Today a software engineer working in one of the two platforms that actually matters (cloud and mobile) does so with the richest toolset ever available; from languages like the Perl/Python/Ruby family of dynamic languages to tons of high quality libraries to do just about everything imaginable. All because a whole load of hackers were early to this party and have spent the last 10 years showing everyone else how it is possible to work, collaborate, and belong without the explicit motivation of material wealth, the very grease of modern capitalism.
It may started in software, but as Wikipedia has shown, it will not stop there. To try to understand why, pick up my last book recommendation of the year: Daniel Pink's new brand book, "Drive," which delves much more deeply into why this new form of organized value creation works. Or subscribe to Umair Haque in your blog reader for 2010.
Happy new decade. In the midst of the economic cataclysms of the last couple years, of multiple wars of the last decade, it pays to pause for a moment and realize that there is no better time to be alive than now.
Now that the word is out that Google is going to launch a phone, and that it is not going to use whitespaces and flux capacitors to obviate the need for a carrier, we can all breathe a little easier. In fact, the general reaction should be "ho-hum," but not because you are going to have to pony up $530 for an unlocked version of the device, because for all intents and purposes, this is just another T-Mobile phone.
I've had two of the three major Android phones that have come out thus far: the G1, and the HTC Ion (or MyTouch as Sprint calls it). And while they (and the Droid) have fallen short in ways that the Nexus doesn't (specifically around something as simple as the diminished proportion of the on-screen keyboard), their true Achilles heel has been the lack of 3G functionality when operating with an AT&T SIM. Once you've had 3G EDGE just blows for web surfing— which is after all the killer app of these new devices.
And let's face it, T-Mobile in the US sucks— or at least in sucks anywhere I've ever lived in or traveled to. Their 3G network is okay— when you have coverage, which is hit and miss, and mostly miss if you are in any kind of a fast-moving vehicle (by which I mean anything that travels faster than a rickshaw).
But that is not the real reason why a phone that doesn't work on the AT&T 3G frequencies is a bonehead move. The real reason is because the only people that are likely to pay up for a phone sold through a new channel like www.google.com are likely to already have an iPhone and an AT&T SIM just begging to be set free. We are the folks who are likely to be vocal, we are the Eloi who are currently fielding the questions from the fat belly of mainstream adopters who see 2010 as the year they will move to some sort of smartphone.
The only thing I can think of is that there is something hard or expensive about the 3G AT&T frequencies. After all, Nokia made the same mistake with the N900 which I would have happily bought if I could run it on my regular SIM. But this is Google we're talking about. If I were them, I would have worried less about the koi-pond wallpaper and more about getting full GSM 3G frequencies in the US models, and maybe even a dual device like the Frankesteins RIM sells under the moniker "World Phone."
Otherwise let's face it— this is yet another T-Mobile Android phone made by HTC running Google software.
As we move towards the era of "appliance computing" with iPhones and Kindles and Droids and Nooks, one downside that people rarely talk about is that we are losing visibility into the components that make up our devices. This trend is not helped by the way OEM/ODM contracts are cut, where Asian manufacturers often make on-the-line component changes because someone else's WIFI chip seems to be cheaper for that quarter.
Ever notice for instance how Apple never talks about the CPU in the iPhone? Sure, the 3GS brought marketing claims around "50-100% faster" but we were never told that the ARM core had changed on that the clock had gone up by 50%.
An even better example of how this trend can bite you in the butt is what has recently happened to the Kindle. A true believer from day one, I helped to make the Kindle Amazon's #1 product this Christmas by giving it as a present. However, one of the folks I gave it to wanted to use it in rural New Hampshire, a place where my own Kindle 2 had previously worked flawlessly. Assuming this bode well for its "Whispernet" 3G service up there, I didn't think that Amazon might itself switch service providers (from Sprint to AT&T) without announcing it anywhere, thereby rendering the "same" model (Kindle 2) totally useless where previous units had worked flawlessly.
At the end of the first season of Mad Men, the good folks at Sterling Cooper get the Kodak carousel slide projector as a product to pitch. One of the copywriters extolling the virtues of Kodak as a technology-led compare (this is 1960) says "they are so proud of their technology, they even mention R&D in their ads!" thus giving you the feeling that this was the start of technology as a selling proposition.
Consumers aren't stupid, and in a day and age where the web makes the space available for marketing copy of infinite length, we might want to get back to a little more R&D and a little less "wow," "amazing," and "boom" on the side of the box.
But this is Jeff Bezos we're talking about, and fantastic though he may be as an entrepreneur, he does not (yet) have the Jobsean "Reality Distortion Field" powers, so before we all get carried away, let's remember that we are just at the start of ebooks— and more importantly that this first inning is pretty ugly.
E-Ink sucks. Its refresh rate is pathetic. On the device front, you can either go with the medical instrument inspired ID of the Kindle, or the crappy firmware of the Nook (the Sony being the book version of their MP3 player). The storefronts have a really limited selection and the lack of marking, lending, and dropping into the pool are marked limitations, to say nothing of the fact that contrast rates still leave a lot to be desired when compared to paper.
In my mind, eBook readers don't get significant until they help to reinvent the format. Yes the book is popular (with 400-500 years of installed base), but so was the map before the connected mobile device put a pin that marks your location and follows you around on it. I loved maps before but absolutely would never go back to them given the opportunity to see myself on it, and watch the map spinning around me as I turn 360 degrees around. And I suspect Amerigo Vespucci would agree.
Similarly, until we've got embedded videos in our books (a la YouTube) and a "Choose your own adventure" level of interactivity, we're just going to be aping old formats with plastic devices that will remain inferior in every way except traveling weight. There is hope yet— after all TV started as radio shows with faces.
I have a feeling that 2010 is going to be good to us on this front.
Carriers today are all aflutter about the prospect of non-mobile phone devices. For instance, as a large OEM, you are likely to get a meeting with the top brass at any of the world's largest carriers so long as you are touting a netbook device or an ereader. At the same time, the smartphones are being starved for 3G data connectivity throughout the world. What gives?
Well the reality is that the all-you-can-eat, general purpose device is more than most carriers can handle. The iPhone has definitely proved that in the United States with AT&T. Give people a decent general purpose browser and a few specialized applications (namely around media streaming) and they will go nuts, or at least more nuts than current T1 backhaul and cell radio stations can accommodate.
The ereaders are easy to understand: with the e-ink displays gating any meaningful use of the network, and the tollbooth that is the bookstore on the backend, carriers see Kindle clones as easy money (at least until the Apple tablet ships). But the bigger question is: why netbooks?
One theory is that people will expect to use netbooks mostly where they already use laptops, around wi-fi halos that will give them 3-10x the speed they can expect to get from a 3G network. And as such, the ability to charge $60-80 USD/month is just free gravy to the carrier.
But I think it goes beyond that. I think that most carriers love the idea of getting consumers hooked on the idea of ubiquitous access to the network— so much so that they are willing to "forward price" access to the the 3G bits (forward pricing implies taking a loss now that will be made up later when the cost of manufacturing supply catches up with stimulated demand and has been common in semiconductor driven industries for a long time). You may not spend a lot of time listening to Pandora on your 3G netbook, but the sheer fact that you can is likely to get you hooked to the ubiquitous service. For those rare moments when you might want to.
Unwittingly this business decision to collect marginal revenue with little marginal cost is training a marketplace of ubiquitously connected consumers who will begin to measure devices not on megahertz and gigabytes, but on how "connected" they are. And my suspicion is that once the mainstream flips into this mode of thinking, no one will dare ship a device without the ubiqconn feature box checked. Good times.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 23, 2009)
The FT has one of these mostly wrong pieces today on the Android Market versus the iPhone AppStore that makes you glad old media is dying. Usually the province of the mail-it-in NYT writers, the article makes a few spurious arguments, including that it is really easy to port an iPhone app to the Android platform (it is absolutely not), and that what users really want is quality apps instead of overwhelming amounts of quantity.
What users really want is mobile computing, full stop. This means a first-rate web browser, an email client that works well, a maps application that is usable walking and driving, the best possible camera software for cleaning up the deficiencies of a small form factor, and maybe, just maybe, a media player that can fill some white spaces. The AppStore mania, partly fueled by Apple fanboy fervor, and partly fueled by Apple's fantastic marketing machine, keeps making it such that this gets lost in the mix.
What developers want is the ability to deliver their increasingly cloud-based applications into as broad of a mobile device footprint as possible, along with— in a few narrow verticals— the ability to monetize at point of install through a micropayment system that works. Apple is off to a great start on the last point, but let's face it, the carrier/consumer billing relationship is much stronger (ringtones have proven that), and also a more natural place for micropayments to happen.
We are so tied up in AppStore mania (one of the great themes of 2009) that we've lost the real story: the twin forces of the move of computing happening in the cloud with really compelling mobile browsers that should, over the medium term, subsume all of the more important native platform capabilities. That is the real story I wish these big guys were writing about.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 21, 2009)
The single biggest thing I miss about my pre-iPhone Nokia e61 is the way that great applications like Shozu let you perform a network-related content authoring action, and then faded gracefully into the background to slowly bang on the Inter Tubes and get the bits across. I was reminded of that earlier today when in the process of messing around with an HDR iPhone application, I tried to reply to a text and ended up dropping the phone into a snowbank. Much like this chap over here.
I've had the discussions over and over about how the iPhone doesn't need background processing, that it is not a general purpose computer, that it would slow down the phone with bloated apps, and that would ruin its magic. Frankly though at this point all of these Apple apologist arguments are ringing about as false as those around how the battery is "good enough" and doesn't need to be removable.
These are general purpose computers, and what is more, they represent the next stage of all sorts of rich content publishing for most of us. And that means that you need to be able to go from start to finish in a little as 15-60 seconds— a virtual impossibility once you move beyond meaningless tweets about who you've just run into.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 21, 2009)
IEEE Spectrum has a fascinating piece on the failure of automated systems that use sensors, actuators, and software to drive all sorts of transportation equipment on behalf of the humans who become simply passive "gauge watchers." The piece is great for airplane junkies, but it makes a much more fundamental point about the way that supposedly foolproof systems are designed incorrectly, often because the engineers involved forget to take into account the human nature of the operators:
”We draw a system’s boundary in the wrong place,” Thomas states. ”There is an assumption that the system boundary that the engineer should be interested in [sits] at the boundary of the sensors and actuators of the box that is being designed by the engineers. The humans who are interrelating with these systems are outside it. Whether they are operators, pilots, controllers, or clinicians, they are not part of the system.
The part of the piece I found more applicable to general product design for regular people comes at the end though:
Parasuraman explains that ”if you deliberately engineer anomalies into the automation, people rely less on it and will perform a little bit better in monitoring the system. For example, if the system is 90 percent reliable, operators will be better at picking up the 10 percent of the errors than if the system is 99 percent reliable.”
[Sort of like Desmond on Lost pushing the button, right?]
Something about this statement made me think about driving engagement with users in web applications. It's not often the apps that are most completely baked— nor, as is the conventional wisdom today, those that are as simple as Google to use, that spark the imagination or win the hearts and minds of users. Instead the web apps that users seem to really engage deeply with, are the ones that do just enough to make a task easier or more enjoyable, but leave enough fuzziness in their design so as to make the operator want to lean forward and explore the space of possibilities.
A concrete example: the first generation photo sites (Shutterfly, Ofoto) were completely baked to make people slip down the 4x6 slide of print ordering, with each of the experience flows targeted at the handful of tasks that supposedly would lead to more of that. Along came Flickr with its dead-dumb simple metaphor of "one photo in a stream" and drove mass adoption of photo sharing by a group of folks who previously had little interest in photos online. In the third phase, when we set out to improve on that at Tabblo, we gave people a half-formed page editor to create stories in a fairly open-ended way that combined photos and words with a little bit of software assist. The concept was harder to grasp than the previous two iterations, but its open-ended nature led to some pretty engaged, "lean forward" types of users.
The piece just continues to remind me that the future of computing is really all about cyborgs— or the intelligent design of systems that use both machines and humans (with our flawed and sloppy analog brains) to obtain results which neither can achieve alone. Or, more succinctly put, the future belongs to the giant Human Computing Platform that the Internet is helping to create.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 3 weeks ago (Dec. 9, 2009)
So the news is out: two and a half years after having been acquired, I am leaving HP. It is with mixed emotions that I do so— as there are still great folks from Tabblo I'll no longer get to see (as well as a host of other solid people I've met while at HP).
HP itself has treated me very well over the last couple of years, seemingly able to head off any incipient complacency by giving me a new challenge every six months. While here I've had the good fortune to work on large-scale web services, all manner of smartphone projects, platform architectures, and perhaps best of all, to see the Tabblo team never meet a challenge they couldn't overcome, whether it was ridiculous deadlines, moving-target deliverables, or the crushing weight of a very large bear that "just wants a hug."
I've also learned something incredibly valuable about how new technologies are perceived and adopted across big companies, thanks to the CTO opportunity I got to have this last year. At $112B and 300K employees, HP is as big as they get in technology, thus facing a set of challenges when entering any market or absorbing any sort of new technology into their product lines that would baffle the most sophisticated of systems thinkers. Having experienced this first hand has made me much more aware of the role of startups in an ecosystem that contains both them and giants like HP, IBM, Apple, and even eventually Google, as well as some of the misconceptions (both positive and negative) that even experienced entrepreneurs who haven't spent the time in the guts of one of these aircraft carriers can fall prey to (I'll be writing more on that in coming posts).
Why am I leaving? The timing just feels right. In last two and a half years we've seen the launch of the next major wave in personal computing (with the iPhone and associated devices), the broad-based acceptance of the cloud as a true platform (with everything from data APIs to compute cycles available to programmers big and small), and an accelerating rate of acceptance around all sorts of facets of personal publishing and personal commerce that astounds even me. It's time to dive back into that stream— if for no other reason than because it just looks too damned fun.
And finally, what am I doing? Enjoying the holiday break for starters. Relaxing a little while I put some thought into what this next chapter looks like. And hopefully, blogging more.
I am a fan of conspiracy theories. Whether it is the "Tintin for adults" simplistic plots of 24, or the "Goldman Sachs is the epicenter for a new kind of white-collar mob," I lap them all up for the color they inject into life.
Which is why I have been enjoying Greg Pfistegr's blog, "The Perils of Parallel" so much. Greg writes about a lot of interesting stuff, especially if like me, you grew up feet firmly planted in software land expecting the hardware guys to do their Moore's Law dance and just keep ponying up the cycles for us to burn. One of the central themes of his posts— the one which is wet with the conspiracy paint— is that the shift to multicore processors has far-reaching implications on how we humans interact with computers, from developers trying to write performant applications to users looking for that "new computer high" that you used to get every couple of years when a hardware upgrade gave you a 10x perceived performance boost. As he himself writes in an early post:
It particularly bugs me that people still blather on about how Moore's Law will keep on trucking for decades. Maybe it will, interpreted literally. But the Moore's Law that will keep on trucking has been castrated. It lacks a key element (frequency scaling) that drove the computing industry for the last four or more decades. This is a classic case of experts focussing on the veins in the leaves on the trees and ignoring the ravine they're about to fall into. More. I have this suspicion that many people who really understand how deep into the doodoo we're going are weasel-wording it deliberately. No point in frightening the hoi polloi, now, is there? Maybe there's a cure, who knows, we're not there yet, hm? Horsepuckey.
I think there may be something to what Greg is talking about here. A few months ago, I was visiting with some folks in Labs and mentioned that it seemed that we had sort of given up on running the clock up on CPUs and that "multicore" seemed as buzzworthy as "cloud" in that people seem to use this one-word incantation without further explanation to quiet the naysayers, and I got that glass-eyed look from the researchers I was talking that just made me want to crawl down from the clouds of pure R&D into my product development hole.
Later that day I saw Craig Barrett at Stanford speaking to students talking about how much hair Intel engineers have on their chest after decades of keeping Moore's train on the tracks (and more importantly, how we had at least a couple of more decades to go) and decided that perhaps I was just not getting that there was no problem here, and that the MultiCoreCloud would save us all. Or, at the very least, create a great runtime for the AIs that will rule us like organic batteries not worth recycling.
Thanks to Greg though, I now know that the Dharma initiative is behind this all, and that we all ought to wonder why those fancy new computers don't feel so new and fancy anymore!
To close off on the Google Chrome OS thoughts, I decided to go back to my favorite whipping boy, the netbook. Over the last two years I've had a couple of HP models which have showcased good hardware build quality and features (especially for sub $400 devices) but piss poor software (at the office we've even joked that all netbooks are good for are constantly installing OSes on them to try to make them useful).
This time though I wanted to try the latest Netbook Remix based on the 9.10 Ubuntu release and I have to say that it is an amazing feat of engineering on the part of the Canonical folks. Gone are the days of compiling custom kernels for two weeks and incessant fiddling with /etc/X11/XF86Config to get the display to look right. In fact, having recently installed Windows 7 on the same machine, I can attest that outside of a couple of wireless network issues, the installation experience is just as good.
But that is not the real news here. The important stuff happens when you've got a working base configuration and then load the Chromium browser on it (Chromium is the name of the open source project based on the Chrome browser Google is building). Whereas Firefox 3.5 remains a complete pig on the Atom processor, Chromium screams, running at almost the same clip on the Google family of Javascript intensive apps as Safari 4 on my 5x as expensive Core2 Duo Macbook Pro.
And to boot, the minimalistic UI of the Chrome browser, along with its sane fullscreen performance, are the best things to have happened to the DVD player-like squished screens on these netbooks since they first started showing up 2 years ago.
I remain skeptical about Chrome OS (after all with UNR you get text editors, a local filesystem, and a whole host of useful client apps to drive the various peripherals you may want to use), but for the first time since the inception of the netbook, I've can claim that if you want an affordable and super portable laptop that you can beat up while traveling, Chrome the browser and UNR 9.10 may have finally gotten us here.
Note: The machine that runs this so well is a first generation HP Mini MIE 1000, possible the nicest hardware to ship with the shittiest software (an HP badged Ubuntu custom distro) since the Apple Lisa. It has a 1.6Ghz Atom, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB solid state drive, and I believe it cost about $350 when new.
Chrome is browser is a terrific addition to the Internet operating system. It's put Safari and IE on notice and showed the world what a pig Firefox has become in middle age. Google Chrome OS however, is at best a really dumb idea from a team that wanted to get some of that Android OEM love— or at worst, proof that Google is not immune to the big company-itis that causes successful franchises to start warping reality to better fit their business models (I know, I've been living this!)
I've spent the past few days thinking about what it is that really bothers me about the notion of a stripped down Ubuntu that boots into a super secure browser and here it is: in an era when the access devices are getting more and more powerful, be they smartphones or netbooks (which Intel is supposed to be taking over the multicore threshold soon enough), the notion that we are going to hobble that client side processing for the sake of security or simplicity is just ass backwards.
And the notion that it is being made secure for my mom to use? Gimme a break! This smells like the kind of paternalistic thinking that got us the first rev of the OLPC with its hobbled software and bad assumptions about how stupid most of those peasants were going to be.
Computing is on an unstoppable march towards more and more processing in smaller and smaller devices. The cloud is really interesting for all sorts of synchronization, collaboration, and "living software" reasons, but pushing us all back into the mainframe stone age seems... well like a very unGoogly thing to do.
Love it or hate it, Wave is disruptive. Android is disruptive. Bidding to keep spectrum open is disruptive. Even Chrome the browser and all of the associated HTML5 goodies that Google is spitting out are disruptive.
But locking us out of the real power of portable and affordable computing? Come on.
There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you." — Steve Jobs
I've got a similar aim, though I want to go further back— quite a bit further back to a time when Steve was not the king of the industry that he is today, but instead, a cocky 29 year old that hadn't been booted from the company he started, hadn't failed publicly, come back, almost died, and given (re)birth to the last remaining big tech company I know which is still truly innovative.
1984 was the year, and Playboy magazine was the venue. The interview is long but well worth reading for two main reasons. First, it is a great picture of the computer industry before consumers had been touched by it, and as such, a fantastic lesson for anyone who has ever struggled to pitch new technology to a mainstream audience. Sort of like watching Obi Wan in movies 1-3— you see the raw talent there without the years of refinement, and as such, it almost looks attainable.
The more important reason why the interview is so good though is because underneath it all, you can still see a beautiful consistency with the same core values that still lead Apple today. Here is the money quote:
PLAYBOY: What's the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?
JOBS: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
What you see in the Apple of today is the continued adherence to this core belief that by building products for themselves which they would consider "insanely great," the employees at Apple have managed not only to define a nascent industry (personal computing), but increasingly to redefine existing but borked industries. And inspiring us all in the process.
There are all sorts of other great nuggets in this rather long interview for Apple fans, entrepreneurs, and just about anyone who might resonate with the notion of "making a dent in the universe."
This past weekend I saw a story on Hacker News about something that has been bothering me more and more over the last two years: our perpetually receding attention span in the digital era.
As I think about my own dwindling attention span over the last couple of years, I can find three main culprits:
1. A big company corporate job: this is a recipe for carving your day into thinner slices than tuna at a cheap sushi bar. I don't come from many meeting heavy work environments so the past two years have been sort of boiling frog phenomenon in that respect. By the time you subtract the meeting time and the context-switching 5-10 minutes on either end, you've sliced your typical 8 hour day into the following array of potentially productive chunks of minutes: (15, 5, 20, 15). And what is worse, you have made yourself into an interrupt-driven machine.
2. Twitter/Facebook/Reddit (stream-based micropublishing): The torrent of "realtime" updates was really cool a couple of years ago when it was new, but lately I've come to realize that it is now the greatest excuse for distraction that was ever created. Linda Stone first wrote about "continual partial attention" a few years ago, mostly in reference to email, IMs, and SMS, but it applies even more so to all of these micropublished updates. The constant barrage preys upon our scarcity-tuned primate brains which convince us that we should never turn away for fear of missing that "next meal."
3. The smartphone: This last one is the most insidious because it slowly but surely takes over all of the white spaces in your life, from waiting at the doctor's office to sitting in line at the grocery store. In my case, I've found that the iPhone has had a great amplifying effect on 1-2 above in that it allows for those activities to be extended to moments when I'm away from the desktop and ostensibly not "at work."
It's too early to tell whether this is all necessarily bad, though it certainly doesn't feel healthy when it comes to intense concentration. Also, the cognitive load exerted by 2-3 is undeniable and makes me wonder the analogy of a PC, ground down by a bunch of background processes, doesn't equally apply to us.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 1 week ago (Nov. 21, 2009)
I've not downloaded or attempted the early release of Chrome OS yet, but having read through the docs, I can't help but feel that Google attempting to launch two post-PC operating systems at the same time is only going to confuse partners, consumers, and even developers.
Unless Google gets into the hardware business, it's going to have to depend on large OEMs to ship Chrome OS preinstalled. These are the same folks that took their limited software resources (because even though you might ship billions of dollars of hardware, the razor thin margins mean that you just don't have that much money for software R&D) and bet "big" on Android for everything from phones to slates to netbooks. Now two years later along comes Google saying "Whoops, we didn't really mean that we were excited about you using Android, instead check out this shiny happy new toy!" That one is gonna sting.
Also, no matter how many cute videos Google puts out, consumers are going to be really confused by Chrome OS. Will it have an AppStore? Will it run iTunes? Can it see the shared printer? Share files with the other machines on the network? The smartphone doesn't have any of these affordances (it is, after all, the grandchild of the telephone) so it doesn't disappoint in the same way. And what of the connection to Chrome the browser? The first time someone sees a netbook that runs both Chrome the browser (a fantastic product) and iTunes and then makes the mistake of buying the "webtop only" Chrome OS version, I suspect the Google brand will suffer. Repeat a million times and Google may have to start worrying about its unassailable brand in search.
Finally, developers. The story here is simpler, but not obvious by any means. Chrome OS runs Chrome the browser which means that we're talking about HTML5 applications. But what if we want access to the camera on the bezel (and not through the flash plug-in)? Will the DOM API be extended? Supposedly this is how developers will get access to really important things like the power meter. So now we've got to test for a series of DOM elements that may or may not be present across Chrome runtimes? When you're talking about tens of millions of Chrome the browser instances, do we really want to do this? And the alternative, which is changing Chrome the browser to behave like Chrome the OS from an API perspective seems like a mistake in a world where Firefox, Safari, and IE are still relevant.
So I don't get it. To me it seems like a great example of the netbook distortion effect (NDE): netbooks are so cool looking to fans of Star Trek, Batman, and 24, that they completely obscure their essence as cheap laptops for those that can't afford better and paperweight toys for the rest of us. Meanwhile some IDC clown put out numbers saying that a gazillion netbooks will be sold and boom! You've got folks at Google scheming to kill Windows on this new dark horse.
Sort of like the guys with the cornseed engine for this new killer car called the Edsel.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 2 weeks ago (Nov. 13, 2009)
This morning's XKCD really struck a chord with me, not because it is a criticism of Apple's approval process, but because it reminded me of two things I find horribly wrong with this whole "smartphone explosion:"
1. Carriers have replaced banks as the retail presence that is destroying urban areas, and their gross commercialism around getting people to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone (and associated $100/month plan) is even more obnoxious than all of the mortgage advertising. Where I live in Cambridge (Harvard Square), the one benefit of the mortgage collapse was the clearing out of all of the banks that seemed to have no trouble paying the jacked up rents that landlords were seeking. But just as quickly as they moved out, Sprint, AT&T, and now Verizon are moving in with giant human-sized replicas of their latest toys, flashy billboards, and sales people handing out flyers to unsuspecting pedestrians on the sidewalk (people they are smartphones not raves!). And no matter where I travel: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, the same blight is visible everywhere.
2. If these devices really are the future of personal computing, it's a little sad to see how much of the positioning is around consumption: listening to music, downloading movies, playing games, reading reviews— and how little of the value expressed seems to be around creating or producing interesting content and data from a mobile device. I love the line in the comic about the stick man who wants to spend life "restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming" for this very reason, because it gets right to the heart of what seems to be just off about putting so much computing power and possibility into users' pockets only to expect them to never again miss "Desperate Housewives" while on the move.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 6, 2009)
He isn't motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned -- proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.
Lately, I've been wondering whether the rhetoric of "top and bottom line growth" that pervades almost all corporate discussions in large companies isn't not only misguided when it comes at the exclusion of all else in technology companies, instead bordering on the downright destructive of what made these tech titans giants in the first place.
Only time will tell whether these behemouths driven to delight fund managers the world over won't end up smoldering craters of indistinguishable products and services.
Recently though I've realized that in two such companies, it didn't always use to be this way. Having just finished "The HP Phenomenon," I finally discovered that the term "make a contribution," which we today use as a synonym for "revenue and profit" was first coined by David Packard to mean: employ great engineering to make products that no else can build and that make the world a better place. Similarly, Craig Barrett from Intel recently talked at Stanford about how continuous investment in great engineers solving hard technical problems (like say, doubling transistor density every 18 months) is the only proven way to build sustaining value.
For sure, making money is awesome. A healthy business and balance sheet affords a company great opportunities for investment in all sorts of cool new projects, it brings with it independence, and best of all, if used wisely, it can go a long way towards creating a fantastic working environment. But to have that as the sole end— the only meaningful mission that gets repeated and internalized (as opposed to the crap on the Powerpoint slide that gets shown once for 30 seconds at the beginning of the year)— that seems to me to be a bit short-sighted.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 7, 2008)
Friends who drive the Prius say the best thing about it is its Atari-like dashboard that makes you feel as though driving in an MPG friendly way is a video game with you pitted against the laws of physics.
After much prodding from David about his TED ("The Energy Detective") device and how cool it is to have one, I bit the bullet and spent some time this weekend installing one. Essentially the TED is the house equivalent of the Prius dashboard for your electric bill. You install it to play this game called: "cents per hour" where you can run around the house turning things off to see how little you can pay the electric company at any moment in time. At rest, my house costs about 18 cents/hour. Turn on some of those yuppie halogen lights and you quickly get to 34 cents/hour. Run the dryer while the water heater is going and bam! you are talking about dollars/hour.
Growing up I remember my father being obsessed with shutting off lights. Try as he might though, he never managed to instill that Great Depression sense that electricity was a finite and expensive resource that we should attempt to conserve. In today's achievement-oriented, videogame-fueled culture, I can tell that the TED is going to perform that magic on my kids.
Before you run out and drop $150 on one of these things, take note though: installation is not for the faint of heart. To measure the electricity consumption of your entire house, you need to open up (as in screws and stuff) your main circuit panel, a task that would have stopped me cold as soon as I saw the notes that the previous owners left on the inside of the panel dated 1971 (along with some really ominous asbestos covered wires as thick as two of my thumbs that are what you actually have to clamp something to) were it not for that same conservation-obssesed father there to do the hard, electrocute-yourself-to-green-heaven, work for me.
Once you close the panel, the rest of setup entails reading your bill to figure out whether you billing varies by time or total consumption and what the fixed cost, taxes, and other random surcharges are (this pencil pushing part I found quite enjoyable). You enter all of that into the TED's receiver and next thing you know, you'll have a house full of pellet-obssessed rats running around shutting off lights and pulling plugs— at least while the novelty lasts.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 7, 2008)
If you like myths, fabulous martial arts sequences, awesome storytelling, solid characters, and want to see the best kids television ever produced run get all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender as soon as possible.
Of all the stuff that I've watched with my kids, Avatar is the only series that has made me put the laptop down and engage— through and through in a feel the story deep down kind of way. You get sucked in by the beautiful animation and the well choreographed martial arts scenes (move aside Wachowski brothers), and the rest is pure entertainment at its best.
I won't go into the story here but to say that Joseph Campbell would be proud. George Lucas's popularization of myth has nothing on the two guys behind this Nickelodeon show and the depth of the themes explored is amazing given who the show's intended audience must have been.
Sadly there are only three seasons— though I think it is in part because of this that the series ending is so powerful. Supposedly M. Night Shyamalan is making the trilogy as action movies though; here's to hoping that he doesn't go all po-mo on it and instead respects the quality of the original feel of the show.
Trust me, whether you have age appropriate kids or not, you will not regret watching this gem.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 6, 2008)
It turns out that the iPhone supports video-out, it just hasn't been exposed to developers. I guess this should come as no surprise given the device's iPod heritage and its full-on computer characteristics.
All Apple would have to do is expose a Bluetooth interface for traditional HID (keyboard & mouse) and it will be game over for the netbooks, small laptops, and even perhaps up to 50% of the regular laptop market.
Three thoughts related on this topic:
1. I've got a friend who is traveling for work to the Netherlands next week who told me that he was going to take the bold step of leaving his laptop at home and relying only on his iPhone. He's not a programmer or designer, but an ops guy who needs to be able to be constantly on top of his email and web dashboards. At first I was surprised when he told me, but then I realized that he may be on the leading edge of a trend.
2. I used to commute back and forth to work with a laptop in the event that I was going to be somewhere either before or after work where someone might ask me to log in to check on something. I almost never carry a laptop around now, instead leaving one at either place and using the iPhone for the rare moments when I do need to be connected while not at home or at the office.
3. Remember how all of the sudden it seemed that every business travel hotel replaced its alarm clock with one that has an iPod dock? I've been amazed at how far down market this trend has gone; even Comfort Inns have iClocks gracing their bedside tables. Additionally, this upgrade was concomitant with the replacement of tube TVs with flat panel ones—basically better monitors for computer display. How long after Apple officially opens HID for mouse and keyboard and video out before these same hotels start providing these two relatively cheap peripherals so that business travelers can leave the laptop at home?
Sure, the iPhone is underpowered relative to even the most anemic of laptops. But for how long? And in the meanwhile, how should we be thinking about the applications we write for this new infrastructure?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 4, 2008)
I find it ironic that Merlin Mann, the guy who became famous for his bite-sized tips on getting organized, has written a thought-provoking piece about how content grazing will not lead to developing any meaningful expertise in anything, but I think he is right on to point it out.
Google Reader is an awesome productivity waster for this very reason: it occupies the space between really sitting forward and engaging in thinking (while programming, writing, working on a project, etc.) and sitting back and watching TVâ a sort of half-engagement that feels more pure than other forms of entertainment but which has begun to feel to me like the intellectual equivalent of a bag of Cheetos.
As we trade reading for skimming and blogging for twittering, we might do well to think a little bit about what this might ultimately do to our ability to think clearly.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 2, 2008)
First it was IWantSandy and now it is Pownce. The new trend seems to be that instead of going out of business, the founders of these Web 2.0 services prefer to claim that they have been "acquired" and will thus be shutting down their respective money-losing services and stranding whatever users they had.
Back in the good old days when you startup failed, you went out of business, dealt with your lawyers to declare bankruptcy, and then went to get a job. I remember doing that in 2002. It sucks among reasons because you had to explain to a bunch of potential employers why you failed. But you also had to explain it to users, friends, and neighbors.
This new trend to call this same motion an "acquisition" is bad for the web ecosystem because it will make users more wary than they need to be about trying new services. At a gut level everyone understands a startup going out of business, and they even can have sympathy for you. To the uninformed casual user of the service "getting acquired" sounds like a good thing and a subsequent shutdown of the service feels like much more of a slap than it needs to.
So come on guys, just admit that you failed— it happens to all of us— and then call it what it is. I care much more about keeping the web a lively and experimental place than I do about your fragile egos.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 29, 2008)
This blog post will show you how to build an autonomous robot that seeks out light based on a toy with a low power DC motor, an Arduino board, and a host of electronic components. Look at the pictures or go and check out a movie of the end product— the robot on a flashlight "leash." I built it with my 6 and 3 year olds over Thanksgiving weekend in stages, and we had a blast doing it. I'm putting the assembly process down as a blog post to get all of the information in one place for people who might be interested in these types of projects. It is written from the perspective of an electronics noob so hardcore hardware hackers or Arduino experts will be bored.
To begin I should say that this is the most fun I've had on a hobby project since I set up my first server on the Internet back in 1996. As in back then, the best part was how little I knew going into it and how quickly I was able to make progress due to the many smart brains that contribute to the collective fabric of our group brain— so thank you web!
A few weeks ago, the kids had seen a cheesy robot in a toy store and thrown a tantrum about getting it. Promising them that we would built our own, I've spent weeks scouring the Internet for the hardest part of a low end hobby robot to find— a cheap and easy drive system. Servos, stepper motors, gearboxes all turn out to be relatively expensive, and the electronics required seem to be overly complex for anyone who isn't either a dedicated amateur or Macgyver on a deadline.
Last week I happened to come upon a fun kit called the "Tin Can Robot Science kit" which is nothing but a low power 1.5v DC motor hooked to a gearbox and a set of oblong wheels that cause an anthropomorphized beer can to wobble along like a drunk guy along a quasi-straight line. It's a cute 45 minute project and I would recommend it for anyone who wants to "build something" though I suspect that most of the fun in this toy comes from the assembly.
In our case, the fun was just beginning. Having built a light-sensitive Mindstorms robot that would chase a flashlight, I was pretty sure that the beer can equivalent would be fun to play with for a while. So our blueprint effectively consisted of 3 parts which I will describe in turn, along with some instructions:
The drive system: This proved the hardest to build for two reasons: 1. most lightweight toys tend to be very carefully balanced to move with low-power motors and are thus are not often capable of taking extra weight (in the form of the Arduino board and more batteries), and 2. it turns out that you can't just hook a motor into one of the digital pins on a microcontroller like the Arduino, turn the pin on HIGH and expect the motor to go (at least not without burning something out in a hurry).
I can not overemphasize point number one enough: in fact, I would advise anyone building am ambulatory robot to get the mechanical bits working first by simply building the robot and setting it to move with nothing but power to the drive. The Tin Can robot was designed as a standing beer can but as it turned out, there was no place to attach the Arduino board that wouldn't tip the robot over or render it totally motionless, to say nothing of the additional power required to run the motor. The design compromise in this case turned out to be putting the can on its long side and building something that looks much more bug-like, as well as getting rid of the 1AA power supply of the original kit in preference of the +3V that the Arduino board provides.
Coming from the world of software engineering, the best analogy I can think of to describe the process for getting the can moving was that of iterative development. Do something. Hook the motor up to power and see if it moves. If it does, take the next step; if not, iterate on the design. This will take a while, but the less you think of any part of your design as being fixed, the better. What can I say? The physical world is a bitch with all of its gravity and stuff.
The second bit of the drive system that baffled me was that there is not way to drive a motor from one of the digital pins on the Arduino. The short answer is that most things draw way too much power (current) relative to the 40-50 milliamps that each of the pins on an Arduino puts out, something which you quickly discover by the way in which an IC near the pins gets hot enough to boil your skin (amazingly, this as well as other noob mistakes don't tend to damage your Arduino if you catch them quickly enough— have I mentioned how awesome Arduino is?)
Once you realize this, you can find many options online for driving motors, servos, and all sorts of things that move— from full on "shields," or boards that you snap on top of your Arduino with as many chips as the Arduino itself (and often about as expensive) to all sorts of motor control circuits. It turns out that most robotics folks know that what you would want is something called an "H bridge" which uses a bunch of transistors and diodes to give you fine grained control over the direction and speed of multiple motors and servos. But even this was too much work for us— we just wanted the motor to move when the robot sensed light irrespective of speed and only in its ambling forward direction. Fortunately thanks to the web (or more specifically, the wonderful LetsMakeRobots.com), I discovered that you can actually use one transistor, an NPN silicon one from Radio Shack (part #276-2016) to build a simple circuit that lets you control current from the 3V power supply on the Arduino from one of the digital pins. Think of a transistor as a big electronically controlled switch and you'll get the gist of it (but have a look at my monkey circuit diagram to figure out how to wire it up).
The light-detecting circuit: I had the leg up on this one as I did one of these circuits for a science fair about 20 years ago (my dad's idea for how to make me popular as a recent non-English speaking immigrant in the public school system in the US— and no, it did not work). Surprisingly, it even worked the first time. The basic circuit requires placing another resistor (I used a 1k ohm one but the value will depend on what kind of photo resistor you have on hand). A photo resistor (you can Google "CDS" to find one) seems to be hard to find these days, but you can get them from Radio Shack online for about $2. The other step is taking measurements on the analog pin from the circuit you build; you will basically get values from 0 to 1023 depending on the ambient light of the room you are in and will have to tweak your program to determine what the "move robot" threshold should be (in our case, with the circuit detailed above, values above 200 trigger the robot to move).
The "mouth" circuit: this is a standard yellow LED plugged into one of the digital pins and buried deep inside the can. When the robot moves, the LED comes on. Note that all of the tutorials for Arduino say to use a resistor with the LEDs but as a master of burning out LEDs I can tell you that you won't need it on the digital pins of the board.
The final step was getting the software written which proved to be the easiest part of the project (and I suspect it was not just that that is my background but that the Arduino folks have done a great job on their IDE). You can see the "sketch" (Arduino/Processing for program) here. After some initialization, it simply goes into a loop reading the photo resistor circuit and when appropriate turns the pin connected to the NPN transistor to HIGH and the mouth LED pin to high as well.
We live in wonderful times— and nothing like the ability to take on a weekend project like this with little prior training in electronics proves it as well. So now it's my turn to give back to the collective brain— please feel free to either leave me comments with questions/clarifications or send me email at antrod at gmail dot com.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 29, 2008)
Back when I was in college, I thought UNIX was the worst thing to ever happen to computing. The arcane commands coupled with a crappy text interface and the lack of root access on the SunOS machines on the campus created an experience so utterly frustrating that I found myself wondering what all of the hoopla was about.
Two years after graduation though, all the rage was this free OS called Linux and so I decided to take the plunge and spend a little time trying to see if I could get over my UNIX hate. While I'd love to claim that it was the older, calmer me that re engaged with pipes and processes, the reality was that back in 1998, there was this thing called Alta Vista that made life much more bearable. Instead of paging through cryptic man pages on a terminal screen, the combination of the Linux community and the mountains of content on the web made for a much smoother learning experience. No matter what you wanted to do, there was a chance that someone out there had done it (or something close enough) and written it up on some mailing list or some other webpage (blogs would come later).
Overnight UNIX went from sucking to being incredibly empowering.
Which is why when people write about how Google (today's Alta Vista) is making us dumber, I find the proposition ridiculous. Part outboard brain, part wisdom of the crowds, the powerful combination of the web and the latest of the search engines is probably the best thing that has happened to skill acquisition since the written word.
I am writing about this again now, because for the past six months I've been having a similar experience to that original Linux/Alta Vista one except that the subject of my fascination has been microcontrollers and circuits, or more specifically, the emerging Arduino community of hardware hackers. Knowing little about electronics in general, I am been amazed again and again by how Googleable everything about hardware hacking is. Thanks to active forums/blogs/etc. and clear part numbers, it is relatively straight forward to learn how to wire up just about anything.
I've still got to write up the two projects I've been working off lately, but here is a small example: just this morning I was struggling to figure out how to make an electronic switch for a small DC motor in a toy I've been tinkering with. It took about 15 minutes of Googling to find out what the general approach I was supposed to take was, and about another 45 to figure out exactly what I needed.
I can not imagine what it must be like for kids growing up today— the empowering feeling that this combination of outboard brain and collective intelligence must be.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 29, 2008)
It seems that in just under two years, folks have been able to port the beginnings of Linux on to the iPhone hardware, which is both an awesome feat of reverse engineering, and sort of ironic since there were apparently folks at Apple arguing to use Linux in the first place.
Along the same vein, what really blew me away this morning was a story on CNET's Crave blog about a Vietnamese entrepreneur who is unlocking iPhones "old school" with a soldering iron and a chip reader (go check it out, great pictures included).
Neither of these things by themselves are going to make a meaningful dent in the torrent of soccer moms and "cool" tech company executives currently driving Apple's resurgence as the premier tech company. I don't ever expect to run Linux on my iPhone, or have its guts extruded on to the table of the cellphone equivalent of a tattoo parlor, but I do love to see the raw power of ingenious hacker/entrepreneurs at work. Outside of the sheer amount of learning they are doing about the brains of the next major computing platform, it makes me feel as though Zittrain's apocalypse may be averted yet.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 28, 2008)
CNET has a story about some Intel exec making disparaging comments about the new "netbook" category (very small laptops with diminutive specs and low price tags) which argues that people in the industry are beginning to see the netbook as an extension at the bottom of the traditional laptop category instead of a new category in and of its own.
For a while, the dream of the netbook as a new type of computing device was fueled by the OLPC foundation and its mission to equip the other 6 billion people in the world with $100 laptops. Since Asus jumped into the game with its $400 EeePC last year though, netbooks have become broader all-purpose computing devices with even giant PC companies like Dell and us jumping into the game. I have HP's first entry, the 2133 and have written about how while it is a well built piece of hardware, as a "cloud computer" it's got some fairly crippling limitations.
In my view what has really killed the emergence of a potential new type of product from the netbook form factor is not the inherent weaknesses of underpowered hardware and small screens but rather the emergence of smart phones— and especially devices like the iPhone with screens that are not that much smaller, constant high-speed connectivity, instant-on browsing of the Internet, and perhaps most importantly, software that is tailored specifically to that all important 15-60 second usecase that could have given the netbook its true opening. In the time that it takes the latter to come out of suspend, a user has pulled out his iPhone (or Gphone or Storm, etc.), accessed the Internet, read something, posted something, and put it back in his pocket.
Until the netbook manufacturers (us most significantly) begin to appreciate the need for fundamentally new types of software in the devices, all the emergence of this new ultracheap laptop will achieve is an erosion of the healthy premiums that laptops have carried since the beginning of the personal computer industry.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 28, 2008)
Ned is blogging about the fiasco that is the sudden service termination of Rael Dornfest's, IWantSandy.com, something that is likely to get more attention as more of these Web 2.0 experiments fizzle.
I've had non-geeky people say to me in the past that they refuse to try all of these shiny new web services for exactly this reason: not knowing whether the service is likely to have staying power. With the collapse of the blind faith "make something people use and everything else will take care of itself" mantra of the last few years, I think that even bleeding-edge users are going to start to become more discriminating about the underlying model for sustainability for any given service that they might think about investing their time and data into.
This doesn't mean that everyone is suddenly going to become adept as an Internet investor at understanding business models, but it does mean that more people will come to expect to at least understand the vague outlines of how a service provider is intending to make money.
At Tabblo for instance, we were always very clear that the service was free (including storage, templates, sharing, etc.) because we were hoping that people would consider their creative investment worthy of a physical artifact. And I imagine that if we were still independent today, we'd have no qualms about "nudging" the users of the service towards transactions for those money-making products.
Making money is such a pesky nuisance on the web— too bad it's the only insurance against getting clipped by a change of temperament on the part of investors or entrepreneurs.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 27, 2008)
Though I was initially excited to read Gladwell's new book, Outliers, finishing it last night left me with the feeling of just having consumed bad fast food. It's hardly an insightful book and seems to meander all over the place, jumping from random story to personal anecdotes without a worry about ripping the reader around on a random walk down the course of a half-baked argument. What is more, it seems that the already thin book is populated with a number of multi-page charts that reminded me of when I would go crazy with Word charts in high school to beef up my anemic papers with extraneous information that I hope would make me seem more "studied."
The best part of the book is the factoid that it takes 10,000 hours for anyone to truly master anything (assuming that they are working hard and receiving feedback along the way) which roughly translates to about a decade in a normal person's life. This is a good yardstick to keep in mind as we go through life dabbling in new things: after all, we might at most get 4-5 chances throughout our lives to get truly good at something.
Outside of that, the other two conclusions of the book, that circumstances matter when it comes to becoming really successful and that cultural heritage does as well seem pretty obvious to me. Skip the book— you've already gotten the gist here.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 16, 2008)
If want the opposite of a Sunday pick-me-upper, go and read Barry Ritholtz on "The Shallowest Generation" about how the self-indulgence of the Baby Boom generation has gotten us into the economic pickle we are currently facing. Not just a rant, the piece has got a bunch of really interesting data, including CEO pay over the last 18 years compared to the stock indices and more importantly, the average worker (see below) as well as a breakdown on what today's biggest consumers spend most of their borrowed money on (hint: eating and drinking seem to be surprisingly high on the list).
I do wish the piece had been a bit more balanced however. After claiming this:
Past U.S. generations invented the airplane; invented the automobile; discovered penicillin; and built the Interstate highway system. The Baby Boom generation has invented credit default swaps; mortgage backed securities; the fast food drive thru window; discovered the cure for erectile dysfunction; and built bridges to nowhere. No wonder weâre in so much trouble.
the author fails to mention that this same Baby Boom Generation gave us the PC, commercialized the Internet, and the mobile phone upon which we're likely to be basing the next big tech boom. In fact, just the other night, David sent me the Wikipedia page on 1970s technologyin response to my complaining about how toys from then just seemed "better thought out." It is really something else to think about the fact that it was Boomers during this era that gave us the PC, the Apple ][, the software industry, and Star Wars!
Still, good to remember that we've got some excesses to undo.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 14, 2008)
I ran across two unrelated things this week that reminded me how easy it is to forget that the formula for success is really a lot simpler than we make it out to be. Especially as the economy tanks and people from StartupLand waste countless hours second guessing what this will mean for those seeking funding/exits/etc., it's great to keep these things in mind.
The first was a video of Michael Crichton being interviewed by Charlie Rose which incredibly refreshing. After Charlie asks Crichton what the secret of his success is, the latter responds non-chalantly that it is just hard work. It's great because it is such an atypical super successful person answer; what is better is that he then admits that he doesn't even consider himself a super talented writer, but just one who worked really really hard to get there (for more on how important this is for writing, check out this great book).
The second was a post by Brent Simmons, developer extraordinaire on what it takes to become a successful independent Mac developer (quoted via Daring Fireball):
You have to work every day. You have to sit in the chair and stay seated. And sleep and come back to the chair. You need to wear out that chair and then buy a new one and then wear out that one.
Both of these also reminded me of the upcoming Gladwell book on outliers and how they go there. In a recent New York magazine piece, the author reveals some of Gladwell's research where a psychologist has uncovered that it takes about 10,000 hours of serious work to become truly expert at anything.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 8, 2008)
In trying to break a dad-inflected addiction to the Nintendo DS for my six year-old, I just came across the Scratch project from the Lifelong Kindergarden lab at MIT. If you've ever wanted to teach kids the basics of programming in an engaging way, get over there and pick up a free copy of the Scratch environment right now. Scratch is what Logo meant to be but couldn't afford due to the resource limits of those early PCs. And the hour and a half we spent playing with it this morning was more fun than Mindstorms, OLPC, or any other such endeavors.
There are a lot of good things to be said for Scratch. Essentially, it is a graphical environment for animating sprites (shapes you draw on the screen with a primitive Paint-like application) along with sounds and effects. Much like Lego Mindstorms, the programming is done by snapping blocks together, except that unlike Mindstorms, the Scratch blocks seem to be able to stretch better to encompass the full power of control structures, variable assignment and all of those other "pesky programming things" that often leave the toy environments feeling like just that— toys.
The editor is very intuitive and relatively bug-free. Which is amazing considering that it is built on top of Squeak— a Smalltalk environment that I've spent the last two years playing with without really being able to get my head completely around. I suspect that a lot more is possible than the simple stuff we did this morning— and even then we got basic keyboard-controlled sprites along with effects, collision-detection, and some basic sound effects— all without reading any documentation and with zero prior experience. I spent quite a bit of time playing with a previous Squeak-based environment that ships in the OLPC, eToys, which I found horribly unintuitive.
But it doesn't stop there. The Scratch team has apparently been paying close attention to the whole "Web 2.0" thing because along with the programming environment, they've built a community site which contains all of the best collaborative features of a user-generated content repository. From the one-click upload within the Scratch environment, the Java applet that lets anyone embed their "scratches" (as the programs are called) into any webpage, to a tagged and filtered site for people to leave comments or download each other's scratches, the end-to-end experience leaves you feeling like you are part of something much bigger than just another attempt to teach programming to kids.
The only thing that surprises me about Scratch is how little attention it seems to be getting, especially given that they are local to Boston. Why anyone writing about the real innovation coming out the ashes of Web 2.0 isn't featuring these eternal kindergardeners (see this video to see how much they really do look like happy kindergardeners) is beyond me.
One final note: I'm not sure that "Mario fights the Alien" (our first game) broke the DS addiction but it was really special to see how, after telling me that what we'd done was "lame" and "embarrassing," my six year-old's face lit up when his little brother decided that the game was the bee's knees and spent the next 25 minutes engrossed in it. Nothing like that creative high, and it's 100% thanks to the work of the Scratch folks that this is possible with such a shallow learning curve.
I don't get it. A laptop's boot time is such a discrete problem that it seems somewhat amazing to me that manufacturers don't feel capable of tackling it head-on as a real differentiator. The lack of control over the Windows stack may be a factor (though it strikes me as insane that Microsoft itself isn't laser focused on this), but now that the floodgates have opened and everyone from HP to Dell is serious about shipping Linux on the low end, there is no excuse not to get deep into this and fix it.
Come on guys, surely this isn't on the rocket science end of the spectrum.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 1, 2008)
Over the last month, I've come across two absolutely awesome games that are driven not by shooting and killing or by incredible graphics, but by a series of puzzles underpinned by great physics models. The first was 2D Boys: World of Goo, which I downloaded from the Nintendo Wii store for $15 and consists of using the controller to build structures out of Goo balls that have to fit, squeeze, climb, and just generally survive the challenges posed by the world in Goo.
Sound like it can get boring? Absolutely. Does it? No way. Between the use of the wiimote and the awesome soundtrack, you will only discover how much time has passed when the RSI sets in from gripping the controller so tightly for hours on end.
The second game, Enigmo (for the iPhone), is all about redirecting a stream of droplets to get them to perform gravity-defying feats. Though a bit less entertaining than Goo, it is still a load of fun, and made amazing by the portable nature of the iPhone.
