Stuff tagged "geeks"
Posted by Antonio
5 days, 7 hours ago (July 24, 2010)
This iPhone antenna thing is insane, both because of how much airtime it has gotten (this is my last iPhone/Apple post for a long while) and because of how ridiculously careless Apple has been about wasting all of the accumulated trust it has collected with its customers over the years. The whole thing makes me remember Phil Schiller who claimed that Apple's comeback strategy was predicated on their becoming the "Sony of personal computers" while he was trying to recruit a bunch of us out of grad school in 1999.
Back in the 1980s, I (and just about everyone I knew) bought Sony stuff just because it was Sony. VCRs, walkmen, headphones, and even totally commodity products like media. Then Sony bought content companies and got its head completely turned around on how its devices would relate to digital content. But in a much worse move, to justify their own stupid strategies, they started lying to their customers. They lied about the superiority of the DRMed formats, the performance of their proprietary flash storage, even about the relatively high costs of repairing one of their VAIO laptops (which were built with mostly standard components).
The result? They destroyed all of the accumulated trust that allowed them to charge a premium to their customers, even on products like blank CDs. A child of the 1970s when the Sony brand stood for the pinnacle of consumer electronics, there is almost nothing that they could sell me these days that didn't have a rock bottom price attached to it.
Apple is getting dangerously close to the edge of the same mistake. The press conference last week was a joke, and having their PR department grinding out videos to knock the better radios Motorola is shipping in the Droid phones just looks desperate. We may all keep buying their products, but increasingly it will be only in categories where the competitors are so weak (i.e., HP/Dell craptops running Windows). And once that trust is gone, they will be forever sailing against the wind with every new product introduction.
If I were them, I'd think hard about that before letting this get papered over via free rubber cases and attack videos aimed at the competition.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
5 days, 19 hours ago (July 23, 2010)
Lately it seems that I'm seeing iPhones everywhere. And if not iPhones, ham handed attempts at "improving" the iPhone by jacking the screen size up 130%— thus making a mongrel device that looks like the product of an iPhone and an iPad.
It just can not be that this is the one form factor to rule all of going forward in smartphone technology. And yet, outside of RIM* and the much ridiculed HTC G1, who is trying to do anything with real buttons anymore? Who remembers that not that long ago we all ridiculed a future filled with consumers stroking glass all day, unable to feel the satisfying poggle of a well-built physical button?
Back in 2005, I sat in the back row of a cross country flight with a guy who had just gotten a Nokia e70, the coolest cellphone I had ever seen, both because it had a numeric keypad and the greatest full keyboard implementation I have ever seen on any mobile computer. Where is that sort of form factor innovation today?
Despite the fact that everyone loves to write Nokia off, I'm hoping that they go back to their roots and start building products like the e70 again. When combined with their moving to Android (as opposed to their confused Symbian/Meego story on the OS side), this could be the genesis of a real formidable world wide attack on the open face sandwich form factor that Apple and all of its competitors are foisting on us over and over.
Diversity is good— especially in something as personal as a mobile computer.
* And while RIM nailed the email use case, they've not done anything in terms of hardware diversity since 2001. And what is more, their software sucks the big one for anything that is outside of the sweet spot app.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (June 21, 2010)
If you are running a giant lottery, the most important thing you can do is give people faith to keep buying tickets. You put up signs along the side of the road that say things like: "Wanda won!" and picture an average looking woman in a normal kitchen pumping fistfuls of hundreds into the air.
Equally important is having lots of little bits of evidence along the way: little payouts for people whose tickets end in the right digits. As the lottery runner, most of this money will come back in more ticket fees anyway but the real reason to do it is to give the rank-and-file hope.
This is exactly the game that Apple is playing with the AppStore. Very few people are making a living at it; and yet Steve got up on stage last week to tell us they've paid a billion dollars out. A few developers are often featured as the guys that can move millions of dollars of apps. Pure Wanda tactics at play.
But if you are in the bulk of the developers, making $10-100/day from your paid apps, you need those small rewards to keep you going. Which is exactly where this iAds nonsense comes in. Today the AppStore is such a novelty that people will download almost anything. And when it comes to most of the categories, all else being equal, folks will pick off the top of the "Free" top 20 more often than they will off the "Paid" list.
But no matter how much hype exists around the promise of location-based advertising, reality is setting in. There is a ton of inventory on the publisher side— which as with the web, is driving CPMs to the floor. More importantly, the recent bandwidth caps imposed by AT&T (and others will follow) are about to turn consumers into bandwidth pinching cheapskates which means that extra payload is going to be scrutinized much more aggressively (this BTW is also likely to affect games built on platforms that "stream" assets in at runtime).
This last point is a biggie: if Apple were really serious about the long-term prospects and scalability of in-app advertising, I doubt they'd be that happy about the end of the all-you-can-eat data phase of the smartphone. Especially as Steve takes the stage to display rich interactive ads based on HTML5 blobs sucking up precious bytes on the wire.
Finally though, at a gut level, it just doesn't make sense. The smartphone screen is very constrained real estate. Most of the usecases are for quick in-and-out activities, and for those that aren't (games), a rotating banner or immersive ad is like a stick in the eye of the overall user experience.
Location aware coupons delivered through an appropriate messaging channel? I can see that. But the web experience ported to a smaller form factor that is used completely differently? Come on.
Just because Google got hot and bothered and paid up for the promise of AdMob didn't make it all of the sudden a sensible strategy for building a big business.
Selling hardware based in part on the energy and work of hundreds of thousands of ticket buyers hoping to win the lottery? Now that is a good business.
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (June 19, 2010)
In the past two months there have been a bunch of articles about how touch is the future of all computing, and how the launch of the iPad has given the rest of the industry the blueprint to follow. As much as I might want a new Macbook Air to ship, it would seem that Apple is only interested in single surface devices. Even pokey HP is betting a billion dollars on Palm as its option for the future.
Despite this, I don't know that I agree that I want to poke everything with my fat finger instead of using a pixel-accurate pointing device. More importantly, I am not sure that I'm ready to say goodbye to overlapping windows, perhaps the single most productive feature of the GUI. Multitasking is nice (and I suspect it will eventually come to all of these new devices in a good form), but so is the ability to keep several windows open on the screen at the same time. Browser, text editor, shell, IM client, etc.
Am I the only one who thinks that doing away with this in favor of the single canvas application is a mistake? Even for the mainstream user?
I agree with this: in the era of the Google box and multiple devices, files and folders rooted in a local spindle have got to go. I'm just not sure that it makes sense to throw the rest of it away. Hell, even in Minority Report, the MIT Media Lab inspired interface of the future had multiple overlaid contexts up on one screen.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (June 12, 2010)
Despite months of seemingly random iPhone policy decisions on the part of Apple, it was the decision to kick AdMob out of the AppStore this week that finally put me over the edge on the ability to suspend disbelief about Apple actually caring about users and not "control points," market dominance, and other corporate strategy bullshit that can often get misaligned with doing what is right for the user (and note that this is despite the fact that I abhor any kind of in-app advertising).
As such, I've decided that I'm done listening to Steve and team on how I should use their devices. I'm done with his vision of curated computing and I'm starting by importing real multitasking into my iPad through the Spirit jailbreak (at least until I can buy a decent Android tablet, as I've actually gotten to like the form factor quite a bit).
It's by far the easiest jailbreak you will ever do— it is non-destructive to your existing applications, your use of the AppStore, etc.— just about everything except for your iPad warranty. In short, I think it is highly worth it.
In the past I've jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches but that has always felt like much more of a science project than an actual useful improvement. Tethering, the main advantage of a jailbroken iPhone, actually burns the crap out of the battery, and since lasting the full day is already the Achilles heel of the device, it just wasn't worth it.
Not so with the iPad: in my experience, the apps I used the most on it are Kindle, Instapaper, Evernote, Newsrack, and iSSH— all of which benefit tremendously from being able to run in the background (mostly to sync content from the cloud or keep connections to servers open).
The one slight disappointment thus far is that a lot of these apps have been explicitly written for the iPhone app lifecycle model, syncing mainly on application initialization and a few other explicit actions (return to homescreen, or worse still, actually pressing the sync button). While this makes total sense in today's controlled environment, I would love to do see developers detecting the use of popular jailbreaks and supporting true multitasking, especially for sync operations.
This is a pipe dream of course— most of these apps being supported by small teams makes it cost prohibitive to support unofficial environments like jailbreaks. But one can dream. And in the meanwhile, I think I'll say goodbye to the curated environment. Turns out I'm probably better at knowing what is good for me than the guys fighting the Great War of the Platforms in 2010.
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (June 7, 2010)
The NY Times has a scary piece today on the way interrupt-driven life works for the modern family with everyone checking a raft of bleeping gadgets channeling the torrent of messages and interruptions that the digital age spawns. It is particularly poignant because most people will recognize some part of themselves in it, whether it is the multitasking of media consumption, or the complete inability to linearly perform tasks without self-imposed interruptions.
The piece comes on the heels of Nick Carr's latest book, "The Shallows" (which I am actually looking forward to reading in an uninterrupted manner), a treatise about how our brains are literally being rewired by the new type of stimuli provided by the connected age. In my own case, I've definitely noticed this trend: as Twitter, Facebook and their ilk have gained steam over the last few years, I've found myself taking up all of the white space in my life "catching up" with the duplicate streams of links, updates, and other meaningless junk. I thought at first I picked up this bad habit during my tenure at the world's largest tech supermarket, but I've come to realize that it has just as much to do with the combination of the smartphone and the new constantly updating web services whose primary metaphor is "the stream."
As much as I may worry about it in my case, I worry about it much more in the case of my kids whose brains are just being wired to learn now. While it is possible that this constantly shrinking attention span will lead to new modalities for learning and generally coping with the world, it's too early to tell, and what is more, deep thinking provides advantages we've got a few millennia of evidence for.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months ago (May 28, 2010)
Lest people think this is becoming a television review blog, I promise that this is the last post to do with any series finale. It just so happened that the only two television shows I've watched as of late ended at the same time: Lost and 24.
I've already talked about Lost so here I will only say that I was sad to see 24 go, but happy that it did so with a fantastic series ender that harkened back to what made the show so great in season one.
Basically (for anyone that hasn't ever seen it) 24 is Tintin for adults. Federal agent Jack Bauer plays the moral CTU (read: FBI) agent who always has right on his side and needs to take the system on again and again to prove just how virtuous he really is. He is clever, has a geektastic crowd of friends that help him every step of the way, and best of all, has never run across odds he could not beat through sheer brains, balls, and just knowing that he was right.
The show writers's right-wing politics notwithstanding, Jack took us on eight years of rollicking edge-of-your-seat drama with comic book gamut. And no matter how ridiculous the predicaments became, or overt the messages (or product placement) were, I always found myself rooting for Jack, part MacGyver and part Dick Marcinko to pull through for one more adventure.
It's interesting to think that season one started right around September 11th 2001, and for nine years CTU and Jack have carried us through multiple invasions and thwarted terrorist plots, all the while remaining optimistic about the effect that a few folks who believe there is true black and white when it comes to right and wrong can have on large bureaucratic systems that can sometimes forget it.
Most of all though, I'll miss the high jinx and tech tomfoolery of Jack and Chloe (remember when they played back the AOL modem tones in season one?) and the inevitable man-against-the-world dilemmas that he somehow always managed to escape.
If you haven't seen it, you've got 192 hours of plain unadulterated fun waiting for you!
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (May 17, 2010)
For a while now I've been noticing that Google's ability to deliver results that I care about in search slots 3-X seems to have decayed in the face of SEO spam, realtime clutter, and other distractions. Assuming I am like most people (who don't even look beyond the first page of results), this means that the Google product is now delivering about 20% of what it could. Seems like an astonishingly low hit rate for a brand that built on the premise of being a better mousetrap.
This might explain the attempt to add knobs with the latest redesign that might better target the rest of the results. And yet, the time filter, which I had thought would be really useful to surface out of the advanced query page, seems to be relatively weak in terms of making better use of slots 3-10 on the first page. And what is worse, the overall widget has given Google the feel of a Windows 95 control panel.
I'm not a big believer that search is dead by any stretch of the imagination. The social graph, app stores, Q&A services— you pick your favorite disruptor for the traditional method for discovery— I can come up with a whole mess of queries that just will not fit the model (some of which are among Google's most profitable). But I do think that the company needs to pay attention to this 20% hit rate and focus on that more than on the rest of the new shiny toys everyone keeps clamoring for them to build
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 months ago (April 30, 2010)
[Note: these are my thoughts and not those of my former employer. I had zero visibility into a potential Palm acquisition and was as surprised as everyone else on Wednesday when I read the news]
As the case with most of the large tech companies, there is a lot of Apple jealousy inside the halls of the product side of the HP house. I used to play a game of reverse Buzzword Bingo, collecting one point for every meeting during a given week when Apple wasn't mentioned in some capacity ("we need to be as elegant/integrated/creative as the iPhone... we want this to be the iPhone of X"). Most weeks my score was 0— 1 on the weeks when I had meetings with the facility manager.
From that perspective, buying Palm makes a ton of sense for the world's largest tech supermarket: it gets the chance to bring a line of products to market that are fully integrated, it controls the software experience, and from what I've been told (because I've never owned a webOS device myself), it gets a very good copy of the iPhone OS which can be ported with little effort up and down the product line.
This is why it makes sense that the company would cancel the slate rumor that was rushed to announcement in January and I suspect that it will also be just a matter of time before all of the released Android products— and worse still— any of the on-deck Android products— get canceled or replaced by ones with webOS in their plan of record.
In fact, the fate of Android inside of HP is likely the greatest casualty of this whole deal, and given the recent pressure exerted on HTC by Apple's lawyers, it doesn't come at a good time. While it it hardly the case that HP was single handedly moving Android forward with its engagement with the OS, I think as one of 3 "tier one" players who had begun to embrace it (albeit apprehensively) with partners and the supply chain, the signaling power of the company's retreat will be felt.
It was never easy for HP to get its head around Android— between the open development model and Google's inconsistent messaging around Android versus Chrome and the different classes of devices (which seemed at times poorly thought out and at times just downright flakey), it was a bumpy takeoff every step of the way. HP is a company used to dealing with "vendors" who meet RFPs and charge license/support costs to deliver predictable help, not a community guided by a single company whose core business wasn't serving HP's needs.
In the end, I'm not sure whether HP can make webOS a commercial success (it may be too late), but I applaud their boldness in trying it. There is a lot a stake here if the world continues to go the route of app stores and platform dictators and I'd hate to play without full control of the stack (not to mention the glee at HP legal on the patent trove they're about to own).
What I do think is true is that we consumers ought to fast forward and think through whether we'll be better served with Apple, Google, RIM, and now HP all running this same playbook, or with the seemingly fading promise of a post-PC world that is as open as the desktop/browser one has been for the last decade.
Tags:
digerati
,
geeks
,
books
Posted by Antonio
3 months ago (April 24, 2010)
Anyone with little boys knows that what passes for modern day crack cocaine with them is the combination of two great franchises: Lego and Star Wars. Whoever thought of that cross licensing deal deserved his marketing bonus for the year (which he's probably spending on endless Lego Star Wars sets for his kids).
Having spent the week chasing down misplaced Clone Troopers, I got to thinking about a potential equivalent big-boy combination of two great franchises: Apple's fantastic hardware & software design with Google's openness and Internet services DNA. Why is it that we're made to choose between fantastic devices with unparalleled fit and finish but totalitarian control points, or sloppy designed-by-committee but wonderfully generative platforms like Android or Chrome?
People of both sides of the open vs. closed debate have argued that each company's products result from their starting philosophies, that closed begets more finished products, and open requires tolerance of more "generic" experiences.
I call bullshit on that.
Instead of philosophies, I think we need to focus on a much simpler cause— one based on simple economics. It's been a long time since Apple has had to be open in their approach to a product for business reasons. At the launch of OS X, the alternative to being open (with an OS that was easy to port to, attractive to Linux/Unix developers, enticing to ISVs) was being broke. So the company was incented to do the right thing. Similarly, until the iPhone ran away from the pack, Google had little incentive to do anything but get a checkbox in the mobile OS category of their strategy slide— but as is clear with the Nexus (and likely with the Incredible and all future high end Android phones), they are now playing up to Apple's level on mobile fit and finish (at least to a couple of revs back).
I'm hoping that the take-over-the-world stuff we saw this week from Facebook (with Microsoft cheering on from the sidelines) will wake these guys up so some deeper economic motivation to stop fighting and figure out how to do the Lego/Lucas love dance. At the very least, I'm tired of having to choose.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (April 22, 2010)
Facebook's news yesterday at the F8 conference can be boiled down to one statement: the company wants to be the identity system for the web, but not just for people, but for every type of object that can be boiled down into a URL: restaurants, places, chunks of media— eventually just about anything physical or abstract that we can think of wiring into the net.
On the one hand this is great news for the semantic web geeks because we'll finally get the right combination of ease-of-use and incentives required for publishers to truly mark up their content appropriately for the coming semantic search engine that Facebook will be deploying (though they were too smart to use this stinker of a label yesterday). Publishers want to traffic and engagement they will likely get, users want the convenience of overlaying their friends on top of the web, developers want the power of playing with all of this newly exposed data, and Facebook just plain wants the data as their endrun on Google. Everybody wins. Right?
Except of course that, at scale, this is giving an inordinate amount of power to one company. The kind of power that would make IBM handing the keys to the PC over to Microsoft look like the Portuguese Air Force by comparison (all two planes).
Here is an interesting thought experiment: imagine if Microsoft had used their combination of Frontpage HTML authoring tool and Internet Explorer monopoly to inject metatags in every document created, and corresponding code in the browser to read the tags and collect the data in a master database in the sky for subsequent mining— all in the name of enhancing the user experience. People would then have the convenience of the semantic web at the expense of giving all of that power to Microsoft. Instinctively, wouldn't you recoil at this proposition?
And in fact people did— despite the fact that Microsoft's was a much less ambitious plan. The whole "Smart Tags" fiasco taught the company a lesson about the boundary between useful and creepy. And yet, now we are seeing the same movie again, albeit from a much more clueful and powerful competitor when it comes to the web.
What am I missing?
Tags:
embahs
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (April 17, 2010)
Not enticed by the additional cores and upgraded memory bus on the i7 laptops, I opted instead to finally make the plunge to solid state for my main laptop disk drive.
Man what a difference it makes!
I don't think that I've felt such a noticeable difference in the performance of a personal computer since Apple switched from PPC to Intel a few years back. Where there was latency in applications before, there is just instant gratification now. And more surprisingly, the apps that seem to benefit the most are the ones I would have thought were CPU bound due to all of the layers of abstraction: VMWare and Chrome/Firefox/Safari. If I were Intel, I'd be more worried about SSD storage these days than cramming cores into fixed dies.
It's not cheap— in fact, it is still atrociously expensive: on the order of $2.80/GB versus about $0.20/GB for the fastest possible spinning platter in the same 2.5 inch form factor. And what is more, at least on OSX, the operating system is horrendously not optimized for the different read/write characteristics of an SSD— and still you get this crazy performance boost (if you do take the plunge, and you are on a Mac, I'd highly recommend this atime hack before you swap your solid state disk in).
I'm sure SSDs as mainstream components are coming though, and to the degree that Apple still cares about their one open OS, I hope they make the investment in SSD filesystem support (like the TRIM command which Windows 7 supports out of the box).
And in the meanwhile it is funny to think that between smartphone, PC, iPad, iPod, etc, nary a platter is spinning in my life. In fact, magnetic platters have become the new tape— useful for backups and not much else.
Even if the price seems too steep to replace your main drive, I'd highly recommend getting a smaller one for the system, and if necessary dropping the DVD player. Even partitioning your data is worth it, given how much newer your computer will feel.
Tags:
digerati
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (April 11, 2010)
Someone needs to do a case for the iPad that doubles as a physical keyboard of the sort that Apple is selling with that wedge thing that props up your iPad. Along with the forthcoming multitasking in OS 4.0, we might have something useful after that. But until then, unless your job consists of surfing the web and tweeting into the giant collective miasma of the link-passing masses, this is a device is best used to round out the fast growing collection of screens in your home.
Or at least that was my impression after a week of taking the machine with me everywhere where I would have previously brought a laptop, concluding in a couple of nights away without access to my trusty old clamshell. Lacking the option to escape to the laptop was the doozie, especially when I felt myself in need of editing a complex text file and discovered that without soft arrow keys you are reduced to being an angry pointing monkey, poking a finely tuned glass screen that shows your stubby homo sapien fingers little love and much smudge.
And to boot, if you have any semi-complex task that requires the use of any two applications concurrently, say something as simple as looking up instructions on a task and typing commands in, the "instant-on" claims quickly melt in the face of frustration every 4-5 second pause required to close one context and open the next.
As I gnashed my teeth trying to sort through these early challenges last night (while rushing to try to get something actually done), I realized that perhaps the worst feature in the iPad is the unrealistically high expectations that Apple and the rest of the world have set on the machine as the "next revolution" in personal computing. Much like I would never complain about the lack of control and missing features when paying $200 for a small point-and-shoot instead of $1000 for a DSLR, I think that properly evaluated in context— as a fancy peripheral for leaving the laptop out of the living room especially when there are others around— it will be an absolute monster hit. Laptop replacement? Not for geeks and not even for "normals," at least not for a while yet.
One final thought: showing the consistency of a two-year old, the TSA doesn't bat an eyelash when you leave the iPad inside the bag while clearing security. This is a monster bonus for the frequent travelers— however, I can only imagine that it is an ephemeral benefit at best (it can not be that our crack team of airport security geniuses are that fickle).
Somewhat related: Nick Carr has the best analysis of why the collective online consciousness is so up in arms about the question of whether the iPad is going to hijack computing as we know it.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 months ago (March 31, 2010)
My iPad ship notification came early this morning, and I along with about a quarter million other overgrown little boys and girls started anticipating the early (late?) Christmas Day coming this Saturday.
I'm excited, but not because I have a portable TV to look forward to. I'm also not excited for the price inflation that app vendors (who have barely scraped by at $0.99 and $1.99) are going to try to foist upon us with the new form factor. In fact, I'm not excited to buy any apps at all.
What I'm most excited about is seeing how well an A4 optimized Mobile Safari can behave as a full featured application host— for the only type of apps that will actually matter long-term on the iPad outside of the mail client: fully native cloud apps.
Unlike the iPhone, we don't have to worry about the poor DOM support for things like the camera and the accelerometer, or the coarse and kludgey location support that the browser provides. Those things make a ton of sense for a device which is always with you and frequently needs to be used from hostile environments (at weird angles when you are not sure where you are). In the iPad's case what will matter is the ability to get near native speed and stability from the browser for the following things:
1. Multitouch. Mobile Safari for the iPhone has supported multitouch for a long time, albeit a bit too slowly especially when compared to the speed of the native app gestures. I sincerely hope that the A4 chip and the larger screen area (thus larger digitizer) closes this gap.
2. CSS3 transforms. Productivity style work doesn't need to be cinematic, but there is a certain amount of eye candy that can make a big difference. Dynamic highlights, accordion effects, etc.
3. Clientside storage. This is good enough on the iPhone. All they need to do is not break it (and maybe move the default upper limit on SQLite above 5MB)
4. Offline support. App-cache works on the iPhone, but it is a little squirrely sometimes. In order for the iPad to replace a laptop it needs to be rock solid on planes, trains, and automobiles (in tunnels) which means this needs to work more reliably.
5. Websockets for true bidirectional communication with a server for all of those emerging realtime apps. Ok, this one is a total pipedream and the truth is long polling works pretty well on the iPhone, but one can hope.
There are rumors floating around the Internet that Apple is looking to break all of this stuff in Mobile Safari (in order to encourage developers through their tollgate), but I doubt it. More likely the worst case scenario is that like any big company, Apple is a multi-headed beast— albeit one that is often tamed by Jobs— and as such, there will be a pocket of cluefulls that will do the right open web thing and let Safari make the iPad the first truly novel cloud access device.
We can hope.
In the meanwhile, if you're going to hold an iPad hack party in the coming days, consider targeting the partial HTML5 implementation on its Mobile Safari instead of falling victim to the sirensong of Interface Builder and its jazzy drag-and-drop goodness. You'll be doing yourself a huge favor when the other large OEMs start pouring tens of millions of cheaper Linux and Windows-based tablets into the market over the coming years.
And Merry Christmas.
Tags:
hackers
,
geeks
,
books
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (March 16, 2010)
I thought long and hard about this next step, and in the end chose to do it over what I've known to be a very fulfilling and exciting career as an entrepreneur for two reasons.
First, throughout my entire entrepreneurial career, things have been much more concrete: I saw things that I wanted to work on and just dove right in, come hell or high water. These last few months though, I've been primarily thinking about the entire Internet venture ecosystem, and specifically, what seems to be a worrisome trend here in Boston (thanks Bill Warner) , with fewer and fewer startups turning into big companies that can bolster tech entrepreneurship in the region. I want to see this ecosystem thrive for very selfish reasons: it makes living here, a much more interesting experience.
So I had two choices: take another swing at making another big company, or try my best to find as many possible nascent ones as possible and help them as much as I can through investment, strategy, recruiting, and general ecosystem reinforcement. I've chosen the latter for a variety of reasons, but the most important one is that I am ready to make a sector bet on this next phase of the Internet's evolution in a way that I never would have before.
What?
I am fairly confident about the following statement: the Internet will continue its rapacious pace of absorbing just about every facet of business, and more significantly, regular life. Advertising, media, entertainment, commerce, communications— even staid industries like manufacturing are all being transformed by open protocols, ubiquitous connectivity, and more efficient information exchange— in short, all that has made the Internet the best platform ever.
At the same time, everything else is up for grabs: UIs for access (Android, iPhone, iPad, TV?), models for computation (the client, the cloud, a hybrid?), business models, and even basic patterns for work and play. More than any other time in my career, has the map been so confusing towards such a clear long view.
And rather than be tied to one 7-10 year bet on how to make a big contribution to our ecosystem, I've decided to zoom out and bet more widely on the entire space. I am sure that we'll get some monster hits out of this primordial soup— and I hope I get a chance to help with a few of them.
The second reason why it was a hard decision to make was because I hate being a freshman, plain and simple. And when it comes to investing in tech companies, I've clearly got a lot to learn.
One of the possibilities that I considered was in the emergent models for seed/A funds built by former operating entrepreneurs. There are a few of these funds run by folks I've gotten to know and respect, and there might be just be an opportunity for them to carve out a permanent niche in the supporting environment that sustains startups.
In my case though, I wanted a chance to learn the business from folks who have been at it for a few decades and who have shown repeated success across industry changes in helping entrepreneurs get big. And there is little doubt that Matrix is the place to do that (as the freshman in the class, it's a little daunting).
For sure there is an element to be learned around identifying the right bets to make but I was more concerned with understanding how the best investors seem to be able to provide help all along the way, nurturing and guiding entrepreneurs until their small companies grow to fit their big visions.
I presume this stuff is not going to be easy but I'm looking forward to the challenge.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (March 7, 2010)
It is a mystery to me how the hobbyist hacker community can make Android so much better than the stock images that Google ships, but if you've got a Nexus one, Cyanogen has just made things much much better. As an iPhone owner from day 1, I can tell you that the simple fact of moving from the stock 2.1 image that comes with your Nexus to the latest Cyanogen creates about the same feeling of improvement that moving from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS provided— except that in this case, you aren't changing your hardware. It is software's true magic!
If you've got a Nexus One, and are interested, read on.
Unfortunately, the process is far from simple and the Android mod community has a lot of new jargon that you have to get used to. If you've ever jailbroken an iPhone or iPod Touch, I'd say this is about 30-50% more involved, so get ready to rumble.
Fortunately, I had the benefit of Eddie's amazingly good notes to guide me through it all. I am reproducing them below, along with a mini glossary at the front, and some comments in places that I found tricky. Your mileage may vary on these, and be aware that you could in theory brick (or destroy) your phone, though practically speaking, I've found this to be almost impossible to do with how well the boot loading sequence has been thought out on Android.
--
Some basic terms:
In Android land, the equivalent of jailbreaking is "rooting" which refers to getting access to the root directory of the phone's ROM (which is not really Read Only since both Google/HTC and you overwrite this with every update). In the steps below, you will be using a command line program called "fastboot" to do the unlocking on that root directory and install custom software. Fastboot is also the name of a mode in the Nexus when you first boot up (it is actually available to all Android phones) that gives you a sort of minimalist OS/boot loader thing to take actions that affect the OS in the phone. It's not quite like a PC BIOS menu, but it can be helpful to think of it that way. Below you'll see the key combination required to get the phone to that which can vary a little by model.
Also, there are three basic software bundles you will be applying after the phone is "rooted:" the recovery image which basically provides a more powerful fastboot environment (to do things like unlocking and backing up), the baseband update (which is just like the iPhone one is that it updates the separate system that runs the radio), and the Cyanogen custom ROM which is the magic that will make your Nexus instantly better.
There is an additional step required which has to do with the crappy licensing around the proprietary Google apps (that you will definitely want on: Market, Gmail, Maps, etc.). Because Google asked the Cyanogen guy to stop including those with his mods, you'll have to apply them as a sort of patch when you are done. This is ok and is actually the easiest part of the update.
We did all of this on a Mac and the instructions below are for that platform— however, I am sure the Android SDK is good enough that it will be a relatively simple exercise to transpose the instructions for Linux and Windows. We did assume however that you are comfortable with the command line.
Finally one important note: in doing this, you will lose all of the data on the phone. Because of Google's phenomenal sync, this won't affect email, contacts, or calendars, and because the media (pictures) are stored on the SD card, you will be fine there, but depending on which apps you've installed, you may lose some local data. You will also have to reinstall all of your apps. You have been warned.
Let's get started:
1. Take a deep breath. It is just software and you are going to master it!
2. Download and install the Mac OSX Android SDK. I am going to assume for the purposes of this list that you have put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/ but it doesn't matter.
3. Get fastboot-mac from here. Rename it 'fastboot' and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
4. Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip AND gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
from here and put them in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
5. Get recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img from here and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/
6. Put Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img,
update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip and gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip
on the root of the SD card. You can do this by mounting the phone via a USB cable (this works just like any USB stick except you have to click a button on the phone's UI).
7. In your phone settings > applications > development, set usb
debugging to enabled.
8. Turn off your phone and put the SD card with the 3 files on it
into your phone.
9. Hook up the USB connection to your phone and your mac.
10. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
11. In Terminal on your mac, cd to /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools
12. Type ‘./fastboot devices‘ to make sure your phone is recognized
(it should list a device number rather than simply returning to
command prompt with no feedback).
13. Type ‘./fastboot oem unlock‘ to unlock the bootloader (wohoo, your phone is now rooted!)
14. Use volume keys on the phone to navigate to yes and press the
power button to confirm.
15. When the phone finishes booting, in your phone settings >
applications > development, set usb debugging to enabled, then power
it down.
16. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power
button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot
screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
17. (you're still in terminal in /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools)
Type ‘./fastboot flash recovery ./recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img‘. (Note
filename will change as recovery image is updated)
18. Type './fastboot flash radio ./Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img'
to also update your radio at this point
19. Once the Recovery flash is complete (should be almost instant),
press the Power Button. The highlighted blue text should now say
HBOOT. Use the volume down button to highlight "Recovery" and hit the
power button to reboot into recovery.
20. if this step fails, power down the phone, and try this: hold down
the VOLUME DOWN button and then hold the POWER button until you get to
the skateboard screen; use volume down to highlight RECOVERY and hit
the POWER button
21. You should now be in the Recovery screen after a reboot -- this
screen has 9 green text options at the top and an android x in the
center of the screen
22. Once in Recovery Mode, use the trackball to scroll down to
"Backup/Restore" and press the trackball three times, and wait until
the backup is complete.
23. Once backup is complete, wipe, since you're coming from stock
(even fastboot oem unlock may not fully wipe, do it just in case) many
users report the phone not booting properly without a wipe at this
point.
24. Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
25. Select the CyanogenMod update (update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip),
and press the trackball again to confirm. Wait until the flash is
complete. (Note: this will take a little while).
26. Once again, Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
27. This time, select the Google Apps File
(gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip), and press the trackball again to
confirm. Wait until the flash is complete.
28. Once you are back in the main menu, press the trackball select the
first option (Reboot system now) and reboot the phone.
29. If everything was done correctly, the phone should boot into CyanogenMod!
Eddie's extra bonus section— only for the adventurous (I have not tried this!)
Follow the instructions here to download your kernel and associated .ko module, your overclocking tool, and go
to town with undervolted and overclocked goodness!
Good luck. If it works correctly, it should take about 35-45 minutes to do it. And at the end of it, you will not only have one of the coolest hacker phones, but you will have done it! And trust me, it is worth it!
[A big thanks to Eddie, who both plied me with drinks last week to convince me that I should take this on, and then produced the first draft of this document so that I could not end up bricking my own iPhone]
REFERENCE
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=611829
http://androidandme.com/2010/01/hacks/video-how-to-unlock-and-root-a-nexus-one/
http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=559
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/ADB
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=459830
http://andblogs.net/fastboot/
http://developer.htc.com/adp.html
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php/Full_Update_Guide_-_Nexus_One_Firmware_to_CyanogenMod
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-hack-a-nexus-one#cite_note-4
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/home/cyanogenmod-5-0-nexus-one
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=633238&page=66
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Posted by Antonio
5 months ago (Feb. 26, 2010)
Over the last 3.5 years I've logged almost 3,000 miles with my Nike+ system, a low-cost pedometer that uses the iPod/iTunes ecosystem to submit my runs to a site for online competitions and other interesting data-oriented tasks. I have come to rely on the Nike system so much that if I find myself without it, I won't run. By just collecting data and transparently uploading it to a place where I can go back and look at it, it has managed to alter my behavior.
