If he does launch it, and it doesn't tank, the following two implications are likely to redefine the landscape of the consumer computing industry forever:
1. It means that most of the hardware "value add" really does take place outside of the big companies like HP and Dell and inside the ODMs in Taiwan and the supporting ecosystem of far east software/services companies (TechCrunch it would seem is using one in Singapore for both bringing up the hardware and getting the bits to run). If a non-VC funded startup can pull this off, all of the big companies with their leagues of non-engineer program managers should take a moment to be horribly embarrassed.
2. It also means that what will be increasingly relevant in this new world is access to an audience who is willing to buy based on the media relationship you've established with them. TechCrunch probably has 5-10,000 really passionate folks who would take a risk on a gadget like this (out of the million and a half that come to the site), and in the end, that may be all that is needed to jump start a hardware product with these kind of build economics.
I don't know if this project will succeed in the end but I applaud Arrington for taking the risk. If he does pull it off (by which I mean if he manages to sell 5,000 of these), you can bet that everyone will take notice— both big and small— and we may yet see a new era of hardware-led innovation born.
After two years at a big company, I think I've come to understand the way in which people work here. I've come to know it as the 20-20-60 rule.
20% of the people in a big company are operating above their skill/will level. These are the folks who make up the Peter principle bucket— promoted beyond their abilities. They are also the folks who are living true to the famous jazz edict: always be the worst guy in the ensemble. God love them for taking that risk— and that is despite how miserable they may make the rest of us.
20% of the folks are the real A players. When you read about Microsoft stealing XYZ away from Google or Amazon, these are the folks they are talking about. They have the skills to get things done, the passion, and perhaps most importantly, the patience required to make elephants dance (big companies get stuff done). Every time I meet one of these gems, I walk away believing a little more in the human condition.
The other 60% of folks are what most people mean when they talk about the "fat" in corporate America. They generally only good at producing and consuming meetings and at looking good in front of their bosses. They don't take risks, but not because they are to limited (these are not Peter principle folks), but because they are optimizing for a different outcome: their own career advancement. Knowing that most products and services fail, these folks prefer to be "in" with some senior exec that will always take care of them. And when the shit hits the fan they've got their story down pat as to why everything that was outside of their purview was what "went wrong."
I hate these people.*
They are what makes working in a big company completely intolerable. The are what has given Powerpoint a bad name. And perhaps most importantly, they are the detritus that has to be cleaned out if we are to get our economy to a good place again.
I've just finished reading Alain De Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a somewhat lyrical description of 10 "professions" that range from transportation logistics to electric transmission to airplane manufacture. It's a fun read because at its best, the book provides a very candid look at how the folks in these industries find meaning in their work, no matter how mundane.
My favorite bit happens to be the "biscuit manufacturing" chapter (for us Americans, crackers & cookies) where we get to meet a couple of people that are passionate about getting just the right mix of dough, packaging, and marketing around one of the most basic experiences we humans share. It is in describing this quest for the perfect biscuit that De Botton shows us why it's important to never get caught in that fat 60% belly of the workplace: because if you are there, you will never get more than a paycheck, and certainly not the meaning that most of us deserve from what will be the single biggest time investment of our lives.
* Not personally per se but certainly in the work context.
Posted by Antonio
6 days, 11 hours ago (June 28, 2009)
The NYTimes has a nice piece on the success of Acer, a Taiwanese computer maker, in becoming the #2 laptop/netbook supplier behind HP. The piece is worth reading for all of the digs that the more established players take at the underdog alone, but it makes two things very clear:
1. If I was betting in this sector, I'd say that Acer, Asus, and any of the other Taiwanese makers are going to take over both the laptop and the netbook market in the next 3-5 years. The key statistic here is that Acer is willing to survive in the market with as little as 2% margins across its product line— which is sometimes less than what the channel makes. More importantly, a 2% net margin business is not something that big American companies like HP are going to play seriously in.
2. It's amazing to see how much all of these laptops and netbooks look like each other— across manufacturers. I guess this is what you get as the ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) like Foxconn and Quanta take on more of the basic product engineering. When you've got the same engineers working on things like thermal envelope and clamshell design and working with the same raw materials (CPU, SSD, etc.), it's no wonder everything starts looking the same after just a few iterations.
If I were trying to compete with these Taiwanese companies, I'd try very hard to get out of banana handling— simply speccing and branding these machines— to more substantial sources of value-add through software and service differentiation. Investing serious resources in this area is very challenging to do, especially as the price premium of these portable computers plummets— but the only real alternative at this point seems to be to exit the business, or get ready for the bumpy 2% banana handler's ride.
And it can't just be about slapping Android on these machines either— real differentiation in software and services needs to start from the most common emergent use cases for the portable clamshell computing devices of today. These use cases then need to be used to rethink the computing experience from the ground up. Efforts like Jolicloud (a startup trying to put some real meat behind the term "netbook") or Ubuntu One seem like a step in the right direction, albeit bite-sized ones.
In the short term though, the one thing that is for sure is that consumers will benefit from the plummeting prices for what used to be a premium computing experience.
Posted by Antonio
1 week, 4 days ago (June 23, 2009)
Having been the media darlings of 2008, I can tell that netbooks are entering the phase of the media hype cycle where everyone asks just what the big deal was in the first place and wonders how they ever let themselves get carried away with pronouncing the netbook the "computer for the cloud age."
I was intrigued by the whole phenomenon enough to try two different devices (an HP 2133 and an HP 1000) but after some serious attempts at using each as my main portable device, I gave up and declared them to be nothing more than cheap laptops.
But before we get carried away, we should take a moment to consider that "just cheap laptops" is a dumb statement to make. The laptop is a transformative device that opens up whole worlds of opportunity, especially for people who don't have regular access to computers, and making it possible for someone to get that much portable computing power for $300-500 is really quite a feat. We owe a lot of the OLPC and the subsequent race between the Taiwanese manufacturers to get component and enclosure prices down. Sadly, software makers didn't jump at the chance to redefine the experience as well— with the Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the best viable experiment to date in creating netbook-specific software— but is is still early days here.
And finally, it's important to realize that to first time computer owners who aren't stepping down from 15 inch screens are Core2 Duos, there is a lot of magic in being able to call a general purpose computing device "personal."
Posted by Antonio
1 week, 5 days ago (June 22, 2009)
This is a hilarious story about a guy who got his iPhone stolen and used Apple's new "Find my iPhone" feature to recover it directly from the thief— Jack Bauer style.
Outside of the persistent connection between the phone and the Apple service (is it via XMPP?), this new location broadcast stuff is the most exciting part of OS 3.0 for me. Because while location awareness has been a part of all of the future vision stuff that Nokia and mobile social network sites have shown for years, with "Find my iPhone" we now have a big vendor pushing it as a platform-level feature, and more specifically, one which is likely to start advertising it to the masses in their usual effective manner.
I suspect that the democratization of this technology is going to have broad ranging implications on privacy, terms-of-service, and just about every part of the "personal" in personal computing in the years to come. And as usual, we'll discover we didn't think enough about the implications of being locatable anywhere at any time via a web service before the feature became as prevalent as say, SMS or voicemail.
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 1 day ago (June 19, 2009)
We need a GPL equivalent for websites that accrue user generated content as their main source of value. The way that it would work is that sites could adopt this license, a la Creative Commons, and be able to visibly display a logo that says they are compliant. Then in the event that the TOS (terms of service) of the site changed in any way (for instance, because the site was trying to institute some sort of a paywall), they would have to provide a suitable means of download for all of the data, much like Wikipedia does today.
This wouldn't keep entrepreneurs from building the next YouTube and it wouldn't prevent Google from paying billions of dollars for the value aggregated. It would however protect the content from dumb business model experiments. And more importantly, it would protect the users who contributed the work and effort under a different set of assumptions about the potential impact of their contributions.
I've been thinking about this ever since discovering earlier this week that Instructables.com— one of my favorite sites on the Internet— has decided to hobble their user-contributed database with a clumsily implemented paywall that blocks users from seeing alternative/hi-res images (and a few other things) to the projects written up on the site. This is a terrible move— not because I think Instructables shouldn't try to make money (more on that below), and certainly not because I am against paywalls per se (the Wall St Journal and Zagat are just fine)— but for the simple reason that in making this move now, Instructables has destroyed value contributed by its users under a different set of starting assumptions about what the site was going to do with the content they put up. In so doing, they changed the rules mid-game to the detriment of everyone involved.
While it is true that most regular consumers of content wouldn't care about the GPL equivalent for content much in the same way that most folks who use a Linksys router don't care about the GPLed code provided on the Cisco site, content authors would— especially the ones who spend painstaking hours documenting how to make a continuously rotating servo for the betterment of mankind only to discover that their work has become the pawn of some business model chess game most startups have already lost.
Now, back to making money. I think it is a great thing to do especially for a site as rich in possibilities for monetization as Instructables. How about the site sell a premium print magazine of the best projects every month? How about t-shirts? How about seminars with the "experts"? A conference like Maker Faire but on a smaller scale with Meetup-like distributed dynamics?
Now I'm sure that the guys there have thought of all of these possibilities and many more so my point here isn't really to come up with a new business model for them, but to suggest that there may be some out there that are not quite as corrosive to the mission of becoming the public documentation tool for the DIY generation— a very worthwhile one— that they initially set out upon.
And in the meanwhile, who's going to get this GPL for user-generated content thing going? Because we're going to need it— especially mobile devices empower all sorts of very valuable location-aware content authoring over the next decade.
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 5 days ago (June 15, 2009)
Economists have this concept called path dependence for explaining how non-market driven equilibrium can result from past historical decisions that keep the market from developing to a more efficient point. VHS, sewers, and most natural resource-rich Latin American economies are prime "victims" of path dependence. It's an interesting concept that Tomi Ahonen has recently applied to the development of the smartphone market in the US versus the rest of the world in a rambling but insightful post.
Ahonen, a former Nokia employee and mobile consultant argues that the US has a very warped view of what constitutes a smartphone due to the path dependence of the smartphone being born in this country out of the PDA (or pocket computer) vision which sacrifices hard keyboards for screen size, and more importantly, efficient text input for application flexibility and real estate. European and Asian usage, he argues, has always been driven by the prevalence of SMS (something we didn't wake up to here until just last year) and as such, fast typing rules the roost.
However his most controversial point to do with the unique American view of the smartphone is around the future of the smartphone as a type of PC with the user customizing its functionality via AppStores:
By far the most of those 160 million buyers did not for one second consider "what operating system does this have, what apps can I download to it". You and I may have done so. You and I care. The mass market is not like you and me. And the Apple iPhone customer today is not a typical mass market customer. Do not kid yourself. Those who bought an average smartphone last year wanted a certain high-end phone with certain abilities and that given smartphone happened to match that need. Its operating system and any applications had ZERO bearing on the decision. Not for mass market consumers. ... We do not buy - and the mass market will not ever buy - smartphones so that they could install some apps to it. The vast majority of users will be contented with the apps that come pre-loaded, and then they go to web based services to get their additional benefits.