I am not a huge gamer by any stretch but have been struck by the way in which these two games share a lot of the elements of the original Atari/Intellivision/Apple II games where the limits of the hardware pushed the developers into building truly engaging and innovative gameplay. Except that in these two cases the hardware itself is something that all of those 1970s programmers would have killed forâ except that now, everything from the physics models to the UI interaction takes advantage of it.
One final note: both games were purchased purely as bits without much thought as to their cost. iTunes really did create the mental shift to this new model of paying for stuff online, and companies like Nintendo are smart to follow.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Nov. 1, 2008)
David sent me this sequel to that awesome slideshow about the coming need for new skills in the emerging hyperconnected world:
It is good to watch this passively and let the sheer size of some of these numbers float over you as you think of the things that you might be working on today to help us all manage better in this new tomorrow...
One awesome new phrase I intend to add to my vocabulary: "B.G." for Before Google after the slideshow asks who people asked the 2.8 billion questions they ask to Google before it existed.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 27, 2008)
Five years ago I fell in love with Neil Stephenson's "primer," the intelligent tablet/book/PC, part AI, part nano-technology, part information access device, and most importantly the star of his novel "The Diamond Age." In the days before the OLPC I remember writing a blog post about how a $500 laptop with a net connection could get us there in most of the developing world, thinking all the while that $500 seemed like a Crazy Eddie Low Price for a laptop, and in fact one which we might not achieve without some kind of subsidy.
Looking at the booming "netbook" category these days, it's almost hard to believe what is going on. What Asus pioneered just over a year ago with its EeePC (a flash-based subnotebook at $400) has been copied by vendors big and small to the point where $500 for a top-brand laptop seems like too much. With HP and Dell churning these guys out inside of their hyper-efficient supply chains, it is just a matter of time before we truly see the $100 laptop become a reality.
In the meantime, another very interesting thing is happening: the OS on these machines is finally being reduced to just a "buggy bunch of device drivers" (in some cases literally) with the web browser being the main event. The netbooks are becoming the physical representation of the web browser (much like the iPhone has) and in the process they are changing the expectation for what portable computing is all about: from performance and features to battery life and connectivity.
The first game changer in the netbook category was abandoning hard drives for flash and being willing to use 8 and 9-inch displays in order to boost robustness and get the cost down. The next discontinuous move will come from the first hardware manufacturer that bundles in a subsidized 3G data connection (a la Kindle) by cutting a deal with either Google or Microsoft for advertising and desktop search. Free access would change the personal computer forever, but even Peek-like contractless $20/month would put a significant dent in today's market for laptops and smartphones.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 26, 2008)
According to TechCrunch, YouTube has just released a URL extension that allows people to send around links not just to videos but to particular time codes within the video. This is a small feature but a big deal because it will allow for more fine-grained addressing into the relatively "un-webby" media format of video which I think of as the speed bump of modern web-based information consumption: click, scan, scroll, click, scan, videoâ crap! (five minutes later you realize you didn't really care to see that useless video review of the G1 because it never addressed the battery life issue you were researching).
Of course Jon Udell was writing about this stuff years ago; realizing that linearly consumed media needed finer addressability, he implemented a kludgey solution for audio transcripts that even worked. YouTube doing this though will hopefully set a new de-facto standard (are you listening Hulu?) and make video consumption online even more webby.
By the way, I think the next great contextualizing descendants of the recently popped Web 2.0 bubble may emerge from taking this notion of making traditionally un-bookmarkable objects bookmarkable in much the same way that YouTube did for television, and thinking along this access of finer and finer addressability is not a bad way to start. SMS bookmarking? Transaction bookmarking? Traffic bookmarking? It's all part of that wonderful emerging shared data cloud of ours!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 25, 2008)
I saw that really mean ad Apple is running against Windows Vista last night and it occurred to me that Microsoft's expiration date may have finally come. Not because they might not have smart people working on their new products and services but because it wasn't until recently that I realized how ridiculously impossible it is for a company with a great, profitable franchise (like Windows) to find itself another new one.
Today's NYTimes Bits is about Vista's lack of adoption and the ensuing problem this is likely to create for Microsoft. Sadly what the numbers are saying is that the desktop OS is now an absolute commodity, mostly because as we all know, the best thing it can do is boot up quickly and provide us with a fast and stable browser. Even the sudden explosion in the low-cost ultraportable segment ("netbooks") won't help reverse this trend.
I feel for Microsoft on this one. They've had a great run. People have been circulating premature rumors of their demise for a long time now. But this time it feels like the combined pressures of the web and users' appetite for innovative integrated solutions may finally get them.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 22, 2008)
Gruber has a fascinating post about Apple's transition from being a computer company to being a smartphone company where he unpacks the company's earnings call yesterday. What is most remarkable to me about this story is that we are talking about a company that resuscitated itself with the breakthrough hit that was the iPod only to the reinvent itself yet againâwhile still riding high from the success and profitability of the iPod.
How Apple moved from being just "the mac company," or even "the iPod company" is something that good organizational folks should study for years to come. As someone working at "the printer company" where we seem unable to make a meaningful transition to the next franchise even when the conditions might be perfect for such a transition, I am simply in awe.
No doubt part of it is about the fact that Apple was nearly dead. Jobs clearly has also played a big role with his outstanding stewardship of the Apple magic. But I wonder if the real enabler for these two shifts doesn't stem from Apple's two core strengths: its software DNA and its rabid attention to industrial design.
Both of these seem more transferable to finding the next hit franchise in an increasingly mobile and personal computing landscape. Compare those two core competencies for instance, with ones that Wall Street loves in tech companies like: awesome supply chain management, 20-year long bets on proprietary IP roadmaps, control of the distribution channel, excellence in running large services organizations, and you'll see what I mean.
And of the two I think in that the rabid focus on industrial design seems to me to be related to the firstâ in that at Apple it's always been about giving the software a physical instantiation in the associated hardware. The iPhone is the best example of this as is their reluctance to dive head first into the exploding "netbook" market. Until they see the opportunity for making the bold move with software (as they did with the iPhone), I suspect they will stay away.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 20, 2008)
If you loved the replicators Gene Roddenberry introduced in "Star Trek: Next Generation," you should be following the work of all of the folks building out the budding "personal fabrication" industry. Yesterday I ran across this great summary of the various different technologies involved in turning the bits that course through the network into atoms.
This trend is a big deal for 2 reasons. First, as we get closer to bridging the virtual and the physical in all sorts of ways, from exporting the objects we create in virtual worlds to building sensor and actuator based projects that interact with the physical world, the need for custom parts of all shapes and sizes only increases. If we are really going to go through any kind of a physical computing amateur explosion of creativity (as we have multiple times in software), the technologies of custom manufacture need to become accessible to the typical garage tinkerer. Example: the other day, my friend Andy and I were talking about an Arduino-based robot platform and he very quickly descended into talking about "lots" of 5, 10, and 20 thousand which frankly gives me hives.
The second reason why it would be good for hackers, makers, and startups to focus in this space is because small-scale replication appears to be such a disruptive technology that none of the big companies are paying much attention. Working where I do, you'd think that I'd see tons of 3D printing projects sprouting up. Sadly though the reality seems to be that most of the folks I meet on the inside dismiss it as a fad which is nowhere near being applicable beyond a few very specialized industrial verticals (I bet someone probably through the same about vaporizing ink droplets and shooting them at high-speed at paper 25 years ago in the age of toner, but that is a story for another day).
Personally, I am about one late night away from trying to build one of these in my basement. If it wasn't because I have serious doubts about my own mechanical abilities assembling a project as complex as this one, I'd be happy to usher in the era of Skynet with self-replicating robots coming straight out of my basement!
Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of âmereâ words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false oneââsomething that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obamaâs âmereâ speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 6, 2008)
When two people as different as Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman manage to crap on a trend in the same week, it makes one think. In this case, the excrement was directed at the notion of "cloud computing," or moving what has traditionally happened on native PC applications to a server in a data center and a browser-based client. As Ellison stated, it's become such the rage that it's almost more helpful to describe the things that tech companies are doing these days that are *not* classified as cloud computing.
In thinking about the return to centralizing workloads, I was wondering whether we're just on that technology yo-yo that drives everyone from one extreme to anotherâ from totally distributed to totally centralized and back. After all, computing did start in a completely centralized way and most of its history has been towards distributing the workload. Here is my napkin art on the trend:
The evolution of computing
Now I'd be ready to sign up to the theory that we are going to yo-yo here as well, riding that red curve back and forth till the end of timeâ but for the blue line of ubiquitous bandwidth, a trend which seems as unidirectional as Moore's law.
In each of the previous shifts in computing (from mainframes to minis to PCs), it would seem that the driving force was an democratization of computing resources, with equivalent capabilities being offered to an ever-expanding audience. The businesses who couldn't afford mainframes thought the world of minis, and the consumers who couldn't afford those were delighted with the limited PCs of the day. In the case of browser-based computing, the democratization is taken one step further: think of the developing world where an MS Office license is ridiculous but where free Google Apps at an Internet cafe is a complete bargain.
This trend makes the notion of the yo-yo rolling back the curve pretty unlikely, unless of course one of the following factors makes distributed computing compelling again:
Features: There are still apps that can not be shoved into the browser: video editing or hardcore gaming. The advent of richer browsers (think Chrome with its 10x faster Javascript implementation) is definitely fighting this trend, especially for all but the most specialized of computing tasks (video, music, CAD/CAM, programming).
Cost: It's hard to imagine any scenario where the economies of scale don't favor huge data centers, especially when we add the cost to administer computers, but it might happen. Imagine solar-powered computers for instanceâ since rooftop surface area is much less plentiful in a datacenter, there might be some advantages where the lack of density actually helps the overall economics. Heat is another factor as is anything else that is currently a limiter inside a data center.
Policy: Think of the privacy implications of Google storing all of your data, or Facebook having access to your entire addressbook. It seems unlikely that we won't get much more prickly about privacy going forward, and it is not inconceivable that we won't see policy-driven decisions emerge that might force some degree of de-centralization. For instance, I can't imagine government data being floated into a cloudâ and especially not a foreign government's data into an American company's data center.
I'm not sure there is anything in these three buckets that will ever get us back to the ultra-distributed world that the PC ushered in in the late 1970s, so I just hope that we're not a frog in a pot that is slowly having its temperature raisedâ not even aware of the boiling we are about to experience.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 5, 2008)
Umair Haque is either a prescient genius or a utopian nutbag and frankly, I'm tickled that I can't figure out which one despite reading and re-reading his blog post at HBR on building a "Next Gen" business. His argument appears to be that the current mainstay institutions of our free market model for capitalism are rotten from the inside and need to be replaced by institutions that are native to the "hyperconnected global economy."
While it is hard to argue with the rot analogy these days (especially after the calamitous fiasco we've all been watching on television over the last few weeks), I find it difficult to parse out what these post-rot institutions are going to look like. He points to some examples that are compelling: open source projects, peer-production aggregators, and social networks. Each of these "institutions" does represent a fundamentally new way of organizing work that was born strictly out of this new hyperconnected age, but it is not at all clear to meâ even after mightily struggling through half of Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networksâ" that these novel modes of cooperation can give rise to fundamentally new types of companies, specifically ones that can in a different form drive some of the same hardcore innovation that we saw over the 20th century.
If you want a great example of what I mean, check out this 1970 10-minute Eames-produced documentary on the creation of the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera. For those that don't know, Edwin Land (the creator of the SX-70 and the founder of Polaroid) is perhaps the most prolific entrepreneur/inventor that no one has ever written a book about in the history of American business. He was famous for pulling weeks of all-nighters in his research lab in Cambridge with shifts of assistants that would take 12-hour turns keeping up with him. Watch this film and you'll see why.
When you see how a small group of product-obsessed folks can come up with a product like the SX-70, you've got to wonder why any system that promotes this sort of extraordinary achievement could ever come to rot. More importantly, even if you do buy that we need to reset the system in favor of one more in tune with the hyperconnected world of peer production, we need to puzzle out where the new Polaroids will come from. And while I love Linux and Python and even Apache, I'm not sure I can see any of the most famous progeny of this new world sitting beside the SX-70 in the museum of amazing inventions 1,000 years from now.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 5, 2008)
Last week I lost the hard drive in my Macbook Air after about 3 months of it playing the Little Drummer Boy in that hard drive clicking language only terminally ill HDs can speak. It is remarkable that in over 15 years of owning Apple laptops, this is the first drive I've lost, though perhaps more indicative of the fact that it is just a bad idea to expect an iPod drive to be able to do the work of its bigger brethren.
As I attempted to reconstitute the machine, it occurred to me that we are still in the stone ages of virtualizing consumer storage so that people can really treat their small computing devices as active caches instead of as precious sources of data— which is a strange notion given how crowded the space of consumer backup sector is: from small but wonderful services like Dropbox, through at-scale startups like Carbonite, all the way to platform vendor services like Upline and MobileMe, it seems that no one has gotten it quite right in that there is no one place where you can go to seamlessly return to a known working state of your trashed device.
I use a 3-tier system to keep a few laptops in relative sync/backed up, and I can't help but think that this layered approach might actually be the right solution (for now), if only the players at each layer would focus on working well at their layer instead of covering the whole space. Here is how it works:
First, there is the data that is tightly coupled to the application but which needs to instantly replicate across all of my machines and other portable devices, specifically calendar, addressbook, and to-do info. From a shoveling bits perspective, this is really small and therefore easy to copy over even the slowest of networks. The challenge is in sync (and it is remarkable that there is still a challenge here given how many people have beaten their heads against this for the past 2 deacdes), and in making sure that as soon as I make a change on one client, it is replicated to the server and then to all of the other devices. Right now I use a combination of MobileMe and Exchange for this— and it is truly remarkable how poor each of the solutions is— a suckage that is only multiplied when one tries to use them together.
Second, there is data that is loosely coupled to specific applications but in need of quick replication across a number of machines. These are the Office docs, source files, graphics assets, etc. that I might be actively working with at any given moment. Not a huge amount of data, but enough that you have to be somewhat smart about replication to keep from constantly overtaxing the network. A good source control system (I use subversion) is a great model for how this tier of data replication should work, and in fact the solution I've come to use for non source control files— a startup called Dropbox— is just a prettied up source control repository with a set of great clients. Most of the startups in the "consumer storage" space play in this tier, though they tend to spread themselves too thin and (unlike Dropbox) forget about the importance of having a really fast and reliable client.
Finally, there is the "everything else" which should represent everything from / on the machine's drive. I'm talking about applications, application support data, configuration files, etc. On the drive I lost this was about 40GB of tweaked OS & apps that I had spent close to a year customizing. The theory on this tier is that in the near term you won't see enough pipe to be able to back it up offsite so a local solution is necessary. I use the Apple Time Capsule product, which is basically a 1TB drive hooked into a wireless router and a client app that performs full disk backups on a schedule. It works ok— not great— mostly because the client is not good at understanding that laptops are opened and closed a lot and that it needs to be smart about pausing/resuming the backups accordingly. Also, the restore process doesn't overwrite the Apple-installed applications which is deadly when you've done thinks to tweak those, or say when your tightly bound application metadata has been changed by a later version of the application than what the reinstalled operating system has.
Eventually (maybe a decade from now), we'll all go to a system where everything is replicated instantly to some cloud provider— maybe even with a VM instance of the running machine being continuously streamed up for to-the-moment restoring of state. But until we get to this Star Trek universe if I were in this space, I might think about these three layers, decide where it is that I want to play, and focus maniacally of the details that still make each of them suck so much.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 3, 2008)
The Obama iPhone application launched yesterday (why did it take this long?), and while it is largely RSS-powered brochure-ware, there is one feature well worth the entire app (fans of Obama should go and get it regardless).
Two nice details are the "days till the election" counter and the phone-sized encyclopedia of where Obama/Biden stand on all of the issues. This latter feature would be even better if it included the equivalent parts of the McCain/Palin stance— because as the counter gets below 30 days, many of us will find ourselves in lunchtime conversations arguing about the difference between the candidates— a handy use for the pocket reference.
Here's the really interesting feature though: a remixed addressbook tied to a very basic CRM interface element. I've been a proponent of the 15-60 second user experience on mobile for a while now, mostly because it enables something really new. Perhaps one of the best parts of having such a small computer is the way in which you can use it while in line at the store, waiting for the bus, and even driving (at stoplights only, of course) for small bursts of time. All of these spare moments throughout day represent something not unlike the "cognitive surplus" that Clay Shirky wrote about in his book, and it feels like a shame to waste it all playing Wurdle.
The Obama-iPhone people call the phone app the "2 minute volunteer" which is a great term for what just a little bit of data munging enables. When you click on the "Call Friends" option, what you get is a re-sorted version of your addressbook based on who you know who lives in battleground states. So for instance, all of the Ohio contacts come up first, followed by New Hampshire, etc. You also get a new button next to each name that lets you classify the state of that given contact, i.e., "called," "left a message," "not called," etc. Finally, the app seems to work by area code rather than address which is a nod to all of us with incomplete addressbooks.
A fabulous idea and the first good use of the small chunks of cognitive surplus now being unlocked by these tiny computers.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Sept. 26, 2008)
A friend recently told me that upgrading to the 3G iPhone makes him feel like he's back in 1989, constantly worried about the state of his battery, always looking greedily at empty plugs in any public rooms he enters.
Being on the road for days at a time with an iPhone 3G (and far from its desktop trickle charge or a car cigarette lighter), I have to agree. Such a great deviceâ and such a big Achilles heel.
Example: if you are traveling in a foreign city, the GPS and zoomable maps are worth their weight in gold. These two power vampires though will suck you dry faster than you can say "Achtungâ" often after just a couple of hours of walking around lost when you are most psyched to be dealing with a dead phone.
And the iPhone is not unique hereâ in fact just about every 3G handset seems to suffer from batteries that are too small and radios that are too power hungry (what makes the iPhone extra special is inability to swap batteries, though truth be told, the last thing I'd want to do is to have to travel with a Batbelt to hold the 3 batteries I'd need to last through the day).
I think it was someone in Wired who argued that we should think of the iPhone not as a phone but as a mobile computer, and that since we didn't expect our laptops to last all day, why should we expect this new class of smartphones to do so? Almost as stupid as the claim that we should just adapt to its power needs and learn to manage it by trickle charging and turning off all of the best features. Since when are we supposed to be slaves to our devices and not the other way around?
On this power dimension, I want all of my devices to be like my Amazon Kindle which I can charge one before a week-long trip and forget about (even to the point of not bringing the power cord).
If battery technology can't get us there for the foreseeable future, maybe we should hack our way to that usecase by learning the electric toothbrush. Charged by induction, all I need to do is to place it on its pad at night. Could we have big induction pads in hotel lobbies, at restaurants, etc? How far can we push this idea? On subways? And on the flip side of stagnating battery technologies, can we work on the charging circuits such that short 3 minute boosts could be more effective at juicing batteries?
One final thought: when traveling, one thing we certainly all do is move around. If this movement happens to be human-powered, can we not store the kinetic energy for boost-charging later? What about a shoe whose impact on the sidewalk charged a battery that we could use later, a la "Minty Boost" when we might be in dire need of a power bump?
It is so clear that portable power is a multi billion dollar industry just waiting for these kinds of disruptions.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Sept. 25, 2008)
Maybe it is because I've just finished reading the tome that is Atlas Shrugged, and maybe it is because I've been out of the US for the last week, but the idea that we are going to use $700 billion of US taxpayer money to bailout a bankrupt industry that has been gorging on profits provided by asymmetric access to information and Las Vegas style bet-the-house behavior strikes me as absolutely nuts.
Afraid that I was missing some critical element, I was happy to see that apparently Warren Buffett, despite pumping money into Goldman Sachs, generally agrees that this is crazy talk. We need to flush the system. Take the lumps and move on. Otherwise, our ballooning national debt and wasted tax payer money will be the least of our problems.
I was sitting next to a German at dinner last night who genuinely asked me how long we thought we could get away with it? He mentioned that the consumer savings rate in Germany is 8% (compared to our -2%) and wanted to know why people in the US thought that a steady state of spending more than you earn was sustainable.
I had no answer for him.
But it reminded me of the conversations which I've had with other foreigners over the last 8 years. Like the one where I was told that there is no faith abroad in a political system that can produce 8 years of Bush comedy. Or an American legal system that can sustain 7-year detainees in Guantanamo without due process.
I'm afraid that this bank collapse is just the third leg of the stool kicking outâ and that we're now likely to see the loss of faith in our economic system as wellâ at a time when we are ever more reliant on foreigners covering our national debt. For the US government to take an approach that is similar to one that might be taken by a banana republic like that which I come from is just sad.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Sept. 18, 2008)
Whenever Fake Steve would lampoon the real Steve and the iPhone using the phrase "childlike wonder" for the feeling the iPhone creates in its users, I'd always think about this toy I had growing up, the Milton-Bradley Big Trak, a programmable tank born of an era when 8 bit microprocessors became feasible components of toys.
Thanks the power of eBay and a dedicated friend, I just got a Big Trak again (more than 25 years after the fact) just to see if that childlike wonder was still there. And boy, is it ever.
Think of the Big Trak as the physical manifestation of Papert's turtle (from the Logo programming language) in that you "program" it by entering rudimentary instructions, i.e., forward 2 lengths, right 30 degrees, pulse laser 4 times, etc, and then watch it execute your program in the context of the physical world. You also get a sleep() call and for the extra geeky, loops to repeat groups of instructionsâ all with just a 12-digit keypad and no visible display (take that crappy toys of today!)
Growing up my favorite game was trying to get the Big Trak to step its way through an obstacle course with only its program for help. Last night in showing it to my kids, we came up with a suitably modernized (read: violent) version of this game. While one person programmed the tank, the other two would take stationery positions in the room. The goal was to drive the tank within 3 feet of one and "kill" them with the laser. I was floored at how quickly my six year old grasped the basics of getting the tank to move and fireâ something he has just never gotten with all of the educational crapware I've exposed him to.
When people tell me that you can't teach kids to program, I always think of that Big Trak -> Timex Sinclair -> Apple ][ progression that I had the privilege of having. It's nice to see that it wasn't nostalgia that had inflated my notion of just what a great toy can do.
Pictured here: a picture of the manual which of course I couldn't read back in the day but which is beautifully designed and very well-written.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 24, 2008)
If you are at all interested in how personal computing spent its toddler years, go and check out Gamasutra's history of Atari. It is not particularly well written, and is a bit disjointed, but it is the only complete story that I've seen of Atari, the casual gaming powerhouse that started it all. Among some of the great nuggets I got from the piece:
* even when you've got an insatiable appetite to serve (as was the case with early video games), it takes time to ramp up: Nolan Bushnell and team were both patient and very smart about iterating quickly. And this is despite the fact that they didn't "program" at all (not in the way we understand it), but instead wired transistors and worried about vertical and horizontal blanking to get their games to work. The next time I bitch about the iPhone's relatively weak documentation for development, I am going to remember how these guys had it— and yet, they were still agile.
* content companies suck, but you can route around them: corollary, when you are a young company, avoid lawyers and law suits— you may be legally correct, but the process will bleed you to death. When Atari couldn't license Jaws from Spielberg, they just made a shark game that looked like Jaws... and cleaned up in the market. When everyone started copying their TTL (transitor to transistor logic) arcade games thus violating their intellectual property, they sought to play a market-cornering strategy with suppliers instead of lawyering up. These guys had hair on their chests, balls, and probably hairy balls too!
* big companies are where startups go to die: something I didn't realize was that Atari sold relatively early to Warner, the media company, for much too little money ($28MM). I have always wondered why they seemed to have missed PCs altogether when they had the 8-bit 2600 in the market, and both Steves (from Apple) worked there. Turns out the suits at Warner were more interested in stuffing the channel and reaping rent from the gaming consoles than investing in the exploding personal computer market. When you stop thinking about product and market, and start thinking about the channel and the profit margins, hire the MBAs, call it a commodity business, and get the eff out!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 23, 2008)
My new favorite section of the New York Times (a blog-like tech section called Bits) has a piece on the plummeting prices of what they call "Netbooks," or ultra small portables with low-end components and even lower prices. Netbooks belong to a new category of products called M.I.D.s (Mobile Internet Devices) which are apparently selling like hot cakes because of two intersecting trends: mobility and ubiquitous Internet access.
MIDs as a category are hard to ignore which is why every major PC vendor is now playing fast follower to those that led the way (even we at HP are now shipping various versions of the 2133). Most look like small laptops (though some like the Nokia 800/810 tablet push the form factor beyond that) which implies having to have small fingers or loads of patience to be productive, but this is a small price to pay, especially for kids.
I'm a believer. The only thing I'd love to see as part of the emerging MID category is a permanent, bundled in, Internet connection, much like the Amazon Kindle's. If the Bits piece is correct and prices could soon hit $199 on the standalone devices, $399 might just be enough to incent one of the EVDO carriers into a 2 year term of service. And that is before considering some of the more compelling subsidy models. For instance, if I were Larry or Sergey, I'd look to sponsor a device like this targeted at schools in exchange for nothing more than making them Google branded (sure beats the pants off of flying around in a master-of-the-universe customized 767.)
Imagine how compelling that might make the device for the millions of school kids in the US who attend crappy public schools and have no broadband at home. A relatively standard PC (unlike say a pie-in-the-sky reinvention of personal computing a la OLPC) with a permanent net connection might be just enough incentive to get kids interested in treating these much like the kids in Stephenson's Diamond Age. Then we'd just have to get started with the really challenging bitâ writing the primer's software!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 16, 2008)
RRW has a nice piece of how today's hottest developer "platforms" have a degree of closedness which we would have never tolerated, covering the social network sites as well as the iTouch platform. Others have been on this point for a while (for a great read, check out Zittrain's very approachable "The Future of the Internet"), but as we throw our hardware into the tire fire in favor of vendor-controlled "clouds" with little in the way of documented SLAs and APIs, and we pinch our way to glee on the iPhone 3G, it's good to spare a few cycles to folks like Zittrain and Doc who are advocating that we bear a little pain to stay in control.
A friend recently gave me a giant tome worth reading if you think there is nothing we can do, "The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey," which covers the best articles from 20-odd years of the magazine by the same name. The best part of this giant compendium is the section on hacking Ma Bell, the ultimate closed platform from back in the 70s (I discovered that this is where 2600 got its name). Most of these hacks were actually illegal (as they resulted in loss of revenue for the phone company), but the spirit of the endeavors was awesome— and it is interesting to note that this same spirit was then channeled by folks like Woz into the birth of the personal computer industry without which there would be no iPhone today, or even perhaps a commercial Internet. I'd hate to lose this ethic in the name of "democratizing technology" for the mass market.
Last week I installed Linux on a craptop which I'd gotten through work and discovered just how much overhead XP still takes (Ubuntu runs way more smoothly for those interested in a free upgrade to their 2133s). I did it for because I wanted to install Billix (a cool sysadmin swissarmy knife toolset) on a USB stick I carry around and realized that like a frog boiled slowly I had ceded of my locally controlled Linux command lines to VPS accounts to the cloud without realizing it.
Will I drop my Mac-flavored, Quicksilver-enhanced, candy-colored UNIX for daily use in favor of this much more open hardware/software that I control? No way. It's been 5 years since I used a Linux laptop on a daily basis, and even if I could get over the loss of well-integrated, anti-aliased GUIs, I've become far too addicted to adjunct technologies that have emerged since then and are still poorly supported under Linux (802.11n/g, Bluetooth, EVDO cards, etc.), but with my 2133 booting Ubuntu at least I feel like I've got an escape valve when little brother comes knocking.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 10, 2008)
My brother was recently telling me about grounding my thirteen year-old nephew for 3 weeks. He lost his ability to invite friends over, watch TV, play Xbox, and even putter around on his laptop. Despite this, the kid remained surprisingly smug about his prospects for the next 3 weeks bored. Apparently his dad forgot to take all of his screens away— and with his iPod touch still in hand, he felt that he had beaten the rap's worst consequence: being disconnected.
Having just finished reading Cory Doctorow's wonderfully entertaining tale of teenage Geek culture in his polemic against the Patriot Act and all of our loss of privacy in recent years, I was again reminded of how fast kids can take ownership of new technologies in ways that leaves the grownups scratching their heads and... just generally feeling old.
Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," has a really rich description of this world being conquered by teenage geeks, one that struck me as both incredibly realistic, and quite telling of how the first post-PC, post-Internet generation expects to be able to own their electronic fates— from media to communications to the interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds, the narrative serves as much better guidepost for what is coming than all of the artificial "teenage panels" that seem to come at the end of every tech conference these days ("what will you kids pay for?" is always my favorite dumb question at these), or even the ethnographic academic studies that always seem to conclude that kids really like to "socialize."
In the book, three teenagers wage war on an out-of-control Homeland Security by employing crypto, open source, hardware hacking, and social engineering, all without seeming like the contrived movie characters who are always a little too glib, a little too knowledgeable. In fact reading the book on the 25th anniversary of War Games is fitting, for not since Broderick's everday geek have I seen such believable kid-hacker characters, and enjoyed so thoroughly the honest portrayal of self-discovery and confidence building that comes from twisting technology to tweak the system.
Update: The real world imitates art with kids hacking the MBTA, "arphids" and all...
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 12 months ago (Aug. 3, 2008)
When I first read "The Pragmatic Programmer" back in 2000, I remember being bowled over, not because there was any one brilliant insight, but because there were so many suggestions proposed by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt that succinctly described what I knew to be some of my better habits without really knowing why. It was almost as though they were reaching inside my brain and explaining things that I somehow understood without knowing why.
With what may come to be known as that book's sequel, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning," Andy Hunt does exactly that— reaches inside your brain to take you on a mystery tour of it, from theories about skill acquisition (the Dreyfus model), to explaining how insight "bubbles up," to suggesting how you might improve various cognitive facilities. I've just finished the "beta 7" version of the book (available as a PDF for $22, but don't worry, with these guys beta 0.01 is much better than most publishers's final product), and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to any fans of PragProg, and even to any non-programmer involved in any kind of intellectual work who is curious about how their wetware (brain) works under different circumstances.
One note: the book will be even less relevant to software engineer's direct tools than PragProg was (though that still didn't stop PragProg from being the best book written for software engineers since "The Unix Programming Environment"). Think of it instead as the famous lost manual to the superhero suit in the TV show Greatest American Hero— except that instead of being the instructions to a super-powered suit made by aliens from space, this book will serve the manual for something much more important— your brain.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 12 months ago (July 30, 2008)
Great op-ed piece in the Times today that argues the case for the FCC to get out of the pocket of the telco lobby to hopefully open up some spectrum.
While I agree that bandwidth may be as important to our emerging information economy as oil was to the industrial one, we'd do well to keep in mind that digital + wireless essentially means that in the long run there should be no scarcity of bandwidth, and that as such there is no natural way for carriers to form a cartel to control supply. Sure rolling out 3G and LTE/4G costs a lot of money in infrastructure up front, but these costs can be recouped in short order. More importantly, the semiconductor companies and Internet powerhouses (think Intel and Google) are well incented to find ways to make cheaper technologies like Wimax work, if only the government gets them the spectrum.
My favorite part of the piece: the title, OPEC 2.0, helps to really contextualize the issue of open spectrum to the regular Joe currently paying $4.30/gallon for gas.
Everyone appears to love my little Japanese friend Tengu which I received as a belated birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law. Essentially a Tengu is a USB-powered set of LEDs that make faces depending on the ambient noise. So when you play music, Tengu "sings along" with you (as he is doing in the picture here).
It's an interesting reaction people have to it; upon first hearing what it does, almost everyone says "that's it!?!" surprised by the fact that it needs to plug into a computer at all (which sadly it only uses for power). But after watching it for a little while, observers become entranced in trying to determine the pattern of its various facial expressions. It speaks volume not only to good toy design (from what I can discern from the packaging it is Japanese only) but to the power of our natural anthropomorphic tendencies. When we see what we recognize as vaguely human, we tend to bond with it at an emotional level, no matter how silly the device is.
Having seen the mesmerizing power of the Tengu, I now want someone to build a Tengu does something more useful with its host's networking capabilities. What about taking a page out of Ambient's products and showing a happy Tengu when the market is up and a sad one when it is down? Or better yet, what about combining data from the Internet with some sort of locally derived sensor data to provide context-relevant mood swings?
Perhaps this is a perfect Arduino physical computing project...
A couple of months ago my brother-in-law gave me an advanced copy of "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0," a "business history" of Web 2.0 by Businessweek reporter Sara Lacy that I promptly threw in the trunk of my car due to a) the fact that I don't like business books and b) because Lacy had just had quite a snafu at SXSW during an interview with Facebook's Zuckerberg.
Well this morning while unpacking a car full of kids at the beach, I realized I had nothing else to read and decided to give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend it heartily to anyone interested in the history of tech and business, and particularly anyone who cares about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
Lacy follows the genealogical tree from the dot-com boom into the Web 2.0 ecosystem and does a really good job of extracting insight from what must have been countless hours of interviews with founders, entrepreneurs, and executives. Among the better pearls of wisdom: the dot com bubble created a whole load of entrepreneur-friendly capital in the likes of Peter Thiel and his Founders' Fund let Web 2.0 entrepreneurs bypass the typical challenges of VC-based rounds of funding, and focus instead upon building early traction.
The best thing I can say for the book is that as a reporter, Lacy does a good job of portraying the characters she covers. Having met a bunch of these guys during the course of Tabblo (as potential advisors, investors, etc.), I was really struck by how well she "gets" what they are about, and how good of a job she does at telling apart the people who are in Silicon Valley to make money, those who are there to battle internal demons, and most importantly, those who go there to dent the world.
I've never been a huge fan of the term "live web," often used to signify all of the quasi-realtime communications streams that let people swarm and collaborate around particular issues. But it is in fact the combination of these plus Google that have made hacking on things much more interesting. The great collaborative outboard brain makes everything easier and better.
I remember exactly 10 years ago this summer discovering Linux, and more importantly, how because of the tech savvy communities around various parts of it, Linux made UNIX not suck anymore. If some byzantine feature got you tripped up, no matter how arcade, there were always loads of places to turn to for help, without counting Alta Vista and Google which were themselves magical oracles on all of these topics.
If you want a reminder of what it was like to say, deal with Solaris or Windows NT, have a look at what iPhone development is. Outside of some high gloss Apple documentation, and one paltry mailing list, you're stuck figuring it all out for yourself (which I think helps to explain why the current crop of AppStore apps are so mediocre in quality).
Come on Apple, don't go against the grain of the web...
Apparently clouds dissipate because of two primary reasons: because the air temperature rises or because the moisture in the cloud falls. When it comes to the metaphorical cloud that is Internet-scale computing, this past week seems to have given us both.
The temperature of the air started rising with the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G, and more importantly, Apple's foray into cloud services with its MobileMe productivity suite. Stumbling through scaling issues, synchronization problems, and general uptime challenges, the company started by two Steves under the "one man, one machine" mantra proved yet again that providing scalable server-based platforms is a whole different challenge from creating intuitive and edible interfaces and devices, and that maybeâ just maybeâ we ought to leave that work to the pros.
And just as all of us were turning MobileMe off, and reverting to our trusty old Gmail accounts, Google goes and shows us just how fast the moisture is dissipating with its most disappointing quarter to date. AdWordsâ the best model to date for subsidizing cloud infrastructureâ does not appear immune to general economic woes. To add insult to injury, some people are out declaring that software-as-service businesses have to "slog it out" to build sustainable advantage, and predictable revenue streams.
To all of this I say: meh. While Apple may never be a truly credible purveyor of cloud services (along with a host of other big tech companies including the one I work for), some infrastructure players will figure it outâ slog or no slogâ and help us transition to this next phase of computing. And for the business model hiccups? This is a 10 year transition at the very least, and and such it is marathon and not the kind of sprint that has yielded such great speculative financial bubbles.
Engadget's "International Launch Lineblog" reminds me of those hopelessly feel-good early 1970s/80s Coca-Cola commercials where the company would play that "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" song and show scenes of people from all over the world running in fields and smiling at babies. It's a pretty awesome cultural event when you think about itâ around the world today, loads of people from all over the world are going to be getting in line to get their own piece of the Apple magic.
On the other hand, it kind of makes me wonder whether it is only through such a consumerist activity that we can have shared cultural events these days. I guess buying stuff has taken over the role of religion and even media as the great cultural shared substrate?
Hmm, well between that and the low battery life, I'm not sure the iPhone 3G is for me...
I've held off writing this post for a while, mostly because I was afraid it would seem like too much inside baseball for me to talk about how photo sites (which Tabblo attempted to be a superset of) basically still suck almost a decade after the first one launched. But the combination of recent usability testing I attended with my own frustrations using Tabblo and Flickr have overflowed the dam of self-restraint, so here goes.
Three Major ways in which photo sharing sites still suck
Most photo sites are still not geared towards pleasing the most important user, the person giving you their valuable time to see yet another album of your kids doing X, Y, or Z. Why is it that the predominant model for consuming photos online is a contact sheet interface (a grid of X by Y photos) along with a clickable "large" version that is often way too small? Sometimes you might get a half decent slideshow too, though these are very un-webby, and after you've seen 2 of any one theme, you've seen them all.
It is interesting that back in the day when Tabblo could freely call itself a photo site, this is the reaction I'd get from people when I'd talk about this consumption interface challenge: 20% of users would get it right away but 80% of people would give me this "huh?!?" look which was meant to make me feel loony. Here is the example I'd use to escape from Loontown: imagine that you bought a copy of National Geographic but instead of the beautifully art directed layouts of the articles, you'd have all the text of the piece followed by a number of contact sheets of all of the photography followed by a page per photo of all of the individual pictures. How many issues would you subject yourself to before canceling the subscription?
Most photo sites don't have fast enough interfaces for the author, especially around photo organization/selection: Try dealing with a collection of 25,000 images to get all of the pictures of a family member for a birthday. The best of the desktop applications can barely do this (and those are the GPU accelerated ones) to say nothing of how far behind the websites are. And manual tagging is only going to take us so far as it is in effect one of many kludges that enable batch operations (a poor substitute for snappy direct manipulation and search).
On this particular challenge, I would have thought that we would have made more progress by now, but as it turns out, I think most people see the assets stored/created on a photo site as a read-only projection of their photo library which tends to live on their home computer. This allows users to leverage the storage/CPU of the local machine for the heavy lifting, and use the web for sharing and output fulfillment. Apple's iPhoto is perhaps the best example of this: books, cards, and calendars can be assembled 100% on the client out of the entire photo library, and manufactured through a set of partner services. This makes activities like collaborative editing and composition more difficult (though not impossible), and sharing is at best very vanilla on dot mac these days, but it may just be something we have to live with, especially because...
Upload of photos is still horrendously broken, and getting more so as image resolution increases. This is what made me think of this topic in the first place again. Watch a novice user uploading photos and you will get all sorts of understandable errors at the boundary of the desktop and web metaphors. They will drag pictures into the browser window and have them open locally. The will go looking on the website for their C: drive. And perhaps most alarming, often times they will not know how to find their images on the local filesystem in the first place (which points to how expired the desktop metaphor is). Watch an advanced user and you will literally see the hair falling out of their head as they deal with the challenge of sucking a watermellon through a straw (the physical equivalent of uploading 12MP images via a 300kbps asymmetric cable connection). While there are solutions to this problem (a software agent running on your PC uploading everything, wi-fi camera cards, etc.), most of them fall short due to intermittent connections and the challenge of organizing/finding photos once they are living online (see above).
Until we as an industry (camera makers, browser vendors, OS vendors, output vendors, etc.) fix these problems, photo sites are going to remain relegated to the backwater of 4x6 production while the rich hybrid solutions (of which only iPhoto really works) continue to take output share while not really advancing the state of photo sharing. It's a shame too because of how inherently social story telling via photos could be.
Good piece in a well-named InfoWorld blog, "Fatal Exception," on how all of this emphasis on richer UIs for web applications may be unwittingly forcing the web away from what made it great in the first place. Maybe it is the fact that I've been reading Zittrain's book this weekend about how our taste for glossy devices/experiences is causing us to unkonwingly eff up the generative (open) nature of the Internet (ironically, I am reading the book on my very closed Amazon Kindle), but with all of the Silverlight/Flex/GWT stuff landing inside our browsers these days, I tend to agree. Basta to the ever increasing richness of client applications inside the web browser.
Here is an example: there is a new web application called Flowgram that everyone keeps pointing to as the next twist on screencasting. Through a combination of Flash and URL refreshing, you can be taken on a tour of a set of "live" web pages that are clickable and whose embedded objects can be interacted with. Seems pretty cool right?
No, actually it is kind of annoying. Sometimes you just want to dive into the content at your own speed, in your own way and yet, from what I've seen of this seems all but impossible in Flowgram. Despite the fact that there is a timeline scubber thing you can use to jump around, the refreshes are far too slowâ far slower than it would be to just load the underlying sites. For instance, I have been looking forward to seeing/watching/reading a presentation on Facebook's photo-related infrastructure, but because I've only found it on Flowgram, I've abandoned it twice, probably never to return again.
The web is great because it is so lightweightâ let's try to make sure we don't throw that particular baby out with the bath water.
Tomorrow: why photo sharing sites still suck (including the one we built).
For the 4th of July I dedicated myself to Adam Greenfield's manifesto, Everyware, which argues that computing is about to disappear into every day objects that we will interact with without being conscious of the fact that they represent the post PC era of personal computing. The book is broken up into a set of "theses" that should really be called observations about how people behave in a world where every object is connected to the network and capable of serving as an input mechanism (sensor), a display mechanism (output), or both.
The best reference in the book is to a 1996 paper out of Xerox PARC on "calm computing" which basically argues that we will be able to deal with the information/data overload better in a world where we can interact with information/data via our regular contact with physical objects. Maybe, but only if these objects don't end up becoming the manifestations of Google AdWords 2.0, giving us an apocalyptic Minority Report-like future where every surface becomes a new opportunity for displaying an ad.
Everyware ends on a positive note by pointing out that we (as in regular every day hackers) are being given the tools to control our destinies through open source software, and more importantly open source hardware like the Arduino kits that are popping up all over the place. As folks like Jonathan Zittrain make the rounds warning us about losing control of our digital futures as we fall prey to the glossy experiences of the iPhone or the Xbox, it's good to remember that we can still assert our independence by voting with our tinkering.
When I bought my Macbook Air, I debated for about 20 seconds whether to spend the extra grand on the solid state drive. On the one hand it was the bleeding edge, and I've now come to realize that laptops last long enough and evolve fast enough to be worth spending the extra cash up front. What decided me against it was not saving $1,300 (though this helped), but what I call the VW Bug theory of technology purchasing.
When you are buying technology in an industry which is driven by mass market economics (which center around price/performance), it never pays to buy something off of a new branch on the evolutionary treeâ at least not in the first generations. This was the genius of the original 1960s VW bug; because it used tried and true car technologies, its economics were riding the tail end of the experience curve. Ditto for spinning hard drivesâ because a few manufacturers have made billions of them, they've been able to learn how to optimize all of the critical metrics: density of storage, speed of access, and power.
I was worried that the flash speed of access improvement wasn't going to be significant enough, but as it turns out according to Tom's Hardware this week (one of my favorite hardware review sites), SSD drives suck a lot more power out of your battery than you might have thought. In fact, a lot more than those moving platters.
This is not to say that eventually all notebook hard drives will not turn to flashâ I think they absolutely will. It's just that the first few generations of this technology will take a few black eyes. Maybe that's why Apple is now dropping the price of the Macbook Air.
This year at the D conference Michael Dell was asked whether he was worried that the shift towards cloud computing would affect his PC business. Despite not usually seeming like a visionary, Dell gave a great answer. He said that over the last 20 years, every time bandwidth increases, it was his observation that so did the need for processing power on both sides of the pipe, and that because of that, he felt pretty good about the future of his PC business.
Just look at the iPhone or the N95, two mobile phones that pack a tremendous amount of processing power per ounce of weight. Despite being even more suited a a class to offload work to servers in the cloud, smart phones as a category seem to be growing more powerful in their display technology (hardware accelerated video), processing technology (Intel Atom), and general peripherals (5MP cameras, GPSes). Not only are these devices being packed to the gills with more transistors than a mid 1990s PC, but developers are rushing to PC-like development environments like the iPhone's and Google's Android to take advantage of the additional horsepower instead of just writing web applications for the increasingly more powerful web browsers that come with these things.
And it is not just about local processing power; the latest issue of Wired has what will no doubt become a classic piece by Kevin Kelly on the emergent distributed 12-million-teraflop computer that all of our gizmos are getting wired up to make. In the piece, there is a great chart that quantifies the shipped quantities of various different devices with CPUs at their core: from PCs to DVRs, from cellphones to cameras.
Now everyone knows that there are roughly 3 times more cellphones than PCs in the world today, but the stat that I found more interesting is that there are 44 times more PCs out in the wild than servers. Though I realize that it is probably difficult to define what a "server" is in today's world of quad-core x86 machines, the magnitude of that difference brought to mind the delta between storage at the client tier (in offices, in people's homes, at school), and the storage "in the cloud" (i.e., S3).
Even if you assume that the typical x86 server has 13x more storage than the typical PC (a terabyte of addressable storage versus a measly 80GB because you have to factor in the installed base more for the PCs), you are still talking about something on the order of about 100 million petabytes for the client tier and less than a third of that for the cloud tier.
Anyone who has tried to back up a photo collection to a cloud service like .Mac, to say nothing of a music or video collections, knows this at a gut level. The challenges with storage in the client tier have always been consistent addressability and reliability, but in a replicated and distributed world (a la Kelly's megacomputer), we might just be able to make better use of all of those petabytes.
Processing and storage made the PC revolution the juggernaut that it has been. It is why we've come to expect the interactivity native application developers running into the smart phone space are clamoring for, and it's why the dark matter of today's computing environment is composed of billions of hard drives, powered and accessed in a massively distributed way.
It is going to be a while before the cloud catches up with that (datacenter economics and bandwidth being what they are), and until it does, we might all be careful of falling elephants.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 28, 2008)
These paper prototypes of popular websites (via Waxy Links) are absolutely charming. I've always loved drawing paper interfaces because of the way that they help to clarify thinking about what is important. On paper you never have the space (or in my case the skill) to get specific about the details that ultimately don't matter as much as the one or two key actions on each screen.
In fact, I've often wondered why there are no good computer-based prototyping toolsâ or at least ones that approximate the best qualities of paper. Using Photoshop to prototype interfaces is like using a jackhammer to make ice sculptures; with enough practice you can do it, but there has got to be a better way. Over the years, I've found some tools that help to wireframe (Visio, OmniGraffle), but all of these are still too cumbersome and provide little if any help in terms of interactivity. It is no wonder then that some in the web design community are advocating jumping straight to HTML from paper.
Here is a lazy web idea that might help experience designers: how about a software application that let folks scan in their paper prototypes and then manipulate them with simple drawing/animating tools via point and click. The result would look a lot like Ambrosia's SketchFighter 4000 game (in the best of circumstances) but it would give the prototyper both the speed of initial design that paper provides, and the ability to quickly iterate and animate on the computer. With a few fancy filters, one might even be able to start formalizing the digitized paper prototype by replacing the hand-drawn geometric shapes with real polygons.
Back in the 80s, Dan Bricklin developed "Dan Bricklin's Demo Program" for prototyping text-based applications. Though I've never seen it run, I understand from people that used it that the application developed a cult following among early PC application developers. This scanned paper prototypes application might just fill the same need for the web generation.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 27, 2008)
I love TED talks. If TED wanted to package them up and sell them as a premium cable channel, I would gladly pay for it (and watch more television as a result). One of the best talks I've seen there in recent time is Ben Zander's, "Classical music with shining eyes." Zander, for those that don't know is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and a part-time motivational speaker. In this 20 minute presentation, he mainly talks about the power of classical music; however, at some point around the 15 minute mark (don't skip ahead, it is worth it, especially if you like Chopin), he begins talking leadership in a very frank and novel way.
I am not one for "leadership kumbayasâ" frankly I find most of that stuff to be a crutch that people use ploddingly and to their organization's great detriment. But to see Zander talk about his key realization as a conductor, to experience him in full story-telling glory, is an experience that stands far above any MBA course I've ever been in. Go invest the 20 minutes!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 27, 2008)
Bill Gates is retiring today. Love him or hate him, everyone agrees that he's had an incredible impact on the technology industry by commoditizing the Intel architecture and driving terrific economies of scale over two decades of the PC's growth. Even those of us on the Mac get to benefit from his plan of putting a computer on every desk.
What is most amazing to me about Gates's career though is how he managed to stay at the helm of Microsoft as it grew from small languages/consulting shop to the world's biggest and most successful software company— all the while remaining very close to the nuts of bolts of the core products. Lots of people tell great stories about his intimate knowledge of all of his company's projects; my favorite tale though is the one Joel Spolsky recently wrote for Inc. Gates's zeroing in on the details of the date functions seems so at odds with almost every senior executive I run into at HP these days. If I had to guess, I say that most of these "implementation details" here are often stuck somewhere between a program manager and an offshore software team and certainly not anywhere near the top of the company.
Bye bye Bill— I'm not quite sure what's going to happen to Microsoft without you (though I'd bet on bad)— but you've had quite a ride!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 25, 2008)
GigaOm had a good review of HP's recent entry into the mini laptop category created by the Eee PC, the HP 2133. I was most intrigued by the premise of the post which was that this new category of laptop should be more than just a shrinky-dink version of a regular laptop, and instead be geared towards "cloud computer" activities.
Since I recently got one of these computers to use as a travel PC (to show I can fly the appropriate flag when in customer territory), my interest in this line of thinking was particularly piqued. Here are my thoughts on this notion of the 2133 as a cloud computer:
From a hardware perspective, the HP 2133 miniNote is a wonderful machine, especially given its low price point. It's built like a tank and feels like it could take much more of a beating than my relatively sturdy Macbook Air. Of the 3 HP laptops I've had since having joined the company, it is by far the most "designed" one, and despite whatever anyone says about the Via C7-M chip being JV, it is plenty fast. The screen is really teeny, but it is bright enough and sharp enough. And it's got plenty of ports.
But then there is software. The machine I got runs Windows XP which is snappy enough and stable enough to do real work. However it suffers from two major flaws: 1. it takes too long to boot, sleep, and resume, which in 2008 is sort of like a car without ABS, and 2. it provides zero support for bumping the type size up on applications and the OS at a global level.
Given the tiny screen, this last concern is what may kill the 2133 for you. Even if you have relatively fresh eyes, some of the more text rich applications are almost completely unusable over more than 10-15 minutes at a time (at least without enduring a headache). Outlook 2007 for instance, is just too small to read comfortably. The machine ships with an HP utility that lets you bump up some of the font sizes; however, in my experience it seems to affect only window titles and random dialogs. Maybe the Linux version is better, though I doubt it.
However this is one place where being a "cloud computer" really does help. Because all of the best web apps tend to respect font resizing in the browser correctly, and because Firefox 3 seems to remember when you change the default size the next time you visit the site, Gmail, Google Reader, and an handful of other Web 2.0 apps are really able look great on the machine's diminutive screen— quite usable in fact when paired with the machine's awesome keyboard. It was surprising to see web apps beating the native client— at least until you stop to think that the machine is running an 8 year old OS!
I don't know that I'm quite ready to give up the Air for the 2133, but I could definitely see using it for a subset of limited "cloud like" tasks.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 22, 2008)
Just finished reading Charles Stross's latest novel, Glasshouse (incidentally the first fictional work I've actually finished on my Kindle), which is a pretty entertaining sc-ifi novel. As usual with Stross, it is full of great science that makes you wonder what life will be like in a universe where we can back ourselves up, travel faster than light, and change physical bodies at will.
My favorite thing about this book though was the way in which the author throws in all of this running commentary about what life was like in the late 20th century (the glasshouse is a prison set in our time period), and specifically this particular bit on why the 21st century marked the beginning of a dark age before the "acceleration:"
"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For erasons of commercial advantage some of the largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quanitites of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.