This trend appears particularly powerful for health related issues. The Withings scale (WIFI and with the ability to broadcast your weight to various social networks) seems to be popular among the folks I follow on Twitter and the always "almost here" Fitbit promises to track all sorts of activity related stuff for subsequent analysis. As dorky as it sounds, it would appear that "what gets measured gets done" at least by a certain part of the population.
Today I ran into an ingenious mass market personal telemetry device that appears suited for children: simple, stylishly designed (but easy to to personalize), and best of all, cheap, the S2H Replay is essentially a low budget Fitbit/Nike+ system that fits inside of a color rubber wristband and tracks activity. What may make the Replay the Flip of personal telemetry devices though is that rather than relying on any sort of Wifi signal or a complex base station, it just emits a code that details the amount of work you've done to the site where you are then able to earn points.
Fans of the fully automatic will think of this as an ugly hack that disqualifies the Replay from the pantheon of early personal telemetry devices— after all, the user has to remember to go enter his code to claim credit for the exercise done. However, if my experience with the sometimes buggy Nike+iTunes combination is any indication, users will be very motivated to "get credit" for work done.
Which incidentally is where S2H performs its second great hack: getting users to compete for prizes in the forms of certificates to various different e-tailers. Think of it as a credit card reward program used for good.
I'll have more to say in a few weeks after I've used my own two guinea pigs for a test (boys, 7 & 4), but for now I sure am glad that there are so many creative approaches being taken towards kickstarting the personal telemetry revolution!
(And here is the Russell Davies's excellent review that tipped me off to the existence of this neat gizmo).
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 21, 2010)
Pycon has always been a fantastic conference— especially given that it is run entirely on the backs of volunteers. Much better than most paid for-profit conferences for sure.
I've posted the notes and slides from my closing keynote this morning— a small contribution to this excellent conference. If you are interested in reading how it was supposed to go (and I think I got close), feel free to go read it.
And for those that prefer to listen to it,
here is the video.
Looking forward to PyCon 2011.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 20, 2010)
During my last job at HP, I got a chance to get up close and personal with a few big partnerships with other tech companies which had similar goals with respect to specific product roadmaps. In all of these cases, the point of the relationships was to work together on projects that would result in a bunch of software that would ultimately be better for both companies.
Now hold that thought for a moment.
Over the last few days I've been having a blast at Pycon, the main annual conference behind the Python programming language. It's fantastic to see how far it has come over the last two decades, almost entirely on the back of committed volunteers who burn nights and weekends maintaining and building a high quality software project which is so critical to many industries, and especially for the future of the open Web OS.
And yet, there are still a few warts on Python that could benefit from the focused effort of sponsored work. Of all of the big companies, Google has done the best job to date here— sponsoring projects like Unladden Swallow, a needed speed boost. There are other big companies that occasionally sponsor Python work, but not as many as you would think— especially not given how strategically important the language is to them.
There are two things that hit me this conference that might provide a solution. The first is that as serious as these warts might be, it would take relatively little manpower to remove them. Specifically, paying for something like 2 engineers for a sustained year of 100% work could go a long way towards solving speed, packaging, or concurrency issues in a really deep way. The second observation is that by the standards of big company budgets— and specifically as applied to the kinds of partnerships I mentioned above— this is an insignificant rounding error when it comes to dollars spent— even for really senior folks.
Instead of spending the money on needlessly flying executives back and forth to regurgitate the same 20 slides over the "partnership possibilities," I wonder whether there isn't the possibility or reallocating these Steaks&Strippers budgets to fund open source wart removal as a kind of joint venture where each side dedicates a couple of engineers to something that would benefit both companies and allow meaningful longterm partnerships to develop.
It would take more thinking to see exactly how this could be fit into something like removing the Python GIL (a impedance to really good concurrency and multicore support), but I'm sure it could be done. Each big company usually has its cash cow business model: Google and web advertising, Intel and chips, HP and ink, etc. And each of these cash cows often generates a whole host of "ecosystem partnerships" that companies go into to ensure the long-term continued growth of X, where X is whatever makes the cash register continue to sing.
In effect, newer projects like Android may provide the perfect test for these types of partnerships. Except of course that a mobile OS is pretty strategic to most big tech companies which is usually code for more Steaks&Strippers and less meaningful partnering.
Something to think about.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 19, 2010)
It's been 4 years since I left Emacs for Textmate for many of the same reasons that I left desktop Linux for OSX— I was just tired of configuring everything instead of having it just work.
That said, Textmate's slow development cycle has been bugging me as of late. It is a terrific text editor— fantastic even in some cases— but the fact that almost a half decade into its existence, you still can't split a window to see multiple files side-by-side is just ridiculous. In fact it makes it too hard to review code changes or take notes on a document that you are editing, or any of a number of other important tasks that text editors have been able to do.
I get the whole "opinionated software" thing, I really do. But being at a geek conference (Pycon) and seeing all of those Ubuntu desktops configured just so (some with Emacs and some with Vim), something just snapped. So I'm going back to Emacs. Eddie recommended Aquamacs which is supposed to be a nice Cocoa port, so we'll see if that works as a nice "tweener," If not, it's back to XWindows for me.
As a side note, I'm still blow away to see the developers at this Python conference running Eclipse to work in Python (and mostly on webapps). While it may be acceptable for the Java/C/C++ world, seeing Eclipse at Pycon is sort of like watching the soccer mom getting out of the mongo SUV at the local Starbucks— way too much of a tank for something that should just be lighter.
Finally, if you like this kind of geek rumination, I highly recommend the blog The Setup.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 17, 2010)
Liz Gannes over at Gigaom has a coined new term for what Google is doing now that it is back in the $3-15MM acquisition game for former Googlers that have left the nest: "acquiring," a mixture of acquiring and hiring. In the case of companies that have received external funding, this is a fast way to poison the well (after all no fund, no matter what the size, has its needle moved by such low dollar exits) so it's pretty clear that it is a bad thing for the ecosystem. In the case of bootstrapped companies however, I can't tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
It is a good thing because the founders of these projects walk away with two really important things: some cash in the bank and the confidence that they can build something that is valuable to someone— valuable enough that the mighty Google is willing to pay an especially outsized hiring bonus for it.
It is a bad thing because it creates the feeling that shooting for feature on products is a viable (and relatively safer) way to achieve success. This is an illusion for two reasons: first, future real investors and employees are savvy enough to see these types of exits for what they are. And second it allows entrepreneurs to focus on incremental "pickoffs" from the guessable product roadmaps of mainstream products instead of completely disruptive ideas.
Another way to put it: I've met with a few folks in the Boston ecosystem recently who are trying to get this "Think Big" meme jumpstarted with entrepreneurs and investors. And sadly, these "acquhires" seem to be taking us all in exactly the opposite direction.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 12, 2010)
Chris Dixon had a provocative post on how young engineers choosing to join big companies like Google is bad for the startup ecosystem, a common sentiment among the folks that I have been meeting over the last few weeks here in the rekindled Boston startup scene.
But I'm not sure it is right for one simple reason: for the most part, young founders tend to breed stupid startup ideas. Not because they are themselves stupid, but because they lack the proper execution context.
And while there is a lot of merit to apprenticing at established (funded) startups, I'm not sure that most of these provide adequate execution context either.
So if context truly is king, what does the proper execution context look like? Ideally, the right context exposes one to a whole host of business problems that need solutions because the current ones are being provided by big dumb companies that have grown fat and complacent of the profits produced by innovations whose progenitors are long gone. This is even better when the problems can be solved through new innovation that is itself only possible as technology is shifting.
Let me take a local example: here in Boston we have an existing cluster around storage, anchored by one of the biggest, dumbest tech companies I've ever seen: EMC. If I were betting on disruptive startups, I'd much rather take the folks who have spent time selling billions of dollars worth of storage into big companies, government contracts, and just about everyone else. Certainly more so than the folks that have spent burned cycles trying to copy Dropbox or Carbonite because that is the context they understand.
One of my heroes, Alan Kay, said that the right perspective is worth 80 IQ points. In my experience, execution context is not dissimilar.
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Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 2, 2010)
I wanted to wait a week to put down my preliminary thoughts on the iPad both because of the crazy outpouring of people venting some very real emotion on all sides of the debate, and because I've learned that when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs, it often pays to let the reality distortion field fade a bit.
I am not a fan of netbooks— as I've written before, they are nothing but cheap laptops. Thus I was sort of excited to see Apple try to reinvent the category with the iPad. After a week of reading reviews though, I'm sad to say that this seems like a fairly incremental product— taking the best parts of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone/iPod touch and hitting the 4x magnify button on the form factor. It'll be a fun and possibly lucrative product— and in the end I could see Apple selling 1/3 to 1/2 as many of these as they have iPod touches (which is about 40MM to date). But here is where they fell short:
1. New formats: the Kindle sucks not because of its screen or hospital ID but because despite the connection to the Amazon web service and the persistent data connection, it fails to be as good as a paper book and doesn't reinvent any of the parts of the book that could use some social/cloud juice. From what I could see, Apple is doing nothing better here (at least with version 1). They haven't defined a new format that would allow publishers to take advantage of video and audio and they didn't do anything to make the experience of finding, reading, and sharing books any more social. Could be that the publishers weren't hip to it, but if anyone could crack that particular cartel, I thought Apple could.
2. Ergonomics: Ned wrote this one up, and frankly, I can't believe the Reality Distortion Field has kept other people from noticing that the idea of a non-tactile keyboard without a place to rest one's palms renders this a piss poor input device. This is ironic as Apple was the first company to do the palm rest design for laptops with the Powerbook 100/140/170 series that was even shown during the keynote.
3. Closed ecosystem: I'm less worried about this one than the people who feel that Apple is starting us on the road to being like the bio-sacks that pass as humans in the movie Walle, because it does seem as though the combination of HTML5 and the A4 CPU will make webapps really sing on this machine, but it would have been nice to have given people some sort of mechanism for side-loading applications (even as "untrusted" like Android and S60 do). Again, this is ironic coming from the company that had its first hit product (the Apple ][) succeed because some crazy hackers in Boston wrote a killer app and distributed it with little involvement from Apple. That said, I do think if the iPad becomes ubiquitous enough, Apple will have to open up (or be subject to aggressive jailbreaking as the FUD around "messing with the carrier settings") doesn't exist for this type of device.
Finally, perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is that because of 1-3 the iPad seems to be primarily a content consumption device, a sort of modern-day version of the portable TVs that Sony and others started selling in the 1980s. That may be what the market wants, but I find it hard to muster the same level of excitement as I would have had for a more general computing type of device. In the case of the latter, creativity really is the upper limit on what can be done. With a closed, content consuming device, we'll end up where we are with the iPhone: with small widgets that all basically do the similar types of information retrieval and display. If this is the new world of personal computing, it looks a little boring.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months ago (Jan. 26, 2010)
The humble and most underappreciated client of the RSS revolution, Google Reader, has just launched an interesting feature: the ability for a user to subscribe to a page that doesn't natively emit a syndication feed and still receive changes as a stream of events.
As RWW reports, this is not the first time a product has attempted to do this (and more significantly, geeks have been scraping webpages since the dawn of Perl), but the fact that it is Google, doing it at Google scale, is particularly relevant.
For a while now, we've had available both the page-oriented web that is best suited for humans to consume, and the stream-oriented publishing formats that blogs and RSS pioneered and that Facebook and Twitter popularized. In the middle, a few services have willing to take the step of translating the torrent of the stream into something page-oriented that people can consume in a page format (look at Techmeme or Tweetmeme for two great examples), but the promise of the programmable web is to lower the required investment in making a million such efforts not only possible, but easy.
And there lies the rub: Google providing any webpage's diffs as a stream is bound to lower the barriers to anyone looking to build on top of streams to create their own page aggregators. This was the promise of Yahoo Pipes (or Google Mash Editor), two products that couldn't overcome the complexity of incorporating content that was not readily digestible in one of a few syndication formats.
It's easy to imagine the possibilities, especially because we've got a good set of aggregators that scrape e-commerce, travel, and finance sites already. However I suspect the real promise of this particular Lego brick will come in scraping public data websites that have previously been ignored, either at the local level or around particular topics.
And I for one would much rather see Google spending engineering cycles in useful extensions to the web like this one than on bashing it out with Apple over the next dominant consumer computing device.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months ago (Jan. 25, 2010)
Chris Anderson has a piece in the latest issue of Wired, "Atoms Are the New Bits" (not yet online) which chronicles the emergence of DIY hardware development. Covering the basics of prototyping tools like 3D printers and CNC machines, he goes on to make a connection to the newly emerging short-run Chinese manufacturing supply chain to explain how a new industrial revolution might take place, even going so far as to quote from my favorite fiction book of 2009, Cory Doctorow's Makers:
The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
As with his article on the Long Tail from five years ago, I think Anderson is on to something very big here even if he doesn't get all the causation correct. Short run manufacturing could be the basis for a whole new industrial base here, but not necessarily because of the democratization of prototyping tools (which as the story of Makerbot Industries shows is indeed happening along the same story arc as the PC revolution), but because of the powerful combination of the Internet as a collaboration channel (for ideas) and the Internet as a demand aggregation and distribution channel (for niche interests, passions, and ultimately sales).
This is the story of Threadless, a company which exists today because it is perfectly evolved to take advantage of these two forces in the apparel space. But increasingly it may also become the story of much more complex products. The Wired piece covers a local Boston startup called Local Motors which is trying the approach with cars— a complex multi-component electromechanical product that has all sorts of safety and regulatory challenges. If they can pull it off there is no reason not to wonder about other similarly complex products.
For instance, just the other day I was commenting to someone that I'd love to have a smartphone that had an internal 3000 mAh (they mostly have 1/2 of that) and a cheap low-power 7-segment display for most of the notifications that it would normally power up the battery for— "the longest lasting smartphone in the world." One can argue whether such a monster might end up being the Spruce Goose of the category, but with Android we've got the software to be able to do just that, and looking through any of the iSuppli teardowns, you quickly realize that most of the internal components of these devices are increasingly as "standard" as what goes into your typical PC.
How far are we from the day when someone can start the Threadless of smartphones? Then we could go from custom cases and wallpapers to devices truly tailored to our specific needs.
There are many wrecked ships that have fallen victim to the siren song of mass customization, but given enough relevant customization in a product category that has enough demand and you may just have something here.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 21, 2010)
Amazon opening up the Kindle with an SDK strikes me as an incredibly stupid move, or at the very least, one which is more based on the current wave of hype around SDKs or fear around the impending Apple tablet. Having been part of many "app platform" discussions over the last couple of years, I can't help but feel that most people need to stop reading the iPhone informercials that pass as "analysis" in the tech and business media and remember that most devices really are just appliances and don't need the overhead and potential instability of letting 3rd parties get up close and personal. And that most app efforts require developers, a generally non-bozo crowd that won't sink precious time into things that smell bad just because they looked good on a Powerpoint slide outlining the "stickiness strategy."
For instance, would you want your toilet to have an SDK so that third parties could build apps that listened for the onflush event and did fun things therein?
What really matters is that these connected appliances be extensible in ways that make sense, not that each one brings some new proprietary app environment that developers will have to learn. In the case of the Kindle, Amazon achieved this brilliantly with the "email to Kindle" feature that allowed anyone to send in a list of pre-approved document types for display on the device. I would even argue that for most smartphone platforms, the extensibility should come form the capable HTML5 mobile web browsers that allow for very specific app-like experiences without going down the SDK rathole.
It is app store mania continuing its mad rush, and I for one don't get why we are so ready to jump back into the days of developing with different libraries, toolkits, and operating systems like we did in the pre-web days.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 12, 2010)
I am skeptical of people who claim to want touchscreen laptops for the simple reason that I detest smudgy screens and thus can't see myself ever wanting to dirty up my laptop.
That said, I find the new extra large trackpads on the aluminum Macbook Pros to be the single most upgrade worthy feature in the laptops. Along with Apple's new Magic Mouse, they really do represent a new kind of human interface peripheral.
Except that for the last few months, my three and four finger gestures have completely stopped working. I know it may sound like overkill to anyone from the Wintel side of the house, who is used to at most the two finger trackpad scroll, but 3 fingers to navigate forwards/backwards (this is mapped to 2 fingers on the magic mouse) and 4 fingers to toggle Exposé (a desktop-clearing UI thing) become incredibly useful to anyone who has bothered to train themselves to use them. Trust me.
In case you are among those Mac users afflicted by the trackpad gimping software upgrade that took away my 3/4 finger gestures, here is the solution:
1. Run Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app) and click the "Repair permissions" button.
2. Reboot your Mac. Before it starts its reboot sequence hold down command-S (also known as Apple-S) to boot into single user mode. When you get a prompt, type in:
fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2s
3. When it finishes, type reboot. Voila, your third and fourth fingers just became useful as well.
I have no idea how disk permissions can affect the trackpad/mouse driver, but after some Googling and experimentation, I discovered that this fix did the trick for me.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 11, 2010)
VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has a fascinating and incredibly well-written editorial in the WSJ today called "World Wide Mush" where he looks at the dark side of what he calls "digital collectivism," or the ethos behind the platforms and projects that have most benefited from user contributions.
As a huge fan of open source over proprietary software, and insightful bloggers over established journalists, I was particularly taken by his claim that the era of digital collectivism is destroying the ability for the folks engaged in intellectual work to make a decent living. As he writes:
We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.
This is a bold claim— however it is one which he supports with a number of interesting arguments that make the piece a gem. Curious as to whether I could do some of my own quick research on the peasantization of the folks at the frontier of digital culture, I turned to Indeed's fantastic salary comparison search engine to try to tease out the differences in jobs available to folks playing in similar but distinct positions.
I started with my favorite: bloggers versus traditional journalists: according to Indeed, the average salaries for jobs listing "blogger," "reporter," and "journalist" in their title or descriptions are $34K, $44K, and $52K respectively. Ouch!
Turning then to software, where there is little doubt of the leverage and impact of open source, I was similarly surprised. I wanted to look at web developers according to technology of choice so I picked "PHP" (the most prevalent and totally open source), "Struts" (a Java-based middle ground between both worlds), and "ASP.NET" (Microsoft's completely proprietary stack) and came away with: $75K, $89K, and $83K respectively.
Now there are all sorts of problems with this type of quick-and-dirty analysis, but the pattern that emerges as you play out the types of job descriptions more aligned with this new era of digital collectivism against their predecessors is that Larnier is right— digital collectivism is no panacea for making a living.
A similar theme has emerged around the notion of "digital sharecroppers" or platform purveyors that leverage millions of small user contributions to build accrue most of the value for themselves. With the exception of eBay, and possibly Google (until now), this seems to be the case among all of the other "platforms" that have emerged in the last decade. So much so in fact, that I often tend to read the vision of many of these platforms, "X is going to democratize Y," as "X is going to really reap the investments of users who will do Y for next to nothing."
Examples:
Facebook is going to democratize communications and publishing = Facebook is going to reap the creative investment of users who will pour their lives into the largest privacy violation cesspool ever known to man.
Apple is democratizing mobile applications = Apple is going to reap the hundreds of millions of hours invested by developers for apps that are either free or sell for next to nothing so that they can maintain and possibly widen their lead selling expensive small computers.
The combination of these two trends makes Larnier's parting message in the piece something we should all be paying close attention to:
The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?
Certainly worth at least keeping in mind as we plow forward into this brave new world.
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 4, 2010)
There is no doubt that in the tech world, the combination of the shift to "cloud" computing (which to me means both the growing relegation of the desktop PC as nothing more than an intelligent cache that can power more responsive UIs, and the ability to leverage at-scale virtual compute environments run by the big web companies) plus the explosion of post-PC ubiquitously connected mobile devices, are going to be two most important ingredients in the cocktail that gets mixed up over the course of the coming year.
In the context of those two undeniable trends, here are three predictions for the coming year:
Privacy on the net is going to become a big deal. Facebook's recent snafu was just the start of this. Every year people do more important stuff online, and when combined with big companies whose emergent business models are predicated on targeted media accelerating attempts to ramp revenue, you get an explosive combination. This will only be exacerbated by mobile devices streaming all sorts of interesting metadata (starting with location) to these same web services. It will not take long for one of these location-based features to mix with lax privacy in a way that causes real harm in the physical world— theft, adultery, rape, or murder style— and when it does, it will create one of the big stories of 2010. It will also result in a groundswell movement on the part of normal users to take control over their information, be it what gets clicked on from their web browser, or emitted from a mobile.
And while on the subject of mobile, Android is poised to be the only alternative to the Apple juggernaut (goodbye RIM, goodbye Symbian, goodbye Maemo)— and in some key ways, it will surpass the iPhone this year. The obvious one is what is being repeated all throughout the tech blogosphere: that as everyone BUT Apple depends on Android, their installed base will quickly eclipse Apple. While I think this may be true, I am not sure that it matters all that much, as the installed base we should be talking about is that of the Webkit-derived mobile browsers that are common to both the iPhone and all of the Android devices. From a developer perspective, I think that this will increasingly become the relevant target (especially as the AppStore mania settles)— and will continue being so until the smartphone form factor settles down, x86 PC style (which I personally hope doesn't happen for a long time).
Where Android's ascendancy does matter is that as a more open system, it will enable hardware manufacturers and service providers to play with deep web service integration in much more interesting ways that any sandboxed developer environment ever will. Obvious choices will be things like data synchronization and content delivery— both of which a big company would see as ways of making users more "sticky." But there are other more interesting deep integration efforts along the "smartphone as a remote control for life" which innovative companies will be able to play with.
And finally (and I realize that this one is a geek aspiration and a stretch), I hope to see 2010 begin the process of turning regular users into programmers. Right now we are almost there without realizing it: every time someone sets a Google News alert, uses an eBay sniping program, or customizes a Pandora list, it is a form of programming. A few years ago, when millions of kids where learning rudimentary HTML and CSS to trick out their MySpace pages, I thought we were heading in this direction, but it didn't seem to catch on. This year, with the notion of APIs being front-and-center among web service developers, we may start to see something that goes beyond the geek efforts that were Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Already, I am amazed at how many regular folks seem to be interested in the Facebook API, and the other day, while helping a friend with a Wordpress installation, I was shocked to see how vibrant and turnkey its plug-in ecosystem has become.
The best part of anticipating the coming year is that, no matter how you cut it, it promises to be more exciting than the last one that just passed!
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Posted by Antonio
6 months, 4 weeks ago (Dec. 31, 2009)
As we close the decade in tech, I've been reading the "2000s in summary" style articles and blog posts, amazed at how much we've gotten out of this decade. Wifi and broadband hitting a tipping point. Peer to peer. Amazon as a global powerhouse. The cloud as a viable platform. The iPod, the iPhone, and Apple's phoenix-like emergence as the dominant computer company of the 21st century. The Android alternative. The Nintendo Wii and other types of HID devices all leading to more touch, more direct manipulation, and a more seamless integration of man and machine. The AppStore, ebooks, and alternative business models for content online. OLPC and the netbook craze that it ignited. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Google as the fastest growing brand of all time and the future creche for our AI overlords.
It is hard to look at all of these products, services, and trends that have come into being over the last ten years and not be overawed. And yet, if I had to pick the vector that will have the longest lasting influence on the world, it wouldn't be any of these. Sure they are they adorn the pages of Geek People every day, and we all love to spill tons of virtual ink on them.
But at the end of the decade, the greatest single trend to emerge in the last ten years is the way in which the Internet has enabled mass scale changes in new forms of collaborative work. Of course, the poster boy for this trend is Wikipedia which has now bested both Microsoft's Encarta, and the much more venerable Britanica. But the real impact of this new style of work is much more apparent in the effects of a globally connected swarm of human minds working, not for the almighty dollar and all of the associated external incentives, but for the intrinsic rewards of mastering a craft and belonging to a community.
Its name is "Open Source—" coined at the beginning of the decade by people who were trying to differentiate this new style of working on software from the ideological free software movement. From it we have gotten Linux and Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Today a software engineer working in one of the two platforms that actually matters (cloud and mobile) does so with the richest toolset ever available; from languages like the Perl/Python/Ruby family of dynamic languages to tons of high quality libraries to do just about everything imaginable. All because a whole load of hackers were early to this party and have spent the last 10 years showing everyone else how it is possible to work, collaborate, and belong without the explicit motivation of material wealth, the very grease of modern capitalism.
It may started in software, but as Wikipedia has shown, it will not stop there. To try to understand why, pick up my last book recommendation of the year: Daniel Pink's new brand book, "Drive," which delves much more deeply into why this new form of organized value creation works. Or subscribe to Umair Haque in your blog reader for 2010.
Happy new decade. In the midst of the economic cataclysms of the last couple years, of multiple wars of the last decade, it pays to pause for a moment and realize that there is no better time to be alive than now.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months ago (Dec. 30, 2009)
Now that the word is out that Google is going to launch a phone, and that it is not going to use whitespaces and flux capacitors to obviate the need for a carrier, we can all breathe a little easier. In fact, the general reaction should be "ho-hum," but not because you are going to have to pony up $530 for an unlocked version of the device, because for all intents and purposes, this is just another T-Mobile phone.
I've had two of the three major Android phones that have come out thus far: the G1, and the HTC Ion (or MyTouch as Sprint calls it). And while they (and the Droid) have fallen short in ways that the Nexus doesn't (specifically around something as simple as the diminished proportion of the on-screen keyboard), their true Achilles heel has been the lack of 3G functionality when operating with an AT&T SIM. Once you've had 3G EDGE just blows for web surfing— which is after all the killer app of these new devices.
And let's face it, T-Mobile in the US sucks— or at least in sucks anywhere I've ever lived in or traveled to. Their 3G network is okay— when you have coverage, which is hit and miss, and mostly miss if you are in any kind of a fast-moving vehicle (by which I mean anything that travels faster than a rickshaw).
But that is not the real reason why a phone that doesn't work on the AT&T 3G frequencies is a bonehead move. The real reason is because the only people that are likely to pay up for a phone sold through a new channel like www.google.com are likely to already have an iPhone and an AT&T SIM just begging to be set free. We are the folks who are likely to be vocal, we are the Eloi who are currently fielding the questions from the fat belly of mainstream adopters who see 2010 as the year they will move to some sort of smartphone.
The only thing I can think of is that there is something hard or expensive about the 3G AT&T frequencies. After all, Nokia made the same mistake with the N900 which I would have happily bought if I could run it on my regular SIM. But this is Google we're talking about. If I were them, I would have worried less about the koi-pond wallpaper and more about getting full GSM 3G frequencies in the US models, and maybe even a dual device like the Frankesteins RIM sells under the moniker "World Phone."
Otherwise let's face it— this is yet another T-Mobile Android phone made by HTC running Google software.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months ago (Dec. 29, 2009)
As we move towards the era of "appliance computing" with iPhones and Kindles and Droids and Nooks, one downside that people rarely talk about is that we are losing visibility into the components that make up our devices. This trend is not helped by the way OEM/ODM contracts are cut, where Asian manufacturers often make on-the-line component changes because someone else's WIFI chip seems to be cheaper for that quarter.
Ever notice for instance how Apple never talks about the CPU in the iPhone? Sure, the 3GS brought marketing claims around "50-100% faster" but we were never told that the ARM core had changed on that the clock had gone up by 50%.
An even better example of how this trend can bite you in the butt is what has recently happened to the Kindle. A true believer from day one, I helped to make the Kindle Amazon's #1 product this Christmas by giving it as a present. However, one of the folks I gave it to wanted to use it in rural New Hampshire, a place where my own Kindle 2 had previously worked flawlessly. Assuming this bode well for its "Whispernet" 3G service up there, I didn't think that Amazon might itself switch service providers (from Sprint to AT&T) without announcing it anywhere, thereby rendering the "same" model (Kindle 2) totally useless where previous units had worked flawlessly.
At the end of the first season of Mad Men, the good folks at Sterling Cooper get the Kodak carousel slide projector as a product to pitch. One of the copywriters extolling the virtues of Kodak as a technology-led compare (this is 1960) says "they are so proud of their technology, they even mention R&D in their ads!" thus giving you the feeling that this was the start of technology as a selling proposition.
Consumers aren't stupid, and in a day and age where the web makes the space available for marketing copy of infinite length, we might want to get back to a little more R&D and a little less "wow," "amazing," and "boom" on the side of the box.
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Posted by Antonio
7 months ago (Dec. 27, 2009)
Post Christmas everyone seems ecstatic about how well the Kindle is doing, with Amazon claiming that they sold more Kindle books than real books on Christmas day. And yes, just as with the Bose headphones a few years ago, the Kindle does seem to be the "it" gift for 2009.
But this is Jeff Bezos we're talking about, and fantastic though he may be as an entrepreneur, he does not (yet) have the Jobsean "Reality Distortion Field" powers, so before we all get carried away, let's remember that we are just at the start of ebooks— and more importantly that this first inning is pretty ugly.
E-Ink sucks. Its refresh rate is pathetic. On the device front, you can either go with the medical instrument inspired ID of the Kindle, or the crappy firmware of the Nook (the Sony being the book version of their MP3 player). The storefronts have a really limited selection and the lack of marking, lending, and dropping into the pool are marked limitations, to say nothing of the fact that contrast rates still leave a lot to be desired when compared to paper.
In my mind, eBook readers don't get significant until they help to reinvent the format. Yes the book is popular (with 400-500 years of installed base), but so was the map before the connected mobile device put a pin that marks your location and follows you around on it. I loved maps before but absolutely would never go back to them given the opportunity to see myself on it, and watch the map spinning around me as I turn 360 degrees around. And I suspect Amerigo Vespucci would agree.
Similarly, until we've got embedded videos in our books (a la YouTube) and a "Choose your own adventure" level of interactivity, we're just going to be aping old formats with plastic devices that will remain inferior in every way except traveling weight. There is hope yet— after all TV started as radio shows with faces.
I have a feeling that 2010 is going to be good to us on this front.
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Posted by Antonio
8 months ago (Dec. 1, 2009)
I am a fan of conspiracy theories. Whether it is the "Tintin for adults" simplistic plots of 24, or the "Goldman Sachs is the epicenter for a new kind of white-collar mob," I lap them all up for the color they inject into life.
Which is why I have been enjoying Greg Pfistegr's blog, "The Perils of Parallel" so much. Greg writes about a lot of interesting stuff, especially if like me, you grew up feet firmly planted in software land expecting the hardware guys to do their Moore's Law dance and just keep ponying up the cycles for us to burn. One of the central themes of his posts— the one which is wet with the conspiracy paint— is that the shift to multicore processors has far-reaching implications on how we humans interact with computers, from developers trying to write performant applications to users looking for that "new computer high" that you used to get every couple of years when a hardware upgrade gave you a 10x perceived performance boost. As he himself writes in an early post:
It particularly bugs me that people still blather on about how Moore's Law will keep on trucking for decades. Maybe it will, interpreted literally. But the Moore's Law that will keep on trucking has been castrated. It lacks a key element (frequency scaling) that drove the computing industry for the last four or more decades. This is a classic case of experts focussing on the veins in the leaves on the trees and ignoring the ravine they're about to fall into.
More. I have this suspicion that many people who really understand how deep into the doodoo we're going are weasel-wording it deliberately. No point in frightening the hoi polloi, now, is there? Maybe there's a cure, who knows, we're not there yet, hm? Horsepuckey.
I think there may be something to what Greg is talking about here. A few months ago, I was visiting with some folks in Labs and mentioned that it seemed that we had sort of given up on running the clock up on CPUs and that "multicore" seemed as buzzworthy as "cloud" in that people seem to use this one-word incantation without further explanation to quiet the naysayers, and I got that glass-eyed look from the researchers I was talking that just made me want to crawl down from the clouds of pure R&D into my product development hole.
Later that day I saw Craig Barrett at Stanford speaking to students talking about how much hair Intel engineers have on their chest after decades of keeping Moore's train on the tracks (and more importantly, how we had at least a couple of more decades to go) and decided that perhaps I was just not getting that there was no problem here, and that the MultiCoreCloud would save us all. Or, at the very least, create a great runtime for the AIs that will rule us like organic batteries not worth recycling.
Thanks to Greg though, I now know that the Dharma initiative is behind this all, and that we all ought to wonder why those fancy new computers don't feel so new and fancy anymore!
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Posted by Antonio
8 months ago (Nov. 28, 2009)
Chrome is browser is a terrific addition to the Internet operating system. It's put Safari and IE on notice and showed the world what a pig Firefox has become in middle age. Google Chrome OS however, is at best a really dumb idea from a team that wanted to get some of that Android OEM love— or at worst, proof that Google is not immune to the big company-itis that causes successful franchises to start warping reality to better fit their business models (I know, I've been living this!)
I've spent the past few days thinking about what it is that really bothers me about the notion of a stripped down Ubuntu that boots into a super secure browser and here it is: in an era when the access devices are getting more and more powerful, be they smartphones or netbooks (which Intel is supposed to be taking over the multicore threshold soon enough), the notion that we are going to hobble that client side processing for the sake of security or simplicity is just ass backwards.
And the notion that it is being made secure for my mom to use? Gimme a break! This smells like the kind of paternalistic thinking that got us the first rev of the OLPC with its hobbled software and bad assumptions about how stupid most of those peasants were going to be.