I'm not sure he is right here. Just as we were blind to the addictive power of SMS in the US until recently, it seems that the European/Asian analysts seem blind to the power of user customized mobile computers. Perhaps our path dependence is in a different direction overall— that is assuming that it becomes economically viable to survive as a mobile applications developer.
And then again, maybe we're all in the Apple marketing vortex and at some point down the road we'll wonder why we thought that loading native 3rd party apps was such a big opportunity.
Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 1 day ago (June 12, 2009)
At the office today, we were having a conversation at lunch about startups and how to make them successful. The discussion reminded me of a question folks have been asking me a lot over the last year as the economy has been cratering and B rounds have been all but nonexistent: how can you get your startup to a successful exit?
I've been saving this quote since before we were acquired by HP in 2007 but now seems like a fitting time for it:
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the same with startups: the main principle to grasp is that building value for the enduser is the best way to be successful. There are far too many gyrations to do anything but, despite what all of the entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors who are fooled by randomness might claim about how to win.
Build something people love that solves a hard technical problem in the process and something good is likely to happen most of the time. Outside of that it doesn't matter which development methodology you use, which viral loops you bake into your service, or even what your customer acquisition economics look like. These are but methods to be tweaked once you know you've built real value.
Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 2 days ago (June 11, 2009)
It's not been a good week for AT&T with all of the ire the company has taken from frustrated iPhone users who can not MMS or tether and who will not get a nice subsidy discount on Apple's shiny new product. To top things off, Saul Hansell is now using the megaphone of the NYTimes to take the carrier to task for its privacy policy, or more specifically for its ability to use our location information to its own ends:
But the company [AT&T] is saying more clearly than most other big companies that it knows a lot about you, that it will use that information to help it make more money in any number of ways, that it will keep the data for as long as you remain a customer, and that it can be forced to give all that information to the government without giving you the chance to object
I suspect that all current telcos are buying themselves options here given how unpopular wireless carriers are with their subscribers in the first place, I'd think that they might want to keep a close ear to how users might react the first time they are interrupted with a pushed ad that uses information the carrier has obtained and sold by virtue of the privacy policy.
Who knows? Now that Sprint is selling bandwidth to other types of devices, we might have an opening for an MVNO that is more worried about end users than protecting its own business model. It didn't work the first time around but with the increasing amount of power that device manufacturers have with their branded smartphones, should the carriers get too egregious, it might work next time.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (May 15, 2009)
Having recently run into a table of profit per employee at different technology companies, I was floored to see the difference between the top (Google, $210k/employee) and the not-so-top (HP, $26K/employee).
While this may not be a super meaningful ratio for Wall Street (it it were mega mergers might be less popular), it does strike me as a pretty good way to gauge how much money the company has as a "cushion" to support the things that are most relevant to employees in tech companies: long term research on high risk projects, working environment spending (both IT and real estate), etc. It stands to reason that a company with high profits per employee has more to spend to keep that employee happy.
Given the large discrepancy between tech superstars, I decided to dig in a little and look across industries. The table to the left shows a random sampling of large companies in other industries which range from basic retail to other intellectual property-heavy industries like big pharma. The results are interesting.
While the bottom of the tech range doesn't quite qualify for burger flipping status, we're right around telephone repairman and significantly lower than the folks who dress up in fuzzy suits or sell sugared water.
This may give me pause the next time I wonder why I work in a veal pen and eat in a cafeteria that finds vintage a perfectly good metric to apply to milk.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (May 11, 2009)
There is tons of speculation about what Apple intends to do with PA Semi, the chip company they paid $300 million for last year. Though it varies wildly, one thing that people do agree on is that this means the fruit company is going to push more into CPU design and all of the associated accoutrements (GPUs, custom motherboard chips, compilers, deep OS tweaks, etc.)
In the words of J.J. Abrams's Scotty in Star Trek "that's essitin'" mostly because it puts a company with very deep pockets in a place where fundamental innovation can take place. Back when I was living in California and Steve had recently come back to Apple (and killed the clone business), I remember someone saying that Jobs wanted to be so vertically integrated that trucks full of sand would pull into one end of the building, and full computers would come out the other. With PA Semi they are now practically set to turn sand into chips directly!
In a related note, this past weekend, I saw an Alan Kay talk (at Intel of all places) about how the x86 straightjacket has kept software big, complex, and slow. He seems fascinated with FPGAs, going deep into how it's important for the chip to be able to adapt to the software so that it needs to run more efficiently and with fewer levels of abstraction on top of the hardware. Thanks to an NSF grant, Kay has undertaken a "grand challenge" project of implementing an entire system from the applications to the CPU instructions in 20,000 lines of code which is why he is so obsessed about having control over the individual gates.
The most amazing to me about the prospects of PA Semi inside of Apple products is how this evolution has happened. Steve might have always wanted to pound sand into chips but he started from a bunch of commonly available components glued together with great software (for both the iPhone and the iPod) and only after building a big enough business to justify this kind of vertical integration, has this move taken place. And if it works, it won't matter how many other people can buy capacitive touch displays at Foxconn. With the level of integration that Apple might achieve, they could crack something fundamental enough to stand out in terms of power management, performance, or even programmability in a way that might truly stand out.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (May 10, 2009)
To fulfill what seems to be a minimum quota of Twitter pieces (and proving once again that the Nytimes prefers to lead from the rear by picking up on timely web events a month after they happen), Miguel Helft has a piece on Doug Bowman's very public break with Google and subsequent escape to Twitter, a fairer place not dominated by the drudgery of data-driven interface design.
While it seemed like a fun argument to have (data versus art and instinct), it's overly simplistic as any great interface designer will use a full spectrum of tools to push the man-machine interface in creative and interesting new ways.
Interestingly enough, it has been a recently renewed interest in gaming (reignited by the iPhone and games like Rolando and Doodle Jump) that has gotten me thinking about interfaces again. Most of us have spent far too long locked in the relatively limited box model of the standards-based web for information display, and it's good every once in a while to pause and reconsider what that and the relatively crude forms-based way of interacting with the computer via a thin HTTP-powered straw have done to hold us back.
If you feel that way as well, I'd highly recommend reading Bret Victor's "Magic Ink," a long essay on the challenges in software interface design. Victor works at Apple which should give him some street cred in most people's eyes, but more significantly, he comes to the problem of interface design as a systems engineer turned design aficionado. As a result he does more to advance the thinking on interaction and interface design in the 75 pages of his essay than all of the hoopla over whether A/B tests are good for making decisions on interface elements.
Essentially, Victor calls for an end to thinking of the problem from the perspective of interactivity first and foremost, drawing a distinction between "manipulative" software, that the user uses to make something, and "information" software which is is mostly employed by users to acquire knowledge. He argues that most of the software out there today falls into this latter camp and that as a result we should invest more time, energy, and tooling into building what he calls "context-sensitive information graphics" which you can think of as Tufte on steroids— or at the very least, infoporn that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of computer displays. As he writes:
I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user’s eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it.
It's a great piece with a wealth of footnotes embedded throughout. More importantly, as computer companies everywhere race to build their visions of a "fourth computing screen" a.k.a., a tablet (the first 3 being the PC, the TV, and the smartphone), we ought to all stop to consider the ways in which we might better be able to move towards Victor's proposed information software design discipline.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (May 9, 2009)
David sent me a fantastic survey that provides a whole lot of good data about the who, how, where, and why of smartphone usage in the US. The most intriguing part of the study is that they dig into the "why" behind the various different choices people make and discover that iPhone owners are overwhelmingly choosing a portable web surfing experience while Blackberry owners are picking a portable email/messaging experience. By contrast the G1 phone (which I have been disappointed with) does some of everything but nothing exceptionally well and is thus hard to choose.
It's good to stop for a second while we are in the middle of AppStore mania and think about this: according to this survey, the iPhone is the best hardware representation of a web browser that you can put in your pocket out there, and this, more than any of the hype around the 3rd party ecosystem, is what drives the massive adoption.
One outstanding feature.
As we get more sophisticated in what we buy (thanks to the information tidalwave the web enables), I think that the "one outstanding feature" approach to building products and services is going to become more and more important. Think of Asus and its diminutive and cheap laptops unseating Dell and HP. Or the Flip's ease of use crushing Sony and Canon.
Another way to put it is that one amazing feature is what makes the beachhead and that everything else just solidifies that position. This is a good mental model for the apps in the AppStore— as the 3rd most important feature, they can still contribute to stickiness, but they just aren't in and of themselves that one killer thing you've gotta have.
In a related post, Mike Speiser has a nice post of diversification of products and entrepreneurs which gets at the same dynamic. In a nutshell, his post argues that being awesome at one thing demands incredible focus, and focus is the friend of success, while the opposite leads to mediocre mush. It's true of design-by-committee in big companies, but increasingly, even among the startup crowd, I've noticed this new trend for previously successful entrepreneurs to claim to want to "diversify" by taking on multiple projects at the same time. I totally get the intellectual appeal of the diversification, but at a gut level it just doesn't feel right, and Mike nails exactly why in his post.
Over at Gigaom there is a piece called "Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?" which led me to wonder why Mark Sigal (the author) thinks that there is still a for-pay software industry outside of professional niches (development, design, etc.) that is capable of being disrupted.
It would seem that the Internet killed both the channel for (CompUSA, trade pubs, tradeshows), and the reason for packaged software in the first place. You can now get from a blog review to a hosted web service, or even a downloadable app in just a couple of clicks, and increasingly people expect to be able to use what would have previously been considered "features" to products in a stand-alone (albeit connected) way. Case in point: the Picnik photo editor) .
And this is all a Good Thing because it allows us to tailor our computing experiences to specific needs instead of making big investments in money and time to get a full program which needs to justify its $20-100 price point by larding on features that some product manager feels are appropriate justifications for dollars.
So instead of looking at the AppStore today as a marketplace for applications, isn't it better to think of it as the "Customize" menu option of say Microsoft Office where any power user can choose to turn on and off features? In this model, $1-3 (or even free) might be just the right amount to charge per feature, and all of the griping that app developers are doing about the downward trend in prices might be more as a result of mismatched expectations than anything else.
Ever since Google and Amazon led the way in the monetization of increasingly smaller bits of functionality (AdSense and Amazon Affiliates being good ways for small sites/webapps to make money), we've entered an era where the traditional model for delivering functionality in big semi-independent programs is over, as well as the opportunity for reaping Lotus or Intuit-like returns on the back of someone else's platform. And in fact, despite rumors of casual gaming sites making eight figures with micropayments, I imagine that the Facebook F8 platform is probably an even more extreme case of exactly this dynamic.
To date Apple has done a poor job of treating its apps like features: they don't allow any form of rich interapp communication a la REST APIs, OLE, or even because they are Apple, OpenDoc, and they don't expose enough of the phone's interesting data in common frameworks. But this may change as the dynamic of small dollar/free transactions becomes the norm in the AppStore.