This bit ought to be music to any of the digital pack rats that read this blog. A while ago I thought I had this problem licked— I'd periodically burn gigabytes of files to CD, then DVD, and finally the cloud (through services like Amazon's S3). Recently though I was looking for an 8 year-old tarball of some source code from a previous life (Memora) and spent 2 days searching only to find that it was useless because of how utterly impossible it would be to re-create the build environment.
As we throw away old technologies— be they build environments, old OSes, or even web services that have lost their way (I've been thinking a lot about this as it pertains to Flickr given the recent exodus), we might stop to think just what it would take for the kind of virtualization that would save us from Stross's dark ages.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 16, 2008)
Nick Carr has a thought-provoking piece in the latest issue of the Atlantic which argues that how we read and consume content online is changing the way that we think. The staccato nature of reading online, scanning text and skipping from link to link, Carr argues, causes us to turn away from "deep reading" to a fast food equivalentâ a grazing of contentâ that ultimately threatens our ability to think deeply on any particular matter. As he writes at the end of the piece:
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the authorâs words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
I worry less about the threat that all types of long form reading going awayâ it is far too seductive a means of escape for enough people not to stick around for a whileâ than I do about implication that we are jamming this new diet of content grazing in all facets of our lives. As content and communications blur together and our computers and devices encroach upon the previously empty white spaces of our daily routines, we may indeed be giving up a really valuable asset: the ability to think intensely and without distraction about particular issues which may not be what we are getting paid to think about.
Judging from the comments the piece has elicited, I imagine that quite a few people are beginning to feel this way, at least when it comes to our changing content consumption habits. I'm not ready to declare it a net-net bad thing, but it is worth remaining aware of the trend so that our ability to think doesn't suffer from a boiling frog dynamic (turn the temperature up slowly and the frog doesn't realize it is cooking alive).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 14, 2008)
Three lessons, from simplest to deepest:
1. That "live blogging" stuff requires the right template, and the blog format just wasn't right. Talking to folks that followed the live updates, it turns out that it's kind of annoying to see 140 character "title posts" which are paginated 5 at a time. Oh yeah, and Twitter still sucks; due the fact that their API was overwhelmed and I was using it to post there after posting to my blog, I got some really bad duplication problems.
2. Apple is finally getting the whole cloud thing, and more specifically, there are at least some folks there that have gotten the AJAX religion. I remember 3 companies ago being there to pitch one of their experience folks on a web-based music server, the summer before the iPod, and way before the current crop of really capable Javascript/DHTML engines. This designer, let's call him John, told us that apps in the browser were a passing fad, and an ugly one at that. And in a way, in 2001 they were, but these days Apple is dead serious about it (so much so that they are willing to spend cycles pushing their Javascript engine to the front of the pack). There were plenty of sessions related to web apps for Safari for deployment on both the Mac and the iPhone and little of that typical second class citizen feeling that Apple is known for (Java/Cocoa bridge anyone?)
3. That Apple couldn't achieve escape velocity and get out from under the carrier-runs-the-world model that mobile computing is subject to in the US sucksâ it sucks really bad. While people may be excited about the new $199 price tag, there are going to be so many old problems in going back to that model. The awesome iTunes activation model for the phone? Gone. The way you could just gift iPhones to spread the cult of Apple? Not without stealing the recipient's identity. The impunity with which you could trash your iPhone knowing that for $250 Apple would give you a new one? No mas. And perhaps most importantly, the critical missing functionality like IM or unfettered access to the 3G network? Not likely, not as long as they might potentially undermine some Guantanamoesque carrier business model.
This last one is the big take-away for me; in short it means that we're going back to a world where we rent our mobile computing experience and hope that our feudal overlords (the carriers) dole out the features at a decent enough rate.
As I was flying back, it occurred to me that two groups of folks who I've enjoyed lampooning over the last few months, the iPhone jailbreakers and the Android people, may actually be really important as we move towards evolving the mobile experience in spite of carrier interests. So please please please go hug one of these lovable rebels who live by their own rules ;)
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 8, 2008)
I am going out to California tomorrow and if all goes well, I'll be dropping by the keynote at WWDC to see what goodies Apple has in store for us. Last time I went to one of these, one of the most fun parts of the experience was trying to get the word out to friends and family back home in real timeâ the rabid Apple fansâ about what was being announced by Steve on stage. I quickly discovered that Wi-Fi is totally useless at these events (because everyone else is trying to do the same thing), and that the only truly reliable messaging layer was SMS which really meant that all I could do in terms of group broadcast was Twitter. However during Macworld back in January Twitter dropped 50-70% of my updates and duplicated a bunch of the ones that made it through, no doubt because everyone else sitting in Moscone was in the process of trying to do the same.
I am quickly discovering that Twitter just doesn't cut it, not only because of its scaling problems (especially around events like these), but because I've got a lot of people in my life that have no interest in joining Twitter, and even when they do, find it difficult to stay engaged. These folks do come to read this blog though, so tomorrow's experiment is going to be to use the Onda as a sort of Twitter stream.
To do this, I wired in a web service called Textmarks into this blog. Essentially Textmarks provides a neat gateway between SMS and http where you can send a text with a keyword that can fetch the contents of a URL for automated replies. My current plan is to text short messages that will then become blog post titles with no bodies. This should create a Twitter-like experience for anyone using an RSS reader, and for those that don't, a simple refresh of the main page of the blog ought to provide a running stream.
I thought about having each of the SMSes update just one blog entry to minimize the noise on my RSS feed, but it occurred to me that this would break the way that RSS is supposed to flow content around the network. Also, asking people to subscribe to an RSS feed tied to one blog post seems a little goofy.
Instead where I decided to get was in adding an email-to-post mechanism where I can send an email with a photo and some text to a particular Gmail account that then generates a blog entry with the picture parked at Amazon's S3 (I could have used Flickr but wanted to play around with S3). Most mainstream blogging platforms have email-to-blog so there is nothing really novel in this (we had a little-publicized feature at Tabblo that did something similar that I loved, however it didn't survive the move into HP's datacenter); what really struck me about the exercise though was how relatively simple it is to wire together all of these pieces. In a couple of hours it was easy to speak IMAP to Gmail to get my photo and text out, use S3's relatively straight-forward HTTP interface to deposit the image, get a fast and (hopefully) reliable Textmarks SMS-to-web bridge and composite the whole thing as an entry into my blog for general consumption. For distribution, RSS does the rest. As a nice bonus, I've also used the Twitter API to put pointers to the stuff that will go up here into my Twitter account, though in a non-blocking way as the service will most likely suffer another outage tomorrow.
In this great new world of the web, these experiments are relatively cheap. Most will fall way short of being useful, but I suspect that it is only by messing around with all of these pieces in a loosely coupled way that we'll bump into something really interesting.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (May 30, 2008)
Just came back from D6, the conference that Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, and the rest of the Dow Jones staff put on for the tech elite. While not as awesome as past Ds have been, D6 was still head and shoulders above almost anything else on the conference circuit. Though it was weird how both Apple and Google were noticeably absent from the official program (though most speakers brought both companies up several times), and the Yahoo-Microsoft thing got far too much airtime, there were some real standout speakersâ chief among them Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of Dow Jones who all but endorsed Obama and condemned the Alaskan elk within 5 minutes, and Melinda Gates, who was the perfect model of what large-scale modern philanthropy should be.
For me the best part about D is never rubbing shoulders with the titans of industry (I never know what to say), but the thought-provoking interview style sessions that Walt and Kara are able to bring to the stage. This year's thought-provoking highlight was Jeff Bezos talking about the Kindle, especially in contrast to all of the other media execs.
The Kindle, Bezos told the crowd, was built around the notion that long-form reading is actually incredibly valuable and therefore something that we need to shepherd into the digital age. He was very clear on this fact: books provide a different kind of intellectual engagement that all of these quick-hit blog posts/emails/tweets/etc., and as such we need to make sure that they find their footing and are able to flourish in the era of ubiquitous networks, many screens, and constant interruptions. He said that he thought it might take a decade to perfect, and that it was a big betâ but that Amazon was ready to sign up for it.
Contrast this position to Barry Diller, Howard Stringer, and the countless other media tycoons who spent their time on stage talking about how they were going to continue to slice and dice their content to fit smaller and smaller chunks of it on more devices and more networks. The term "webisode" (which I hate) came up several times as some sort of a bastardization of a television episode that is meant for consumption on a YouTube like experience.
This inexorable drive to cut content down to fill every last chunk of white space in the day is something that I am not sure is entirely a good thing. Witness the conference itself: I was as guilty as about 90% of the crowd in filling up the less engaging bits of sessions with iPhone browsing and emailing. In short we seem to be willing to lose our ability to focus, trading it against the adrenaline-induced high of constant content consumption. In this light, Bezos's fight on behalf of long-form content seems like one worth taking on.
In an ironic twist, part of the schwag given to use by the sponsors and partners of D included a fast-paced and funny novel called Hooked by Matt Richtel, which I happened to read on the way home. It is centered in the tech industry and Silicon Valley, and well worth the read. Without giving too much away, I will mention that the central twist is rooted in this very debate about attention, focus, and the crack that is constant content consumption.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 27, 2008)
It's easy to hate wireless carriers but in the world of Internet-connected smart devices, their investment in ubiquitous data networks is enviable, despite whatever the tree-hugging wifi-for-everyone folks might want to believe. Becauseâ as is always the case in the consumer spaceâ it comes back to user experience.
I wanted the wifi devices to win but mostly because I can't stand the notion of physical objects that we buy coming with a subscription. However, the Amazon Kindle (about which I will have loads more to say over the coming months) shows device manufacturers a potential path forward: lock down the user's ability to abuse the network and absorb the wholesale price the carrier must be charging in the price of the device. The Kindle benefits from an annuity business model of its own (as a user you have to keep buying books for it to remain useful) so Amazon is well positioned to take the risk of eating the subscription cost up front, but we are beginning to see other examples where device makers are willing to bundle the cost of the data subscription up front.
Take my favorite recent example as evidence that even a low bandwidth ubiquitous cell connection really makes all the difference. When the Chumby came out, I jumped at the chance to get one, mostly because it seemed like such a cool idea (open source hardware that was "Internet native" through its Wi-Fi radio). However, despite the promise of a blank screen that could be programmed with as many channels of content as I could imagine, there were product limitations that quickly reduced Wallace (you get to name your Chumby) to a screen about the local weather forecast sitting right above my bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, every couple of weeks, Wallace had a bad habit of falling off of the wireless network, partly because of the product's betaness (recent firmware upgrades have made this a little better), but indubitably also because my wireless network is just not that reliable.* And every time it did, I'd look up to see the weather only to be slapped by the Chumby equivalent of the BSOD, a message telling me that it had lost Internet connectivity.
When this happens to a laptop, it is a problem that gets fast attention due to the fact that there are often a bunch of other activities taking place that require a working Internet connection. Single purpose appliances don't have this luxury thoughâ they need to just work and when they don't, they are no longer appliances but IT hassles.
Enter the Brookstone Weather Wizard, made by a local company called Ambient Devices which has become an expert in low bandwidth Internet-connected devices. It is uglier, less capable, and much less cool than the Chumby, but at half the price, it does a brilliant job of serving its single function well. And best of all, it comes out of the box "networked" (the only change I had to make was to tell it that I was not in Providence but in Cambridge). In fact as a user, I don't even have to care how it gets its data which makes it such an easy replacement for all of the meteorological gizmos that came before it.
Interestingly enough, Ambient used to sell their devices along with a subscription, a model which ensured that an Ambient Orb that had been given to me at a conference became instantly dispensable the moment I wanted to display data I had to pay a recurring fee for.
If I was looking into getting into the MVNO business (the companies who buy wireless network access at wholesale to brand it for specific audiences, a la the now defunct Amp'd), I'd look into setting one up that could take some of this subscription risk out of the equation for manufacturers of devices by selling a embeddable radio with a given level of bandwidth for lifetime connectivity at one fixed fee. The economics of an MVNO might make this impossible, so perhaps it would have to be one of the core wireless providers that takes this approach. But as the mainstream consumer moves towards the higher speed 2.5G/3G wireless networks with their mobile phones, there might be an opportunity to flat price all of the old GPRS capacity that is being freed up. And for most appliances, this might be plenty of bandwidth.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 25, 2008)
Almost nine years ago to the day, Po Bronson wrote a New York Times Magazine cover piece on the "Insta-Company," about a bunch on young entrepreneurs hell bent on changing the world by... taking lots of venture capital and building a site for reviewing productsâ in 12 weeks no less! I had a bad feeling as I read the piece that the beginning of the end was near for the wave of innovation that the early commercialization of the web had spurred (in hindsight, it is interesting to see that there was still another year left to "party like it was 1999").
I had that same feeling today upon reading the blubbery cover piece/blog post/diary entry in today's Sunday magazine, "Exposed," about Emily Gould's sad confrontation with the realities of over-sharing, voyeurism, and brushes with infamy. Frankly, the only way I managed to make it to the end of the article was in a vain attempt to quell my incredulity at the fact that someone thought this navel gazer's drama was worthy of a Times Magazine cover (spoiler: redemption never comes).
Personal publishing and social media are really amazing enabling movements to put in the hands of everyone. There is great promise. But as early adopters, I think we are reaching the apex of this particular pendulum swing. For the last little while I've been mulling over the significance of trying to do something useful/good/meaningful with all that we've learned about social software over the last decade. In fact, just this week, I was delighted by Sarah Perez's well-composed ReadWrite piece, "How to Use Social Media for Social Change," whichâ while pointing to sort of obvious stuffâ still reminds us that there is a reason to be passionate about all of this stuff that goes beyond navel gazing and high school drama.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 25, 2008)
A semi-local yokel, Jonathan Zittrain (from Harvard's own Berkman center) made headlines a couple of weeks ago with the claim that all of the devices which we are most excited about (Blackberries, Xboxes, and even iPhones) are actually wrecking the fabric of what has made the Internet such a fantastic substrate for innovation: its openness. Making a distinction between what he calls "generative" platforms, where users can improve the basic function of the platform through open extension points like the Win32 API, and non-generative ones that are built on the back of closed service/appliance loops that only the vendor in charge can control, he argues that we consumers need to be careful of becoming too star-struck by our smart devices.
I prefer to think that these semi-closed architectures actually exist for a good reason (beyond vendor lock-in of course): to allow for the creation of user experiences which delighted instead of frustrate (think of the iPhone versus just about any smartphone built of the "generative" Windows Mobile platform). More importantly, even the most closed of vendors understand that it is imperative to build in check valves for openness into the appliances they make: this is why the iPod can be side-loaded with ripped MP3s and the iPhone can be extended with Safari-powered webapps. Imagine either device losing that capability. Even Amazon's much more closed Kindle platform (more below) accepts arbitrary content through an email endpoint, albeit one that exacts a $0.10 toll per article thanks to the need for Sprint to get paid.
And speaking of those pesky operators, this morning I read a piece by Joi Ito arguing that the mobile Internet may not be such a great place for innovation, mostly because it is controlled by a few carriers which flow profits into a small ecosystem of vendors, whereas on the open Internet, anyone can play. I agree that where network-related profits are concerned, this is the case; witness the rise of all of those 1990s style telecom equipment providers to see how tightly this particular profit pool can be controlled. But this control doesn't mean that network operators can avoid the open check valve existing in their offering as wellâ in fact, by the very nature of the service they provide, it is baked in. So long as we users can treat them like "power, ping, and pipe" providers (something which has only recently emerged in the US with number portability and unlimited data plans), I'd bet that they will soon find themselves in the unenviable position of the Comcasts and Verizons of fixed line broadband, competing mostly on speeds and feeds.
Call me an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing how in the era of Makers and blogs/wikis/online communities, any of these emerging Internet platforms and data services are likely to lead us to a point where suddenly discover ourselves trapped, incapable of finding the right extension points for what we might want our devices to do. And not only because of the current zeitgeist (we are now the Tivo generation for everything!)â rather, the main reason why I don't worry is because fundamentally the business models used by these platforms are aligned with what we users want: if Apple tries to screw us too badly with a closed iPhone ecosystem, we simply won't buy their devices (incidentally, this is the #1 reason people give me as to why they are not buying Kindles, because Amazon is exerting too much control). The unit of value is the device or service and as users we have to continue to open our wallets for them to continue to succeed. And fortunately for us, in most of cases today, unlike the 90s Microsoft monopoly, we've got credible choice.
If people want to be paranoid of vendors, I'd be more likely to point to places where the user and the business model get cross to each other, as in the case of the user need for data portability and the business of advertising in the recent case of Facebook screwing Google and its FriendConnect. Because they are fundamentally selling targeted advertising, Facebook is likely to do whatever it takes to keep their users' data siloed, and in the process it is the end user who loses. Today this is too abstract for most regular folks to really grasp (though Scott Karp's piece does an excellent job of laying out the key issues), but it is worth keeping a much closer eye on that the emerging connected device platforms.
In the meanwhile, just keep a close eye on those openness check valves.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 19, 2008)
An observant friend recently heard me on a tear about the surge in historical fiction and commented that my one of my favorite genres, science fiction, was nothing more than forward-looking historical fiction. While this did not cause me to run out to read The Other Boleyn Girl, it did make me wonder why I like scifi so much while having so little patience for the Victorian era. The answer I believe, comes down to the fact that science fiction paints a world that might be rather than one that was, giving us a glimpse into what is around the next corner.
But if this is the metric for success, the science fiction that is closerâ often not even called science fiction but other goofy names like "the techno thriller genre"â should appeal more to me. And indeed it often does so long as it doesn't suffer from the fact that it can get really tedious and boring. I remember first discovering the novels of Tom Clancy (which noone in their right mind would consider SF until you get into the military tech stuff he covers), only to be bored to tears by the fifth description of the classified radar system and the nth military acronym (Clancy should have worked at HP where the alphabet soup rages on).
I've just finished a book though which gets right to the core of what makes near term science fiction work really well; it is called Daemon and is written by Leinad Zeraus (more on that weird name later). I don't want to ruin the plot by writing about it here; suffice it to say that this is the best scifi/technothriller/whatever that I have read in a long time. The plot is spectacular, the characters are believable as hell, and best of all, the author starts from a landscape which is very much rooted in today's world and slowly brings in bits of the future in a way that is both believable and staves off the eventual Clancy-esque or Crichton-esque narration that ends up sounding like a parts list for what's hot in Popular Science this month.
During the first dot com boom, I ran into several folks who would brandish dog-eared copies of Snowcrash and talk about how the net was going to bring this world into being "very soon now." A decade later the world that Daemon paints to is much closer at hand. For instance (and this is the one plot spoiler): massively multiplayer online environments, GPS-based overlays into the physical world, hijacked servers, and private equity run amok all figure prominently in the plotâ and the way in which they each do is imminently believable.
A word on the strangely named Leinad Zeraus. It turns out that this is the pseudonym of Daniel Suarez, a DB consultant in the Valley who self-published the book through Amazon's Lightning Source partnership. Of course you can't tell any of this from the end-to-end experience: the book can be seen on Amazon and comes via Prime looking like a standard paperback, but according to a recent piece I read in Wired, Suarez and his wife published it and used all sorts of good Web 2.0 tactics to get the word out (getting a pseudonym with good Google juice, reaching out to A-list bloggers) after being turned down by a bunch of folks in the "conventional" channel.
William Gibson is right after all: the future is here; it's just not widely distributed.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 12, 2008)
For me, the power of YouTube has always been about one thing: being able to bookmark pieces of interesting mainstream content that could then be forwarded around in email. For every genius amateur video I've been sent, I've had 5 young Asian guitar virtuosos and 100 SNL skits, Simpsons scenes, or Daily Show interviews. Giving chunks for television permalinks seemed novel enough— the next step in the evolution of Tivo even— even if it wasn't the best thing since the web itself.
In fact I've always been rather sanguine on the prospects of embedded video on web pages (mostly because of the linear consumption challenges that come with any form of rich media). Recently though, I've seen two great uses for embedded video that have brought me back to the conclusion I came to after seeing the New York Times's annotated Obama speech: that video online is more about interface and context than it has ever been on any other screen.
The first, TimeTube, is a brilliant reworking of the standard online interface for consuming video that YouTube pioneered and everyone else copied. Recently I heard an entrepreneur defending all of the cloners of this interface because of the fact that "people are used to it now and find it familiar." However, it only takes 5 minutes of playing around with TimeTube to realize what bad interface designers the YouTube guys were, and how much more is possible when mixing links and videos.
I ran into the second example while performing surgery on my Macbook this weekend. It has now become a yearly event for me to switch out my laptop's hard drive (usually triggered by yet another amazing doubling in HD capacity at a given pricepoint), though I usually loathe the experience of coming to the end of a two hour wrestle with 5 extra screws and no idea of where I should have put them (I've done this now across 3 different laptop models with +/- 3 screws no matter how hard I try).
This year I decided to follow one of the videos that the nice folks from OWC put up for changing various Mac parts and the result was a neat case of the linearity of consumption of video actually helping by guiding me in realtime as I dissected and then reassembled the MacBook. I had to pause and rewind a little in a couple of places, but the overall process was much smoother than its ever been before, thanks to the power of being able to do it alongside my virtual repairman (in fact at one point he got a little stuck, I got a little ahead and somehow managed to miss disconnecting some important cable leading to the laptop's flux capacitor).
I used to think that the bright future of all online video would come when computers could extract meaning from video files and present us with indexes that let us randomly seek to the relevant points, but this week I was again struck by how much usefulness we can still get out of proper contextualization and solid interface design. Go look at TimeTube and think about how this kind of an interface for video navigation could be used to teach more important things than hard drive replacement if you have any doubts.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 4, 2008)
My old office was above a gas station, in a repurposed low income building where some zoning genius realized that living right above gas tanks was not a life-prolonguing move. There were free roaming mice and occasionally there were water issues. But we had distinct working spaces, large common areas, and the definite feel that it was uniquely ours.
I now work in one of HP's east coast facilities, specifically a cube inside the great human veal farm that is at section 18.4 of MRO1, floor 2. Outside of some tweaks that the local real estate crew made on our behalf last year, it's cubesville as far as the eye can see. And from what I've been able to gather from other folks at other big cos, it is pretty much standard for the whole tech industry. This real estate philosophy has accelerated the shift to "remote working" that most of the half million or so workers at HP, IBM, Intel, etc. are taking on to avoid shrinking veal pens (some other genius recently decided that 8x8 feet is spacious and that 6x6 is just fine and that much more affordable).
I paint this bleak picture not to complain, but as a introduction to a great short interview with Brad Bird of Pixar which I came across on GigaOm this weekend. In enumerating the "lessons for fostering innovation," number 6 stuck with me:
Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, youâll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front thatâs like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaiiâ¦John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then thereâs our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the centerâwhich initially drove us crazyâso that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
It strikes me that he is spot on, and that for any creative endeavor the constant physical contact is paramount. However, from what I've learned over this last year, the veal farm model of big companies hurts in two distinct ways: first, the packing of people into tight spaces usually extends into miserable common spaces or "efficient" decisions made around bathroom/kitchen locations that are just not conducive to the right type of bumping into each other. More importantly though, making real estate a cost-center to be managed as non-value add creates such a miserable environment that "working from home" becomes a very attractive alternative. And no matter what telecommuting technologies you favor, like porn, the 2d version is never as good as the real thing.
Pour in a little "offshore fever" and its hard to see how you get back to innovation fueled by creativity in these environs.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 27, 2008)
I love the premise of Clay Shirky's Web 2.0 talk this year, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." Just as gin helped the Victorians deal with the wrenching changes of the industrial revolution, according to Shirky, the modern-day sitcom has helped us deal with the "cognitive surplus" created by rise in free time that 1st worlders benefited from during the second half of the 20th century. It's a great polemic which argues that the participatory nature of the Internet enables us to come out of the content-consumption binge of 20th century television because even if we're blogging about our cats and navels, creating content is inherently more valuable than simply consuming it.
Obviously the idea that any type of content creation is better than simple consumption is a normative judgement. It is one though that lay beneath the foundation of what Tabblo was meant to be from the start, so it is near and dear to my heart. To this day, at the office we argue the merits of Clay's argument on a fairly regular basis, with me most frequently on the side of cat blogs over Desperate Housewives.
That said, I think his attack on "consumption-only" media as just giant suckers of the cognitive surplus is a little harsh. For instance, I'm surprised that Shirky doesn't mention Steven Johnson's wonderful book "Everything Bad Is Good for You" and its analysis of how the best television shows are actually helping to train a whole generation of minds in new ways of coping with ever-increasing complexity of the world.
Similarly, the story of the four year old at the end of the talk who walks around to the back of the screen to "find the mouse" because she expects all media to be interactive struck me as too contrived. As the father of two young boys that straddle the age of his subject (6 and 3), and who are currently obsessed with everything Star Wars, I have a different perspective. Both boys consume Star Wars in at least five different media formats: the original movies, the Lego Star Wars Nintendo DS saga, the Star Wars Guide to Galaxy popup books, actual Star Wars Legos to build and play act, and the games we make up to pass the time in the car. And even at such young ages they have a very nuanced view of when they are supposed to interact and to what degreeâ but most importantly, they also know when to sit back and just drink in the world that George Lucas has created for them.
Finally, the Star Wars example is also one that spans beyond small children for the following reason: I would be willing to bet that if you took the total amount of "user generated content" that is about, based on, a parody of, etc. the Star Wars Universe and divided it by the total amount of user generated content, you would end up with a meaningful fraction. Which is exactly why we'll always need great story tellers and the mediums which let them shine if we are to take advantage of this supposed cognitive surplus as creators and sharers.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 26, 2008)
Could be because I haven't seen a cloud in the sky all week, and it could be because Google was totally inaccessible all morning (at least from Jamaica), but I've got this cloud computing thing on the brain these days. If you really believe that it is a tectonic shift, and that no company will be able to ignore it, read on for my take on the 3 types of cloud efforts, and a couple of associated opportunties:
Core-to-DNA: This is where Amazon and Google fall today. Building out scalable, flexible infrastructure that is up 99.x% of the time is so core to what they do that they just won't be able not to take advantage of the shift in computing. Whether Amazon's more flexible or Google's more prescriptive approach wins the majority of the mindshare is less interesting than the fact that you will always be able to count on these guys' delivering solid solutions. The business opportunity here will be in providing a layer of portability across them so that no one gets vendor lock-in syndrome.
Must-have-for-strategy: Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo are good examples of this one. Each has a pole position in some previously dominant platform, each knows they have to move in this direction, but because it is not core to who they are, they're not likely to execute well, at first anyway. No matter though, because the folks with deep pockets (Microsoft, IBM) will spend whatever it takes to bring the B/B+ offerings to market. They may not scale as efficiently, and they may not be as reliable, but these guys will find some market-power way of gaining meaningful traction.
Wannabes: EMC, HP, big banks, and other utilities fall in this last bucket. These are the companies that know that this cloud shift is a big deal, have some sort of vested interest in being able to play in this domain, perhaps even have a starting move, but are quite simply finding that "clouds is hard!" As a result some will stay (if it is critical to their survival), some will outsource, and some will fall out clouds (if they can afford to ignore it). For the time being however, they will all continue to half-execute, confusing endusers and keeping developers on their toes. Naturally, the near term business opportunity here is the best, as all of these guys will need software to try to keep their clouds running (GigaOm has a nice post of what some of this software might want to target as initial opportunities).
I have no doubt that there will be plenty of movement from tier 3 to tier 2 and backâ what I am less clear about is who, if anyone, will be able to move to tier 1 and join Google and Amazon in what will be a very lucrative market opportunity.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 24, 2008)
As much as I've come to believe that Paul Graham has now sucked in too much of his own exhaust to write with as much insight as he used to, his latest essay on "being good" as a directing principle for startups has stuck with me like a sharp chicken bone at a barbecue. At first I wanted to dismiss it, thinking of cases like the OLPC debacle, where people's politics and grand visions for making the world a better place get the best of them. But as I let the essay fester, it began to dawn on me that Paul's "doing good" is just another way of saying that you need to have a bigger mission than just flipping to Google, or even just making yet another photo book configurator.
At Tabblo we had this: as Eric (our customer guy) reminded me recently, if you look through our wiki (now buried behind layers of HP VPN goodness), you'll see a number of pages that talk about making people more creative in their self-expression, making them better story-tellers despite the normalcy of their everyday lives. Helping the unwitting blogger, empowering the casual publisher, and all of that other jazz we'd talk about at lunch, late at night, and during those moments when we'd feel like big bad world was crushing us.
But lately I've also been thinking about the fact that all of Web 2.0 has been geared towards enhancing self-expression: from Flickr to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter, the whole ride has been about letting people create content that they can (in the best of cases) use as a vector for connecting to other people doing exactly the same thing. In its best days Tabblo did this well because, after all, part of making people feel like creative story-tellers was finding them an audience who was willing to listen and to engage.
As Adam Green has recently pointed out however, greasing the skids of self-expression is just one of the many ways in which the Internet and what we build with/for it can help people. While it is a very good thing that we've all gorged on this particular goal over the last 5 years, the time may be upon us to start thinking about the stuff that is useful and that can actually make a positive impact in the way that everyday lives are being led throughout the world. After all, lord knows we've got enough crises to which we can apply our entrepreneurial energies.
For my part, I've spent quite a bit of time as of late thinking about online group formation and why it is that even on the most "modern" of sites, it still feels so incredibly encumbered, especially when you compare it to the way groups form in the real world. I'm tired of "friending" people, I don't want to "follow" them, and I really could care less about signing up for another "Evite-killer." But I do know that the seeming ease with we can coalesce around a particular task for fun, profit, or just to do good at school, at work, or within our communities is something that still needs a lot of work in the virtual.
This group-forming detour aside, the guys mentioned above may be rightâ it's time to do something useful, something good and to leave the self-expression behind for a little while.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 23, 2008)
Not much stuck with me from my days at business school, but one of the few things that did was from this wacky book called "The Goal" about manufacturing optimization. In it, the author uses a boy scout troop, and more specifically a fat kid named Herbie, to make the point that in most cases a system is only as efficient as its least efficient component, and that as such, finding this constraint and being obsessive about how to loosen it tends to yield the best results. Pretty obvious I realize, but over the years I've found that it is a great way to think about emerging technologies and new opportunities.
Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off of Live Mesh, a combination platform/service to sync files and application across all manner of devices. It looks like an interesting project, especially because it seems to leverage some form of feed syndication for its transport layer. But apparently it's more than just a project: it is the grand vision of Ray Ozzie and has sucked up about 2 years and 100 people to get to release (which reminds me of Ozzie's previous Project Groove a.k.a Lotus Notes 2.0 which took serious resources to get to sync files between PCs). Despite it being tiny by Microsoft standards, feeding all of those people for all of that time to get file and application preference sync seems a bit excessive to me.
More importantly, are we really at the point where the world now needs Lotus Notes 3.0? Let's see: 1. devices are proliferating, with smartphones leading the pack... check. 2. More and more personal computing is taking place in "the cloud" on websites like Facebook and Gmail... check. 3. There is still a lot of data being locked into the local hard drives of millions of PC users... check. 4. What we are all dying for is a way to sync all of this stuff so that we can stop thinking about desktop or cloud and seamlessly carry on our personal computing tasks from any device anywhere...really?
Back to Herbie the fat kid and the theory of constraints. Where is it that we are really suffering today? Is it in new protocols to sync data across devices? It seems to me that everyone and their mother is capable of designing sync protocols, and that more importantly, Internet pioneers solved this one even before the days of Lotus 1.0. Instead, there seem to be three clear places where we are currently suffering from constraints that might make for "big play" business opportunities: 1. we never have enough bandwidth in enough places (whether it is cable, DSL, cellular, etc.), 2. we don't yet seem to know how to economically store enough stuff in the cloud, and 3. in the case of portable devices, we never have enough power efficiency.
But more sync protocols? Hybrid platform/services that require buying into one vendor's silo? At best, these things seem to me to be band-aids that are trying to get us around some of these constraints instead of through them.
Interestingly enough, normally M&A-allergic Apple today announced the acquisition of PA Semi, a chip company that focuses exclusively on power management in CPUs, seemingly to address constraint #3 in their iPhone platform.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 22, 2008)
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is the media's favorite love/hate boy, vacillating between genius to dolt as his stock price see-saws with the collective effervescence of the Internet's potential. However, it can not be denied that for the last 10 years he's charted a really exciting course in the development of three major platforms: the web as storefront (Amazon.com), the web as underlying fabric for computing (EC2/S3, etc.), and the web/device ecosystem for consuming content (Kindle). This month he seems to be on top again, with great articles in Businessweek and Wired describing both the company's ability to innovate and its cloud computing initiative.
For those of us now familiar with the way big tech companies think, the best quote is one he gives Businessweek on how to drive innovation:
Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off? A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do thatâwe don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore.
If the last year of HP life has taught me anything on this score, it is that this skills-vs-customer-needs issue is the club that anyone who interested in protecting fiefdoms will use to kill innovative but risky ideas. It has many guises, from "we don't know anything about X," to "how could we possibly get X to Y scale," but at the end of the day it ends up feeling like the same thing: "we're already good at X so why don't we do X+incremental instead of something totally new!" Fortunately, there are ways of mitigating this: buy new skills, bring in outsiders, empower the mavericks, realize that X is going away and freak outâ but all of these take time and don't come without pain.
That said, all of this customer-focus goodness also strikes me as a bit glib and this week's Amazon media coverage of the cloud computing initiatives points to why: when Amazon started S3/EC2, there was no way that there were customers clamoring for what they've built. No one came to the front door saying "wow, you guys are at 10% utilization, wouldn't it be cool if you could rent me some virtual servers?" and yet, much in the same way Apple has done time and time again, Bezos & crew were able to see evolving trends coalescing into a solution they thought customers would want.
I'm all for listening to the customer, and I'm certainly all for thinking like the customer, but it's important to realize thatâ at least in technologyâ there is something at the moment of initial creation that requires creative insight in a way that listening to what your customers want just doesn't allow. Something about skating to where the puck is going to be comes to mind...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 21, 2008)
While the embedded video clip has become as common as the animated GIF, littering webpages with colorful bits of video that help to make a point or add color to a blog post. Unlike text however, most rich media suffers from a the linear consumption problem; that is, if what you are doing is scanning quickly, the various bits of rich media become speedbumps in the path of grazing the underlying content. In some cases, the video is really worth stopping for, but in most you end up feeling like you want those 3 minutes back in your life.
For a while now I've thought that this proliferation of linearly consumed media would mean that rich recommendation systems were going to be making a comeback (hello collaborative filters!), but in order to do so, they'll actually have to work (a dubious proposition), and more importantly, we'll need to find a sub-URL way to indicate ratings in a open way that can be used as input by the various recommendation algorithms.
Another approach which I've recently seen used to great success is the mixing of the rich media with solid scannable navigation aids and pointers into timecodes in the video, so that the interested user can quickly skip around. Much to my surprise, it was the New York Times that first showed me the power of this approach with their "live transcript" of the Obama speech on race. Having a transcript that scrolls along in sync to the video is such a simple thing to do, but makes such a huge difference in lowering the impedance mismatch between the text-heavy web and various rich media formats.
Another great example is being built by a startup called Omnisio which allows for the annotation of presentations (a frequent subject of the embedded video clips I come across), along with the slides the presenter is using. They've currently got a bunch of annoying user-commenting features but once you shut those off (from the user control panel), the resulting experience makes watching presentations 100x more enjoyable and efficient.
Just another lesson in how sometimes the simple solution, well executed, can yield great results.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 8, 2008)
I'm gonna be writing about Google's AppEngine for a while as it strikes me as one of the most interesting moves in the evolution of the web-as-platform that we've seen in quite a while. So let me get the boring stuff out of the way first...
A couple of years ago when Tabblo was a struggling startup in need of any and all distribution, I visited a senior executive at Yahoo who supposedly had a nose for new and interesting personal publishing applications. Our hour together quickly devolved into him trying to convince me that we should abandon our own user authentication system for Yahoo's recently announced browser based authentication. As he pitched and I listened all I could think was: yeah right, and what happens when one of your competitors is interested in doing a deal with us?
These things shouldn't matter when considering platform-level servicesâ after all, very little of Tabblo's special sauce came from the way we authenticated users (except for maybe some of those "special" security holes). The reality though is that when what you're building is intertwined with a emergent business model, these platform decisions are just as much politically driven as they are technically motivated.
And as Google joins Amazon in racing to provide web developers with critical bits of cloud infrastructure, we're about to see politics come to the fore again. Fifteen years ago, the question was: are you writing for Mac or PC? Today it is: are you writing in Rails, PHP, or Django? 5 years from now it will be: are you on Amazon's cloud or Google's?
Dave Winer was the first to point out that Google's move to open its platform to developers was a smart tactic to grease the skids for acquired startupsâ after all, if you are already running on the Google cloud, assimilation post acquisition is an easy task. And trust me, on a week when we're struggling to move just the hardware from Boston to Austin to get more compliant with HP's IT infrastructure, I can really appreciate this point.
But ultimately I think it's wrong if only because it seems to me that Google's acquisitive binge may be coming to a hiatus of indeterminate length due to maturity of its own business and greater macroeconomic forces. When looked at it from this perspective, AppEngine makes even more sense: why buy the pageviews outright when you can just toll them? All of those great arguments about long-tail application notwithstanding, letting others take the product risk while they ride on the back of your platform seems to be a much better bet to make.
And by the way, as far as platforms go, this one feels like a winner to me, even after only 30 minutes of perusing the SDK and docs. Unless Amazon moves quickly to integrate its own stack, S3/EC2/SimpleDB is going to feel like DOS in Google's Windows world. The latter's integration of the stateless webapp model, its own super scalable persistence layer, and a number of great open source pieces of infrastructure (way to use Guido guys!) possesses an elegance which maybe only engineers will appreciate short-term, but which is likely to pay off in terms of the stuff folks are going to build on top of it.
Again, these guys seems to get being along the grain of the web.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 7, 2008)
My love affair with site specific browsers has ended up a casualty of its confrontation with reality. As TechCrunch is getting ready to spin up the notion of Desktop/Web hybrid applications as the "New Old Thing," I figured it was time to point out the big hole that I did not realize until I started playing: managing security can really get you.
My interest in SSBs was borne out of two recent events: 1. that at HP there are now lots of people looking at this question of the Next Big Platform for application development and 2. that in my time here, I've also been forced to abandon Mail.app/IMAP for Gmail on the web due to all sorts of Firewall/IT complications and I've gotten tired of not having better desktop integration (drag-and-drop attachments, Ctrl-N for new messages, etc.). Figuring that I might be able both of these things from something like a Greasemonkey-enhanced Gmail, I started playing with Firefox 3 but quickly moved to Fluid due to the fact that Firefox was running like a resource pig on my Macbook. One of the apps mentioned in the TechCrunch piece cited above, Fluid does a great job of integrating a bunch of open source projects, specifically Webkit (great renderer), GreaseKit (Greasemonkey for Webkit), and Growl (desktop-level notifications). Together, I was hoping these three might let me get my drag-and-drop and keyboard shortcuts back. Or at the very least, give me a glimpse of the future of the desktop/web integration nirvana that everyone keeps theorizing about.
Unfortunately the black magic of this type of integration completely sidesteps the fact that you can quickly open up security holes worthy of trucks being driven through, especially around providing desktop-level Javascript access to the execution context of externally loaded Javascripts. In fact, even in the early days of Greasemonkey this was obvious to folks brighter than I and as a result, a whole re-architecture of the way Greasemonkey injects the local context into running web pages was needed. In the case of Greasekit however, the author felt it wiser just to pull out all of the GM_ objects that provide some of the more powerful features something that Fluid suffers as a result of.
Some of these issues can be overcome but an early brush with a big old security hole (that would give a malicious script access to my entire filesystem) got me back to thinking that we might want to wait to see how some of the big boys solve these problems. Because at least they have people whose jobs depend on not opening up huge security holes (then again, Microsoft has proven that this doesn't make a huge difference in the end).
So the romance is gone for the SSBsâ at least until we a better handle on how to properly implement a security model that still exposes us to the cool guts at the intersection of the desktop and the web.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 3, 2008)
I had a wonderful time last night with Daniel Pink's new book, "The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need," not because I was looking for career advice, but because the book is written as a manga, a form of comic book popular in Japan for all sorts of ages and audiences. Apparently the author spent some time in Japan last year studying the manga industry out of which came a great Wired article that touched on some interesting points about copyright as well as the appeal of the art form in Japan.
The actual advice is very motherhood and Apple pieâ don't have a plan, focus on what you are good at, focus outward instead of inward, work really hard, make smart mistakes, and try to leave a markâ but it is the story-telling that really stands out. The use of the visuals make the points of the book much more memorable (for instance, the 6 "principles" I listed above came completely from memory despite having ready this quickly late last night) and the subtle interplay between the details of art and the side comments make the overall experience really compelling.
I've long been a fan of well-written and drawn comic books. Back in the day Herge was my first English teacher, as I would take my brother's Spanish version Adventures of Tintin and read them side-by-side with my English paperback ones, thus learning English "one bubble at a time" ("blistering barnacles!" was an early favorite way to ask for things). Much later I discovered Alan Moore's incredible Watchmen (source for the best mashup ever seen here in this picture) and was absolutely blown away by how rich a story could be told in the graphic novel format (though at that critical pubescent time in my life, the prospect of getting near the opposite sex required that I read it tucked inside of my biology textbook).
And perhaps the biggest testament to the art of comics was that, back at day zero of Tabblo while I was researching what we knew about visual story-telling, my friend Jerry recommended Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," a wonderful book which I have referred to often over the last few years.
Even if the pundits are right and the future of the Internet is about ever richer forms of media (video, 3D worlds, etc.), Johnny Bunko is a good reminder of how much we still could learn from an old and mature art form.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 28, 2008)
I attended one of Scott'sNantucket Conference dinners last night to chat on a panel about how Boston tech companies can get better at going after the consumer and thoroughly enjoyed the distinctively hardware-focused crowd that Scott assembled (present company excluded).
As the web becomes more pervasive in everyone's lives, it is hard to imagine that our main interface to it will be governed by laptops and mobile phones, which is why there are a small group of us who've grown up on the web who believe that the next generation of successful consumer startups will be forged at the intersection of hardware, software, and services. Of course this statement is anathema to today's VCs who hear the word hardware and think of the millions of dollars that they would have to invest to get a product with the fit and finish of an iPhone. In reality though, looking at it from this perspective is like looking at the enterprise storage startups with EMC as the yardstick, or the semantic search startups from the perspective of Google. Every jungle has its own 800lb gorilla and it's important not to assume that just because you've got hardware involved you can't be a small nimble monkey.
Witness Bug Labs. Or even the Arduino community effort. On the panel last night, the highlight for me was Carl Yankowski, CEO of Ambient Devices and former senior exec from just about every company that's ever wrapped plastic around a chip. When I asked the panel how being in the hardware business with its relatively long product lead times, they could ever hope to achieve the same tight feedback loop that you get in building webapps, he told me that in his view hardware and software development had gotten to parity in terms of time-to-market, capital investment, etc.
While this may be hard to believe in products as complex as the iPhone, with Carl's current products at Ambient, this fast pace can be a reality. In the picture, he is holding an umbrella whose flashing LEDs communicate Accuweather information about the chance of likely precipitation (you can't see it from the picture but it was blinking at Cylon speeds last night).
The simplicity (or "dedicated purpose") of these products really does point the way forward for injecting network intelligence into things beyond the three primary screens in our lives (the PC, the TV, and the mobile). The elusive hunt for a generic "4th screen" on the part of investors and entrepreneurs seems to yield a number of dumb photo frame investments (trust me we see them when they run out of cash and want to be bought), or at best, products that are fundamentally flawed in their attempt at flexibility (witness the Chumby).
To borrow another one of Carl's insights last night: it's about wrapping hardware around individual applications (email, weather, sports scores, etc.) if what you are looking for is mass-market traction. To this point, I enjoyed hearing his stories about his time at Palm and particularly some of these hardware-wrapped applications that didn't see the light of day. It reminded me that there is indeed tons of opportunity to wrap a few more applications with net-intelligent hardware.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 27, 2008)
Almost one year in, one of the biggest surprises about my new execujob is how little I've come to like the senior "technology architecture & strategy" discussions that I'm invited to sit in on. I had originally thought that being at the biggest tech company in the world would provide some unique perspective on the hot topics of the day (cloud computing, green computing, the semantic web, the blurring of the desktop and the web) that you wouldn't get out in the wild. In reality all I've done is develop an ability to breathe in really shallow atmosphere situations, as most of these discussions take place at such high altitude that I've taken to bringing Kleenex in order to stem the nosebleeds.
Naturally one of the hottest topics these days is the definition of the runtime for the next generation of Internet applications. With Microsoft and Adobe and their vendor sports death match (Silverlight versus AIR) fueling most of the recent debate, and Google/Yahoo/everyone else who matters looking to get more life out of the heavy server/light browser architecture that has become predominant over the last 10 years, it should actually be an interesting discussion.
But alas at 100,000 feet, all of the platform tradeoffs look like small dots in the distance. Everyone's got their favorite example: Microsoft is pushing the whole rich interactivity concept with their zoomable Hard Rock demo (and upcoming Olympics Silverlight-based coverage), and just today Adobe has entered their canonical example into the ring with Photoshop Express. I'm personally much more interested in every day applications that regular folks have gotten used to compromising on, either in their desktop version, or in their browser-based one. Apps like: email, instant messaging, or even word processing.
When considering the web versions of these guys, everyone gravitates towards the offline story because that is the place where the current generation of web-based applications falls down most dramatically. However, with every browser vendor embedding SQLite and efforts like Google Gears well underway, and with the ever expanding reach of the network into every offline nook and cranny, it is unlikely that this will remain a problem for much longer.
Where there tradeoffs get more interesting however, is when it comes to desktop integration. It is ridiculous that 24 years into the evolution of the GUI, the browser makes us take a step back when it comes to simple things like uploading files to a web service or slightly more ambitious ones like integrating across applications. Yet that is exactly where we find ourselves today.
To see how much I missed proper desktop integration in my everyday consumption of one of these apps (Gmail), I recently downloaded a $25 OS X program called Mailplane which puts a very thin rich client wrapper around the Gmail experience. Ideally this is the kind of thing that Google itself could build with something like AIR or Silverlight but while those guys take their time getting to the useful applications (instead of the eye-catching ones), I figured I would skip to the blended desktop/web future by tinkering with Mailplane.
My conclusion (after two weeks): integration really does make for a much better experience. Here are the things that Mailplane does that make me feel happier:
1. All of the standard keyboard shortcuts work as you would expect (i.e., command-N gives me a new message) 2. Inter-application stuff works as expected as well (i.e., "Mail this link" opens a new message in Mailplane with the link in the body) 3. Notification works: on OS X, the incredibly useful Growl notification system can show incoming/outgoing messages like Outlook does along with the icon in the Dock showing the number of new messages) 4. File attachment works as well: unlike the goofy behavior that most web browsers implement when you drop a file on them (to open said file), dropping a file into Mailplane results in it being attached to the outgoing email. This is a huge deal, especially as we rely more on apps and less on the Finder/Explorer to wrangle our data.
There are two downsides to Mailplane. First, because it spins up a separate process with a browser in it (an embedded version of Webkit), it does consume RAM galore, especially in an AJAX-heavy webapp like Gmail). More importantly however, it is a traditional desktop application which means that in this case you have to pay ($25 per seat seems a bit steep in today's world) and that your app preferences are ghettoed in the client computer that you originally installed it on. Ideally, the rich runtimes would help to solve both of these problems.
While researching whether there might be something better out there that might address some of these shortcomings, I ran into this Mozilla Prism inspired project, Fluid, which allows you to create site-specific browsers that approach some of the same functionality that Mailplane provides (through the embedded Greasemonkey functionality). As I played with this "Site Specific Browser" approach however, I found that I wasn't getting enough of 1-4 to make it any better than keeping these webapps in separate tabs.
Here's what I'd love to author of Fluid to do (or some other such force out there on the Lazy Web): wrap a Javascript API around each of my points above so that if a website (or even a user via the built in Greasemonkey functionality) wanted to implement notifications or file uploads or whatever, it would be as easy as testing for the presence of the objects in Javascript and writing to their Javascript API. With a little luck, and a Windows version, you might get some serious traction with a project like this.
I first heard about this custom browser approach when Flock (remember the "social browser") first launched a couple of years ago and found it utterly idiotic that someone might replace their browser with one of these tweaked out custom jobs. But I've got to admit that using Mailplane has made me reconsider.
Or maybe it's just all of that lack of oxygen...
Update: It turns out that Fluid is making nice progress to exactly what I was asking for already as you can see from their developer page. The big missing feature for me at this point is webapps being able to register for keyboard commands (think command-N for new Message not new instance of Gmail).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 25, 2008)
Turns out that if you mess around at all with dynamic web applications on the iPhone, you will suck its battery dry faster than you can hum the little do-da-dee song that Apple plays on the commercials. Like a bunch of other misguided folks that come from the world of watt-sucking laptops and servers, I have been thinking that this has to do with the use of XMLHttpRequest to poll for new content. But as I learned tonight from a clueful engineer at the Boston Momo event (Mobile Monday), a gathering of folks of all stripes interested in mobile, it turns out that the using the radio to send/receive IP packets is relatively cheap from a power perspective, especially when compared to running the CPU at Safari-induced speeds or even keeping the display on for prolonged periods of time.
That alone was worth the trip to Momo, especially because in the aftermath of Apple launching the SDK, there seem to be loads of folks commenting on the lack of background processing for user-developed applications (supposedly the big Achilles heel to sanctioned development for the iPhone) in only semi-informed ways. For instance, this otherwise solid post mistakenly argues exactly what I thought: that applications that indiscriminately used the network to poll servers in the background would be death for the battery thus forcing Apple to impose the "no background processing" rule.
It struck me last night that there are two different generations of folks attending events like this Momo gathering that are in need of retraining as we all get ready to embrace mobile— at least here in the Boston area. On the one hand, you've got all of the enterprise folks; broadly speaking these are the Digital/Lotus people that came out of minicomputers and PCs and mostly bypassed the web in favor of sucking Fortune 500 companies dry with ornate pieces of "industrial strength" software that did X, Y, or Z (and whose market is getting decimated by the combination of open source and SaaS). Then you've got all of the web folk (where I'd put myself) who have grown up with the web at the center of everything they've worked on. In both camps however, the lessons of the last decades have never forced us to deal with power-constrained devices which require a whole new discipline around opening sockets, powering the display, or even just using CPU cycles to do something as trivial as running a web browser.
And power consumption is just the first step on this steep learning curve: you've also got much smaller screens and applications whose total use cases need to be measured in 5-30 second interactive chunks. Overall it's going to be a huge mind shift for hackers, product managers—makers of all types— especially as devices like the iPhone put mobile computing into the hands of mainstream users.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 23, 2008)
The Economist has a great piece this week on what will undoubtedly come to be known as the "Facebook dilemma:" the fact that social networking is both a fun and useful activity for most folks but utterly impossible to make money from. The piece effectively argues that just as with email and IM, the basic verbs and nouns of social networking (friending and the nodes of the social graph) belong in every network-aware application and not just inside of these monetization ghettos created by VC-backed companies in attempt to mine for the next Google.
Making the comparison between Facebook and the AOL of yesteryear is something that has come up before, but is a rather apt way to look at the problem. The rest of the "open web" will build in social networky features and as they do, Facebook's only hope of staying relevant is to open up at a rate faster than AOL back in the day (which their app platform certainly does not do today). But of course as they do so, they will simultaneously limit the choices for their eyeballs-based business models.