Computing is on an unstoppable march towards more and more processing in smaller and smaller devices. The cloud is really interesting for all sorts of synchronization, collaboration, and "living software" reasons, but pushing us all back into the mainframe stone age seems... well like a very unGoogly thing to do.
Love it or hate it, Wave is disruptive. Android is disruptive. Bidding to keep spectrum open is disruptive. Even Chrome the browser and all of the associated HTML5 goodies that Google is spitting out are disruptive.
But locking us out of the real power of portable and affordable computing? Come on.
[As an aside, here is a somewhat related perspective from a former employee— though I think his point applies more to Chrome the browser]
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Posted by Antonio
8 months, 2 weeks ago (Nov. 13, 2009)
This morning's XKCD really struck a chord with me, not because it is a criticism of Apple's approval process, but because it reminded me of two things I find horribly wrong with this whole "smartphone explosion:"
1. Carriers have replaced banks as the retail presence that is destroying urban areas, and their gross commercialism around getting people to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone (and associated $100/month plan) is even more obnoxious than all of the mortgage advertising. Where I live in Cambridge (Harvard Square), the one benefit of the mortgage collapse was the clearing out of all of the banks that seemed to have no trouble paying the jacked up rents that landlords were seeking. But just as quickly as they moved out, Sprint, AT&T, and now Verizon are moving in with giant human-sized replicas of their latest toys, flashy billboards, and sales people handing out flyers to unsuspecting pedestrians on the sidewalk (people they are smartphones not raves!). And no matter where I travel: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, the same blight is visible everywhere.
2. If these devices really are the future of personal computing, it's a little sad to see how much of the positioning is around consumption: listening to music, downloading movies, playing games, reading reviews— and how little of the value expressed seems to be around creating or producing interesting content and data from a mobile device. I love the line in the comic about the stick man who wants to spend life "restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming" for this very reason, because it gets right to the heart of what seems to be just off about putting so much computing power and possibility into users' pockets only to expect them to never again miss "Desperate Housewives" while on the move.
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Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 7, 2009)
A little while ago when the Twitter docs leaked out on the Internet, those poor guys were raked over the coals for writing (in an internal-only document) that their vision was to become "the pulse of the planet."
While I applaud the grand nature of it, I think it is highly unlikely if only because it would require everyone, and a lot of "things" as well, to start actively entering these little status updates as more than marketing signals or social gestures.
I do think though that the Internet is going to eventually bring us "the pulse of the planet—" it's just that that pulse won't be generated actively by humans any more than we consciously generate our own internal heartbeat. Instead, we're probably looking at billions of network-connected sensors, each passively monitoring some very narrow metric, and streaming its data over the Internet.
And right at the center of this sensor soup I think we'll find MEMS technology. The acronym stands for "Micro Electrical Mechanical System" which is a fancy way of describing a silicon-based motion sensor that is so accurate that it can sense your heartbeat just by sitting on the tip of your finger.
Think of a backyard trampoline with a giant level (of the sort you use to hang paintings) right in the center of it. Now shrink that down by several orders of magnitude and connect the level to a digital output and you've got the gist for how MEMS work. Oh, and did I mention that because they are made by the same process that Intel uses to make chips, they are cheap and on a joyride called Moore's law?
Surprisingly, MEMS manufacturing has a lot in common with inkjet manufacturing (the topic of a much longer blog post), which means that we've got some of the deepest pool of expertise in how to do it right, as the Register reported yesterday. Of all of the technologies I've seen in my two years here, none is as mind-blowingly exciting as what the engineers working on it, or as potentially world-changing.
It's funny to think that when it comes, the "pulse of the planet" is likely to be a close relative of the inkjet printer!
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Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 5, 2009)
Boston's airport is run by a bunch of incompetent castoffs from all of the other state agencies that seem to relish applying maximum manpower to minimize anything decent about a modern airport. The other day upon returning to my car from a trip away, I found one of those baggage trolleys trying to eat the rear of my car, sort of like a big English wrench clamped between the undercarriage and the top of the trunk (how a cart like this can wedge in this way probably has something to do with Mayor Menino's third cousin twice removed who gave up a career in carburetor repair to design a better Smart Cart and ended up using the jacks at his garage for inspiration).
After a long wait for one of the 15 roving tow trucks which seem to prize cruising slowly around the parking lot above say, helping motorists, I decided to take my Skeletool to the cart in the hopes of disassembling enough of it to get out. As I got underneath the car I realized that a part of the cart (again designed after garage equipment) seemed to be poking into what I thought was the car's gas tank thus making for a much more fun evening at the airport.
In the end the puncture wasn't really deep enough (and further research has revealed that it was not in fact the gas tank), so off I went. But as I was driving home, I was reminded of how proud I had been that in the case of this particular car everything is "sealed," meaning that from the day I drove it off the lot two years ago, it's been to the dealer once, precisely when the car's computer told me to take it in, a stark contrast to every other car I've had where intimacy with the various parts of the drivetrain or heating system became a necessary survival skill.
The car experience is not unlike those I've had with several other "sealed" devices as of late: my Tivo HD's 2-year service recently expired, and when I realized I couldn't purchase another 2-year contract but had to instead go on a ghastly month-to-month plan that cost more for the EPG than I pay for cable, I decided to let it lapse. Except that now I've got a brick: I can't manually record, and every time I change the channel, I get a popup that tells me to go pay for the month-to-month to use my very own piece of hardware. Ditto for all of the old iPhones in my life— each of them is only mistaken firmware update away from the "Connect to iTunes" bricking that only a painful jailbreak process can fix (and thank God we have that option).
As consumers we love these set-and-forget seamless experiences— be they cars, Tivos, or cellphones. With these type of experiences being every product designer's foremost goal, and companies obsessed with service (or annuity) business models, we're trading something important for all of that convenience— the ability to control our own hardware beyond the life of the original service contract. Or more importantly, the ability to know anything more than the most elemental operating guidelines for the things that surround us, and may in time come to suffocate us.
I'm not looking forward to the increasing amounts of product detritus accumulating throughout my life because of this phenomenon and would prefer more open systems that give these things second lives beyond their initial service period. Sort of like the utopian vision laid out in Makers, where tinkering with old gadgets becomes second hand to the a whole bunch of people tired of this sealed product life.
And I may never again want to know where my car's gas tank is by the way, but I might want someone other than the dealer to be able to patch up the little hickie Boston airport gave it.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 29, 2008)
This blog post will show you how to build an autonomous robot that seeks out light based on a toy with a low power DC motor, an Arduino board, and a host of electronic components. Look at the pictures or go and check out a movie of the end product— the robot on a flashlight "leash." I built it with my 6 and 3 year olds over Thanksgiving weekend in stages, and we had a blast doing it. I'm putting the assembly process down as a blog post to get all of the information in one place for people who might be interested in these types of projects. It is written from the perspective of an electronics noob so hardcore hardware hackers or Arduino experts will be bored.
To begin I should say that this is the most fun I've had on a hobby project since I set up my first server on the Internet back in 1996. As in back then, the best part was how little I knew going into it and how quickly I was able to make progress due to the many smart brains that contribute to the collective fabric of our group brain— so thank you web!
A few weeks ago, the kids had seen a cheesy robot in a toy store and thrown a tantrum about getting it. Promising them that we would built our own, I've spent weeks scouring the Internet for the hardest part of a low end hobby robot to find— a cheap and easy drive system. Servos, stepper motors, gearboxes all turn out to be relatively expensive, and the electronics required seem to be overly complex for anyone who isn't either a dedicated amateur or Macgyver on a deadline.
Last week I happened to come upon a fun kit called the "Tin Can Robot Science kit" which is nothing but a low power 1.5v DC motor hooked to a gearbox and a set of oblong wheels that cause an anthropomorphized beer can to wobble along like a drunk guy along a quasi-straight line. It's a cute 45 minute project and I would recommend it for anyone who wants to "build something" though I suspect that most of the fun in this toy comes from the assembly.
In our case, the fun was just beginning. Having built a light-sensitive Mindstorms robot that would chase a flashlight, I was pretty sure that the beer can equivalent would be fun to play with for a while. So our blueprint effectively consisted of 3 parts which I will describe in turn, along with some instructions:
The drive system: This proved the hardest to build for two reasons: 1. most lightweight toys tend to be very carefully balanced to move with low-power motors and are thus are not often capable of taking extra weight (in the form of the Arduino board and more batteries), and 2. it turns out that you can't just hook a motor into one of the digital pins on a microcontroller like the Arduino, turn the pin on HIGH and expect the motor to go (at least not without burning something out in a hurry).
I can not overemphasize point number one enough: in fact, I would advise anyone building am ambulatory robot to get the mechanical bits working first by simply building the robot and setting it to move with nothing but power to the drive. The Tin Can robot was designed as a standing beer can but as it turned out, there was no place to attach the Arduino board that wouldn't tip the robot over or render it totally motionless, to say nothing of the additional power required to run the motor. The design compromise in this case turned out to be putting the can on its long side and building something that looks much more bug-like, as well as getting rid of the 1AA power supply of the original kit in preference of the +3V that the Arduino board provides.
Coming from the world of software engineering, the best analogy I can think of to describe the process for getting the can moving was that of iterative development. Do something. Hook the motor up to power and see if it moves. If it does, take the next step; if not, iterate on the design. This will take a while, but the less you think of any part of your design as being fixed, the better. What can I say? The physical world is a bitch with all of its gravity and stuff.
The second bit of the drive system that baffled me was that there is not way to drive a motor from one of the digital pins on the Arduino. The short answer is that most things draw way too much power (current) relative to the 40-50 milliamps that each of the pins on an Arduino puts out, something which you quickly discover by the way in which an IC near the pins gets hot enough to boil your skin (amazingly, this as well as other noob mistakes don't tend to damage your Arduino if you catch them quickly enough— have I mentioned how awesome Arduino is?)
Once you realize this, you can find many options online for driving motors, servos, and all sorts of things that move— from full on "shields," or boards that you snap on top of your Arduino with as many chips as the Arduino itself (and often about as expensive) to all sorts of motor control circuits. It turns out that most robotics folks know that what you would want is something called an "H bridge" which uses a bunch of transistors and diodes to give you fine grained control over the direction and speed of multiple motors and servos. But even this was too much work for us— we just wanted the motor to move when the robot sensed light irrespective of speed and only in its ambling forward direction. Fortunately thanks to the web (or more specifically, the wonderful LetsMakeRobots.com), I discovered that you can actually use one transistor, an NPN silicon one from Radio Shack (part #276-2016) to build a simple circuit that lets you control current from the 3V power supply on the Arduino from one of the digital pins. Think of a transistor as a big electronically controlled switch and you'll get the gist of it (but have a look at my monkey circuit diagram to figure out how to wire it up).
The light-detecting circuit: I had the leg up on this one as I did one of these circuits for a science fair about 20 years ago (my dad's idea for how to make me popular as a recent non-English speaking immigrant in the public school system in the US— and no, it did not work). Surprisingly, it even worked the first time. The basic circuit requires placing another resistor (I used a 1k ohm one but the value will depend on what kind of photo resistor you have on hand). A photo resistor (you can Google "CDS" to find one) seems to be hard to find these days, but you can get them from Radio Shack online for about $2. The other step is taking measurements on the analog pin from the circuit you build; you will basically get values from 0 to 1023 depending on the ambient light of the room you are in and will have to tweak your program to determine what the "move robot" threshold should be (in our case, with the circuit detailed above, values above 200 trigger the robot to move).
The "mouth" circuit: this is a standard yellow LED plugged into one of the digital pins and buried deep inside the can. When the robot moves, the LED comes on. Note that all of the tutorials for Arduino say to use a resistor with the LEDs but as a master of burning out LEDs I can tell you that you won't need it on the digital pins of the board.
The final step was getting the software written which proved to be the easiest part of the project (and I suspect it was not just that that is my background but that the Arduino folks have done a great job on their IDE). You can see the "sketch" (Arduino/Processing for program) here. After some initialization, it simply goes into a loop reading the photo resistor circuit and when appropriate turns the pin connected to the NPN transistor to HIGH and the mouth LED pin to high as well.
We live in wonderful times— and nothing like the ability to take on a weekend project like this with little prior training in electronics proves it as well. So now it's my turn to give back to the collective brain— please feel free to either leave me comments with questions/clarifications or send me email at antrod at gmail dot com.
And happy hacking!
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 29, 2008)
It seems that in just under two years, folks have been able to port the beginnings of Linux on to the iPhone hardware, which is both an awesome feat of reverse engineering, and sort of ironic since there were apparently folks at Apple arguing to use Linux in the first place.
Along the same vein, what really blew me away this morning was a story on CNET's Crave blog about a Vietnamese entrepreneur who is unlocking iPhones "old school" with a soldering iron and a chip reader (go check it out, great pictures included).
Neither of these things by themselves are going to make a meaningful dent in the torrent of soccer moms and "cool" tech company executives currently driving Apple's resurgence as the premier tech company. I don't ever expect to run Linux on my iPhone, or have its guts extruded on to the table of the cellphone equivalent of a tattoo parlor, but I do love to see the raw power of ingenious hacker/entrepreneurs at work. Outside of the sheer amount of learning they are doing about the brains of the next major computing platform, it makes me feel as though Zittrain's apocalypse may be averted yet.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 28, 2008)
CNET has a story about some Intel exec making disparaging comments about the new "netbook" category (very small laptops with diminutive specs and low price tags) which argues that people in the industry are beginning to see the netbook as an extension at the bottom of the traditional laptop category instead of a new category in and of its own.
For a while, the dream of the netbook as a new type of computing device was fueled by the OLPC foundation and its mission to equip the other 6 billion people in the world with $100 laptops. Since Asus jumped into the game with its $400 EeePC last year though, netbooks have become broader all-purpose computing devices with even giant PC companies like Dell and us jumping into the game. I have HP's first entry, the 2133 and have written about how while it is a well built piece of hardware, as a "cloud computer" it's got some fairly crippling limitations.
In my view what has really killed the emergence of a potential new type of product from the netbook form factor is not the inherent weaknesses of underpowered hardware and small screens but rather the emergence of smart phones— and especially devices like the iPhone with screens that are not that much smaller, constant high-speed connectivity, instant-on browsing of the Internet, and perhaps most importantly, software that is tailored specifically to that all important 15-60 second usecase that could have given the netbook its true opening. In the time that it takes the latter to come out of suspend, a user has pulled out his iPhone (or Gphone or Storm, etc.), accessed the Internet, read something, posted something, and put it back in his pocket.
Until the netbook manufacturers (us most significantly) begin to appreciate the need for fundamentally new types of software in the devices, all the emergence of this new ultracheap laptop will achieve is an erosion of the healthy premiums that laptops have carried since the beginning of the personal computer industry.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 16, 2008)
While I am on the topic of 1970s technologies, I figure I'd mention a recent eBay purchase (eBay is fast becoming my Internet Archive for physical things), my very first computer, a Time Sinclair 1000. I've been afraid to open the box for the past few months because I was convinced that it would never live up to my memories of it, but 20 pages into the manual (I couldn't read English the first time around), I am hooked. Maybe they were just better at writing manuals back then, but here is how the Sinclair's starts:
Timex Sinclair 1000: Getting Started
Welcome to the world of computing. Before you plug in your new Timex/Sinclair 1000, please take a moment to think about this exciting new adventure. We want to assure you that:
1. You will enjoy computing.
2. You will find it easy as well as enjoyable.
3. You shouldn't be afraid of the computer. You are smarter than it is. So is your parakeet, for that matter.
4. You will make mistakes as you learn. The computer will not laugh at you.
5. Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer. You can't break it by pushing the "wrong" button.
6. You are about to take a giant step into hte future. Everyone will soon be using computers in every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start.
I found this such a charming introduction to a product that I went looking at the manuals of today's greats only to be horribly disappointed. The iPhone, my most recent Mac, the Kindleâ all of these devices contain manuals and getting started guides that are at best balloon help for gadget consuming users who can't be bothered to stop to read. I even looked at the manual for the coolest toy I've seen in years: the Lego Mindstorms NXT, only to see similar Powerpoint-like "power arrows" pointing to colorful pictures of half assembled lego projects and Batman-like "Program!" callouts.
Oh what times those were back at the beginning of the Personal Computer boom!
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 16, 2008)
If want the opposite of a Sunday pick-me-upper, go and read Barry Ritholtz on "The Shallowest Generation" about how the self-indulgence of the Baby Boom generation has gotten us into the economic pickle we are currently facing. Not just a rant, the piece has got a bunch of really interesting data, including CEO pay over the last 18 years compared to the stock indices and more importantly, the average worker (see below) as well as a breakdown on what today's biggest consumers spend most of their borrowed money on (hint: eating and drinking seem to be surprisingly high on the list).
I do wish the piece had been a bit more balanced however. After claiming this:
Past U.S. generations invented the airplane; invented the automobile; discovered penicillin; and built the Interstate highway system. The Baby Boom generation has invented credit default swaps; mortgage backed securities; the fast food drive thru window; discovered the cure for erectile dysfunction; and built bridges to nowhere. No wonder weâre in so much trouble.
the author fails to mention that this same Baby Boom Generation gave us the PC, commercialized the Internet, and the mobile phone upon which we're likely to be basing the next big tech boom. In fact, just the other night, David sent me the Wikipedia page on 1970s technology 
in 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.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 8 months ago (Nov. 8, 2008)
In trying to break a dad-inflected addiction to the Nintendo DS for my six year-old, I just came across the Scratch project from the Lifelong Kindergarden lab at MIT. If you've ever wanted to teach kids the basics of programming in an engaging way, get over there and pick up a free copy of the Scratch environment right now. Scratch is what Logo meant to be but couldn't afford due to the resource limits of those early PCs. And the hour and a half we spent playing with it this morning was more fun than Mindstorms, OLPC, or any other such endeavors.
There are a lot of good things to be said for Scratch. Essentially, it is a graphical environment for animating sprites (shapes you draw on the screen with a primitive Paint-like application) along with sounds and effects. Much like Lego Mindstorms, the programming is done by snapping blocks together, except that unlike Mindstorms, the Scratch blocks seem to be able to stretch better to encompass the full power of control structures, variable assignment and all of those other "pesky programming things" that often leave the toy environments feeling like just that— toys.
The editor is very intuitive and relatively bug-free. Which is amazing considering that it is built on top of Squeak— a Smalltalk environment that I've spent the last two years playing with without really being able to get my head completely around. I suspect that a lot more is possible than the simple stuff we did this morning— and even then we got basic keyboard-controlled sprites along with effects, collision-detection, and some basic sound effects— all without reading any documentation and with zero prior experience. I spent quite a bit of time playing with a previous Squeak-based environment that ships in the OLPC, eToys, which I found horribly unintuitive.
But it doesn't stop there. The Scratch team has apparently been paying close attention to the whole "Web 2.0" thing because along with the programming environment, they've built a community site which contains all of the best collaborative features of a user-generated content repository. From the one-click upload within the Scratch environment, the Java applet that lets anyone embed their "scratches" (as the programs are called) into any webpage, to a tagged and filtered site for people to leave comments or download each other's scratches, the end-to-end experience leaves you feeling like you are part of something much bigger than just another attempt to teach programming to kids.
The only thing that surprises me about Scratch is how little attention it seems to be getting, especially given that they are local to Boston. Why anyone writing about the real innovation coming out the ashes of Web 2.0 isn't featuring these eternal kindergardeners (see this video to see how much they really do look like happy kindergardeners) is beyond me.
One final note: I'm not sure that "Mario fights the Alien" (our first game) broke the DS addiction but it was really special to see how, after telling me that what we'd done was "lame" and "embarrassing," my six year-old's face lit up when his little brother decided that the game was the bee's knees and spent the next 25 minutes engrossed in it. Nothing like that creative high, and it's 100% thanks to the work of the Scratch folks that this is possible with such a shallow learning curve.
(Go check out our game by clicking on this image)
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 26, 2008)
According to TechCrunch, YouTube has just released a URL extension that allows people to send around links not just to videos but to particular time codes within the video. This is a small feature but a big deal because it will allow for more fine-grained addressing into the relatively "un-webby" media format of video which I think of as the speed bump of modern web-based information consumption: click, scan, scroll, click, scan, videoâ crap! (five minutes later you realize you didn't really care to see that useless video review of the G1 because it never addressed the battery life issue you were researching).
Of course Jon Udell was writing about this stuff years ago; realizing that linearly consumed media needed finer addressability, he implemented a kludgey solution for audio transcripts that even worked. YouTube doing this though will hopefully set a new de-facto standard (are you listening Hulu?) and make video consumption online even more webby.
By the way, I think the next great contextualizing descendants of the recently popped Web 2.0 bubble may emerge from taking this notion of making traditionally un-bookmarkable objects bookmarkable in much the same way that YouTube did for television, and thinking along this access of finer and finer addressability is not a bad way to start. SMS bookmarking? Transaction bookmarking? Traffic bookmarking? It's all part of that wonderful emerging shared data cloud of ours!
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 24, 2008)
Kevin Kelly's "The Technium" is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for following the sociology of technology and his latest post on cloud culture does not disappoint. In it, he argues for some of the shifting social and cultural norms that the shift a web-native centralized model for computing (read: the cloud) are bringing about. My favorite— his observation that one of the basic cultural dynamics of the cloud is that we'll become "more smarter:"
Clouds don't have to be smarter than the web we have now, but they are likely to be. The web can be thought of hyperlinked documents. The clouds can be thought of as hyper-linked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Not just to have a convenient backup, or to have always on access, which the cloud WILL give, but to be able to weave together the data and interactivity of the parts, and thereby make all the pieces much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. It is not too much of an exaggeration to think of the cloud as the tool which allows us to share the elemental aspects of our data and activities in a way makes them smarter. The cloud is sort of a hivemind tool. (read the rest of the post)
Thinking about the platform shift from the perspective of the socio-cultural norms that will change with it moves us away from the geeky details of the browser-as-rich-runtime, 3G/4G/5G, and centralizing workloads at huge datacenters to the real game-changing opportunities that will come from threading everyone's activities and data into a natively interoperable set of 24x7 processes that can run semi-autonomously and reach their tentacles into ever-smarter and more portable access devices.
Now that is interesting.
Or certainly more interesting than the future I saw this week at CCA 08, a small conference on the emerging cloud computing architectures and their practical applications. Limited to about 70 folks from academia and business, the two day event convinced me of how early we are in this game— forget analogies about baseball and innings— we don't even seem to have gotten the players on to the field. Other than Amazon and Facebook and a handful of small open source projects, most of the rest of us still seem stuck in trying to bring our old and comfortable 3-tier applications into someone else's datacenter in an effort to cut costs and circumvent half-competent IT departments.
Sure we need cloud portability, sure the security story sucks right now. It'd be great to have better metrics for understanding the cost/cloud unit and I'm sure eventually we'll figure out whether it is 53% or 81% utilization that makes for the break-even point for building your own clusters.
These things seem to be implementation details to me however, and in the meanwhile it's good to see Kelly trying to provide us with some of that "vision thing."
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 20, 2008)
If you loved the replicators Gene Roddenberry introduced in "Star Trek: Next Generation," you should be following the work of all of the folks building out the budding "personal fabrication" industry. Yesterday I ran across this great summary of the various different technologies involved in turning the bits that course through the network into atoms.
This trend is a big deal for 2 reasons. First, as we get closer to bridging the virtual and the physical in all sorts of ways, from exporting the objects we create in virtual worlds to building sensor and actuator based projects that interact with the physical world, the need for custom parts of all shapes and sizes only increases. If we are really going to go through any kind of a physical computing amateur explosion of creativity (as we have multiple times in software), the technologies of custom manufacture need to become accessible to the typical garage tinkerer. Example: the other day, my friend Andy and I were talking about an Arduino-based robot platform and he very quickly descended into talking about "lots" of 5, 10, and 20 thousand which frankly gives me hives.
The second reason why it would be good for hackers, makers, and startups to focus in this space is because small-scale replication appears to be such a disruptive technology that none of the big companies are paying much attention. Working where I do, you'd think that I'd see tons of 3D printing projects sprouting up. Sadly though the reality seems to be that most of the folks I meet on the inside dismiss it as a fad which is nowhere near being applicable beyond a few very specialized industrial verticals (I bet someone probably through the same about vaporizing ink droplets and shooting them at high-speed at paper 25 years ago in the age of toner, but that is a story for another day).
Personally, I am about one late night away from trying to build one of these in my basement. If it wasn't because I have serious doubts about my own mechanical abilities assembling a project as complex as this one, I'd be happy to usher in the era of Skynet with self-replicating robots coming straight out of my basement!
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 6, 2008)
When two people as different as Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman manage to crap on a trend in the same week, it makes one think. In this case, the excrement was directed at the notion of "cloud computing," or moving what has traditionally happened on native PC applications to a server in a data center and a browser-based client. As Ellison stated, it's become such the rage that it's almost more helpful to describe the things that tech companies are doing these days that are *not* classified as cloud computing.
In thinking about the return to centralizing workloads, I was wondering whether we're just on that technology yo-yo that drives everyone from one extreme to anotherâ from totally distributed to totally centralized and back. After all, computing did start in a completely centralized way and most of its history has been towards distributing the workload. Here is my napkin art on the trend:
The evolution of computing
Now I'd be ready to sign up to the theory that we are going to yo-yo here as well, riding that red curve back and forth till the end of timeâ but for the blue line of ubiquitous bandwidth, a trend which seems as unidirectional as Moore's law.
In each of the previous shifts in computing (from mainframes to minis to PCs), it would seem that the driving force was an democratization of computing resources, with equivalent capabilities being offered to an ever-expanding audience. The businesses who couldn't afford mainframes thought the world of minis, and the consumers who couldn't afford those were delighted with the limited PCs of the day. In the case of browser-based computing, the democratization is taken one step further: think of the developing world where an MS Office license is ridiculous but where free Google Apps at an Internet cafe is a complete bargain.
This trend makes the notion of the yo-yo rolling back the curve pretty unlikely, unless of course one of the following factors makes distributed computing compelling again:
Features: There are still apps that can not be shoved into the browser: video editing or hardcore gaming. The advent of richer browsers (think Chrome with its 10x faster Javascript implementation) is definitely fighting this trend, especially for all but the most specialized of computing tasks (video, music, CAD/CAM, programming).
Cost: It's hard to imagine any scenario where the economies of scale don't favor huge data centers, especially when we add the cost to administer computers, but it might happen. Imagine solar-powered computers for instanceâ since rooftop surface area is much less plentiful in a datacenter, there might be some advantages where the lack of density actually helps the overall economics. Heat is another factor as is anything else that is currently a limiter inside a data center.
Policy: Think of the privacy implications of Google storing all of your data, or Facebook having access to your entire addressbook. It seems unlikely that we won't get much more prickly about privacy going forward, and it is not inconceivable that we won't see policy-driven decisions emerge that might force some degree of de-centralization. For instance, I can't imagine government data being floated into a cloudâ and especially not a foreign government's data into an American company's data center.
I'm not sure there is anything in these three buckets that will ever get us back to the ultra-distributed world that the PC ushered in in the late 1970s, so I just hope that we're not a frog in a pot that is slowly having its temperature raisedâ not even aware of the boiling we are about to experience.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Oct. 5, 2008)
Last week I lost the hard drive in my Macbook Air after about 3 months of it playing the Little Drummer Boy in that hard drive clicking language only terminally ill HDs can speak. It is remarkable that in over 15 years of owning Apple laptops, this is the first drive I've lost, though perhaps more indicative of the fact that it is just a bad idea to expect an iPod drive to be able to do the work of its bigger brethren.
As I attempted to reconstitute the machine, it occurred to me that we are still in the stone ages of virtualizing consumer storage so that people can really treat their small computing devices as active caches instead of as precious sources of data— which is a strange notion given how crowded the space of consumer backup sector is: from small but wonderful services like Dropbox, through at-scale startups like Carbonite, all the way to platform vendor services like Upline and MobileMe, it seems that no one has gotten it quite right in that there is no one place where you can go to seamlessly return to a known working state of your trashed device.
I use a 3-tier system to keep a few laptops in relative sync/backed up, and I can't help but think that this layered approach might actually be the right solution (for now), if only the players at each layer would focus on working well at their layer instead of covering the whole space. Here is how it works:
First, there is the data that is tightly coupled to the application but which needs to instantly replicate across all of my machines and other portable devices, specifically calendar, addressbook, and to-do info. From a shoveling bits perspective, this is really small and therefore easy to copy over even the slowest of networks. The challenge is in sync (and it is remarkable that there is still a challenge here given how many people have beaten their heads against this for the past 2 deacdes), and in making sure that as soon as I make a change on one client, it is replicated to the server and then to all of the other devices. Right now I use a combination of MobileMe and Exchange for this— and it is truly remarkable how poor each of the solutions is— a suckage that is only multiplied when one tries to use them together.
Second, there is data that is loosely coupled to specific applications but in need of quick replication across a number of machines. These are the Office docs, source files, graphics assets, etc. that I might be actively working with at any given moment. Not a huge amount of data, but enough that you have to be somewhat smart about replication to keep from constantly overtaxing the network. A good source control system (I use subversion) is a great model for how this tier of data replication should work, and in fact the solution I've come to use for non source control files— a startup called Dropbox— is just a prettied up source control repository with a set of great clients. Most of the startups in the "consumer storage" space play in this tier, though they tend to spread themselves too thin and (unlike Dropbox) forget about the importance of having a really fast and reliable client.
Finally, there is the "everything else" which should represent everything from / on the machine's drive. I'm talking about applications, application support data, configuration files, etc. On the drive I lost this was about 40GB of tweaked OS & apps that I had spent close to a year customizing. The theory on this tier is that in the near term you won't see enough pipe to be able to back it up offsite so a local solution is necessary. I use the Apple Time Capsule product, which is basically a 1TB drive hooked into a wireless router and a client app that performs full disk backups on a schedule. It works ok— not great— mostly because the client is not good at understanding that laptops are opened and closed a lot and that it needs to be smart about pausing/resuming the backups accordingly. Also, the restore process doesn't overwrite the Apple-installed applications which is deadly when you've done thinks to tweak those, or say when your tightly bound application metadata has been changed by a later version of the application than what the reinstalled operating system has.
Eventually (maybe a decade from now), we'll all go to a system where everything is replicated instantly to some cloud provider— maybe even with a VM instance of the running machine being continuously streamed up for to-the-moment restoring of state. But until we get to this Star Trek universe if I were in this space, I might think about these three layers, decide where it is that I want to play, and focus maniacally of the details that still make each of them suck so much.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Sept. 18, 2008)
Whenever Fake Steve would lampoon the real Steve and the iPhone using the phrase "childlike wonder" for the feeling the iPhone creates in its users, I'd always think about this toy I had growing up, the Milton-Bradley Big Trak, a programmable tank born of an era when 8 bit microprocessors became feasible components of toys.
Thanks the power of eBay and a dedicated friend, I just got a Big Trak again (more than 25 years after the fact) just to see if that childlike wonder was still there. And boy, is it ever.
Think of the Big Trak as the physical manifestation of Papert's turtle (from the Logo programming language) in that you "program" it by entering rudimentary instructions, i.e., forward 2 lengths, right 30 degrees, pulse laser 4 times, etc, and then watch it execute your program in the context of the physical world. You also get a sleep() call and for the extra geeky, loops to repeat groups of instructionsâ all with just a 12-digit keypad and no visible display (take that crappy toys of today!)
Growing up my favorite game was trying to get the Big Trak to step its way through an obstacle course with only its program for help. Last night in showing it to my kids, we came up with a suitably modernized (read: violent) version of this game. While one person programmed the tank, the other two would take stationery positions in the room. The goal was to drive the tank within 3 feet of one and "kill" them with the laser. I was floored at how quickly my six year old grasped the basics of getting the tank to move and fireâ something he has just never gotten with all of the educational crapware I've exposed him to.
When people tell me that you can't teach kids to program, I always think of that Big Trak -> Timex Sinclair -> Apple ][ progression that I had the privilege of having. It's nice to see that it wasn't nostalgia that had inflated my notion of just what a great toy can do.
Pictured here: a picture of the manual which of course I couldn't read back in the day but which is beautifully designed and very well-written.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Sept. 2, 2008)
Google is launching a new web browser that on the face of it seems more like a mini operating system than a traditional web browser. They believe the future of the web is applications and not pages and are thus trying to give us a better runtime for it.
As tech news go, the only surprising thing about it their de facto endorsement of Webkit over Gecko as browser guts. I have a feeling that this may be the beginning of the long slide for Firefox, but only time will tell. The only other thing worth noting is that Chrome is part browser and part rich runtime; that is, baking projects like Gears, and chromeless webapp containers (a la Fluid or Prism), along with a lightning fast Javascript VM is likely to make Chrome just as much of a Silverlight/AIR competitor as it is to make it an IE/Firefox one.
What is most fascinating about the announcement though is their hiring Scott McCloud (the guy behind Understanding Comics) to author the product literature as a comic bookâ an absolutely brilliant marketing move. The web experience of reading the comic book is absolutely horrendous and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why Google doesn't just provide a PDF that we could print out, but I can't say enough good stuff about the overall concept.
McCloud is a brilliant visual communicator, and this comic book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the web, or in technical writing of any kind. It reminded me of why Daniel Pink's experiment, Johnny Bunko, a career-advice book written as a manga, was so compelling.
Except that in this case McCloud has taken an even more boring subject, browsers, and has wrapped a lucid and entertaining story around it.