In the meanwhile, if I were an app developer, I'd either be thinking in terms of delivering monetizable features or just using the App Store as a way to driving traffic to features that increasingly live outside on the wild open web.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 2 weeks ago (April 19, 2009)
Proving once again that he is a true master of his craft, J.J. Abrams has a wonderful essay in this month's Wired on the purpose of mystery in life. And in the process, the most well written attack on the current need for content snacking and instant gratification:
Perhaps that's why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it's the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider— or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It's a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.
Can not wait to see what this guy has done with the Star Trek franchise.
Go and get the paper version and slow down enough to read it. Or as he says: dig in.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 2 weeks ago (April 19, 2009)
In the very entertaining Scalzi sci-fi novel "Old Man's War," all of the soldiers are equipped with an embedded computer in their brains (fittingly called the "BrainPal") which allows them to communicate with each other, seek information from the Internet, plan out tactical scenarios— in short get all their "soldier work" done and more.
We're not quite there yet but this week's Newsweek semi-puff piece on the iPod Touch being the handheld of choice for soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is a good reminder of how close we're getting. The use cases described by the writer are totally believable (with the exception of video capture... for now) and speak to the utility of a general purpose, connected, handheld computer with a very high resolution screen.
What is more amazing though is that Apple, a consumer company, is building devices that are considered rugged enough to be used in those kinds of environments. As the writer notes, devices built not with taxpayer dollars but with the power of a large scale consumer franchise running at high volumes— churning out devices that need to sustain the impact of small hands, large purses, sudden drops, and even unexpected baths. As consumers arm themselves with the latest technologies and put them through their paces in real world environments, this is just another data point that enterprises— be they large companies, hospitals, or even the military— are no longer at the leading edge of the commercialization of new technology.
The thing I've got to wonder though: when some of these devices come back broken from Afghanistan, do the Geniuses check the red dots for moisture damage?
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 2 weeks ago (April 18, 2009)
This week's Lost has Hurley rewriting The Empire Strikes Back (a true moment of genius in an already excellent show) so that he can catch Lucas before he gets around to making it to give him a better version of the script (for those that don't follow the show, part of the cast has been transported back to 1977).
Anyway, it got me to thinking about the other momentous geek event from 1977: the launch of the Apple ][. If instead of being a movie junkie, Hurley had been an engineer, how might he have tried to find the two Steves to improve upon their sequel?
Taking a pass on the IIc, IIgs, and Apple III? An open architecture Mac? No Newton?
Oh, I know— a computer small enough to fit in your pocket, with all of the world's information just a few clicks (touches) away, and a wide-open onramp for third party innovation?
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 3 weeks ago (April 8, 2009)
If you've ever doubted that Skynet is here, and that it is being built by Google, you need to go see the twovideos the web powerhouse has just released on how their data centers are built. The second video, a tour of their "container based" data centers, is particularly worth watching as it shows just how much thought they've put into doing a data center their own way.
I have visited quite a few data centers over the last few years, including some with more than 45,000 nodes in them, but I've never seen one that looks like this one. In fact, were in not for the transformers and UPSs (and their associated cables snaking throughout), I'd be hard pressed to identify this as a data center at all. That is until you get shown what goes inside one of these containers:
That is the densest gnarliest concentration of computing power that I've seen.
It's interesting to think that despite the fact that we use a nice fluffy term like "cloud computing," the reality for service providers is that they've got to solve a whole bunch of engineering and operations problems to give us that "webtone" that we're all used to. And I suspect that those that do are not only inventing the next major architecture of computing, but also building a formidable advantage over those of us still blundering about with data centers that look like they came out of the dotcom party.
The dead spaces in my life have been completely consumed by a diet of information snacking that may end up making my "2 Big Mac at 2am" habit from college look downright healthy. And I am not sure there is anything I can do about it.
It used to be the case that waiting in line at the grocery store provided an opportunity to press pause on the day and think a little bit. Not necessarily the Big Thoughts either— but just about anything that might have happened throughout the day that might be worthy of a few extra CPU cycles. Ditto for commuting. Taking the dog for a walk. Waiting at the dentist. In fact, if you look at our lives outside of work, they resemble fragmented databases: tons of seemingly blank spots between a few really meaningful records, all of which used to afford us little slices for out of band thinking.
But those were the days when I was just as likely to take my cellphone with me on errands as I was to take a paperback book. That is, those days are long gone. These days I am more likely to forget my wallet than my iPhone (and I'd prefer it that way).
The recently published data on people's usage of the G1 smartphone's data plan (5ox more likely to surf the web than regular users, 80% go online at least 1/day) reminded me of just how all-consuming this really small, instant-on, web-capable computer can be. Having it with you all the time means that any piece of information, entertainment, or social interaction is just a one idle CPU cycle away.
I remember when Blackberries first became prevalent, how many spouses learned the "Forget it Face—" that angry, scowling look that meant "it's the weekend, put it away." But those devices were much less dangerous— after all they provided only one vector for distraction: work email (which at some point anyone will tire of).
But today's smartphones are different. From Twitter to Facebook to just about any piece of content on the web, the distractions are endless. People worry about Google making us dumber, or at the very least changing the way in which we think. But it strikes me that the smartphone, with its constant ability to immerse us in the flow of the Metaverse (albeit in a limited way, today) is likely to play a much bigger role in how our neocortex changes the way in which we think, from the basic "processing" we do about the mundane details of our day to the very way in which insight happens.
And like all great disruptors, it's going to start by doing it first in the dead spaces of our lives where we might not care or even notice. But just wait until we get to a place where you are out to dinner with another couple on a Friday night and it becomes totally acceptable for four smartphones to be out on the table to grease the slow parts of the evening and then ask yourself: is this really worth it?
As RIM launches its app store to lukewarm reviews and Palm seeds its dev kit to a ho-hum response, I'm left wondering: why don't big companies get that the best way to disrupt a market leader is with simplicity and polish and not feature copy-and-paste and bad integration?
Recently I ran across a term in the blogosphere which I like very much: "Minimum Viable Product." The concept is particularly useful to web offerings where the MVP can be as limited as a Google AdWords campaign testing the appeal, but I think the approach is worth porting to hardware products, especially these days when most CE companies are leveraging the Lego-like bricks that the big ODMs provide to snap together bad copies of market successes.
My two favorite examples of hardware MVPs are the Flip video camcorder and the Peek messaging device. Both pass the test that the marketing department of any big company would have flunked them during the planning phase for "not being differentiated enough," and yet Flip (now Cisco) is well on the way to being a video camera powerhouse and Peek seems to have a good head of steam.
Hardware is often complicated by the challenges of the channel: because it is made of atoms that require transport and selling, product designers often have to be sensitive to a series of retailer/carrier requests that can border on the insane wishes of an inbred king. I don't quite know how to solve this one, but continuing to do so in an era where companies are increasingly learning to go direct (and consumers as well) seems to be a recipe for disaster.
In the meanwhile, I'd like to spend some time thinking about what an MVP would be for an "information display device" (think small tablet or photo frame) that people could use to truly extend the Internet into their kitchens. But that is for a later post.
I so enjoyed reading John Carmack's notes on porting Wolf 3D (id software's 1992 remake of the classic Apple ][ game Castle Wolfenstein) that I was eagerly anticipating the release of the $5 commercial version on the AppStore. While I never played Wolf 3D when it came out, I did spend countless hours in the original— bumping into the SSs with the bulletproof vests and making them hold their hands up while you liberated them of their gear.
What struck me most about the port/release notes though was Carmack's direct style for describing the challenges of the port, and more significantly, the differences between the iPhone and the 286 DOS machines that were the game's first target platform (hint: the iPhone is a much much more powerful piece of hardware).
In fact I so enjoyed it that I went looking for more background of this famous video game legend and found David Kushner's awesome book, "Masters of Doom," which traces the development of id from the beginnings of the Carmack-Romero relationship, through the drama of their break-up and seeming implosion of what made the company great.
In some ways, the book is a classic startup tale: young hotshot programmers hacking 24x7 to take control of their own destinies. But it also covers plenty of details about the constant technical leaps that Carmack kept making in succeeding generations of his game engines as well as the innovative tricks that the company played with the then emerging distribution channel of "shareware" to get really viral before the term was applied anywhere outside of hospitals.
It's a great read for anyone interested in the history of the computer industry, and a particularly great one for all of the folks looking to make their fortunes on iPhone games and casual applications.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (March 20, 2009)
I was talking to another entrepreneur this week about Cisco's acquisition of Pure Digital, and we both agreed that contrary to popular belief, the acquisition makes a ton of sense, and not just for the obvious reason that more video on the net means more Cisco gear pushing the bits around.
The real reason why it makes so much sense for Cisco to spend a half a billion dollars on these guys is because Pure Digital has demonstrated that it is possible to pose a credible threat to the consumer electronics giants by surfing along the grain of the most valuable axiom in technology since VHS versus beta: in any consumer horse race, convenience will beat fidelity every time.
The Flip series of cameras is far from being the high quality option, but building the USB jack into the camera and putting a modicum of effort into the software that uploads the clips to the net makes the gizmos the most convenient way to publish videos in the market.
It happened when the web beat client server in the enterprise. It happened when MP3 beat high quality CDs. It's happening now as netbooks spank laptops and iPhones destroy more powerful and complex smartphones. It's why Google Apps will eventually kill Microsoft Office and why storing data in the cloud will also trump local storage even as the latter migrates from platters to RAM. And I'd be willing to bet that it's going to happen as H.264, Flash video, and Hulu blow high definition television back into the laserdisc era.
In fact as I type this post on my netbook, I'm listening to Pandora on its tinny speaker because my main iTunes library is not accessible via my in-home audio distribution system (my main Mac is asleep). And you know what, it's perfectly fine for Friday night around the kitchen table.
But if the essence of the strategy is to take it on faith that convenience will always beat fidelity, why bother paying such a large chunk of change for a company? Because big companies— especially ones that have gotten rich selling fidelity to corporate customers on the back of explosive demand— find it impossible to act to deliver convenience over quality.
An example: here at HP, the mantra that when it comes to printers, "it's not about feeds and speeds anymore," is something you'll hear over and over in meetings to mean that the race for fidelity is over in the inkjet printer business. And yet, we're still bringing out better and better printers instead of figuring out how to make ones that print in under a second and take spent coffee grinds for ink.
I suspect that there are a ton of IP video codec engineers at Cisco that feel the same way which is why the purchase of Pure Digital may be just what they need to turn their heads sideways and finally accept that, for consumers, convenience beats fidelity every time.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (March 17, 2009)
24 is a great television concept and this season has been brilliantly executed. Occasionally though, even an ardent fan like me has to trip over the suspension of disbelief required to truly enjoy the show, and for whatever geeky reason, the portrayal of modern technology is always my own particular speed bump (I have a theory that geeks needs to point out the tech flaws to feel better about so whole-heartedly enjoying the larger plot issues like the terrorists that sneak into the White House through the sewers).