And that right there is the challenge with huge horizontal plays in the Internet spaceâ the more broadly applicable they are, the more they need to be baked into the fabric of the Internet and not held hostage by monetization theories. And in the absence of alternatives to the advertising based business models (other than e-commerce which seems to help the likes of Amazon & eBay build out very horizontal platforms), this dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 18, 2008)
Steve Gillmor has a beautiful essay on the significance of Twitter which is well worth the read. In it, he explains the perfect storm situation that gave birth to the incredible success Twitter is experiencing. In his own words:
The key to this signalling network is the duality of Twitter posts - both personal and public in equal doses. Personal data such as what I'm reading or listening to conspire with public data such as what news is important to us and what news isn't to cut through the glut with surprising efficiency. Each of us has to perform an instant editorial calculation of the relative value of the data as divided by the nature of the cloud of followers into which the post is injected. Overlapping circles of influence and authority resonate like a pebble tossed in a smooth pond.
What results is an elastic and supple map of how to transit the information space, contoured by the relative effectiveness of the editorial agenda of each poster and its success at attracting the right audience. Just as the 140 character "limit" promotes clarity and focus, the decision to follow is not taken lightly for fear of upsetting the value of the aggregate flow by having it accelerate beyond the ability to absorb it. Each node must traverse a high wire between value and noise.
I've been looking at Twitter for the last two years trying to figure out why it is that despite its paltry featureset and it's extremely unreliable uptime there seems to be a core of something there that makes it more with "the grain of the (social) web" than anything else that's come along in the last 5 years. And it's great to see Steve nail it in his post (especially because so many other pundits have tried to feel this particular elephant in the dark to no avail).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 16, 2008)
Any self-respecting ManGeek ought to love a term I picked up from the Economist a couple of weeks in an article on cloud computing: data smelter. Apparently this is moniker used for the huge data centers that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are building on the banks of the Columbia river in Oregon. Located in the middle of the cheapest power available in the US, the name data smelter is a play on the aluminum smelters that peppered the banks of the Columbia over the last hundred years, but it's also great because it hints at one of the most relevant facets of the cloud computing/web services revolution: the ability for new services to recombine data hosted by other services in novel and interesting ways. We haven't even begun to feel the true power of how transformative this loose coupling of data and processing is likely to be; today's "mash-ups" are barely at the crawl phase of development in what we are likely to see.
And yet, it's worth pausing for a second to think about the cost of the current smelting. The Economist piece cites the Google data center at the Dalles as requiring the power of a town of 200,000 people. Most of this wattage goes to power the compute cycles that Google requires to index the world's information, and in most cases these cycles are well spent by running hairy algorithms that apply the bleeding edge of computer science to extract order from chaos.
But this is not always the case. For instance, at Tabblo, a meaningful amount of our general web traffic comes from Google Bot or one of its competitors. This despite the fact that we have well-structured RSS equivalents that could be polled/processed in a much more efficient way. Ditto for all of the much bigger user-generated content sitesâ they too have a meaningful amount of traffic coming from indexing bots while at the same time providing feeds that might provide just as much information for searchers while using less bandwidth, fewer CPU cycles, and not as much overall smelting.
The few times I've read any luminaries from Google talking about the semantic web in any shape or form (RDF, microformats, etc.), they always pooh-pooh it with slights like "people don't want to deal in angle brackets all day." And until I started thinking about the energy implications of these data smelters, I was likely to agreeâ after all, we're all still suffering from the CORBA/DCOM hangover of the last decade where a few vendors bamboozled the entire industry into thinking that an overwrought solution for remote process data exchange was the answer to all of these coupling needs (watch the WS-* offspring for a modern-day equivalent).
But last week Yahoo played a potentially game-changing move with its pledge to support the semantic web standards (microformats, RDF, etc.) across all of its properties. As much I tend to write off Yahoo as roadkill on the Google highway, it's clear that a few folks there are still doing good things for the net and the planet.
If the other industry heavyweights are goaded into following through, we may end up running slightly cleaner data smelters in the near future.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 15, 2008)
Though I am a huge fan of my recently acquired Macbook Air, having spent the last week digesting the implications of iPhone 2.0, and more importantly the SDK, I can't help but feel that the product form factor we have come to know as the laptop computer is about to get crunched by the smartphone in the same way that laptops have killed desktops over the last few years.
Let me start with the real strength of the Macbook Air: it's diminutive weight and slim shape. That these two attributes are enough to offset all of the other shortcomings (not nearly enough hard drive, barely enough processing, and no way to work for more than 3 hours at a stretch) says a lot about how much we care about portability these days. And yet there are still a whole bunch of things that are just too cumbersome and "disconnected" about the Air for me to feel as good as I should about a 3lb computing environment I could absolutely take anywhere. I want to love it but my heart has now been stolen by that lozenge-shaped computer traveling as a phone in my pocket.
"Stupid fanboy," I can hear you thinking, those crappy "smart" phones don't have the juice to run a real computing experience! For all who think that, I'd suggest taking a look at the iPhone SDK keynote, about 2/3 of the way through when the application vendors get paraded on stage to show their games/business apps/etc. built with the iPhone SDK. Ignore all of the Apple love and focus on the responsiveness of the UI, and the amount of "computing" taking place. Additionally, with rumors of the iPhone moving to Intel's new super-efficient x86 processor, I can only imagine that this will only get better— despite the need to protect that teeny little battery. And what Apple does here, you can bet Nokia, HTC, Ericson, and the rest of the 7 Dwarves will implement as well.
The other big criticism about the phone's ability to eclipse the laptop comes from the keyboard lovers— after all, no one could do anything other than consume media, send SMSes and reply to the occasional email on small keyboards, nevermind virtual ones like the one on the iPhone (which I am now ready to predict will win over the ant-sized keys of Blackberry like devices). Enter Nokia's Project NoBounds, an attempt to point to a world where our smartphones can easily pair themselves to larger displays and fuller input mechanisms (think how far we've come with Bluetooth headsets in the last 5 years and then extrapolate to displays). Were the gloried docking stations (anyone remember the old Apple Duodocks?) to become even as pervasive as iPod-equipped alarm clocks are today in most hotels, we'd have just enough infrastructure that most of us would be willing to take a chance and leave the laptop behind. And of course, you'll also come to expect one at work and a few scattered around your house.
Other trends that are going to push us in the direction of laptops being relegated to a niche similar to where desktops thrive today (CPU-intensive creative crafts):
Storage: For whatever reason, laptop drives have not kept up with the mushrooming demands of multimedia. I always buy the biggest drive I can get, and yet despite changing my laptop every 12-18 months, I'm always running out of space. So much so that most of my multimedia has already been split up according to file type— which is a horrendous PITA. I want a canonical copy of all of this stuff to live on some network-attached hard drive in my house with a backup in the cloud. Think Time Capsule + S3 with a nice usable layer of software to let me sync partial copies from my various portable devices. When this happens, we'll be able to really make the switch to flash for local storage (64GB won't seem small at all) which points again to the ability for the mobile device to become our primary computing device.
Closer physical contact with the rest of the world: No two ways about it, the ability to have a camera, location information, an accelerometer, and a net connection available within 5 seconds of taking a device out of your pocket constitutes a new platform whose real depths we have not really even begun to plumb. This is as true for frequent travelers as it is for people at the supermarket. And the funny thing is that even when these capabilities are brought on to the laptop to extend its term of service (witness the CMOS camera mounted on most portable computer bezels these days or attempts to add location aware functionality to laptops), they just don't yield as much use as you'd expect. Mobile computing is about user experiences that last 15-60 seconds and unfortunately laptops just aren't competitive under such stringent time pressures.
I love my laptops and have to really stretch my brain to think that in 3-5 years, I'll be looking back at this svelte Macbook Air in the same way that I saw the last desktop tower I ushered out of the house last fall. But it's coming and over the course of the coming weeks, I'm hoping to get some time to noodle on what the 15-60 second platform that will replace them is going to mean for those of us building the consumer apps of the next 3-5 years.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 9, 2008)
Fast on the heels of my energy-on-the-brain week in San Diego, I decided to run some experiments with my recently acquired Kill-a-Watt to debunk some myths about consumer electronics and power consumption. What follows is by no means exhaustive, but I figured I would write it up as it has frequently been the topic of lunchtime conversation at the officeâ with people arguing both sides of each argument as though it were politics and not simply electricity 101.
The basic statement that I was trying to confirm or disprove was that your computer/cellphone/ipod/etc. charger sucks electricity even when it is not connected to a device. Savvy environmental marketers have called this the "vampire effect" or the problem of "phantom power," and truth be told, after I first heard the term, I could never look at one of those cuddly black bricks the same.
So I went around the house looking for as many bricks as possible, putting my Kill-a-Watt between them and the wall source of power and then connecting and disconnecting their associated devices. An aside: For those that don't know what a Kill-a-Watt is (pictured here), it's one of several cheap gizmos you can buy to plug between a given appliance and the wall to measure how much power is being consumed. I'm not quite sure how it works, but quickly testing it on both 60 and 100 Watt lightbulbs convinced me that it worked as billed.
The result: for each of the 13 bricks that I tried, ranging from a wireless phone charger to a MacBook Pro power adapter, the vampire/phantom thing is complete BS. The moment you disconnect the associated device the Watts measured on the Kill-a-Watt go right down to zero. Interestingly enough, this is equally true for low wattage chargers like the iPhone one (~1-2W while charging). It makes senseâ after all I'm fairly certain that a fairly cheap circuit on the power adapter can get a good sense of load and just cut the whole power supply off if nothing is connected. As a funny aside, it seems that there is a whole category of "smart powerstrips" that are sold to protect the user against this bunk phantom power thing.
Since I had the Kill-a-Watt out anyway, I then went on to try to prove one of my own wacky theories: that you could actually conserve overall power when using your laptop at home by a) pulling the battery out when you were connected to the outlet and b) never leaving the machine connected after it was fully charged.
My theory about pulling the battery out went something like this: if a machine consumes X amount of power just to run, then also charging the battery at the same time must require X+Y power where Y is whatever it takes to charge the battery. And to point b above, even when the battery was fully charged, there would still be some amount of power required to trickle-charge, or keep the battery topped off.
However, in my very simplistic testing, it seems that with or without battery attached, my MacBook sucked in about 20-30 Watts pretty constantly (the variation being most directly affected by the display brightness). I tried it with 50% charge in the battery, 80%, and even 100% and it just seemed to hold constant in its power consumption in all cases.
Which of course leads me to wonder where the incremental power to charge the battery comes from. My current guess is that the Kill-a-watt does have some standard margin of error (that I didn't see with my lame lightbulb tests) and that this is where the incremental power to charge is being missed.
To end on at least one energy saving tip, for a typical MacBook in sleep mode, the cost of trickle charging is about 1-3 Watts which means that unless you are going on a long airplane ride the next day (or are a power hygiene freak who must have all devices at 100% charge all the time), you will save a little bit of power by pulling the adapter from the machine (though not unplugging it from the wall) when the little charge light turns green.
Whew, ok. With that behind us, I promise to get back to InterWebs topics tomorrow!
PS, if anyone knows of a relatively cheap device that can act as a Kill-a-Watt does but store data points over time for subsequent analysis on a computer, please let me know. My next set of experiments requires more than just eyeballing the display as the junk attached sucks power.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 6, 2008)
As I sit here writing this sentence, my brain is consuming about 20 watts of energy. For some reason that seems like a lot to me, until I think of the fact that 3 of me could run on the energy that one of the many 60 watt lightbulb I constantly forget to turn off.
Thought exercises like this one were the natural outcome of attending Saul Griffith's energy literacy keynote— by far and away the best of the keynotes I attended. Underpinning the talk was a relatively simple premise: to put all of the things we do on a constant energy scale (watts consumed) and check out where we might be terribly wasteful (in my case: airplane travel by an order of magnitude, followed by commuting to the new HP offices, with buying too many gadgets as a distant third). His talk was fascinating because of this one act of normalizing data— and has given me a much better view of things than Al Gore's documentary or the various overly complex papers and books I've tried to digest. Watts, watts everywhere (edit: for clarification purposes I should say that a watt is a unit of flow, the real absolute unit for energy is the joule; 1 watt is just 1 joule per second [thanks Paul in the comments)— for everything from running your gas sucking automobile to that can of Coke you are about to drink.
And speaking of wattage, that brain of mine seems pretty efficient compared to the laptop I'm writing this on which sucks up about 40 watts to give me an infinitesimal amount of the processing my puny brain puts out (which according to Kathy Sierra's self-help /feel-good keynote could be vastly improved by less Brain Age and more intense periods of concentration). Why then does it suck up twice the power? According to Stan Williams, from our very own HP labs, because we may be using an inefficient model for computation. In a fascinating talk that made me proud of HP labs, he gave a survey of techniques used to increase computing power to get to computers whose power nomenclature sounds like the Sunday morning special at Waffle House (ExaFlop?). I've never been a big fan of the quantum computing stuff (which according to Williams only has application in crypto, if at all), but I was riveted by his assertion that our starting assumption that computers ought to be built with standard boolean logic (AND, OR, NAND, XOR) might be something that we want to check, especially because we trace its origins back to some 16 year old farm boy named Claude Shannon (famous for his work in information theory) who was getting his PhD at MIT in the 30s. The best part of Stan's talk: how even keeled and practical he sounded about all of the crazy sci-fi shit that is getting done in his lab! This is one guy I am definitely looking up when next at the mothership in Palo Alto.
Flawed boolean logic notwithstanding, it was awesome to see all of the hardware hacking taking place at the conference. Bug Labs and Chumby are neat attempts at building companies out of some of this creative energy, though limited precisely because of commercial constraints. Much more interesting were a number of conversations I had with folks about Arduinos and the whole related ecosystem of camera/GPS/network modules that are springing up around them. The king of cool in this category was definitely Chris Anderson (of Wired fame) with his DIY Drones talk on making full autonomous flying things out of cheap componentry. If I hadn't seen his videos, I would not believe that the stuff in his talk was even remotely achievable by an amateur. Particularly cool was the UAV that he flew over the Google campus to take pictures that he was then able to collage through GPS coordinates captured during flight.
And speaking of GPS, geo was the new black at this year's conference. The number of talks, hallway conversations, and keynote mentions that centered around location hacking were too numerous to list here. It is honestly beginning to feel like understanding how to work with geo-data is the new SQL with this crowd (where is the O'Reilly book on this topic?!?). And amidst this buzz, Yahoo launched FireEagle, a thin piece of geo middleware that lets users register producers and consumers of geodata. Despite the panning the poor guys took on TechCrunch, what they are trying to do strikes me as super cool and important (email me if you want an invite).
It's funny— during the first 12 hours of the conference (which I have to admit I was forced to duck in and out of due to work obligations), I felt ready to declare that it had jumped the shark (especially after Tim's rambling and slightly depressing opening talk). But in the end I'm glad I went, mostly because of the way that an event like this helps to remind me of the for some folks, it is a core belief that anything is hackable (including according to Lesig, government).
More than anything else the crowd that O'Reilly is still able to attract to this event exudes that ethos from every pore. Magazines like Make, blogs, and websites are helping to propagate this more broadly, but seeing it first hand— even if once a year— helps to recharge the batteries that run this 20 watt brain.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 2, 2008)
Heading to Etech this week which should be a great treat not so much because of the high octane crowd that O'Reilly attracts to this conference but because it seems like with Etech 2008, the conference organizers are taking a turn away from the standard Web 2.0 themes and looking at other places where technology is making a big difference in how people relate to the world (go read Tim's perspective on it).
I am excited about the green-tech theme that seems to be all the rage for the software/Internet people these days, and as a result, I'm looking forward to all of the sessions along that track, starting with the energy literacy keynote. In fact this morning I was reading a piece in the Economist on how all of the prominent geeks in Silicon Valley are becoming green tech entrepreneurs which made me wonder whether in technology there is such a thing as the entrepreneur truly divorced from the type of innovation wave which he exists in. During the explosive early growth stages of the Internet there were a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who came out of PC-era companies and did ok in their 2.0s, but it bears mentioning that there was none of those second timers really knocked it out of the park, and that today's Internet powerhouses are all led by folks who had none of that historical baggage/experience with them.
Nonetheless, it is the rare conference these days that offers the chance for a broad and fresh perspectiveâ which is exactly what I'm hoping Etech will be this year.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 1, 2008)
ReadWriteWeb has an astonishing roundup of the multitude of sites playing in the "stream your life" spaceâ a category which essentially amounts to rolling the feeds from the various different sites you participate into one activity stream that your friends can then use to keep tabs on you. Since this is a specialized feed reader application, and since I've had feed readers on the brain lately, I spent some time checking a few of the services.
My conclusion: I remain unconvinced that these services can exist as standalone destinations, though I now see an important task they fulfill that a more general purpose feed reader (a la Google Reader) does not. The best of them provide a nice feature in managing distributed identity across a whole variety of sites. FriendFeed does this the best; you subscribe to individual people and then get all of their various different activities in one stream. Where this comes in most helpful is with people who have blogs but who also do a lot of twittering, flickering, and deliciousing (though it bears mention that in some cases those other activities are of a completely different modality). I realize that this seems like a sort of trivial feature that could easily be added on to a mainstream blogging engine (and probably should), but it is worth pointing out nonetheless.
Where I'm fairly sure these sites are not going to win is in providing yet another way to author a similar but distinct type of micro content. Back to FriendFeed for a moment: outside of aggregating my own content, I can also write quick posts (a la Tumblr) that live only inside of my FriendFeed feed for my FriendFeed friends to look at. Do we really need this in the age of blogger and Wordpress and Twitter and a whole bunch of other very similar content creation engines?
What I'd prefer to see is the folks from the 35 different startups profiled here picking up a copy of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaranâ O'Reilly's wonderful new book on the data processing algorithms that will power the next wave of social computing. It's taken me more than 10 years to get a much more superficial understanding of some of the core filtering, grouping, indexing, and ranking algorithms that Segaran covers with an extremely lucid style and concrete code samples in this book. More importantly however, this is the kind of experimentation we should be doing, instead of having people just jamming Wordpress and Twitter or Jaiku and Flickr in the transporter and hoping that what comes out the other end doesn't have a fly's head.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 25, 2008)
Continuing along the theme of custom readers for RSS streams, I can't help but notice that there has been a recent explosion in sites that do nothing other than aggregate the feeds of content that you (and others) create across various activities. It was a neat idea back when Jaiku implemented "add RSS feed" to their version of the Twitter timeline, but since then we've gotten Spokeo, FriendFeed, and now Second Brain to name but a few of the new entrants into this most meta of categories.
Given the ease and cost of starting an Internet property these days, all good ideas on the Internet automatically get a half dozen good implementations right away. In this case, everyone is trying to generalize the Facebook Activity Stream to work across all of the Internet (with "all of the Internet" being the top 10 user generated content sites of the Web 2.0 world). Having tried a couple of these, I'm not sure that they're going to work for two important reasons:
1. They feel too spare to work as places that people will actually log into. I can maybe see bunching up a load of feeds into one of these services for the sake of de-duplication and then putting the RSS feed directly into a regular reader, but I have a hard time imagining that I'd go to any of these aggregation sites as destinations in and of themselves.
2. It's not clear to me that even at scale, these utility sites will find business models that work for them. If Facebook can't monetize well with all of its supporting structure, why would a site that trades in just one element (albeit an addictive one) do any better?
If I owned one of these sites, I'd be thinking about repackaging these aggregate feed streams in formats that are not for consumption via a web browser, or even a standard feed reader. And the more heavy lifting required to shoehorn this content into some other format, the better. Where are the custom printed newspapers of feed aggregates? The photo frame slideshows that are actually compelling and not just teeny type doing the rumba on a screen that is 6 feet away? The spoken versions (read by the computer equivalent of Jeremy Irons) for consumption as podcasts? I have no idea how many different formats might actually work, but it's worth thinking about if entrepreneurs really aim to make stand-alone businesses here.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 23, 2008)
Why don't people like RSS readers? I can't imagine how anyone could stay on top of the blogosphere without the use of one; yet even Big Kahuna Bloggers like Doc don't use them, preferring instead to troll through their bookmarks and rely on pointers sent by email or Twitter.
Perhaps it is all about the fact that most RSS reader developers chose to ape the 3-pane interface of the traditional email client (in the hopes of conceptual synergy) and most people just don't want another inbox. That said, this would not explain why even the mail program plug-in readers that put the feeds right into your regular inbox (FeedDemon and Thunderbird) have failed to catch on. Hell even when Microsoft baked RSS reading into Outlook, people barely took notice.
On the other hand, the famous Facebook "Activity Stream" is nothing more than an internal news reader (and as of yesterday, it would seem that it is also an external one). And sites like Techmeme and Tailrank are aggregated newsreaders with a slightly more complex sorting algorithm.
When I think of what works about both of these alternative newsreaders, the conclusion that I come to is that the "add to reader" step (actively subscribing to a feed of content) must deter most folks. If this is indeed the case, then crowdsourcing this step in the process seems like an interesting possibility. Or at the very least, baking the reader into the web browser (which all of the browser vendors have done, albeit in a "one feed, one website" model that seems borked from the start) and then relying on browsing patterns to subscribe and unsubscribe folks from particular feeds.
As I continue to think through "web as movement," I can't help but feel that we've got tons more innovation to do on the reader front, and that we're only now just getting started.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 22, 2008)
Driving up to New Hampshire in the midst of a blizzard tonight, I was captivated by the swirling snow and thoughts of how the web is quietly turning into a series of flows (blog posts, Flickr streams, Twitters, etc.). It has take many more years than I would have thought: after all, RSS first entered my life back in 2002 on a hot summer day when I made a stupid bet that everyone would be consuming their content via readers inside of 5 years. The two trends driving this evolution of the web: 1. the web as a communications/publishing platform and 2. the atomization of web content such that we care less about "page loads" of information and more about individual atoms (for instance, did you know that every tweet has its own permalink?)
Perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of work on this whole transformation as of late has been Matt Webb's presentation "Movement" where he makes this point and more in describing a new interaction pattern for information (think interactive RSS feeds). His argument stimulates the grey matter because of the way that it makes you think about how the metaphor of the "web as movement" versus the "web as place" changes your expectations for the medium.
There are loads of other folks sniffing around this notion from different starting points. Some see web services as programmable data sources that the elusive mashup serves to recombine in new and interesting ways (Tom Coates did this one best in his presentation "A Web of Data.") Others see the new web being born out of the micropublishing boom (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr) where the constant update combined with the lightweight social network drives the main pattern of interaction. In both of these cases though, we are leaving behind the Geocities/Homestead/etc. view of webpages as static (or even semi-static blogs) and jumping on to the moving web, be whatever may.
It's a big shiftâ about as big as the one to cloud computingâ so I'm not really sure of where it will take us. One thing I do hope however is that it lays to rest the notion of the "destination site" with its registration-based walled garden and constrained experience designed to chases money in the form of shifting ad dollars. Maybe Techcrunch's report of the stagnating Facebook traffic is a harbinger of things to come (though seen from the best possible light all Facebook is is one giant web-as-movement-reader).
I'm just kicking off the thinking about this, which is to say there is tons more thinking to do. At the end of the day this is likely to touch everything we do online: from how we communicate to how search engines index the web, from how we buy and sell to how we look for recommendations. All coming from billions of loosely joined little pieces moving...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 17, 2008)
The Gmail guy gets into the fray with a very nice blog post on building good products. According to him, the key is humility. You have to be ready to listen to your users, and iterate on what's working while fixing what isn't. Most definitely great "motherhood and apple pie" advice for anyone trying to get the consumer Internet.
In fact the only challenge that I see with this approach is that while it is 100% correct for a product team that has already won (hello Google), it's pretty hard to pull off when you're a starving startup teetering somewhere between insanity and oblivion. The only way to stay productive in that type of situation is to believe that you are somehow better than everyone else— the exact opposite of the humility that Paul Buchheit argues for in his piece. It's why you think you're doing something technically that no one else will pull off, and why you need to believe that your design is just better.
Of course as in all that is worth doing, it's a careful balancing act. You need to think that you are better than everyone else... except for your users. They rule, and if you don't listen closely you're going to end up circling the drain sooner or later.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 16, 2008)
Despite my having grown to disagree with almost everything he writes, I have to admit that Paul Graham's latest essay "Six Principles for Making New Things" is a great read for makers of all shapes and sizes. In it, he makes an argument for keeping it real simple and not worrying about the fact that the world is going to call you an idiot for being overly simplistic.
Almost everyone that I've met over the last few years in the startup world seems to have fully embraced this new philosophy of minimalism. And even at HP, people with decades of experience in waterfall model software development seem to be getting hip to this jive.
However despite the love-ins for sans-serifs and single-function websites, it continues to surprise me how few people actually follow the philosophy in practice. I've come to believe that for most of us it's about how hard it is to stop listening to that voice inside your head that keeps saying: this is too trivial to be meaningfulâ I've got to put more meat on it. Management teams yield to it because they want to seem big and meaningful to the market, the press, and especially to their VCs. Engineers do it because they want to work on the "hard stuff" and because the "simple stuff" is somehow beneath them. And yet as Graham writes, time and time again we see the simple and limited winning in the market.
On a related theme, I recently finished listening to the audio book of Steve Martin's awesome memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," and was quite struck by how much his own creative trajectory follows the same path that Paul Graham writes about. Starting from magic tricks and canned one-liners, he spends 2 decades perfecting an act that becomes rich and complex only after thousands of nights playing to crowds of all shapes and sizes. My favorite part of the Martin book (outside the fact that he writes beautifully, reads with gusto and even plays banjo throughout) was seeing how much he was willing to work on what others at first called lame and unoriginal all the while following his gut.
And in fact that is the one thing that I would add to Graham's design philosophy for creative endeavorsâ that it is not so much about finding the simplest possible solution (though this is often the best place to start), but about listening to your gut very closely... and then not desisting when what your gut tells you leads you to something you're afraid will make you look like a simpleton in front of your peers.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 9, 2008)
I've been thinking a lot about intent lately. Or specifically, ever since Google reported their earnings and claimed that they were not as good as they might be because of the failure to monetize social networking inventory to expectations. Of course, this is a complicated way of saying: people just don't click on ads when they are on MySpace and so we don't make money despite having exclusive access to advertising on them!
I don't think it takes some kind of advertising genius to see why this is the case: on both MySpace and Facebook, the link density is quite high: it's often hard to click on the thing you want, never mind a piece of advertising. Additionally anything that is put on those pages is competing with "needs" that are of much higher priority on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely mating and socializing/gossiping (the modern day version of delousing).
But there is another piece around intent which all of us on the web ought to think about, especially if we really are moving to a 95% advertising-sponsored consumer Internet. When I type into a Google search box for some portion of the searches that I run, I am as close as I can be to wanting to buy something without actually being in a store (and I loathe stores). This is why it is much more likely that I'd be willing to click on an ad related to whatever it is that I am searching for. Sitting-forward with the intent to spend dollars is something that I don't see as a regular part of my Internet use anywhere else with two exceptions: eBay, and Amazon. And unsurprisingly, Amazon seems poised to capitalize on this behavior outside of the four walls of their own store with the recent launch of Product Ads.
Another related example: when we started Tabblo, our plan was to affect cost that it takes to acquire a user who wanted physical products from their photos by giving them a compelling creative and social experience around the sharing of their photos to "get them in the door" and thinking about making creative goods. This was in direct contrast to the big 3 photo-sharing sites (Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Ofoto) that spent all of their money driving people through a photo print experience. This past week Shutterfly released its 2007 results and as we crunched the numbers on the data available, we were surprised by how much higher their conversion rates are to printed products (not just prints) relative to the number of page views they see. Note that we never expected that we'd match them page for page— after all, they exist solely for the purposes of getting their users output— but the wide gap in conversion rates showed yet another example of intent rearing its ugly head.
Maybe I am being incredibly stumb on this one (the place where stupid and dumb collide), but I just don't see how over the long term inventing a new form of advertising— as Facebook claims it will to justify its $15B valuation— will get us past this intent hurdle. Even display ads, the bread-and-butter of all of the new media content sites, seem threatened by CPC ads which naturally implies that those sites too will have to worry about the following dynamic: when it comes to serving advertisers on the Internet, it would seem the name of the game is web-as-yellow-pages. As far as the media model goes, everything else might just be filler, or at best, content for the gatekeepers of intent (Google ins some instances).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 2, 2008)
Fabulous piece by Tim O'Reilly in Radar on why Yahoo deserves to get swallowed by Microsoft. To borrow from Paul Graham, Tim seems to be arguing that Yahoo just never got with the "grain" of the web despite having bought awesome grain assets (Flickr, Delicious). The money quote here:
The other important characteristic of the winners, of course, is that they tap into a data stream that really matters. Owning network effects around consumer photos, for instance, is much less powerful than owning network effects around paid search. So one of the key questions we have to ask ourselves going forward is this: what are the major data subsystems of the future Internet Operating System. Location, identity (and social graph), search (and not just web search but also product search, in which Amazon has a very strong position) come to mind. In a lot of ways, finding the data associated with the old vectors who, what, when, where, and how is a good place to start.
While the jury is still out on whether the "social graph" belongs in this primal set of key types of data that you can build huge businesses around, I completely agree with the others that he lays out. It would be interesting to explore how some of the big Internet trends tend to interesect these different types of data: mobile computing, virtual worlds, custom manufacturing, and emergent online marketplaces just to name four.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 1, 2008)
I lived through one dot-com crash and all of the associated aftereffects, so I'm not psyched about the fact that the day of reckoning has finally come for this cute little kumbaya we've come to call Web 2.0. Sure on the surface it's just Google being slightly off their spectacular growth trajectory, but deep down we all knew this moment was coming. The wonderfully intoxicating "build critical mass and the rest will follow" buoyancy that started with Flickr and ended with Facebook's ridiculous $15b valuation is about to come to a close, and not so much due to one bad quarter of ad revenues, but because it just couldn't last forever.
Small companies struggling with product risk are now going to have to answer the revenue model question as well, and for good reason. Selling to Google— or even selling to someone else who is afraid that Google might buy you first— has just run out of juice. And unfortunately it has done so right at the beginning of a pretty scary set of perfect storm factors in the consumer economy: depressed consumer confidence, tons of credit risk, looming creep of inflation, and an inscrutable political outlook.
But what to do in the middle of all of this? Get somewhere where you can work on something meaningful with a 3-4 year runway. If you are at a startup, either get cashflow positive or raise a buttload of money soon. If you are at a big company, get on the longest lead time (but critical) project that you can find. Put your head down and just shut out the crap that is about to start flying.
It's all going to be good again— it always is. The challenge is that it may take until 2011 for us to get there. Until then, we can all stop worrying about getting rich and get back to grinding it out. Good times.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 29, 2008)
David Beisel has done a great service for web ventures in the Boston area with his "Web Innovators Group" gatherings. Though this type of event is commonplace in the Valley, we are sorely missing it here and it's been a pleasure to watch it grow over the last year and a half from about 50 people to over 800.
One thing I continue to be struck by however, is the poor quality of the demos that are given at these events. It may be that David is explicitly selecting for non-venture backed companies (a little rougher around the edges), and it may just be the compressed format (though this being the week of the original demo conference, I'm not sure about the latter), but even when the companies on stage have cool and innovative products, the demos done WebInno generally leave a lot to be desired.
Since, giving a good demo should be secondhand to any startup employee (CEO, founder, hacker, product manager, etc.), here is my 3 step guide to coming up the learning curve quickly (though I don't claim to be an expert, I have given a lot of demos in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of products in my career).
1. Write the story: before you start, open up your favorite text editor and write a one-pager on what you intend to show. Make it less laundry list and more murder mystery. If you don't know what progressive disclosure is, go read up on it, and use this technique to move your story line forward. The number one reason why I often want to put a stick in my eye during demos is because the presenter hasn't thought enough about telling a story and being entertaining. Make it relevant to the audience at every step— which often means skipping the techno-babble and contextualizing features for your audience.
2. Find your own Demo God(s) and study them incessantly:everyone loves Steve for this one, but there are many many others presenters worth watching (go look at all of the highly rated TED talks for inspiration). If you go to conferences, pay attention to presenters that can work with the crowd and watch how they keep cool and on message even when things are exploding. If you are lucky enough to know anyone whose demoing you respect, ask them for very critical feedback. I've been very lucky to have people like Adam Green to rely on for raw and uncut feedback. It hurts but makes you 10x more effective.
3. Practice, practice, practice: don't just think about what you're going to demo— go and sit in front of the mirror and do it. If you're going to be miked, learn how to use the AV system to your advantage. If you need the Internet for your demo, assume it will crawl and work around it. Practice it until you are so tired of hearing yourself that your ears start ringing. There is no such thing as too much practice. Trust me, even Steve does it.
One last thing: if you are not particularly good at this type of thing, try giving demos of products you haven't actually worked on. Textmate, OmniOutliner, Firefox, OneNote, whatever— just step through 1-3 for any one of those products assuming you'll have 5 minutes to convince someone that they absolutely need to start using whatever it is you are showing them. This trick helps to de-personalize your subject and lets you focus on your own performance.
There is a wise saying in raising venture funding: the demo seals the deal. Think about this next time it's your turn at WebInno.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 28, 2008)
I remember only 3 toys from my childhood (4 if you count my brother's Tintin collection): my Milton-Bradley Big Trak, my Apple II, and my collection of Space Legos. Contrary to what you might think, of the four, I think that Legos went the furthest towards landing me at the startup end of the software industry. Of course there is the obvious reason: discovering the pleasure of making things from an early age— but there is another more subtle reason which may hint at the Lego's greater legacy.
As I was thinking about the way that toys influence the kinds of adults children become on Lego's 50th, I thought of this wonderful TED talk by Lost co-creator JJ Abrams on a mystery box given to him by his grandfather and its influence on his own development as a story-teller. I've long been a fan of Abrams and Lost, so it was a great pleasure to get a peek as to what's made him such a compelling storyteller and to wonder whether those Lego constructions that kids make might not have played a similar role for many of us.
When I think back to the countless hours with my Space Legos— or even when I watch my kids with the new modern version, "Mars Mission," I can't help but think that the true impact of Lego as a toy comes just as much from building as from the play and story-telling that ensues. For hours and hours after completing the spaceships or moon bases, I'd imagine all sorts of adventures for the little yellow men and the worlds which I built for them.
Happy Birthday Lego! Let's see what the next 50 years brings...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 19, 2008)
So using Apple's new movie rental service, I saw WarGames (1983) on the red eye back from San Francisco last night. I had seen this movie a couple of years after it came out but it is much better after say, having learned to speak English. This time around I loved the Matthew Broderick character as his "hacking" as incredibly realistic. Unlike those techno-puffery movies where lots of creative freedom is taken with the technology for the sake of good story, WarGames keeps it real— from Broderick's hacking ability (mostly social engineering really), to the WOPR's dumb-computer weakness that almost starts World War 3 (just about the only part of the early 80s technology that gets stretched as plotaid is the voice synthesizers that everyone has on hand so we can hear the WOPR talk).
It's amazing to think that despite the fact that the movie is 25 years old this year, it gets so much about the way we've come to interact with computers in the network-age spot on. I'm not talking about teenagers trying to hack into military systems, but more the social engineering and playfulness that first gets Broderick and the WOPR locked into their death spiral.
For this reason the movie also made me think about the Udell piece that I recently wrote about regarding how any major technology that we'll be seeing broadly deployed over the next decade has already been around for at least 10 years. Specifically, I realized two things: first, we really need to look back more than 10 years— at least 25 if WarGames is any indication of how people saw the opportunities that came with personal computers back then. And second, that something that I absolutely need to add to the list I made is virtual worlds and simulation environments that live on the network.
In the meanwhile, go rent this movie if you want a really fun "period piece."
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 16, 2008)
After yesterday's poor performance live blogging the Steve keynote, I spent some time thinking about how frustrating it is to have a fundamentally communications-related service go down the way Twitter did for all of us who were trying to let the world know about what went on during the keynote.
I can't really blame Twitter. The pile-on that they are suffering from as everyone tells them they can't scale is something that any other startup would kill for, and the fact that they are taking egg on their face is to be completely expected. I don't think I know of a single small startup these days that wouldn't be similarly crushed by the load they experience during events like Macworld— in fact, I can almost guarantee that we at Tabblo would have been.
However, the big bummer about the way we use the Internet today is that we are breaking its fundamental architectural principle of loosely couple services that you don't count on for 100% reliability. This was the genius behind SMTP: if the receiving mail server was down for whatever reason, the sending one had a protocol for either finding a relaying service or for backing off and re-delivering later. Unfortunately web services aren't built like this (some of the bigger ones like Amazon and Google are built like this on the backend though which is why they scale, but it takes big bucks to get there).
And you know what? For most web services, this single point of failure design is ok. Just not messaging-based ones. When we use messaging-based services, we expect uptime (witness how annoying Gmail's recent glitches have been), and at the very least, reliability on the message delivery front.
We'd do well to think of this as we shift any time an attention to web services that have grown their own internal messaging systems, or even those that aim to replace them.
I am sure that with microformats, syndication and personal publishing platforms that we own ourselves and host on elastic computing clouds like Amazon's EC2, we can rebuild most of the messaging/publishing-based services that are currently appealing (Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr) but flakey. However, it is going to take time, standards, and the realization that we can in be in control of more reliable online experiences.
In the meantime, just be glad those evil phone companies spent billions building "carrier-grade systems" (well except for AT&T EDGE network which sucks).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 13, 2008)
The New York times has a great piece this morning on the 1 billion cellphones that are sold in the world every year and where they go to die. The problem of e-waste is something that the big tech companies seem to have woken up to across all sorts of devices, but the author, Jon Mooallem, argues that cellphones are the most pressing problem given the sheer number that are shipped every year, and how quickly both technology and fashion turn over the installed base. I recently unpacked a box of old cellphones that contained the 5 old phones that I've had from 2003-2007 and currently do not use at all. My first thought was to try to figure out a way to use some of the components in these old phones for some of the physical computing projects that I want to take on in 2008 (after all, a bluetooth serial radio chip costs $60 and each of these phones has this functionality buried somewhere inside it). However, when I couldn't find anything online about how to repurpose them in such a manner (why is this so easy for all of the terrorists on 24 to do so but nearly impossible for the rest of us?), I then briefly considered eBay before realizing that with the exception of the 6 month-old Nokia, it probably wouldn't be worth the hassle. My next thought was this big bin they have in our office's cafeteria that claims to recycle the phones, but having recently read Bruce Sterling's provocative book "Shaping Things," I decided I had to know a little bit more about what would happen to the phones after I deposited them in the bin.
This is where the NYTimes piece shines— it does quite a bit of good reporting on how there are a number of for-profit ventures mining the phones in an environmentally conscious way for precious metals, or reconditioning them for secondary markets. Without giving too much away, I love the idea that by melting down phones, this Belgian company called Umicore gets to manufacture $24K bars of solid gold.
Governments are very good at providing structure that keeps companies from doing the really bad things, but in my mind, it is private efforts like these— motivated by profit— that are ultimately going to help us out of this environmental morass we are sinking ourselves into.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 12, 2008)
Since this was CES (and therefore gadget) week, I figure I'll close it by talking about a gadget that really does feel useful enough to go mass-market.
If you are a fan of seeing how we perceived technology might affect our lives 50 years ago, you should head over to the Internet Archive and check out this advertorial film made in 1939 by Westinghouse called "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair" where the promise of "mechanical brains and robots" manifests itself primarily through the automation of domestic chores. It's kooky and campy (you have to love that long before NAFTA there were still people afraid of job decimation) and mostly wrong as it seems that very few domestic chores been automated... at least until iRobot's Roomba.
A friend who had a much earlier model a few years ago declared it "just shy of useful." Fortunately in the intervening years iRobot has improved on the design (3 subsequent generations) and shipped 1 million of them to cleaner homes throughout the world.
For those who have not heard of it, the Roomba is about 1.5 times the diameter of a frisbee and about 4 inches tall (for getting under counters). It comes with a base station and a timer which kicks it off vacuuming any flat contiguous surface. It is bag-less and doesn't have a huge receptacle (so it needs frequent cleaning), but surprisingly it works just as well as a human with an Electrolux. At the end of the cleaning cycle, it finds its own charging station and parks itself awaiting the next scheduled vacuum task.
It is truly a mechanical engineering marvel. It's durable, agile, and even when it chews up a toy it can't swallow, you can take it apart with little effort and not even a glance at the instruction manual.
The more remarkable thing though is how quickly you adapt to having a Roomba in your life. After making the mistake of running it during the middle of the day ( thus prompting the kids to play a game of Lord of the Flies with it), it now runs only at 1am doing its thing while the rest of us sleep. You go to bed at night with Cheerios on the kitchen floor and poof— the next day they are in the little receptacle at the machine's rump. It sounds simple but it feels amazing.
Having this kind of automation has naturally made me think of other things that could be automated. iRobot has launched other home robots: one that mops and one that cleans gutters, but I am more interested in the tasks I actually do: opening the mail, turning off all of the lights at night, emptying the dishwasher, sorting the recycling, etc. It would be great if the building blocks that have taken iRobot 10 years to build (and some nice military contracts building bomb-finding robots) were available for new small startups to experiment with doing these types of things.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 11, 2008)
Jon Udell has a nice short post on a Businessweek article that tries to argue that innovation is just as much about refinement of ideas as it is about breakthrough concepts. As Jon quotes:
The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one.
While I'm not sure I completely agree with the claim, I do love this notion that "any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old." This statement is a neat twist on something that I heard from one of the Sun founders at a talk while I was at Stanford (I can't remember if it was Andy Bechtolsheim or Bill Joy) about how you should keep notes about what you think will happen in technology 5 years from now so that you can go back and see the bias in your predictions.
Jon closes the post by mentioning the web-browser as a good example (invented just over 10 years ago, big over the next 10 years). I would add: cloud-based consumer data services, auction-based e-commerce systems, and search engines as three vectors for what we might see as having even more of a significant impact over the next 10 years. What do you think?
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 10, 2008)
And for this month's best techno-porn, look no further than "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry" in this month's Wired. In it, Fred Vogelstein tells the inside story of the development of the iPhone, from its guts to the crazy deal that Apple got from AT&T, to the bumps along the road. As with all great tech-porn there is a fair bit of dramatization in the piece, but it does make three really interesting observations:
1. Steve & co saw the coming crunch on their near-perfect monopoly on the iPod and decided that to get ahead of it by going to a media-playing phone well ahead of when their business was impacted by it. This is something that I've heard a few times from VJ, my boss here at HP over the last few months: you have to innovate the next big thing when you're on top and can still afford it, not when you're managing an empire in decline. That said, it is extremely difficult to get big companies to do this especially when they are as arrogant as Apple, so kudos to them.
2. I love the idea that even as it was going to market, Jobs knew that the Motorola Rockr was a camel (a horse designed by a committee). Senior executives that engage with their product— from how it comes out of the box to how it feels to how it breaks— are really really rare in my experience. It's why you often get such goofy products from big companies so I 100% buy that it is a big part of the secret to Apple's success.
[ One quick aside: in 2005 while at the WSJ D conference, I arrived late (as usual) and went to get my badge only to see that there was a technician working on one of the HP PCs that had been set up for registration. It was one of the first all-in-ones and he had flipped it on its side and was closely examining the bottom of the case in the empty registration hall. Before I had time to figure out what the hell could be wrong with the computer than would manifest on the outside of the case, two executive assistants straight out of Entourage came in and whisked the technician away. Imagine my surprise to figure out that it was Steve Jobs who had someone ended up alone in the registration room and had wandered over to one of these machines to inspect it.]
3. The piece only hints at this general point, but one of the most amazing things about the iPhone is how well the hardware engineers timed the development of the mobile components such that they hit a perfect balance between CPU speed, performance, and battery. It's been my experience that in other consumer products with long multi-year development cycles, the hardware folks either radically under-estimate Moore's law, or worse yet, over-estimate it and end up with pokey and over-priced devices.
Overall a great read for junkies of Cupertino's shenanigans.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 9, 2008)
Both Matt Webb and the Economist this week are ruminating on the economics of the software industry. Matt has a interesting post which basically argues that there are other more compelling revenue models for building enduser software than the straight-up license (a lesson which I learned well while book-enabling the iPhoto application while the rest of the consumer image management space was cratering). He covers ads, subscription fees, and some other models, making a whole bunch of interesting observations along the way.
It was the piece in the Economist though that really made me laugh. Especially this juicy bit on why the SaaS (software as service) business model just isn't as good as its progenitor:
Vendors of conventional enterprise software made a killing by requiring customers to pay a high licensing fee upfront and then charging them for maintenance. Web-based firms, by contrast, have to make do with subscription fees.
We need to stop taking for granted that just because software vendors were able to maintain obscenely high margins for the last 30 years, it means that this should serve as a baseline for all software related businesses going forward. In the consumer space specifically, Microsoft's ability to extract rent for that layer of value seems to me to have been a historical accident— one that made Bill Gates very wealthy in the ensuing 30 years— but not necessarily one that can be relied on going forward. I know less about the enterprise space, but would be shocked if the same microeconomic force of marginal revenue trending towards zero wasn't in full swing in the age of the Internet, open source, and software-on-demand.
Instead we have to get used to saying that 22-30% margins are actually a great achievement, and that the era of crazy absurd software profits (though not growth, as Apple is showing), is now behind us. And the bonus is that in the process we get to repurpose old business models (atoms!) and invent new ones.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 8, 2008)
I used to think that blogs were interesting because they represented an individual's raw voice unfiltered by editors and undisturbed by distractions. Thus I saw the introduction of comments into blogs as a weird adaptation from the land of forums. Pings and trackbacks seemed like a much better way for people to carry on a conversation in the blogosphere.
Unfortunately my characteristically Betamax instinct was on the money yet again, as it turns out that most of the people I want to carry on a conversation with aren't interested in the distributed computing showcases. When combined with the constant chiding that I take in the office for a) writing ridiculous things in this blog and b) not providing a vehicle for talking back, I've finally been worn down to a nubble. As of tonight, this blog is now commentable.
As always, I have to give credit to the wonderful Django framework (and it's sparsely documented Freecomment sub-framework), along with the very useful comment-utils (from James at the B-List) which provides Akismet filtering and basic moderation in a nice and transparent way. Trackbacks may not have won the day, but it's nice to see that web services like Akismet are now used as simply and plainly as one might have used a third-party library two years ago.
So if you're an RSS-only reader, hit the V key and come visit, stay for a while, and leave a comment or two.
Just not the guy who used to comment on my last blog— I don't know what V-ONE-AGRA is, but I don't think I need it...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 7, 2008)
Continuing on the hardware theme for the week, I was recently captivated by Adrian Bowyer's presentation at POPTech last year on self-replicating 3-D printers. Still very early on, these 3-D printers are essentially glorified glue guns mounted on harnesses that can use them to squirt out three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. The really neat hack to his work however is that the printers can "print" most of their own parts thus placing the devices themselves on an exponential, evolution-like curve where the random mutation role is played by people tinkering with the printers to make them better while the evolutionary cycles are fueled by these same people posting the improvements back to the Internet.
Imagine what technologies like these would do to another project I found this weekend at the Harvard microbotics lab, a robotic fly which can be manufactured cheaply and is almost exactly the size of a real fly (see the video).
How annoying is it going to be when robotic flies are capable of self-replicating and evolving on their own?
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 4, 2008)
The best technical books are bits of "frozen wisdom" that can definitely be acquired with enough time and experience. But we evolved from monkeys thanks to our ability to abstract and to learn, so why bother?
"The Definitive Guide to Django" by Adrian and Jacob is a particularly juicy bit of frozen wisdom. As I flipped through its pages today, I recognized so many nuggets that we at Tabblo learned the hard way, which is to say with a mix of the online docs, reading the source, and trial-and-error, as well as a bunch of stuff that I know very little about (internationalization, the admin interface) but am eager to learn.
Just this week in fact, I was futzing with the code on this blog and needed to do something with generic views to further filter my querysets. Though I felt incredibly creative (and Pythonic) in my solution (wrapping the generic view function), I couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that it is part of the "best practices" recommended in the book.
Frameworks like Django are the mortar we web folk use to build our castles in the sky. Like great typography, they should be mostly invisible, supporting the applications built with them. However, Django is great mortar— as everyone at Tabblo will attest— so if you're planning to use it, make sure to get a copy of this book.
Postnote: Our very own Ned Batchelder even makes an appearance in the case studies section, sounding much wiser than the Ned that lost this great burrito t-shirt to a bet...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 4, 2008)
I've started the year by trying to make a dent in my backlog of small (but useful) webapps to try, beginning with the "help organize your life" category. So in the last few days I've tried: Jott, Iwantsandy, and Remember the Milk, and already I'm feeling overloaded.
All three are all really well done mini-applications that do a single function well, play nice with other pieces of the web (a la Unix tools), and provide clever interfaces that span multiple devices, input mechanisms, and output formats. And yet, why is it that after only trying three of them, I'm already feeling app fatigue?
I think it must have to do with the small incremental cognitive load imposed by each new webapp. Because no matter how similar each of these applications is— after all they are each a way to manage a list of reminders— there are still small differences that impose a small barrier at every use. And despite each site's desire to simplify the interface as much as possible, I've still got to go link hunting across non-standard interfaces every time I want to do basic things like creating new categories or adding a new email address.
I used to think that the old "Office Suite" megaproduct was a function of distribution economics alone; that Microsoft beat out all of the best-of-breed standalone applications because they could bundle all of the products together into a cheaper overall offering and stuff it into the channel. But now I'm realizing that there are huge advantages to this type of integration when it comes to usability (and I don't mean power features like OLE, these new webapps already support their own forms of foreign object embedding). With MS Office, the user had more or less one mental model for how to perform a whole load of related tasks (a model which has been increasingly unified with each Office release)— a huge advantage for those of us just trying to get things done.
Do we need this unification for all of these little webapps to reach critical mass? Maybe. The counter argument would be that the web audience is so big that every application vendor will find his own niche audience, but in a world where sustainable economics depends on advertising (and therefore audience scale), I'm not sure this works. And if we do need this grand unification, will it be brought on by a vendor (Facebook, Google) or by a set of standards (microformats, Yahoo UI best practices)? Right now I'd put my money on the integrating vendor platform a la F8 or Google Gadgets, but maybe that is just because I am looking for the modern day Office-like player. Maybe the rules have really changed on the web...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 2, 2008)
It's always good to start the first entry of every blog year with some predictions. Making accurate (and actionable) predictions is the chief currency of the entrepreneur in the technology industry (along with not confusing a long view for a short distance), so any practice in gazing into the crystal ball is a good thing.
The usefulness/pervasiveness of the web will really hit a tipping point this year: David Weinberger wrote a short piece for HBR called "The Year of Scale" which makes this point nicely. Everything from markets to expectations is now mediated by bits of information that we pluck from the ether on websites, social networks, blogs, tweets, etc.— whether we work and live in the medium or not. Of course Google plays a huge role in this augmentation of our own intelligence (as might Facebook and Twitter over the coming year), but so do web-enabled smartphones and the ever-increasing expectation that we can just "know" the answer to something.
Recently a friend told me that her 5-year old had defined Google as "where you go to find out what is true—" a sentiment that when expanded to the web itself, captures the zeitgeist of what is going on here. The next chapter in the story of the Flynn effect won't be written as the increasing ability to reason abstractly but by our ever-increasing ability to weave the information stream into making better decisions.
Smart, speedy, and portable interfaces frozen in hardware are now mass market: this is the iPhone effect, plain and simple. A couple of years ago I was writing that Apple should become the less-than-6lb. company ("if it weighs less than 6lbs and does computing, we rule it"). Last year they took the most important step in that transformation by launching the iPhone— but not because it's the sexiest product ever built, nor because it's a particularly good phone (let me tell you, it isn't!), but because it is the perfect embodiment of portable web consumption experience.