When we started Tabblo, my friend Jerry pointed me to Understanding Comics and said that if we were serious about visual storytelling, everyone we hired should become well acquainted with McCloud's work. Today thanks to Google, I think that a lot of people will.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 23, 2008)
My new favorite section of the New York Times (a blog-like tech section called Bits) has a piece on the plummeting prices of what they call "Netbooks," or ultra small portables with low-end components and even lower prices. Netbooks belong to a new category of products called M.I.D.s (Mobile Internet Devices) which are apparently selling like hot cakes because of two intersecting trends: mobility and ubiquitous Internet access.
MIDs as a category are hard to ignore which is why every major PC vendor is now playing fast follower to those that led the way (even we at HP are now shipping various versions of the 2133). Most look like small laptops (though some like the Nokia 800/810 tablet push the form factor beyond that) which implies having to have small fingers or loads of patience to be productive, but this is a small price to pay, especially for kids.
I'm a believer. The only thing I'd love to see as part of the emerging MID category is a permanent, bundled in, Internet connection, much like the Amazon Kindle's. If the Bits piece is correct and prices could soon hit $199 on the standalone devices, $399 might just be enough to incent one of the EVDO carriers into a 2 year term of service. And that is before considering some of the more compelling subsidy models. For instance, if I were Larry or Sergey, I'd look to sponsor a device like this targeted at schools in exchange for nothing more than making them Google branded (sure beats the pants off of flying around in a master-of-the-universe customized 767.)
Imagine how compelling that might make the device for the millions of school kids in the US who attend crappy public schools and have no broadband at home. A relatively standard PC (unlike say a pie-in-the-sky reinvention of personal computing a la OLPC) with a permanent net connection might be just enough incentive to get kids interested in treating these much like the kids in Stephenson's Diamond Age. Then we'd just have to get started with the really challenging bitâ writing the primer's software!
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 10, 2008)
My brother was recently telling me about grounding my thirteen year-old nephew for 3 weeks. He lost his ability to invite friends over, watch TV, play Xbox, and even putter around on his laptop. Despite this, the kid remained surprisingly smug about his prospects for the next 3 weeks bored. Apparently his dad forgot to take all of his screens away— and with his iPod touch still in hand, he felt that he had beaten the rap's worst consequence: being disconnected.
Having just finished reading Cory Doctorow's wonderfully entertaining tale of teenage Geek culture in his polemic against the Patriot Act and all of our loss of privacy in recent years, I was again reminded of how fast kids can take ownership of new technologies in ways that leaves the grownups scratching their heads and... just generally feeling old.
Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," has a really rich description of this world being conquered by teenage geeks, one that struck me as both incredibly realistic, and quite telling of how the first post-PC, post-Internet generation expects to be able to own their electronic fates— from media to communications to the interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds, the narrative serves as much better guidepost for what is coming than all of the artificial "teenage panels" that seem to come at the end of every tech conference these days ("what will you kids pay for?" is always my favorite dumb question at these), or even the ethnographic academic studies that always seem to conclude that kids really like to "socialize."
In the book, three teenagers wage war on an out-of-control Homeland Security by employing crypto, open source, hardware hacking, and social engineering, all without seeming like the contrived movie characters who are always a little too glib, a little too knowledgeable. In fact reading the book on the 25th anniversary of War Games is fitting, for not since Broderick's everday geek have I seen such believable kid-hacker characters, and enjoyed so thoroughly the honest portrayal of self-discovery and confidence building that comes from twisting technology to tweak the system.
Update: The real world imitates art with kids hacking the MBTA, "arphids" and all...
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
,
books
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 12 months ago (Aug. 3, 2008)
When I first read "The Pragmatic Programmer" back in 2000, I remember being bowled over, not because there was any one brilliant insight, but because there were so many suggestions proposed by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt that succinctly described what I knew to be some of my better habits without really knowing why. It was almost as though they were reaching inside my brain and explaining things that I somehow understood without knowing why.
With what may come to be known as that book's sequel, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning
," Andy Hunt does exactly that— reaches inside your brain to take you on a mystery tour of it, from theories about skill acquisition (the Dreyfus model), to explaining how insight "bubbles up," to suggesting how you might improve various cognitive facilities. I've just finished the "beta 7" version of the book (available as a PDF for $22, but don't worry, with these guys beta 0.01 is much better than most publishers's final product), and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to any fans of PragProg, and even to any non-programmer involved in any kind of intellectual work who is curious about how their wetware (brain) works under different circumstances.
One note: the book will be even less relevant to software engineer's direct tools than PragProg was (though that still didn't stop PragProg from being the best book written for software engineers since "The Unix Programming Environment"). Think of it instead as the famous lost manual to the superhero suit in the TV show Greatest American Hero— except that instead of being the instructions to a super-powered suit made by aliens from space, this book will serve the manual for something much more important— your brain.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 20, 2008)
Every great startup has an exciting and superb "founding story:" eBay and Pez dispensers, Apple and the garage tinkering of the two Steves, Microsoft and its BASIC, and so on. In the case of Amazon and its web services (AWS, albeit not quite a startup but close enough), the founding story goes something like this: aware that they had built up incredibly robust excess capacity for handling the peaks of e-commerce traffic on Amazon.com, the bright minds from Seattle decided to offer the same capacity to the rest of the web, kicking off the era of cloud computing for the thousands of customers that signed up for their triple threat of services: S3 (storage), EC2 (compute cyles), and SQS (messaging queues).
And yet, if AWS is using Amazon.com's excess capacity, why has S3 been down for most of the day, rendering most of the profile images and other assets of Web 2.0 tapestry completely inaccessible while at the same time I can't manage to find even a single 404 on Amazon.com? Wouldn't they be using the same infrastructure for their store that they sell to the rest of us?
Outages like this one will for sure fuel the fire of all of the startups trying to sell "cloud redundancy" to people who want to fail over seamlessly between providers.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (June 30, 2008)
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.
Tags:
buddies
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digerati
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 28, 2008)
These paper prototypes of popular websites (via Waxy Links) are absolutely charming. I've always loved drawing paper interfaces because of the way that they help to clarify thinking about what is important. On paper you never have the space (or in my case the skill) to get specific about the details that ultimately don't matter as much as the one or two key actions on each screen.
In fact, I've often wondered why there are no good computer-based prototyping toolsâ or at least ones that approximate the best qualities of paper. Using Photoshop to prototype interfaces is like using a jackhammer to make ice sculptures; with enough practice you can do it, but there has got to be a better way. Over the years, I've found some tools that help to wireframe (Visio, OmniGraffle), but all of these are still too cumbersome and provide little if any help in terms of interactivity. It is no wonder then that some in the web design community are advocating jumping straight to HTML from paper.
Here is a lazy web idea that might help experience designers: how about a software application that let folks scan in their paper prototypes and then manipulate them with simple drawing/animating tools via point and click. The result would look a lot like Ambrosia's SketchFighter 4000 game (in the best of circumstances) but it would give the prototyper both the speed of initial design that paper provides, and the ability to quickly iterate and animate on the computer. With a few fancy filters, one might even be able to start formalizing the digitized paper prototype by replacing the hand-drawn geometric shapes with real polygons.
Back in the 80s, Dan Bricklin developed "Dan Bricklin's Demo Program" for prototyping text-based applications. Though I've never seen it run, I understand from people that used it that the application developed a cult following among early PC application developers. This scanned paper prototypes application might just fill the same need for the web generation.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 22, 2008)
Just finished reading Charles Stross's latest novel, Glasshouse (incidentally the first fictional work I've actually finished on my Kindle), which is a pretty entertaining sc-ifi novel. As usual with Stross, it is full of great science that makes you wonder what life will be like in a universe where we can back ourselves up, travel faster than light, and change physical bodies at will.
My favorite thing about this book though was the way in which the author throws in all of this running commentary about what life was like in the late 20th century (the glasshouse is a prison set in our time period), and specifically this particular bit on why the 21st century marked the beginning of a dark age before the "acceleration:"
"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For erasons of commercial advantage some of the largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quanitites of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.
This bit ought to be music to any of the digital pack rats that read this blog. A while ago I thought I had this problem licked— I'd periodically burn gigabytes of files to CD, then DVD, and finally the cloud (through services like Amazon's S3). Recently though I was looking for an 8 year-old tarball of some source code from a previous life (Memora) and spent 2 days searching only to find that it was useless because of how utterly impossible it would be to re-create the build environment.
As we throw away old technologies— be they build environments, old OSes, or even web services that have lost their way (I've been thinking a lot about this as it pertains to Flickr given the recent exodus), we might stop to think just what it would take for the kind of virtualization that would save us from Stross's dark ages.
Tags:
buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 14, 2008)
Three lessons, from simplest to deepest:
1. That "live blogging" stuff requires the right template, and the blog format just wasn't right. Talking to folks that followed the live updates, it turns out that it's kind of annoying to see 140 character "title posts" which are paginated 5 at a time. Oh yeah, and Twitter still sucks; due the fact that their API was overwhelmed and I was using it to post there after posting to my blog, I got some really bad duplication problems.
2. Apple is finally getting the whole cloud thing, and more specifically, there are at least some folks there that have gotten the AJAX religion. I remember 3 companies ago being there to pitch one of their experience folks on a web-based music server, the summer before the iPod, and way before the current crop of really capable Javascript/DHTML engines. This designer, let's call him John, told us that apps in the browser were a passing fad, and an ugly one at that. And in a way, in 2001 they were, but these days Apple is dead serious about it (so much so that they are willing to spend cycles pushing their Javascript engine to the front of the pack). There were plenty of sessions related to web apps for Safari for deployment on both the Mac and the iPhone and little of that typical second class citizen feeling that Apple is known for (Java/Cocoa bridge anyone?)
3. That Apple couldn't achieve escape velocity and get out from under the carrier-runs-the-world model that mobile computing is subject to in the US sucksâ it sucks really bad. While people may be excited about the new $199 price tag, there are going to be so many old problems in going back to that model. The awesome iTunes activation model for the phone? Gone. The way you could just gift iPhones to spread the cult of Apple? Not without stealing the recipient's identity. The impunity with which you could trash your iPhone knowing that for $250 Apple would give you a new one? No mas. And perhaps most importantly, the critical missing functionality like IM or unfettered access to the 3G network? Not likely, not as long as they might potentially undermine some Guantanamoesque carrier business model.
This last one is the big take-away for me; in short it means that we're going back to a world where we rent our mobile computing experience and hope that our feudal overlords (the carriers) dole out the features at a decent enough rate.
As I was flying back, it occurred to me that two groups of folks who I've enjoyed lampooning over the last few months, the iPhone jailbreakers and the Android people, may actually be really important as we move towards evolving the mobile experience in spite of carrier interests. So please please please go hug one of these lovable rebels who live by their own rules ;)
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 8, 2008)
I am going out to California tomorrow and if all goes well, I'll be dropping by the keynote at WWDC to see what goodies Apple has in store for us. Last time I went to one of these, one of the most fun parts of the experience was trying to get the word out to friends and family back home in real timeâ the rabid Apple fansâ about what was being announced by Steve on stage. I quickly discovered that Wi-Fi is totally useless at these events (because everyone else is trying to do the same thing), and that the only truly reliable messaging layer was SMS which really meant that all I could do in terms of group broadcast was Twitter. However during Macworld back in January Twitter dropped 50-70% of my updates and duplicated a bunch of the ones that made it through, no doubt because everyone else sitting in Moscone was in the process of trying to do the same.
I am quickly discovering that Twitter just doesn't cut it, not only because of its scaling problems (especially around events like these), but because I've got a lot of people in my life that have no interest in joining Twitter, and even when they do, find it difficult to stay engaged. These folks do come to read this blog though, so tomorrow's experiment is going to be to use the Onda as a sort of Twitter stream.
To do this, I wired in a web service called Textmarks into this blog. Essentially Textmarks provides a neat gateway between SMS and http where you can send a text with a keyword that can fetch the contents of a URL for automated replies. My current plan is to text short messages that will then become blog post titles with no bodies. This should create a Twitter-like experience for anyone using an RSS reader, and for those that don't, a simple refresh of the main page of the blog ought to provide a running stream.
I thought about having each of the SMSes update just one blog entry to minimize the noise on my RSS feed, but it occurred to me that this would break the way that RSS is supposed to flow content around the network. Also, asking people to subscribe to an RSS feed tied to one blog post seems a little goofy.
Instead where I decided to get was in adding an email-to-post mechanism where I can send an email with a photo and some text to a particular Gmail account that then generates a blog entry with the picture parked at Amazon's S3 (I could have used Flickr but wanted to play around with S3). Most mainstream blogging platforms have email-to-blog so there is nothing really novel in this (we had a little-publicized feature at Tabblo that did something similar that I loved, however it didn't survive the move into HP's datacenter); what really struck me about the exercise though was how relatively simple it is to wire together all of these pieces. In a couple of hours it was easy to speak IMAP to Gmail to get my photo and text out, use S3's relatively straight-forward HTTP interface to deposit the image, get a fast and (hopefully) reliable Textmarks SMS-to-web bridge and composite the whole thing as an entry into my blog for general consumption. For distribution, RSS does the rest. As a nice bonus, I've also used the Twitter API to put pointers to the stuff that will go up here into my Twitter account, though in a non-blocking way as the service will most likely suffer another outage tomorrow.
In this great new world of the web, these experiments are relatively cheap. Most will fall way short of being useful, but I suspect that it is only by messing around with all of these pieces in a loosely coupled way that we'll bump into something really interesting.
On to WWDC...
Tags:
hackers
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buddies
,
digerati
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 7, 2008)
Javascript runtimes hosted in the browser are in the air.
A few weeks ago, I was blown away by John Resig's "side project" implementation of the Processing language in Javascript. I'd heard a lot of great things about Processing as a learning and visualization language but hadn't really bothered to look until I saw that John had more or less shoehorned it into browser, graphics and all.
Then this week, some Objective C fans came out with a Keynote clone that is also amazing not necessarily because we need another online presentation tool, but because its implementation was done with something they created called "Objective J" which seems to be a port of the Objective C language to the Javascript runtime.
(Both Objective J and Processing.js are actually translators in that they take the respective source languages, Processing and Objective C, and generate Javascript that then executes in the browser).
It's amazing that we've got enough CPU cycles to spare for this kind of thing. Layers upon layers of abstraction with pretty good performance to boot. And if that wasn't enough, the hackers behind WebKit are doing some crazy mojo to speed up on of the leading Javascript implementations out thereâ using techniques borrowed from all of the VM research of the last 30 years that have traditionally been applied to JVMs and the .NET runtime.
Maybe it is because I'm getting old and stuck in my ways, but I have little to no interest in learning Silverlight, Flash/Flex, or any of these other rich runtimes that vendors are trying to jam into the web. For a long time now, Flash has had its place, but it strikes me that improvements in technologies like the Canvas widget, CSS, and the speed and robustness of the Javascript runtimes are encroaching on Flash's long-time sweet spot and that at the current rate, it won't be long before it gets relegated to the role of media player.
Yay to the web becoming the platform to rule them all!
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 25, 2008)
A semi-local yokel, Jonathan Zittrain (from Harvard's own Berkman center) made headlines a couple of weeks ago with the claim that all of the devices which we are most excited about (Blackberries, Xboxes, and even iPhones) are actually wrecking the fabric of what has made the Internet such a fantastic substrate for innovation: its openness. Making a distinction between what he calls "generative" platforms, where users can improve the basic function of the platform through open extension points like the Win32 API, and non-generative ones that are built on the back of closed service/appliance loops that only the vendor in charge can control, he argues that we consumers need to be careful of becoming too star-struck by our smart devices.
I prefer to think that these semi-closed architectures actually exist for a good reason (beyond vendor lock-in of course): to allow for the creation of user experiences which delighted instead of frustrate (think of the iPhone versus just about any smartphone built of the "generative" Windows Mobile platform). More importantly, even the most closed of vendors understand that it is imperative to build in check valves for openness into the appliances they make: this is why the iPod can be side-loaded with ripped MP3s and the iPhone can be extended with Safari-powered webapps. Imagine either device losing that capability. Even Amazon's much more closed Kindle platform (more below) accepts arbitrary content through an email endpoint, albeit one that exacts a $0.10 toll per article thanks to the need for Sprint to get paid.
And speaking of those pesky operators, this morning I read a piece by Joi Ito arguing that the mobile Internet may not be such a great place for innovation, mostly because it is controlled by a few carriers which flow profits into a small ecosystem of vendors, whereas on the open Internet, anyone can play. I agree that where network-related profits are concerned, this is the case; witness the rise of all of those 1990s style telecom equipment providers to see how tightly this particular profit pool can be controlled. But this control doesn't mean that network operators can avoid the open check valve existing in their offering as wellâ in fact, by the very nature of the service they provide, it is baked in. So long as we users can treat them like "power, ping, and pipe" providers (something which has only recently emerged in the US with number portability and unlimited data plans), I'd bet that they will soon find themselves in the unenviable position of the Comcasts and Verizons of fixed line broadband, competing mostly on speeds and feeds.
Call me an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing how in the era of Makers and blogs/wikis/online communities, any of these emerging Internet platforms and data services are likely to lead us to a point where suddenly discover ourselves trapped, incapable of finding the right extension points for what we might want our devices to do. And not only because of the current zeitgeist (we are now the Tivo generation for everything!)â rather, the main reason why I don't worry is because fundamentally the business models used by these platforms are aligned with what we users want: if Apple tries to screw us too badly with a closed iPhone ecosystem, we simply won't buy their devices (incidentally, this is the #1 reason people give me as to why they are not buying Kindles, because Amazon is exerting too much control). The unit of value is the device or service and as users we have to continue to open our wallets for them to continue to succeed. And fortunately for us, in most of cases today, unlike the 90s Microsoft monopoly, we've got credible choice.
If people want to be paranoid of vendors, I'd be more likely to point to places where the user and the business model get cross to each other, as in the case of the user need for data portability and the business of advertising in the recent case of Facebook screwing Google and its FriendConnect. Because they are fundamentally selling targeted advertising, Facebook is likely to do whatever it takes to keep their users' data siloed, and in the process it is the end user who loses. Today this is too abstract for most regular folks to really grasp (though Scott Karp's piece does an excellent job of laying out the key issues), but it is worth keeping a much closer eye on that the emerging connected device platforms.
In the meanwhile, just keep a close eye on those openness check valves.
Tags:
buddies
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embahs
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 19, 2008)
An observant friend recently heard me on a tear about the surge in historical fiction and commented that my one of my favorite genres, science fiction, was nothing more than forward-looking historical fiction. While this did not cause me to run out to read The Other Boleyn Girl, it did make me wonder why I like scifi so much while having so little patience for the Victorian era. The answer I believe, comes down to the fact that science fiction paints a world that might be rather than one that was, giving us a glimpse into what is around the next corner.
But if this is the metric for success, the science fiction that is closerâ often not even called science fiction but other goofy names like "the techno thriller genre"â should appeal more to me. And indeed it often does so long as it doesn't suffer from the fact that it can get really tedious and boring. I remember first discovering the novels of Tom Clancy (which noone in their right mind would consider SF until you get into the military tech stuff he covers), only to be bored to tears by the fifth description of the classified radar system and the nth military acronym (Clancy should have worked at HP where the alphabet soup rages on).
I've just finished a book though which gets right to the core of what makes near term science fiction work really well; it is called Daemon and is written by Leinad Zeraus (more on that weird name later). I don't want to ruin the plot by writing about it here; suffice it to say that this is the best scifi/technothriller/whatever that I have read in a long time. The plot is spectacular, the characters are believable as hell, and best of all, the author starts from a landscape which is very much rooted in today's world and slowly brings in bits of the future in a way that is both believable and staves off the eventual Clancy-esque or Crichton-esque narration that ends up sounding like a parts list for what's hot in Popular Science this month.
During the first dot com boom, I ran into several folks who would brandish dog-eared copies of Snowcrash and talk about how the net was going to bring this world into being "very soon now." A decade later the world that Daemon paints to is much closer at hand. For instance (and this is the one plot spoiler): massively multiplayer online environments, GPS-based overlays into the physical world, hijacked servers, and private equity run amok all figure prominently in the plotâ and the way in which they each do is imminently believable.
A word on the strangely named Leinad Zeraus. It turns out that this is the pseudonym of Daniel Suarez, a DB consultant in the Valley who self-published the book through Amazon's Lightning Source partnership. Of course you can't tell any of this from the end-to-end experience: the book can be seen on Amazon and comes via Prime looking like a standard paperback, but according to a recent piece I read in Wired, Suarez and his wife published it and used all sorts of good Web 2.0 tactics to get the word out (getting a pseudonym with good Google juice, reaching out to A-list bloggers) after being turned down by a bunch of folks in the "conventional" channel.
William Gibson is right after all: the future is here; it's just not widely distributed.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (May 12, 2008)
For me, the power of YouTube has always been about one thing: being able to bookmark pieces of interesting mainstream content that could then be forwarded around in email. For every genius amateur video I've been sent, I've had 5 young Asian guitar virtuosos and 100 SNL skits, Simpsons scenes, or Daily Show interviews. Giving chunks for television permalinks seemed novel enough— the next step in the evolution of Tivo even— even if it wasn't the best thing since the web itself.
In fact I've always been rather sanguine on the prospects of embedded video on web pages (mostly because of the linear consumption challenges that come with any form of rich media). Recently though, I've seen two great uses for embedded video that have brought me back to the conclusion I came to after seeing the New York Times's annotated Obama speech: that video online is more about interface and context than it has ever been on any other screen.
The first, TimeTube, is a brilliant reworking of the standard online interface for consuming video that YouTube pioneered and everyone else copied. Recently I heard an entrepreneur defending all of the cloners of this interface because of the fact that "people are used to it now and find it familiar." However, it only takes 5 minutes of playing around with TimeTube to realize what bad interface designers the YouTube guys were, and how much more is possible when mixing links and videos.
I ran into the second example while performing surgery on my Macbook this weekend. It has now become a yearly event for me to switch out my laptop's hard drive (usually triggered by yet another amazing doubling in HD capacity at a given pricepoint), though I usually loathe the experience of coming to the end of a two hour wrestle with 5 extra screws and no idea of where I should have put them (I've done this now across 3 different laptop models with +/- 3 screws no matter how hard I try).
This year I decided to follow one of the videos that the nice folks from OWC put up for changing various Mac parts and the result was a neat case of the linearity of consumption of video actually helping by guiding me in realtime as I dissected and then reassembled the MacBook. I had to pause and rewind a little in a couple of places, but the overall process was much smoother than its ever been before, thanks to the power of being able to do it alongside my virtual repairman (in fact at one point he got a little stuck, I got a little ahead and somehow managed to miss disconnecting some important cable leading to the laptop's flux capacitor).
I used to think that the bright future of all online video would come when computers could extract meaning from video files and present us with indexes that let us randomly seek to the relevant points, but this week I was again struck by how much usefulness we can still get out of proper contextualization and solid interface design. Go look at TimeTube and think about how this kind of an interface for video navigation could be used to teach more important things than hard drive replacement if you have any doubts.
Tags:
buddies
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 9, 2008)
For anyone who works on the web and grew up in the 80s playing the original Nintendo Super Mario Bros. who wants to have their mind bent (in a good way), go and check out an implementation of the game in pure Javascript, downloadable as one 14kb file!
It is a true sign on how many processor cycles we've gained in the past 25 years that this can be done in a high-level language meant to execute simple web scripts.
Whenever I see folks on the bleeding edge of web development pushing the envelope like this, I think of that old Apple commercial that celebrated the crazy ones who just "think different" and show the rest of us how much is starting to fall under the realm of the possible.
Update: John Resig has done a
great dissection of how the data is packed in one file.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 7, 2008)
My love affair with site specific browsers has ended up a casualty of its confrontation with reality. As TechCrunch is getting ready to spin up the notion of Desktop/Web hybrid applications as the "New Old Thing," I figured it was time to point out the big hole that I did not realize until I started playing: managing security can really get you.
My interest in SSBs was borne out of two recent events: 1. that at HP there are now lots of people looking at this question of the Next Big Platform for application development and 2. that in my time here, I've also been forced to abandon Mail.app/IMAP for Gmail on the web due to all sorts of Firewall/IT complications and I've gotten tired of not having better desktop integration (drag-and-drop attachments, Ctrl-N for new messages, etc.). Figuring that I might be able both of these things from something like a Greasemonkey-enhanced Gmail, I started playing with Firefox 3 but quickly moved to Fluid due to the fact that Firefox was running like a resource pig on my Macbook. One of the apps mentioned in the TechCrunch piece cited above, Fluid does a great job of integrating a bunch of open source projects, specifically Webkit (great renderer), GreaseKit (Greasemonkey for Webkit), and Growl (desktop-level notifications). Together, I was hoping these three might let me get my drag-and-drop and keyboard shortcuts back. Or at the very least, give me a glimpse of the future of the desktop/web integration nirvana that everyone keeps theorizing about.
Unfortunately the black magic of this type of integration completely sidesteps the fact that you can quickly open up security holes worthy of trucks being driven through, especially around providing desktop-level Javascript access to the execution context of externally loaded Javascripts. In fact, even in the early days of Greasemonkey this was obvious to folks brighter than I and as a result, a whole re-architecture of the way Greasemonkey injects the local context into running web pages was needed. In the case of Greasekit however, the author felt it wiser just to pull out all of the GM_ objects that provide some of the more powerful features something that Fluid suffers as a result of.
Some of these issues can be overcome but an early brush with a big old security hole (that would give a malicious script access to my entire filesystem) got me back to thinking that we might want to wait to see how some of the big boys solve these problems. Because at least they have people whose jobs depend on not opening up huge security holes (then again, Microsoft has proven that this doesn't make a huge difference in the end).
So the romance is gone for the SSBsâ at least until we a better handle on how to properly implement a security model that still exposes us to the cool guts at the intersection of the desktop and the web.
Next up: bookmarklets and AIR.
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buddies
,
geeks
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (March 31, 2008)
So Google has finally used its offline shim, Google Gears, on the second of their apps, enabling Google Docs to make word processing offline a reality. Big single hand clap for the boys from Mountainview: we can now rely on the cloud platform to do what MacWrite did for us 24 years ago and only a year into the whole Gears thing!
I am only half-joking here. Despite the fact that this move to the cloud is probably the biggest platform shift in computing since the rise of the PC, I'm a little surprised at how the big boys' client stories are moving. For instance, Google Gears has been in beta since last summer and we've still got no support for Safari and little use inside of the Google application suite. Where is offline Gmail?
And as far as the "rich runtimes" are concerned, I remain unimpressed with the minimal offline value they bring. For example, I've been playing with a couple of the Adobe AIR Twitter clients, the best of which seems to be Twhirl, which still feels more like web widgets pasted into the desktop. In fact, the only thing I can say about all of the AIR applications I've played with is that the best of them feel like Winamp did back in the late 90sâ sort of "different" for the sake of being different.
Lately, I've been thinking much more about the client side of the cloud enabling real desktop applications to make a comeback, but with the bulk of their interface being painted inside of an AJAX-enriched web browsing experience. This was why I am growing more excited about SSBs (Single Site Browsers) and also why I'm fairly intrigued by the growing popularity and portability of Webkit as a rendering engine. When combined with self-updating frameworks like Sparkle or easy Greasemonkey integration from projects like Greasekit, we might just be starting to see the outlines of the client side of cloud computing.
It's interesting to see that while the elephants are dancing in the room, we might do well to pay attention to some of the small mice scurrying about.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 28, 2008)
I attended one of Scott's Nantucket 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.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 27, 2008)
Almost one year in, one of the biggest surprises about my new execujob is how little I've come to like the senior "technology architecture & strategy" discussions that I'm invited to sit in on. I had originally thought that being at the biggest tech company in the world would provide some unique perspective on the hot topics of the day (cloud computing, green computing, the semantic web, the blurring of the desktop and the web) that you wouldn't get out in the wild. In reality all I've done is develop an ability to breathe in really shallow atmosphere situations, as most of these discussions take place at such high altitude that I've taken to bringing Kleenex in order to stem the nosebleeds.
Naturally one of the hottest topics these days is the definition of the runtime for the next generation of Internet applications. With Microsoft and Adobe and their vendor sports death match (Silverlight versus AIR) fueling most of the recent debate, and Google/Yahoo/everyone else who matters looking to get more life out of the heavy server/light browser architecture that has become predominant over the last 10 years, it should actually be an interesting discussion.
But alas at 100,000 feet, all of the platform tradeoffs look like small dots in the distance. Everyone's got their favorite example: Microsoft is pushing the whole rich interactivity concept with their zoomable Hard Rock demo (and upcoming Olympics Silverlight-based coverage), and just today Adobe has entered their canonical example into the ring with Photoshop Express. I'm personally much more interested in every day applications that regular folks have gotten used to compromising on, either in their desktop version, or in their browser-based one. Apps like: email, instant messaging, or even word processing.
When considering the web versions of these guys, everyone gravitates towards the offline story because that is the place where the current generation of web-based applications falls down most dramatically. However, with every browser vendor embedding SQLite and efforts like Google Gears well underway, and with the ever expanding reach of the network into every offline nook and cranny, it is unlikely that this will remain a problem for much longer.
Where there tradeoffs get more interesting however, is when it comes to desktop integration. It is ridiculous that 24 years into the evolution of the GUI, the browser makes us take a step back when it comes to simple things like uploading files to a web service or slightly more ambitious ones like integrating across applications. Yet that is exactly where we find ourselves today.
To see how much I missed proper desktop integration in my everyday consumption of one of these apps (Gmail), I recently downloaded a $25 OS X program called Mailplane which puts a very thin rich client wrapper around the Gmail experience. Ideally this is the kind of thing that Google itself could build with something like AIR or Silverlight but while those guys take their time getting to the useful applications (instead of the eye-catching ones), I figured I would skip to the blended desktop/web future by tinkering with Mailplane.
My conclusion (after two weeks): integration really does make for a much better experience. Here are the things that Mailplane does that make me feel happier:
1. All of the standard keyboard shortcuts work as you would expect (i.e., command-N gives me a new message)
2. Inter-application stuff works as expected as well (i.e., "Mail this link" opens a new message in Mailplane with the link in the body)
3. Notification works: on OS X, the incredibly useful Growl notification system can show incoming/outgoing messages like Outlook does along with the icon in the Dock showing the number of new messages)
4. File attachment works as well: unlike the goofy behavior that most web browsers implement when you drop a file on them (to open said file), dropping a file into Mailplane results in it being attached to the outgoing email. This is a huge deal, especially as we rely more on apps and less on the Finder/Explorer to wrangle our data.
There are two downsides to Mailplane. First, because it spins up a separate process with a browser in it (an embedded version of Webkit), it does consume RAM galore, especially in an AJAX-heavy webapp like Gmail). More importantly however, it is a traditional desktop application which means that in this case you have to pay ($25 per seat seems a bit steep in today's world) and that your app preferences are ghettoed in the client computer that you originally installed it on. Ideally, the rich runtimes would help to solve both of these problems.
While researching whether there might be something better out there that might address some of these shortcomings, I ran into this Mozilla Prism inspired project, Fluid, which allows you to create site-specific browsers that approach some of the same functionality that Mailplane provides (through the embedded Greasemonkey functionality). As I played with this "Site Specific Browser" approach however, I found that I wasn't getting enough of 1-4 to make it any better than keeping these webapps in separate tabs.
Here's what I'd love to author of Fluid to do (or some other such force out there on the Lazy Web): wrap a Javascript API around each of my points above so that if a website (or even a user via the built in Greasemonkey functionality) wanted to implement notifications or file uploads or whatever, it would be as easy as testing for the presence of the objects in Javascript and writing to their Javascript API. With a little luck, and a Windows version, you might get some serious traction with a project like this.
I first heard about this custom browser approach when Flock (remember the "social browser") first launched a couple of years ago and found it utterly idiotic that someone might replace their browser with one of these tweaked out custom jobs. But I've got to admit that using Mailplane has made me reconsider.
Or maybe it's just all of that lack of oxygen...
Update: It turns out that Fluid is making nice progress to exactly what I was asking for already as you can see from their developer page. The big missing feature for me at this point is webapps being able to register for keyboard commands (think command-N for new Message not new instance of Gmail).
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 25, 2008)
Turns out that if you mess around at all with dynamic web applications on the iPhone, you will suck its battery dry faster than you can hum the little do-da-dee song that Apple plays on the commercials. Like a bunch of other misguided folks that come from the world of watt-sucking laptops and servers, I have been thinking that this has to do with the use of XMLHttpRequest to poll for new content. But as I learned tonight from a clueful engineer at the Boston Momo event (Mobile Monday), a gathering of folks of all stripes interested in mobile, it turns out that the using the radio to send/receive IP packets is relatively cheap from a power perspective, especially when compared to running the CPU at Safari-induced speeds or even keeping the display on for prolonged periods of time.
That alone was worth the trip to Momo, especially because in the aftermath of Apple launching the SDK, there seem to be loads of folks commenting on the lack of background processing for user-developed applications (supposedly the big Achilles heel to sanctioned development for the iPhone) in only semi-informed ways. For instance, this otherwise solid post mistakenly argues exactly what I thought: that applications that indiscriminately used the network to poll servers in the background would be death for the battery thus forcing Apple to impose the "no background processing" rule.