Last night, Jack Bauer escapes from custody in a hospital, Vulcan grips the security guard and runs off with the CD that contains all of the security video footage from the hospital (he is looking for a bad guy). He then smashes a car window where the owner happens to have left his Macbook in the passenger seat fully charged and ready for some counter-terrorist kungfu. As he rips away from the FBI at 55MPH down a 25MPH street, Jack nonchalantly opens the Macbook and pops the cd into the drive. And what is awesome is that instead of being some heinous Windows 3.1 security system with some crazy video format that was standardized in 1982 and abandoned in 1986, the security videos as conveniently archived as an iPhoto library which Jack is able to load up in mere seconds, proceeding to grab a frame and then use the awesome "terrorist face enhancing wand" to get a clear closeup from the grainy black and white video frame. (Almost done here, bear with me as I have a point) Because the Macbook's original owner is cheap and doesn't pay $80/month, Jack is then forced to take out his Sprint Novatel 3G modem which he pops into the laptop, and magically sans drivers, instantly establishes a strong EVDO signal to zip the picture of said bad guy to his accomplice in the FBI office.
As I was watching it happen, all I could do was think about how slow the real iPhoto is, how ridiculous it is that he's able to get the Sprint modem working without installation, and how awesome the fact that he doesn't have to know the FBI agent's email to send her stuff.
But as I thought about it more, I realized that we're really almost there today, and that this has been as a direct result of how fast the Internet has taken over our lives. In fact, iPhoto does act like a swiss army knife for many different types of video, Facebook and Twitter (and their inclusion into phones) are showing us the way which the address book can automagically find you recipients, and perhaps most impressively, 3G networks and their associated modems really do work the way they did in the show— and have become a totally normal and boring part of mobile computing. To say nothing of the progress of video conferencing, search engines, and all sorts of other technologies employed in 24 that are quickly becoming de rigeur for mainstream consumer users.
We do live in good times indeed.
And if you don't believe it, check out this hilarious sendup from Collegehumor.com on what 24 would have been like with 1994 technology.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (March 16, 2009)
Back to my favorite punching bag topic for a moment: the cluelessness of laptop makers in the face on the iPhone-like interface onslaught. If this picture doesn't say it all, with the iPod Touch being favored over the "kid-friendly" OLPC by the 4 year-old, I don't know what does.
Except of course that according to the NYT this morning, now the PC makers want to get into the smartphone game which to me seems as far-fetched as the car companies getting into bicycles because they see how many people are buying them these days. The only remarkable thing about it is the fact that they might actually be able to put products in the market— but this speaks more to the power of the ODMs in getting almost anything built for those clipboard-wielding product managers.
Instead of that, or worse yet, jamming touch interface shells on standard laptops, why don't PC folks spend time thinking about the deep reasons why the iTouch devices have been successful? I continue to believe that the "touchability" is effect and not cause— that the true reason of success for this new class of device is around the interface married closely to use cases of the mobile (small device) experience with great software-hardware integration.
After all, the Wii has shown us that we don't need touch to get to an intuitive and revolutionary interface. Come on PC guys, it's time to innovate!
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks ago (March 14, 2009)
Realtime. Dynamic Privacy. The social graph. If cool-sounding terms that mean relatively little were business models, we could have saved Web 2.0!
Look, there is some very real world-changing stuff going on in the primordial soup of social networking and micropublishing. Stuff that will affect how we work, play, and communicate for the rest of time. But it's not as complicated as people seem to need to make it. Just fresh from a run during which I listened to the talking heads on the Gilmour Gang overcomplicate things unnecessarily, I decided I'd had enough, that it was time for a simple explanation (perhaps more for me than for anyone else!). In case you feel that way too, here goes...
All of this stuff can be traced back to the instinctive need for the social animal to communicate. As a species we do better when we communicate, so we are hard wired to do it as much as we can. The revolution in electronic communications, namely email, took this to a whole new level with anyone being able to send anything to anyone in the world instantaneously. I was part of the first generation of people to go to work as corporate America was rolling out cross-company open email to desktops, and let me tell you it was an awesome thing to watch. Not so much for the folks like me who had had it in college, but definitely to the people that were coming from the closed Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes systems and still depended on fax/Fedex/peons like me to get stuff to the partner/client/whoever.
And for the record, IM was only synchronous email, nothing more. All of the sociologists and cultural anthropologists who claim that it encourages more informal means of communicating have never seen two corporate drones flirting over a Blackberry-empowered network (I'll get back to how realtime is just an implementation detail in a moment, but the first time we saw it hailed as something different was in the email/IM faux distinction which is why I mention it here).
After the first dot-com collapse, there emerged this cool little standard called RSS for the syndication of published content. Anyone anywhere could author content and publish it— not as an email newsletter (which used to be popular if you remember) where you had to know, beg, borrow, or steal the exact list of recipients, but to the world who could then "pull" that content from you by subscribing to your stream of published items. It was a fantastic idea mostly because it provided a layer of indirection between writer and reader that was sorely missing from mediums like email and IM.
The problem: RSS never took off. It was too cumbersome to set up, explain, discover, and understand relative to the existing alternatives. I personally gave up evangelizing it to regular folks after years of getting "yeah, but why wouldn't I just go to the site?!?" and seeing that despite folks like Google (Reader) and FeedDemon (the thing in Outlook) getting the consuming implementation right, it just wasn't taking off.
Imagine my surprise then upon discovering that Twitter— an SMS app-turned-micropublishing service— has now evolved into RSS for the mainstream. Like many other people, I hate trying to follow conversations on Twitter— they most definitely feel like listening to half of an interesting conversation, or worse yet 1/25th of one— but I do love the quality of the links that I get from the dot-product of the people that I follow. I'm already a Google Reader convert but on weeks when I accumulate 4500+ items to go through, I find that Shift-A (the keyboard command to wipe them all away) is much easier to embrace because I've got a Twitter feed of content to summarize it all.
So, to repeat: what does Twitter give me? A layer of indirection between the people who are communicating interesting things with the world and me so that they can send great stuff my way without knowing or caring about who I am. This is powerful stuff because it allows me to take control of a torrent of communications that I find incredibly valuable but which I wouldn't be exposed to if I were just to have stuck to my parochial little address book. RSS publish-and-subscribe did it first, and arguably in a richer more open way, but it has turned out to be Betamax to Twitter's VHS.
What about all of those that claim that Twitter is "realtime" while everything else before it is not? Again, an implementation detail just like email and IM. There is no reason why RSS readers can not poll aggressively enough to simulate realtime especially in a world of distributed blogs where one service doesn't have to take all of the load. Google can (and is) updating selective parts of its index in close to realtime as well. Culturally, Twitter tries to enforce a difference with the 140 character limit (to borrow from evolution, an exaptation that came from the service's original desire to blend SMS and the web), but in reality there are plenty of valuable blogs that provide little more than title and link with each entry so that seems like a thin distinction.
Now, to close on Facebook. Unlike the one-way subscribe/follow relationship of Twitter, Facebook's roots come more from the standard addressbook/buddy list where relationships are bi-directionally approved. Friending is no different than adding someone to your buddy list in that it implies that you are now also in theirs except for the fact that the act is the used to filter a steady stream of communications on your behalf. The folks at Facebook are geniuses at doing this well once the relationship is established— both by rolling out a steady stream of really useful but lightweight applications (Photos for instance) and by encouraging "social signaling" behaviors (relationship status anyone?) on the part of their users that increase the volume of communication.
But where Facebook really hopes to innovate, and has in fact started to already, is in the process of discovering new bi-directional relationships on your behalf by stuff that can be as simple as exposing you to friends of your friends or finding your old school mates, and as complex as trying to match your "profile" with other people you might like.
Before the social networking craze of 2000+, there were many startups that died on the vine trying to tackle the more complex methods of forming new relationships automatically (Abuzz, Visible Path, etc.). All of these companies failed because they overthought the problem (certainly compared to Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook), but they were dead on about the fact that the evolution of the address book requires automatic updating with valuable contacts you may not yet know being added by using the power of electronic communications and good software.
I think that both of these innovations, the taking of publish/subscribe that RSS introduced into the mainstream and the growing of the dynamic address book are eventually going to be as big as email or the web itself. They will have to become open standards to truly thrive, and it will be tricky to find sustainable business models for all but the largest players (who can just monetize the eyeballs), but they are here to stay as permanent fixtures in the evolution of how we communicate.
The most important thing to keep in mind though is that both of these companies are playing on a continuum and not doing something that is so fundamentally new that we should go around inventing buzzwords and claiming we can not yet understand it. Jeff Bezos, while on Charlie Rose to pimp the new Kindle, told Charlie that the important thing to realize in technology companies taking the long view is that while the technology itself may change quickly, the core underlying customer need doesn't, and in fact tends to evolve slowly. We ought to keep this in mind when we consider all of these new communication platforms.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks ago (March 9, 2009)
Om has a great piece on how Apple is for sure making a netbook that won't be like the Fischer-Price toys that vendors small and big are characterizing as the brightspot of the PC industry in 2008 (8 million units last year and expected to grow quickly).
His piece reminded me of having owned a Rio PMP500 way back before the iPod. It was amazing to replace the walkman I was using in much the same way that it is amazing to replace a Windows Vista luggable computer with a svelte laptop that just emanates portability. But as soon as you start using it for real you realize that the limitations far exceed the cool factor and quickly learn to supplement the device with a more traditional big sibling (in my case, I was doing a lot of cross continental travel and the PMP500 would only get me about an hour of music so I carried a Discman as well).
We are so desperate for volume in the PC industry during this global meltdown that we're not clearly applying the "bozo test" to this new segment (the bozo test states that only a bozo would back the business plan). In my case, I've now owned and tried to push 3 netbooks (if you count the OLPC) on my family only to have them prefer the iTouch form factor for most of the common computing activities.
More significantly, this weekend I went for a walk in Harvard Square, a fairly urban area full of students and young professionals alike, in search of spotting netbooks in the wild. The final tally: out of about 25 computers (and about the same number of smartphones), I spotted one Asus EeePC. I did however notice that about 35% of the laptops I saw were some form of MacBook (especially popular at Peet's), and more surprisingly still, plenty of iPhones. I even noticed one young woman waving an iPod touch around like a magic wand, trying to cast a spell to conjure some Internet.
Clearly this isn't a super empirical study but I'd love to see return rates on netbooks when they are purchased as primary computers. In the meanwhile, it is good news that Apple is trying to reinvent this category because once they do, there will be all sorts of vendors who will be fast followers and drive ubiquity for whatever that tweener formfactor ends up looking like. Unlike the MP3 case, there is no portable computer vendor that is asleep at the wheel on this transition to the second high volume post-PC device.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks ago (March 8, 2009)
Interesting weekend that started with my feeling that the Internet has brought us a long way in just about a decade. There is probably no better place to see progress than in the way we can now shift the consumption of media to better suit our individual lives. And the best case study of that is the way people are getting educated on the current financial crisis.
First, a week ago I saw Twitter light up with a mention of how Jon Stewart had stuck it to CNBC over their ridiculously wrong calling on the bottom of the financial crisis. A little help from Hulu provided me with the most entertaining 7 minutes of my week.
Then at the office, Dave mentioned that he had heard a great episode of "This American Life" on the way to work that covered the whole financial mess in 59 minutes. I never listen to the radio but it was a cinch to download the podcast and queue it up for my weekend run.