If the web browser itself could leap out of your computer and take the form of a piece of hardware that you could carry all the time, it could do no better than to look, feel, and behave just like an iPhone. From the huge screen to the multi-touch interface, every feature that makes it truly stand out boils down to delivering a killer web browsing experience (and the only real handicap, the pokey EDGE network is ameliorated by the Wi-Fi and will soon be crushed with a 3G rev).
Expect a lot more, and not just from Apple. Sure, Cupertino will ship the rest of the dev kit (which I still contend should be nothing more than an enhanced object model for mobile Safari that gives web developers access to the camera, the addressbook, any forthcoming GPS information, and the SMS message stream), as well as begin a whole load of experimentation with point-of-presence applications that mix the virtual world with the physical world. But everyone else will try their hand as well, starting with mobile giants like Nokia (where I am 100% sure some Finnish dude named Pekka is now tied to the bottom of a dogsled crossing the tundra for having missed the all-screen embodiment of a browser in a phone), and filtering down to all of the smaller venture backed startups crazy enough to do hardware (which I think should be all consumer-facing VC startups these days, but more on that in a later post).
And this mobile fever is not just about phones, but in fact about any small devices that help people better consume the web. For instance, I bet this is going to be a good year for MIT-spawned Ambient Devices which has always seemed like a glorified science project to me. Unlike digital photo frames or the utterly useless Chumby, Ambient has figured out that simple design, well-instrumented cues, and singularity of purpose can make the different between a gadget which suffers from the net-connected version of the alarm-clock flashing "12:00" (e.g., my Chumby), and a device that weaves itself into your everyday life. Physical computing is here to stay and 2008 is going to be a vintage year for it.
The Activity Stream will become hot as Hansel: I'm not sure whether it will be Twitter, Google's Jaiku, the Facebook minifeed, or something completely new from a random startup, but the notion that there will be streams of metadata that we'll share with each other in the same way that people share blog feeds today but on a much more massive scale is going to become a standard part of the way that people interact with the web, and with each other. I suspect Facebook has the lead today, mostly because its minifeed takes no effort to set up and is very nicely scrubbed in the application, but Facebook seems to be getting this walled-garden stench which may create an opportunity for a lighter-weight, more open alternative. Initial setup will remain the challenge for regular users (and may be why the platform vendors: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Nokia could win here, or at least do a bunch of cool M&A in 2008), but once people get used to living in each other's flows, they'll be no going back.
Those are my top 3 predictions for this year. A little more abstract than usual, but thinking at this level certainly beats wondering whether we're going to suffer from a global economic recession.
Finally, just to mark where I've gone wrong in this game in the past: I'm ready to throw in the towel on the unwitting blogger, the casual publisher, or whatever you call the regular person who does something akin to starting a blog. I've been looking for the mass market application that causes millions of people to sit forward and put the same level of effort that those of us that keep blogs do, believing that the right combination of ease-of-use and ego gratification could get people over all of the barriers, but I just don't see it. Micropublishing— a popular trend predicted for the mass market for 2008 by the pundits— may come the closest, but there is a point at which it's just not publishing anymore.
R.I.P, Mister Unwitting Blogger— you content creating bastard— we hardly knew ye!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 29, 2007)
Steve Rubel has a nice post on how to become a power user of Google Reader, a webapp for consuming syndicated feeds in an aggregated way. I've long been a fan of the feed reader as a great tool for consuming lots of content quickly— at least for as long as I've been confused by the large number of people that I know that consume syndicated content (blogs, news, etc.) without the aid of a feed reader. For me the old "bookmark it and revisit it every once in a while" technique went out of style with the old Netscape browser which is why I'm often amazed when I hear of net mavens who still employ this antiquated approach.
Which is not to say that feed readers, even Google Reader, are anywhere near where they need to be for mass adoption. To me, the standard feed reader is the command prompt of syndicated content; capable of doing the work that needs to get done, but clunky and hard to grok. In order to get to my mother using one, we'll need to get rid of the explicit subscribe/unsubscribe cycle, get competent at de-duping long feed lists, and perhaps most importantly, find an unobtrusive way to make the whole experience social and light-weight, much in the same way that some of the better Web 2.0 experiences have for a select few.
Of all of the folks in the game today however, I have the most faith in the Google Reader team, both because they are willing to experiment, and because they've got the cultural legacy of Google (make it fast, make it work) behind them. So you'd do worse than spending the time to learn how to become a Google Reader ninja in 2008...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 28, 2007)
So it's too early to tell whether I can really give the OLPC a firm thumbs-up (or a definite trashing). From using it myself, and watching my five year-old play with it, I have two observations: 1. the hardware is really cute and definitely right-sized for children, and 2. the machine is really slow. About 45 seconds to boot up an application like the web browser and no less than 25 seconds on any other app.
I realize complaining about its slowness is unfair as this is a machine destined for third world hands who will likely never see anything faster and thus not know to expect better. Given that the machine is meant for kids though, I do feel somewhat justified in complaining about the fact that the OLPC folks have jammed too much software into it and made the overall discoverability of the "fun" applications for kids that are not quite literate too hard. Witness Alex (the 5 year-old in the photo) who has thus far only taken to the "Memorize" game (sort of like the old game with pairs of matching cards you flip over) and to typing his name over and over in 48pt type in the word processor. Between these two activities I think he could entertain himself for hours. However, the challenge is that any time he hits some part of the global navigation interface, he quickly gets himself in trouble. And unfortunately, this problem is compounded by the slow load time of new applications and the inevitable swapping that starts to quickly slow the machine to a crawl when you launch more than about 4 applications.
The ultimate test will be whether he sticks with it through these problems, coming to an adult when he is hopelessly stuck. At first I was skeptical that this would be the case, but then I remembered that as a kid, I spent countless hours playing with my father's Heathkit HERO 2000 kit under many of the same conditions: I would often get the robot stuck in such a way that only adult supervision would help unstick me (incidentally, I recently saw on Chris Anderson's blog that the HERO is coming back— yay!). In my case, the promise of controlling a robot kept me coming back for help.
Let's hope that the same applies for the kids looking to learn about the benefits of computers in the third world.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 27, 2007)
The biggest advantage that startups have in being in Silicon Valley is proximity to people that have the know-how around how to create something out of nothing. And this isn't just the VCs— lawyers, recruiters, real estate people, even caterers just know how it goes for startups. Sure the talent is concentrated there as well, but talent concentration doesn't seem to be as much of a hurdle in the age of the Internet.
Nor is expertise and experience as you can see from this fabulous Read/Write post on all sorts of good tips for engineering, infrastructure, and marketing/PR. As I read this, I could not help but think of all of the resources at the fingertips of a young college graduate today. From the likes of YCombinator to the nuggets of goodness in the High Scalability blog, there is just a ton of stuff out there for those looking to get a startup off the ground.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 24, 2007)
The whole digital media in the home equation has yet to be solved by any company, big or small. You've got all types of content that needs to get itself to a wide variety of output devices. Then you've got the issue of the control interface for things like selection, volume, play/pause. And to boot you've got an ever-changing set of sources for that very content (Rhapsody, YouTube, iTunes Music Store) which means that almost any dedicated "appliance-like" system is likely to be obsoleted within 12-18 months.
If you're like me, you've found an inelegant but very extensible solution for the last of the three problems in the general purpose PC. Since most of these new content sites are built to run in a web browser (via Flash, Quicktime, or Windows Media), you just can't go wrong with a machine connected to your TV/stereo that can play all of these formats. A concrete example of why a Mac Mini is better connected to a TV than an Apple TV is the studios' new YouTube clone, Hulu.com: while the site has a really nice selection of content, the embedded Flash player is the only way to watch the content, which means that for now all of the Apple TVs, PSPs, etc. are S.O.L.
The second problem around being able to control the PC's output (play/plause, etc.) has been the deal-killer for the whole just "hook your PC up to the TV/stereo and go" scenario for a while now. Back at Memora, we implemented a webserver for rendering an HTML control interface that could start/stop streams either to embedded players or to remote endpoints, but it was always kludgey as the interface tended to get out of sync with what the underlying devices were doing, and in those days cellphone/small device browsers were very limited are hard to come by.
Fast forward a few years though and you've got two key elements on the Mac platform that finally provide a good solution for this problem. The first is the very instrumentable iTunes application which lets any third party developer drive almost all of its controls from an external application. Given that iTunes has built into it the ability to target streams of content to Apple Airport Extreme bricks, you get a free pass on the distribution problem.
The second element is my recommendation for this year's awesome last minute gift (no mall parking lots required!) If you've got a friend with multimedia aspirations, a fixed Mac, and an iPhone, you absolutely must buy them IOSpirit's Remote Buddy, an OSX application that will wow their guests with what it can do. Essentially, Remote Buddy allows anyone with an iPhone (or other decent browser) to control iTunes and whole host of other applications that run that on the Mac itself. In my case the killer app is to drive the Mac Mini's iTunes library to the 3 Airport Express bricks installed throughout my house, but I'm sure this is just scratching the surface.
It's a relatively cheap application (19 Euros) that you can just tell was built with a lot of love and attention to detail. And you can just forget what the Bloggery is saying about the iPhone versions of Meebo or Facebook (or Fizzl and Pizzl)— Remote Buddy is the single best iPhone web application I have used— so good in fact that you forget that it is running inside of a browser within 30 seconds of starting to use it. And best of all, if you're not getting as a gift, you can try it for 30 days after which I would be shocked if you didn't decide to get it for yourself.
It is applications like Remote Buddy— along with the resurgence of the Mac platform as a mainstream alternative— that makes me wonder when we'll see the first venture backed startups that will target the Mac/iPhone platform exclusively. Perhaps a prediction for 2008 is in the making there...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 22, 2007)
Google made waves last week with the introduction of its "Knowl" product which, on the surface, seems to be a copy of Wikipedia. The conspiracy theorists think that Google is tired of giving up pageviews to the nonprofit (because some ridiculous percentage of Wikipedia pageviews come from Google search results) and would prefer to keep these for themselves. I'm not sure; after all, it would be a really short-sighted case of crapping where they eat for Google should publishers get concerned about the search giant playing with the fidelity of the search results.
Instead, I see Knowl as an interesting experiment in personal publishing that centers around recognizing authorship. The announcement talked about a number of features that Knowl was going to have that Wikipedia didn't which included the standard "Web 2.0 social stuff," but the main thrust of the publishing model is the "highlighting of authors" by recognizing them more explicitly both in branding and in allowing the authors themselves to set the advertising on the specific knowl pages.
While I'm eagerly awaiting the results, I think that Wikipedia has worked (unlike blogs and other forms of personal publishing), specifically because it has made the authors/contributors fungible across the various different pages. Over the years I have contributed content to a half a dozen Wikipedia pages— content that in some cases has been quite a bit longer than this blog post. All of these pages have survived without my constant care and feeding, because other people have taken them well beyond where I felt compelled to in a way that this blog wouldn't were I to take the same fickle approach to it.
"Highlighting the author," or giving primacy to the content creator over the subject matter is not always the answer in getting a big content store, even when this process brings a potential business model to the content creators (just look at all of the abandoned About.com pages or Squidoo lenses). In fact, I would argue that this Menudo-dization of publishing (where authors were buried under the brand "Wikipedia") was Jimmy & team's great hack and their true legacy to field of knowledge creation.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 20, 2007)
As always, David Brooks had a great op/ed piece this week in the New York Times on the real difference between Obama and Clinton. It is worth reading not so much because it helps those of us still trying to make a decision, but because it is a great commentary on leadership in general.
Brooks's character-based argument centers on the fact that the presidency is about more than positions of issues and political experience. He writes:
Many of the best presidents in U.S. history had their character forged before they entered politics and carried to it a degree of self-possession and tranquillity that was impervious to the Sturm und Drang of White House life.
because, according to Brooks:
The presidency is a bacterium. It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House, and is best for the country.
While the presidency of the United States is clearly at the top of this pyramid, all sorts of leadership positions possess this same dynamic: they exert all sorts of pressures that exacerbate character flaws and biases in a way that almost nothing else does. In my limited experience, those that do best as leaders are not necessarily the people who look best on paper, nor even those with the fewest wounds, but those who, aware of their own weaknesses and biases, possess enough reserve of character— knowing who they really are— to avoid being overcome by the bacterium.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 16, 2007)
Doc always talks about how much he hates "vendor sports—" well this weekend, we're getting it in the guise of cloud computing all over the place. First, Businessweek has a cover story on some random Google engineer who is fiddling with the CS curriculum at UW which is really just cover for a puff piece on how we're at the beginning of this whole new type of computing which today's CS students need to learn to program for. Then, today's NY Times has a big piece on how Google is headed for a showdown with Microsoft over a new way to deliver applications to computer users. The blogosphere (which unlike Doc does loves vendor sports) is naturally all over it.
I can already see that people are throwing this cloud computing term around so loosely that it's going to cause more confusion than the whole Web 2.0 thing did. For some people, cloud computing means running applications over the web with the interface painted inside the frame while the executable sits far away in an undisclosed data center. For others, the cloud is about a massive amount of CPU cycles available on demand (but metered). And for others still, it's about a hard drive in the sky.
The reality is that the cloud is about all of these things and more. Perhaps the easiest way to see it is as the extension of anything that might be connected to a PC over the public Internet to some magical data center that gets to provide as much you might need. Need more space? Extend it with a Google hard drive over TCP/IP. Ditto for the CPU. And especially ditto for all of the installed applications.
Most importantly, in what is hardly mentioned in all of the articles, the real kicker is the access device doesn't even have to be a PC at all— in fact, most of the real leverage from the cloud is likely to come to all of these really powerful mobile phones that are capable of running a web browser and mimicking that part of the PC. That is where the rubber really hits the road on this stuff!
If you look it as extending the computer on your lap (or in your pocket) on demand, then the next natural question is: what other things are you using today in that computing experience that you'd like to have re-attached in this fashion? Let's take a retro example: what about the 400MM printers we've shipped at HP over the years? What is the cloud version of the print driver? (Our team is actually working on a version of this, but more on that later) We're not doing our PR well here because every cloud article talks about the big four: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, and leaves HP— the only big IT company that spans every type of access device and peripheral with services and servers— out of the running altogether.
Finally, it's funny to see Schmidt (Google's CEO) in the role of the guy with the new disruptive platform, mostly because he's spent almost his entire career (Sun, Novell) fighting for the losing platform— each time getting disrupted by none other than... Microsoft. I'd hardly count those guys out of it at this point, but it is interesting to see how much more the platform disruption can count for over the leadership (stewardship) from the guys in the corner office. Schmidt has had a few losing hands, but this round he seems to be holding a full house and that, more than anything else, may make all the difference.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 16, 2007)
Yesterday I wrote about how micropublishing comes out of intercepting a communications stream and making the messages chunks of published content, ending the post with an argument that this will only work for a mainstream audience if it can be totally unobtrusive to the communications channel. Even then though, I have my doubts as to whether communications-parasiting micropublishing could really go mainstream (whereby I mean the "regular" folks piling iPhones under the Christmas tree this year).
What I do think serves as a great model for micropublishing is when applications or better yet, devices, can be properly instrumented to emit a steady excrement of relevant metadata that can then be "massaged" into something that resembles a micropublishing content chunk. Since that statement takes the Abstract Award for the weekend, let me follow it with some concrete examples:
Application: I love Google Reader. While the province of true geeks, RSS readers strike me as the next killer application for managing the vast information flows that we're all crumbling under, and as far as they go, Google Reader is tops. It is fast, reliable, and best of all, keeps sprouting these interesting social features that are likely to make it a very interesting product to watch over the next year. While Reader has always had the notion of "shared items" that friends could subscribe to, the process for doing this was cumbersome in that it required your friend to seek out the syndication URL of your shared items and the subscribe to it. This past week, the Reader team launched the ability for you to see what friends have shared without having to explicitly subscribe, a great improvement that I think will finally raise shared items to the level of first-class feature inside of Reader. This matters because every time a user hits Shift-S on an item, that is in itself a micropublishing event (on Tumblr this is called a "reblog" but Reader makes it seem like more of a non-event). And these events strung together make a great frozen flow of ideas.
Device: A location aware mobile device is the best possible excrement generator for review-based micropublishing that I could possibly imagine (assuming of course the phone is open enough to application developers). While we constantly debate the merits of the "thumbs-up" flyby reviewers at the office, there is no doubt that when I'm evaluating a restaurant I've never eaten at, a barber who hasn't yet nicked my ear, or a hotel I'm about to entrust my sleep to, I'd rather have that information no matter how hastily it may have been generated than not. And these are categories of services that I research today— with an ever-present ability to thumbs-up/down anything at any time, who knows what else we might start micropublishing in binary about? Playgrounds? Busy intersections? Barristas? "Hot" spots?
In both of these cases the work we expect from the user publishing is as close to zero as possible within a certain limit. In fact, taken to the limit, you get models where just by doing stuff, you're generating metadata. The Google Pagerank index for instance is the inadvertent result of billions of micropublishing events (links being created) and its aggregate value is huge. Similarly, the new GPS in my car gets its traffic information from over 1MM radio-enabled GPSes that get a free ride on top of all of the semi-tractor trailers you see on the highway.
However, there does seem to be a limit beyond which it really is just metadata— potentially valuable in the aggregate— but wholly useless to the type of micropublishing that facilitates social connections and fires off the creative endorphins in people. I'm not sure where to draw the line (after all some types of metadata can go either way depending on context— for example, my Nike+ running sensor data), but the key is that the closer we get to the line without going over, the faster we might see micropublishing getting a foothold with a huge audience.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 15, 2007)
When one of my favorite tech blogs titles an article "The Evolution of Personal Publishing," I am most definitely going to bite on it (after all, this is a topic on which I like to noodle). As it turns out, the piece mostly adds color to a post by Fred Wilson who argues that "microblogging" (Twittering, social sharing, etc.) is actually not just blogging under a new guise but a new type of communications/publishing hybrid that not only deserves its own category, but may actually reach into the mainstream Internet userbase in a way that its progenitors (personal publishing and blogging specifically) have not been able to.
Why? Because according to Fred, micropublishing at its core is lightweight (low cognitive load), social, and interactive (which strikes me just social under a different name). In other words, it is easy to do and keeps you in touch with your friends and family as well as the world at large, when appropriate.
And in fact, it seems that this last bit is the critical piece. The relevant part of all of these lightweight tools is that they intercept a communications flow and create a permanent record of it that people who may not have been in the original dialog— people who you may not even know— can have access to it via the archive (the frozen flow).
A little over a year ago, I was eating lunch at Google with Jason Shellen who was the first person to pitch me Twitter. As I was arguing that this seemed just like SMS + groups he said something which has stuck with me ever since: that Twitter allowed every SMS to have its own permalink. I remember my initial reaction to his statement as though it had been yesterday; I thought: Silly Googler, not everything needs to be in your index.
He was absolutely right about the significance being the addressability and persistence of each SMS/tweet, but not because we might be turning up the fact that he had too much to drink for Thanksgiving in the Google index 3 months down the line. Instead what the permalink implies is that what was a disposable message is now a micropublishing event which can in effect become a vector for socializing with people who would otherwise not be in your regular communication stream.
Now the question still remains: how much do regular folks really care about the potential for this type of publishing-sourced social serendipity? Especially when the insertion of micropublishing into some communication channels can have unanticipated adverse effects? An example: I recently tried to give Twitter the good ol' college try by getting everyone at work to use it as well as a few key friends and family members. My older brother (who ironically in this small world was once one of Fred's entrepreneurs) puked on it because he decreed his SMS inbox to be a high-priority near-synchronous channel for communication with a select few. By overflowing his phone with tweets, he was convinced that Twitter was "breaking" the promise of SMS. The serendipity of social experiences on top of micropublishing was just not worth it.
(And before people write to me to tell me that you can turn SMS off on Twitter and just view the tweets on the website, think about this: why would a normal person want one more website to have to go check every day?)
I think that in fact Fred is right that micropublishing done right can go mainstream— but we have to look to models like Amazon reviews and not just the progeny of Blogger to see how we take it there. More on that tomorrow though.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 8, 2007)
It usually takes me hearing really clever smart (but crazy sounding) ideas three times before they begin to sink in. So hopefully, noticing them at two is an improvement. A couple of months ago, while attending a conference with Alan Kay, I heard him talk about how any new modern computer should be designed with "Internet principles" at its core. That is, the hardware and OS should be designed to support small isolated "components" that behave like nodes on the Internet, sending each other messages through a TCP/IP-based networking fabric even on the bus of the computer itself. Knowing that he is the perennial object & message nut, I filed his statements away as curiosities, thinking only that while his observations about how the unstoppable trends of virtualization and multiple cores as the base substrate for this fundamental change in the architecture of every individual computer seemed clever, the practicality of it seemed elusive.
After all, the stored-program, shared-memory, single instance computer exists for good reasons (simplicity, efficient, cost) right?
Imagine my surprise then while running today to the latest episode of the Google Developer Podcast (hit-and-miss, but pretty good as of late as far as podcasts go), the "All About Android" episode which basically described an implementation of what Alan was talking about in almost every aspect of system design: from the message-passing model for app interop to the way resources are described internally. It gave me pause for thought— after all, if resource-constrained mobile devices are being designed around these architectural principles by smart people, then maybe there is something to this notion of turtles all the way down, from the services we use from the cloud to the devices we carry in our pockets.
I think I've let Fake Steve with all of his Googletard ranting color my perspective too much, as I've paid scarcely any attention to the Android project. And truth be told, I wanted to write this before digging into it— after all, ideas are much prettier as abstractions, and Android seems to be one weird beast of a mix of things on the face of it: Linux + Java + Webkit, all on very resource constrained but heterogeneous hardware platforms. I mean, we're talking about serious potential for a fly in the transporter with this baby.
Still, it's the second time I've heard it, so time to pay attention...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 7, 2007)
Last year, a couple of us at Tabblo got a chance to get on the beta program of this really neat wireless camera card called Eye-Fi that automatically uploaded your pictures from your camera to your favorite photo site. The idea was very cute, and even as a beta, the implementation was very nice, so it was a fun surprise last week to receive the 1.0 version of the card in the mail. In the intervening year, the Eye-Fi guys seem to have polished their packaging and found great distribution for their product (Amazon, Walmart), while settling on a very sensible business model (sell the card at a slight premium to regular memory cards).
I like the Eye-Fi concept a lot and intend to give a couple of the cards out as Christmas presents this year. But after a week of constant use, I've been forced to rethink some of my assumptions about getting all of your content up into the cloud as quickly as possible, bypassing the PC at all costs.
While it is fun and sort of magical to see pictures just appear on your favorite Internet photo site (though arguably less now now that camera phones are so prevalent, especially those armed with awesome applications like Shozu), but the problem with getting your regular camera pictures sent automatically is that the mode of use for a typical digital camera these days is very much "ready, fire, aim" with most casual photographers using brute force as a substitute for innate skill, knowing that there is a nice editing step waiting inside of Picasa or iPhoto. When photos go straight to the cloud and into a service like Flickr (which is what I've been using with the Eye-Fi), that editing step disappears, which means one of two things happen:
1. you really frustrate people who might be following your picture stream on Flickr with twelve slightly different shots of the same subject in the same composition
2. you frustrate the hell out of yourself using a web interface to take on that first editing pass
Of course, #2 could all be fixed if Flickr were to support an IMAP-like protocol that iPhoto and Picasa could implement as rich clients to help you manipulate the photos and do the editing later (I have to admit that Flickr almost does this with their API today, but no mainstream clients have taken advantage of it). And in that case, having the data resident in the cloud where other applications could use it might justify someone using some basic algorithms around finding good unique pictures to solve #1 (I've seen a bunch of algorithms that do this very well with date-clustering and object detection inside of HP Labs, so this part is not science fiction).
In the meanwhile, it is worthwhile pausing for a moment as we all race to cut the venerable PC out of the content-device-Internet loop, and thinking about what we might be giving up.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Dec. 1, 2007)
Fred Wilson (VC/blogger extraordinaire) wrote up an interesting analysis of his own investment career viewed from the perspective of startup nimbleness. His main conclusion is that the majority of startups that succeed in achieving superb returns at some point in their history "transform" by being flexible enough to experiment. I love pieces like this because they help to pop the myth of entrepreneur-as-visionary who just seems to know at every decision what needs to be done.
To Fred's point, all of the best entrepreneurs I've seen combine two key abilities: a set of lightweight planning capabilities (to set up measures for success and gates that determine failure), and an unrelenting ability to execute quickly over repeated iterations without the rest of the company getting completely demoralized. In the software space in particular, another key skill is being able to build enough platform assets that can be re-used across experiments. Even in the fast and cheap world of web development, this is a key part of being able to iterate quickly and with as little technical debt as possible, which is why getting some hackers with experience on board can mean the difference between Facebook (iterated well) and Friendster (crapped out).
Finally, the article is also interesting because it applies well outside the context of the traditional startup. I'd say that about 50% of what I've been focused on since the HP acquisition has been on setting up the right execution context for maintaining this nimble experimental capability. Some of that involves figuring out how to work around big corporate process that exist for very good reasons in other contexts, and some of it involves cultural changes that reset the definition of success on the part of key contributors. But most of it— the really challenging bit— involves managing the impedance mismatch between what a big company needs to be successful (predictable success), and what a little startup relies on to make a dent in the world (huge risk-taking and nimble execution that may or may not work).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 30, 2007)
It must be a slow end-of-the-month press cycle because the press seems intent on proving to the world that Apple's OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was just too buggy to put out there, joining its Redmond cousin in the land of crappy desktop OS releases.
Personally, I've only been dealing with small annoyances (keyboard locking up, Desktop files flickering incessantly, Spaces not working, the Finder losing its handle to certain running apps) and not the really big stuff (network not working, data loss), but I am somewhat underwhelmed by what Apple delivered with this release both from a polish perspective and in terms of new capabilities.
Maybe what is happening now with OSX is that it has reached that level of maturity that most big software projects get to where it is very hard to make forward progress without noticeable regressions. This would be ok though because I'm fairly certain that better processes (Apple bring back the public beta please?) would take care of this.
But maybe, this is about the fact that all of the big brains in Cupertino are now enamored with Apple's next platform, the iPhone.
Listening to the newly (re)launched Gillmor Group on the airplane a couple of days ago (this show is definitely an acquired taste, but one which I would recommend for nuggets such as this one), I heard Steve Gillmor defend Apple by saying that the iPhone was "the center of Apple's universe now" and that everything else including the computers and Leopard were just "peripherals." Sad as this may be to admit, it sounded somewhat right to me in that there seems to be a lot more "denting the world" potential in putting very capable portable multimedia computers in the hands of tens of millions of folks than in continuing to polish the desktop platform of yesteryear.
I'll be sad though; as the sun sets of the PC platform as the most innovative place to be developing, all of us who were introduced to computers through it will go through our own little pangs of nostalgia.
[Postnote: After writing/before posting, it occurred to me that projects like OLPC may have quite a bit of innovative growth in them... we will have to see]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 28, 2007)
The article in Monday's WSJ outing that the rumored Google storage service, where all of your files are stored on Google servers, initially rubbed me me the wrong way. The implication that we'd get all of our data stored in exchange for our eyeballs and our privacy (in light of all of the recent Facebook hoopla) must have struck me as a Faustian bargain that seems hard to extend much beyond email (and even that has been bothering me lately as Google seems to be misreading my email in the ads it is choosing to put inline).
But after thinking about it a little more, I realized that the irritation goes deeper than the business model to the dominant underlying assumption these days that all of personal computing is going to move to the server farm and that maybe, just maybe, we're finally getting ready to go back to the thin client model for computing. [If you see the irony in this given that I've just spent 3 years pushing content creation webapps as the end-all be-all, read on]
Let's review for a second why moving all of our personal computing to the cloud sucks:
1. Offline. Since HP bought us, I've upped the amount of time that I spend on planes crossing from east to west and it's beginning to really get to me that I can't use Gmail, Reader, or Tabblo during these six hour stretches. For instance, I have no problem keeping relatively current with my work email (thanks to the flying), but my personal Gmail account is usually 10 days behind. And even though the Reader team did a nice thing in integrating Google Gears for offline use, the offline experience still feels sort of bolted on with key command sequences not available.
2. CPUs are awesome and universally under-utilized these days. I've lost count of how many cores I have in my laptop but outside of spinning up for buggy Javascript goodness, they are only really ever taxed when I'm doing something to multimedia inside the rich client apps. Why does Flickr have to resize photos for me in a queue that takes 4 times the amount of time that iPhoto would? At Tabblo, we're offenders on this score as well; though the team has done a great job of making image transform operations tolerably fast, there are still operations that would benefit from a little CPU help, especially when the site is under load.
3. Uploading stuff over and over sucks. I've been obsessed with this one lately so here I'll only say that it's now not just about photos— on top of (re)uploading rich media, I've now also got profile picture-uploading fatigue and friend-finding ennui, and status-updating exasperation. And unless you're only going to ever use one company's "cloud," this is just a fact of life these days.
These are all good reasons why cloud-based services are probably not the only model for moving personal computing forward, but this morning while reading Tim O'Reilly's update on the definition of software above the level of a single device, I went back to being exasperated by this mottled relationship we have with our devices and data where everything that we care about seems to be spreading across more devices, more websites, and in most cases more PCs.
Tim writes about what a good model the iPhone/iPod+iTunes+iTMS is for this concept of of allowing software spanning multiple devices to play in delivering a solution. To me this seems to be an opportunity for stuff to get lost in more places. In fact, I've found that having the device tethered to the PC for the sake of connecting to data from the cloud a pretty horrendous proposition. RIM's Blackberry showed us the power of over-the-air sync a decade ago, and with WIFI on more and more of these devices, it's time to extend the model across all types of data. It is great to use the PC's richer interface to configure these more interface-constrained devices (a great example of this being the way that I can now program my Tivo from my PC instead of being deafened the bouncy Tivo noise every time I need to schedule a new recording). And frankly I'm not all that good at actually remembering to sync my iPhone thus exposing myself to all sorts of data loss/sync issues.
Which is of course another way of saying that this cloud thing really does have legs if Google and others can see their way to a good implementation for getting around problems 1-4 described above. As I was racking my brain wondering how they might do that, I thought of my earlier example of being able to answer email on the plane, and realized that we've got a pretty good real world example for what needs to happen in IMAP today (which is partly why I was so excited to see Gmail implement it). A good IMAP server lets me work offline, can more-or-less reconcile changes across devices that need access the mesage store, supports the server pushing status changes to the client, enables rich CPU-intensive activities to take place locally (indexing the cache of my account contents), and provides folders for aggregating items as well as a timeline view of when items are stored.
What if we had a cloud-based service that supported an IMAP-like protocol for read/write? Couldn't I then use iPhoto to begin organizing pictures, Flickr for adding some from friends, and Tabblo for creating a different "view" of the collection? What would it take to get a few of the broadly distributed clients to support this via plug-ins, and a few of the services to support it as a backend store API? Ditto for video, or any other type of multimedia.
Of course this model could also be applied to metadata (addressbook, buddy lists, etc.) The key would be that unlike RSS or even the bidrectional APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), an IMAP-like protocol would start from the assumption of many clients of different shapes and sizes needing rich read/write capabilities first and foremost (as I think about it, APP and a proper RESTful API might get you there, but I wonder if you couldn't simply start by actually using IMAP).
So who knows? Maybe the cloud is the right place to manage data and some of our computing tasks, assuming that we managed to get IMAP going for the rest of our electronic lives.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 24, 2007)
I've had occasion over the last week to use both Evite and eBay and I've got to say that no matter what all of the Internet pundits claim about how much fluff instead of stuff Web 2.0 is about, one thing we've learned is the last 10 years is how to make websites more usable. My god are these two sites horrendous to use! It is a true credit to Amazon and Yahoo that they managed to avoid the absolute stagnation that the eBays of the world seemed to have suffered from.
Ebay is a particular peeve of mine, both because it pioneered the world's best business model (as a market-maker for otherwise illiquid goods), and because it is still the greatest mainstream stealth success out there. When I ask people who I trust to be smart members of the mainstream what they love about their net-connected lives that they didn't have last decade, eBay is what most often comes up as the example of why the Internet is great. That the company has managed to remain in control of the auction market despite a truly horrendous user-experience speaks volumes to the power of positive feedback loops and network effects.
If I were in charge of one of these big winner-take-all Web 1.0 companies that hasn't yet understood that the web application space is going to be won and lost on usability over the next 5 years (and mobile platform support, though that is for a different post), I'd set up a Yahoo Brickhouse style R&D lab for innovating on user experience alone. Combined with proper A-B testing infrastructure (which I happen to know both of the companies mentioned here invested in heavily during the last decade), you'd have a real opportunity to bring user experiences forward to where they ought to be in this day and age.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 22, 2007)
So today is the day that we are supposed to give thanks in a general way for all of the things we appreciate about life. In my view as an immigrant this is a uniquely American type of holiday— so far as I know in fact, no other country has a holiday specifically dedicated to giving thanks to something that is not a person or an event. And in my own particular case (Venezuela), most of our holiday reasons come with epaulets and egos.
Given the crazy year that it's been, here are my thanks:
Thanks America for not being cynical
No matter what you think of politics or society today, the US is a pretty unique place in the way that it generally tends to eschew cynicism, preferring instead a sort of bounded optimism. I swear that when we look back on the "American Century" decades from now, it is this quality that folks will most associate with what made the US a great place for building Big Things out of nothing.
So thanks to all of the non-cynical investors who are always willing to write checks on the promise of building something out of nothing. Thanks to all of the non-cynical employees who are willing to get on the startup rollercoaster again even after they've been flipped out of it a few times before. Thanks to the big companies who keep buying innovation despite having been burned by it in the past. And most of all, thanks to all of the people out there from Boston to San Francisco who keep buying into the notion that the future is bright, and that we've got more opportunities ahead of us than have already passed.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 22, 2007)
Jeffrey Zeldman has the essay to ponder during the after-meal coma this year, "Understanding Web Design," on how web design is not about fancy bevels and cinematic effects but instead about creating extensible structures that others can inhabit. More like architecture and typography and less like traditional graphic design. Here is his definition:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
His definition finally made me get to closure on the ambivalence that I've been feeling around Flash-based web applications. They sure are snazzy, but Flash webapps have this feel to them that has always felt "non-native" when it comes to how we relate to the web which goes beyond their relative heavyness.
With most Flash-based websites these days, you get exactly what the developers and designers wanted to give you and get to take it or leave it wholesale. This can be ok for applications that you use infrequently such as shoe configurators or stationery makers, but often gets overly cumbersome as soon as you start to layer in community or workflows that rely on collaboration of any sort, or more significantly when the users are supposed to help extend the environment. In those cases, thinking through building web applications that ring true to the definition above seems like a better bet to me.
The piece reminded me of Christopher Alexander's definition of "living structures" in architecture— places that are designed from the very beginning to be extended as their occupants learn how the want to relate to the space. As with the best architects in Alexander's world, the most interesting challenge for web designers these days is to figure out how to design for this kind of habitability.
I think I am developing a man-crush for Ev as a product guy.
Though I suspect the ambling style portrayed in the piece may drive me nuts, I can't help but respect the way in which he seems to have pulled two infectious content/communication projects out of the ashes of mediocre ideas. This guy would be worth his weight in gold to any VC-backed company looking to restart its failed me-too consumer website.
My favorite quote in the piece:
Just like Blogger, Twitter was a simple communications product salvaged from the impending implosion of a more complex project. In both cases, Williams didn't really know what he was doing. With both ventures, his genius--if that is the word--derived from what the English poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, called "negative capability": "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Rings so true to being an entrepreneur and making things out of nothing that it almost makes me want to start reading poetry.
On another note, part of my fascination with Twitter (and all of the clones that it has inspired) is how it seems to have— in sitting at the intersection of communication and publishing— nailed what Jeremy refers to as "lightweight self expression for the general public." At Tabblo, I tried very hard to instill this discipline into our content creation experience, and failed repeatedly in the process. On good days I tell myself that this had to do with the fact that we were after a much more complex authoring experience (we wanted to make your stories to look like magazine layouts so you'd buy them as physical products), but I think deep down I've often wondered about my own acumen when it comes to "negative capability" and making key product decisions.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 18, 2007)
At the local coffee shop this morning, I found myself in line reading a review of "Love in the Times of Cholera" from the SF Chronicle on my iPhone when I failed to notice that the line had inched forward ahead of me. As the old lady behind me made some "I'm annoyed" grunt noise, I apologized and explained that I had been reading a review in the newspaper. Which of course prompted her to point to the stack of Sunday newspapers behind us and inform me that I might prefer reading "the real thing."
I don't know if it's the recent prodding that I've been taking from friends to be more green or the fact that I'm less and less interested in other people picking my entire reading list, but these days I look at a stack of newspapers like this one and feel a mix of disinterest and revulsion. I love tire fires in the backyard as much as the next under-developed South American, but I'm still bothered by all of those trees getting chopped down for such a disposable form of content consumption.
Nothing super insightful here. I just wanted to mark the day on which the paper newspaper officially died for me. I still love reading parts of the NYTimes on Sunday, but from today on, I'm done buying the newspaper. Sort of reminds me of the day which I bought my last audio tape (a "metal TDK-90") back in 1998. The content lives on but the means of distribution dies.
[Interestingly, I most definitely do not feel that way about magazines, but that is for a different post]
OK, so what about all the business school stuff? I must tell you a bizarre thing about our company: I believe it's still true that not a single person with an MBA has ever succeeded with us. Probably that's because we're really not a formula-run kind of place. We insist on understanding things from first principles. Which is good if you're trying to do things for the first time. But a waste of time if you're just doing things that have been done lots of times before.
I've always thought that running companies is pretty much common sense. It's stuff that can be figured out just by thinking, practically, about things. And knowing a certain amount about the world.
Now, there are lots of smart people who are great at their specific areas. But somehow they don't seem to engage the thinking apparatus when it comes to other things. And that's fairly crippling in trying to run a company.
I love to see a scientist talking about first principles in describing the entrepreneurial challenge because it rings so true to a lot of the hard thinking you have to do in the process of creating something new. I was talking to a friend while out in California this week and mentioned something about those times at work when you have to sit down to do the hard thinking. She looked at me as though this was somehow an optional part of most jobs which, when I thought about it, is probably true.
But thinking from the ground up is definitely a must in new venture creation. An example: a lot of the VCs that I run into can often be classified as "momentum investors" in that they like to talk about funding the YouTube of X or the Facebook of Y (usually after these companies have had successful exits or massive valuations) without really thinking about whether the translation to X or Y actually fits from what Wolfram would call a "first-principles" analysis. In contrast, the thinking VCs, like my friend Nick Beim from Matrix Partners, think through the idea and the business model from the bottom up, starting from the individual motivations of the customers/users/etc. and building up a micro economic model that fits the behavior. This is usually a much better investment of time than reading "Momentum Weekly" on the crapper or looking through sector sizing reports to find the next high growth segment that the other 1000 investors doing the same haven't already found. And it is anathema to the top-down astronauts (often self-identifying as "pattern recognizers") who must have been the kids in kindergarden jamming the Fisher Price square pegs into the round openings.
Incidentally, I met Nick while doing Tabblo which borrowed its first office from extra Matrix space. While he was not our board member directly, we spent many an afternoon chatting about the fundamentals of the consumer Internet and I often came away thinking that I needed to do more hard thinking about some of our underlying "first principles." Nick also introduced me to a great mentor and now friend, Reid Hoffman, who is his entrepreneurial doppelganger— intellectually honest to a fault, analytical as hell, and never afraid to say "it might work but the concept sucks." Always refreshing, though sometimes painful.
If you're thinking about a startup, in a startup, or even in a big company in a group looking at a new product or market, go read the Wolfram piece— it might help keep you honest next time you get sloppy in a strategy session.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 12, 2007)
I remember the first computer I was given as a child as though it were yesterday. When I was 6, my dad bought me a Timex Sinclair ZX81 which was this funky little computer that had a built-in BASIC and BASIC statement macros that you could access through a modifier key. At the time we had both an Apple ][ and an IBM PC at home but that Sinclair was special to me because it was all mine. I would plug it into an old black and white television set in my room and go nuts programming simple text input programs that made me feel as though I was denting the universe.
Today One Laptop Per Child went live with its "Give One, Get One" program— a great hack of the idea of getting an OLPC for yourself. By paying $400, you actually get two— one that gets shipped to you and the other that ends up somewhere in the third world, making a difference for someone who would otherwise never get a computer.
I'm fairly sure that this is too advanced for my 5-year old, but I just can not resist getting this as his Christmas present. For starters, it's a great cause. The machine is also likely to be a collector's item sometime down the road. And maybe, it won't be too much for him; after all, we've got the benefit of better software, richer interfaces, and a machine that sounds like it might just live up to all of the hype.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
Andrew got this monkey from his grandfather (who doubtlessly got it after giving Stanford money) that I've been staring at while changing diapers over the last two years. The wide-eyed stare combined with the Stanford t-shirt always reminds me of the heady times during the end of the last decade during my stay there: people in the engineering school were awash with the boundless optimism that is so endemic to Silicon Valley, and over at the business school, just about every embah was convinced their next job would be their last. When friends visited me, they would inevitably point out how foreign the culture felt, not because the crazy dot-com fever wasn't raging on the east coast (it was), but because everywhere but in the Valley, it was somehow tempered by that east coast stoicism (or is it cynicism?) that keeps people from really believing that 60lbs of dog food shipped overnight for $19.95 was really the beginning of something new.
I'm thinking about this because tomorrow morning I'm going to give a talk to the Stanford Alumni Club of New England about entrepreneurs outside the Valley, or more specifically what the key differences are between the east coast and west coast when it comes to starting companies. I'm not sure that I am particularly qualified to do this— after all, despite having worked at 4 startups, none of them were actually begun on the west coast. So the talk may instead be more of a "grass is greener" kind of thing. In fact most of what I'll be talking about is how at Tabblo we were always of the mindset that our next round of funding had to come from a west coast fund in order for us to stay relevant as we scaled. Having had six months of time post-acquisition to reflect on this, I'm not sure I completely agree with our original sentiment. But before I get to that, at the cost of spoiling tomorrow's fun talk, here is what does blow about entrepreneurship on the east coast:
1. When the 495 corridor lost the reigns of the technology-led revolution that started through the mainframe, continued through the minicomputer, and eventually transitioned to the PC and the Internet, we lost a lot more than an industry. We in fact lost a key ingredient in what the Economist has come to call an "economic cluster:" the combination of solid technical research universities, a young workforce, a risk-seeking set of capitalists, and what we lost here after Digital and Lotus navel-gazed their way into extinction: large successful industry bellwethers to train the next generation of entrepreneurial managers.
The hardest part of embarking on a consumer Internet startup here in New England is finding wealthy veins of talent to mine out of big companies that provide relevant experience sets. From my non-technical entrepreneur friends I often hear about how hard it is to find class-A engineers that know "web stuff," and we ourselves at Tabblo had a very hard time finding good direct marketing talent that understood how factors like viral adoption could be weaved into a coherent user acquisition plan. Both skills can be learned by those who are really talented, but this takes time and discipline— something is hard to cultivate because:
2. Thanks to the more conservative nature of investors here, ventures in the consumer Internet space often fall prey to the business equivalent of premature optimization, favoring getting to revenue at the expense of adequate distribution (users) or product refinement. I don't know that I would go so far as to espouse the Y-Combinator idea that you just need to "make something users want" and everything else will take care of itself— in fact if you've taken venture capital and are expected to deliver venture returns, it is irresponsible not to understand what the path to positive cashflow is, and to be testing the key assumptions at every step of the way. But an over-emphasis on this can lead to a dangerous situation where amidst slower growth than expected (which happens to just about every startup I've known at some point), the management team gets distracted by the "monetization problem" just to focus on something that might in the short-term appear to be more directly controllable. And when you've got a board of investors that encourage this trap, things can get ugly quickly.
Incidentally, the VC fund which we raised our money from at Tabblo, Matrix Partners, and our board member David Skok were A+ at helping us to avoid this trap. David was always pushing us to focus on solving the distribution problem at the cost of prematurely optimizing a business which would not at that point not have been at scale. Revenue is important, as is understanding the drivers of the business, but I've seen way too many entrepreneurs prepare for board meetings replete with spreadsheets and powerpoints that are more fitting of HP's printer business than of a rag-tag bunch trying to find a market with their product.
Both of these shortcomings can together create a vicious downward cycle that takes anyone who is not sitting on top of a golden egg idea down quickly.
Now what do we have on the flip side? The short answer: lots. Every other element of the Economist's cluster abounds here— universities, youth, capital— and we've got a whole bunch of other things to boot: access to the media companies from NY (who thanks to Google and Apple are now paranoid of anything that smells of the Pacific ocean), and an undeterred willingness to tackle really hard technical problems for periods of time that would seem like Paleolithic eras on the west coast.
But best of all, the best thing about starting a company that will eventually need regular users to scale (which is the case with all consumer Internet businesses) is that we are much less subject to the echo chamber effect of the Valley. In the Valley everyone is twittering, sharing links on Delicious, digging articles left and right, and uploading pictures to Flickr from their super phones, but the rest of the country is really not quite ready for a lot of these applications. And the sad part is that most of the companies that I've seen started appear to be aping a lot of these initial Web 2.0 experiments instead of trying to think about how to move the adoption curve back into the mainstream.
To be sure, there are some great companies that burst out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream from the Valley: Google, eBay, and YouTube strike me as three really great examples. But monocultures can be very self-reinforcing for most of us, for both good and bad. When I first came to the States, I was a fairly ok student but had the good fortune to go to a private school where there was a strong monoculture of academic achievement. And guess what? It worked its magic on me.
In the same way, I'm sure that were I on the west coast, I would probably not have embarked on Tabblo, worrying about moving bits to atoms, and building better tools out there for folks who just wanted to feel more creative. Instead, I might have been more willing to drop vowels from the name (Tbbl, Tbbblz, ...) and gone with some sort folksonomy-based social platform for content digestion. Over RSS and ATOM, of course.
I love California for its bright-eyed optimism and willingness to experiment (back to the monkey here). For sure. In fact, I'll be surprised if I don't make it out there at some point for more than my 6 day/month average. But for where I am now, I'll take a pass from the monoculture for a while and think through some of what makes the consumer Internet work for the rest of the non-early adopters.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
I read this weekend that in Japan consumers are slowing their PC purchases in a major way— eschewing them for the likes of iPod Touches, smartphones, and other portable devices that can bring the Internet to their pockets. So much so in fact that major web application vendors are targeting the small screens ahead of the big PC-connected LCDs.
This could just be about the death of the current PC form factor, which in space-constrained Japan might be coming on earlier. And in fact, it would seem that the Japanese love for small computers is extending down in the laptop-for-everyone sweet spot of $300 that OLPC and others are pioneering. But it could also be that the consumer computing platform has now been defined: web applications through the browser that let you do content-consumption things, buying things, social things, and in rare cases, authoring things. With gaming as the one big caveat, it seems that gone are the days where application developers talked about using the GPU to deliver amazing interfaces, or the raw processing power of the PC to do crazy magic around speech/gesture/video recognition, etc. And so cheap access devices are ruling the day, with the feature set being around how well they can support 3G/Wifi (for connectivity) and the web browser.
This is good for us but bad for Microsoft, Dell, HP, and even Apple. When the spec for an application or platform freezes from a features perspective, it's bye-bye hypergrowth and hello slogging it on price/quality/colors deathmarch. Apple gets to avoid this a little more than the others (though not much according to the article), but for all of PC folks it will be ugly. Especially given how much of a device form-factor renaissance we seem to be seeing (iPhone, Nokia N95, Nokia 810, Googlephone, etc.).
Fast forward to Open Social, this Google-led effort to freeze the spec of social networking core capabilities that everyone is going crazy about. For starters, I agree with all of the folks who say that consumers vote with their feet irrespective of standards and that these days they are all voting for Facebook, so I don't really see what the big game-changer is in putting out a standard for widget developers. More importantly though, it doesn't seem like the right time to do it, unless of course, it is an attempt to take some wind out of Facebook's momentum.
The most interesting thing about the "social network platform" is what Facebook calls the Minifeed (Open Social calls it the "Activity Stream"), an aggregation of all of the activity that is going on between connected members of a social network that seems ripe for data mining, advertising, and best of all, experimentation around how it can be used to help people find stuff that is highly relevant (including today's killer app, helping people find each other). Open Social's Activity Stream API seems pretty simplistic and maps directly to thinking of each person's stream as an RSS feed that you might want to read or potentially jam items into. And while this may cover most of today's use cases, I'd be surprised if the tightly integrated social network sites (like Facebook) don't find a whole load of more interesting uses over the next few years. One could argue that their continued dominance sort of depends on it, especially as they build out an advertising platform capable of supporting their crazy valuation.
Don't get me wrong, standardization is a good thing, even if it implies a sort of freezing that tends to kill product categories. I just wonder whether we're quite there in the social network space.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 4, 2007)
One of my favorite topics for fun discussion among technology entrepreneurs and investors is why the west took off while the east languished after the invention of the PC. Here on the east coast, we had the mini computer lock, were awash in people who had one foot in that world and the other in the emerging PC software industry, and still we managed to give up not only the PC boom but the subsequent Internet boom, and the most recent social web explosion as well.
Many many bytes are wasted on the blogosphere discussing a related topic— do you have to be in Silicon Valley to start a cool consumer Internet company?— so I won't belabor that here. In short, I think that you do not in fact have to be located there, though you have to work extra hard to stay connected if you are not.
That said, my favorite entrepreneur-blogger, Ev, had a post this week about people just starting their careers in technology that I wish I'd read 12 years ago, "Going west, as a young man." In it he covers his early career in getting out from Bumbletown Nebraska and out to the Valley (and fortunately for him into the hands of the O'Reilly folk) for his formative years.
Ev is a very special guy— in fact every time I hear him speak or read his stuff, I am impressed with his underspoken wisdom (for instance, I thought he had the most insightful 10 minute slot at the recent Web 2.0 conference). That said, after reading his post, it would seem to me that had he not found his way out there, he may have wasted 10 or 15 years of his career working on some insurance company intranet app in Connecticut or writing Spam copy for one of NY's finer spam companies, only finding out too late that the degrees of freedom life gives you when you are young and independent were gone.
This morning's NYT had a fun piece by John Markoff about Andy Rubin, an engineer-entrepreneur behind some of the most interesting consumer gadgets of the last couple of decades (and the supposed "father of the Google phone"), which also reminded me of how important it is to be around interesting people and bleeding edge big companies when you are bumbling around with the first decade of your career. And bumble we all certainly do— though some of us just hide it better.
The Village People had it right I guess— at least early on in your career.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 27, 2007)
The ever-inspiring writer/commentator David Brooks has a great piece in today's NYT called "The Outsourced Brain" where he writes about the way in which net-connected electronic life is making us all smarter by allowing us forget about the mundane. He starts with the wonders of an in-car navigation system, which resonates well with me as I've completely relied on one of these since 1999, and finishes by talking about how he sometimes doesn't know where he ends and his Blackberry begins.
This being the year of the smartphone, the piece is particularly prescient. Brooks is focused on whether this sea change is causing us to lose our individuality and concludes that it is our autonomy that we are giving up instead but I find it much more interesting to think about what the long term effects of the connected ubermind will be on productivity and creativity.
After having wrestled with whether the PC has had a positive impact on economic productivity over the last 25 years, macroeconomists are now going to have to think through how to measure the productivity impact of the always-connected devices in our pockets— an even trickier proposition. I don't have a single friend with a Blackberry who doesn't claim that it makes them much more productive— always available at a moment's notice to return an email. But really, how much better is the economy because the velocity of email is jacked up on on critical subjects like the company's annual dinner or the preference for softer language in the next day's presentation? All of these things feel like work which makes the 7 people playing ping-pong over the chain of emails feel productive on friday night, but I am hard pressed to see how these will show up in GDP data (outside of the increase in data usage and purchases of Blackberries).