It struck me last night that there are two different generations of folks attending events like this Momo gathering that are in need of retraining as we all get ready to embrace mobile— at least here in the Boston area. On the one hand, you've got all of the enterprise folks; broadly speaking these are the Digital/Lotus people that came out of minicomputers and PCs and mostly bypassed the web in favor of sucking Fortune 500 companies dry with ornate pieces of "industrial strength" software that did X, Y, or Z (and whose market is getting decimated by the combination of open source and SaaS). Then you've got all of the web folk (where I'd put myself) who have grown up with the web at the center of everything they've worked on. In both camps however, the lessons of the last decades have never forced us to deal with power-constrained devices which require a whole new discipline around opening sockets, powering the display, or even just using CPU cycles to do something as trivial as running a web browser.
And power consumption is just the first step on this steep learning curve: you've also got much smaller screens and applications whose total use cases need to be measured in 5-30 second interactive chunks. Overall it's going to be a huge mind shift for hackers, product managers—makers of all types— especially as devices like the iPhone put mobile computing into the hands of mainstream users.
Very very fun stuff.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 23, 2008)
The Economist has a great piece this week on what will undoubtedly come to be known as the "Facebook dilemma:" the fact that social networking is both a fun and useful activity for most folks but utterly impossible to make money from. The piece effectively argues that just as with email and IM, the basic verbs and nouns of social networking (friending and the nodes of the social graph) belong in every network-aware application and not just inside of these monetization ghettos created by VC-backed companies in attempt to mine for the next Google.
Making the comparison between Facebook and the AOL of yesteryear is something that has come up before, but is a rather apt way to look at the problem. The rest of the "open web" will build in social networky features and as they do, Facebook's only hope of staying relevant is to open up at a rate faster than AOL back in the day (which their app platform certainly does not do today). But of course as they do so, they will simultaneously limit the choices for their eyeballs-based business models.
And that right there is the challenge with huge horizontal plays in the Internet spaceâ the more broadly applicable they are, the more they need to be baked into the fabric of the Internet and not held hostage by monetization theories. And in the absence of alternatives to the advertising based business models (other than e-commerce which seems to help the likes of Amazon & eBay build out very horizontal platforms), this dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 16, 2008)
Any self-respecting ManGeek ought to love a term I picked up from the Economist a couple of weeks in an article on cloud computing: data smelter. Apparently this is moniker used for the huge data centers that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are building on the banks of the Columbia river in Oregon. Located in the middle of the cheapest power available in the US, the name data smelter is a play on the aluminum smelters that peppered the banks of the Columbia over the last hundred years, but it's also great because it hints at one of the most relevant facets of the cloud computing/web services revolution: the ability for new services to recombine data hosted by other services in novel and interesting ways. We haven't even begun to feel the true power of how transformative this loose coupling of data and processing is likely to be; today's "mash-ups" are barely at the crawl phase of development in what we are likely to see.
And yet, it's worth pausing for a second to think about the cost of the current smelting. The Economist piece cites the Google data center at the Dalles as requiring the power of a town of 200,000 people. Most of this wattage goes to power the compute cycles that Google requires to index the world's information, and in most cases these cycles are well spent by running hairy algorithms that apply the bleeding edge of computer science to extract order from chaos.
But this is not always the case. For instance, at Tabblo, a meaningful amount of our general web traffic comes from Google Bot or one of its competitors. This despite the fact that we have well-structured RSS equivalents that could be polled/processed in a much more efficient way. Ditto for all of the much bigger user-generated content sitesâ they too have a meaningful amount of traffic coming from indexing bots while at the same time providing feeds that might provide just as much information for searchers while using less bandwidth, fewer CPU cycles, and not as much overall smelting.
The few times I've read any luminaries from Google talking about the semantic web in any shape or form (RDF, microformats, etc.), they always pooh-pooh it with slights like "people don't want to deal in angle brackets all day." And until I started thinking about the energy implications of these data smelters, I was likely to agreeâ after all, we're all still suffering from the CORBA/DCOM hangover of the last decade where a few vendors bamboozled the entire industry into thinking that an overwrought solution for remote process data exchange was the answer to all of these coupling needs (watch the WS-* offspring for a modern-day equivalent).
But last week Yahoo played a potentially game-changing move with its pledge to support the semantic web standards (microformats, RDF, etc.) across all of its properties. As much I tend to write off Yahoo as roadkill on the Google highway, it's clear that a few folks there are still doing good things for the net and the planet.
If the other industry heavyweights are goaded into following through, we may end up running slightly cleaner data smelters in the near future.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 15, 2008)
Though I am a huge fan of my recently acquired Macbook Air, having spent the last week digesting the implications of iPhone 2.0, and more importantly the SDK, I can't help but feel that the product form factor we have come to know as the laptop computer is about to get crunched by the smartphone in the same way that laptops have killed desktops over the last few years.
Let me start with the real strength of the Macbook Air: it's diminutive weight and slim shape. That these two attributes are enough to offset all of the other shortcomings (not nearly enough hard drive, barely enough processing, and no way to work for more than 3 hours at a stretch) says a lot about how much we care about portability these days. And yet there are still a whole bunch of things that are just too cumbersome and "disconnected" about the Air for me to feel as good as I should about a 3lb computing environment I could absolutely take anywhere. I want to love it but my heart has now been stolen by that lozenge-shaped computer traveling as a phone in my pocket.
"Stupid fanboy," I can hear you thinking, those crappy "smart" phones don't have the juice to run a real computing experience! For all who think that, I'd suggest taking a look at the iPhone SDK keynote, about 2/3 of the way through when the application vendors get paraded on stage to show their games/business apps/etc. built with the iPhone SDK. Ignore all of the Apple love and focus on the responsiveness of the UI, and the amount of "computing" taking place. Additionally, with rumors of the iPhone moving to Intel's new super-efficient x86 processor, I can only imagine that this will only get better— despite the need to protect that teeny little battery. And what Apple does here, you can bet Nokia, HTC, Ericson, and the rest of the 7 Dwarves will implement as well.
The other big criticism about the phone's ability to eclipse the laptop comes from the keyboard lovers— after all, no one could do anything other than consume media, send SMSes and reply to the occasional email on small keyboards, nevermind virtual ones like the one on the iPhone (which I am now ready to predict will win over the ant-sized keys of Blackberry like devices). Enter Nokia's Project NoBounds, an attempt to point to a world where our smartphones can easily pair themselves to larger displays and fuller input mechanisms (think how far we've come with Bluetooth headsets in the last 5 years and then extrapolate to displays). Were the gloried docking stations (anyone remember the old Apple Duodocks?) to become even as pervasive as iPod-equipped alarm clocks are today in most hotels, we'd have just enough infrastructure that most of us would be willing to take a chance and leave the laptop behind. And of course, you'll also come to expect one at work and a few scattered around your house.
Other trends that are going to push us in the direction of laptops being relegated to a niche similar to where desktops thrive today (CPU-intensive creative crafts):
Storage: For whatever reason, laptop drives have not kept up with the mushrooming demands of multimedia. I always buy the biggest drive I can get, and yet despite changing my laptop every 12-18 months, I'm always running out of space. So much so that most of my multimedia has already been split up according to file type— which is a horrendous PITA. I want a canonical copy of all of this stuff to live on some network-attached hard drive in my house with a backup in the cloud. Think Time Capsule + S3 with a nice usable layer of software to let me sync partial copies from my various portable devices. When this happens, we'll be able to really make the switch to flash for local storage (64GB won't seem small at all) which points again to the ability for the mobile device to become our primary computing device.
Closer physical contact with the rest of the world: No two ways about it, the ability to have a camera, location information, an accelerometer, and a net connection available within 5 seconds of taking a device out of your pocket constitutes a new platform whose real depths we have not really even begun to plumb. This is as true for frequent travelers as it is for people at the supermarket. And the funny thing is that even when these capabilities are brought on to the laptop to extend its term of service (witness the CMOS camera mounted on most portable computer bezels these days or attempts to add location aware functionality to laptops), they just don't yield as much use as you'd expect. Mobile computing is about user experiences that last 15-60 seconds and unfortunately laptops just aren't competitive under such stringent time pressures.
I love my laptops and have to really stretch my brain to think that in 3-5 years, I'll be looking back at this svelte Macbook Air in the same way that I saw the last desktop tower I ushered out of the house last fall. But it's coming and over the course of the coming weeks, I'm hoping to get some time to noodle on what the 15-60 second platform that will replace them is going to mean for those of us building the consumer apps of the next 3-5 years.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 9, 2008)
Fast on the heels of my energy-on-the-brain week in San Diego, I decided to run some experiments with my recently acquired Kill-a-Watt to debunk some myths about consumer electronics and power consumption. What follows is by no means exhaustive, but I figured I would write it up as it has frequently been the topic of lunchtime conversation at the officeâ with people arguing both sides of each argument as though it were politics and not simply electricity 101.
The basic statement that I was trying to confirm or disprove was that your computer/cellphone/ipod/etc. charger sucks electricity even when it is not connected to a device. Savvy environmental marketers have called this the "vampire effect" or the problem of "phantom power," and truth be told, after I first heard the term, I could never look at one of those cuddly black bricks the same.
So I went around the house looking for as many bricks as possible, putting my Kill-a-Watt between them and the wall source of power and then connecting and disconnecting their associated devices. An aside: For those that don't know what a Kill-a-Watt is (pictured here), it's one of several cheap gizmos you can buy to plug between a given appliance and the wall to measure how much power is being consumed. I'm not quite sure how it works, but quickly testing it on both 60 and 100 Watt lightbulbs convinced me that it worked as billed.
The result: for each of the 13 bricks that I tried, ranging from a wireless phone charger to a MacBook Pro power adapter, the vampire/phantom thing is complete BS. The moment you disconnect the associated device the Watts measured on the Kill-a-Watt go right down to zero. Interestingly enough, this is equally true for low wattage chargers like the iPhone one (~1-2W while charging). It makes senseâ after all I'm fairly certain that a fairly cheap circuit on the power adapter can get a good sense of load and just cut the whole power supply off if nothing is connected. As a funny aside, it seems that there is a whole category of "smart powerstrips" that are sold to protect the user against this bunk phantom power thing.
Since I had the Kill-a-Watt out anyway, I then went on to try to prove one of my own wacky theories: that you could actually conserve overall power when using your laptop at home by a) pulling the battery out when you were connected to the outlet and b) never leaving the machine connected after it was fully charged.
My theory about pulling the battery out went something like this: if a machine consumes X amount of power just to run, then also charging the battery at the same time must require X+Y power where Y is whatever it takes to charge the battery. And to point b above, even when the battery was fully charged, there would still be some amount of power required to trickle-charge, or keep the battery topped off.
However, in my very simplistic testing, it seems that with or without battery attached, my MacBook sucked in about 20-30 Watts pretty constantly (the variation being most directly affected by the display brightness). I tried it with 50% charge in the battery, 80%, and even 100% and it just seemed to hold constant in its power consumption in all cases.
Which of course leads me to wonder where the incremental power to charge the battery comes from. My current guess is that the Kill-a-watt does have some standard margin of error (that I didn't see with my lame lightbulb tests) and that this is where the incremental power to charge is being missed.
To end on at least one energy saving tip, for a typical MacBook in sleep mode, the cost of trickle charging is about 1-3 Watts which means that unless you are going on a long airplane ride the next day (or are a power hygiene freak who must have all devices at 100% charge all the time), you will save a little bit of power by pulling the adapter from the machine (though not unplugging it from the wall) when the little charge light turns green.
Whew, ok. With that behind us, I promise to get back to InterWebs topics tomorrow!
PS, if anyone knows of a relatively cheap device that can act as a Kill-a-Watt does but store data points over time for subsequent analysis on a computer, please let me know. My next set of experiments requires more than just eyeballing the display as the junk attached sucks power.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 2, 2008)
So we've got Adobe Air that just went 1.0 this week. Microsoft is coming on from a copy-come-from-behind strategy with Silverlight. Mozilla has got something going on, and Apple has got Webkit at the center of their whole device strategy.
So who wins in the web development platform war for the next decade? Which of these rich runtimes suck the oxygen out of the rich client world and give a nice evolutionary twist to what's been going on with the AJAX spruced applications? Or are Win32 and Cocoa here to stay?
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, it'd be DHTML all the way.
Why? Because at the end of the day we've got to think in terms of access devices. At HP we're living as primary beneficiaries of the move to laptops these days, but just as we've moved there from the desktops, I'm sure we're going to move to the portable devices (iPhones and others) from laptops. And in the case of these portable devices, why would you care about a really rich runtime? What matters is the data and how quickly you can get to it. Sure Air and Silverlight can run in these mobile devices, but the real question is: at what battery cost? And to what benefit?
I'm guessing that the DHTML model has got long legs to itâ especially as the world comes to standardize on Webkit and all of the good stuff that comes with it. At Tabblo we've been totally biased towards it; at first because it was the only way to remain truly "platform neutral," and later because of the advantages it has given us in terms of embed-ability within other websites, other online experiences.
If I had to guess I'd say we've got a lot to squeeze from the web browser especially now that we've got a great canvas like Webkit. Even Firefox 3 with its much improved performance gives most of us room for pause as we think about the browser of the future and the world of mobile platforms.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 25, 2008)
Continuing along the theme of custom readers for RSS streams, I can't help but notice that there has been a recent explosion in sites that do nothing other than aggregate the feeds of content that you (and others) create across various activities. It was a neat idea back when Jaiku implemented "add RSS feed" to their version of the Twitter timeline, but since then we've gotten Spokeo, FriendFeed, and now Second Brain to name but a few of the new entrants into this most meta of categories.
Given the ease and cost of starting an Internet property these days, all good ideas on the Internet automatically get a half dozen good implementations right away. In this case, everyone is trying to generalize the Facebook Activity Stream to work across all of the Internet (with "all of the Internet" being the top 10 user generated content sites of the Web 2.0 world). Having tried a couple of these, I'm not sure that they're going to work for two important reasons:
1. They feel too spare to work as places that people will actually log into. I can maybe see bunching up a load of feeds into one of these services for the sake of de-duplication and then putting the RSS feed directly into a regular reader, but I have a hard time imagining that I'd go to any of these aggregation sites as destinations in and of themselves.
2. It's not clear to me that even at scale, these utility sites will find business models that work for them. If Facebook can't monetize well with all of its supporting structure, why would a site that trades in just one element (albeit an addictive one) do any better?
If I owned one of these sites, I'd be thinking about repackaging these aggregate feed streams in formats that are not for consumption via a web browser, or even a standard feed reader. And the more heavy lifting required to shoehorn this content into some other format, the better. Where are the custom printed newspapers of feed aggregates? The photo frame slideshows that are actually compelling and not just teeny type doing the rumba on a screen that is 6 feet away? The spoken versions (read by the computer equivalent of Jeremy Irons) for consumption as podcasts? I have no idea how many different formats might actually work, but it's worth thinking about if entrepreneurs really aim to make stand-alone businesses here.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 22, 2008)
Driving up to New Hampshire in the midst of a blizzard tonight, I was captivated by the swirling snow and thoughts of how the web is quietly turning into a series of flows (blog posts, Flickr streams, Twitters, etc.). It has take many more years than I would have thought: after all, RSS first entered my life back in 2002 on a hot summer day when I made a stupid bet that everyone would be consuming their content via readers inside of 5 years. The two trends driving this evolution of the web: 1. the web as a communications/publishing platform and 2. the atomization of web content such that we care less about "page loads" of information and more about individual atoms (for instance, did you know that every tweet has its own permalink?)
Perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of work on this whole transformation as of late has been
Matt Webb's presentation "
Movement" where he makes this point and more in describing a new interaction pattern for information (think interactive RSS feeds). His argument stimulates the grey matter because of the way that it makes you think about how the metaphor of the "
web as movement" versus the "web as place" changes your expectations for the medium.
There are loads of other folks sniffing around this notion from different starting points. Some see web services as programmable data sources that the elusive mashup serves to recombine in new and interesting ways (Tom Coates did this one best in his presentation "A Web of Data.") Others see the new web being born out of the micropublishing boom (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr) where the constant update combined with the lightweight social network drives the main pattern of interaction. In both of these cases though, we are leaving behind the Geocities/Homestead/etc. view of webpages as static (or even semi-static blogs) and jumping on to the moving web, be whatever may.
It's a big shiftâ about as big as the one to cloud computingâ so I'm not really sure of where it will take us. One thing I do hope however is that it lays to rest the notion of the "destination site" with its registration-based walled garden and constrained experience designed to chases money in the form of shifting ad dollars. Maybe Techcrunch's report of the stagnating Facebook traffic is a harbinger of things to come (though seen from the best possible light all Facebook is is one giant web-as-movement-reader).
I'm just kicking off the thinking about this, which is to say there is tons more thinking to do. At the end of the day this is likely to touch everything we do online: from how we communicate to how search engines index the web, from how we buy and sell to how we look for recommendations. All coming from billions of loosely joined little pieces moving...
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 16, 2008)
Despite my having grown to disagree with almost everything he writes, I have to admit that Paul Graham's latest essay "Six Principles for Making New Things" is a great read for makers of all shapes and sizes. In it, he makes an argument for keeping it real simple and not worrying about the fact that the world is going to call you an idiot for being overly simplistic.
Almost everyone that I've met over the last few years in the startup world seems to have fully embraced this new philosophy of minimalism. And even at HP, people with decades of experience in waterfall model software development seem to be getting hip to this jive.
However despite the love-ins for sans-serifs and single-function websites, it continues to surprise me how few people actually follow the philosophy in practice. I've come to believe that for most of us it's about how hard it is to stop listening to that voice inside your head that keeps saying: this is too trivial to be meaningfulâ I've got to put more meat on it. Management teams yield to it because they want to seem big and meaningful to the market, the press, and especially to their VCs. Engineers do it because they want to work on the "hard stuff" and because the "simple stuff" is somehow beneath them. And yet as Graham writes, time and time again we see the simple and limited winning in the market.
On a related theme, I recently finished listening to the audio book of Steve Martin's awesome memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," and was quite struck by how much his own creative trajectory follows the same path that Paul Graham writes about. Starting from magic tricks and canned one-liners, he spends 2 decades perfecting an act that becomes rich and complex only after thousands of nights playing to crowds of all shapes and sizes. My favorite part of the Martin book (outside the fact that he writes beautifully, reads with gusto and even plays banjo throughout) was seeing how much he was willing to work on what others at first called lame and unoriginal all the while following his gut.
And in fact that is the one thing that I would add to Graham's design philosophy for creative endeavorsâ that it is not so much about finding the simplest possible solution (though this is often the best place to start), but about listening to your gut very closely... and then not desisting when what your gut tells you leads you to something you're afraid will make you look like a simpleton in front of your peers.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 16, 2008)
Everyone is aflutter today about the fact that Amazon's web services, including its indispensable Simple Storage Service, took one on the chin with a multi-hour outage. Apparently the entire productivity-sucking swath of the Web 2.0 economy sputtered along with the outage (no profile pictures on Twitterâ OMG!!) and folks started screaming bloody murder about the coming apocalypse.
Interesting that one of the first to report was Nick Carr, whose new book "The Big Switch" I just finished reading. The book's central argument is that there is a platform shift coming in computing that will be very similar to what happened with electrification, with computation and storage moving from a distributed model (loads of server racks managed by IT) to a centralized one (a la Amazon Web services) where a few vendors will run huge compute clouds that the rest of us will plug our applications/appliances into.
The book makes a great argument, though it could just have easily have been made in 50 pages instead of 233 (including all of the fab historical color around what happened during the big switch of electric power generation)â an argument which is no less compelling because of today's outage. The reality is that these types of glitches happen at all scales, and though they hurt a little more when its a big centralized provider (witness RIM's second big outage the other day), some economic forces are just too strong to fight.
But what the book doesn't cover well is the way in which opportunities for innovation move around when these big shifts happen. I was really looking forward to understanding how centralized, ubiquitous, and cheap electricity made it possible for a host of appliance vendors to invent whole new product categories around the home and office. And though Carr touches on just this, the extension of the analogy to the current computing shift falls flat with a lame discussion of consumer mashups, a brief tour of personal publishing tools available today, and some recycled speculation on how Google really is trying to build an omniscient AI.
I would have preferred a more nuanced parallel between the first mass-market electric gizmos and the new appliances of the centralized computing grid (i.e., the iPhone, the Tivo, the Chumby, even the bulk of today's laptops). After all, it is only when we start to think about how these new appliances that consume compute cycles from the cloud will change our lives in a permanent way that we can really pause and take measure of what outages like today's will really mean 2,5, and 10 years from now.
Perhaps that is coming in his next book...
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 9, 2008)
These days everyone wants to grow a big cloud-based service with millions of users and billions of page views. Even Microsoft has got cloud-envy and wants to plunk down $50B to prove it. Unfortunately, most of us mere mortals have tons of trouble really getting these services to scale once we do get the users in the door. Things start to crawl, drives start to fill up, and before you know it you're Twitter with everyone biting the hand of the free service you've given them. Including this piece that argues for fronting Twitter with a proxy based of some sort of distributed hashtable thing.
While the caching/proxying thing has worked great wonders for most of todays super-scaled cloud services (YouTube, Facebook), I doubt it will continue to be the panacea for write-heavy communications applications like Twitter. Even the infallible Google seems to occasionally hit speed bumps with its venerable Gmail (which is not RDBMS-backed but is no doubt cooked from dilithium crystals).
It strikes me that the right solution to this problem is to revisit the notion of making distributed Internet applications work— but not the kind that have the service provider scaling across cages and datacenters. Instead what we need is to find models for using the "dark matter" of the Internet, namely all client computers connected to broadband connections and sitting idle for most of the day. NAT traversal issues and the mass-migration to laptops notwithstanding, these machines could be what is needed to help truly scale cloud-based services.
And even if all of those home/office PCs are too sporadically available, we could begin to rely on the growing number of personal accounts being created on VPS/shared hosting/Dot-Mac/whatever environments where each user is given some fractional part of a CPU and disk storage to do with as he pleases. This is why Wordpress's attempt at distributed Twitter, launched just a couple of weeks ago, is so interesting; most shared hosting environments provide a Wordpress install which means that with a little work (and some coordination between Twitter and the Prologue team), everyone can help take the load off.
There are "business model" reasons for why pulling off a hybrid implementation like this might prove difficult. After all at the end of the day, most consumer cloud services are valued by how many users (and more importantly user data and metadata) they are in possession of at the time of acquisition. Technical challenges aside, I am 100% certain that had someone pitched this approach to us at Tabblo back in 2005, we would have flat-out rejected it for all of the wrong business-model reasons. However, now that we are moving data centers though, I'm keenly aware of all of the terabytes of high-res image data that we must now shepherd across the continent when for most of what we needed, we could have done with a lot less (incidentally this problem is much worse for all of our bigger older cousins in the photo-hosting business).
Hopefully sometime soon we'll all get back to the original architecture of the Internet when it comes to this stuff— loosely coupled and distributed when it counts the most— and the scaling question will morph into one about writing large-scale distributed systems, a much more fun problem to work on.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 6, 2008)
This is CES week which, ever since we were a struggling startup looking to stay alive in this space back at Memora, gives me the willies. Unlike most of the computer tradeshows, CES manages to feel polished and scummy at the same time— with vendors pimping their wares to a pulsating Las Vegas gluttony which never ceases.
This morning the New York Times had a piece which gives is me hope that consumer electronics may be getting some of that good old hacker ethic. The piece covers an open Tivo-like device from a company called Neuros that is "hacker friendly."
More significantly, companies like Chumby Industries and Bug Labs are going one step further by selling kits instead of finished products that can be used by folks to extend the reach of the net into the physical world.
I worry a little that the promise of hackability is a lot more powerful than what actually gets done. In the case of the PC for example, it was the shift from "kit computers" like the Apple I to the productized Apple ][, with its pre-assembled good looks and relative ease of use, that readied the entire industry for all of the software innovation that followed*. In my own case, I've dabbled with a number of Linux appliances over the years only to be disappointed by either too many bugs, or a lack of extensibility. My Chumby for instance, seems to be the net-connected version of a VCR clock, spending most of its days flashing the widget equivalent of 12:00AM (though I am hoping the official release will make this better).
That said, I'm still hoping that these kits will result in some useful devices that free us from thinking that the Internet is something we consume with a keyboard and a mouse.
* See the very awesome book, Fire in the Valley
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 2, 2008)
It's always good to start the first entry of every blog year with some predictions. Making accurate (and actionable) predictions is the chief currency of the entrepreneur in the technology industry (along with not confusing a long view for a short distance), so any practice in gazing into the crystal ball is a good thing.
The usefulness/pervasiveness of the web will really hit a tipping point this year: David Weinberger wrote a short piece for HBR called "The Year of Scale" which makes this point nicely. Everything from markets to expectations is now mediated by bits of information that we pluck from the ether on websites, social networks, blogs, tweets, etc.— whether we work and live in the medium or not. Of course Google plays a huge role in this augmentation of our own intelligence (as might Facebook and Twitter over the coming year), but so do web-enabled smartphones and the ever-increasing expectation that we can just "know" the answer to something.
Recently a friend told me that her 5-year old had defined Google as "where you go to find out what is true—" a sentiment that when expanded to the web itself, captures the zeitgeist of what is going on here. The next chapter in the story of the Flynn effect won't be written as the increasing ability to reason abstractly but by our ever-increasing ability to weave the information stream into making better decisions.
Smart, speedy, and portable interfaces frozen in hardware are now mass market: this is the iPhone effect, plain and simple. A couple of years ago I was writing that Apple should become the less-than-6lb. company ("if it weighs less than 6lbs and does computing, we rule it"). Last year they took the most important step in that transformation by launching the iPhone— but not because it's the sexiest product ever built, nor because it's a particularly good phone (let me tell you, it isn't!), but because it is the perfect embodiment of portable web consumption experience.
If the web browser itself could leap out of your computer and take the form of a piece of hardware that you could carry all the time, it could do no better than to look, feel, and behave just like an iPhone. From the huge screen to the multi-touch interface, every feature that makes it truly stand out boils down to delivering a killer web browsing experience (and the only real handicap, the pokey EDGE network is ameliorated by the Wi-Fi and will soon be crushed with a 3G rev).
Expect a lot more, and not just from Apple. Sure, Cupertino will ship the rest of the dev kit (which I still contend should be nothing more than an enhanced object model for mobile Safari that gives web developers access to the camera, the addressbook, any forthcoming GPS information, and the SMS message stream), as well as begin a whole load of experimentation with point-of-presence applications that mix the virtual world with the physical world. But everyone else will try their hand as well, starting with mobile giants like Nokia (where I am 100% sure some Finnish dude named Pekka is now tied to the bottom of a dogsled crossing the tundra for having missed the all-screen embodiment of a browser in a phone), and filtering down to all of the smaller venture backed startups crazy enough to do hardware (which I think should be all consumer-facing VC startups these days, but more on that in a later post).
And this mobile fever is not just about phones, but in fact about any small devices that help people better consume the web. For instance, I bet this is going to be a good year for MIT-spawned Ambient Devices which has always seemed like a glorified science project to me. Unlike digital photo frames or the utterly useless Chumby, Ambient has figured out that simple design, well-instrumented cues, and singularity of purpose can make the different between a gadget which suffers from the net-connected version of the alarm-clock flashing "12:00" (e.g., my Chumby), and a device that weaves itself into your everyday life. Physical computing is here to stay and 2008 is going to be a vintage year for it.
The Activity Stream will become hot as Hansel: I'm not sure whether it will be Twitter, Google's Jaiku, the Facebook minifeed, or something completely new from a random startup, but the notion that there will be streams of metadata that we'll share with each other in the same way that people share blog feeds today but on a much more massive scale is going to become a standard part of the way that people interact with the web, and with each other. I suspect Facebook has the lead today, mostly because its minifeed takes no effort to set up and is very nicely scrubbed in the application, but Facebook seems to be getting this walled-garden stench which may create an opportunity for a lighter-weight, more open alternative. Initial setup will remain the challenge for regular users (and may be why the platform vendors: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Nokia could win here, or at least do a bunch of cool M&A in 2008), but once people get used to living in each other's flows, they'll be no going back.
Those are my top 3 predictions for this year. A little more abstract than usual, but thinking at this level certainly beats wondering whether we're going to suffer from a global economic recession.
Finally, just to mark where I've gone wrong in this game in the past: I'm ready to throw in the towel on the unwitting blogger, the casual publisher, or whatever you call the regular person who does something akin to starting a blog. I've been looking for the mass market application that causes millions of people to sit forward and put the same level of effort that those of us that keep blogs do, believing that the right combination of ease-of-use and ego gratification could get people over all of the barriers, but I just don't see it. Micropublishing— a popular trend predicted for the mass market for 2008 by the pundits— may come the closest, but there is a point at which it's just not publishing anymore.
R.I.P, Mister Unwitting Blogger— you content creating bastard— we hardly knew ye!
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 14, 2007)
First they made it so that you didn't have to worry about disks with their S3 storage service. Then they took away the need to manage hardware and a colo with EC2. And now for the final piece: Amazon has just announced SimpleDB, a database hosted as a web service that application developers can plug into. Despite one curious choice, this is just brilliant strategy on their part.
Everyone who hosts a website that has any level of traffic spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to tune the database. And as with almost every infrastructure layer in the webapp cake, I'm fairly certain that 80% of this tuning work is just good RDBMS hygiene and adds preciously little "special sauce" to the core application. In fact this is why there are specialists in tuning MySQL or Postgres who bounce from project to project with the same basic bag of tricks.
If Amazon does it right, making a database scale is one time-consuming headache web application developers will never have to worry about again. But it goes beyond scaling too: backups, replication, failover— these are all common database chores that Amazon just makes go away.
On to the curious choice: no support for full (or even partial) SQL. I'm guessing that this may have had something to do with the complexity involved in supporting SQL on their super-scalable, super-distributed architecture as I'm fairly certain the Amazon folks realize just how much momentum SQL has in the web application space. And if anything holds people back from adopting SimpleDB (outside of potential uptime/performance issues), it will be the need to learn a new way to store and query data (albeit a very simple one).
A potential work around: open source libraries that substitute the back end of the most popular ORMs (Rails, Hibernate, Django) with the SimpleDB service. Now that could be a game changer.
Here's to never thinking about sharding databases again.
[Update: More info on the guts of this beast.]
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 8, 2007)
It usually takes me hearing really clever smart (but crazy sounding) ideas three times before they begin to sink in. So hopefully, noticing them at two is an improvement. A couple of months ago, while attending a conference with Alan Kay, I heard him talk about how any new modern computer should be designed with "Internet principles" at its core. That is, the hardware and OS should be designed to support small isolated "components" that behave like nodes on the Internet, sending each other messages through a TCP/IP-based networking fabric even on the bus of the computer itself. Knowing that he is the perennial object & message nut, I filed his statements away as curiosities, thinking only that while his observations about how the unstoppable trends of virtualization and multiple cores as the base substrate for this fundamental change in the architecture of every individual computer seemed clever, the practicality of it seemed elusive.
After all, the stored-program, shared-memory, single instance computer exists for good reasons (simplicity, efficient, cost) right?
Imagine my surprise then while running today to the latest episode of the Google Developer Podcast (hit-and-miss, but pretty good as of late as far as podcasts go), the "All About Android" episode which basically described an implementation of what Alan was talking about in almost every aspect of system design: from the message-passing model for app interop to the way resources are described internally. It gave me pause for thought— after all, if resource-constrained mobile devices are being designed around these architectural principles by smart people, then maybe there is something to this notion of turtles all the way down, from the services we use from the cloud to the devices we carry in our pockets.
I think I've let Fake Steve with all of his Googletard ranting color my perspective too much, as I've paid scarcely any attention to the Android project. And truth be told, I wanted to write this before digging into it— after all, ideas are much prettier as abstractions, and Android seems to be one weird beast of a mix of things on the face of it: Linux + Java + Webkit, all on very resource constrained but heterogeneous hardware platforms. I mean, we're talking about serious potential for a fly in the transporter with this baby.
Still, it's the second time I've heard it, so time to pay attention...
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 7, 2007)
Last year, a couple of us at Tabblo got a chance to get on the beta program of this really neat wireless camera card called Eye-Fi that automatically uploaded your pictures from your camera to your favorite photo site. The idea was very cute, and even as a beta, the implementation was very nice, so it was a fun surprise last week to receive the 1.0 version of the card in the mail. In the intervening year, the Eye-Fi guys seem to have polished their packaging and found great distribution for their product (Amazon, Walmart), while settling on a very sensible business model (sell the card at a slight premium to regular memory cards).
I like the Eye-Fi concept a lot and intend to give a couple of the cards out as Christmas presents this year. But after a week of constant use, I've been forced to rethink some of my assumptions about getting all of your content up into the cloud as quickly as possible, bypassing the PC at all costs.
While it is fun and sort of magical to see pictures just appear on your favorite Internet photo site (though arguably less now now that camera phones are so prevalent, especially those armed with awesome applications like Shozu), but the problem with getting your regular camera pictures sent automatically is that the mode of use for a typical digital camera these days is very much "ready, fire, aim" with most casual photographers using brute force as a substitute for innate skill, knowing that there is a nice editing step waiting inside of Picasa or iPhoto. When photos go straight to the cloud and into a service like Flickr (which is what I've been using with the Eye-Fi), that editing step disappears, which means one of two things happen:
1. you really frustrate people who might be following your picture stream on Flickr with twelve slightly different shots of the same subject in the same composition
2. you frustrate the hell out of yourself using a web interface to take on that first editing pass
Of course, #2 could all be fixed if Flickr were to support an IMAP-like protocol that iPhoto and Picasa could implement as rich clients to help you manipulate the photos and do the editing later (I have to admit that Flickr almost does this with their API today, but no mainstream clients have taken advantage of it). And in that case, having the data resident in the cloud where other applications could use it might justify someone using some basic algorithms around finding good unique pictures to solve #1 (I've seen a bunch of algorithms that do this very well with date-clustering and object detection inside of HP Labs, so this part is not science fiction).