I think of these two pieces of media, one produced for TV and one for the radio— neither consumed by me on their original channel— and I have to wonder whether this new ability to deliver information multimodaly won't end up being a much bigger deal than putting the means of production and distribution in the hands of everyone.
For sure it is likely to change the amount of sheer information the average worker/student/politician is capable of assimilating. Compare for instance what most anyone can tell you about the mortgage meltdown with respect to what that same person might have known about the savings&loans crisis of 15 years ago for a good example.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 4 weeks ago (March 7, 2009)
Wikipedia. It is an amazing phenomenon. It never would have flown as a business. For information it is second only to Google.
More importantly, I wonder what it will be like to have a generation of kids who have grown up on Google and Wikipedia and are used to looking things on the fly as an extension of their brains. A true outboard brain.
Via Kevin Kelly, I came across this fantastic short on the power of virtual reality by Bruce Branit. Kevin points out that the interface the protagonist uses is both compelling and extremely believable given the state of today's tools (i.e., Google Sketchup). As with those rare novels that brilliantly depict the future (Snowcrash, Neuromancer, Daemon), this short is worth watching to see where all of those CPU cycles are likely to come in handy:
Watching it also reminded me of both Richard Morgan's depiction of "virtuality" and even more of Greg Egan's fantastic (though tragically out of print) Permutation City where a set of embedded simulations drives the story forward.
There is no doubt we are heading towards this world, and whether it is 10 years or 25, it is going to ripple through everything: business, education, politics, how we socialize, etc. I for one hope that when we get there the interface is as good as what Branit portrays.
I use three Mac Intel laptops: one from this past November, one from 17 months before that, and one from 17 months before that. I think the processor speeds are something like 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4 Ghz and I think there are a bunch of differences in RAM type, video cards, and HD speed.
But you know what?
The reality is that I use them all interchangeably and don't really notice the difference! Outside of their obvious form factor differences (overall size wise), the biggest difference between them has been the shift to glossy LED screens— and this hardly screams upgrade to me.
Sure global demand is in the tank, but the reality is that ever since laptops went to the Core Duo architecture, progress seems to have slowed to a crawl, and PC buyers are not dumb.
Even the one bright spot, the 9% anticipated growth in netbooks won't save us now. Until and unless the manufacturers get start getting significant battery life increases (and not cheaps like the 2 lb batteries), way more storage (TBs not GBs), or CPUs that get us back on the Moore's Law rollercoaster, I doubt we'll see any meaningful pickup in demand— global recession depression or not.
Like Umair Haque, Bruce Sterling has always been one of those sharp commentators that is either much smarter than the rest of us or just plain batshit crazy— and maybe a bit of both. Perhaps it is because I am just about to finish his latest book, "The Caryatids" (a fantastic dystopian vision of the future of the world), but I found the transcript of his talk from Webstock 09 an amazing analysis of just what this whole "Web 2.0 thing" was all about.
Many people have tried to describe it in hindsight (usually with a fair dollop of cynicism), but having lived it, Sterling's summary strikes me as the most accurate:
Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined.
And as to the "next new thing," he writes:
So -- what does tomorrow's web look like? Well, the official version would be ubiquity. I've been seeing ubiquity theory for years now. I'm a notorious fan of this stuff. A zealot, even. I'm a snake-waving street-preacher about it. Finally the heavy operators are waking from their dogmatic slumbers; in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die. But it's too early for that to be the next stage of the web. We got nice cellphones, which are ubiquity in practice, we got GPS, geolocativity, but too much of the hardware just isn't there yet. The batteries aren't there, the bandwidth is not there, RFID does not work well at all, and there aren't any ubiquity pure-play companies.
[Which interestingly enough, is the main technological backdrop to all that happens in The Caryatids]
I could quote many more parts of the talk— but you should go read it instead. Dense and pithy at the same time, it is worth the slog, not just because he has nailed the cultural analysis of what has happened over the past 5 years, but because he leaves us with a glimmer of optimism for what it is that we need to do now.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 27, 2009)
Apparently there was an article in the Globe last week about the need for the Boston technology scene to rebrand itself to attract attention to the local successes around here. Wade Roush takes this apart today as the wrong way to approach the problem of getting more innovation, investment dollars, and entrepreneurs around here.
I could not agree more.
When I clicked through to the original article, I felt as though I were reading something out of the Onion— with that exquisite feel of "almost real" while at the same time being totally ludicrous.
It is really simple: the only thing we need to "brand" ourselves as a technology powerhouse is more successes. We've got almost all of the ingredients in just about the right quantities. What we are missing is minor attitude shifts on the part of investors, startup service providers (lawyers, landlords, etc.), and even entrepreneurs (I will write about the attitude shift needed in the last bucket more later). Oh yeah, and maybe some more global warming to take care of this "winter thing."
But come on— a $150,000 study on branding? Come on guys, if this is how we are going to waste money, we deserve to become irrelevant.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 25, 2009)
In this month's Wired, Clive Thompson has the best single piece of analysis on the netbook phenomenon. While he makes the standard argument that this anemic but affordable low-end disruptor took the big PC vendors by surprise and threatens to eliminate the last bastion of attractive profits in the commodity PC business, the feature-laden laptop, where the piece really shines is in the way that he traces the confluence of factors that led a Taiwanese company, Asustek, to become a powerhouse in launching this new category.
For Thomspon it was the combination of the design work started at OLPC, the design muscle that Asustek had built up over a decade of making, and eventually designing, PCs for the big American companies, and the shift in computer use to the web browser for most everyday computing tasks that allowed the EeePC to explode on to the scene. It is worth considering the power of these overseas ODMs (as opposed to an Original Equipment Manafucturer, an Original Design Manufacturer can play a big role in the design of a product top-to-bottom).
Thompson's money quote:
What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base.
I can attest to the fact that every product we make these days has big contributions from the ODM even very early in the planning phases. For the most part this is a good thing, after all specialization and factor inputs tend to lead industries in this direction; however, as a non-hardware person, I've been surprised at how some design decisions seem to turn significantly on what the ODM can or can not do for a given project. More often than not American companies present specifications in the form of Word docs and not real engineering to companies like Asustek, Foxcom, and Quanta. It makes one wonder whether we have not opened ourselves up to a dependency that might be unhealthy for the types of R&D engineering innovations that made companies like HP in the first place.
Meanwhile the best analogy in the article is of the standard laptop to the SUV— a computer that is far too powerful and sold for the promise that one might actually do some simulated annealing work on it someday. And just like no momtank ever goes off road, most computer users (nongamers and nonprogrammers) barely venture off of the communications paved highway.
That said, it may just be that we are currently in a phase of personal computing where we are not delivering the software applications around experiences like immersive video or voice recognition that could really exercise local computing power in the client. Maybe, but as the power in a smartphone approaches that of a standard Atom netbook (and as these in turn start to adopt ARM cores for battery reasons), we might have just painted ourselves into a corner where those applications will either reside on server farms, or worse yet, not get invented at all.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 23, 2009)
For a good long while now I've been pondering the differences between the coasts when it comes to the successful commercialization of new technologies. It still astounds me that after the prominence that Route 128 had in minicomputers, it missed not only the PC but two succeeding waves of the development of the Internet while the raging optimism of the west coast gave us Apple, Google, and Facebook, as well as sustaining big companies like HP and Intel.
Just by chance, I happened to run across two pieces of media this weekend that, while not taking the question on directly, do leave one with the impression that commercialization around trends brought about by innovation might be something that is just culturally the purview of the west coast.
The first was a talk given by Stanford president, former entrepreneur, and one of my favorite textbook authors, John Hennessy on innovation in academia and the private sector. Hennessy has seen the process from both startups and academia and it is worth listening to him balance the need for hardcore long term research along with fast-moving product development. This is a guy that gets that you need fundamental advances like the microprocessor or the Internet before you can have a vibrant ecosystem of startups commercializing it— and he's adamant that the Stanford ecosystem still has it going on.
Or to put it another way, as Marc Andreessen said to Charlie Rose: "each new platform enables a new layer of innovation, just like the pervasiveness of PCs with GUIs opened the door for the web browser and the commercialization of the Internet." Marc talks a mile a minute, a trait which I often associate with people trying to sound smarter than they are, but in his case he's got the goods— and his ridiculously opinionated views on just about everything (i.e., "the iPhone has been beamed in from five years in the future," or "Twitter is our new realtime electronic nervous system") make it one of the best Charlie Rose interviews ever.
In the middle of this absolute economic meltdown, what these two valley guys share that I think makes the west coast special in a way that the east coast just is not, is an unbridled sense of optimism that seems to make each almost manic when considering the sense of possibility engendered technology's march forward. I've been to far too many events as of late where people claim that the software industry is now "a mature business," or that the "Web 2.0 party is now officially over—" usually right before they start talking about some crazy shit like buying gold coins or getting a plot in Costa Rica to retire to, so it is particularly good to be reminded by these two of why we're all in this business to begin with.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 18, 2009)
I love my Kindle 1. It beats carrying a whole bunch of books around when traveling for work, and as many reviewers have noted, as soon as you start reading a book on it (and get used to the tricks required not to accidentally advance the pages) it just melts away and lets you focus on the content itself.
But having taken it on vacation for the first time this week, I've noticed something interesting about my own behavior. Rather than sitting by the pool reading the Kindle, I found myself spending time on Google's excellent version of Reader mobile, taking great pleasure in actually having the time to read what I mostly just skim.
After burning through two full battery charges while reading content on the iPhone's tiny 3.5 inch screen, I began to wonder whether I might be able to get the same experience from the Kindle, first by trialing a number of the magazine subscriptions available, and then by forwarding custom issues of Tabbloid to it. In neither case however, was I left satisfied, preferring instead to resort to the tiny phone screen despite how unpleasant it is to spend an hour reading off of it.
Which is to say, for magazine and online content, the Kindle is flawed mostly because the combination of screen refresh rate and overall device speed make it a real offline device. You can not credibly follow links, share content, or send a quick email— three actions that I now realize are more critical to consuming perishable (timely) content than are glossy layouts, displays that don't tire the eyes, or even a number of product compromises that I would have previously considered dealkillers for a Kindle-like device. [Funny to accuse a gadget that comes with a perpetual 3G data connection built in of that, eh?]
This new form of content consumption is why I'm fast becoming a believer in the 7-inch capacitive touchscreen form factor that Apple and others are rumored to be working on for release in the next year. Though a lot of things could be sacrificed on such a device, it would need three attributes to fit this new type of reading: 1. a killer web browser with as close to a ubiquitous Internet connection as can be arranged (either tethered to a mobile phone or directly wired into a 3G network), 2. battery life that is acceptable (2-3 hours would actually be ok so long as recharge time was 1 hour), and most importantly, 3. not too much weight on the device. Notice I said "too much" because I actually believe that a device that weighs say what my HP 1000 netbook weighs would actually be ok. Not great, but worth the compromise for the connectivity it would bring.