And on the flip side, we're giving up all of the dead time in our lives to our electronic leashes, time that was previously spent at the grocery store checkout line daydreaming, free associating about problems, or jut thinking. Now it seems much easier just to check Twitter and see what's been put into the flow.
It is obvious to me that the net is going to go down as the most significant productivity boosting man-made thing ever— bigger than electric power, the steam engine, antibiotics, the book, whatever. Being networked is so transformative in the way that it allows people to communicate, work, and relate in just about any discipline that I find it impossible to believe that anyone would argue against this. Here I'm just curious about extending the net's reach into every place we go and every second of our lives.
And for the record, there is no way I would go back, even if it turns out we're going to be half as productive and twice as boring as a society— if only because I think that being more connected is a worthwhile positive mission to keep on driving. But it is interesting to read Brook's social commentary and think about how much more like the Borg we are slowly becoming.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 24, 2007)
This has been a long time in coming. For such a great web app, I've always been amazed that Gmail did not support IMAP. At first I thought it was a result of the fact that Google was really arrogant in thinking that it could totally re-invent email (which Gmail almost does) and that as a result everyone should just always use the web interface— that the POP3 support was only a slight nod towards supporting email clients.
But this announcement shows that Occam's razor always wins in the end: implementing a semi-stateful protocol like IMAP is hard, and especially hard on a platform which is supposed to support millions of simultaneous users and be able to fail-over across nodes instantly. I'm glad Google has tackled it though; in the era of the iPhone (and other mobile devices), IMAP's richer semantics for pulling parts of messages down are much kinder on your battery, and the protocol's ability to let the server push state changes makes good clients (though not the iPhone today) behave as well as Blackberries.
It's not widely available yet but I am going to be glad to be dumping the kludgey forward-to-Dotmac workaround that I've been living up until now.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 22, 2007)
Of all of the stuff I saw last week at Web 2.0, the most exciting meme was that of the mobile devices in our pockets finally turning into true portable computers. Together, all of these different smartphones are supposed to become a viable platform for innovation— ushering in a new era of social applications that are not only more useful (finally delivering on the whole "augmenting human intellect" thing, but also more ubiquitous and relevant.
Amen to all of that. Except of course that I walked floor and listened to companies big (Nokia) and small (Fizzl, Pizzl, or Dizzl) tell this tale, I kept thinking of the way Steve Jobs talked at D a couple of years ago about how getting to consumers via the phone carriers was like going through "orifices," and that Apple wasn't very good at that.
Fast forward two years. Apple made a deal with the devil and is reaping the profits from it— but the orifices remain. Which is why it is so great to see tech's last great journalist taking an aggressive and thoughtful stance on the issue in his latest blog post, "Free my Phone."
Walt is a real standup guy when it comes to calling it like it is. He is often accused of being too "soft" on the big companies he reviews— but what I've noticed is that when it comes to egregious behavior on the part of companies trying to make profits from consumers, he often pulls no punches.
And the best part: I know first hand that when he writes the folks at Apple listen. Ditto for AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and all of the other big companies. A very good thing if last week's utopian vision is ever likely to come to pass here in the US.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 17, 2007)
Amidst an environment that is feeling very bubbly to me these days, I'm at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this week. In fact, we (HP) are sponsoring the event at the Palace Hotel, so if you're around please come and say hi. And if you want to know all about how moving your content to output can make your users happy and you rich, drop by our workshop this morning.
I have to admit that I am a little worried about this whole Web 2.0 thing now because no matter what other people say about how much cheaper it is to start a web company, it's still just as easy to go out of business as it was in 1999, and VCs only have to get burned so many times before they crawl back into the hole they spent 2000-2003 in— at least when it came to the consumer web.
And it's not because of the crazy names (like Pizzl and Dizzl) anyone, or derivative concepts that I am worried. It's because, as with 1999, it seems like the "concept astronauts—" the entrepreneurs with the vision to transform X by applying Y— have gotten into high orbit while leaving the business models back on the ground. The mantra seems to be "make something that users will use" and worry about the money later which seems ok only if the ad model really will scale to work for all of these sub-scale players, something which I have some doubts about.
I'm hoping that the next few days leave me feeling that there is indeed something very different about this turn of the merry-go-round and that my Spidey sense is just off. Or at very least that Doc ends up being wrong, and that "Web 2.0" isn't just what we'll call the next crash.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 13, 2007)
Ok, so my last post is starting to smell like blogger's fromunda, if only because I tried too hard to reduce the argument about creation/consumption to make it more fun and polarized. That said, since posting it, I've had a few really interesting conversations with folks about consumption, creation, and the consequences of the tools at your disposal.
The most interesting one was at the weekly office pizza session yesterday where we quickly got off of the iPhone vs. N95 thing (not so interesting anyway) and into the question over whether any type of content creation— even if it is bad, lazily composed content— was better than any type of content consumption (I know, generalizations like this can make one's hair catch on fire). I was somewhat amused to see that this belief was not universally held among the folks that brought you Tabblo, with some preferring to think of some types of content as not worth the bytes they take up. It's an interesting assertion which cuts so against this whole democratization of personal publishing that it took me for a loop-de-loop as I thought about whether this might indeed be true. Certainly worthy of more thought.
One thing which Dave also argued for, but which I'm not on board for was that easier, more ubiquitous, and more connected content-creation and publishing tools (as has been argued about the N95) were not necessarily a net-gain because the serious folks would just take out the big honking iron to get the pictures and videos worth capturing.
It turns out that we are both wrong, but it took another David to prove us both wrong. Talking about his friends Greg and Petra who've just finished documenting a cross-country trip, he wrote to me last night:
I agree the trip is only interesting to close friends it's no On The Road, but great content, great stories, great communication, great pictures. And it requires a very low barrier IMO the same phone greg had in his pocket helped to be able to take pictures and email them to blogger more often than he would have any other time he took a trip.
Now it turns out that these guys used an iPhone and a Blogger account to tell this story. And you know what? Despite not knowing them, I found myself completely captivated by both commentary and photos. This may speak to Greg and Petra being particularly creative, it may be because I've done this very trip a couple of times, and it may simply be because it feels so real, but in any case, here was a clear case of what I had labeled the ultimate "consumption device" being used to tell a really wonderful story. I'm sure someone better equipped could have done a much more artistic job of it, but for the 10 minutes I spent learning about Greg and Petra's sweet adventure, I don't know that it would have made any difference. And in fact, the risk that they would have gotten to the Pacific without the time to edit, compose, and publish it, thereby depriving me of my 10 minutes is certainly not worth it.
So maybe not all content is worth publishing, but I do dig what these guys have done. Oh, and I'm happy to eat crow on my attacking the iPhone (for now).
Postscript: I got a chance to meet these guys last week while out in SF.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 11, 2007)
In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.
I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").
Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:
The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.
—via Steve Litchfield
(to be fair, I think Eddie and Pitkin were trying to tell me this last night but I was just fried)
How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.
Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming content, most people would rather just sit back and consume. This is why YouTube won when many other more producer-friendly video sites floundered. It's why TV still commands the kind of audience that most "huge" online properties would kill for. And it's why, as a mass market product, I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone will spank the N95.
But there is something potentially different about this particular twist on consuming versus creating. For a long time now, I've been hot and bothered by the idea of the "unwitting blogger," or the regular user who, in the process of doing stuff, becomes a creator of content without really thinking about it. On the PC/Internet, the trick is most successfully implemented by the proper harvesting of either metadata or messaging data. Digg is today's king of metadata, and Facebook the king of messaging. Both sites turn their "consumers" into creators during the very process of consuming the services.
What I would argue in the case of the N95 is that a phone equipped with a really good camera, a GPS, and an open API could become rocket fuel for the explosion of unwitting bloggers. Geotagged automatic upload to Shozu is just the beginning (though a very powerful one), as is Jaiku's twist on presence. We've surely got more to come as developers begin to explore how we bring location, multimedia, mobility, presence, messaging, and the cloud together in new and creative ways.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 8, 2007)
My brother-in-law gave me an ARC copy of the forthcoming Fake Steve Jobs book, Options, which I have to heartily recommend as high quality trash that is also very good for your soul. Why? Because it has been a long time since I've caught myself chuckling out loud— no, downright crying/laughing in public like this (to be precise, the last time I had this experience was while watching Arrested Development while on long cross country flights). In fact, last week I kept quite a few people up on a redeye flight as I laughed my way across the continent while reading about Fake Steve's trials and tribulations.
The book is great not just because it is an awesome parody of Steve Jobs himself, but because it it also a sendup of all of the famous people in his life. From Bono to Spielberg, from Hillary Clinton to Yoko Ono, no one escapes Fake Steve's wit and acerbic observations.
For me though, the funniest parts always come back to "El Jobso" and his attempt to cope with a world that is quickly moving away from the PC and towards new media company and the "Googletards" that he just can't understand. I'll leave you with one of my favorite passages in the book, where Jobso is celebrating his public company CEO achievements to some fanfare:
They're all raving about us...Cramer, that lunatic, is pounding his desk and screaming at people to buy Apple. "This stock is a must-own!" he says, his face so red it looks like his head is going to explode and splatter his brains all over the set. "Steve Jobs should be elected president of the world!" I'm so psyched that I drive down to the back of the parking lot and do some donuts in my Mercedes. There's smoke everywhere. A bunch of Mexican groundskeepers stand there whooping and waving their arms. One of them scream, "Chinga tu puta madre, cabron!" which I believe means, "Dude, you totally rock!" And you know what? I do. I totally do.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 7, 2007)
Paul Graham, whose writing is usually a real treat for me, has written a lame essay about the impeding abundance of web startups due to how cheap it has become to get one off the ground. In the piece he foresees a world where the startups become like a dandelions sprouting up all over the web. He asks how basic elements of the startup lifecycle (funding, strategy , acquisition) will change as we much into this world of surfeit.
While I think that it is an interesting thought experiment, I doubt that things will fundamentally change all that much. Rather, the current explosion of PHP-monkeys building Zizzl or Dizzl (thank you Fake Steve Jobs), the next great tagging-based version of eBay for digital goods, reminds me a lot of the late 1990s. There may have been a lot more money sloshing around then, and there certainly was a path to exit that is now closed to all non-businesses (IPOing), but the same overabundance of people trying things was around then as well.
Except for one big difference which Fred Wilson mentions in his follow-up post: back in the 1990s the surfeit of entrepreneurs were largely newly-minted MBAs looking to apply their talents to dreaming up all of these new businesses. Today it seems like that particular cattle cart of lemmings has returned to financial services, leaving the mantle in the hands of the geeks who are now "empowered" by Ruby on Rails, virtual dedicated hosting, S3, and essays about how easy it is to build a startup today.
Unfortunately, as is the case with pendulum swings, the sustainable model for startup innovation and wealth creation is probably somewhere in the middle of the two scenarios. From what I've seen it takes three things to have a great startup: 1. an exploding market, 2. a great product that works (herald the great geeks!), and 3. solid thinking about the business model and the go-to-market plan. The need for this third leg of the stool has not been obviated by cheaper infrastructure costs, and certainly not by the emergence of AdWords as "instant businessmodel."
Confusing the success of startups that get $25,000 in funding and sell for $5MM to Some Big Company with a fundamental change in how businesses are built is not understanding the core driver of value for the acquirer. When any big company buys on the cheap like this, what they are generally doing is smart hiring, not actually paying for the opportunity to enter a market or inherit and working business. Vesting schedules being what they are, paying $5MM for 5 engineers that have a proven track record as a capable team, and making them work for 3-4 years for that money is actually a great deal from an HR cost of acquiring talent perspective, especially because it is generally funded out of the balance sheet.
There is no magic— it is hard to start startups, especially if the role of these is to build businesses that work. Making stuff people will use is a good first step, but there are a whole bunch that need to come behind it.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 6, 2007)
I can not for the life of me believe that people who have better things to write about are still debating the definition of Web 2.0, 3.0, 3.x, etc. It has now entered the realm of the absurd. And as a beneficiary of the "Web 2.0 tidalwave," I feel justified in ranting for just a second.
Tim did us all a favor back in 2003 when he coined the term Web 2.0 but for only one very simple reason: he gave the media and investors a conceptual frame from which to begin seeing a world which for the previous three years had been seen as a complete wasteland. It took about a year and bit for this conceptual frame to catch on in a meaningful way, but when it did, entrepreneurs could finally talk to financiers again about the web without being laughed out of the room. And for the most part, journalists who had been burned by the long view/short distance fallacy during the dot-com boom, were coaxed out of crap pieces about "the best places to launch a career" to talk about the impact of the net again. There was a tremendous amount of value in this soft reset, and for that, all of us entrepreneurs owe Tim a beer.
But that is it. There is absolutely no other reason to try to version the web, and any entrepreneur who relies on these dot releases for any sort of consequential decision making or strategy formation is just looking for trouble. Notice that Google— the perennial Web 2.0 company according to a whole load of experts who matter— rarely refers to Web 2.0 in describing itself or the products it is bringing to market (interestingly enough, Yahoo is not shy about cloaking its (re)launches in Web 2.0 lingo).
Most significantly, users don't actually give a rat's ass which version of the web their application belongs to. Instead of focusing on version of the web, the versionites might be better served by thinking about versions of users, as in User 1.0 ("wow, this Internet thing is amazing so I'll put up with anything"), User 2.0 ("if it isn't as simple to use as the Google search bar, I don't care about it"), User 3.0 ("if it doesn't come in my BrainPal I don't care about it), etc. At the end of the day, all of the technologies, data sources, and macro social trends that we are trying to lump into the versioned web need to support these fundamental change in user demands.
Just to end on irony: I'm looking forward seeing everyone at the Web 2.0 conference!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 5, 2007)
Last week's awesome encounter with Alan Kay left me with quite a few anecdotes; during one particular moment in the conversation, he reminded me in tone of the caught villains on Scooby Doo who always end the episode by claiming that they would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for "those meddling kids." Except of course that he was talking about the stagnant state of the software industry and the meddling kids are all of us failing to read the literature.
I am as guilty of this as the next guy which is why I decided to catch up on my list of queued papers on a recent cross country flight.
The theme of this bunch: the limitations and fallacies of the current web application development stack, and specifically the relational database. In particular, I wanted to point out two interesting articles in the "your architecture sucks" department:
1. In "The End of an Architectural Era" Stonebreaker et al. argue that using relational databases for most of today's web-scale information processing tasks is like throwing a buggy-whip under the hood of the car and expecting it to go fast. It's a good read (at least right up to the point which they start talking about their plan for a distributed transaction processing system) because it covers a lot of the history and design motivations behind the original RDBMS (back in the day of some very IBM sounding thing called "System R") and makes interesting points about places where web scale computing that is done on the back on an RDBMs is taking on unnecessary overhead. My only criticism of the paper is that in the proposed alternative the authors are willing to just toss away one of the most important benefits of a relational database— the ability for developers/administrators/whoever to perform ad-hoc queries on the dataset without having to drop to writing code.
2. Not having been crazy about the proposed alternative in the Stonebreaker paper, I was excited to come across "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store" by a bunch of smart dudes at Amazon, because of how well it was written, how simple and elegant the solution they propose seems to be, and most importantly, because it describes a system that is in actual production use every day. The basic concept is BerkleyDB on steroids, distributed across an arbitrary number of nodes in a fault-tolerant and self-healing design. In English: you can have persistent, reliable hashtables even in the midst of a semi-reliable infrastructure (node outages and network partitions), all at web scale. After pooh-poohing the relational database (sorry RDBMS, you are just not having a good month!), they go on to describe a system that supports an "always writeable" datastore and fails only in the rarest of cases. Best concept of the whole paper: the "vector clock" that follows each write operation around the network of nodes (a "vector clock" is a pairing of a write's version # with the node that initially takes that write) to solve conflicts across the system. I wish everything I ever did on any computing device came with its own vector clock!
Alan is right— anyone building a website that could someday live at web-scale (millions of users, billions of transactions) should be reading these papers rather than simply taking on the intellectual challenge of re-inventing some of these schemes from scratch (we were guilty of some of this at Tabblo). Fortunately we've got a lot of resources around to help the cause; if you haven't seen the always-entertaining, and frequently excellent "High Scalability" blog (source for both of these papers), you should subscribe.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 3, 2007)
Two years ago I blogged about this fabulous new writer I had found named Richard Morgan because I found him very clever in how he used his genre (sci-fi) to relax constraints in a way that created very thoughtful fiction. In his first book, Altered Carbon, Morgan sets a basic detective Whodunit in a world where people find it difficult to die due to the complete separation of consciousness from the physical body. The book is great fun and quickly turned into a trilogy that— like all good trilogies— loses steam in the middle, and picks it up again at the end.
Well this summer Morgan came back with another excellent novel— Thirteen— which is the conceptual reciprocal of Altered Carbon. This time he's put the classic Fugitive plot in a world that is populated by "variants" (of the genetic variety) or humans that were bred for specific tasks. I'm not going to ruin the cleverness of the types that he breaks down (let's just say the run to some pretty base human qualities), but will instead recommend it as a highly entertaining (and thought-provoking) twist on the age-old question of nature versus nurture.
I've personally found that where people sit on the nature-nurture question tends to track the dynamic of the old Disraeli quote about 20 year-old conservatives being heartless and 40 year-old liberals being brainless, with the schism rooted right around when people have children. Though all of us want to believe we can be whoever we think to be, there is nothing like seeing fundamental character differences expressed from such an early age in all sorts of ways to make us parents feel that the effects of nurture are sort of irrelevant and that it's mostly about the code running in your chromosomes. And so it is especially entertaining to watch Morgan play with the ideas of nature fully constraining who we are in such a complete and fatalistic way. By the end of the book, you can't help but feel that there is a little bit of variant in all of us.
He also rocks at inventing new terms— in fact so much so that I am sure this guy is turning out idiom in Scotland as we speak). My favorites from 13? Twist and Cudlip. Go read it to find out just what they mean.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 29, 2007)
So everyone is on fire about the fact that Apple seems to be bricking cracked iPhones with the new 1.1.1 software upgrade, which is a bit surprising to me. Did people not expect one of the most proprietary companies in the industry to take this path when its walled garden is under attack?
In fact, I think that the Apple of today— which is to say the Apple that launched OSX— is actually much more clue-full about how to enable something which is critical for companies in their position: key axes of user/developer participation that enrich the platform without threatening the very aspects that gives it its edge (stability and perception of control for partners). Which is why I'm left wondering why this is such a big deal, and why we can't just all focus our energy on getting Apple to support the right vector of participation for the rest of us, by which I mean enhancing their web appplication platform to the point where developers won't really care about the fact that they can't install binaries to run on the iPhone.
Below are the three things I think Apple could do to cut this gordian knot of control versus user-led innovation. In providing an "SDK" that allowed web developers access to these 3 APIs I think Apple would (as they did with the "open for business" OSX strategy) unleash a torrent of creativity while keeping the relevant bits of their platform closed for the sake of their small-minded (but critical) partners, the phone companies and the content holders.
1. Access to the camera's current "roll:" though it would be ideal to be able to control the camera itself, a great start is being able to take pictures off of the current set via Javascript/DOM scripting. For instance, I would love to be able to write:
var img = document.camera.roll[0].images[0]['thumbnail'];
for manipulating images inside of the browser for say posting as a file upload to a server. One of the coolest things about mobile imaging is the ability to completely bypass the PC; Shozu on Series 60 showed us this in a big way. I'd like to be able to send photos up not only to Flickr but also to all sorts of other cool web applications that could take advantage of basic image recognition to provide all sorts of new functionality.
2. Growl-like notification hooks, preferably tied to the SMS pipeline: this one is hard to describe for people that haven't used the fabulous Growl OSX service, but I'll try anyway. A portable computer like the iPhone (more on this below) needs to be really good at messaging which means that it needs to support as a core capability the ability to have messages "pushed" to the end device. Currently on the iPhone this comes as either phone calls or SMS messages. Why not let developers of web applications register "listeners" for particular SMSes that can the point mobile Safari to specific pages, or, at the very least, get the user's attention. When we look at mobile Meebo or mobile Facebook on the iPhone, the biggest limitation is their inability to push notifications up to the user that is not currently on their respective pages. Sure, each of these apps can send generic SMS messages to a particular phone number, but wouldn't it be so much easier on the user if these SMSes could drive specific behaviors on the phones? The idea of copying a system-wide notification like Growl goes all the way back to the Cocoa framework, so I'm sure Apple would have no problem doing it.
3. Minimal control of the local radio-based networking: Apple is already heading in this direction by giving us Bonjour (local multicast) support inside of mobile Safari in 1.1.1. Taking this further would allow application developers to find out more about the local networking environment, and where appropriate, to make connections with locally available devices for sharing information that do not require connecting to the greater Internet.
Notice that none of the three vectors of functionality I describe above touch either of the two sacred-cow business models that Apple is trying to protect: the carrier lock for using cellular networks, or the content providers' lock on the music they push to the device.
I often tell new iPhone users that the best way to always be happy with their new toy is to not think of the iPhone as cellphone-on-steroids, but to think of it as a laptop in your pocket. When looked at from this perspective features like a battery that lasts all day and a form factor that lets you surf the web in a device that weighs less than 6lbs and doesn't require a keyboard seem more like magic than say the touch screen replacing the number pad, or the constant limitations of the AT&T network. As they build out vectors for extensibility, it would behoove Apple to remember the fact that they are indeed seeding portable computers and not locked phones.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 26, 2007)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." —Alan Kay
It was the moment I read that quote a few years ago that I decided that Alan Kay was one of my absolute top software heroes. Of course it also had to do with his pioneering work at Xerox PARC (read all about it in Dealers of Lightning), around object oriented programming, conceiving the first laptop, and a general adherence to both elegance and execution in software design that make him truly stand out among an already pretty impressive class of peers at PARC.
Yesterday I attended a TTI Vanguard conference on behalf of HP and had the chance not only to meet Alan, but to spend 90 minutes talking with him about software design and the state of engineering, as well as a whole bunch of related topics. I've been unwinding the conversation for most of the past twelve hours, and if I have one regret, it's that I don't have a transcript of it so that I could spend some time really digesting what he was getting across to me. He has a way of using very concise terms that carry a tremendous amount of meaning and then backing them up with references to work done by colleagues across a broad range of disciplines that is incredibly dense. If Alan himself were a Smalltalk object, I think he might need a little refactoring on the messages he sends; they are compact for sure, but depend on such a rich shared context of meaning that it can be hard for the rest of us to follow.
And speaking of compactness, I really dig his latest project. He's gotten funding from the NSF (and some other folks) to rebuild an entire personal computing system in 20,000 lines of code. And by personal computing system he doesn't mean a VM like the JVM or .NET, but in fact the "whole stack—" from the interface the user sees to the instruction set on the processor. Yeah, crazy right? When he first said it to me, I wasted the first 10 minutes trying to understand what kind of "whole system" definition he was going to use to cheat his way to the 20K LOC constraint, but it soon became clear that he was deadly serious about doing this soup-to-nuts.
Why? Because according to Alan, the edifice that is any major computing "stack" (Windows, Linux, OSX + drivers + frameworks + applications) can easily run into 100-300M lines of code— far too much for any one person to even hope to begin to understand (20K lines is by comparison, about the equivalent of a 400 page book). And if we can't understand it, there is no way that we could ever hope to begin to fix the entropy that is slowly eating these systems from the inside out, or to innovate enough in software development practices to allow software to experience its own Moore's law-like exponential increase in power per line of code written.
I'm torn over whether I think that working the sort of alchemy that Alan & team are going to have to undertake to pull off this Herculean task so that one person can truly understand the entire computing environment is going unleash the type of revolution that he hopes it will. On the one hand, I love the notion that building this type of system will usher in new tools and ways of thinking about software development that will allow us to keep teams small and productive. I've always been very proud of the small size of our team at Tabblo (especially relative to what we are able to do), and have been a little shocked since joining HP about how many other "lab managers" scoff when I tell them that our team is fewer than 10 people, following it with some statement of size about their own multi-hundred person team. It shouldn't be this way— on this front both Alan and Google are absolutely correct. Small teams make the magic happen; in fact, I can not remember the last piece of software that I was blown away by that had more than 25 people working on the core of it (one of my favorite analogies that he used while we chatted yesterday was that of the pyramids, "hunks of rubble covered with limestone," that took thousands of people years to build and could not stand up to the simple Roman arch built by 2-3 masons).
On the other hand, one of my favorite things about working in software is how well abstractions work to isolate me from the stuff that I don't care to know about. As I type this, I have a vague idea of what the CPU and GPU are doing together to make the characters appear on the screen, but most of the time I don't want to have to think about it. And if I wanted to build a new kind of word processor, I'm not sure I'd really want to think about it either. Furthermore, there is a whole generation of people just like me who probably don't have the training and experience to think that deeply about the low levels of what the OS and the hardware are doing to provide us with our computing environments— and each generation of kids coming out of school knows less and less about this arcane stuff. Today's PHP hacker wants to build the next Facebook, but he is likely to know very little about how PHP executes, how a webserver is built, or even how TCP works to send bytes all over the Internet. Should he have to worry about this if his goal is to build social applications?
Obviously, I am simplifying his argument as I think that what he would argue is that in a properly self-describing, self-bootstrapping system, it's turtles all the way down which would make it a lot easier for our PHP-hacker friend to understand the system to its core.
In fact, it is the pursuit of this elegance that is the most inspiring part of Alan's new project— and of his whole life's work. The fact that he is always looking to make things more logical and concise, to find a new kind of science (and art) in the way that most of us will build software in the future is a very good thing indeed.
And in the meanwhile, the rest of us still working on the pyramids should take a pause to think a bit about how we could move towards that arch.
[Postnote: After writing this, I went and read his NSF proposal. I'm not an expert in grant writing, but this proposal is so good that anyone looking to write any sort of pitch should read it (especially people writing business plans for risky new ventures). It's grand while remaining incredible humble in what is known and what is really hard to do. It covers the depth of experience the team has concisely, and gives a great history of "water under the bridge." But most of all, it inspires with its broad vision of what computing could be for everyone, and why it's so important that we be commissioning this type of work. I don't know who you are NSF person who approved this, but you have definitely spent my tax dollars well here!]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 17, 2007)
Jon Udell has a great interview on his podcast "Interviews with Innovators" where he talks to Ed Iacobucci, a veteran software guy (founder of Citrix) about his new business, DayJet. Like others before him, Ed is looking at the constant money-loser, customer-displeaser that air travel has been in the United States and asking the simple question: does it have to be this way?
But unlike most others, Ed came out of retirement to start a business around demand aggregation for seats on a network of much cheaper regional jets (made by another software industry veteran Vern Rayburn). The core idea is that the network provides the ability for customers to self-select along a "time arbitrage" spectrum, and that when this is combined with some heavy duty optimization algorithms, the capacity of the overall system can be managed to make what has thus far been a terrible business (regional charters) profitable.
I won't go into the specifics of how this all works because Jon does such a good job of covering it in the podcast (I'm really digging Interviews with Innovators by the way). What I will say is that it is really interesting to see people that come out of the software industry try their hands at other businesses while borrowing a lot of the software thinking that helped them before. Outside of helping him to see two core business problems from the computational perspective (a potentially huge advantage), I was left wondering how much Ed's years at IBM and then Citrix are influencing his thinking in this new endeavor.
I first met Ed during the time when he was having his "false start" in regional air travel. He was brought to our office at Memora by a common friend to see if what he saw us doing would make for an interesting investment. And even back then, my take-away from our meeting was that he was very interested in how we might make a run at the platform that Microsoft was putting together for attacking the home. Though he was a very nice guy, he was rather skeptical about our prospects for making any kind of significant dent in the market. In the end he was both right and wrong: right because we couldn't make it work (Memora), but wrong because worrying about the Microsoft platform (or any platform) proved to be entirely useless. Six years later, the digital home is still unconquered, and the company that looks closest to it today had nothing but an overpriced portable music player which people were convinced was named after the acronym "Idiots Price Our Devices" back in 2001.
Throughout the interview Ed spends a bit of time talking about platform he is trying to usher in— at first making the analogy between the airframe being like the PC, the engines being like the CPU, and DayJet being like the OS/application suite— which is an interesting analogy which I found lacking in its predictive power. Interestingly, I find a lot of the same stuff going on today as software veterans talk about the Internet as a platform, or the mobile handsets as platforms— interesting but not totally insightful.
Meanwhile though, I think I am beginning to develop an aversion to the term platform.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 11, 2007)
A few weeks ago while trying to find someone in the middle of a downpour in New York City, I borked my iPhone (iPhoners be forewarned, apparently, the smooth surface and lack of buttons has little to do with the iPhone's ability to resist water). Since I was away from home and in need of a phone that could make and receive calls, I went to the local Apple store and had it replaced with a loaner unit. Despite my expecting it, the most amazing part of the experience was what happened when I plugged the loaner into iTunes— most of my phone's state was restored from a backup including the state of the various messaging applications (SMSes, emails, read/unread, etc.). While I lost a few things (YouTube bookmarks and ringtones), the overall experience underscored the fact that more and more, the actual devices that we do our computing on are nothing more than interface and an intelligent cache, while the bulk of what matters to us today (data) is increasingly moving to the cloud.
Ok, so I cheated in that paragraph above a little bit. Most of my iPhone's state was actually stored on my Mac laptop, which today is not strictly in the cloud. In fact the Mac makes a bad case for the cloud, because its own state would be so difficult to replicate up to a server farm somewhere. Sure, I can use DotMac to backup files and the datastores of specific Apple applications (Addressbook, iCal), but most of what represents my Mac (my iTunes collection, my tweaked out DarwinPorts, my various .rc files, the rest of my installed applications) doesn't play well with cloud-based services because we currently lack a good protocol for replicating the data and machine state to the cloud.
Or do we?
I guess I must be having a bad month, because the main server I use for experiments (my own personal bit of the cloud) seems to have gotten sick somewhere in its bowels. Every few days the kernel panics and the entire machine locks up. After re-jiggered most of the software installed on it, I've now come to realize the root cause is some bit of flakey hardware on the motherboard or RAID controller. Having probably installed Linux more than 100 times over the last 10 years, I can honestly admit that the magic of building a useless bunch of PC parts into a little piece of the Internet is now all but gone, and that even in the cloud, it's probably a good idea to treat the hardware as ephemeral.
Enter virtualization. A few months ago, I remember seeing Brad Fitzpatrick enamored with the open source para-virtualization project Xen because he could just "spin off VMs for each application." However, at the time I didn't have the cycles to play with it. The intervening months have done little to make the open source part of the Xen project move forward (there is still no bootable CD version of it, most documentation is at least six months out of date, and XenSource is now on the way to the dustbin of acquire-to-kill companies). Since I didn't have quite enough patience for digging through all of that, and since I have been quite impressed by VMWare's Fusion (the Mac OSX version of VMWare's VM runner), I decide to give their free server product, VM Server, a shot.
[A parenthetical aside on those interested in Xen versus VMWare on a technical level— all others skip this paragraph: VMWare Server doesn't quite perform as well as a fully "paravirtualized" VM (like Xen) because it has one more level of abstraction between the guest OS and the hardware. In effect, a guest OS on VMWare Server runs as a process on a base (or host) OS without modification to the guest OS, and with minor tweaks to the host OS (implemented through a set of kernel modules). It's not like those old crappy CPU emulators (Virtual PC comes to mind here) in that instructions are still executed natively by the processor (which is why VMWare primarily supports Intel on Intel configurations), but you will pay a penalty, especially around IO operations. That said, for my workload, the penalty was neglible. In fact the server that pushed this page to you is running in a VMWare instance inside of an Ubuntu Linux based OS— go ahead, hit reload really fast a few times to see how much the network has become the bottleneck these days!]
To make a long story short, I now have a bunch of Linux VMs which I run on two physical machines, as well as my development laptop interchangeably. In and of itself this is nothing special, except that maybe it is interesting to see how some of us like to waste the cycles that Moore's Law gives us with an increasing number of levels of abstraction.
But back to getting my Mac into the cloud, for real. Why couldn't the OS support virtualization natively, and then let me run all of my computing on a guest OS that itself could be streamed up into the cloud? Wouldn't this then become the ultimate (albeit complicated) protocol for syncing state between client devices and the cloud?
There are interesting possibilities around a solution like this one that go well beyond backup and restore from the cloud. At a crude level, this VM-shipping is the same thing as packaging up code and data and moving it around the network. It is in effect an entire execution context that is just mine. Does it mean no more traveling with a laptop? Sure, but it also means being able to keep my computer running all of the time, whether I have it on or not. This isn't anything new for the energy-sucking desktop crowd, but as the world moves to laptops, there may be some interesting new businesses here.
To close, let me come full circle back to my borked iPhone. Naturally, there is little chance that a device that is as power and cycle-constrained as the iPhone is going to grow a virtualization layer any time soon (thought it's amazing what can be put on chips these days). The more relevant question though is: should it? Are there benefits to having every computing platform that we use be able to save its entire state in one bag of bytes that is portable, cloneable, and ultimately, sychronizable across other devices?
I'm not sure, but then again, I've definitely grown up in the simplest possible protocol age where the best thing you can do for an application is emit its data as an RSS feed. It will be interesting to think about what happens when these virtualized devices find more comfortable homes in the cloud.
Postface: I wrote most of this post at 2 am while recovering from my brother's 42nd birthday celebration but then lost it to a fibbing laptop battery (fittingly enough). It's his total and utter lack of respect for conventional wisdom (combined with more than a few drops of crazy) that I've found most inspiring in thinking more broadly than the immediate engineering problems in front of me, and for that reason this wacky entry is my way of saying: happy birthday brother.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 8, 2007)
Blackberry Internet Mail service seems to have borked this morning, leaving millions of Crackberry addicts without an excuse to avoid their children. I'm sure in the end it will have been some silly admin error that caused it, but as we grow more and more used to (and addicted) the gigantic signaling fabric that the Internet has become, it is going to be harder and harder to cope with these kind of outages. Why just last week, we were just getting over the Skype outage during which I heard podcasters claim they were going to be "put out of business" by bad Skype capacity planning.
What is especially rough about the Blackberry outage is that it is endemic of the types of outages we can expect to see if we continue switching to proprietary (and thus centralized) messaging platforms. For instance, all sorts of web services have sprung up to replace email with varying degrees of success. On some sites, the internal messaging is peripheral to the experience (Flickr), but on others, it is either central (Facebook), or the experience (Twitter). Unfortunately, these systems were designed as centralized web services. And even well implemented web services can go down, mostly because the redundancy is added after the initial design. For instance, I'm sure that Facebook's database layer is sharded and replicated, its assets are on multiple CDNs, and its application servers are geographically distributed— but because the application was never designed to be distributed, these solutions will only take robustness thus far (especially after you add in the potential for human error at each of these layers).
Contrast this to decades-old email, or rather email + DNS. The combination of a very simple protocol for message exchange (SMTP) with a very flexible address resolution system (MX records in DNS) means that is is pretty hard to make all of email "go down." Sure the big centralized services like Gmail and Hotmail can have outages, but all of those law firms running Exchange, schools running Sendmail, and startups running Postfix will keep right on chugging. And even when these small poorly managed mail servers fail, there is usually some marginally better server at the ISP queueing up email just for the occasion.
Ray Tomlinson and his colleagues at BBN deserve a ton of credit for having put together a system in the 1970s that could grow to the scale and scope that it has while remaining more robust than a lot of what has come after. All of the rest of us should take a page out of their book in working towards improving the fabric of the Internet.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 2, 2007)
I find myself taking either of my real digital cameras out less and less these days which is a little ironic, given where I've just come from. Actually, I still use my Nikon D70 in much the same way (episodically around events where I want to get a set of very permanent pictures), but my small Canon point-and-shoot rarely sees the light of day. It still takes much better pictures than the iPhone, and over the last week I've found myself wanting the zoom and low light shooting a couple of times, but overall, the combined needs just don't get me over the activation threshold (which is telling given how small these little cameras have become).
The other thing I've noticed is that I'm just not super excited about the category of the small, disconnected point-and-shoot camera anymore. It used to be that every 6-9 months I'd find something that would push me to upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Unfortunately, these little cameras have now gotten to Microsoft Office status, with all of their incremental improvements being about as exciting as new Word templates. Even the big reviewers are getting the message— this week, David Pogue reviews a low end Fuji camera that he claims is targeted at "Generation Z" because it has a number of features that prep photos for eBay, Blogger, etc. before they leave the camera. Overall, it seemed like a very ho-hum proposition, though he does mention one interesting feature: the Fujifilm Z10fd comes with an IR port to blast pictures Palm Pilot-style to other cameras similarly equipped. Though this seems like a fairly borked implementation, I'm sure that this is where cameras need to go in the consumer segment to become exciting again.
As he often does, Dave Winer hit the nail on the head a few weeks ago with his concept of the "social camera" where the whole point of the camera's design was to enable the sharing of pictures. I think he hits the nail right on the head in that I can not count the number of times that I've asked for/been asked for pictures tha somehow never make it out of the camera/PC of their owner. And unfortunately, just about all photo-sharing sites (Flickr being the one that comes closer to being the exception) are far too much of a band-aid solution, mostly because of how labor intensive the upload/tagging/sharing sequence is.
The right solution starts from a network connected camera; however, this is a necessary but hardly sufficient precondition. Having had a Nikon S7c, and having been a beta user of the wonderfully clever Eye-Fi wireless SD card, I can attest to the fact that poorly implemented network connectivity can hinder the experience in two key ways. First, if it is too hard to get associated with an wireless access point, and too manual to pick the photos one at a time to send to the cloud, it just won't happen (this is where the Nikon really fell down). And second, if the camera doesn't connect to and send the pictures to a very open cloud-based service with an extremely simple and well-documented API for extracting them for inclusion into other services, there won't be the opportunity for other people to write innovative applications around the photostream.
In fact, if I was a camera manufacturer, I would do two things: first, I'd look at the way that the iPhone works to get on and off of wi-fi networks to see if I could do the same. And if the processing power was just too much for the electronics in a camera, I'd get a Bluetooth module on board and piggyback off the fact that everyone carries a phone, and that increasingly, most of these phones will have Bluetooth and all-you-can-eat data plans. The second thing I would do is build a river-of-photos service backed by Amazon S3 for all of the photos taken by the camera to go to. The challenge would be handling privacy, but with a little thought and some smart defaults, I'm sure something could be worked out (or perhaps early implementations of the system could be just for "Generation Z" who doesn't care about sharing everything).
The closest I've seen anyone come to this is the Shozu series-60 application that would take all of the photos I would take on my Nokia e61i and upload them to Flickr in the background. When I retired my Nokia, Shozu was the thing I missed the most, if only because it hinted at the possibilities of managing my photos as one big feed, with all of the same tools and tricks that I have come to increasingly use with all of the other feeds in my life.
Are you listening camera vendors? I'm ready to buy if you're ready to make!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 12 months ago (July 31, 2007)
After yesterday's rant about creating parallel infrastructures for messaging, I was amused to read Scott Karp's blog post on the "inefficiencies" of Web 2.0 where he argues that plugging your Twitter stream into Facebook and then consuming both it and the Facebook feed in Google Reader can get annoying.
Absolutely true.
However, parallel messaging infrastructures aside, Scott is missing the point. The cool thing is that we can do these things at all.
Find any three year-old who has discovered Legos and watch him go to town snapping stuff together. For the two years, the creations that he will assemble will look like molten piles of plastic growing haphazardly every which way, really amounting to nothing more than the sheer joy of knowing that force and concentration work magic with Lego pieces. This is exactly where we are with RSS and ATOM feeds and all of the hidden readers that can consume them (Facebook, Jaiku, Google Gadgets, Yahoo Pipes, etc.).
But keep watching that three year-old as he turns into a five year-old and you'll see something really amazing start to happen. The jumbles become ships, airplanes, cars. The haphazard construction gives way to a careful understanding of where a 1x2 makes all the difference and where a right angle join can turn a car into a rocket. And in the best of cases, these new found skills find ways to surprise even the very designers of the kits the respective pieces belong to.
When it comes to syndicating and remixing content and web application functionality, I think we're just about to turn that five-year old corner. We're really about to see the true promise of web services delivered— on a consumer platform and mostly by "user programmers" remixing feeds and plugging things together. And a little redundancy is a small price to pay for that.
I've have four different exchanges with folks today about the puff piece that Jason Pontin wrote on Pownce in today's New York Times. Essentially Pownce seems like another social network Web 2.0 application that is trying to build its own messaging infrastructure. Maybe I'm not getting something about what is going on with these sites but my general thinking is that between the web, email, IM, and SMS (all relatively open albeit in decreasing order), we've got enough bricks to play with, and that building closed systems in the name of expediency is a waste of effort.
Jason Kotkenailed the general sentiment a few weeks ago when he accused Facebook of "becoming the new AOL." In jumping on its closed platform, developers are cutting a Faustian bargain at best— and especially so if the revenue model is not clearly split out.
That said, Facebook is a juggernaut, and as such not many can ignore their "platform" play. I'm almost ready to admit that their in-system messaging and status updates make sense. After all, there are millions of college kids hitting refresh 60-70 times a day in order to see what they might have otherwise seen in their inboxes and buddy lists. But a brand new startup attempting to replace email and IM?
I love the implementation of Pownce (especially because it's powered by Django and feels very fast and light). But I just can not see getting onto yet another identity network and another messaging platform just so that I can send big files around. And I think that the Pownce folks would do much better to focus on the features that could complement email and IM instead of wholesale replacing it. For instance, both of these mediums could use much better integration with SMS— and yet Pownce didn't even come out of the gate supporting SMS at all (which to me this was the killer feature that made Pownce's original inspiration so compelling).
Note: to anyone who still wants to try it, I've got a whole load of Pownce invites. Send me an email and they are yours— no need to be bidding on eBay.
My friend Jerry Michalski has long held that businesses that think about "consumers" are setting themselves up for failure from the start. In what will stand the test of time as a brilliant quote, he stated that companies who thought about the "consumer" reduced him to "a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash." Now Josh Bernoff from Forrester is arguing that the term "user" has been equally debased and that we should all just stop using it.
The term "user" in the "consumer Internet" space has taken on special importance as a measure of value. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are all measured in terms of "unique users," and every little company looking to make a similar run has a board full of investors asking the same question every month: "how many users have you got?" We certainly did.
The bummer about it is not the use of the term— but rather how much the constant focus on growing the pool of users quickly distorts any connection that the word user actually has to a real breathing person, even in startups that claim to be "user-centric." You stop focusing on the individual people coming through the site and start abstracting away to the clickstream, the userflow, or the suite of A-B tests. All of these tools have their place to be sure— but they tend to further exacerbate the problem brought on by the constant question at all of the board meetings: "how many users?"
In his post, Bernoff cites an essay by Don Norman (a personal hero) who argues that it is really important to focus on the language used to refer to the users of a product or service during the design process. The piece is required reading for anyone who works on anything meant to be used by anyone else, as it will begin to make you aware of all of the in-built biases that the all of the associated practices around user experience have.
If you like the piece, I'd go out and get his book, Emotional Design, which rocked my world when I read it with the seemingly trite starting premise that each of us in just a big bag of emotions and that the sooner we design products that accept and leverage this, the better off everyone will be. For the past year now I've been grinding through cellphones wondering how it is possible that the folks at Motorola, Palm, Nokia, and now Apple, haven't all inhaled and internalized the messages in this book. After all, what is more emotional than the way in which we communicate with the folks we care about the most?
I'm all for dumping user but I'm sure that it won't be long before some other term comes to replace it— author, owner, creator, or perhaps some Sterling-esque made up word. To get rid of the problem of abstracting away the person behind the wallet, the human behind the eyeballs, it takes making their own experience using your product or service the end goal and not just the means to something other goal. And recognizing us as the emotion bags that we are might be a good place to start.
I first met Scott Kirsner back in 2001 when he wrote a column about Memora, a company my brother and I had started at the intersection of consumer technology and broadband infrastructure. I liked Scott because of how much he seemed to "get" what we were trying to do, and how far ahead of other journalists he was willing to see. Naturally I was disappointed when he moved west and subsequently glad to see that he's come back, though this morning's Sunday Boston Globe article on how we're just continuing to miss the consumer tech opportunities here on the east coast rankled me a bit. It reminded me of Mike Arrington referring to Boston as a backwater, and even more so, of all of the folks I would meet on the west coast while traveling for Tabblo that argued for moving the entire company out there.
For the record, right before starting Tabblo I almost pulled up stakes and headed to the west coast for most of the reasons given in Kirsner's piece. That I stayed is a tribute to two things: my faith in the depth of the Boston-based engineering talent that I'd been building into my network, and the good efforts of the folks at Matrix who single-handedly funded the plan with little more than a concept, me, and a sales pitch. Which is not to say that it was not a painful process to make the financing happen: it took a lot of education and hard thinking on both of our parts to come to the conclusion that there was a viable, scalable, and ultimately defensible business model in what Tabblo was going to do. But when after just under two years, HP came knocking, I was very glad that we had done the hard work up front and that we had the depth and breadth we needed on the team.
Scott is certainly right about one thing— starting funded consumer Internet "Hail Mary" businesses in Boston is pretty nearly impossible. There is no VC in Boston that I know who would have funded YouTube, and for good reasons too; namely, cost structure and copyright. But those Hail Mary plans rarely succeed and for every YouTube, we've got several Napsters to prove the counterpoint. Instead, we've got the less sexy but more fundamental consumer Internet businesses here: Zipcar, Kayak (ok, in CT), and TripAdvisor to name a few. I know folks at all of these companies and they all share an incredibly analytical view towards what is happening on the "Internet as distribution channel" which is simply not a part of what I know of the west coast ethos.
I certainly do not mean to knock the swing-for-the-fences mentality of the west coast, and as an entrepreneur, I would certainly kill for the recruiting efficiency of being able to drive down to Google or Apple for some talent. To boot, we've still got a lot of Digital/Lotus detritus to clear out of of the VC pipelines before we can really adequately fund the new opportunities the Internet presents with the proper teams of folks. But give us time Scott— don't lose faith quite yet!
Lots of people have been spending way too much time blogging about the iPhone (though believe it or not, I still think it is under-hyped), so I'm going to stay away from reviewing mine. That said, I did want to make a quick software comment that the iPhone's keyboard makes clear as day.
Whenever you can turn a piece of complex UI from hardware to software, you seriously accelerate the rate of improvement of the general interface.
I've had two other Smartphones, the Treo 700p and the Nokia e61i. Both have the full tactile keyboard that the RIM Blackberry pioneered— which despite looking like it was made for Smurfs, works remarkably well. However, you make two key compromises with it: the loss of real estate that could either go to the screen or to a smaller overall device, and a hard upper limit as to how fast you will be able to go. In the case of the iPhone, it seemed to me that Apple's engineers valued screen over buttons and went with the soft keyboard as a compromise.
And despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the soft keyboard, I never in a million years expected that I would actually find myself typing faster on the virtual iPhone keyboard than on a tactile one. Yet three weeks into it, that is exactly what has happened— I can now type faster on the iPhone than I ever did on the Treo or the Nokia, thanks exclusively to the interface and to the simplistic spelling correction algorithm. More importantly, the rev cycle just went from 12-18 months (the average amount of time between my hardware updates) to whatever the frequency of the iPhone software updates shakes out to be. They've taken something that was tied to the limitations of the physical world and moved it squarely into the realm of the virtual.
ReadWrite web had a thought provoking post on exactly this topic, "digital physics," arguing that an interface which borrows just enough from real world physics but takes it beyond those constraints is the future of all user experiences. At the time I saw it as an esoteric point, but now that I've experienced it, I'm completely sold.
And of course there are other benefits to moving the interface into software. When Tivos replaced VCRs we got a big boost in "recording productivity" just because of how much more heavy lifting was being done in code. I suspect we'll see a lot of the same types of things in the iPhone's virtual keyboard, especially as the API is opened up to third-party developers.
That said, there are clearly examples of when moving an interface from hardware (buttons and knobs) to software can really screw things up: BMW's iDrive and all of those fancy universal remotes being good case studies. It would seem to me though that most of these counterpoints are better examples of poor implementations and not so much a weakness in the idea of moving hardware interfaces to software.
One final caveat: there is this famous Alan Kay quote about how people who are serious about software ultimately build their own hardware (which incidentally Jobs keeps using about all things Apple). I've never understood it until now. It is after all the incredible sensitivity of the panel in the iPhone that lets the software do its magic, and we'd do well to remember that bit of wisdom before even considering the approach.
I have been a fan of Jon Udell's ever since his awesome "Practical Internet Groupware" hit the stands back in 1999. So when he interviewed the dean of the CS department At Carnegie Mellon, Jeanette Wing, about her views on the importance of "computational thinking" as a core discipline that should be taught to kids early on, I was intrigued. Lego Mindstorms and Milton-Bradley BigTracs notwithstanding, I've always found the ability to reason abstractly and algorithmically about a problem a huge asset that has been helpful to me way beyond of the realm of programming a computer. And now that I've got Alex (my five year old) getting to an age where he can start to grok this, I'm obsessed with taking every opportunity to pass this down.
Which, as you can imagine, doesn't make me (or the rest of my family) that much fun for playing games or doing puzzles. Ever since I can remember, every game we've ever tried to play quickly turns into an excuse for thinking about how a computer might do it better: from Blackjack to Clue, from Stratego to Scrabble. This weekend we had a similar situation with a puzzle called "Scrambled Squares" from a company called B-Dazzle that my in-laws had bought for Alex because the puzzle was about pirates (a long standing obsession of his). On the face of it, the puzzle appears to be about spatial reasoning: nine squares, each with 1/2 of a pattern on each side, have to be put together to form a complete 3x3 super-square where all of the patterns "foot." But with way too many combinations, spatial reasoning and brute force quickly give way to tearing your hair out and declaring the puzzle unsolvable.
And thus, Scrambled Squares is a great puzzle for teaching the principles of computational thinking. The puzzle is mostly governed by very visible constraints which quickly force the issue of more abstract thinking, and to boot, it's got a great graphical interface that encourages all sorts of direct manipulation.
In the end it was unrealistic of me to expect that I could teach him how to solve it for himself (I could barely solve it myself!). But I was very pleased to see that certain lessons (find the middle piece and work outwards, find blocks of two and try those as 'units,' turn the highest 'constraint-pleasing' edges inward) were quickly internalized and then repeated to the gathering crown of befuddled adults. What we ended up with was much less of a formal algorithm (though a subsequent Google search turned up a whole term project on it), and more of set of rules to cut down the space of possible arrangements. But it is precisely this type of early computational thinking that I'm guessing does not get covered in primary school math classes and thus why we may indeed need to introduce a new top-level discipline right from the get-go.
So I've been on vacation in Barbados this last week where I used to come when I was a kid. One of my favorite things about this island are its people— incredibly friendly and outgoing, they are just a sheer delight (and given Barbados's public beach policy, this is not constrained to just the fancy resort employees). In fact, on the beach most days you are likely to experience Bajan (Barbadian) entrepreneurship at its best with everything from jetski rentals to foot massages being offered by a gaggle of passing merchants*. Everything is negotiable, and surprisingly, the process of being sold is almost as good as the product or service being offered.
My absolute favorite Bajan entrepreneur this year has got to be Stephen, the man who made palm leaf hats for the three of us. The hats are made from a single palm tree branch, curled and cut in just the right way and then woven together from the brim on to the top of the hat. Stephen has been making these hats for 29 years which you can tell from just looking at the way he works with nothing other than an armfull of palm, a sharp knife, and one short 1-inch wire to hold the brim together. From start to finish, he can make a hat in about eight minutes.