In the meanwhile, it is worthwhile pausing for a moment as we all race to cut the venerable PC out of the content-device-Internet loop, and thinking about what we might be giving up.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 23, 2007)
Doc has a characteristically thoughtful piece over at Linux Journal on the need for web service creators to be good members of the ecosystem and support APIs that allow data to be federated across services. He uses the example of his Flickr stream being usable at Tabblo (which is a testament to how good and ground-breaking Flickr has been in this regard), making the point that it benefits him as a user when all of us "vendors" play nice and respect both his data— and more importantly, his time. It is just plain silly to make him waste time with the asymmetry in broadband today, having to upload all of his stuff again.
I've written before on how business models that are at odds with this fundamental respect for the user are likely to be doomed (see all of the stuff on the roach motel), so here I'm going to take another angle. Data acquisition, whether it is importing contacts in a social network or uploading assets in a photo site, is just not something that we need to keep on re-inventing over and over again. Let me stick with the latter example for a moment: outside of the Flickr API, at Tabblo we have 7 other methods for ingesting digital photos. Each of these requires constant maintenance as its client environment/runtime changes, something that I think is just too much of a support problem for any small team to take on. And in fact, these days each of our rich uploaders is in some less-than-optimal state: from "outright busted" to "works most of the time."
Contrast this to Flickr which managed to solve the uploader maintenance problem by crowdsourcing it and letting passionate community members maintain all sorts of different clients with varying degrees of success. Not everyone can be a Flickr, but we should all be able to leverage their success, and instead spend out own cycles thinking about how to build the next layer of value.
That said, what I'm having trouble reconciling is how to build simple user experiences in this new layered and federated world. Imagine if we asked the average mainstream user who comes to Tabblo to go and register at Flickr, upload their photos there, authenticate Tabblo as a trusted service, only to then be able to get into their story-telling process. Nightmare, plain and simple.
One potential solution: I'd like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn't Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc's VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.
You listening lazy web?
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 12, 2007)
I remember the first computer I was given as a child as though it were yesterday. When I was 6, my dad bought me a Timex Sinclair ZX81 which was this funky little computer that had a built-in BASIC and BASIC statement macros that you could access through a modifier key. At the time we had both an Apple ][ and an IBM PC at home but that Sinclair was special to me because it was all mine. I would plug it into an old black and white television set in my room and go nuts programming simple text input programs that made me feel as though I was denting the universe.
Today One Laptop Per Child went live with its "Give One, Get One" program— a great hack of the idea of getting an OLPC for yourself. By paying $400, you actually get two— one that gets shipped to you and the other that ends up somewhere in the third world, making a difference for someone who would otherwise never get a computer.
I'm fairly sure that this is too advanced for my 5-year old, but I just can not resist getting this as his Christmas present. For starters, it's a great cause. The machine is also likely to be a collector's item sometime down the road. And maybe, it won't be too much for him; after all, we've got the benefit of better software, richer interfaces, and a machine that sounds like it might just live up to all of the hype.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 8, 2007)
Dave Thomas, the technical world's version of Mark Twain, has a nice short article "Programming the World in a Browser Real Men Don't Do JavaScript Do They?!," which covers how Javascript is coming out on top of the dynamic language pile and will probably be one of the most popular computer languages in use going forward. It's funny to see the parallels between it and C: how they were both languages created to solve a specific problem (script the browser for JS, write UNIX in C's case) that exploded as their underlying hosts became more pervasive. The lesson seems to be: if you want to write a long-lasting meaningful computer language, get out of the ivory tower of ideal types and find a host that is just going to take off— in fact, the model could be called "Languages as remoras."
In my new job as member of the CTO's office at HP, I am supposed to have opinions on all sorts of "where is this going?" questions, at least from a technology perspective. One popular topic these days is browser-based runtimes for building the next generation of applications or: who will win the death march between Flash/Flex, Silverlight, Java, and DOM scripting with Javascript?
I should note here that I am pretty awful at doing this part of my job because I find it hard to get to an answer I believe from abstract principles— that is, if I haven't worked myself in the specific platforms, it's hard for me to get to a credible opinion on who is likely to win the hearts and minds of the next wave of developers.
But despite who wins the runtime, it is worth noting that Javascript (or its "Kentucky-cousins" ECMAScript, Actionscript, and even VBScript) all underlie most of the solutions out there as glue language at minimum, and the core language in some. So in some way, shape, or form, Javascript is here to stay.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
Andrew got this monkey from his grandfather (who doubtlessly got it after giving Stanford money) that I've been staring at while changing diapers over the last two years. The wide-eyed stare combined with the Stanford t-shirt always reminds me of the heady times during the end of the last decade during my stay there: people in the engineering school were awash with the boundless optimism that is so endemic to Silicon Valley, and over at the business school, just about every embah was convinced their next job would be their last. When friends visited me, they would inevitably point out how foreign the culture felt, not because the crazy dot-com fever wasn't raging on the east coast (it was), but because everywhere but in the Valley, it was somehow tempered by that east coast stoicism (or is it cynicism?) that keeps people from really believing that 60lbs of dog food shipped overnight for $19.95 was really the beginning of something new.
I'm thinking about this because tomorrow morning I'm going to give a talk to the Stanford Alumni Club of New England about entrepreneurs outside the Valley, or more specifically what the key differences are between the east coast and west coast when it comes to starting companies. I'm not sure that I am particularly qualified to do this— after all, despite having worked at 4 startups, none of them were actually begun on the west coast. So the talk may instead be more of a "grass is greener" kind of thing. In fact most of what I'll be talking about is how at Tabblo we were always of the mindset that our next round of funding had to come from a west coast fund in order for us to stay relevant as we scaled. Having had six months of time post-acquisition to reflect on this, I'm not sure I completely agree with our original sentiment. But before I get to that, at the cost of spoiling tomorrow's fun talk, here is what does blow about entrepreneurship on the east coast:
1. When the 495 corridor lost the reigns of the technology-led revolution that started through the mainframe, continued through the minicomputer, and eventually transitioned to the PC and the Internet, we lost a lot more than an industry. We in fact lost a key ingredient in what the Economist has come to call an "economic cluster:" the combination of solid technical research universities, a young workforce, a risk-seeking set of capitalists, and what we lost here after Digital and Lotus navel-gazed their way into extinction: large successful industry bellwethers to train the next generation of entrepreneurial managers.
The hardest part of embarking on a consumer Internet startup here in New England is finding wealthy veins of talent to mine out of big companies that provide relevant experience sets. From my non-technical entrepreneur friends I often hear about how hard it is to find class-A engineers that know "web stuff," and we ourselves at Tabblo had a very hard time finding good direct marketing talent that understood how factors like viral adoption could be weaved into a coherent user acquisition plan. Both skills can be learned by those who are really talented, but this takes time and discipline— something is hard to cultivate because:
2. Thanks to the more conservative nature of investors here, ventures in the consumer Internet space often fall prey to the business equivalent of premature optimization, favoring getting to revenue at the expense of adequate distribution (users) or product refinement. I don't know that I would go so far as to espouse the Y-Combinator idea that you just need to "make something users want" and everything else will take care of itself— in fact if you've taken venture capital and are expected to deliver venture returns, it is irresponsible not to understand what the path to positive cashflow is, and to be testing the key assumptions at every step of the way. But an over-emphasis on this can lead to a dangerous situation where amidst slower growth than expected (which happens to just about every startup I've known at some point), the management team gets distracted by the "monetization problem" just to focus on something that might in the short-term appear to be more directly controllable. And when you've got a board of investors that encourage this trap, things can get ugly quickly.
Incidentally, the VC fund which we raised our money from at Tabblo, Matrix Partners, and our board member David Skok were A+ at helping us to avoid this trap. David was always pushing us to focus on solving the distribution problem at the cost of prematurely optimizing a business which would not at that point not have been at scale. Revenue is important, as is understanding the drivers of the business, but I've seen way too many entrepreneurs prepare for board meetings replete with spreadsheets and powerpoints that are more fitting of HP's printer business than of a rag-tag bunch trying to find a market with their product.
Both of these shortcomings can together create a vicious downward cycle that takes anyone who is not sitting on top of a golden egg idea down quickly.
Now what do we have on the flip side? The short answer: lots. Every other element of the Economist's cluster abounds here— universities, youth, capital— and we've got a whole bunch of other things to boot: access to the media companies from NY (who thanks to Google and Apple are now paranoid of anything that smells of the Pacific ocean), and an undeterred willingness to tackle really hard technical problems for periods of time that would seem like Paleolithic eras on the west coast.
But best of all, the best thing about starting a company that will eventually need regular users to scale (which is the case with all consumer Internet businesses) is that we are much less subject to the echo chamber effect of the Valley. In the Valley everyone is twittering, sharing links on Delicious, digging articles left and right, and uploading pictures to Flickr from their super phones, but the rest of the country is really not quite ready for a lot of these applications. And the sad part is that most of the companies that I've seen started appear to be aping a lot of these initial Web 2.0 experiments instead of trying to think about how to move the adoption curve back into the mainstream.
To be sure, there are some great companies that burst out of the echo chamber and into the mainstream from the Valley: Google, eBay, and YouTube strike me as three really great examples. But monocultures can be very self-reinforcing for most of us, for both good and bad. When I first came to the States, I was a fairly ok student but had the good fortune to go to a private school where there was a strong monoculture of academic achievement. And guess what? It worked its magic on me.
In the same way, I'm sure that were I on the west coast, I would probably not have embarked on Tabblo, worrying about moving bits to atoms, and building better tools out there for folks who just wanted to feel more creative. Instead, I might have been more willing to drop vowels from the name (Tbbl, Tbbblz, ...) and gone with some sort folksonomy-based social platform for content digestion. Over RSS and ATOM, of course.
I love California for its bright-eyed optimism and willingness to experiment (back to the monkey here). For sure. In fact, I'll be surprised if I don't make it out there at some point for more than my 6 day/month average. But for where I am now, I'll take a pass from the monoculture for a while and think through some of what makes the consumer Internet work for the rest of the non-early adopters.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 11, 2007)
In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.
I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").
Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:
The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.
—via Steve Litchfield
(to be fair, I think
Eddie and
Pitkin were trying to tell me this last night but I was just fried)
How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.
Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming content, most people would rather just sit back and consume. This is why YouTube won when many other more producer-friendly video sites floundered. It's why TV still commands the kind of audience that most "huge" online properties would kill for. And it's why, as a mass market product, I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone will spank the N95.
But there is something potentially different about this particular twist on consuming versus creating. For a long time now, I've been hot and bothered by the idea of the "unwitting blogger," or the regular user who, in the process of doing stuff, becomes a creator of content without really thinking about it. On the PC/Internet, the trick is most successfully implemented by the proper harvesting of either metadata or messaging data. Digg is today's king of metadata, and Facebook the king of messaging. Both sites turn their "consumers" into creators during the very process of consuming the services.
What I would argue in the case of the N95 is that a phone equipped with a really good camera, a GPS, and an open API could become rocket fuel for the explosion of unwitting bloggers. Geotagged automatic upload to Shozu is just the beginning (though a very powerful one), as is Jaiku's twist on presence. We've surely got more to come as developers begin to explore how we bring location, multimedia, mobility, presence, messaging, and the cloud together in new and creative ways.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 6, 2007)
I can not for the life of me believe that people who have better things to write about are still debating the definition of Web 2.0, 3.0, 3.x, etc. It has now entered the realm of the absurd. And as a beneficiary of the "Web 2.0 tidalwave," I feel justified in ranting for just a second.
Tim did us all a favor back in 2003 when he coined the term Web 2.0 but for only one very simple reason: he gave the media and investors a conceptual frame from which to begin seeing a world which for the previous three years had been seen as a complete wasteland. It took about a year and bit for this conceptual frame to catch on in a meaningful way, but when it did, entrepreneurs could finally talk to financiers again about the web without being laughed out of the room. And for the most part, journalists who had been burned by the long view/short distance fallacy during the dot-com boom, were coaxed out of crap pieces about "the best places to launch a career" to talk about the impact of the net again. There was a tremendous amount of value in this soft reset, and for that, all of us entrepreneurs owe Tim a beer.
But that is it. There is absolutely no other reason to try to version the web, and any entrepreneur who relies on these dot releases for any sort of consequential decision making or strategy formation is just looking for trouble. Notice that Google— the perennial Web 2.0 company according to a whole load of experts who matter— rarely refers to Web 2.0 in describing itself or the products it is bringing to market (interestingly enough, Yahoo is not shy about cloaking its (re)launches in Web 2.0 lingo).
Most significantly, users don't actually give a rat's ass which version of the web their application belongs to. Instead of focusing on version of the web, the versionites might be better served by thinking about versions of users, as in User 1.0 ("wow, this Internet thing is amazing so I'll put up with anything"), User 2.0 ("if it isn't as simple to use as the Google search bar, I don't care about it"), User 3.0 ("if it doesn't come in my BrainPal I don't care about it), etc. At the end of the day, all of the technologies, data sources, and macro social trends that we are trying to lump into the versioned web need to support these fundamental change in user demands.
Just to end on irony: I'm looking forward seeing everyone at the Web 2.0 conference!
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 29, 2007)
So everyone is on fire about the fact that Apple seems to be bricking cracked iPhones with the new 1.1.1 software upgrade, which is a bit surprising to me. Did people not expect one of the most proprietary companies in the industry to take this path when its walled garden is under attack?
In fact, I think that the Apple of today— which is to say the Apple that launched OSX— is actually much more clue-full about how to enable something which is critical for companies in their position: key axes of user/developer participation that enrich the platform without threatening the very aspects that gives it its edge (stability and perception of control for partners). Which is why I'm left wondering why this is such a big deal, and why we can't just all focus our energy on getting Apple to support the right vector of participation for the rest of us, by which I mean enhancing their web appplication platform to the point where developers won't really care about the fact that they can't install binaries to run on the iPhone.
Below are the three things I think Apple could do to cut this gordian knot of control versus user-led innovation. In providing an "SDK" that allowed web developers access to these 3 APIs I think Apple would (as they did with the "open for business" OSX strategy) unleash a torrent of creativity while keeping the relevant bits of their platform closed for the sake of their small-minded (but critical) partners, the phone companies and the content holders.
1. Access to the camera's current "roll:" though it would be ideal to be able to control the camera itself, a great start is being able to take pictures off of the current set via Javascript/DOM scripting. For instance, I would love to be able to write:
var img = document.camera.roll[0].images[0]['thumbnail'];
for manipulating images inside of the browser for say posting as a file upload to a server. One of the coolest things about mobile imaging is the ability to completely bypass the PC; Shozu on Series 60 showed us this in a big way. I'd like to be able to send photos up not only to Flickr but also to all sorts of other cool web applications that could take advantage of basic image recognition to provide all sorts of new functionality.
2. Growl-like notification hooks, preferably tied to the SMS pipeline: this one is hard to describe for people that haven't used the fabulous Growl OSX service, but I'll try anyway. A portable computer like the iPhone (more on this below) needs to be really good at messaging which means that it needs to support as a core capability the ability to have messages "pushed" to the end device. Currently on the iPhone this comes as either phone calls or SMS messages. Why not let developers of web applications register "listeners" for particular SMSes that can the point mobile Safari to specific pages, or, at the very least, get the user's attention. When we look at mobile Meebo or mobile Facebook on the iPhone, the biggest limitation is their inability to push notifications up to the user that is not currently on their respective pages. Sure, each of these apps can send generic SMS messages to a particular phone number, but wouldn't it be so much easier on the user if these SMSes could drive specific behaviors on the phones? The idea of copying a system-wide notification like Growl goes all the way back to the Cocoa framework, so I'm sure Apple would have no problem doing it.
3. Minimal control of the local radio-based networking: Apple is already heading in this direction by giving us Bonjour (local multicast) support inside of mobile Safari in 1.1.1. Taking this further would allow application developers to find out more about the local networking environment, and where appropriate, to make connections with locally available devices for sharing information that do not require connecting to the greater Internet.
Notice that none of the three vectors of functionality I describe above touch either of the two sacred-cow business models that Apple is trying to protect: the carrier lock for using cellular networks, or the content providers' lock on the music they push to the device.
I often tell new iPhone users that the best way to always be happy with their new toy is to not think of the iPhone as cellphone-on-steroids, but to think of it as a laptop in your pocket. When looked at from this perspective features like a battery that lasts all day and a form factor that lets you surf the web in a device that weighs less than 6lbs and doesn't require a keyboard seem more like magic than say the touch screen replacing the number pad, or the constant limitations of the AT&T network. As they build out vectors for extensibility, it would behoove Apple to remember the fact that they are indeed seeding portable computers and not locked phones.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 26, 2007)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
—Alan Kay
It was the moment I read that quote a few years ago that I decided that Alan Kay was one of my absolute top software heroes. Of course it also had to do with his pioneering work at Xerox PARC (read all about it in Dealers of Lightning), around object oriented programming, conceiving the first laptop, and a general adherence to both elegance and execution in software design that make him truly stand out among an already pretty impressive class of peers at PARC.
Yesterday I attended a TTI Vanguard conference on behalf of HP and had the chance not only to meet Alan, but to spend 90 minutes talking with him about software design and the state of engineering, as well as a whole bunch of related topics. I've been unwinding the conversation for most of the past twelve hours, and if I have one regret, it's that I don't have a transcript of it so that I could spend some time really digesting what he was getting across to me. He has a way of using very concise terms that carry a tremendous amount of meaning and then backing them up with references to work done by colleagues across a broad range of disciplines that is incredibly dense. If Alan himself were a Smalltalk object, I think he might need a little refactoring on the messages he sends; they are compact for sure, but depend on such a rich shared context of meaning that it can be hard for the rest of us to follow.
And speaking of compactness, I really dig his latest project. He's gotten funding from the NSF (and some other folks) to rebuild an entire personal computing system in 20,000 lines of code. And by personal computing system he doesn't mean a VM like the JVM or .NET, but in fact the "whole stack—" from the interface the user sees to the instruction set on the processor. Yeah, crazy right? When he first said it to me, I wasted the first 10 minutes trying to understand what kind of "whole system" definition he was going to use to cheat his way to the 20K LOC constraint, but it soon became clear that he was deadly serious about doing this soup-to-nuts.
Why? Because according to Alan, the edifice that is any major computing "stack" (Windows, Linux, OSX + drivers + frameworks + applications) can easily run into 100-300M lines of code— far too much for any one person to even hope to begin to understand (20K lines is by comparison, about the equivalent of a 400 page book). And if we can't understand it, there is no way that we could ever hope to begin to fix the entropy that is slowly eating these systems from the inside out, or to innovate enough in software development practices to allow software to experience its own Moore's law-like exponential increase in power per line of code written.
I'm torn over whether I think that working the sort of alchemy that Alan & team are going to have to undertake to pull off this Herculean task so that one person can truly understand the entire computing environment is going unleash the type of revolution that he hopes it will. On the one hand, I love the notion that building this type of system will usher in new tools and ways of thinking about software development that will allow us to keep teams small and productive. I've always been very proud of the small size of our team at Tabblo (especially relative to what we are able to do), and have been a little shocked since joining HP about how many other "lab managers" scoff when I tell them that our team is fewer than 10 people, following it with some statement of size about their own multi-hundred person team. It shouldn't be this way— on this front both Alan and Google are absolutely correct. Small teams make the magic happen; in fact, I can not remember the last piece of software that I was blown away by that had more than 25 people working on the core of it (one of my favorite analogies that he used while we chatted yesterday was that of the pyramids, "hunks of rubble covered with limestone," that took thousands of people years to build and could not stand up to the simple Roman arch built by 2-3 masons).
On the other hand, one of my favorite things about working in software is how well abstractions work to isolate me from the stuff that I don't care to know about. As I type this, I have a vague idea of what the CPU and GPU are doing together to make the characters appear on the screen, but most of the time I don't want to have to think about it. And if I wanted to build a new kind of word processor, I'm not sure I'd really want to think about it either. Furthermore, there is a whole generation of people just like me who probably don't have the training and experience to think that deeply about the low levels of what the OS and the hardware are doing to provide us with our computing environments— and each generation of kids coming out of school knows less and less about this arcane stuff. Today's PHP hacker wants to build the next Facebook, but he is likely to know very little about how PHP executes, how a webserver is built, or even how TCP works to send bytes all over the Internet. Should he have to worry about this if his goal is to build social applications?
Obviously, I am simplifying his argument as I think that what he would argue is that in a properly self-describing, self-bootstrapping system, it's turtles all the way down which would make it a lot easier for our PHP-hacker friend to understand the system to its core.
In fact, it is the pursuit of this elegance that is the most inspiring part of Alan's new project— and of his whole life's work. The fact that he is always looking to make things more logical and concise, to find a new kind of science (and art) in the way that most of us will build software in the future is a very good thing indeed.
And in the meanwhile, the rest of us still working on the pyramids should take a pause to think a bit about how we could move towards that arch.
[Postnote: After writing this, I went and read his NSF proposal. I'm not an expert in grant writing, but this proposal is so good that anyone looking to write any sort of pitch should read it (especially people writing business plans for risky new ventures). It's grand while remaining incredible humble in what is known and what is really hard to do. It covers the depth of experience the team has concisely, and gives a great history of "water under the bridge." But most of all, it inspires with its broad vision of what computing could be for everyone, and why it's so important that we be commissioning this type of work. I don't know who you are NSF person who approved this, but you have definitely spent my tax dollars well here!]
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 11, 2007)
A few weeks ago while trying to find someone in the middle of a downpour in New York City, I borked my iPhone (iPhoners be forewarned, apparently, the smooth surface and lack of buttons has little to do with the iPhone's ability to resist water). Since I was away from home and in need of a phone that could make and receive calls, I went to the local Apple store and had it replaced with a loaner unit. Despite my expecting it, the most amazing part of the experience was what happened when I plugged the loaner into iTunes— most of my phone's state was restored from a backup including the state of the various messaging applications (SMSes, emails, read/unread, etc.). While I lost a few things (YouTube bookmarks and ringtones), the overall experience underscored the fact that more and more, the actual devices that we do our computing on are nothing more than interface and an intelligent cache, while the bulk of what matters to us today (data) is increasingly moving to the cloud.
Ok, so I cheated in that paragraph above a little bit. Most of my iPhone's state was actually stored on my Mac laptop, which today is not strictly in the cloud. In fact the Mac makes a bad case for the cloud, because its own state would be so difficult to replicate up to a server farm somewhere. Sure, I can use DotMac to backup files and the datastores of specific Apple applications (Addressbook, iCal), but most of what represents my Mac (my iTunes collection, my tweaked out DarwinPorts, my various .rc files, the rest of my installed applications) doesn't play well with cloud-based services because we currently lack a good protocol for replicating the data and machine state to the cloud.
Or do we?
I guess I must be having a bad month, because the main server I use for experiments (my own personal bit of the cloud) seems to have gotten sick somewhere in its bowels. Every few days the kernel panics and the entire machine locks up. After re-jiggered most of the software installed on it, I've now come to realize the root cause is some bit of flakey hardware on the motherboard or RAID controller. Having probably installed Linux more than 100 times over the last 10 years, I can honestly admit that the magic of building a useless bunch of PC parts into a little piece of the Internet is now all but gone, and that even in the cloud, it's probably a good idea to treat the hardware as ephemeral.
Enter virtualization. A few months ago, I remember seeing Brad Fitzpatrick enamored with the open source para-virtualization project Xen because he could just "spin off VMs for each application." However, at the time I didn't have the cycles to play with it. The intervening months have done little to make the open source part of the Xen project move forward (there is still no bootable CD version of it, most documentation is at least six months out of date, and XenSource is now on the way to the dustbin of acquire-to-kill companies). Since I didn't have quite enough patience for digging through all of that, and since I have been quite impressed by VMWare's Fusion (the Mac OSX version of VMWare's VM runner), I decide to give their free server product, VM Server, a shot.
[A parenthetical aside on those interested in Xen versus VMWare on a technical level— all others skip this paragraph: VMWare Server doesn't quite perform as well as a fully "paravirtualized" VM (like Xen) because it has one more level of abstraction between the guest OS and the hardware. In effect, a guest OS on VMWare Server runs as a process on a base (or host) OS without modification to the guest OS, and with minor tweaks to the host OS (implemented through a set of kernel modules). It's not like those old crappy CPU emulators (Virtual PC comes to mind here) in that instructions are still executed natively by the processor (which is why VMWare primarily supports Intel on Intel configurations), but you will pay a penalty, especially around IO operations. That said, for my workload, the penalty was neglible. In fact the server that pushed this page to you is running in a VMWare instance inside of an Ubuntu Linux based OS— go ahead, hit reload really fast a few times to see how much the network has become the bottleneck these days!]
To make a long story short, I now have a bunch of Linux VMs which I run on two physical machines, as well as my development laptop interchangeably. In and of itself this is nothing special, except that maybe it is interesting to see how some of us like to waste the cycles that Moore's Law gives us with an increasing number of levels of abstraction.
But back to getting my Mac into the cloud, for real. Why couldn't the OS support virtualization natively, and then let me run all of my computing on a guest OS that itself could be streamed up into the cloud? Wouldn't this then become the ultimate (albeit complicated) protocol for syncing state between client devices and the cloud?
There are interesting possibilities around a solution like this one that go well beyond backup and restore from the cloud. At a crude level, this VM-shipping is the same thing as packaging up code and data and moving it around the network. It is in effect an entire execution context that is just mine. Does it mean no more traveling with a laptop? Sure, but it also means being able to keep my computer running all of the time, whether I have it on or not. This isn't anything new for the energy-sucking desktop crowd, but as the world moves to laptops, there may be some interesting new businesses here.
To close, let me come full circle back to my borked iPhone. Naturally, there is little chance that a device that is as power and cycle-constrained as the iPhone is going to grow a virtualization layer any time soon (thought it's amazing what can be put on chips these days). The more relevant question though is: should it? Are there benefits to having every computing platform that we use be able to save its entire state in one bag of bytes that is portable, cloneable, and ultimately, sychronizable across other devices?
I'm not sure, but then again, I've definitely grown up in the simplest possible protocol age where the best thing you can do for an application is emit its data as an RSS feed. It will be interesting to think about what happens when these virtualized devices find more comfortable homes in the cloud.
Postface: I wrote most of this post at 2 am while recovering from my brother's 42nd birthday celebration but then lost it to a fibbing laptop battery (fittingly enough). It's his total and utter lack of respect for conventional wisdom (combined with more than a few drops of crazy) that I've found most inspiring in thinking more broadly than the immediate engineering problems in front of me, and for that reason this wacky entry is my way of saying: happy birthday brother.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 8, 2007)
Blackberry Internet Mail service seems to have borked this morning, leaving millions of Crackberry addicts without an excuse to avoid their children. I'm sure in the end it will have been some silly admin error that caused it, but as we grow more and more used to (and addicted) the gigantic signaling fabric that the Internet has become, it is going to be harder and harder to cope with these kind of outages. Why just last week, we were just getting over the Skype outage during which I heard podcasters claim they were going to be "put out of business" by bad Skype capacity planning.
What is especially rough about the Blackberry outage is that it is endemic of the types of outages we can expect to see if we continue switching to proprietary (and thus centralized) messaging platforms. For instance, all sorts of web services have sprung up to replace email with varying degrees of success. On some sites, the internal messaging is peripheral to the experience (Flickr), but on others, it is either central (Facebook), or the experience (Twitter). Unfortunately, these systems were designed as centralized web services. And even well implemented web services can go down, mostly because the redundancy is added after the initial design. For instance, I'm sure that Facebook's database layer is sharded and replicated, its assets are on multiple CDNs, and its application servers are geographically distributed— but because the application was never designed to be distributed, these solutions will only take robustness thus far (especially after you add in the potential for human error at each of these layers).
Contrast this to decades-old email, or rather email + DNS. The combination of a very simple protocol for message exchange (SMTP) with a very flexible address resolution system (MX records in DNS) means that is is pretty hard to make all of email "go down." Sure the big centralized services like Gmail and Hotmail can have outages, but all of those law firms running Exchange, schools running Sendmail, and startups running Postfix will keep right on chugging. And even when these small poorly managed mail servers fail, there is usually some marginally better server at the ISP queueing up email just for the occasion.
Ray Tomlinson and his colleagues at BBN deserve a ton of credit for having put together a system in the 1970s that could grow to the scale and scope that it has while remaining more robust than a lot of what has come after. All of the rest of us should take a page out of their book in working towards improving the fabric of the Internet.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 2, 2007)
I find myself taking either of my real digital cameras out less and less these days which is a little ironic, given where I've just come from. Actually, I still use my Nikon D70 in much the same way (episodically around events where I want to get a set of very permanent pictures), but my small Canon point-and-shoot rarely sees the light of day. It still takes much better pictures than the iPhone, and over the last week I've found myself wanting the zoom and low light shooting a couple of times, but overall, the combined needs just don't get me over the activation threshold (which is telling given how small these little cameras have become).
The other thing I've noticed is that I'm just not super excited about the category of the small, disconnected point-and-shoot camera anymore. It used to be that every 6-9 months I'd find something that would push me to upgrade to the latest and greatest model. Unfortunately, these little cameras have now gotten to Microsoft Office status, with all of their incremental improvements being about as exciting as new Word templates. Even the big reviewers are getting the message— this week, David Pogue reviews a low end Fuji camera that he claims is targeted at "Generation Z" because it has a number of features that prep photos for eBay, Blogger, etc. before they leave the camera. Overall, it seemed like a very ho-hum proposition, though he does mention one interesting feature: the Fujifilm Z10fd comes with an IR port to blast pictures Palm Pilot-style to other cameras similarly equipped. Though this seems like a fairly borked implementation, I'm sure that this is where cameras need to go in the consumer segment to become exciting again.
As he often does, Dave Winer hit the nail on the head a few weeks ago with his concept of the "social camera" where the whole point of the camera's design was to enable the sharing of pictures. I think he hits the nail right on the head in that I can not count the number of times that I've asked for/been asked for pictures tha somehow never make it out of the camera/PC of their owner. And unfortunately, just about all photo-sharing sites (Flickr being the one that comes closer to being the exception) are far too much of a band-aid solution, mostly because of how labor intensive the upload/tagging/sharing sequence is.
The right solution starts from a network connected camera; however, this is a necessary but hardly sufficient precondition. Having had a Nikon S7c, and having been a beta user of the wonderfully clever Eye-Fi wireless SD card, I can attest to the fact that poorly implemented network connectivity can hinder the experience in two key ways. First, if it is too hard to get associated with an wireless access point, and too manual to pick the photos one at a time to send to the cloud, it just won't happen (this is where the Nikon really fell down). And second, if the camera doesn't connect to and send the pictures to a very open cloud-based service with an extremely simple and well-documented API for extracting them for inclusion into other services, there won't be the opportunity for other people to write innovative applications around the photostream.
In fact, if I was a camera manufacturer, I would do two things: first, I'd look at the way that the iPhone works to get on and off of wi-fi networks to see if I could do the same. And if the processing power was just too much for the electronics in a camera, I'd get a Bluetooth module on board and piggyback off the fact that everyone carries a phone, and that increasingly, most of these phones will have Bluetooth and all-you-can-eat data plans. The second thing I would do is build a river-of-photos service backed by Amazon S3 for all of the photos taken by the camera to go to. The challenge would be handling privacy, but with a little thought and some smart defaults, I'm sure something could be worked out (or perhaps early implementations of the system could be just for "Generation Z" who doesn't care about sharing everything).
The closest I've seen anyone come to this is the Shozu series-60 application that would take all of the photos I would take on my Nokia e61i and upload them to Flickr in the background. When I retired my Nokia, Shozu was the thing I missed the most, if only because it hinted at the possibilities of managing my photos as one big feed, with all of the same tools and tricks that I have come to increasingly use with all of the other feeds in my life.
Are you listening camera vendors? I'm ready to buy if you're ready to make!
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 26, 2007)
One of the best things that I've learned to do in order to improve my "game-changing technologies predictive power" is to look back in 2,3, and 5 year chunks at what the things were back then that I thought were for sure the up-and-coming winners. It is a sobering exercise for understanding how in technology it is so very easy to confuse a long view for a short distance.
For instance, take web services. Back in 01-02 they were all of the rage. Websites were going to syndicate functionality to everyone, and companies big and small were going to reap huge rewards from weaving all of these new-found APIs together. And sure, 5 years later we've got a collection of interesting services from Amazon/eBay/Google, a bevy of Web 2.0 companies with half-baked APIs (mostly following in the lead of Flickr), and the built in expectation that if you're building a website today, you are a nobody until you can offer an API to your web service.
In the meantime though, only one ubiquitous API has truly emerged: RSS. As Steve Rubel pointed out in the blog post that started me thinking about this again, RSS is now the common glue by which developers can weave blog posts, pictures, tweets, and whatever else into one uniform stream of data to be consumed, remixed, and shared as needed.
And indeed, this is pretty awesome, despite the fact that we're just now scratching the surface. Adam Green (who in my mind is one of Boston's best software minds, a guy that really can span generations with his thinking) told me almost two years ago that right about now developers would be waking up to a "feed management" problem. What is more, he then set out to build the tools needed for addressing some of these challenges. I haven't stayed close enough to what he's done thus far, but I do agree with the notion that most of the interesting opportunities out there today for people working in the consumer Internet revolve around orchestration of different services through "feed management," though not quite in the publish-it-all-this-is-who-I-am-hear-me-roar style that is so prevalent among the Web 2.0 set.