Note also that I didn't mention video, music, or any of the things that people clamor for their smartphones to be able to do. While I think that the ability to play back embedded Flash videos would be a nice feature) given how predominant embedded videos have become on web, it would not be essential. Nor would an "App Store" or any of the other things that the smartphone makers are now fighting to bring to market with new twists and turns.
Finally, I've recently become a big fan of the crude-but-effective "buckets of money" theory for consumer products. You buy an iPhone with money from the bucket for cellphone spending. You buy an LCD TV from the entertainment bucket, and so on. The challenge with a product like this is that the closest bucket is the PC spending one which could make it difficult to get a new toehold in the market. PC prices are plummeting and netbooks are quickly sucking up any new dollars there.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 16, 2009)
This crazy silliness of Twitter taking over a realtime version of what Google has done for webpages has got to stop. Yes it is a great service that has created a valuable layer abstraction between people's extended and overlapping addressbooks that can sometimes deliver an awesome level of serendipitous shared context in close to realtime. Yes it further lowers the bar for "publishing" by continuing to blur the distinction between communication and content creation.
But at the end of the day, it's just a very thin little app with a medium number of people on it— still far from crossing into the mainstream.
And most important of all, as my friend Andy recently wrote, disruptive innovation does not happen in isolation of the incumbents, and in this case Google would be absolutely idiotic not to be paying attention to the value of realtime indexing of status updates. And unfortunately for Twitter, once they do I think it will be easy for them to add realtime to search (or any of their other products) and suck the unique power of Twitter right out from under them.
Finally, on the $50MM incremental investment as proof that Twitter is going to be "something huge." Venture guys are not stupid and in this new climate most of the ones in the consumer online space have turned into momentum investors where ever deal that shows any real adoption traction is still getting bid up too much. In this case though, I'd be willing to bet that one of the new investors has a real strong "feeling" that Twitter is going to be bought, either by Google or Microsoft in the next 12 months. It won't be a homerun investment for them— but it will not be bad and also help to garner their fund more street cred in the consumer online space.
Because one thing is clear to me— Twitter is not a billion dollar business about to happen. It is an interesting tweak that belongs inside one of the big information portals and at this very moment I am sure there are people at each of these big companies tweaking their "Twitter killer" strategies (or getting their M&A ducks in a row).
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 15, 2009)
Yesterday I wrote about the need for a cron in the cloud and ended with the hope that someone builds a scalable way for periodic processes to run in much the same way that AppEngine allows for request-reponse interactions (turns out that it is already in the plan for AppEngine).
There are obvious reasons why a distributed scalable job manager is a great service, but today I want to pick up on why a common sandbox for all of the world's cron jobs might be a really interesting thing to develop.
My inspiration for my view of a cron in the cloud was really influenced by a recent talk I heard from my newest favorite author, Daniel Suarez (of Daemon fame) on "Bot Mediated Reality." Daniel is quickly coming to be regarded as someone who can pick out the faint outlines of the near future from existing technologies and in this talk he does not disappoint when he takes on the implications of the dangerous mix of society's ruthless quest for efficiency with automated programs deployed to take actions over a world whose interface is increasingly being standardized by web forms, APIs, and other such disinter-mediators of human judgment.
In his world, left unchecked, these bots will continue ruthlessly running on schedule taking first order actions that will cause the continued centralization of power in the hands of the few people capable of maintaining a semblance of control over the vast bot nets currently working for bad (DDOS style) and good (automated trading systems). Suarez's answer to avoiding the coming Judgement Day where the machines take over revolves around using richer interfaces to distinguish human from machine and forming committees of humans to control the types of bots we allow into a more secure and verifiable Internet (the "Dark Net" as he calls it).
But what if instead of doing that (or before getting there), someone like Google (or Amazon or anyone else who is credible in the cloud computing ecosystem) launches a platform for running bots that has built into it clear lines for distinguishing identity and (where appropriate) intent? I'm thinking of something a lot richer than "* * * * * run_me_every_minute.bin > email_errors—" something that encompasses identity, context, inter-job communication (with something a little richer than publish/subscribe), and maybe even some sort of a transaction system, just for starters.
Think about it. As the Web 2.0 lovefest melts down for real, one its true legacies is the legitimazation of the XML over HTTP API for inter application communication. At some conference last year I remember someone talking about how the inefficiency of the high volume polling that takes place to determine for instance whether a information source has been updated has a real and measurable impact on the carbon footprint of some of our largest web services. It might be worth doing Cloud Cron for just its green impact alone.
What I'm thinking is something like Second Life for processes with server farms partitioned and dedicated to all sorts of collaboration across processes. In Suarez's talk, he mentioned how deployed bots sometimes start working at cross purposes when one company acquires a competitor and the IT guys forget to turn off the competitive intelligence scrapers that have been looking at prices (or worse yet trading against) a former competitor. I have no doubt this more reality than fiction even today, and no matter how brittle these jobs may be enough of them running unchecked may bite us in the butt someday soon.
So who wants to go out and build this cron for the cloud already?
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 12, 2009)
James Dyson (of "sucks like a Dyson" vacuum cleaner fame) has a great piece in the Guardian calling on engineers to make Britain great again. In it he talks about how we all need to start making stuff again. Or as he puts it:
We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood. We've built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dotcom bubble. Now that's collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don't, we risk losing an already weakened position for good. Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.
As I've been looking at the profile of a number of different businesses inside of HP lately, I've been struck by how much profitability in almost always directly correlated with how much product invention the business happens to do. A long list of IP assignments in a given market is almost always a predictor of a very profitable business while all the PR, transactions, and buzz in the world can't keep a business very far from "banana handler" profits.
A great compliment to the new president's insistence that we need to bring the makers back to the center of this story.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 12, 2009)
Last month I decided to find out what this netbook craze was all about and purchased an HP Mini 1000 running the HP/Canonical developed MIE (a stripped down Ubuntu 8.04 with an attractive coat of gloss on the surface). I gave it a fair shake, trying to use it at home, at work, and even on the road while on a trip to California last week.
And while I have to say that it is impressive that HP has managed to pack this much into a device which costs $400, the end result of my experiment was to conclude that netbooks are just cheap laptops and that all of the analyst/press/reviewer hoopla (Forrester recently called the Netbook the "third PC formfactor) is just marketing hype. What is more, unless your primary laptop is some huge boat which can't be moved around, or unless you've never been able to have a laptop— I can almost guarantee that the netbook performance will disappoint you to say nothing of the obvious screen/keyboard issues.
Prior to the popularization of smartphones, there might have been a role for these small machines as a new class of Internet access device. Unfortunately the space between the top of the smartphone range (or at least any smartphone that can run Webkit-derived browsers well) and a 12+ inch laptop that is portable is too small to squeeze a new product category into— especially one that doesn't deliver any new interface paradigms or real software innovation.
And on the subject of software (it always comes back to that), I am amazed that despite the apparent polish that HP and Canonical put into the MIE environment, they left such ridiculously obvious issues with the mobile experience unaddressed. The suspend/resume is still too slow and flakey (though this might be a Linux thing, I would imagine a customized kernel could have done a better job given that the hardware was known), and it still takes far too long for the machine to find and associate itself with a WIFI access point, even when it has been previously configured. In the world of 15-60 second "Internet snacking" these two bugs are deal killers.
[Come on guys, if you don't want to look as far as how quickly OSX latpops come out of sleep and on to the network, look no further than today's crop of smartphones and make that the target.]
Finally, back to the form factor issue for a second: though it is amazingly obvious in hindsight, unless you can put the device in a pocket (jacket or otherwise), its diminutive formfactor over other laptops just doesn't buy you anything other than a weaker battery that limits its use to about 2.5 hours (I got about a day of sporadic use assuming that the suspend cycle was working) and a screen which is bound to drive you to Advil after extended use.
[In this picture the devices top to bottom are: iPhone 3G, Nokia N800, HP 1000 Mini MIE, Macbook 13 inch]
It's too bad— I was really looking forward to using this machine all the time. But until suspend/resume and time-to-network are resolved (along with a number of other interface annoyances that have more to do with MIE's Linux legacy than anything else), it is destined for my graveyard of cool but useless devices.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 10, 2009)
I remember the first time I synced a PalmPilot to a computer 12 years ago being amazed at the way in which all of my contacts and calendar entries seemed to stay in tune with each other across both devices. Like many others I spent the obligatory 5 minutes trying to trick the sync process and then an hour or so wondering what this brave new world of possibilities this new capability would offer us. True device independence as our metadata (contacts, calendars, bookmarks) and data (all sorts of files) would get intelligently squirted between devices and kept up to date no matter what we did on each of our devices.
Boy how wrong we all turned out to be. Even after a dozen years, sync still sucks. Yesterday Google announced iPhone-Google Contacts-Google Calendar sync which I was excited to try because of how bad Apple's for pay Mobile Me service has turned out to be for keeping 3 computers and an iPhone up to date with each other. And after a few hours of screwing with it, I'm ready to conclude that Google's sync doesn't seem all that much better.
It may have seemed like magic a dozen years ago, but it's just not that hard of a problem to solve. What confuses me most is why the OS vendors haven't solved this problem all the way from metadata to data and offered it as a part of the OS. It's clear that Apple sort of tried (they still don't have a good story for keeping files current across computers— and using a WebDAV server is not adequate), but initial scaling issues and and to much of a focus on the Jobsian "one man, one shiny box" dictum seems to have kept them from truly embracing the cloud as a viable canonical store for the original copy of everything. And while I hear Microsoft has a nifty utility with Folder Share, true sync has only ever worked well in Outlook/Exchange environments (it's no surprise that Google emulates the Exchange protocol for its iPhone calendar/contact sync). Perhaps Mr Notes Ozzie can change this, but the evidence is not there today.
And so we're all left patching our own solutions out of offerings from vendors big and small: Dropbox for files, Foxmarks for bookmarks, and then some hodge-podge of MobileMe and Google for the rest. Until someone steps up and acquires a bunch of these point solutions (which should be cheap these days) and integrates the whole thing into a cohesive whole (maybe this is the GDrive promise), we'll continue the bad habit of confusing a long view for a short distance in the world of sync.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 6, 2009)
An artist friend once told me that in painting class you learn to trust yourself with the mantra: "first stroke, best stroke" which is a paraphrase of something that Picasso apparently used to say. This blog post reminded me of that today— after a long week of reviewing "vintage charts" at work (multi-year masturbatory exercises in predicting the future)— and made me reconsider something I've learned about building products on the web.
At one end of the product development spectrum you've got what I'd call the "Apple myth:" a long slow slog to get every pixel perfect, every swipe just so, every transition amusing. At the other you've got the "build it quick, iterate like a madman and hope that they never catch you" attitude that has dominated Web 2.0 world since the launch of Flickr. This failed many a me-too startup, but the approach had its merits. The piece above reminds you that after enough experience, you too can become like "one take Frank," belting it out just so on the first try, especially in mediums that allow for that kind of pliability (like the web as opposed to say hardware).
Making stuff is hard, and no matter how much we may try to disguise the in-predictability of getting it right behind things like "ethnographic studies," or even— dare I say it— "usability tests," it's good to be reminded that sometimes it just pays to go with your gut. Oh yeah, and build up a lot of experience along the way.