As we watched him work (see the tabblo for more), I got to thinking about how nice it is to have mastered a craft in the world, to have a skill making stuff, where you can really get into a groove. This is especially nice when you can make your living from it. In fact, this was the third time in two weeks that I thought of this: the first being 10 days ago when I was in the chair of the most skilled root-canalist I have ever seen. This particular endodontist had all his own tools and the way of a master craftsman about him as he patiently worked his way through all of the canals in the root of my tooth. After he was done I felt compelled to tell him: "I wish that someday I could be as good at anything as you are at doing root canals" to which he replied dryly and without apparent pride, "I wish I was as good at anything else as I am at doing root canals."
The third time that I thought about craftsmen recently was in reading the fabulous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. In it Joe Kavalier, a brilliant magician/escapist/artist refugee from Prague, comes to the US during the comic book boom in the late 1930s and succeeds as a comic book artist. The novel is a great riff on the American Dream, and all of the best passages in it are all about Joe and his single-mindedness when it comes to practicing his craft.
For me programming a computer comes the closest to practicing a craft. I like to write, and I love to build companies, but at the end of the day, if you dropped me into a strange city with no history, credentials, or reputation to ride on (one of my favorite job interview questions), this is the main thing I know I could do to earn a living. More importantly, I love to be around great software engineers, to read beautiful code, and to talk shop in all of its annoying and seemingly self-centered ways: chatting about tools, approaches, and war stories for hours on end. As I've gotten older, I've dabbled in more and more things but for most of them, it's just that— experimentation until the novelty wears off. With software, time stops and things just seem to fall into a very nice groove for me.
I'm sure that I'll never be as good at writing software or designing big systems as Stephen is at making his hats. But at least I'm glad to know that this is what I love to do, and that in some weird joke-on-the-universe way, I get paid for it.
Incidentally, it feels to me like it is the best time to be alive for all of those people still looking for crafts to love. Kavalier and Clay's comic boom with its creation of a new medium pales in comparison to what we're seeing as the tools of production become ubiquitous and the net binds us ever close together.
*Between writing and posting this, I even had someone come by and ask if I wanted to have my hair braided— my chest hair that is.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (June 27, 2007)
The first major reviewers of the iPhone have cast their votes and on the whole, the response is overwhelmingly positive. Walt and Katie had a great time with the phone calling it a "whole new experience and a pleasure to use," and thus far David Pouge (New York Times), Steven Levy (Newsweek), and Ed Baig (USA Today) all agree. To be sure there are quibbles about the network and about the number of steps required for certain operations, but that a device this over-hyped has its early reviewers so ga-ga is an incredible achievement for the folks from Cupertino.
I'm really happy to see it, not because I'm thrilled about the iPhone (which as a two-time owner of smartphones, I am) but because I love to see folks rewarding Apple for taking such a big product risk. Founded when I was just three years old, I feel as though I have grown up with Apple; from the Apple ]['s evolution as the first mainstream PC, to the Macintosh's shift to the Intel processor, I can remember all of the major product announcements the way one remembers big family events. With every major product Apple (under Steve) has been bold in crafting a unique product that often times defines a market by disrupting what heretofore has been nothing more than engineers grasping in the dark.
Which is not to say that Apple has not been without its big misses, most of which can be attributed to Steve Jobs: the Lisa, the lack of HD in the original Mac, the absence of licensing for the Mac OS, the Apple Cube, and even the company's deaf ear to the early days of the Web are a few examples of times when Apple was just plain wrong and often stuck with their mistake far longer than what we might refer to as "nimbler" companies.
Overall though, a small price to pay for the company that has given us a great UNIX on our desktops, Wi-Fi in every broadband connected home, the iPod ecosystem (remember when pundits called it an acronym for "Idiots Price Our Devices"), and hopefully the new computing platform that the iPhone is about to usher in.
Few companies are that bold about the things that they put out into the world— and none have survived so many misses at bat as Apple has while at the same time going on to have so many hits. It is precisely because of this that I think the "Think Different" ads best captured what I think are at the core of both Apple and Steve's soul. And as we get ready to line up for the iPhone, I'm just glad that they have kept on swinging hard.
Update: David reminded of this great piece a few weeks ago in the Economist about Apple and innovation that just needs to be added to this post.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (June 26, 2007)
The only thing I'd ever known about Marc Andreessen was that he was the Netscape guy that brought a ton of shit down on himself by claiming that Microsoft was soon to be relegated to a bunch of buggy device drivers back in the day when Netscape itself was having trouble shipping good browsers. These days though he's writing a stellar blog about all sorts of interesting things and his latest post on startups and success is probably the best single piece I have ever read on the question of success factors specifically, team, product, and market.
His argument boils down to the fact that a killer market trumps all else. My favorite line is that an exploding market will pull the product out of the startup even if both the team and the product vision are less than good. This is readily apparent to anyone who has been on the east coast for a while and had the chance to meet some of the PC and Internet 1.0 entrepreneurs, arguably the two largest exploding horizontal markets.
Well worth reading, especially because it is a bit more nuanced than similar posts that get to the same message by usually arguing for "making something that people want."
Ever since I read Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, I've been waiting for someone to crack the code on moving books into the digital age. Despite the false starts of local companies like E-Ink, it's clear that paper (or some form of it) is here to stay. The form factor is just perfect for some use cases and, more importantly, the emotional attachment that all of us nerds have to the page-flipping format is way too strong to be broken by even the most over-hyped and anticipated of gadgets.
Moreover, the history of print design is rich with a lot of smart people thinking very hard about the best way to present information to be consumed on the printed page, and it's not likely to be eclipsed by the world of web designers anytime soon. Even the guys at 37 signals are all about how online design may now be making a U-turn and heading back to the realm of print.
For me, the biggest challenge in understanding how the book will transform into a digital object is in creating a proper back channel so that users can continue interacting with content in the way that the web has enabled. Take Digg or Reddit as cannonical examples of how we are used to injecting feedback into the content consumption process: if I read something really awesome, I want people to know about it. I might even want to leave a comment if I think that I can help extend the argument.
Until the book form factor solves the back channel problem, we're stuck with their being static artifacts of the information explosion going on around us. Which is again, why I was sad to miss Manolis's presentation. Of all the work I've seen around e-books, his comes the closest to expressing what could be a very viable product roadmap for the venerable book.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (June 18, 2007)
I remember Seth Godin from the first Internet boom as the guy who wrote the smallish marketing pieces about colored cows that I never really paid attention to. But then I had his good friend, Lisa Gansky, on my board at Tabblo and heard all about how Seth was really one of the few Internet marketing folks who "gets it."
Which was why reading his recent blog post about John Heilemann's piece on Steve Jobs and the iPhone was such a pleasure. Better yet, in the blog post Seth points to this old Fast Company piece of his where he writes about Walt Disney as the ultimate three-time rifter:
What's a rift? It's a big tear in the fabric of the rules that we live by. It's a fundamental change in the game, one that creates a bunch of new losers -- and a handful of new winners.
I love this notion— that some people are just hard-wired to spot the real rifts— because it explains a lot about the best entrepreneurs that I know. Some people call it "pattern recognition," but for me it has always seemed more like good taste around what really constitutes new opportunities and not just hype and line noise.
As Seth tells it, most rifters wander into their first rift almost by accident and then go on to think that they are gifted enough to spot rifts even when they aren't there (I guess this would be the business equivalent of second system syndrome), but it is those rare few that can keep on spotting the rifts again and again despite position, age, or stature.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (June 15, 2007)
Roger von Oech has a nice short post comparing his behavior when he reads articles online versus in print that makes the basic point that his relationship the content differs depending on whether he is flipping the page or scrolling with the mouse. Expectations, time spent, even conclusions drawn can vary, despite the fact that it's the same exact content.
The post underscores the premise that presentation matters, the fundamental underpinning of the graphics design profession. However, Roger also gets to something more: the commitment that a reader makes to a particular bit of content when he decides to consume it on paper. It is almost as though the act of stepping outside of the natural flow of screen life implies that a different mode of thinking is going to be used a different part of the brain engaged.
When we all became employees of HP, we were given this really sweet All-in-one printer to help us start thinking about how a printer is used in the home. In my case, this was the first time I've had a consistently reliable printer outside of work since I left my college dorm so I've been overconsuming paper and ink quite a bit. In fact, I've got this new pattern of consuming content where I star all of the items in Google Reader that I want to go back and consume on paper at a later point (as a general rule they have to be about 500 words or more and particularly thought-provoking for me though in my "skim to star" mode, I often get the latter wrong). Then, when I'm ready, I'll print off a whole bunch of posts and go through them as I might have a newspaper 10 years ago or the latest issue of the Economist on a Saturday morning. Right now this mode of consumption has two big limitations:
There is no backchannel for communicating feedback on the really good stuff back into my electronic life (I can't add it to del.icio.us for example or email it to a friend)
but outside of these two limitations, I find that I'm doing more careful consideration of the arguments presented in the pieces when I consume them on paper. This whole Facebook/F8 meme for instance, has been something that I've read about mostly on paper where I am more likely to focus on the longer more thoughtful pieces and less likely (frankly because I can't) to jump around from soundbite blog post to soundbite blog post.
Along a somewhat related vein: in anticipation of the most hyped product launch ever, I've been reading "Designing for Small Screens," a book about user interface/interaction design for display-constrained devices. The book is well worth reading if you are interested in this vein of different mediums/different modes of relating to content. It starts from the premise that the visual interface is the most high bandwidth way to consume content and then walks through a number of interface patterns that are useful in maximizing limited real estate. In light of the paper versus screen modalities, you can not help but wonder what mode of relating to content might emerge as these smartphone-like interfaces really do gain mass market traction over the next couple of years.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (June 7, 2007)
I spent this past week in Europe visiting HP sites, partners, and vendors and was taken aback by how much connectivity we now take for granted in our regular work here in the United States. The last time I was in Europe for work was 9 years ago (when we'd be amazed just to be able to dial up from the hotel room), but I guess with all the talk of broadband being much better overseas and the 3G cellphone networks being ubiquitous, I was sort of expecting at least parity with the setup I've got here. Boy was I surprised. Here are some of the things you can expect to go wrong:
Power (this one was on me for being unprepared). Between Spain and England, I discovered 3 different plug types. What is more, if you travel with a laptop and a phone (more than one device to plug in) and check in late, good luck getting the hotels to have anything to lend you to plug your American appliances in.
Consistent SMS/data on your cellphone. Having just switched to a GSM network, I was really excited by the prospect of 3G networks and zippy-fast mobile data. While voice worked everywhere, SMS and data did not. In fact, SMS was the flakiest of all of the services that I've come to rely on— I could receive messages almost everywhere, but I had at best 50% odds of being able to send them.
EVDO and Wi-fi. I knew my EVDO card wouldn't work at all; I guess I just hadn't realized how much I rely on it to stay in touch with the team back in Boston while waiting at airports, in cabs, or in dead times between meetings. And as far as the wi-fi is concerned, it does seem to be fairly ubiquitous, but in 100% of the cases it was expensive and encumbered by either its billing mechanism or by some lame proxy server setup that blocked most of the useful Internet services you'd want to get access to.
Overall Internet speed. Finally, the speed of "broadband" connections (especially in Spain) is painful. In this new world of rich Internet applications, it's easy to forget that we've only just been able to get to the point where we can use them in the US and that this is far from a given for other parts of the world. For instance, in Spain Tabblo.com was completely unusable, and even Gmail was severely hobbled by the dearth of bandwidth.
I'm not just writing this to gripe about my technical defficulties with the "old world," or even to warn other innocent travelers, but because I realized for the first time this week how much I've gotten used to filling the small cracks of free time when I am traveling with little bits of collaborative work and communication. It made me think that the macro effect productivity boost must finally be something that economists can measure as a positive impact of PCs and mobiles— always-on connections to the data and people that you need to get stuff done.
And yet at the same time, it was sort of nice to have a few cab rides and airport stays to do some disconnected work. Or even better, to just sit and think.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 3 months ago (April 30, 2007)
Today was our last day as Tabblo employees and my last day as CEO. To mark the passing of an era in the history of this group, we continued pushing fresh versions of the site (as we do every day) up to production even as the movers were taking our office out to HP's facility, one box at a time. In fact, I had the distinct pleasure of pushing out the last version of the site (including the soon to be announced "Caption of the Day" minisite) to go live from 810 Memorial Drive. And to commemorate the moment, I managed to clobber the private keys we use for storing credit cards on all of the application servers thereby rendering the shopping cart completely useless.
I mention it not because it was a fairly idiotic thing to do (it was) but because it was a bittersweet moment for me. One of the best things about working within a group of a dozen people is that every single person counts— a lot— and the fact that right up until the last day of Tabblo, the CEO had the keys to push builds out the door speaks volumes to the amount of cooperation and trust that we have all built with each other over the last two years.
As folks scrambled to retrieve keys from the offsite backup and fix the site and I walked on to the bar where we were scheduled to have our last Cambridge beers, I thought of how there are jobs you have where it is crystal clear why you get paid, and then those rare ones where you think you've pulled one over on the world because someone was silly enough to pay you for showing up every day. Running Tabblo has been from the latter category for me— mostly because of the folks involved. After all, at the end of the day, the only thing that is more rewarding than knowing that you are making a difference is the feeling that you've helped create a place where everyone can.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 3 months ago (April 29, 2007)
I was really looking forward to getting into the Economist's latest survey on wireless ("A world of connections") this weekend. But about halfway through it I realized something that just soured the rest of the experience. Though it was written in 2007 with the central hypothesis being that every "thing" is soon to be connected wirelessly to the Internet, tis very same survey could have been written in 2002. Bluetooth is just around the corner in terms of gaining mainstream adoption (and more importantly, mainstream usability), cool whizbang companies like Ember are just about to deploy millions of wireless sensors (just like they were at the end of 02), and before you know it, your refrigerator will be ordering its own water filter over the Internet from GEappliances.com.
It all reminds me of the old adage, "Don't confuse a long view for a short distance." The Jetsons world of wireless is still not here and rather than drink the kool-aid, we're all well off to remember how little progress has been made in the last five years— possibly because there may just be something quite fundamental about the every appliance Internet-connected model that the industry has been preaching for a while now. COGS that are too high? Too much configuration complexity? No real compelling usecases?
I was surprised to see though, that the absolute best non-WIFI wireless device that I have seen and experienced over the last 5 years got barely one mention in entire piece— the Apple/Nike+ sports kit which effectively combines a wireless transmitter in the sole of your shoe with a receiver docked to the bottom of your iPod so that you can track your run telemetrics closely. I've written about it before, but I just think the world of this general architecture for deploying cheap, semi-Internet connected devices that capture really useful (and fun) metadata about our interactions with the physical world.
The device is cheap ($29) because all of the heavy processing (including the connection to the cloud) runs on what is effectively subsidized infrastructure. First, you've got the 200 MIPS of the iPod to capture the telemetry, and then you've got the harness of iTunes to get it up on the network.
But best of all, the effort of docking the device to the network is subsidized by another activity as well— the act of getting the latest music/podcasts on your iPod before the workouts. What a great way to parasite an already popular activity. Social engineering at its very best!
It bears mentioning that Nike has done a brilliant job of making the application a lot of fun by leveraging competitive tendencies (for instance, virtual challenges with friends are a huge source of entertainment and motivation). However, at the end of the day, the architecture is what bears close study, and copying where appropriate.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 3 months ago (April 28, 2007)
The other night I was up with a heinous toothache and decided to consume some content to forget about the pain. Because the television was borked (HD TV is some sort of early adopter hell these days), I started cruising old episodes of Ze Frank that I had missed and discovered Jonathan Coulton, a kindred spirit of Ze's who set out to do a song a week for an entire year in his "Thing a week" project. Or I should say, I rediscovered Jonathan, as I had first been exposed to him through his hilarious (and great) song, Code Monkey.
I am in awe of guys like Ze and Jonathan not because of how talented they are but because of how hard they are willing to work exploring new means of connecting with their audiences. They truly are the new media entrepreneurs— except that in their case there is no clear path to riches as is the case with most of the folks starting the Flickrs and YouTubes of today. Instead they work between two elephants dancing: 1. the big media companies with their constant threats of "sizing down" to match the new forms on the Internet and 2. the peer production orgy that drives sites like Wikipedia.
In fact, in all this talk of the everyman getting access to the means of production and distribution— after all, anyone can be a record producer now— what is often lost is that most of this user-generated content actually sucks and wouldn't entertain a late-night toothacher for more than 2 minutes. It is an interesting social phenomenon for sure, but ABC has nothing to worry when it comes to the entertainment value of the content created by the average Joe videographer.
The Zes and the Johns? Maybe. Probably if someone figures out how create a viable revenue model that doesn't require them to sign the big record deal or the tv production show contract. And certainly if features like podcasting and products like the Apple TV gain mass market traction. And I for one, can not wait!
One final note: I noticed that Ze went to Brown and John went to Yale which got me to thinking about all the folks that I knew in undergrad who were equally talented and creative but who had not taken to the net with quite the same zeal. It's not for lack of talent— I think the real barrier is sticking your neck out creatively like these two have done. Fortunately as they do so, Ze and John are really paving the way for the torrent of talent that will undoubtedly come behind them.
[Note: to see them both together, go and watch this episode of The Show— a fabulous inside new media joke]
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 14, 2007)
Josh Kopelman (of First Round capital) has a nice summary of the argument around how Web 2.0 allows investors to place cheaper bets including some data on how much cheaper it is to launch a web startup today. This means that failure comes faster which he argues is a good thing both for the investor and for the entrepreneur.
Largely I agree with argument he makes, but— as is the case with most hypotheses when they pass into the land of "conventional wisdom—" it turns out to be a little more complicated than just: open source, commodity boxes, off-shore development equals a $200K lottery ticket to riches. I think that this model works very well if what you are doing is taking a social media bet whose main goal is to amass users and flip to a big portal before getting to either the "mass market," or more importantly, the monetization.
Flickr, Delicious, even MySpace— all of these guys fall right into this model as do the 50-100 companies that have been micro-funded like by Josh and others. But what happens when Yahoo, Google, IAC, etc. stop buying? How much of the critical risk of building a business is really removed by initial geek traction? Josh himself in an earlier blog post has a brilliant write-up of why it is so hard to get Internet consumers to part with money. Shouldn't this be the key risk to remove before getting to this key valuation inflection point?
I am biased because at Tabblo, I decided to take a hybrid approach: raise an A-round that is reminiscent of the 1990s ($5MM from Matrix partners) but operate the business as though we really had only about a fifth of that. There were two main reasons for this:
I knew we were going to have to build a bit of technology and felt that we needed a pretty unencumbered 18 months to do so with a decently-sized engineering team
I wanted enough cash to get through proving the monetization phase with what we considered a "mainstream" consumer.
Neither of these goals lend themselves to a "failing fast" test (if by fast you mean 3-4 months) so it's pretty hard to do things the microfunded way. And as far as the Tabblo approach is concerned, the jury is still out, so stay tuned.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 13, 2007)
I was nearly in tears during parts of this cartoon on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates:
My favorite part is Bill Gates on the music prevalent in most of today's PC/Mac ads: "What's up with that music?!? It's like baby music..."
I feel pretty lucky to have grown up during the phase of computing when the titans were Bill and Steve, given that they are both such colorful characters and so distinct from each other. 20-30 years earlier it would have been the Watsons from IBM or the wacky cowboys from the minicomputer revolution. Worse yet, if you were coming out of school today, the titans would be the Yahoo guys, the Google guys, or maybe even the guys from Facebook. Bright and driven, but not terribly distinguishable from each other. I can't really see them inspiring a cartoon like this one— can you?
Update: In digging around on the source of the cartoon, I discovered that it is a show called "Current News," by Josh Faure-Brac, which seems to be cartoon shorts of popular culture/politics hosted on Al Gore's Current TV network. It's too bad they don't serve the shorts as a video podcast feed, but some of the other ones are well worth checking out, especially the Oval Office one.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 3, 2007)
In reading a great piece on the future of social networking in today's NYTimes (via Pete Cashmore's great Mashable blog), I learned that Cisco has been snapping up "social networking" assets— a move that is being universally ridiculed in the blogosphere because Cisco is only apparently supposed to know about routers and switches.
This is indeed a bogus move but not because "social networking" is a perfect example of a feature and not a product. After all, Cisco is the king of buying features and making products out of them. The real elephant in the room on this one is that there is absolutely zero business model overlap here— and this is what will ultimately lead whatever assets they acquire to get marginalized, ignored, and finally written off as a hangover during that crazy "Web 2.0 bubble."
So far as I can tell, the only business model that works with social network sites, once they are at scale, is an ad-based media model (this of course begs the question of why you'd buy a social network site that is not at scale if you don't have the tools to bring it to scale). And I may be wrong here— but I'm not sure that I've ever seen Cisco's ad salesforce pounding the pavement on Madison avenue.
I remember that people laughed when Cisco bought Linksys and commented that the company didn't know the first thing about marketing and selling consumer networking equipment. But at least in that case, the business models (sell chips with RJ-45 ports, make money) was pretty complementary. In this case, I'm afraid of what the ultimate fate of these social networking folks is going to be 12 months from now. Unless of course, then can get good at writing router firmware.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 3, 2007)
I've been cynical about the One Laptop Per Child project ever since I first saw Nicholas Negroponte talk about it at the D conference two years ago. That said, I'm really happy to be wrong in that it seems like it's way more than a science fair project and that millions of kids may actually reap enormous benefit from this little $100 laptop that could.
This morning I was reading an article in Businessweek about the OLPC's innovative UI (which the guys tell me was apparently shown on a real X0 at Pycon this year [it's mostly written in Python]) which talks about how innovative the UI is because it abandons a lot of the WIMP metaphor we've been stuck with for the past 30 years.
While I am all for innovative interfaces, I wonder if starting with the world's poor is the best approach to take. It's not that I don't think that an OLPC alum couldn't pick up a WIMP interface very quickly (after all my first "computer" was a Milton-Bradley Bigtrac and that helped me understand programming probably more than any other single toy I had growing up)— it's just that building up a whole new set of interaction primitives seems like a big risk to take on an audience which is already taking on a lot in using the OLPC in the first place. It's taken 30 years to polish windows, menus, and gestures (which of course the OLPC team will no doubt leverage experience from) and it seems a little strange to dump it in favor of something radically different.
Plus, I'm not sure that fancy New York graphic design firms (the article talks about how Pentagram is doing design for the OLPC) are best positioned to take on this job. After all, even the folks at Apple cribbed heavily from Xerox PARC back in the day.
However, I've learned my lesson with the OLPC and my pragmatic cynicism, and am thus optimistically awaiting the release of Sugar and the X0.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 5 months ago (March 1, 2007)
In further helping to middle the line between desktop and web, Adobe held an event this week to showcase the promise of the Apollo platform. For those that don't know, Apollo seems to be the Flash runtime bundled with an HTML renderer and Javascript VM in a desktop application harness. It's supposed to allow developers to write hybrid web/desktop applications that can run offline and take advantage of local services.
I continue to scratch my head over the Apollo platform mostly because it seems so incredibly ambitious and because I really do have a hard time understanding whether it is going to do anything meaningful for adoption (the real problem that rich client software which does not ship on the platform has these days).
My guess would be that the devil will be in the details— after all, the JVM could have owned this layer on the client 10 years ago if a) it wasn't a 10MB download, b) it didn't take 45 seconds to boot, and c) it didn't run and look like a pig. Instead Flash beat it to the punch because it was less that 1MB and much less ambitious. Less is more— which is what is also something that is weird about Apollo. Why dial the ambition back up when they could do so much by just continuing to extend Flash?
As I think about a site like Tabblo, I realize that we would just love to see Apollo deployed on every computer— our users constantly have to struggle with the pain of crossing the desktop-web membrane with their big photos, our engineering team is well-trained in the ways of the browser frame and ECMAscript/Javascript, and there is tons we'd love to see done with the local CPU that we could completely offload from our image front-ends. At the same time I have a hard time believing that if this was going to such a huge win for us, we wouldn't find other clever ways of putting a footprint down on the desktop (see this clever OSX-specific way to run a browser frame as a full flown application).
And while I am on the devil in the details, one huge win from Adobe betting on Apollo internally could be a properly instrumented version of Online Photoshop that sites like Tabblo could easily embed into our experience. We've had tons of inbound interest to partner with the myriad of "online photo editors," that are out and while the promise is always there, for the most part, startups are like mosquitoes looking to sting: not all that likely to work for all when done in groups. On the other hand, easily being able to integrate with the 800-lb gorilla is a tide that would truly lift all boats.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 23, 2007)
Though I am really happy to see Google experimenting with revenue models outside of advertising, yesterday's launch of their premium business applications left me thinking that they are either a) gleeful about the possibility of putting a stick in Microsoft's eye or b) not yet clued in to what makes things work on the web if they don't have a search box in them.
Software as a service (SaaS) delivered in the form of dynamic and rich web applications is a really great thing— in fact probably the most significant thing to happen on the Internet since the coming of the web itself. However this does not mean that every possible thing someone wants to do with a PC can be crammed down the HTTP-pipe and decorated with pretty Javascript effects. Below are some of the standard reasons:
FIOS-enabled homes and offices notwithstanding, there is still just too much latency on the Internet, plain and simple. This is the main reason why taking any old desktop application and webifying it usually doesn't work. Word is faster than Writely, Excel is speedier that Google spreadsheets, and no matter how hard we may try, iPhoto or Picasa will always be faster than Tabblo for manipulating photos. Therefore, if you've got an application which sits open on your desktop all day ready for you to edit, compose, and otherwise author 20-50 times a day as is the case with Word, Excel, and Outlook for most office workers, taking that online is a big bet to make.
There are things you just need calls into the OS for which most modern browsers do not give you access to yet. For instance, office applications often produce documents that people want to print, and yet most browser-based printing is still stuck in the stone ages (how many times have your printed Mapquest directions only to get that hanging chad of a last turn on the last page?) Ditto for really rich APIs into other sources of data that live on the local filesystem (Outlook pst files, OSX Spotlight index), or even for rich access to the local filesystem itself. Try as we might, if you have things that you need to either source from the local disk or output to the local peripherals (printers, CD burners), the browser is not your friend. Interestingly enough, Adobe's Apollo projectmay solve this (a big "may" though as many have tried).
Where the data lives is a pretty important thing to think through, especially if you are a business. Sure no one backs things up properly, and for sure your office is more likely to be burglarized, burned down, etc. than a world-class datacenter, but for most people knowing that the data is under their control is more important at times than the data itself. Sure, a service provider can encrypt the data and partition it accordingly, but in much the same way that big financial institutions with liability exposure don't allow their employees to use standard IM, I suspect most big companies will be leery of trusting Google with sensitive, mission critical data. On the consumer side this is also a problem, albeit one that is mitigated by the fact that most consumer data that makes is to the web is not as sensitive (and the fact remains that most savvy consumers see uploading the data to a service as a poor man's backup).
These reasons by themselves should serve as powerful motivators for thinking carefully about trying to move any major desktop application to the web. If an application is going to take on the encumbrances mentioned above, the benefit of living on the network have got to be very high— in terms of ubiquitous access, collaboration, or best of all, the symbiotic relationship that the application can have with its users as it grows up.
Ephraim Schwartz interviewed me about Tabblo recently and wrote a nice piece on this co-development process where I make all sorts of bold claims about the productivity improvements that come from having an online app that lives and grows directly based on the use patterns of the community around it (which is itself growing). That same thin HTTP pipe I mentioned as a problem above becomes your best friend in this regard— by serializing every action into a very digestible set of log entries for subsequent analysis, it gives one a much better real-time view of what is working and what isn't. And because the user-facing application runtime is the web browser, UI flows can be changed near instantly without having to redeploy to an installed base.
The overall mental image I have of the process is that of an acelerated time-lapse movie of coral growing according to its environment and the actions of its co-habitants.
The main problem with trying to grow a coral from a word processor, a spreadsheet, or an email client is that the specs for these products are fairly known and have been pretty fixed in users' minds for about a decade now. Witness Gmail— every time I hear complaints about it, it is from someone who comes from the Outlook worldview and is almost certainly around the most innovative (and web-native) parts of the interface. The patterns are already well-worn so it becomes difficult for the application/community to take on a life of its own.
Paul Graham wrote an essay a while ago about Web 2.0 that argued that Google was succeeding because it was aligned with the "grain of the web." I completely agree which is why it is strange that they would use the office suite as their first beachhead into for-pay SaaS.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 4, 2007)
All of this hoopla over the new releases of PC operating systems has been bothering me lately, mostly because it's made me think back 10 years to when Windows 95 was released, or even 5 to when Mac OS X first shipped, and think about why today the releases feel like such non-events. Just the other day I was struck by an eager teenager who excitedly tabbloed his Vista unboxing, and at the office they have been relentless about some Vista-related quote I gave an AP writer (mostly because I just really don't care about Vista or its impact on our "lab").
Even this year's MacWorld— usually replete with pronouncements about how OSX is going to change the face of personal computing by introducing features which are long overdue on most client operating systems— was bereft of even a single OSX-related announcement. Craig Syverson over at Venture Cast had an interesting thought on this that got me thinking along a different line: he basically argued that the future of the Mac OS ("Mac OS XI" as he called it) was really iTunes in that more and more of what is relevant to users (media, iPods, mobile phones) was going to start to flow through iTunes, whether on the Mac or on Windows. In this case then, for media hungry consumers, iTunes is the new runtime and everything underneath it really is just a bunch of buggy device drivers.
The geek in me bristles at that, first and foremost because of how closed the whole iTunes ecosystem (including the forthcoming iPhone) is relative to POSIX, Win32, and even OSX. Even the relatively closed cellphone runtimes appear open as a commune by comparison. That said, plenty of valiant startups are finding ways to hack into iTunes to extract metadata and insert themselves into the flow of media— so if the desire is there and the resulting user experience doesn't end up being too encumbered, I'm sure that enterprising and curious geeks will find a way to make Apple's media-based OS XI a more open system.
A more relevant reason as to why OS releases are no irrelevant (hello Marc Andreesen?) is that all of the interesting things you can do with computers now (outside of specialized content creation like programs, video, music, etc.) has little to do with the OS itself unless you count the bits required to run a fast (and standards-compliant) web browser. I first heard Tim O'Reilly articulate this 4 years ago in a talk on the web as platform, but it has become dramatically more true with the development of Web 2.0.
Just this morning, I ran across a YouTube video that really captures the underlying sense of wonder in the possibility of it all when we start thinking of the network as the relevant runtime for innovation. After watching it, I'm sure you will come away thinking that the real innovation these days is as far from a shrink-wrapped box of device drivers as internal combustion is from a barrel of feed.
I highly recommend this video to any of the new web naysayers who think that the biggest things in the web over the last 5 years have been the return of pastels, rounded rects., and XmlHttpRequest replacing hidden iframes. Though it is gimmicky at points, it does a wonderful job of communicating why the folks on the leading edge get so excited about what's been happening in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years.
Update: A sadder but potentially more impactful of example of why the web-as-platform is so much more compelling than 3-D shading on windows and buttons is the search for Jim Gray via the use of a lot of the work/collaboration patterns that have really caught on in the last couple of of years.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 26, 2006)
Ev, who I find to be as intellectually honest as anyone I've ever met in the Internet sphere, has decided that the venture model is not right for Odeo and bought out his investors to create a more experimental, nimbler company. Or perhaps he saw that the podcast runway wasn't quite long enough for the big old airplane his VCs had saddled him to reach V2 and not crash. Either way, it takes balls to do what he is doing and I bet there is more than one funded entrepreneur out there right now scratching his head and saying, wow wouldn't it be nice to try that?
And in some ways it would. But I am a little struck by the fact that what he's doing with the new company (Obvious) is turning it into something that looks a lot like 37Signals. I can understand why 37signals wanted to do this— as a consulting shop without outside capital, they had little other choice. But for a company with no consulting clients to disengage and enough capital in the bank, setting up a "lab-like" structure with the general mandate "build webapps" seems to be a strange choice.
There is great benefit to come from focus, especially for those projects that require more than 2 engineers and 3 days. And external constraints are a good thing for creativity— even the best artists tell you that the clashes between the limitations of their medium and their intent is where most of the good stuff happens. Without deadlines and ship dates (the website kind not the packaged software kind), or external dependencies to other parts of a company (marketing/biz dev./the BOD), it's hard to see how any constraints can be enforced. The lab thing smells of the R&D labs of places like Microsoft and Yahoo (though supposedly Google has cracked the code on how to do this right) and it makes me wonder whether the outcome might not be similar— lots of smoke and no fire.
In looking for the why? behind this new structure, I found this part of his blog post:
Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant.
...and later...
The consumer web is increasingly hits-driven and increasingly crowded, which makes it more difficult to predict what's going to work.
to be most telling.
Ev is describing the Hollywood model where a studio backs two dozen movies in the hopes that one will hit it big and cover all of the flops. The way I see it, he's basically saying: no one can tell what the difference between a Star Wars and an Ishtar is but we know we want a hit with the consumers, so we've got to try a lot of stuff. I sort of agree with his statement that it's hard to know ahead of time what the megahits are going to be— but I am bummed to see that in this day and age of cheap innovation on the web, we're all stuck with the hits-driven model.
Why? Because, first of all, getting to 10MM users should not be the only path to success. And secondly, a web service is not like a studio movie in one critical way: if it sucks at launch, the web as a medium allows you to rip it apart and put it back together so that it does work for its natural audience. A movie is a piece of media you finish and ship— a website is a process of learning from your users and the limits of your medium.
I think this unfortunate mindset comes back to business models. We're back in the eyeballs game except that now the world is dominated AdWords which means that it's even less profitable than it used to not to be at some large enough scale where you can afford to own (or be owned by someone who owns) the ad network. And without the opportunity for other types of business models that work at lesser scales, everyone is going to be stuck going for the next MySpace or hoping to fool some big megacorp into thinking that there might be a small chance that they will someday become the next MySpace.
An example of the opportunities this mentality squelches: I liked Odeo a lot— I thought there were a lot of things that they did which were much better than what iTunes did. As a paying member of Audible (a much worse website for finding and acquiring audio), I would have gladly switched over to pay for an Odeo premium subscription if they had just added some more types of licensed content. Now I realize that people don't generally like to think of subscriptions as a viable business model on the web today but one good thing about charging for a service is that revenue grows linearly with the user base which means that the business doesn't have to get to 10 million actives before it can make some nice money. Ditto for e-commerce models, or mass-customized output models.
Good luck to the Obvious guys— but let's hope that as part of the experimentation, the play around with some of the businessmodel constraints that got them there in the first place.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 30, 2006)
Much has been made of Jeff Bezos's talk this week at some MIT conference on web services, and specifically S3 (the storage service) and E2C (CPU service). Wade Roush from MIT Tech Review interviewed him and everyone who saw the interview felt compelled to announce to the world that all of us little startups need to move all of our backend processing and storage to Amazon's cloud. Even the ever present canary in the coal mine, Nick Carr, seemed relatively positive about it.
This just doesn't pass the smell test for me. I know that other little companies that I respect like SmugMughave raved, especially about S3 the storage service, but I have very real concerns about the viability and scalability of this approach and I certainly feel like any commercial companies that put a key piece of infrastructure under S3 are a bit like the test pilots who fly the monster jets that have previously only "flown" in simulation. [Disclosure: for big compute applications (which I am not familiar with) E2C may actually make sense so the rest of this post is really about S3, and any other infrastructure tier services like SQS).
First, anyone who has worked on a big website that has grown organically over a period of years knows just how rickety and duck-tapey the whole infrastructure can get. This has got to be especially true for Amazon which got started before we learned about how to scale on the web. And it's actually a fine thing for most sites– because just like the pilot who still flies mail routes on a DC-3 with bolts popping out of it, most sysadmins/developers at these big sites learn to put their hand on the fuselage and just know where the bolts might be about to pop.
However, I'm not sure that this institutional knowledge will export well across SLAs and web service APIs. More importantly, at the end of the day Amazon is a retailer that makes its money from selling stuff which necessarily means that all of its best and brightest are probably working on that side of the fence. Even if there is a small and talented group pushing the infrastructure web services initiative, they've still got to deal with 11 years of bolts that have have come loose and been tightened under the pressure of having to keep Amazon's site and sales up.
Second, people seemed to make a big deal out of the fact that Amazon has built infrastructure that is often at less than 10% utilization which must mean that they have plenty of capacity for third parties. But they certainly didn't build a system intending it to stay at 10% utilization– they've instead built all of this infrastructure to handle peak load at certain times of the year (say Christmas). What happens if as a consumer of AWS, your business cycle also peaks during the holidays (as most output-based businesses do including ours). When it's about serving your files or that gif of the Davinci Code, how is the decision made? And even if it's evenly distributed, do you really want your traffic to be mushed in the stream with the 35M people trying to buy last minute Christmas presents going through the app is best tailored to use these services? How many optimizations have the developers at Amazon put in that you just won't know about when the load spikes on that compute grid?
I don't want to sound like one of those off-the-grid guys who wants to produce his own electricity– however, I'm not sure I'd want to buy my electricity from Costco just because they have big generators at the back of their store that sit idle right until the middle of summer.
Finally, what really gets me about the whole proposition is not that it's a bad idea– it certainly makes a lot of sense to have services provided by infrastructure providers up in the cloud– but that it seems misguided in design and then promoted under false assumptions. If I were Amazon and wanting to get hardcore about the web services space, I would look at my assets and start from either my payment processing capabilities or my huge content archive of product and sales data. When Amazon launched its web service API (the one that let you get products and prices) a few years ago, I thought for sure this is where they were going, and so it comes as a surprise to see them now recasting themselves as an infrastructure utility computing player. Even extending into identity management (as Yahoo did this week) would make more sense from a core competency perspective.
And to the folks that argue that most of us building software are writing 5-10% of software that is truly value-add and 90-95% that is just rote, I would absolutely agree. However the right solution for this problem is open source, not managed services. It really doesn't take that much to go out and buy a rack at a tier-1 datacenter, shove some whitebox 1Us into it and install Linux/Apache/MySQL/YourFavoriteAppStack on it. And if you make a half decent set of stack choices, you'll be able to scale in much the same way that AWS will let you. The challenges come when you have to start getting deep into your infrastructure to understand how your particular application's workload puts stress on it, how you can rework pieces of both the app and the infrastructure to meet your scaling/costs needs.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 19, 2006)
I like output based business models. It's no secret that there is something special and extra nice about being at that point where bits get turned into atoms and then charging for the experience. It's simple, it's clean, and it leverages all sort of good things about computers (customization), the Internet (a channel), and technology (mass customization). Whether it's custom clothing, books-on-demand, or some of the other interesting things we've got planned at Tabblo, the era of mass customization is definitely here to stay.
Which is why it's been a little depressing to make the rounds in Silicon Valley over the last 12 months– at the epicenter of the Google AdWords inspired haze– and see people look blankly at me when I get going about the pleasure of actually making things. The world there has turned into a hammer made of eyeballs and just about everything looks like ad inventory. Today it looks like Yahoo is proving that even in virtual goods, the laws of supply and demand take effect– and when there is not enough demand (and too much supply), the market corrects. Is it the beginning of the end for this new mini Web 2.0 bubble? Doubtful, mostly because advertising is not going anywhere but online (though it may be quite slimmed its life there). But it is nice to see that we may get some attention paid to two other types of business models in the coming months: those that are output based and those that are subscription based. There are a lot of talented folks at the big media companies that have spent far too much good brainpower "enhancing ad inventory" or "maximizing click-through rates" and it is going to be nice to see these guys get into another groove for a while.
Case in point: Moo.com and their mass-customized businesscards, launched just today. A really nice, really light-weight application for repurposing your Flickr stream for a simple (and compelling) product. Photo-like businesscards aren't for everyone, but the experience of leveraging the investment made into Flickr for something completely physical will only get better over time and it's good to see Moo taking this first step.
Also, kudos to Flickr/Yahoo for letting this type of creative experimentation bloom on their platform. Because it has been non-core to their ad business, they've let folks like Moo (and us) experiment on top of their APIs without the onerous requirement that a revenue-sharing infrastructure might impose at this early stage. In my mind, this will be the greatest legacy of the online advertising boom– it has seeded the fields for what comes after it in much the same way that the PC software boom (and its associated hardware advances/commoditization) laid the groundwork for the open source movement and for cheap scale-out datacenter infrastructure.
And when the time is right, I've no doubt that we'll be able to give back to the folks that let us into the playground in an economically meaningful way.
First, the whole Netscape/Digg thing (with Jason Calcanis from Netscape offering to pay the top social bookmarkers) kicked off a lively debate on whether this could be a viable means to build momentum online that surfaced a very intriguing possibility. Perhaps it is because social news is such a narrow application, but I think that Jason is right in assuming that a few people properly incented can suck the oxygen out of competitors' sites and create a lot of momentum quickly. The more interesting question in my mind is whether this same tactic can be used for deeper/richer applications– that is, could you build a YouTube by paying the top contributors? An eBay? I tend to be skeptical of this, but if it is indeed possible, it may give all of these hungry VCs with their trigger-happy capital fingers an opportunity to put a lot of money to work fast.
Second, the debate is especially timely because of how many great producers of content there are out there in the world these days. Chris Anderson beats this to death in his Long Tail, so I will just contain myself to one observation. Whenever I fly across the continent, I bring along my video iPod chock full of content. I've got bought episodes of The Office, Lost, etc. but I've also go a number of video podcasts. Last Saturday while flying back from SF, I was struck by how much I enjoyed two particular pieces of content: The Office, and Ze Frank's The Show (maybe it's all about the simple noun names). As I crammed in 10 3 minute episodes, I realized for the first time I was looking at content that I would pay a premium subscription for. Now, if I had started on Ze Frank by being asked to pay, I very much doubt I would have– but now that I am hooked, I should be able to pay for him to keep working.
Micro-payments and micro-content and the holy grail that people have been chasing probably since long before Web 1.0– but for some reason, it feels like we may be getting there now. Sure Anderson is right in pointing to the tools and the aggregators in his book, but I wonder if there isn't something else at work– some sort of major shift in how producers/makers actually do stuff. There have been echoes of this in recent bestsellers like Friedman's flat world book or Richard Florida's creative class work, but I don't think anyone has actually come out and spelled out the fact that we're in the middle of a huge transition in terms of defining what "work" is, how it gets done, and how one gets compensated for it. Even Om is getting in on the fun with a great new blog concept on what the "web worker" is about. Taken to it's limit case, one could imagine a much more immersive experience (a la Stephen Levy's new piece on WoW) where work gets done in much the same way that WoW is played, by loosely coupled but tightly-knit guilds that take things happen one project at a time, sometimes for immediate material gain and sometimes for fun.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 31, 2006)
Ned has jumped into the fray on web application frameworks and this reminded me that just about a year ago when we were getting Tabblo off the ground, my head was spinning (or more specifically my laptop was) with every web framework known to man to see which one we'd begin with. At the time my thought was that we would use one of the frameworks to get started and then abandon it as we needed to scale the site to something beyond a prototype/early alpha.
So it's been a pleasant surprise to see that we've been able to stick with Django for the last year and even through a couple of massive spikes in traffic (something I am fairly sure that we would not have been able to do with some of the other contenders I considered so kudos to the Django guys).
However, Ned's post brought back all the memories of reading reams of commentary on all sides of web frameworks and passionate arguments around how "game changing" this or that was, and how software development was never going to be the same again. He does a good job of debunking most of this as the crap, so instead I just wanted to mention one of the greatest benefits I think we've seen from using a "fringy" framework like Django.
If you get passionate about your tools– passionate enough to try new things, get into the fray on the discussion, and always be looking critically at everything that comes down the pike, you're probably the type of engineer who thinks hard about tradeoffs and the "whys" behind decisions which means you are most likely also to do very well coming up with the right answers to some of the harder (softer) questions that Ned has on his post. In other words, getting people who are passionate about their web frameworks, especially when these frameworks are not part of the mainstream "career advancing" canon, is a great way to pre-select for the types of people who will thrive and do really well in small team environments. This isn't always true– and interestingly enough, as the tool/framework gains acceptance (something which should be considered a "good thing"), it's value as a preselector rapidly decreases (what Java monkey doesn't "totally love Ruby on Rails" these days?).
It reminds me of a story that I've heard third-hand about the way that Steve Jobs did recruiting at NEXT. When asked what he was looking for in hardware engineers, he supposedly said "engineers that understand surface mounted board assembly," and we he was asked why that specifically, his response was "it's easy: the best hardware engineers all want to work with surface mounted components, so that is why we want them." When I first heard this story I thought, what an idiot! but working in the Django ecosystem has taught me that this type of self selection can be much more beneficial to a startup than URL dispatchers, ORMs or any of the other stuff that comes with a web framework.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 17, 2006)
Sometimes a blogosphere meme is so good and on-point with what you've been thinking that it's hard to do anything other than agree vehemently with it. Such is what is going on today with the volley between Caterina and Fred about "Business Development 2.0." Basically, they argue that we're past the point of needing the big biz dev dances that we all did during web 1.0 with suits at long meetings and contracts and meetings and sushi bars and meetings, etc., etc.
Around the office I've been calling it "lightweight business development" because it feels much more agile than any of the other stuff I've ever done. Fred outlines a bunch of good examples on his blog so instead I'll try to give the geek's perspective: doing biz dev between unprofitable sites, or in the context of unexplored types of relationships (say Tabblo and a major photo retailer for example) the old way is the business people's equivalent of premature optimization and is therefore almost likely to lead to a bad outcome.
Now there are cases when partnerships need more than the lightweight approach– usually because there are CAPEX or marketing resources that need to be applied. But, as I was telling a prospective printing partner today, if he's going to have to make a significant investment and venture into unexplored waters because of us, it's probably not the best fit at this point in time. Sometimes it may be (though I am hard-pressed to think of a good example), but more often than not, this probably leads up to a situation where escalation of commitment becomes an obfuscating factor in figuring out that it probably wasn't meant to be in the first place.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 28, 2006)
Mike Arrington has a nice writeup of Dave Winer's new project, "Share Your OPML" which covers a really neat experiment in collecting what I think is invaluable profile data on RSS-powered people. OPML is the XML-format most commonly used by RSS aggregators to export a list of subscriptions in a single file. Though the format could be a lot richer (capturing metadata about items read, for example), it is good enough to get a real feeling for the type of subjects that a particular person is motivated enough to track. In fact, a relatively rich OPML file (>50 feeds) is so good at telling you about its owner that I now find myself asking for an OPML export as part of the interview process during hiring for any position, and find it to be (when available) at least as good as the candidate's resume.
That said, herein lies my concern with the viability of Share Your OPML: the system appears to have no inbuilt way of encouraging users to take the trouble to upload this type of valuable metadata in the first place. Though it is early still, I think this is why the data extracted from the OPML files collected reveals a blogging A-list distribution in the various aggregated stats (these are after all Dave's friends and fans who have the necessary incentive at this point). Arrington suggests that it will be cool to have "better recommendations," using the classic collaborative filter model, but this still is not good enough for me to have the system slurp my data, at least not until I've seen it work its magic with other people's data, and even then it's unclear that the collaborative filter could bring enough value by itself).
It strikes me though that there is more low hanging fruit in terms of encouraging active participation (and upload). Share Your OPML could quickly become a sort of delicious for feed lists if it grows a simple API quickly. Fortunately, this is something that Dave Winer has proven very adept at in the past, so I would find it hard to believe that he is not already about to release it. In the meanwhile, it's worth checking out what this neat experiment will bring.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 3, 2006)
So Barcamp Boston is off to a great start, at least from the energy level of the first day's crowd. It feels almost like a whole lot of folks here in Boston have been in a state of suspended animation while the dot-com fallout took place, and they are just now starting to re-emerge.
It's good to see contemporaries who started their careers during the first web coming back wiser and better than before. More patience, more humility, and a greater willingness to listen are amongst the qualities that I'm feeling in this crowd. Even the kids just starting out seem more humble than we were the first time around.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 7, 2006)
I have to say that I am really impressed with Google spreadsheets. It's the missing piece to moving entirely off of Office as a tool for coordinating work for us. In my world, the wiki killed Word but it's always had this horrible problem with tabular information (or any sort of structured information for that matter). Google Spreadsheets takes care of that AND adds realtime multi-author capabilities. Dan Bricklin spotted this need in presenting tabular information on the web months back which is why he got going with WikiCalc. And despite the fact that I'm not sure I'd want my company's product schedules living on some Google Labs server, I think most people won't care, and for the 80% of users who use Excel as a fancy table editor, this product is going to really hit the spot.
My only minor complaint is around the lack of Safari support. Safari sucks as a web development environment-- there is no doubt about that, but if even small companies can come out of the gate supporting it, why can't Google plan for a degraded experience in Safari from day 1? Otherwise, Spreadsheets does a really nice job of providing the basics around editing as well as an amazing job of Excel file import (haven't tested the export).
Now, it would seem in a predictable twist of fate that Google has run out of good graces in the blogosphere. Everyone seems to be piling on with respect to how ho-hum this is, or how non-core to the mission it is, or just how much Google sucks now. Then there are the people who claim that this will never be able to replace the richness of the Excel experience. Having recently seen a demo of Excel 2007, I'd have to say: yeah, but so what? Outside of some formatting goodness which Excel 2007 seemed to have in it (which could be done in an AJAX GUI), most of the other improvements didn't strike me as particularly useful.
Besides, I think that Nick Carr has it right when he writes about how Spreadsheets should be seen as complementary to Excel (and I don't usually agree with his shrill blogging). If you buy the complements argument, which seems to have a lot of legs when you think of iPhoto/Flickr or iTunes/LastFM where each of the online services complements the rich client application with publishing/sharing/collaboration featuresets, then Spreadsheets is an absolute no brainer. In fact, it could do a lot less than it already does and still be quite useful as a complement to Excel.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 4, 2006)
Caterina Fake comes back from her travels and writes an incredibly thought-provoking post attempting to categorize the types of social sites out there, especially with respect to user growth metrics. In the post she argues for three categories: primarily social (MySpace, Facebook), rich content (Flickr, YouTube), and person to person (Y Photos, Ofoto) with each type having different kinds of production/consumption behavior.
I think Caterina's three categories are great as archetypes to use when thinking through the character of sites, or key product management questions, but at the risk of going against the current Web2 grain of "keeping it simple," I was left wondering why we can't have a little bit of everything. In fact, I think this little bit of everything is what makes Flickr such a great success.
It wasn't until we launched a got a whole influx of Flickr folks that I realized that the Flickr social community is very vibrant. I've heard from more than one user now that Flickr is in fact their adult version of Facebook. They use the "Your contacts" page as their browser's home page and wake up every morning to the sight of new photos within their social network. One user even described Flickr as a "communal photo blog" that was "the best way to stay in touch with people that I care about but who I don't talk to regularly." Does this sound MySpacey to anyone? In fact, I think it's way better because of the way in which the photos provide an entertaining substrate for the types of social activity that are otherwise context-less on sites like MySpace (more on that in a future post).
On to the person-to-person type of site: in a totally unofficial survey of some of the Flickr pro users I know, I was surprised to see how many of them use the site as one would use Ofoto or Yahoo Photos to share pictures on an access controlled basis with people in their tight social circle (family and close friends). In fact, when we first built the Flickr-Tabblo bridge, we failed to respect photo ACLs form Flickr which was a clear mistake we had to rush to fix given the number of folks who had a substantial number of private photos. If I had to guess, I bet that Flickr photos and privacy resemble a sort of upside-down glacier with 40% or so of the content buried under the privacy waterline for just this reason.