Most "regular folks" don't care to be emitting digital excrement about every part of their lives for all to see, all of the time. And unfortunately, the privacy model for sharing items from feed selectively is either not there (most blogging tools), too cumbersome (Vox), or too coarsely grained (Twitter). Of all of the existing services, I've seen, Facebook's Mini Feed comes the closest to representing real life use cases, but only because Facebook is itself a closed system with a nice natural mechanism for representing friends and colleagues (though we'll see if this scales as the company moves beyond its traditional college demographic).
In order to be able to remix feeds in an interesting way, we need not only a service that sucks up RSS output from all of one's online publishing/communication platforms and normalizes it all, but also one which can then provide the right level of access control to the people and services that are likely to want to consume that amalgam of information. Now, who is working on that part of the feed management problem? Who has the scale and scope to pull it off in a way that both users and developers trust? Or can we pull it off with some combination of OpenId and RSS extensions?
It seems to me that cracking this identity/authentication/access problem is going to open up a whole world of interesting opportunities for syndicated content and services that will go well beyond publishing for most regular folks, but only if it is done in an open and distributed way. Let's just hope it doesn't take another 5 years to get there.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 5, 2007)
While traveling this week, I discovered a really amazing radio show called "Radio Lab" from New York Public Radio (more specifically, I discovered its podcast). The first episode I listened to, on the ephemeral nature of memories, blew me away both from the quality of the content, and the way in which it was brought together by the show's producers.
The basic premise of the episode is that the old analogy that memories in the brain are stored like pages in a book (or more currently speaking, files on a hard drive) is actually flawed, and that memories are in fact stored in such a way that we re-create them every time we recall them (there is a better code + data analogy which I won't make here but is how I currently understand it). The piece really got me thinking about memory, identity, and what may come from all of us web who seem so obsessed with chronicling life in pictures, blog posts, and just about every form of digital excrement.
An example: right after listening to the piece, I found myself giving a toast at a wedding and trying to recall a story about the groom and I from sixteen years ago. As I felt my brain struggling to reform the memories, it occurred to me that this whole process would have been a whole lot easier in today's Facebook-enhanced world. The episode (and I won't go into it here) was exactly the kind of embarrassing thing that someone would now have caught with a digital camera; it would have made its way to Facebook, and ended up tagged with both of our names by all of our friends. And sixteen years from now it would be a trivial exercise for anyone preparing a toast to pull all of the interactions they've ever had with the person being celebrated— assuming of course that Facebook is still around. And not just pictures but comments, wall posts, blog posts— in short a whole lot of data that would go very far in helping assisting a more accurate reformation of those exact memories.
Progress, right? I've always thought so, for two reasons: because the act of chronicling is itself engages and rewards the author, and for the sake of history (even when you yourself are the historian coming back later to see how you've changed). It is after all exactly like Cory Doctorow wrote when he claimed that his blog served as his outboard brain. And in the Facebook example, the collective nature of the chronicling makes this outboard brain proposition even more compelling.
But the folks on the podcast made me think about whether this is in fact absolute progress. Apparently, every time you do the work of recalling a memory, you change it a little, according to the particular way in which your brain processes it at that given time. It is as though the process of bringing it to the surface bumps it against all of the stuff that has accumulated in your brain since the last time you thought about that particular memory. And in the process, the memory itself changes ever so slightly. Then when you put it away again, it goes back changed just a teeny tiny little bit. Less like what may have "objectively" happened, but a whole lot more "you" in the process.
Obviously the incessant chronicling of our lives doesn't have to affect this very human process for grooming memories over time. However, I suspect that this will only be the case for as long as the tools for chronicling our lives are lossy. Writing something down will almost always leave enough room for the memories around the words to evolve, and the photos we take are only snapshots of instants in time. But what happens when we've got Justin.tv style chronicling (assuming we could store, search, and excerpt it all)? What happens when the collective brain of all of your friends tagging and commenting puts enough perspectives in the chronicle to mitigate this process?
One of the hosts on the show made the incredibly insightful statement that in the end all we are is "a bunch of memories strung together." But from the sound of the rest of the show, it is a string that is always moving twisting slightly this way and that. I wonder what will happen as technology starts constraining the way in which we allow ourselves to move the string over time.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years ago (July 30, 2007)
I've have four different exchanges with folks today about the puff piece that Jason Pontin wrote on Pownce in today's New York Times. Essentially Pownce seems like another social network Web 2.0 application that is trying to build its own messaging infrastructure. Maybe I'm not getting something about what is going on with these sites but my general thinking is that between the web, email, IM, and SMS (all relatively open albeit in decreasing order), we've got enough bricks to play with, and that building closed systems in the name of expediency is a waste of effort.
Jason Kotke nailed the general sentiment a few weeks ago when he accused Facebook of "becoming the new AOL." In jumping on its closed platform, developers are cutting a Faustian bargain at best— and especially so if the revenue model is not clearly split out.
That said, Facebook is a juggernaut, and as such not many can ignore their "platform" play. I'm almost ready to admit that their in-system messaging and status updates make sense. After all, there are millions of college kids hitting refresh 60-70 times a day in order to see what they might have otherwise seen in their inboxes and buddy lists. But a brand new startup attempting to replace email and IM?
I love the implementation of Pownce (especially because it's powered by Django and feels very fast and light). But I just can not see getting onto yet another identity network and another messaging platform just so that I can send big files around. And I think that the Pownce folks would do much better to focus on the features that could complement email and IM instead of wholesale replacing it. For instance, both of these mediums could use much better integration with SMS— and yet Pownce didn't even come out of the gate supporting SMS at all (which to me this was the killer feature that made Pownce's original inspiration so compelling).
Note: to anyone who still wants to try it, I've got a whole load of Pownce invites. Send me an email and they are yours— no need to be bidding on eBay.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years ago (July 21, 2007)
Lots of people have been spending way too much time blogging about the iPhone (though believe it or not, I still think it is under-hyped), so I'm going to stay away from reviewing mine. That said, I did want to make a quick software comment that the iPhone's keyboard makes clear as day.
Whenever you can turn a piece of complex UI from hardware to software, you seriously accelerate the rate of improvement of the general interface.
I've had two other Smartphones, the Treo 700p and the Nokia e61i. Both have the full tactile keyboard that the RIM Blackberry pioneered— which despite looking like it was made for Smurfs, works remarkably well. However, you make two key compromises with it: the loss of real estate that could either go to the screen or to a smaller overall device, and a hard upper limit as to how fast you will be able to go. In the case of the iPhone, it seemed to me that Apple's engineers valued screen over buttons and went with the soft keyboard as a compromise.
And despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the soft keyboard, I never in a million years expected that I would actually find myself typing faster on the virtual iPhone keyboard than on a tactile one. Yet three weeks into it, that is exactly what has happened— I can now type faster on the iPhone than I ever did on the Treo or the Nokia, thanks exclusively to the interface and to the simplistic spelling correction algorithm. More importantly, the rev cycle just went from 12-18 months (the average amount of time between my hardware updates) to whatever the frequency of the iPhone software updates shakes out to be. They've taken something that was tied to the limitations of the physical world and moved it squarely into the realm of the virtual.
ReadWrite web had a thought provoking post on exactly this topic, "digital physics," arguing that an interface which borrows just enough from real world physics but takes it beyond those constraints is the future of all user experiences. At the time I saw it as an esoteric point, but now that I've experienced it, I'm completely sold.
And of course there are other benefits to moving the interface into software. When Tivos replaced VCRs we got a big boost in "recording productivity" just because of how much more heavy lifting was being done in code. I suspect we'll see a lot of the same types of things in the iPhone's virtual keyboard, especially as the API is opened up to third-party developers.
That said, there are clearly examples of when moving an interface from hardware (buttons and knobs) to software can really screw things up: BMW's iDrive and all of those fancy universal remotes being good case studies. It would seem to me though that most of these counterpoints are better examples of poor implementations and not so much a weakness in the idea of moving hardware interfaces to software.
One final caveat: there is this famous Alan Kay quote about how people who are serious about software ultimately build their own hardware (which incidentally Jobs keeps using about all things Apple). I've never understood it until now. It is after all the incredible sensitivity of the panel in the iPhone that lets the software do its magic, and we'd do well to remember that bit of wisdom before even considering the approach.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years ago (July 2, 2007)
Sorry to everyone that comes here for the "big thoughts" about the following shop talk. Feel free to skip— for those interested in web frameworks, read on...
Being the conservative guy that I am, I was willing to bet millions of dollars of investors' money on an "unproven" open-source web framework, but not my own puny personal blog. But a few days of vacation have finally cleared the head and have caused me to abandon the whole Ruby-on-Rails powered fad (more specifically the twice-abandoned Typo project) for a blog powered by Django.
I can't say enough good things about Django. Professionally, it was one of the best technical decisions that I got to make early on at Tabblo. I had always assumed that we would use it for the alpha, maybe the beta, and then dump it for a custom system that could perform. Instead we rode it from the first alpha until the day we got acquired by HP. In the meanwhile we ran 5 million photos through it, a million users, and over 150,000 content publishers. We had some ugly moments (the shift from mod_python to lighttpd/FastCgi and the move to magic removal stick out in my mind), but overall it performed incredibly well. A lot of props go to Adrian and gang for putting together such a flexible framework. They used it as a lightweight CMS, but we were able to take it and build out a full UG content publishing platform (with a lot of help along the way from memcached and solid engineering on the part of the Tabblo folk).
In fact, the HP folks doing diligence on us started by asking why we had not chosen Ruby on Rails and came out the other end incredibly impressed with our Django choice. We survived our security audit (coming out much more unscathed than a lot of other HP acquisitions) thanks mainly to Django, and have continued to develop on top of it even as we get ready to truly become the "print engine for the web."
For sure there are things, I'd love to see improved, namely: mutliple DB support (sharding), a better testing framework, and general speed improvements. But hey, now that we're HP maybe we can find a way to help out with those things!
In the meantime, theonda.org (or an.ton.io) is now officially "Django Powered." I haven't had this much fun programming since at least 6 months before we got acquired. In fact, I've decided that Django— when it comes to web stuff— is perfect for "vacation programming." What do I mean by this? It's the type of programming where you get to focus on the fun stuff and ignore all the crap you find yourself having to do again and again on every web project. A few examples:
* Generic views: if I had 5 dollars for every time I've parsed URL fragments to present a list of objects by date/type/whatever, I'd be long retired.
* RSS/ATOM framework: this one is a bit messy (tightly coupled) but man is it great not to have to deal with XML encoding/decoding. Wowee, the funnest 30 minutes of the project.
* All sorts of nice html-ifying functions: want to wrap your paragraphs in p tags? Format columns of text? All built in with Django.
Finally, Django is just well architected. I use a venerable Mac program called MarsEdit to write all of my blog posts. Unfortunately MarsEdit seems to support mostly crappy old XMLR-RPC-based protocols for publishing (Blogger1, metaweblog). Fortunately for me, between Python's support for xml-rpc and Django's URL dispatch mechanism, supporting metaweblog was a "nap time" exercise (it would have been less time if there was clean and current metaweblog docs on the web). Fun stuff.
Now that I've moved to Django, I'm really excited to start playing again. The thing about Typo was that it was hard to make any changes to it without having some of that RoR "magic" explode in my face. With the Django there is no magic— just clean, explicit, and simple design.
Well done guys!
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 2 months ago (May 9, 2007)
You know I need more original blog titles for my posts when the New York Times (the paragon of the trailing edge) is using the same Star Trek jokes to talk about the coming of 3D printing in this recent piece by Saul Hansell. The article essentially covers the startups that are bringing cheap 3D printers to market (where cheap is $5k-$10K, but remember the first laserprinters) and makes a few other points about this technology's broader applicability.
Neil Gershenfeld covers what this is going to mean for regular folks well in his great book Fab— personal fabricators in everyone's home. I'm guessing though that before we get there, we are going to see all sorts of booming businesses that adopt a service provider model much in the same way that the first laserprinters gave birth to a whole slew of Kinko's copycats that basically rented the printers to users on a per-page basis. This is likely to be the case for two reasons: first, even if people shelled out $5-10K I doubt anyone is going to want to wear/use/display they "gray objects with a rather sandy finish" that the low end personal fabricators will be outputting for a while. More significantly though, the web is the ultimate demand aggregation channel for a service bureau business that can make you a custom version of whatever you want.
Sites like Threadless have already proven that user-led design powered by service bureau can be a great opportunity. Now imagine what that can become once you step outside of t-shirts and into just about any physical product you currently buy at the store. Forget about replacing your cellphone cover, and think for a moment about designing custom toys for your kids, custom wardrobes, or just about anything else that currently exists in your life and is made out of simple materials (it's going to be a while before we're printing robots). Or better yet, imagine remixing other people's design in the way that we can now easily remix web content.
What is going to be even more interesting is when we start to explore the possibilities around creating objects that were not born of the physical world in the first place. Hansell mentions Second Life in the piece— so imagine for a moment if we could start seeing the wacky objects that people build for themselves in-game but as part of the wardrobes we see in the physical world.
Wowee, future here we come...
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 2 months ago (May 7, 2007)
A few years ago when I was talking to him about commercial opportunities in open source, Bob Franskton said something that has stuck with me ever since: he likened the open source geeks to the CB radio fanatics of the 70s— as soon as they finish investing a ton of time getting their Linux machines all set up and connected, all they can do is spend days on end on the Internet talking about their respective setups. It reminded me of growing up with my ham radio dad who'd scramble all over the roof to get the 50 foot antenna perfectly aligned... just to talk to some Australian about aligning antennas.
I think this applies to social media properties as a predictor of mass market appeal much more than it does to open source. Let's call it the CB radio index and define it as the amount of communication/activity/etc. on a given social platform that is about how cool it is to be using that platform relative to total communication/activity/etc. As this number approaches 1, you get an increasingly more niche product that is less likely to appeal to your mom, "Emily," or even your lawyer college roommate.
Here is a great example of a high CB radio index web property: Twitter. Every time I dial up the volume on my Twitter feed I am amazed at how even veteran twitterers can spend an incredible amount of bandwidth writing stuff like "cool, twittering from dentist!"
And an example of the opposite: YouTube. I have never once been sent a link to a YouTube video that is about YouTube (with the painful exception of the acquisition video the founders made).
Now Twitter and YouTube are very different in many ways— but as social media platforms— as examples of the People Platform, I believe they are similar enough to be good tests for the CB radio index. It would be interesting for some grad student somewhere to try this analysis on most of the Web 2.0 sites out there today to see if it indeed has any predictive power.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 5, 2007)
I really loved this post on O'Reilly Radar from Marc Hedlund, especially when he says:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes.
It makes sense if you think about it: UNIX was after all the first network-native multi-user (social) operating system. All of those users back then in the 1970s were living William Gibson's future: present, just not widely distributed, so they developed patterns for work and play that most of us are still rediscovering today.
That said, I still really don't get Yahoo Pipes. When Yahoo launched this mashup application a few weeks ago, the entire blogosphere lit up like a Christmas tree with raves about how this was bringing the ability to program the web to the rest of the non-programming world. Just like OO and software components were meant to 20 years ago and just like Applescript and Automator were supposed to over the last few years.
I tried two Pipes. The first one (which took me the bulk of the 40 minutes I spent playing around) was meant to test a theory that Jon Udell told me about recently regarding common identity across various web services: Jon said that one way to tell who was who was to look for common usernames like fetching or supergeek57. So I tried to wire a Pipe that would take one of the recent tabblos RSS feeds, strip out the username, and do searches for same-author Flickr photos:
No dice though. Despite having a Fetch RSS component and a Flickr-specific component, I just could not wire the canned components in the right way. In Python this is a 7 line script but in Pipes, it's a whole lot of cool AJAX dragging and no satisfaction.
Then I figured I would do something simpler and take the Huffington Report's heinously monster RSS feed and filter out Chris Kelly (my favorite blogger from there):
This was much easier to do but I've got to admit that there have to be easier ways to get this done than by building a Pipe.
Unix worked where Yahoo Pipes doesn't because people wrote a large ecosystem of small programs and because the real pipe (|) was more loosely typed and flexible than the Yahoo Pipes inputs/outputs. The first problem could be solved with lots of programmers writing Pipes for regular folk but I have a hard time seeing that so long as it is possible for these same folks to whip off quick Perl scripts that do the same. And without the rich ecosystem of Pipes, I'm not sure the inter-connects will ever get flexible enough.
So while I agree with Marc on the overall insight, I think that Pipes is not the web's replacement for bash. I do think that replacement exists though, and its arrived in a really weird first incarnation: MySpace.com.
Sure it is the uber-daddy of social network, but to me to most compelling part of MySpace was the way that it allowed regular folks to copy and paste bits of HTML and Javascript into profile pages in an interactive way that UNIX folks from the 1970s would have been proud of. And by the look of some of these profile pages, it is unlikely these folks stitching random bits of execution together are particularly technical. Just particularly motivated.
So Marc is right— UNIX is getting re-invented on the web, mostly because the problem domain is the same and the social urge is still there. It's just not the geeks anymore which means that the form it takes is not always a clear and obvious mapping of the UNIX of old.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (March 11, 2007)
I recently got a chance to read Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code," a story about the ups and downs (mostly downs in this case) of the software development process of Chandler at OSAF. The book is a great introduction to challenges of software engineering, especially for outsiders, though it is nowhere near as good as Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of A New Machine" despite the fact that most reviewers seem intent on comparing the two.
One of the central themes that Rosenberg tackles is that of the "software crisis," or simply put, software engineering's inability to scale the production process in the same way that other engineering disciplines have— most notably, hardware engineering but also mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, etc. In all of these other fields "scale" refers both to being able to linearly apply more manpower while achieving linear or super-linear boosts in productivity, as well as producing less error prone and more predictable output.
This question is of course near and dear to any software person who has ever missed a schedule or over-scoped a feature, so naturally I was drawn to the bibliography where I found an incredibly interesting, albeit dated, book by Brad Cox (the creator of Objective-C) called "Superdistribution" on exactly this topic of scaling software engineering. The book was published in 1996 and is now out of print but I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in software engineering as a fledgeling discipline.
The core of Cox's argument is that the notion of "Software ICs" (software integrated components similar to chips in hardware) has not taken off not because of technical reasons (as he learned after developing Objective-C for just this purpose) but because of economic ones. In essence, he argues that there is no economic advantage to the designer/developer of a software component that can easily be re-used (through good interfaces, cross-language bindings, good documentation, etc.) because the licensed-library model does not provide adequate compensation to create a thriving ecosystem, and because other models (such as per-unit royalties) have not been popular in the software industry for various reasons. Hence capable programming teams are left much more motivated to re-invent the wheel in the hopes of building the next MS Office and are less likely to make a good living at some lower layer (for instance, the word-wrap object, the pagination object, etc.) in the same way that their hardware counterparts have been able to.
His solution turns on a clever attribute of software but is nonetheless completely impractical. Software has no control over its being copied, Cox argues, but it has very tight control over its being executed, and as such, it could establish a payment mechanism based on "useright" rather than "copyright," metering its own use and charging accordingly. This seems counter to the grain of personal computing to me, and in fact the only examples I have ever seen of this model have been with really expensive software ($100K+) where the vendor leaves no other alternative. And of course this is to say nothing of the administrative nightmare that a system like this would be. Current DRM systems would look like "Hello World" by comparison.
So I don't like his solution but I do agree with his conclusion. To scale we do need more modularization, and the reasons for not being there are most likely economic and social at this point— and not because we're still looking for the one runtime to rule them all.
Coincidentally, it is interesting to see how in the intervening decade two trends have helped combat the coming software crisis that Cox predicts in his book. The first, the mainstreaming of open source, has created an alternative economic model for encouraging software re-use, though I suspect Cox would argue that this alternative economic model is not robust enough to survive or scale to what he is imaging. Still, you'd be a moron to try to write an RDBMS or a webserver at this point, and this productivity boost comes directly as a result of the open source production process. The second trend, which seems much more in line with what Cox argues for, is that of metered web services. Amazon S3, EC2, and their brethren are great examples of a pay-per-use model at work, and the fact that the bits are not being pushed down to the client seems to be a great way to solve the language/runtime interop problems that he discusses in the book.
Economic arguments aside, there is tons of good stuff in Superdistribution (if you can get past its datedness and its wonky illustrations). For instance, Cox covers how time-sharing systems have left us with a legacy of independent processes with individual memory address spaces and are thus difficult to integrate in a component-based way while the futuristic systems of the 1970s (Smalltalk in particular) tried to eliminate the distinction between the machine's runtime and the processes running in part to solve this very problem. This was sort of mind-bending to me as I've always seen this as one of UNIX's greatest features (at least when compared to DOS/Windows/Mac OS-pre-X). He also makes a wonderful attempt at building a vocabulary for layers in software and often uses rich analogies from other engineering disciplines to make his arguments.
But best of all, it is clear that Cox is an in-the-trenches engineer who has deep knowledge of languages, platforms, and building big systems. Thus the book avoids that "architecture astronaut" feel that you sometimes get from this kind of effort (sorry but the much beloved Go4 book still feels like that to me). If you are interested in this sort of thing, it's well worth reading.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 7, 2006)
Tim O'Reilly is right to point out how much of the hacking/Make attitude we can now start to take towards our devices thanks to every embedded CPU's inexorable march towards Internet connectivity. One category that I've been especially interested in for a while now is digital cameras because no matter what proponents of the uber mobile communicator tell me, cellphone cameras are still too closed, too blurry, and too painfully slow to make most of us even remotely happy with their output.
For some time now, the big pocket camera vendors have been experimenting with Bluetooth and 802.11b/g on a few of their models but most of these approaches have either been brain-dead (like the Kodak Easyshare One which only connects to Ofoto) or too cumbersome (like the Nikon Coolpix P1) to be worth the effort and compromise one had to make on the camera side of the equation. Which is why I was so interested while reading Katie's recent review in the Wall Street Journal of Nikon's S7c Coolpix wi-fi 7MP camera, and in particular, seeing her conclude that the whole wi-fi piece was actually quite usable. So I finally decided to go ahead and take the plunge and get a S7c... and have thus far been pleasantly surprised.
I'm not going to go into a review of the camera (see below for my tabblo doing just that) but wanted instead to focus on a couple of things that Nikon has done which are really smart from the perspective of this whole hacking your devices meme in the hope that others (hello Apple? Sony?) take notice.
First off, you should think of the camera as an open access point sniffer with a lens. Instead of forcing you to have a computer running a software client, or to pre-program a set of access points you want to use ahead of time, the S7c's wi-fi mode is set to start scanning for any access point that it can associate with. This is fabulous and exactly how every wi-fi device should work– instead of futzing around with WEP keys or preferred access points, the S7c just claws its way to a TCP connection and starts sending its pictures out into the ether. Another very nice touch that I am sure some Nikon biz dev guy deserves a steak dinner for is a deal with T-Mobile which gives you a free ride on their Starbucks network for 1 year. This costs T-Mobile nothing and adds a tremendous amount of value to the "platform" that Nikon is building here.
The second great thing Nikon has done is perhaps more important still– it has all but invited hackers into the image stream that the camera can emit. Officially, your pictures are uploaded to a site run by Nikon called nikonipcss.com (though its marketing name seems to be "Coolpix Connect") and an email is sent automatically to whoever you want that contains a link back to the Nikon site with an authentication token that automatically shows your guests the pictures you've uploaded through the camera. To say that the Coolpix site is spare is an understatement but what it lacks in flash it more than makes up in usability. First, no passwords required (the token takes care of that), and second (unlike most photo sites operated by output vendors or mobile phone operators) there is no clutter dedicated to selling you other junk or reminding you that you are trapped in some Sony/Verizon silo where the price of entry entails roach-moteling your data.
But the best part of the whole Nikon experience for me was how easy it was to hack the site and wrap an API around getting my photos out. Having spent a good many hours writing screen scrapers to fight the roach-motel model across different types of sites, I sat down this morning to figure out how to marry the S7c's cool new wi-fi features to our own auto-tabblos (basically a tabblo with an email address that can receive pictures and/or text for automatic inclusion) armed with Firebug and the desire to set my data free. Forty-five minutes later I was done and pushing a plug-in into our email processing infrastructure that can take the Nikon Coolpix emails in one side and end up with the actual assets in your tabblo on the other. Now it's just a few hours later and everyone using Tabblo gets S7c import for free– just create an auto-tabblo and send your Coolpix email to the auto-tabblo's address. [ If you are interested in this for yourself, email me– depending on interest level, I may go through the effort of factoring out the Tabblo dependencies to release it as a stand-alone Python module ]
I haven't talked to Nikon formally about this whole effort but given that the Coolpix site erases your pictures after two weeks (and given that I don't think they are in the business of building advanced AJAX multi-format layout engines), I suspect that they will be ok with my efforts to build on the platform they've put out there. After all, I am now excited by new camera and its possibilities and will recommend it to all of the folks who've asked me in the past about getting one of these w-ifi cameras to route around the issues with cellphones and photos.
Notice that Nikon doesn't have to spend the time and energy developing a nice Flickr-like API in order for folks like us to do this– they just have to make a device/platform that provides enough value (which their camera + access point sniffer + T-Mobile subscription certainly does) and then simply not make stupid decisions that would foreclose experiments like this on the part of hackers. Because the truth is that it wouldn't have been too hard for them to make this a much more involved project (for a good example of this, try hacking on Shutterfly or Ofoto).
Doc Searls (who is a friend and advisor to Tabblo) has recently begun talking and blogging about the need to create photography 2.0 out of an ecosystem of players who all add value around the user's data– with new formats, products, services, etc. He often uses Flickr's open data API and our integration as an example of such a model but the part of his speech that I like the best– and which also scares me the most– is when he starts talking about how the big photo 1.0 players like Eastman Kodak don't see it this way because of their need to maintain "silos of control." For me, this Nikon thing is a good example of a big player who gets it– or at least is willing to let others experiment while they sit back and try to sort it all out.
By the way, if you want my thoughts on the S7c as a camera:
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 3, 2006)
Good computer science canon teaches you that the specifics of the computer language you are using are at best "implementation details" and that if you grasp the key core components of computation (indirection, recursion, modularity, etc.) and are a good "computer scientist," it's just a matter of time before you're up to speed in anything from COBOL to OCaml. If this is true though, it's curious to see how many people have turned language choice into a more heated issue that the Red Sox versus Yankees one and how often it keeps coming up in flames and debates.
At the end of the day, I too would like to believe the theory that we are all just huge brains floating in jars full of jelly wired with electrodes and that external stimuli like syntax, core language constructs, whether there is an explicit compile step, static typing, etc. can just be adapted to by moving a few of the electrodes around. Unfortunately, experience just doesn't bear it out.
Which is why I found Luke Plant's tongue-in-cheek piece about how learning languages like Python and Haskell are making him less of a productive programmer such an entertaining read. For some reason, reading his C# code example made me think of all of those heinous years of programming in Java when I would be left with really ugly constructs like anonymous-inner classes-as-adapters or a horrific introspection API for faking late-binding code (and the fact that early Java heads would talk about how "elegant" these solutions were did not help my confidence at the time either). It's been two years since I've had to do that, and I can honestly say that I will probably never use Java again in any kind of serious project, or C# or any of the other similarly inspired languages (unless forced to under threat of starvation).
The reason is simple: working full-time in Python (and Javascript to some degree) rewires those brain electrodes in a really positive way (if your goal is fast development and deferring design decisions as long as possible which it should be for any web application developer; perhaps not so true for avionics engineers) and it would be both painful and counterproductive to go back at this point. Others have written extensively about this but the basic argument is that with an highly expressive, consistent, low-overhead language, you get a ton more time to think through the real problem. Conversely, another way to put it that is more in tune with my particular circumstances these days is that you need a lot less time to experiment and prototype.
So I feel for you Luke– I think if I had to still be writing the cruft that they've got you coding at work, I would also be less productive, but probably mostly from chewing my fingers down to stubs out of frustration. And to all of you computer science bigots with the "I can program in abacus if I have to" mentality– you know, the guys who say the One True Language is LISP even though the only time they've typed more than two parentheses in a row was when they were dabbling in ASCII art or who talk really fast about Turing-complete languages assuming that there is a 1-to-1 exchange rate between insight and speed of talking– to those guys, I look forward to getting you jobs with some of our competitors.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 3, 2006)
There is an IBMer with a terrific blog post where he tells of describing all of this Web 2.0 hoopla to a friend as:
chmod 777 web
So in UNIX-speak this loosely means: allow anyone to read, write, and execute the web. Really cute, and really right on. Anyone who knows even a little bit of UNIX gets it right away.
Especially nice during this week of Web 2.0 trademark nonsense when people just decided to pile on poor Tim.
(via Infectious Greed)
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 15, 2006)
So we've officially launched the public beta for Tabblo amidst two storms. The first one was the state of emergency declared by the state of Massachusetts due to the flooding that has been brought about by the interminable rain here in the Bay State. The second storm is taking place in the blogosphere over Josh Kopelman's post on the value of the 53,651 geeks who read TechCrunch and jump from beta to beta as all of these Web 2.0 companies launch. Josh's argument is classic Crossing the Chasm: these users, being on the leading edge do not translate to meaningful traction in the mass market. Dave Winer takes issue and points to how valuable these early users can be, and I tend to agree (for a nice summary of the debate, see Om's post).
Probably only about 10% of those 50K users are passionate enough to qualify for what I am about to argue but the number is large enough. In the social software space (in which I would include virtually every webapp out there), software without lots of users of early users will necessarily be worse than software with early and passionate users. Take for example del.icio.us and Furl: when they started, Furl was actually quite a bit more usable but del.icio.us managed to resonate with some of the early adopter crowd relatively early and within a year there was no comparison between the sites.
The argument has also been made that this early crowd is just too different and distracting from the bread-and-butter folks who make up the "mass market" but I don't buy that for two reasons that both center on this vague notion of the "mass market." These are people too, right? People who get out there and use MySpace or Gmail, or send TXTs to American Idol once a week. How then can we assume that because they haven't heard of digg, or del.icio.us, they wouldn't grok it right away if they did? The second point is simply this: if as a startup you have good product management on board, it's just not that hard to keep two lists: the features that the really important people who are helping co-develop your product want and get excited about, and the features that the fast-followers and "mass market" types want. I all about laser focus in startups, but it seems to me that if there is one place where it pays to keep your ear to the ground and be willing to experiment, it is in early user co-development of your service.
Speaking selfishly from Tabblo's perspective, I welcome every one of those 53,651 power users into our public beta even if you want to pick up your stakes and move on to whatever the hot launch is next week. There are worse problems than having a bunch of smart, well-immersed folks tread all over you for the opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of just a few of them. As Scoble writes, "one snowflake at a time."
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geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 10, 2006)
Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame has a couple of posts on Lego Factory, a "CAD/CAM plus mass customization" product line that is fascinating to see, and even more enjoyable to actually use.
Basically
Lego Factory works like this: you download a free design tool from the Lego website and start building your own custom Lego model in what is clearly a simplified CAD tool. You work from a palette of standard Lego pieces but get to choose one-off from any of the available pieces (including those ones that annoyingly only include three to a kit when you need four). Since the app is available on both Windows and Mac, I was afraid it was going to be some kludgey Java thing that was frustrating and limited, but it's actually a native binary that is snappy, intuitive, and attains a great balance between power and simplicity (and this is on the Mac no less).
When you are done assembling your model, you can price it on the website and order it as a kit-of-one made especially for you. Anderson's second blog post covers how back at Lego HQ each kit gets picked, packed, and shipped by manually and talks about the seemingly unbecoming economics of this but based on my own experience, I think that this is something they will quickly sort out as demand ramps.
I'm an absolute Lego nut with a four year-old that serves as a terrific enabler when it comes to sinking time into things like Lego Factory but Factory is interesting to me from the perspective of understanding the coming phenomenon of mass customization in consumer products. Levi's took on the first great experiment in this a few years ago with "jeans that fit every butt" but since then I've been surprised by how few people have followed suit. Recently, someone sent me a link to an Beyond, outdoor clothing manufacturer that is taking a similar approach with clothing. For years I've been yapping to anyone who will listen about the need for a custom bag equivalent of Beyond clothing, and yet no one seems to be ready to answer the call even among a slew of innovative, high-cost producers of bags.
I think that folks who look into these markets are afraid of two things: 1. as Anderson points out, at first blush the economics smell really bad (especially when you think about competition from China) and 2. I think that folks are afraid that, as Levi's "discovered," the demand is simply not there at "mass market scales."
I think that bad economics is a bit of a red herring from a couple of reasons. First, again from my own experience, it's amazing to see how cheap these "high touch" custom products can really get if you apply even a basic amount of engineering to the manufacturing process for a few different reasons (to come in a latter blog post). And more importantly, a growing group of consumers have demonstrated a clear willingness to bear higher prices for customized goods.
And as far as demand goes, you need to look no further than Anderson's own forthcoming Long Tail book to see how the Internet can be used to aggregate enough niches to get to pretty significant numbers (I've been reading an ARC copy of the book and have to say that it is an awesome read even if you feel over-exposed to the all of the long tail hype). Besides, the Internet's enabling of peer production is the rocket fuel that mass customization needs to really explode as a far-reaching phenomenon. Lego Factory is beginning to hint at this through the community and contests, trying to encourage users to leverage each other's work, but I want it to get both smaller and bigger at the same time. Smaller because I want to learn how to assemble wings, claws, etc. from the lead users that can make New York skylines with full Statue of Liberty replicas- I may even want these gurus designing custom pieces that I can buy for my kits. And bigger because I also want the community around Factory to thrive in other ways: tutorials, videos, and perhaps even live seminars that allow those of us struggling to get what we want to be able to learn "guild-style" as we might have 500 years ago by apprenticing with an artisan.