Henry Ford once famously said that his customers could have any color car they liked as long as it was black. When playing with the various emerging "mass customized" versions of already popular products, I am often reminded of his statement. Thus far I've tried custom Nike running shoes, a custom bag from Timbuk2, and just this weekend, Lego's "Factory" product. In all three cases, I've been disappointed.
The reason is simple: for a mass customized/personalized product (by which I mean on that can be manufactured according to the enduser's design specifications) to justify its premium, it has to be measurably better than its off-the-shelf cousin. And note that when I say premium I don't just mean price (in fact one of the mistakes I think companies experimenting in this space are making is not charging a price premium), but also the cost in time as anything made-to-order is bound to take longer.
The case of Lego Factory is a good example of how a company can almost get it right. The idea is simple: after downloading a Legoized CAD program, users can design their own Lego set by picking from a catalog of bricks. After this design step Lego will custom build your un-assembled set and ship it directly to you from overseas in about 2 weeks. You can even customize the cover of the box with an image of your model set against a number of canned backgrounds. Overall the price is fairly decent (I paid $25 shipped for a set with 110 pieces) and the basic experience delivers on the promise of "making your own Lego set." However far too many edges are too rough for this to ever become a mass market experience.
The configurator: In the photo creative world this is what we call the online service/software that lets you assemble the photo book/card/product. In Lego's case, the downloadable CAD Lego Factory program is B-grade software at best, and that is for a truly committed user. There are plenty of bugs that riddle the experience, the catalog is tough to navigate, and the physics of snapping the virtual pieces together doesn't work consistently. But most importantly, the company forgets to provide enough partial starting points towards building a compelling model and offers little in the way of guided help to get people to feel creative. True you can start from a car or a plane, but these are finished products at different scales that don't even manage to combine well with each other. Partially finished consistently scaled models or better yet, the ability to "draw" out shapes and have the tool fill in with bricks would go a long way toward fixing most of the heinous issues.
The out-of-the-box experience: It turns out that after messaging that you could "customize the box" what actually comes with the set is a cheap generic box with an inkjet printed version of your model stuck behind a cellophane cover. I doubt that Lego would actually ship a product to a store with such a poor box. Similarly instead of the choke-proof sealed plastic bags, the bricks come jumbled together in what looks like the ziploc bag grandma used to give you cookies to take home with.
And worst of all, there is no manual! Instead there is a lame letter stating that the Factory kits don't come with manuals suggesting instead that you use the software to step through an arbitrary assembly process while the CAD program reverse-explodes the model you've built one step at a time in what seems like a truly random process.
Until my experience with Factory, I had no idea how much human editing went into making Lego build instructions (I had naively thought that most of it was automated by computer). And as it turns out, these highly edited guides are an integral part of the experience, especially if you are a kid who has been trained in the 3 rules of Lego (1. Never lose pieces, 2. The manual is always right, 3. Don't ever force it).
As with Nike and Timbuk2, I think Lego deserves praise for the Factory experiment. But unless they remember that mass customized goods need to be that much better and not actually worse than their factory-churned relatives, it's going to remain an interesting side project.
If I were in charge of that team, I'd work hard on the software— both during the design phase, and in the creation of a compelling and usable guide (two software problems which appear to me immanently more solvable than some of the others the team has already solved in the end-to-end experience)— in order to move this experience into the mainstream.
Engineers, scientists, and artists create value. Everyone else just moves it around. —Robert Noyce, co-founder Intel
Thus begins Steve Hamm's light and fun read, "The Race for perfect: Inside the quest to design the ultimate portable computer." The story starts with Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook (incidentally inspired by a visit to our very own Seymour Papert here in Lexington) and traces first the development of the clamshell laptop and then the pda-turned-smartphone. Throughout it all we get to know a bunch of cowboy-entrepreneur engineers that spend many cycles cramming ever more powerful components into ever shrinking cases trying desperately the whole time to catch up with the hype that the vision of truly mobile computing had unleashed.
I loved this story. And to boot, I can't think of a better time to have read it.
It's been over a week, so I figure the presidential inauguration hype has died down enough for me to quote my absolute favorite part of the speech:
Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
I was surprised that this one line was not picked up by more of the media, especially because $850 billion stimulus package or not, it is these kinds of folks that we are in desperate need of to pull us out of this financial bubble hangover we're suffering from.
We need more of those crazy entrepreneur-engineers that Hamm chronicles in The Race for Perfect. Folks like Edwin Land who invented instant photography by rolling up his shirtsleeves and getting to work. Or more importantly, as the man in the big white house says, all of those folks "obscure in their labour" but chronicled by Hamm in his book that spend countless years building real value.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 25, 2009)
I've spent the last couple of weeks noodling on a project at work which involves these cheap sub $500 laptops, also known as "netbooks," that are all the rage now. All of us in the business of making them vastly underestimated the demand for a cheap, resilient, very portable computer in 2008, and everyone is now furiously trying to figure out how to best capitalize on one of the few bright spots that currently exists in consumer tech spending.
But the fundamental question is simple: are these just cheaper laptops, or a new class of device worthy of new software, new user-experience paradigms, and best of all, new ways of getting people to relate to their computers?
If we are talking about the former and netbooks are just one step on a ruthless road to making ever cheaper electronics that are more disposable, then we might as well just bury the PC now and go on to multi-touching our way to content consumption nirvana— as dumb consumers of media, mediated experiences, and nothing that makes us think too hard.
But if indeed this solid-state, Internet-connected, portable computing experience can lead to something more compelling then we ought to follow it there. The OLPC, which arguably kicked off the interest in ultra-cheap laptops, is as good as D.O.A. but its spirit may still live on in the millions of netbooks that the industry will ship this year, and we owe it to Alan Kay, who first came up with the concept of the "Dynabook—" a small tablet-like networked portable computer for teaching kids, to chase this dream down.
Interestingly, on the 25th anniversary of the Mac— the computer for the rest of us— we might also want to remember Bill Atkinson's original vision for the project before it was co-opted by Steve Jobs: a sub $500 machine that would make computers accessible to new set of folks most in need of them— children and educators. Or the fact that most of the "revolutionary" parts of the original Mac's UI came from... you got it, Xerox PARC, home of the Dynabook.
A very sweet piece from a 17 year Apple veteran on working there, the implications of Steve's bailing on MacWorld, and best of all, some good career perspective for anyone looking to understand the real reasons why people stay at jobs.
With the collapse of the current Ponzi scheme that redefined career motivation as "speed to rich," perspectives like these are helpful.
The barristas at my local coffee shop are jaded 20-somethings that think they have seen it all, which is why I was so pleased to delight them yesterday morning through my demo of Shazam, the wonderful music recognition application for the iPhone. Breaking for once from their affectations of ennui, they displayed a childlike sense of wonder that this joker with the jeejah (Stephenson speak for yuppie iPhone) could actually recognize their eclectic mix of tunes. As with others that I've shown Shazam to, after getting over the initial shock of the iPhone recognizing Yo La Tengo's "Mr. Tough," their next move was to let the line grow as one twiddled the stereo and the other tried mightily to confuse Shazam's algorithms.
Walking home I realized that Shazam, more than any of the other 10,000 applications in the iTunes App Store, points to the future for this next wave of always-connected, always-with-you, personal computers. Combining the power of a web service, local processing (including rich sensors), and the digitization of all manner of content, Shazam creates something that is truly unique: a computer assisted discovery, cataloguing, and commerce experience that feels like a real augmentation of our intellect.
And so, I figure it being the beginning of the year and all, my 2009 predictions are going to turn of the pattern that is beginning to emerge from use cases like what Shazam for music represents. In fact, let's call 2009 the year in which we implement Shazam for other things, and specifically, people, products, and places.
Shazam for people: I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to be able to snap a photo of someone and have a Shazam-like listing of everything that is relevant to me about the person come right back. Though it may be socially awkward to point the business end of a cellphone camera at a relative stranger, the general idea goes something like this: between Twitter, Facebook, and all manner of other social tools, there is plenty of useful metadata to mediate richer in-person interactions, so why not take advantage of that? And I'm not just talking about the amoeba bumping behavior of tech conferences (entrepreneurs bumping together aggressively in the hopes of recombining into higher life forms), but regular life as well. I'd love to know more about the other parents at my kids's schools, and I'm sure that if I could obtain that knowledge in-situ and unobtrusively (which is where the Shazam-like magic comes in), idiotic topics of conversation like the weather and the Red Sox would soon be buried by more interesting exchanges.
This has got to be the next step in social network evolution. As pioneers in the space have wrenched control of the "social graph" away from individual vendors and attempted to standardize its portability, it becomes only natural for all sorts of personal publishing/communications tools to emit valuable social metadata that could feed a giant Shazam for people.
Shazam for products: When I am in that "buying kind of mood" (something we will all occasionally feel despite the collapse of modern capitalism as we know it), it'd be great not to have to squeeze every expression of intent into a teeny little search box. While getting a great lead on the latest HP C7180-xd is child's play for Google, buying most of the non model numbered goods in our lives through the search interface is sort of like sucking a watermelon though a straw— eventually you can do it, but it makes a mess and most of the time, it leaves you dissatisfied. Amazon has taken a great step with the "remember it" service on its iPhone app; by combing the output of the camera with its Mechanical Turk service (read: people in 3rd world countries trying to identify the product in your blurry image), they've got a start. Unfortunately most of the products the service can currently identify could also be identified by a quick Google search. So we need to improve it.
I'm particularly looking forward to the evolution of Shazam for products because of the implications that exist when you combine it with another trend I track closely: mass customization, or custom manufacturing. Just as savvy clothing folks tend to rip out pages from magazines as grist for their tailor's mill, I can imagine doing the same for a class of products that can be either customized or made from scratch directly for me.
Shazam for places: while Shazam is the coolest application on my iPhone, it is far from the most useful one. That title may belong to the combination of the GPS, the iPhone Maps application, and Google. With it, I can find almost anything, leave the house without much less of an idea about how I'm going to accomplish what I set out to do, and just generally be far more productive. Earlier this year I was even floored by how powerful this combination of local processing and web service can be in totally foreign environments: I managed to get myself around Cologne purely through public transport with zero German and not even a subway map to my name.
But of course, a Shazam for places needs much improvement over the current offering. I want tailored web searches from authoritative sources woven seamlessly into my map view. I want alerts when I walk by something that I might enjoy. And most of all, I want to be able to integrate the GPS and camera with an overlay of the world that makes directed activities more efficient, and true digital serendipity possible. Collaborative filters and other wisdom of the crowds algorithms have only taken babysteps thus far— with Shazam for places, we're likely to see incredible opportunities for augmentation of our intellect.
I'll close my predictions (or are these more like wishes?) for 2009 with the best year-end post from 2008: Om's admonition that we should stop tolerating mediocrity in business, products, and in life. As technology products and services continue to weave themselves into the fabric of our everyday existence, we are less likely to put up with the shitty user experiences and flakey services that tech companies have adopted as the standard for the consumer space. Om takes RIM to task on the Storm, but a year and a half into my present big company job, I can attest to the fact that they are not alone— most of us ship shit and expect that the razzle dazzle of the technology space will save us. It's why Apple is eating everyone's lunch in every product category they enter.