Here is my reason for pointing out how well Flickr does in the other two types Caterina describes– I think most people are multi-modal in their online behavior. Sometimes you want to act like one of Bradley's content generators putting together stuff with your "publisher" hat on, sometimes you want to share the photos of the BBQ with little care for composition or editing with people you know really want to see them, and there are even times when you'll use the site to find people who you might want to know. It is the sites that do the best job of providing enough flexibility to accommodate the different modes of behavior that end up doing the best in the end. Doing anything else (at least until you've got many many users showing you otherwise) seems like premature optimization to me.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 12, 2006)
Note: this post will be of little interest to you unless its title grips you like a Richard Morgan novel (ok, John Grisham for the non sci-fi fans) and you are in the middle of tearing your hair out trying to get EVDO working on your MacBook Pro (MBP). Read on if appropriate...
I got addicted to Verizon's 3G EVDO network back when I was riding the Acela between New York and Boston twice weekly. With it, you can get real work done on a laptop, and it tends to be rock solid when you can get a connection. However after releasing very beta hardware in the form of the early MacBook Pros, Apple also nuked the PCMCIA slot in favor of an Express34 one which meant that my Novatel 5220 card was left a paperweight (an Express 34 EVDO card is "just around the corner" apparently).
Enter the Treo 700p to the rescue. It supports EVDO natively, doesn't run the slow-as-molasses mobile Windoze that its predecessor did (the 700w), and best of all can be configured to use DUN (dial up networking) via Bluetooth with the MBP. Now, folks have complained that it is not possible to get the MBP to work with the Treo as a USB EVDO modem because this is supposedly faster than Bluetooth while keeping the phone on trickle charge, but based on a few tests I ran (the MBP/Treo versus a Powerbook G4/Novatel 5220), the speed difference amounts to line noise around 25-75 kbps on download and 10-15kpbs on upload. And if fact, I find the notion of having to whip out a wire on a train/airplane/cab to "tether" the two devices sort of stupid (isn't "tethering" something we do to horses?).
Anyhow, without further ado, here are the instructions to get this done with minimal third party software getting installed on your computer, and the least amount of hunting through forum posts. I'm doing this because the first pairing of a cellphone and a Mac I did was greatly helped by a guy who took the time to do this with a v710 a couple of years ago, and I got many miles out of it. Oh, and I am also doing it because the Verizon support reps. are absolutely clueless about Macs, Broadband Access on EVDO, and just about anything you may want to get done that doesn't entail accessing voicemail. No joke, and no rant intended, though it does amaze me that they can be so bad at selling what is one of their highest margin and best offerings.
Before you start
As of 6/10/2006, Verizon has a couple of plans that provide unlimited data on top of some allotment of minutes. Go and sign up for this, but make sure that you also sign up for a $15/month "feature" to let you do this in the first place called something like "Broadband Tethered Access." Just check that a) it is $15/month incremental for nothing other than the privilege of using your Treo as a modem, and b) that when you log into your account and check your service, you see a line item that reads like so: "BBA CONNECT UNL." Without this enabled, you will not be able to authenticate. In my case, I asked for it at the store (didn't get it), and twice on the phone (didn't get it). The trick was getting to the data support people and using the magic words "BBA CONNECT UNL" which seemed to turn some lightbulb on.
Also, you do not need to install the Verizon Access connect software that they put out for the Mac. I am not sure whether this software is good or bad- in fact I've only ever used it on my Thinkpad where the first thing it did was flash my otherwise very Mac-friendly 5220 so that it only worked just ok after that- but I prefer to keep as much of that third-party crap off of my computer, particularly when it comes to OS services like networking (and given that the MBP seems to have a few hiccups of it's own in this area, why add insult to injury?).
Getting the Treo and the Mac friendly with each other
I didn't install any of the Palm Desktop manager software, mostly because I was afraid that it would run in emulation and really clog the MBP up. Instead I got a $39 program called the Missing Sync which I'd heard was great and had an Intel binary. Either way though, pairing your MBP and your Treo should be a simple matter of going to the Bluetooth control panel in System Preferences and adding the Treo as a device. Make sure you turn Bluetooth on on the Treo itself (mine came off). You will go through a standard wizard on the computer where you have to enter some numbers the MBP gives you on the Treo and get stuff paired correctly. The key thing to realize is that the process is initiated from the MBP (not the Treo).
Once you finish the pairing (assuming it is successful), the wizard will ask you if you want to use your phone for Internet access. Choose yes, and enter the following bits of information:
Username: XXXXXXXXXX@vzw3g.com (where the Xs is your 10 digit Verizon phone)
Telephone Number: #777
Password: vzw
and click the box for "Show modem status in menu bar."
If you've done this all correctly, all you have after you've closed everything out is pull down on the little handset icon that appears in the menu bar and choose "Connect." The computer will display the various steps in the process and the Treo's screen will go on to indicate that the process is going.
When things go oops
First, make sure you've signed up for the "BBA CONNECT UNL" service option. Without it you are hosed (unless there is some modem init hack that you can do). If you see the service on your web-based Verizon portal, make sure that Bluetook pairing between the MBP and the Treo is solid, deleting other Bluetooth pairings if necessary.
Some things I've noticed
The connection speed is comparable to the old PCMIA setup (350/60 kbps on dslreports speedtest versus 400/70kbps) but from very early testing it seems to drop after a smaller interval of inactivity (I'm sure this is configurable but I haven't had enough time to explore). Apparently others have written that with this setup an incoming voice call will allow you to pause the EVDO connection without having to disconnect (a big improvement over the pre-EVDO days) but I haven't seen this first hand.
That's about it. I hope someone gets to save some time in reading this the way that I did a few years ago. After all it is only by doing write-ups like this that we customers are ever going to be able to build a decent support system around Verizon's great network. Now if we could only do this to build actual network infrastructure as well...
The implementation looks to be a really nice version of a clean photo-gallery plus a "photo-cast" capability that allows other Picasa users to download the photos that you publish. It's clear that what Google is hoping to do is leverage their gorgeous Picasa client to give people a way to begin sharing their photos online in a simple and basic process that doesn't allow more much beyond basic sharing (this is probably made obvious by the their own blog post titled: "It’s all about the photos.")
I'd be worried though, that without more advanced features specifically around privacy, presentation, and collaboration, the product may fail to attract the increasingly more sophisticated publishers of photos online (then again, the product may be geared towards the 30% of folks who have never shared a photo online). For instance, most of us have loads of different groups that we communicate with online and a simple two-state privacy system (private/public)– while better than the all-public model of most blogging engines– doesn't really begin to address the ways in which we'd like to represent ourselves to others via our photographs.
More importantly, I want much more creative control than the standard grid of photos plus zoom-in view that Picasa Web Albums provides. It's interesting to me that most of the online photo sites copied their interface for display (the standard grid) from desktop photo management software even though that interface was built mainly for organization/editing and not consumption. It's almost like if magazines from the newsstand were laid out like the Quark or InDesign interface. The grid is easy for sure– it requires very little creative investment on the part of the user sharing the pictures– but as anyone who has ever been the recipient of a "weddingstorm" or "babystorm" can tell you (this is what happens when your friends start getting married/having babies and discover how easy it is to spam everyone repeatedly with huge online gallery links), after the first 9 grids, it starts to get old. With all of Google's AJAX goodness, I was sort of hoping we'd get a lot more of the cinematic effects that Picasa became famous for around the composition and story-telling aspects of photo presentation and display.
Finally, I wanted Picasa web albums to be more like Google Spreadsheets in the way that the latter breaks new ground around collaboration. As one would expect, the blogosphere is already abuzz with posts about how this is the first volley in a showdown between Picasa Web Albums (Google) and Flickr (Yahoo), but I couldn't disagree more. Flickr is the world's best collaborative digital shoebox with a few people throwing stuff in, and many many more sifting through the box for the best photos, helping to reorganize them, and writing small comments on the back of the pictures for others to read. It works so well, the experience is downright entertaining. But Flickr is not a photo editing tool, a photo organizing tool, or (as mentioned above) a photo compositing and layout tool. Picasa Web Albums, on the other hand, is an online extension of a rich client tool that does do some of those things. Nick Starr wrote a few days ago that Google was trying to build the new Dot Mac with tools that allow for easily publishing content that resides on your PC, and to this end, Picasa Web Albums is a very nice first step. But to me, collaboration around photos could be a lot richer than that, and we'll have to see whether it gets there as the team evolves the product.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 17, 2006)
As usual our friends over at TechCrunch have ignited a debate around web services, data, and the openness of APIs. This one centers around the fact that Zoomr, a Flickr clone, has been denied access to a commercial API key to export people's photos/metadata out of Flickr and into Zoomr. Since we've been mentioned a few times, and since the issue at the core of the debate (should Flickr allow a direct clone access to the data it has built up despite the clone's desire to "replace" Flickr) is a tricky one, I thought I'd give some quick impressions.
First, to the importance of official "openness" in an API: when we were doing early alpha testing, there were two applications that our lead users told us we had to integrate with: Flickr and Picasa. Flickr was no problem: they have a process for applying for a developer key, a clean and well-documented API, and a bunch of third-party libraries/apps that you can use as examples. Picasa? Well, that was a bit trickier. No documentation, no API, and no seeming desire to do anything about it. Fortunately for us, we have someone at Tabblo who relishes these kinds of challenges, and so with a couple of days work, he had it reversed-engineered and we were off and importing photos from Picasa.
So my first point is this: if it's important enough to your product/service to get at some of this stuff, you will find a way whether the company or service you are dealing with is "open," "a model Web 2.0 citizen," or not. Sure they may be a little more friction involved, but one of the great things about networked services is that at some point you have to get on the wire and push bytes, and when you do, it is not that hard for someone else to come along and learn how to speak your language.
Second, and this is the tricky bit to grok, when you use an API like Flickr's, the goal should always be to benefit the user and not to "jumpstart your userbase" or "blow out the metrics." In our case, we wanted to be able to integrate with Flickr for two clear reasons: 1. the avoid the user the hassle of re-uploading photos that they wanted to use in their tabblos, and 2. to avoid the user the hassle of re-organizing the photos with tags, dates, etc. But as far as where the data lived, the stickiness of the app, etc., we really didn't care (in fact, at first we wanted just to use thumbnails and metadata and leave all of the original file-serving on Flickr, something which we had to give up on only because it impacted the user experience.
And since this is a clear enough goal, I think that it should be ok for the person doling out the keys to the API to make a judgement call about whether you are in fact trying to do something that truly is going to benefit their users with the API. I realize that defining this is tough but just because the line in the sand in hard to draw, doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In my mind it has something to do with the nature of the features/functionality being offered by the API requestor, and whether there is a clear and demonstrated need on the part of the community of users for that sort of thing. At Tabblo, we talked to quite a few Flickr users who said things like "well I'd never leave Flickr as my primary place for photo uploading/storage, but what I'd really like to be able to do is ..." and it was the "..." that we listened to really closely.
Now the Zoomr guy may actually have a pretty good "..." to offer Flickr users, and if he does it may be the wrong thing to deny him the API key. But here is where I fall back to my first point– if it's really all that critical to get those Flickr folks in, just do what we did with Picasa and figure out how to get a minimal export working. If enough people start doing it, and given how well Flickr listens to its community, it won't be long before you get the keys to the data. Generally speaking the great thing about clued in companies born of the web (Yahoo, Google) unlike those born of the PC era (Apple, Microsoft) is that they listen and adapt quickly.
Of course this doesn't answer a lot of the hard questions that people are asking with respect to data storageon the cloud in this brave new world but unfortunately we are all ankle-biters when it comes to the really big questions here, and only the bigguys can help make the right policy decisions about what should happen in the grand scheme. As more people from the clued-in companies climb the ladder at those places though, I have faith they will influence things in the right direction. Until then, we should all cut them a little slack.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 12, 2006)
I didn't get a chance to read about Apple's World Wide Developers Conference as this was a crazy week but lots of people did nice write-ups of the whole event, sounding mostly disappointed that Apple didn't introduce an iPhone (which by the way is sorely needed as I've discovered that the Treo 700p, "smartest of the smartphones," is very much at the Windows 3.11 level though that is a different story). My favorite part of WWWDC had little to do with snazzy hardware though, and was instead around a feature of the OS called "Time Machine" that let's you restore your entire hard disk to some previous timestamp.
This is a really good idea. In fact, it's so good that over a decade ago David Gelernter and a bunch of Yale computer scientists came up with a whole system for managing information on a computer called "Lifestreams" that basically worked as a time-indexed set of events (emails, IMs, files written, files edited, files deleted). Lifestreams was cool because it argued for something other than the stamdard WIMP desktop metaphor, and because it seemed to come at a time when the Internet was giving computing a whole new vector which most regular users had not anticipated (email? IM? web search history?)
But Lifestreama was a commercial failure and a meme failure because it was just too different. The brilliant thing that Apple has done with Time Machine is to fit the whole paradigm into the standard desktop metaphor: you go backwards and forwards on a timeline in order to restore the state of the entire desktop at a certain moment in time– with a snazzy interface. This is something that regular non-propellerheads can get their heads around.
Another way to look at this may be to think of it as source control for the masses. Imagine that every app you ran on your desktop was wired through Subversion (in fact I think in some O'Reilly Hacks book this was exactly what is recommended). Then with a simple svn command you could easily get back to any previous state in your workspace. The challenge would be to make sure things like app-specific metadata got into the svn repository– but here again, the Mac shines since it does such a good job of avoiding the PST hell that most Windows apps have (one mega file with a proprietary binary format that makes it impossible to diff). In the meanwhile, I've got to give it to Apple for bringing good (if old) ideas to the masses in a nice package.
I've been following the raging debate around the alpha geeks who are dumping OSX for Ubuntu (and the beta geeks who are making a stink about following them) with some of the same detached interest that I save for the Ruby-Python debate or the emacs-vi throwdown of yesteryear. Mostly because there are only two good points being made over and over again, with the rest of the chatter being just line noise.
The whole thing started when Mark Pilgrim (who writes as well as he thinks and thinks very well) wrote about how he was switching to Linux from OSX due to Apple's braindead proprietary data formats in their iLife suite. And herein is great point #1: proprietary data formats suck, especially as more and more of your critical information (photos, movies, music) migrates on to your computer. You will always run into some kind of artificial roadblock that the vendor (in this case Apple) cares little about helping you with because when you're running into the problem, it is either because you want to leave their "ecosystem" or too far in the future for it to be worth their worry.
The important thing to keep in mind though is that Mark is talking about metadata that is being locked up in a propietary way, not actual data. Yes it would suck to lose your iTunes playlists, and your iPhoto albums/tags/comments, but it definitely would suck a lot more to lose all of your data due to lock-in (hello Outlook at PST fans!?!), and at least thus far, Apple has been good about keeping that data visible and transparent to common filesystem tools. While they keep that up, I think they've still got the best platform out there.
Why? Because of point #2: running Linux on a desktop/laptop blows, plain and simple. The debate raging in the blogosphere would be a lot more information-rich if Technorati provided a filter that let you remove posts from anyone who has never actually run Linux on a laptop before, and by running it, I mean using it as their main OS in day to day activity. I did it for two years (about three years ago) and I can honestly say that the only way you could talk about it favorably is if you were suffering from Stockholm syndrome. It's just no fun to deal with power management (especially around suspend/resume), video issues, font issues, and wireless networking issues. True, Ubuntu has made great strides, but having recently installed it on an IBM T43, I can still see all of the same holes that have always existed around "user-centered Linux distros," the main one being around the way that GUI configurators and the textfiles they twiddle can get out of state and send you right into a commandline/manpage hell. This is ok for ifconfig (because you should know this anyway) but for X? for apm? C'mon, almost anyone has better things to do with their time. (Rob Flickenger has the best blogpost outlining the issues as to why Linux is just not viable and he touches on a number of things that I don't mention here for those who are curious).
So, what to do? Get ready to lose your metadata (read: don't invest a lot of energy in it) and make sure you practice good platform independence hygene for the possible moment when Apple drives us all off the cliff. Learn how the iApps store your data, and get really cozy with rsync and ssh (investing time in these two tools will pay off for far longer than investing energy into configuring X fonts or Alsa sound drivers). I used to think that good platform independence hygene meant not using applications that weren't available on all platforms which is the main reason why I kept running all those buggy versions of Aqua Emacs but after years of pain I finally said basta! and got on the Cocoa groove train. Now I live in TextMate and NetNewsWire and am fully expecting the coming withdrawal that may come someday. I'm not sure it's worth punishing yourself now for true platform independence.
Anyhow, I realize this debate has probably been spent (for now anyway, as it seems to come back every six months) but I figured it would make a good Independence day post, so happy 4th!
A long time ago in a faraway blog, I spent some time arguing that providing really cheap computers would have a really positive impact on society. Fast forward a year when at the Wall Street Journal's D4 conference Nicholas Negroponte got up and talked about the $100 PC for poor countries and I wrote that it seemed silly that he was spending all of this alpha geek energy designing something from scratch when there were plenty of cheap components that could be used to get mighty close to the price target. Well it's been a year, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative has made good progress, and I guess it's time to color me wrong.
What I had not realized was how brainwashed I was by existing form factors in PCs/laptops, and how much innovation could truly be achieved by starting from scratch and designing the hardware so that it hit the right price/features/performance point. And to boot, getting luminaries like Alan Kay (and even Python's very own GvR because as it turns out a bunch of the GUI has been wrapped for quick dev. with Python) involved has definitely been good for the project, and I didn't realize just how many would jump on board.
But actually, outside of the progress that they've made in one short year, the thing that has most convinced me that going with a brand new hardware platform was the key was getting a Nintendo DS Lite, essentially a portable game player with a lot of clever design in it and the unbelievable price tag of $129 (for a computer with two displays, enough processing power to run a number of fun games and a wireless radio in it). Now I know we're supposed to think that all game manufacturers do the "blades and razors" thing and give away the console in order to make it up with the games, but I seriously doubt that Nintendo is really losing much money on every DS-Lite. And seeing it run for hours on a charge, dropping it several times on hard surfaces with no serious effect, and most significantly seeing how the most clever of games uses innovative input methods to enable gameplay (a graffiti-like character recognizer and even better, a microphone), that made me think of the $100 laptop again, and the promise that it could bring.
I still have my doubts as far as OLPC goes. Despite a seemingly well thought-out process for building software, and the aforementioned software gurus, I worry that the apps on it may stink. I worry that there may be hardware/software integration issues that require the concentration and effort of a single product management organization making trade-offs and compromises in the right direction. Perhpas now that these guys have been outed as being a world-class hardware manufacturer, maybe they could jump in and try to help?
But I do have to give it to Negroponte for thinking big, and getting out there to sell it big as well.
I really dig digg. I remember being at our VC's offices the day that the deal came in and thinking only one thing: wow this is going to be the end of Slashdot. But Seth Godin has recently written a brief but interesting piece about the challenges facing everyone's new media darling these days. In short, he argues that Digg is about the diggers and not so much about the larger community of readers that Kevin & co. like to talk about when the cite 900K uniques per day.
The problem with the diggers according to Seth? They are a "legion," an elite, and as such you have to treat them with kid gloves and manage them like talent. In my opinion, the real problem is that Digg as a site is built around too few publishers doing too little work to build the "media experience." To take an extreme on the other end, compare the diggers to your average World of Warcraft player and think for a moment: who is more likely to move elsewhere in the event that the guy running the hosting platform pulls a fast one? If I'm a digger, all I've invested in learning is the old thumbs-up/thumbs-down deal. How hard can this be to port to Reddit? If I'm a WoW player though, I know about my guild, I know about the 5 second rule, and most of all, I know a lot about the creative investment that I've made in my character(s).
If you're going to make a new media property, and if you're going to call it sticky, it seems to me that it makes sense to understand the nature of the creative investment you expect your users to make. Now, digg that!
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 3 months ago (April 26, 2006)
The Economist (my absolute favorite) has a wonderful special report this week on "New Media" by Andreas Kluth that is absolutely worth its weight in dead trees. It is thorough, substantive, and manages to hit all the high notes while getting quotes and insight from all of the key players driving the transition into the era of Personal Media (Kluth calls it "personal or participatory media," however I like the word personal better because it has the same ring as Personal Computer).
The intro piece(if you read only one piece, read this one) starts with the now-venerable debate on quality versus quantity in content brought on by the new media explosion, framed between quotes from Barry Diller and my friend Jerry Michalski (who follows up on why he's not getting invited to Barry's next Christmas party) with a great blog post (and getting Jerry to put fingers to keyboard on his blog is about as hard as mating a flamingo with a plunger so kudos to the report for that as well). The quality-versus-quantity argument is almost not worth having at this point; we're all aware that on average an amateur is going to produce a less "finished" product (just compare this post to the depth and insight of the aforementioned survey). Like Jerry says in his follow up post, the wonderful thing about the new media explosion is just how much content is out there for us to consume.
Example: at the office everyone is obsessed with Lost which means that, despite the fact that it's gone steadily downhill during the second season, we all have to watch it. This week I found it especially funny that while putting up with a bad excuse for a new episode (hello, recap episodes went out with MacGuyver treading water for 60 minutes 20 years ago), I was able to surf from an email to YouTube and see a much more entertaining bit of video content. Now this 24 spoof is definitely much lower quality in terms of production value (it's not even that good), and it qualifies as what Steven Johnson calls parasitic content, but since I am a huge fan of 24 anyone who can pull off such a good Jack Bauer impersonation will get my attention.
The final thing I will say about the Economist report was how great it was to have David Weinberger (another Boston local) quoted as saying this new media thing was more of a social phenomenon than a publishing one. So true, and yet so often missed in all of the "blogs will take down the New York Times" articles that usually appear on paper.
It is about small audiences that find the content you produce as new media maker incredibly relevant- much more so than rehashed Lost episodes. And even if it takes 10 years to find the business models (assuming we even need to) it's great to be around during a time of so much choice is how we spend our time communicating, consuming, and even making, new media.
It's pretty clear now that looking for product information on the web is a Killer App that has no equal with general users (except for possibly email). Which is why I am astounded that we still don't have the equivalent of a Froogle for product reviews. Sure, there was Epinions back in the day and there are also a number of new Web 2.0 comparison shopping sites that claim they are going to extend their reach into reviews, but none of these quite work because they don't live inside of my search engine.
I just finished writing up a review of a pair of Mion Current outdoor sandals that I got (despite not being able to turn up any reviews on them in Google), and I'm fairly sure that because I wanted to include pictures and therefore used Tabblo, I'm not going to see this review popping to the top of any search engine anytime soon.
Here is all that I would like:
Google, instead of doing all of these Microsoft office-killing apps (some of which I like), create a separate entry point into "reviews" and give me a search engine for reviews. Crawl Amazon, crawl the blogs, crawl anything you want- hell you are already doing that- but just make sure to present me with an interface that lets me sort through reviews really quickly, to rate them, and if you're feeling Web 2.0 to add to them if the feeling moves me.
There is hardly a day that goes by that I don't find myself typing "XXX review" only to have to sort out a bunch of junk I don't care about from the general Google search. Solving this problem can't be any harder than Google News which seems to be working pretty well these days.
And no, I don't want to use some standalone site- frankly I don't think any startup would be able to get enough scale (hype around "vertical search engines" notwithstanding) to cover anything and everything. And I certainly don't want to have to go run multiple searches: i.e., Google, Amazon, Technorati, just to get decent coverage. I just want the most comprehensive list of reviews you can give me.
C'mon, Google, how cool would "Google Reviews" be? And if not you, then maybe Yahoo, the "social search" company can jump on this one.
I'd be worried if I had any Microsoft stock, and not because Bill G. is retiring, but because the visionary he's left in charge has got this to say about the future strategy of the company.
Now, you know it's got to be a bad strategy for one reason: this speech could have been given 5 years ago (it probably was, at Groove) and it would still have been as platitude-filled and un-actionable back then as it is today. Sure, we're going to connect all devices together with the Internet, and sure we're going to move all of our data to services that synchronize it, back it up, and move it intelligently on our behalf. And to boot, we're going to "optimize" our lives by harnessing the collective intelligence of our group behavior. Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat.
I don't want to pick on one of Boston's own renown tech-heads because everyone I know in common with him claims that he is both really nice and really sharp, and because he's been building software for longer than I've been alive, but I am floored that we can't get something a little more original out of the world's biggest software company, especially one with such an incredible asset.
If I were Ozzie I would have tried to lay out a strategy that leverages the still-dominant PC client footprint in two ways: 1. to build the best peer-2-peer platform for compute intensive apps out there (including gaming, telepresence, group authoring, etc.), something he knows a lot about, and 2. to build the best web-authoring client tool out there (to replace Office) that uses all of the existing back-end services that have in effect already won, as its native document format. Microsoft can still make great client apps, especially now that all of the rest of the world of great client talent has moved on to AJAXy things, and it strikes me that if they don't wake up and recognize this, Adobe is going to eat their lunch. Finally, if I had any more cycles were I Microsoft after chasing #1 and #2, I would focus on making the mobile Windows OS actually usable, or at least competitive with the totally abandoned Palm OS in the Treos that still walks circles around it, but only because the phone is probably the thing that will most quickly erode the PC as the dominant client.
It is true that given how things are going now, the long term doesn't look good for client software, but many things may change. And if they do, it would be a shame to see Microsoft ill-prepared and spread too thin to take advantage of it.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 6, 2007)
Last year I was obsessed with 2006 being the year of the "casual publisher" which I guess it might have been if you buy the load of hoopla Time magazine heaped on us with the Person of the Year but I'm not sure we got as far as I would have liked. Sure YouTube is the absolute bee's knees and they really do deserve almost $2b of Google's money they got, but it's not because of the explosion in casual publishing they've enabled (it's because they did something really amazing in giving the bits of television that serve to hold our culture together permalinks that we could all email, IM, and post to our blogs).
And no, wikipedia— though even more awesome than YouTube— does not make for a universe of casual publishers (for instance, it's been 18 months since I last contributed to an entry). What Wikipedia did prove in 2006 is that the dynamic from the Professor and the Madman can be amplified 1000-fold with the Internet and broadened way beyond the scope of the OED.
We spent the year at Tabblo focused on the casual publisher. Our particular twist was that the distance between "photo sharer" and "casual publisher" was short and easy to cross if you could pre-select the type of person coming to you by giving them an app with the right attributes. Our angle was (and still is) collaborative story-telling with pictures and words, helped by a personal art director in software and the ability to go from online to print with a few clicks of the mouse.
The good news was that more than a million people seemed interested enough to at least drive by and take a look with a good number of them staying around to make some really outstanding stuff. The more interesting news however, is that we've still got a bit of work to do to truly make it casual and that this looks like a great year for that to happen.
By casual we don't just mean easy (which is where we'll be focused for the next few months) but also compelling, relevant, and right-sized. This last bit is the big lesson from all of personal publishing in 2006— and the hardest one to get right. For instance, blogs are really interesting and compelling but for most people they are the hammer of personal publishing; that is, sitting down to compose an entry like this one takes forethought, time, and sweat. I am afraid that is is still the same for tabbloing— giving people that much creative freedom amidst a community of artistes who live to look at each other's work necessarily implies that authors have to really make an effort to tabblo. We attempted to mitigate some of this by building a publishing platform where distribution could be varied with access controls (from 1 person to the world), and as the folks at Six Apart have learned, this does help a bit— but it doesn't solve the whole problem.
We also attacked it with different formats— defining some as quick and others as more involved and elaborate. We did this specifically with the introduction of books and other printable products that could also be shared virtually. This gives you two axes— intended audience size and type of output which does provide some freedom to do all sorts of different kinds of things depending on your mood and intent.
But there is still one big problem in getting the experience to the right size: the ease of publishing when the moment motivates you to do so. The mobloggers got this from the very beginning— blogging from your cellphone wasn't just about "hey cool I can blog from my cellphone!" but also about being able to casually publish during the holes in your day (waiting in line at the supermarket, riding the subway, driving). Unfortunately the experience is just too cumbersome for most device/platform combinations. That said, the product that did the best job of bringing the potential of mobile-based publishing this year was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Odeo, Twitter. Sure, they're only aiming to help you answer the question: "What are you doing?" but everyone of those SMSes has just picked up a thread, an audience, and most importantly, a permalink (no surprise that this product is from Ev and some of the other ex-Blogger folks).
Even if Twitter solves it for the words that come out of SMSes though, I want to see it solved for photos, audio, video, even the data that comes out of my Nike+/iPod running partner. We'll be giving it our own unique twist for photos at Tabblo this year, but as 2007 bring all sorts of new device/data combinations, the opportunities are almost limitless.
To close: why the hell should we care? I would argue that we should care because it turns out that casual publishing is a lot more like voicemail and a lot less like commercial radio— it's an opportunity to make connections with the fellow tribesfolk you most care about in new and interesting ways. And as Barry Schwartz argues in his book, it is these relationships (and the constraints they bring with them) that truly make us happy and fulfilled.
And even if you don't buy that, Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) had another possible reason in the best answer in this year's Edge question with his "Metcalfe's law of minds." Essentially, it this type of activity that can make us smarter as a species more quickly than anything that came before it. This too should be plenty of reason why you too should continue rooting for the casual publisher in 2007.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 12 months ago (July 30, 2006)
This was an interesting find on John Battelle's blog about the different amounts spent on R&D by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Apple. It's not the first time I've seen something like this where companies that get the lion's share of regular people's oohs and ahhs spend disproportionately little on R&D. In fact I remember when Steve came back to Apple and started hacking costs, one of the first things that went were a lot of these R&D project which caused some Wall Street Journal reporter to write a piece about how this was going to be short-term smart/ long-term stupid. Mind you this was before Apple did Wi-Fi, the iPod, the iTMS, video editing for everyone, or just about any of the incredible things they've done since then.
John argues that the data, being from Microsoft, is self-serving and under-reports Google's spend, but I think that there is something else going on here.Spending cash on R&D when there are no huge leaps to be made but instead incremental hops mostly punctuated by the commercialization of technology seems to be sort of a waste, and worse still, a distraction. The latter comes from the fact that the product groups at these big behemoths (MSFT, IBM) seem to be relieved of the responsibility of truly innovating because someone from the "R&D department" is supposed to be doing it. Maybe I am limited in my understanding of how much future-tense R&D shops can deliver, but when the engineering teams can come up with clever hacks like these, and when it's not clear what the last major R&D innovation Microsoft or IBM commercialized successfully, something certainly seems broken.
Then again, I've also just seen this new Photosynth project from Microsoft that seems really interesting and worth exploring further. That said, there is always an example afoot of how these new-fangled technologies can go awry as did the speech recognition in Vista just last week.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 6, 2006)
While rich feedreaders like NetNewswire (and their fast-following web-based cousins like Bloglines and Google Reader) made reading lots of blogs possible, it still amazes me that no one has been able to make any kind of significant improvement in the discoverability of cool new content. To this day, with one notable exception (more on that below), the best way to find new blogs still remains the blogroll and direct link from respected source. From sites crafted around aggregating attention metadata (like Rojo) to user-generated directories, I've tried at least one of everything and left it for my homegrown list of 200-odd feeds after just days of experimentation.
I was excited for the big Technorati redesign mainly because so many bloggers swear by it, but after just a few days of looking at this page, I find myself dizzy and confused about which of these highlighted (and often duplicated) posts, I might want to click on to follow a particular thread in the blogosphere.
This weekend I came across Brad Feld and Fred Wilson's (two ex-abuzz investors) excited posts about FeedBurner's new content and advertising networks which are really aggregated feeds along topics with a "manager" deciding who is in and who is out (for example, they are both part of the VC network). I love Feedburner as a company, and am always surprised to see it left out of most industry conference discussions about "Web 2.0," particularly because of how much the company/concept/product seems to exemplify so many of the things that are exciting about Web 2.0, but I'm not sure I buy that Feedburner has got a winner in remixing feeds topically like this. Though they do build a "homepage" that shows some basic stats around who is in a network and what the posts are, you have only to look at the community section of any open source project page that aggregates bloggers (i.e., Rails bloggers or Django bloggers) to see what a mess this can quickly become without the careful attention of an editor. Basically, feed remixing is cool, but we need much finer and richer editorial control (sometimes at the sub-post level) if we're going to get a tool useful enough to keep using beyond the initial gee-wiz phase.
Now there is one tool which has become a part of my daily information consumption diet: Tech Memeorandum or Techmeme as it has now been rebranded. Essentially, Techmeme tries to be a front page for blogosphere using nothing but its algorithm for editorial control (think what Google News should be to news but for blogs). Techmeme is not without its flaws– the greatest one being that a lot of the most interesting parts of the discussion as often left out of the Techmeme rollup and has to be ferreted out of the blog posts that are mentioned, but overall I have been amazed at how often I've come back to Techmeme to try to get a "snapshot" view of what is going on, especially when I find myself backed up and looking at 8,000 unread posts in NetNewswire.
Can it be that this problem of blog discoverability is actually hard to crack? I don't believe it– but what I do think is that it is very hard to monetize, and as such, some of the people I think would be most likely to crack it aren't even thinking about it. Google AdWords are not enough, and it is not clear that a really amped up Techmeme can survive as a destination property on its own. In fact, the closest model I can think would work for something like this would be the Topix model where the core technology development is subsidized/owned by big media companies that are hoping to make it part of their overall offering.
In the meanwhile, I will keep drowning in posts while I try to poke my head about water for long enough to find the cool new stuff...
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 22, 2006)
Bill Burnham, an ex-investment banker of Quatrone fame and one of the brightest business guys covering the technology space, has a very nice summary piece on the importance of syndication, microformats, and search for the development of online marketplaces. Nothing he states in the post is earth-shattering from the insight perspective but it is a nice synopsis and attempt to understand a scenario for how the semantic web could emerge.
Of particular significance to me is how he describes people behaving in order to create the necessary substrate for the evolution of the web. After introducing the central role that sites like MySpace and Facebook will play for users, he extrapolates:
Specifically, these sites (as well as sites such as MSN’s Spaces and Yahoo’s 360) are highly likely to evolve into an all encompassing digital identify for each user. People will use these sites not just as a way to socialize, but as a hub to manage their broader digital identify on the web. Part blog, part digital cubby hole, these sites will provide each human being with a digital homestead from which they can manage their entire digital identify on the web.
What your profile page becomes then is your point of presence online with the social interactions around that page serving to validate and qualify your online identity. I love this notion for two reasons.
First, it is true that people will increasingly need a point of presence online where they can root their digital selves both for online and offline purposes. As Burnham continues:
Today people with their own websites are regarded as either curious or vain, yet I feel quite confident saying that 10 years from now everyone in the developed world will have their own website and the few that don’t will likely be regarded as hopeless Luddites much like those without e-mails are today.
I remember back in the 1990s when I moved to California and set up a website with the express purpose of providing directions to my house. It was such a novelty at the time even that in Silicon Valley, most people would just print out the email and then wonder how they were supposed to use the long link at the bottom to get to me. Nowadays it is hard to get invited to a wedding that doesn't already have a "wedding site" with all the related hotel, travel, and gift registry info.
The point of presence is absolutely necessary as more person-to-person transactions get done online which is why sites like eBay and Flickr (the latter is also about transactions albeit non-commerce related) push the profile page front and center.
This brings me to my second reason for liking Burnham's characterization of the point of presence through sites like MySpace and Facebook-- unlike the normally heavyweight process of using something like Geocities, or Homestead, or even TypePad or Blogger to "set up" a point of presence, most community-oriented presence creation happens as a by-product of other activity in the environment. This is back to the notion of being a casual publisher-- you start interacting with a site in a very task-directed way and before long, you've grown a whole little structure that becomes "you" as represented in that environment (to me, Furl did this the best way before the del.icio.us hype explosion by making a blog-like thing out of your public archive by default). After you've built up the profile, this bit of real estate becomes really valuable because it would talk an incredible amount of work (more than most normal people are willing to put in) to recreate it.
Burnham goes on to talk about the importance of microformats so that people can publish all sorts of structured information to allow search engines to create distributed marketplaces for goods and services. While this makes for a great read, I am not sure I see how we get there anytime soon. The main reason has to do with what makes a marketplace succeed: its value is proportional to the number of participants. People continue to go to the specialized auction sites (like Basehit for baseball cards) despite eBay's attempts to own the category because they perceive a deeper marketplace at these specialized sites. Ebay and Craig's List will always have this over any emergent effort on the part of people who load the contents of their basement on their blogs, at least until the latter get to some sort of meaningful scale.
It's a classic chicken and egg. The microformats guys understand this which is why there are all of these Movable Type and Wordpress plug-ins that process content into structured chunks of XML during the blog publishing process. I haven't tried these but suspect that they are at best as kludgey as the publishing interfaces on the blog tools they support. More importantly, it's not clear to me that even if you take all of the Movable Type users, add them to the TypePad userbase, and then sprinkle in Wordpress and Blogger, you get enough of a population to make even one worthwhile marketplace (10-15M blogs at most?).
Instead it's going to take a big social site (a la MySpace) developing enough expressiveness in the profile-building part of the application (which by some people's standards MySpace does already) in an accessible enough way for the regular folks not normally interested in the overt popularity contest that is the mainline attraction on sites like MySpace and Facebook. In my mind this means the tool should be task-centric (like furl was) and personal in scope (so that its excrement is meaningful in creating a personal point of presence).
The key is that people are encouraged to create a permanent presence as a by-product of the thing that they really want to do, that this presence be something that can be useful in its own right once created, appealing enough to its owner, and customizable so that any lingering expressive desires can be met. Whoever gets this equation right first could both subsume all of the current standalone features of the blogging/personal publishing apps out there today, and really jumpstart the vision laid out by Burnham in his post.
I, for one, welcome the age of the unwitting bloggers.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 22, 2005)
A recent Tech Crunch piece on a new photo sharing service called BubbleShare has got everyone excited about the power of simplicity. Bubbleshare amounts to a very thin (mostly email-based) interface for gathering collections of photos as "albums," along with a very nice set of DHTML effects (all built of the marvelous scriptaculous Javascript library).
Here is the good: BS has a wonderful out-of-the-box upload experience. You can get your stuff up there without a laborious account signup process that requires you to enter in every last bit of info only to then wait for an email with a too-long-for-its-own-good confirmation URL that you have to click on to get started. The BS team clearly worked hard to get this part right and it really shows.
Here is the bad: this is not an application but an applet, or perhaps better yet an tinyplet. In BS I don't have a notion of a library except for a bunch of emails in my inbox with byzantine Dewey Decimal style URLs that are also too long for their own good. There is no notion of permissions and sharing is limited to "forward this cool link to your friends" which, while great for videos of martial arts mishaps, doesn't map to the semi-private way in which most folks want to share photos (and security through obscurity can only take you so far).
And worst of all, despite the nice page title "Tell your story", BS provides very little in the way of tools to really tell stories. Where are the rich templates that incorporate text as a first-class citizen? Where are the picture editing (think crop not Photoshop) tools that really allow you to leverage the power of images? And where are all of the cool ways to tell stories online that folks have been dreaming up for some time now? And most importantly, where is the community?
Having dug around the site a bit, I realize that the BS folks were working with a role model in mind:
When we set out to build BubbleShare, the first question we asked ourselves that I can remember was: “If Google created a photo sharing service, what would it look like?”
But Google is mostly search, not expressive tools for personal publishing. To me this is like saying: if Cisco built a photo-sharing site, what would it look like? And you can bet that if Blogger (which is Google after all) had set out to build a photo sharing service it would most certainly not look like this. Because in BS there is precious little opportunity for context on the part of the story-teller and blogging in general is all about story-telling in context. Whereas I might spend six hours tweaking my Wordpress template, in BS there is no chance for a creative investment.
There is this general trend with all of these Web 2.0 companies to minimize the interface to the point where we're back to 1995 CGIs with two form elements and nothing else (witness the recent Odeo makeover). While I am a big fan of a lot of the tenets of Web 2.0, this is not one of them. Instead, I'd like my webapps to provide me with an interface that I can learn. Sure, let me do the basics fast and make it dead-dumb simple (as someone from the PC era once told me, the key is to get the user to a moment of absolute pleasure within 5 minutes). But then give me enough depth to sink my teeth in, to learn by struggling with the app, and to be rewarded when after struggling my creative investment pays off in something that really lets me express myself.
We're not dummies that either get a blank page with two form elements or click away to the latest Hollywood drivel. We want to be challenged, and if we're going to switch photo sharing sites, or start using them over email attachments at all, it better be because they really make something possible which just wasn't before.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 21, 2005)
The number one justification that I hear these days about why so-called Web 2.0 companies succeed in areas where better-funded Web 1.0 companies failed is the "maturity" of the online audience. Ofoto had to dump millions into marketing online photo sharing because people didn't understand what you could do with digital cameras and the network. At abuzz, we were too early for people to understand that the site was really a mix of the best parts of Friendster, Craig's List, and the current crop of Q&A sites.
Baloney. This has always felt like the easy way out to me. It would be one thing if the "before" world consisted of people with 14.4Kbps modems and gopher file requests, but the reality was that the web of 1998 looked a lot like the web of 2005 (the penetration of broadband being the main material difference). We may have had more browser hoops to jump through in order to get decent usability but people were still able to grok the power of the network and the implications of communities online even back then.
Which is why it's so refreshing in the wake of the Yahoo-Delicious deal to read this piece by Ari Paparo on why Blink failed with more money and time where Delicious won. In the final analysis Paparo claims that it always comes right down to product:
My intent was to show that product design matters. We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really, really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is that we simply didn’t get it right.
I'm ready to admit that on the web it's all about getting the product right. This is exacerbated by what someone yesterday described it to me as the "hit-and-run" mentality-- since it seems that just about every day someone is announcing a new online service, a key segment of your early adopters are likely to "hit" your site, make up their minds in 5 minutes (if you are lucky), and quickly run to the next thing if you fail to capture their hearts and minds.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 13, 2005)
I've written before about how I feel about great people and what they do when put together under the right circumstances. Well today at "Secret Startup X" (name to be announced before the end of the year), we picked up another great person who is coming on to help change the way people tell stories online.
And yes (to all of the Django people who have asked), Ned is going to be working with Django. We've got a sort of layer cake approach to what we're doing that picks the right tool for each task. We're doing a lot of stuff with images (storing and transforming them) so we've got a bunch of C. We're doing a fair amount of AJAX work so obviously we've got a load of Javascript. And in the middle of that great big Oreo cookie is a whole load of Python running inside of Django.
Django is great for a lot of reasons (so many that they deserve their own blog post). It does just enough without trying to do too much magic. It's relatively bug-free. It's surprisingly snappy. And you don't have to "buy in" wholesale or risk feeling like you are fighting the framework all the way to your task.
Anyway, the team is super excited to be getting another castaway on to the island. And we are all eagerly waiting to show him that-- at least in this category-- software doesn't have to suck.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 13, 2005)
It is a rare pleasure to see something that is so good-- so far above the rest of anything else that might compete with it-- that while you are using it (or watching it), you keep asking youself how it is possible that this thing/service/content could be so good. It happens with Apple and their portables, jetBlue and their flights, and in the case of recent television shows, the first season of Lost.
After watching the first episode for exactly four minutes it became perfectly clear to me that this was a television show cut of a different cloth than just about anything else out there. In it's first season (disclaimer: I have not seen any of the second season) is better written, better shot, better edited, better cast, and better acted than anything else out there. By a long shot.
The obvious question to ask is: why Lost and not the other two dozen shows that have been created over the last two seasons? Or perhaps more strikingly, given Hollywood's "studio model" where the same folks come together in different combinations to work on projects, why is there such a big gap between the quality of Lost and the quality of just about everything else out there?
I'm not sure I know the full answer, and frankly I'm not sure JJ Abrams (the creator of the series) knows for sure either. After all, his previous hit, "Alias," is a far inferior show-- in fact at it's core it's just an hour-long music video with a semi-klad Jennifer Gartner changing costumes and bouncing through raggedy-thin plot lines.
It was so striking though that I went looking for wisdom in the 'Bonus Features" part of the Season 1 DVDs. I don't often get into the bonus tracks mostly because of the way in which they end up making the actors look so much more clueless than the characters they portray, but in the case of Lost I just had to look. And I'm glad I did not so much because of anything that Abrams says but because of the smart things that his producers, set people, and other staff say about him. Here I want to focus on the two observations made that I think can best explain why the show is so good:
talent: on the casting side, someone described JJ's style as finding the right people and then re-writing the characters around them. I am not sure how common this is but when you see characters as complex as Kate and Hurley and listen to how their characters were written before the actors were cast (and subsequently re-written), you quickly realize that this was a team that was just not afraid to make wholesale changes to the story to accommodate the way in which the actors could bring different characters to life.
creative direction: I've heard this one about great CEOs as well but it's still worth mentioning it here. One of the production people says at one point that what JJ is really good at is having "very clear big concepts" and then letting the team (actors, cinematographers, special-effects people) "texture" the ideas to get to the final product. The "having the big thoughts" bit is part of every bonehead business book written so it's nothing new. What is not often said however is that it's also very important to be crystal clear about the big idea or plan. Without clarity it's very hard to discern when someone's "texturing" is going in the right direction.
This has got me thinking about how to apply these two insights to building software. You can't quite draw a direct parallel because the product delivered in both cases is so different. But it is an interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen if product features could be dictated by the specific talents of the engineers and designers hired. To some degree features are emphasized (or de-emphasized) according to engineers's preferences unofficially, but the whole process of "software engineering" with its product management, functional specs., etc. is in place to correct for this. Maybe the new era of software delivered as service (with much tighter time-to-market schedules and instant feedback from users) will help to get us there.
So, go and get Lost. You won't regret it.
Update: I started writing this post while on an airplane ride to California. While there I met with a bunch of folks at different places including some at Google. It occurred to me after talking to them about their work that Google gets this JJ Abrams insight about shaping the work around the talent. It was pretty incredibly to see a company of 4,000+ people that can operate like this at the scale they are at.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 16, 2005)
So Joel (from Joel on Software), who just barely missed the cut for my sidebar, asks a very similar question to one I often ponder when I think of the east coast and the west coast in terms of good startup activity in the online space. He is griping about NYC-versus-Boston when he writes:
Is New York just lame compared to Boston? Or does it just seem that way? Why is that... is it because of MIT? or all the other high tech stuff going on there?
It's good to see this, because it makes me feel a little silly to often ask the question in the context of Boston-versus-Silicon Valley. Having just worked in New York for two years, and having just recently raised money in Boston, I feel qualified in saying that it really is no worse in New York than in Boston, and that in fact when it comes to media-related businesses it's actually better.
That said, it is still tough to find folks in Boston on the investment side of things that will take the big swings with that same level of nonchalance that you get from your typical west coast VC. In general I don't find this to be a huge impediment, but sometimes you see start-ups which try to squeeze themselves into a certain unnatural shapes for the sake of potential investors. The cost of this is an inability to stay loose and playful, two elements which seem to be so critical to the experimentation that allowed the west coast to take the torch from the east as soon as the PC wave hit.
However, the bigger problem is not with the investors or sources of talent per se, but rather with the fact that we are lacking a cabal of folks who can get together to bat ideas around without an explicit agenda. This was one of my favorite things about the culture out at Stanford when I lived there and it seems to be sorely missing here. Most of the events that I have been too are either tediously forced (where people with nothing more than raw ambition bump into each other, much like amoebas trying to recombine into higher lifeforms) or totally out of touch with the real cool and interesting stuff.
This is why, as Joel points out, Y Combinator may be such a special place-- if indeed Paul Graham's experiment can be made to take off.
In the meanwhile, I may take some airtime here to try to puzzle this out. And given that we've had 10 straight days of rain I might start with the climatological argument-- that is, maybe our shitty weather keeps us all locked away inside instead of out of doors bumping into each other between the rollerblading, biking, and tofu burrito munching.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 10 months ago (Oct. 1, 2005)
It's really happening: the creatives are taking over. There is no question about it-- whether it's the mantra of free-agent nation, the impetus behind the Long Tail, or the success of sites that distribute indie music, it's pretty clear that the tools, the network, and the inspiration is there for stuff to be created by the people instead of for the people.
Amen to that. However, it would seem that our economic institutions (by which I mean mainly contracts, both between investors and corporate entities, and more importantly between employers and employees) are woefully out of date.
This is an obvious thing to all of my trend-spotting friends who are currently struggling with trying to understand how this massive change is going to ripple through the economy. Just this past week, I was having breakfast with Kellan and talking about models for patronage applied to the modern age. Specifically, he's got a cool idea for a web services that a lot of companies should be willing to invest in. Since he doesn't want to start his own company at the moment (a well understood model for harnessing economic energy), it would be great if there was a way that he could be "sponsored" by some entity to get his idea to see the light of day. Unfortunately, the economic structures just don't exist for that today. In software, the closest I've seen is corporate sponsorship of open source projects; however, this doesn't always work and to boot, a software license is increasingly less relevant to some of the cooler ideas I come across these days.
Someone needs to work this out and pronto. Here's why: the folks that want to participate under this new model are some of the most creative high-energy people that I know. Furthermore, I would love to find a way to get them involved in my project, as would most of the other funded entrepreneurs I know. And yet professional investors (by which I mean VCs) raise valid objections to the "contractor" model of building stuff (which is incidentally the only structure in place today for this type of work arrangement). As R0ml has pointed out, software is just as much about the people who build it as it is about the source files so it's understandable that the folks underwriting the projects would been uneasy about the talent just walking out the door at the end of the contract.
It would seem that Hollywood has figured this out in the way that the studio model works to bring creative folks together for projects with a finite length to them and clear objectives. A musician friend of mine recently suggested I take a look at Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce, a recent book by Richard Caves, an economics professor we had in college who was insightful on industrial organization, but dry as sawdust. Caves apparently got a mid-tenure crisis and decided to look at how creative industries organize themselves for kicks. I'm hoping that the book educates me a little bit in how folks in Hollywood have managed to adapt the patronage model to the modern age.
We'll figure this out as an economy. In the meantime though, I sure am glad that these are the questions we get to struggle with. Imagine thinking about "how to trade-off capital and labor" or the 'union factor" instead.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 17, 2005)
I'm not a big fan of most Microsoft stuff and I think their best product ever is still Excel. But I am a fan of two things: 1. their full-on embrace of openness with respect to letting their people represent Microsoft to the outside world without the usual corporate filters, and 2. Bill Gates's ability to run a $300 billion company and still keep all of the details of what his vast empire is doing in his head in a deeply technical way. It is the second of these two that I want to focus on here.
If you have not heard Jon Udell's interview with Gates at PDC 2005 run and download it now (for fans of text over audio, he put a full transcript on his blog as well. I am a big fan of Jon's style (going all the way back to a book he wrote that flopped but changed my perspective on software and the net in a deep meaningful way): Jon does his homework, thinks hard before he talks, and always gets right to the core of the issue. So getting him as Gates's interviewer was just an incredible treat.
[ As an aside, Bill is clearly thinking about all the right stuff even if it is from the wrong perspective (fat client). Pay close attention to the part about RSS as a two-way protocol and the way in which the various groups at Microsoft have gotten the religion. ]
Anyhow, I really dig Gates as a software boss because of the way that he seems to be able to operate at so many levels at the same time. He can talk at the CEO-level one moment and then dive right down to implementation issues that the team in charge of a particular product has faced the next. He should be a model in that respect, at the very least to all CEOs of tech companies. I know that McNealey is a ham and Jobs is the ultimate demo man but it would seem to me that above all else, this multi-level talent is what sets Gates apart from the rest of the crowd. (Plus, it's nice to see that he's just not afraid to poke fun at himself).
In fact with the recent fiasco around the handling of the relief effort post-Katrina, I have to wonder whether the Gates model of leadership might not have broader relevance outside of technology.
Here is a lazy web idea that might help experience designers: how about a software application that let folks scan in their paper prototypes and then manipulate them with simple drawing/animating tools via point and click. The result would look a lot like Ambrosia's 
I remember only 3 toys from my childhood (4 if you count my brother's Tintin collection): my Milton-Bradley 
The theme of this bunch: the limitations and fallacies of the current web application development stack, and specifically the relational database. In particular, I wanted to point out two interesting articles in the "your architecture sucks" department:
The third time that I thought about craftsmen recently was in reading the fabulous 
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.