And no extension of the Shazam pattern in people, products, or places, is likely to make any serious headway without careful attention being paid to avoiding the creeping specter of mediocrity.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 27, 2008)
One year after giving him an OLPC (which was bomb of a present), I broke down and gave my 6 year old a bottom of the barrel iPod Touch thinking that it might be fun to give him access to the Internet for those random moments when he bets me that he can google something.
Two days into it, I have two observations:
1. These keyboardless laptops are the future of computing, no question. For about $200 you can put something in a kid's hands that can a) surf the Internet, b) consume media, and c) do just about anything that a general purpose computer can do. Forget about it— the old desktop/laptop paradigm of computing is about as toast as the minicomputers were when the PC showed up. Compared to the OLPC, the intuitive factor is high: within an hour he was using the web browser and with just a teeny bit of coaxing he was sending emails like a pro. Subject line only emails, but emails nonetheless. This is the platform of the future and we might as well get used to it. Netbooks? Come on, give me a break!
2. Please Steve put a fricking camera on the iPod touch— it's got to be about $3 of extra BOM and I am sure the market will accept you charging an extra $20 for it. The main challenge of both the iPod and the iPhone is that they are still being built as media consumption devices and it's about time for that to change. These are the PCs of tomorrow so let's get kids capturing still images and video and audio on them and fast. The AppStore wall will have to come down as well but you can hold on to that one for a while so long as you are willing to make all of these devices first class citizens on the content creation spectrum.
It may not be the iPod touch, it may not even be Apple— but let's be clear about one thing: the post laptop form factor has been defined and it is going to be all about an Internet-connected screen that you can both touch and put in your pocket.
Now let's get building some usecases for this thing!
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 24, 2008)
I was particularly struck by a recent Radar piece on our rampant consumerism in the technology industry and the notion that the economic meltdown might forever stamp 2008 as the year of "peak consumption."
While I agree that it is true that most of us geeks are always looking over the horizon to the next generation of gadgets where Moore's Law can unleash the next layer of functionality, having chewed on it for a couple of days, I'm not sure that it is all about just consumption for its own sake. Rather, it seems to me, most of us are on this never-ending upgrade cycle because of the sense of wonder and possibility that it inspires in us. Is that a justification for all of the e-waste and environmental cost of pursuing this illusory perfect gadget? Absolutely not. Does it absolve us of the need to think through the whole lifecycle of the components (especially the toxic ones) in our laptops and cellphones? Certainly not. But it does help to explain the psychology of the dynamic in terms that are not just Big-Gulp ugly.
Speaking of child-like sense of wonder, I recently read Ted Nelson's 1974 Opus, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, and discovered this wonderful little blurb addressing just this very topic:
Finally, on the subject of getting rid of old (but still desired and usable) devices, check out this wonderful site I've recently discovered. As a middleman to eBay, they provide a great service that is both useful and good for managing the problem referred to in the Radar piece (I had a great experience with them and a Macbook Air recently).
I love Charlie Rose not because he is a hard hitting interviewer, but because he is smart and egoless and can get just about anyone to open up. This is a great skill to have with someone like Gates who can be prickly and automaton-like in interviews, but who nonetheless has a lot of worthwhile things to say.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 23, 2008)
I've blogged about how much fun World of Goo has been (to be surpassed only by the recently discovered iPhone game Rolando). Gamasutra has a great post on the value of rapid prototyping in the creation of WoG's predecessor, "Tower of Goo," which was borne out of a Carnegie Mellon project on experimental gameplay.
Though the piece is nominally about techniques for designing video games, anyone involved with building any kind of consumer software should be very interested in this piece, especially those who work in the very malleable and fast moving environment of web services. I've often invoked the principle of "tracer bullets" on teams that I've worked on to try to get folks thinking about the minimal amount of work possible to get something that might demonstrate value in front of real users. From now on, I'll also be including references to this piece.
Some of my favorite pieces of advice in the post: * give yourself less time than whatever you think the minimum time you need to get something out (< 7 days seems like a good rule of thumb). * formal brainstorming sessions suck and aren't worth the time. Intersperse the creativity while you work. * fake as much of the magic as possible; users care about the experience, not your great engineering.
And some of the things I learned from the piece: * get a team of generalists who have the right attitude; they will be much better than skilled specialists with the wrong attitude. * prototype in parallel to make sure people aren't blocked while prototyping.
I swear that if all of the VC-backed consumer Internet startups took this advice to heart, as a sector we would waste 50% fewer investor dollars than we currently do. Which might imply 2x the number of successes.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Dec. 17, 2008)
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a great, lucid, and wildly entertaining piece by Stanley Williams, an HP researcher who has spent the last decade researching the "memristor" a new type of fundamental electronics component that is bound to shake up computing. A memristor is essentially a programmable resistor with a memory; programmable via the voltage applied to it and capable of maintaining its programmed resistance without any current in the circuit.
Williams does a great job of explaining why the applications for such a component go far beyond the obvious ones (like smaller more efficient memory) to cases where we might finally be able to approximate the analog computing model used by the brain so the piece is a real mindbender. But it's also an incredibly entertaining read; though my father often gives me articles from this magazine, I have to admit that most of what I try to read from there has the effect of an elephant tranquilizer right before bedtime. By contrast this piece was super approachable and a real page-turner at the same time.
Finally, it's good to see a big tech company R&D arm doing this type of crazy fundamental research. During my time at HP, I've spent a lot of time with the HP Labs folks (a real feature of this job), and I've often found it a little sad to see how much pressure most of the researchers have to deliver something "implementable" back to the businesses as soon as possible. The fact that Williams has been given the leeway to spend more than 10 years chasing this elusive 4th fundamental component makes me feel like we are doing something right.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Dec. 14, 2008)
The Economist review on Don Tapscott's new book, "Grown Up Digital," reminded me of how lucky kids growing up in the "net generation" are today. Based on a huge survey of kids growing up today, here is his summary of this new crop just coming out of school:
Mr Tapscott identifies eight norms that define Net Geners, which he believes everyone should take on board to avoid being swept away by the sort of generational tsunami that helped Barack Obama beat John McCain. Net Geners value freedom and choice in everything they do. They love to customise and personalise. They scrutinise everything. They demand integrity and openness, including when deciding what to buy and where to work. They want entertainment and play in their work and education, as well as their social life. They love to collaborate. They expect everything to happen fast. And they expect constant innovation.
Sounds like the ideal employee to me! More significantly, as Detroit crumbles in part because of the inability of a huge workforce to retrain itself quickly enough, I'm left wondering whether this cohort just coming out of school now might be able to avoid some of the same pitfalls.
The whole concept of Tapscott's sequel reminded me of this YouTube video I came across last week on the "Networked Student:"
It's worth viewing this video and wondering whether the education our kids are getting today at school prepares them as well as the narrator of this short piece might like. My bet: for the most part, no, though scattered through all manner of schools today, we've probably got great glimmers of hope in those teachers that are looking forward and thinking about what skills might be relevant to this new generation of students.
Finally, this is where I come to my second plug for Corey Doctorow's "Little Brother" and the kids he portrays. He might not have had Tapscott in mind when he wrote the novel, but his heroes sure do possess all eight of the aforementioned qualities of a net-genner and the book is a testament to how useful these can be in a pinch.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 4 weeks 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
6 months, 4 weeks 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.
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?
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 TV— 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.
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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 1 week 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
7 months, 2 weeks 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 we’re 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
7 months, 3 weeks 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
7 months, 4 weeks 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.
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 for— 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.
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
8 months, 1 week 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
8 months, 1 week 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, video— 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
8 months, 1 week 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
8 months, 2 weeks 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 again—while 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 first— 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
8 months, 2 weeks 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 “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” 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.
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 another— 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 time— 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 instance— 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 cloud— 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 raised— not even aware of the boiling we are about to experience.
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 me— even after mightily struggling through half of Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks—" 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.
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.
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
9 months, 1 week 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 device— 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 "Achtung—" 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 here— 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
9 months, 1 week 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 out— and that we're now likely to see the loss of faith in our economic system as well— 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
9 months, 2 weeks 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 instructions— 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 fire— 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
10 months, 2 weeks 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
10 months, 2 weeks 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 bit— writing the primer's software!
Posted by Antonio
10 months, 3 weeks 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
10 months, 4 weeks 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...
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
11 months, 1 week 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.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (July 20, 2008)
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...
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (July 19, 2008)
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...
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 2 weeks ago (July 19, 2008)
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 maybe— just maybe— 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. AdWords— the best model to date for subsidizing cloud infrastructure— 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 out— slog or no slog— 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.
Posted by Antonio
11 months, 4 weeks ago (July 11, 2008)
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 it— 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 slow— 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 lightweight— 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 tree— 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 drives— 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 flash— 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.
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 tools— 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.
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 kumbayas—" 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!
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!
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.
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.
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 equivalent— a grazing of content— 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 author’s 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 away— it is far too seductive a means of escape for enough people not to stick around for a while— 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).
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 sucks— 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 ;)
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 time— the rabid Apple fans— 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
1 year, 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 speakers— 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 bet— 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
1 year, 1 month 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. Because— as is always the case in the consumer space— 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 though— 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
1 year, 1 month 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 products— 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," which— while pointing to sort of obvious stuff— 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
1 year, 1 month 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 well— 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!)— 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
1 year, 1 month 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 closer— often not even called science fiction but other goofy names like "the techno thriller genre"— 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 plot— 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
1 year, 1 month 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
1 year, 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, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then there’s 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 center—which initially drove us crazy—so 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
1 year, 2 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 degree— 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
1 year, 2 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 back— 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
1 year, 2 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 right— it's time to do something useful, something good and to leave the self-expression behind for a little while.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 2 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
1 year, 2 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 that—we 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 out— 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 that— at least in technology— 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
1 year, 2 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
1 year, 2 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 services— 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 startups— 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
1 year, 2 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 SSBs— 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
1 year, 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 pie— 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 mark— 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
1 year, 3 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
1 year, 3 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
1 year, 3 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
1 year, 3 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 space— 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
1 year, 3 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
1 year, 3 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 sites— 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 agree— 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
1 year, 3 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
1 year, 3 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 office— 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 sense— 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 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 perspective— which is exactly what I'm hoping Etech will be this year.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 4 months ago (March 1, 2008)
ReadWriteWeb has an astonishing roundup of the multitude of sites playing in the "stream your life" space— 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 Segaran— 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
1 year, 4 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
1 year, 4 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
1 year, 4 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 shift— about as big as the one to cloud computing— 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
1 year, 4 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
1 year, 4 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 meaningful— 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 endeavors— 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
1 year, 4 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 5 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
1 year, 6 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
Though the piece is nominally about techniques for designing video games, anyone involved with building any kind of consumer software should be very interested in this piece, especially those who work in the very malleable and fast moving environment of web services. I've often invoked the principle of "
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 