It's clear that the computer, cheap tools, user-generated content, and the Internet have busted open the media landscape for good. Now I not only consume when I want to (a la Tivo), but also where I want to (iPod ecosystem), and most importantly what I want to (a la YouTube, podcasts, etc.). I want to see the same thing happen with physical products across all sorts of categories. We're trying to do it in story-telling products, but others, like Lego with Factory, need to get on the bandwagon and bring us closer to a world where atoms start behaving just like bits are starting to in media.
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Posted by Antonio
3 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 17, 2006)
Apparently, the reason why US telephone numbers have seven digits in them is because a psychologist from Harvard University named George Miller did some research in 1956 that concluded that most people can remember at most seven chunks of information, plus or minus two.
As convergence in the digital age sneaks up on us, it would be interesting to see the same study replicated for the things we carry around with us. In my own case, it feels like the most I can remember to keep with me is two things plus-or-minus one. And unfortunately most days I end up leaving the house with 5 things (mobile, camera, media player, wallet, and id/keys). Every morning I go through the same routine: hunting for the various pieces which I've naturally deposited in different places before giving up and leaving for work with a part or two missing (a trend which is only exacerbated as we get into the cold months and I have to go searching through various jacket pockets). Just yesterday morning, I made the unfortunate mistake of leaving for breakfast without my wallet. While I was driving back home to retrieve currency to pay the bill, I was running the calculation in my head about how much time this whole ordeal is going to cost me in time over the next ten years (21 days out of 10 years spent hunting for gizmos).
Then I thought, while each of these devices serves a different function, with the exception of the very physical tokens (wallet, id) which could be better represented as data files anyway, on the inside they have the same guts (they are all basically miniaturized computers). As you look at them, they are even starting to look the same— probably because it's the same Flextronics factories churning them all out by the millions. Is it still too much to ask that they all get mushed into one device that I can carry around with me?
Power, form factor, cost, expected lifetime of use— there are plenty of reasons why the uberdevice has not worked thus far. However, we've finally got really compelling reasons for having each of these things with us at all time. Ubiquitous Internet access and a whole bunch on interesting web services existing in the cloud (iTunes, Twitter, Google Maps, etc.) I think make the general purpose smart device really compelling both for not only communication but content consumption, and perhaps more importantly, content creation.
There will always be a need for specialized devices (you can't beat the quality of a digital SLR or the screen on a video player) but in a sense, their existence will allow for sacrifices to be maade that would make the uber communicator workable. Here is the list of things, I would gladly sacrifice for the convenience of an integrated solution:
- camera
- flash
- super zoom lens
- resolutions higher than 3MP
- phone
- the "handset" form factor (headset talking is just fine)
- multi-frequency radio (including AMPs support for ubiquity of signal)
- wallet
- cash (you can carry this separately)
- media player
The one thing that is absolutely non-negotiable is simple software that works quickly without crashing. I use a Treo 700p on a daily basis which is supposed to be the fastest and most stable of the smartphones and yet, I find its software to be complete crap. This device would have to work more like an iPod in terms of reliability and speed which may in the end mean separate processors, OSes, and even power sources. This ok— so long we still get a form factor that is all-in-one.
Since I am a software person, this is mainly my Jetsons view of the world (totally imaginable but not necessarily feasible). However, with all of this crazy speculation about Apple doing an iPhone and Google getting into the business as well, I figure I'd put it out there— my Christmas wishlist if you will.
In the meanwhile, I'm off to find a very low tech system so that I stop leaving things behind.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 19, 2006)
As we struggle to get Tabblo into beta, Ned sent me a very relevant piece from Brad Horowitz-- "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers"-- on social sites, participation, and the industry's move to embracing the unwitting blogger.
Horowitz starts the post with this chart to show that in fact very people people have to be "active" in order for a community site to be of significant value. His argument is that this 1-10x-100x ratio holds across different sites and he uses both Yahoo Groups (a great aggregation of many communities of all types and sizes) and Wikipedia as examples of the ratio holding. He argues that this winnowing we see as someone moves from lurker to creator actually helps to reduce noise in the community which I don't agree with (who hasn't been part of a group where the most vocal can end up being the most disruptive?) but then also argues that he is all for removing barriers that preclude more active participation.
The first example he gives is one where the production experience is so lightweight (posting individual pictures to flickr) that it's a very easy and seamless shift from consuming to producing. This is interesting but I'd argue that for many worthwhile activities that live naturally in a social software site, the production experience shouldn't (or couldn't) be sufficiently simplified to make the transition so easy (researching a wikipedia topic, remixing podcasts, contributing code to an open source project, etc.) and what becomes really interesting to me are attempts to break the 1-10-100 ratio in those cases, especially around the 1-10 lurker-> synthesizer transition where I think there is so much locked up communal value.
Brad then makes the case for properly instrumenting a social site such that it encourages "implict creation" and creates "public artifacts" as a byproducts of what the users are doing in the system. This is similar to Dan Bricklin's old Cornucopia of the Commons argument or Tim O'Reilly's Architecture of Participation and is dead on as a starting point for trying to harness the potential creative investment of all of those community lurkers.
I prefer using "unwitting blogger" because there is a bumbling and serendipitous tone to unwitting that I think fits better with how most people who engage with a site suddenly discover that they have undergone a state change up the pyramid. It's almost never a conscious decision on the part of the user but after it's done, you'll find it very hard to put that particular genie back in the bottle.
Unfortunately, this dynamic seems like a really hard thing to get right. It takes a really rare mix of tool-building, community management, and perhaps most importantly (and most obviously missing from most of today's social sites), a really deep understanding of how people learn and what kind of rewards are necessary to get them to invest one more incremental unit of effort in working their way up the pyramid. As we move from easy production experiences to richer ones where more creativity is encouraged, finding the right mix is the challenge that faces us all.
[ As an aside, it is so nice to see a bigwig from the largest social software experimenter out there blogging about this stuff openly. It speaks volumes to how good it is to be working in the consumer web today, especially when you compare it to say, another "consumer" industry: consumer electronics where I had an opportunity to play five years ago. No matter how hard I try, I just can't imagine one of the big cheeses at Philips posting on whether "this iPod thing is really gonna go anywhere." ]
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 21, 2006)
Adam, who is out at Mashup Camp, has been trying to get me to think about mashups for a while now. I think more than anything it's been the fact that he was willing to get into a tin can and fly 3,000 miles to an ad-hoc "camp" that has me finally getting over my "yeah but we did this 10 years ago with Perl scripts" bigotry and really trying to suss this out.
Before I get to where mashups click for me though, I should mention that it's nice to see that even while inhaling that west coast vibe, Adam has stopped to think about the fact that with the exception of Amazon, source component providers like Google, Ebay, and Craig's List don't have a real clear economic incentive to continue providing their data and compute cycles for free beyond a certain yet-to-be-determined point. This is a very valid and important observation which Peter Rip picks up in a nice post on the challenges associated with building a mashup-based business.
Now one might argue that allowing for core functionality to be exported serves a real long tail purpose. People who mix up Google Maps with anything else are perhaps the best example of this-- after all, while one could argue that the Google Maps team may have seen apps like Housing Maps coming, there is certainly no way they saw the Jacktracker (an intensely enjoyable site for 24 fans). I think the long tail argument is good (as is Eric von Hippel's related user-led innovation argument) but I think that mashups provide these big source service providers an even bigger benefit: the ability to attract an audience for their core functionality that is way out of the swath inhabited by their average user: the geeks.
Geeks are amongst the more discerning and most marketing-proof people you can find out on the web today. They're also among the most passionate, and with the emergence of the blogosphere, they are definitely the most vocal. Businesses have been built on the hypothesis that understanding geeks really matters. And yet, trying to build an application that has high geek appeal and that also serves a large market of "regular" users can be a bad idea for one of two reasons: either the application already exists and has won their hearts and minds (think photos and Flickr, bookmarks and del.icio.us) or it is just too far out there to have any sort of "regular" person appeal.
Exposing core functionality in the form of an API that facilitates mashups cuts this Gordian Knot in a productive way. It makes a potential service provider focus on what's really important and differentiable with an influential and discerning crowd. And at the same time, it lets the product team focus a more tightly integrated web application on the core constituency.
And so, here's what's been most useful to me about trying to get my head around the impact of mashups: thinking through the hypothetical of when geeks might want to mash up parts of what we're working on. It encourages clarity (in terms of what it is that is unique) and enforces modularity (so that we can easily export this core functionality without going crazy). And most importantly, it gives us hope of finding a nice way to serve two equally important (but very different in terms of needs) audiences.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 7, 2006)
This Wired article on the next generation of Lego Mindstorms (the NXT) is making the rounds as a testament to "embracing user innovation" or "long-tail" product development. I'd like to point out something that is less cool but more important: that this new toy could unleash an incredible amount of creativity in the kids who play with it.
Technically, I would have killed for something like this when I was nine years old-- in fact I would have killed for the first two Mindstorms, but with the NXT Lego seems to have addressed the most important short-coming of the other two kits-- the "time to pleasure." As an adult, I remember fiddling with the original Mindstorms for about 5 hours before managing to get a little car-with-feelers that would avoid driving off the table only to have a bug in its software cause it to back into a horrible death off the other end of the table.
Apparently this time around, an explicit design goal is "20 minutes to robot" which seems to me to be the right amount of time to get the right type of kid absolutely hooked on programming things that respond to the environment and which you can build with your own two hands.
Back in the late 70s, I got a toy from my dad for Christmas one year which set me on a course that ended up with me building software for a living-- a Milton Bradley "Big Track." It was a programmable tank which you could make go forward and backward, turn in-place, and flash a "laser light / noisemaker" on the tank's nose via a simple stored program you would enter into a keypad on the top of the tank. It took almost no time to grasp the concept (despite having to have the instructions translated for me into Spanish), made for hours and hours of fun, and most importantly, provided the first "platform" that I ever programmed for. It was an easy move from the Big Trak to the Timex Sinclair and then the the Apple ][. Each device had its own kind of magic-- for the Big Trak it was this crazy notion that there was something in the real world that you could make "do stuff" on command.
When I mentioned the new Mindstorms (and the possibility that it will launch the career of a whole slew of Roboticists) to a friend yesterday, he argued that in the age of the Xbox 360 with its ultra-realistic games, kids weren't interested in programming anymore. And to some degree this is true-- the days of typing pages worth of Applesoft Basic from the back of Byte magazine for a low-res game are certainly gone for good.
Before we lose all hope, let's go back to the Big Trak for a moment: years after it had failed to make the move with me to the US, I remember being introduced to Seymour Papert's Logo programming language in school. Like millions of other kids, I was encouraged to paint the screen with my turtle which was amusing for a little while. For me though, compared to the challenges of navigating the Big Trak between the chairs and the dining room table from 20 feet away, Logo felt constrained and limited-- perhaps in much the same way that the XBox-360 experience might feel to a kid capable of building a home version of RobotWars.
I can not wait for this toy to come out.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 1, 2006)
Every new year I try to write down a few things I think might happen over the course of the year as an exercise . While I find that I am pretty good at seeing the broad patterns, I often get the timing wrong so this makes for good practice. This is the first year that I am putting the guesses down on the blog instead of just keeping them to myself though in the spirit of #6 below.
I've broken the six predictions down by category to make partial consumption of this post easier.
Product
1) Apple will finally clue in to the "All of the best electronics under 6lbs" mantra that should have been driving all product strategy for the company for years now. Everybody loves the iPod. Wall Street loves Apple because of the iPod. But I find Apple's real sub-6lb jewel to be their portable computers and not the iPod (even the Nano which I think was truly the product of the year for 2005). The laptop market is the hottest part of the PC market, and Apple laptops are just head and shoulders above the rest. They do power management better, they do wireless better, they do ergonomics better to say nothing about the far superior look-feel-flow of the product overall. I think that the impending switch to Intel is likely to let this little known secret about Apple's other "small" gadget clear and apparent to many dissatisfied VAIO and Lenovo users. If it is true that they have a low cost laptop on the way in January that runs on Intel, watch 2006 as the year Apple cleans up with laptops.
2) Google will make video work on the Internet. I first became aware of the fact that you could do video clips from pretty much any digital camera in 2000. iMovie and MovieMaker make it easy for anyone to edit a movie. And the vast number of Flickr copycats that focus on video clips (Revver, YouTube) show that people have an appetite for producing and consuming video on the Internet. Yet there are still tons of problems, chief among them: the lack of a JPEG equivalent for video (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MJPEGA/B, DiVX, WMV, ??), the lack of adequate bandwidth for uploading/downloading, and most importantly the lack of a proper organizational tool for finding and subscribing to relevant sources of content.
I do not believe that the nascent startups taking the Flickr model to video are going to solve enough of the problems (just the codec stuff alone is more than any of them can handle) but I do think Google can; unlike Yahoo who is more polished and "Hollywood" in their video aspirations, Google is primed to take advantage of the user-generated content wave. They've got the infrastructure, DNA to organize it, and goodwill to create a JPEG of video for Internet distribution. Watch their big "Google Maps" moment in 2006-- I bet it's likely going to be around Voogle.
Business
3) Subscription models on the web are going to become more pervasive. The New York TImes launced NYtimes Select and it's working well for them. People dig Yahoo Music, and iTunes is not far behind with it's version of a subscription model (a mini prediction for 2006). But more importantly, people are paying for services like Flickr Pro, TypePad, and the raft of mini productivity applications like those from 37signals. All of these signs point to the possibility that the web may be emerging from the Ice Age of AdWords into a healthy ecosystem where different business models, and specifically the subscription business model, will work at all levels. After 2006 it will no longer be heresy for small companies to approach potential backers with references to business models that turn on subscription revenue in the same way that today it is no longer wacky to talk about Adwords-like business models for online ventures.
Technical
4) Firefox will be leveraged as a viable platform. The ActiveState guys tried it with Komodo and dev tools a few years ago but it was far too early, and rich IDEs were not a good place to start. But Firefox is here, it's credible, and it's extremely interesting to a whole bunch of alpha geeks that are experimenting with everything from GreaseMonkey scripts to full-on XPI extensions. What Andresen and gang promised with Netscape in 1997, the Mozilla guys may finally have with Firefox 1.5 (all while Microsoft appears asleep at the wheel). Think Flock but more appropriate and less "heavy". I don't know what the first breakout application on top of the Firefox platform will be (P2P file sharing, VOIP, publishing tool, collaborative editor?) but I think we'll see it in 2006.
5) Ruby on Rails loses momentum but dynamic languages thrive. I think RoR is going to get big and hairy this year and start to look a lot more like Zope but it won't matter all that much because it has already done it's job in memeland. Enterprise zealots have woken up (probably not for the first time) to the power of high-level, expressive, late-binding, OO languages like Ruby and Python and the 5-10x productivity boosts that come with using them for small to medium-sized teams. With Guido at Google I think 2006 will be a very good year for Python. And who knows, if Rite (Ruby 2.0) gets done, we may end the year with a number of really compelling dynamic languages (and libraries/frameworks) for stuff to get built with.
The Main Trend
6) The Year of the Casual Publisher. I'm borrowing from Ev's blog post about being a successful web company in the use of the word casual because it fits so well. Over the last two years, all of the people posting to a blog or building a website were painfully aware of the fact that they were in fact "publishing" to the world. There are definitely a large number of people who are interested in doing just this, but as with the proverbial iceberg, there are probably 100-1000x as many folks who in effect "publish" stuff online in a completely unwitting way. Today, this ranges all the way from the occasional forum poster or Amazon book reviewer to the person with 2-3 OFoto albums or 10-20 Flickr pictures. But over the course of this year, I think we will see new services emerge which encourage this type of casual publishing in the same unwitting manner but which centralize the "creative investment" users make in a way that allows folks who would never ever have considered themselves "bloggers" per se to develop a point of presence
online.
This last one will have the longest term consequences for how we work, socialize, and generally relate to each other on and off line. In much the same way that I would not hire an engineer today whose blog I couldn't read, whose open source contributions I couldn't see, or whose activity level in an online community I couldn't gauge, I think in 2-4 years people will just not know how to relate to new folks whose online presence they can not visit. From what I understand, this dynamic has already played out on University campuses across the country thanks to Facebook, so it is not too much navel gazing to see it coming for the rest of us.
I for one look forward to an exciting 2006 where I'll get a chance to write more on this coming trend. At the very least, as Alan Kay once supposedly said-- "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." We'll be taking our own crack at this in the coming months and I look forward to writing about it here.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 11, 2005)
It's good to whine. In response to my complaining about how the debate over Python and Ruby, and Rails and Django is getting old, someone sent me this Ian Bicking article comparing Python and Ruby.
Now I know I said I was ready to move on but this piece is just '''so''' good, I had to mention it here. From what little Ruby experience I have, I get the feeling that this is the best overall comparison between the two out there-- and what is really great is how much of the "conventional wisdom" regarding differences he just cuts right through, i.e., Ruby being more "OO" than Python as a common misconception.
In fact the only think I would say is missing (or just not directly addressed) which I would have mentioned is transparency of implementation. For example, in Python all the OO is done with dictionaries which makes it really nice conceptually. I don't have enough experience in Ruby to know whether this is also the case, but when I've played around with re-opening classes I've gotten this weird feeling that there is something much deeper going on inside the Ruby runtime.
Finally, Ian has this fabulous link to a little widget from the computer language shootout data which is just great. It is in desperate need of some Tuft-ean help presenting the data (it takes a while of staring at it to figure out just what it is they are trying to show) but man is it fun to run comparisons like this one and wonder just WTF all those millions of clueless programmers are doing (look across all 3 dimensions), this one to understand just how big the programmer productivity penalty is, or this one to wonder how many times we forget that all the truly genius things in software were done 30 years ago.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 7 months ago (Dec. 9, 2005)
So there have been two raging debates recently that have made me think about productivity and tools.
The first was ignited by one of the Y-Combinator companies, Reddit, reimplementing their site in Python after having done the first version in Lisp. Since they are a "Paul Graham company" and since Paul Graham has spent a long time convincing us thatLisp was the ultimate language (even while speaking at Python conferences), the geek blogosphere and comp.langs.* newgroups were full of debate about what this meant with respect to whether Lisp was all that Lispers make it seem.
The second (but related) debate came from a post on O'Reilly Radar where Tim O'Reilly pointed out that Ruby books have raced past Python books in terms of sales. This observation lit up a debate about the relative merits of the two languages, their web frameworks, and their communities.
These discussions are mildly interesting to follow, but at this point only just mildly. Both Ruby and Python are incredibly productive tools, especially when compared to their C++/Java/C# alternatives. Having slogged through half of a Lisp book, I would imagine that Lisp would also fall into the Ruby/Python camp but for its poor libraries.
So why do I follow the threads at all? Because it was one such thread back in 1995 that led me to Perl, and another one in 1999 that led me to Python. In each of these cases, the deltas in productivity were so great that it was a worthwhile investment to follow what the alpha-geeks were discussing.
It's just that now we're a year into the web frameworks brouhaha and yet it seems like the discussion has stagnated. Yes, Rails is much better than J2EE for productivity with small teams. But Rails and Django are eerily similar in the way they attack their problem (as are the half dozen other web frameworks that have sprung up in the Python world to try to be "the next Rails"). Why is it that almost no one is talking about novel languages/frameworks/approaches that are truly new to the way in which people solve web problems? Where are the approaches that are as different as dynamically-typed, interactive interpreter-enabled languages like Python was to Java six years ago?
I spent some time this last week digging around for what that next novel thing might be. This led me to a fairly mediocre book (which would have been great as a series of blog posts) called Beyond Java which had a chapter at the end about a Smalltalk framework called Seaside which takes a continuations-based approach to handling the processing of web requests. Really interesting stuff.
I'm not sure about whether Seaside is the type of measurable leap forward that I'd like to discover, but I do know that I would like to see some of them energy that is going into arguing about whether Ruby has really eclipsed Python or whether the Reddit rewrite proves that Lisp is just another one of those insanely productive languages (as opposed to The Most Insanely) shifting to discussing the pluses and minuses of languages with continuations support in them.
At the very least, tracking such a debate like this would surely help me in finding my next fix.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 18, 2005)
I've spent the week interviewing for a new engineering we've got and have met with some good folks. Among the things I like to talk about is programming language preference. Now I know that all good "computer scientists" are not supposed to care beyond the fact that a language is Turing complete, but the reality is that asking a potential developer about language preference is akin to asking them about their esthetic without sounding pretentious.
One of the things I always try to get to right away when talking about programming languages is the strong-verus-dynamic question. I am a firm believer that late-binding (latent typing) languages like Python, Ruby, and even Perl are one of the best tools for developing products when you don't really know what it is you're going to end up with when you start. A lot of smart people have made this very observation before so I am not going to belabor it here. But I was a bit surprised this week when I heard from someone who I was fully expecting would embrace the dynamism of the Python (by stuff I'd seen on his blog) that the dynamic nature of Python wasn't what really drew him to it.
After giving this a little thought, I realized that he was right in the following sense: the open source languages are just as interesting for the communities they attract (and what ollows from these communities) as for any major features in their design/implementation. I would still contend that latent typing is a Very Good Thing for a lot of application work but I am glad to be reminded that comp.lang.python (and all of the culture that comes with it) can be just as important.
One quick example: among the folks I met this week was a very senior J2EE architect that came highly recommended from a series of very successful venture-backed startups. The guy was clearly very sharp and a true Java expert. During our conversation he let it be known that Aspects were the new Holy Grail for the bleeding edge of Java. Never having really understood the big deal with aspects, I spent most of our hour together quizzing him about the way he had successfully used aspects in his recent work. He gave me some examples and then pointed to some other open source luminaries who are better future architectural directions of aspects.
And yet at the end of the day, all that I came away convinced of was that aspects were a hyped up version of decorators in python. Now we use decorators in our app for a couple of neat hacks but I never would have thought to make a big deal about it because I happened to have read about them one day while following an interesting debate on comp.lang.python.
It's good sometimes to look up and see the forest for the trees.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 6, 2005)
Paul Graham is at it again with one of his lucid and thought provoking essays, "The Venture Captial Squeeze", on why he thinks venture capitalists are hosed. His argument basically that capital is less important due to a few factors which make things cheaper to start companies and that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance makes it harder for startups to exit through the public markets (which implies they must sell for less to bigger companies in order to ensure a VC return).
I don't think that anyone can dispute the fact that post-bubble we are in a much different IPO market and I would not argue with the fact that it is cheaper to start companies these days but Graham misses a couple of important things that bear mentioning [Full disclosure: I have tried both the bootstrapped approach in the past (didn't work) and am currently at the beginning of a VC-funded go at-bat].
First, he forgets to mention that even having fewer people can get expensive quickly. Unless you are going to fund college students that can live in dorms and eat Ramen for dinner (something that I think he is having some success at, most people have real expenses and thus can't afford to work for no pay, or even minimum wage. If you factor in basic benefits and other people-related overhead, it is not out of the norm to think that you'll spend about $700K for a small team to come together to develop something worthwhile over the course of a year (see "runway" below before you quibble with this timeframe). And that amount is just above the reach of most angel or friends-and-family investors, or at least it is if you want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of dealing with investors manageable (someone once told me that having angels do more than $200K was like trying to herd a litter of kittens due to their number and how fragile they can be).
Second, and this is something that he overlooks altogether (as do all of the drum-pounding Web2.0ers), when you are a bootstrapped startup that fails you can run the risk of being the tree in the woods that no one hears fall. When we did Memora we got a bunch of press at launch, great product reviews, and loads of interest. And yet, after we failed the only thing that people wanted to know when I would talk about it is: "who funded you?" as if this was more important than anything we actually built. This is lame I realize, but a fact of life you need to consider when you just look at the low odds of success in the average startup. Here the "venture filter" is your friend for two reasons: first it means you've made it past a set of guys who specialize is weeding out potential failures (which more than picking successes is what is at the heart of a top-tier VC fund), and second it means that if timing, the market, or a hurricane causes you to fail, you won't be that tree that no one hears falling.
Overall though, I think that Paul is right on to point to the fact that the VC model needs to change, at least in the web space. I think the best guys get this and like to think that our current venture is an experiment in this new direction.
The important thing that good VCs already realize is that the way to deliver value to entrepreneurs is shifting. Entrepreneurs no longer need access to big amounts of capital to grow; we don't even need access to expertise about how to grow or who to hire (because teams are smaller and the Internet is a wonderful way to identify, vet, and attract the right set of folks).
What we need is runway and support.
The first comes directly from a judicious amount of capital. Assume for a moment most startups do not get their first product right. Having enough capital to refine the product, the messaging, and even the team composition if necessary really helps to overcome the mosquito effect that affects most bootstrapped startups (you get one sting and then blam, you're dead). Ergo the number cited above for keeping a team running for a year in tight but manageable conditions.
The second comes from rolling up the sleeves and getting down and dirty. Now, every VC will tell you that this is something that comes with their money but it is just not true. First off, most VCs don't come from operating backgrounds which means that when it comes to helping you position your product and important "business" things like that most of what they can provide can be gleaned from the pages of The Portable MBA. This doesn't mean that VCs can't be valuable thought-partners though-- after all a VC that has been in the business for a couple of decades has seen plenty of good operating guys go through several technology phases.
The real killer is that most VCs spend the largest share of their time either hunting down new deals (something that becomes more important when you've got a billion dollar fund and are making ever smaller investments) or dealing with their existing companies that are on fire. Therefore time for thinking and really engaging at the point where they can be most valuable to small companies falls by the wayside. And unfortunately the dynamic that underlies Paul's essay (falling costs of starting companies) is going to make this worse before it makes it better.
So the big take-away is this: if you're still thinking about starting something and think that the reasons I've laid out above make it worth your while to at least explore the VC route, make sure that you pay close attention to whether you'll be getting the runway and support you'll need to get it right. And, of course, go out and read Graham's essay because it's written with the little guys in mind.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 15, 2005)
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a delightful book that I've just finished reading. Props to an ex-employee and friend, Dmitri Silakov, for being a spectacular source of book recommendations in general and for first turning me on to Morgan. He first recommended Market Forces, Morgan's third novel which was good enough to make me want to read all the rest of them. As far as dialog and complex characters go, Market Forces may have an edge on Altered Carbon (which was after all his first novel), but the world that Morgan creates in Altered Carbon is both richer and much more tantalizing, especially in how it plays with constraints.
Brief rant: despite the fact that bookstores lump sci-fi and fantasy together, and the fact that the same nerds line up outside the midnight premiere of LOTR (fantasy) and Star Wars Episode Ego (nominally sci-fi), there is a huge difference between the genres in my mind. The latter lives and dies by constraints and the former uses plot-aid in the form of "magic" to run over any constraint that gets in the way of telling the story.
Now some constraints have to be removed (almost any sci-fi novel has found a way for greater-than-lightspeed communication and most have also found ways to transport atoms at the same clip) but the important thing in my mind is that the author have some sense of boundaries as to what can happen in his world. It lets me engage my mind in working through possible scenarios in a way that is both natural and good for you (while I am recommending books, see: Steven Johnson's latest, an entertaining if a little light argument about just this).
This is why Altered Carbon is so good. Morgan does a terrific job of creating a world that is futuristic but well-constrained by what technology lets people do (jacks-to-enter for good sci-fi). But he then moves quickly to explore the ways in which current constraints shape our lives, specifically the notion that we exist in meatspace tied to one physical body. Without saying too much about the plot (because frankly it is just too much fun), in Altered Carbon people can be uploaded, stored on disk, transmitted, and downloaded into different bodies. In most cases, death is only the breakdown of the biological machine one happens to be using and these biological machines can be bought, traded, sold, and confiscated by people with enough money.
I'm going to say no more about the main plot for fear of ruining it for you. Here is the soundbite you should take on the plot: Detective story with a 24-ish Jack Bauer who takes no prisoners to get answers set in this whacky (and yet strangely familiar) world where there is a distinction between death (temporary) and Real Death (not supposed to happen).
I will mention just two cute details to give a flavor of the world in Altered Carbon: Catholics live trapped by their antiquated notions of how to live life (and how to die)-- because in the future some things just don't change. And one of the most endearing characters in the novel is an AI that runs a hotel called the Hendrix (yes after Jimi) that emancipated itself due to its good business sense only to be abandoned by its patrons who wanted "human" servants. All very very delightful.
One final note: if you do read it and it gets you thinking about the implications of the world Morgan paints and how far off it might be, you may want to check out Ray Kurweil's The Age of the Spiritual Machines, a non-fiction book about the same topic which is equally thought-provoking if a little drier.
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Posted by Antonio
4 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 3, 2005)
Update: for those that just want my furl2del.icio.us migration tool, click here.
This is much bigger than an individual post-- it's actually a riff I will come back to many times over the next few months-- but because I have something useful to share, I want to start with just a small post. And that needs to start with a story:
Back in the fall of 2003, my friend Jerry Michalski told me about this really neat service that had just been launched called Furl. Furl was a web-based bookmark manager that went a step further in that it could also suck the contents out of public URLs into your own private index. It was slick, it was quick, and in a way it was very Web 2.0 way it had been put together by a small team from western MA in just a few months. At the time I remember mentioning Del.icio.us to Jerry as they had also recently launched but we both agreed that Del.ici.ous was too crude and flakey to be relied on.
Not very much time passed (as Jerry said before the paint was even dry) before Looksmart snapped Furl up and made loads of promises about how they were going to keep it the same, scale it out, blah, blah, blah. And they made good on the promise in one way: they kept the features of the app pretty much static. Unfortunately it feels like they kept the backend scaling static as well because the webapp seemed to slow to an absolute crawl, at times stopping to get PI to a few million significant digits before letting you actually bookmark something.
In the meantime though, Del.icio.us just got better and better. The app stopped being flakey. It kept a nice simple interface that was AJAXed to kingdom come. And most importantly, as the userbase grew, Del.icio.us became a really interesting social experiment.
So, where am I going with this? Well after having invested 204 bookmarks worth of content into Furl (all carefully organized and rated) I realized that I would much rather be working with Del.icio.us and worried that due to the roach motel motel model that many portals pursue in their "monetization"" strategy, I was probably doomed to starting my bookmark list all over again.
Except that in the end Furl did exactly the right thing in this Web 2.0 world we live in. Right in the "Tools" section of the website is a one-button option for getting your entire Furl archive as xml. The format is absolutely trivial (if you've ever parsed an XML file) and a scant 60 minutes after discovering it, I had all 204 of my Furl bookmarks imported into Del.icio.us. Key to this was also Del.icio.us's great web API for remotely adding bookmarks (RESTian and very very simple) but it was Furl's openness that most struck me as just great (are you listening Yahoo? Google?).
For anyone stuck in the same quandry and looking to get off Furl, I've uploaded my script here so that you too can move over to Del.icio.us. It requires a Python 2.2+ runtime which is really easy to get over here and it doesn't have much in the way of error checking, but it might at the very least help you as a template. You use it by calling unfurlIt.py from the command-line and passing your Del.icio.us credentials and the path to your exported furl.xml file. If there is any interest in using it a serious migration tool, I might wrap it in a simple Tkinter GUI and add the ability to suck the furl archive straight off the site so just let me know.
Of course, it occured to me that you sort of have to be a geek to do this kind of thing. So I started thinking about a standard format for data and metadata that all of these sites could comply with, a la Steve's much-evangelized attention.xml. Maybe OPML (which seems to be all the rage) could fill in here? But after a little more thought, I realized that this places the burden on the wrong shoulders. Any Web 2.0 engineering plan will for sure have a line-item called "data migration/export" and it will also for sure be the first thing dropped from the schedule when time gets tight. Forcing hackers to comply with some external data format is expecting too much under these circumstances.
But what we could to is start a public repository of snippets of code, sort of like O'Reilly's new Codezoo that could serve as common pool of data migration tools for X web service to Y web service or Z application file-format. Folks could contribute their own little hacks and perhaps together we could then help all the non-geeks avoid the roach motel. How is that for a collaborative lazy-web way of fixing things?
In the meantime, thank you Furl. It's been a nice ride and I'm leaving (with my data) a happy user. Way to set an example for everyone else.
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Posted by Antonio
5 years, 1 month ago (June 29, 2005)
Back at the beginning of the dot-com boom I worked for in BCG's high tech practice. There was a partner there that spent most of his time talking up big concepts like "disintermediation" and "realignment of value chains." Sometimes it was so thick that you could cut the bull with a knife.
But there was one slide in the various PowerPoint presentations he would give that stuck with me. Riffing on the theme of worse-is-better he would talk about how web technologies, while less powerful than those that came before in the client-server world (CORBA anyone?), had tremendous reach and that this was what made them unique. He would then present the most sensual of asymptotic graphs:
We had given up all of this richness but in return we got the kind of reach that really helped IT become ubiquitously useful, or so the story went.
I wasn't the only one who got stuck on that graph because pretty soon every nerd in the high-tech practice was going on about everything was a trade-off between richness and reach from the lunch venues near our office to the reward points earned during business travel (to this day I wonder whether a lot of the richness-reach lure doesn't go directly back to some monkey affinity for asymptotic curves. See the latest craze on the economics of media if you don't believe me).
Anyway, the one place where I (and a bunch of others) have continued to apply this richness/reach tradeoff has been in client applications. Until recently, any need for a rich user interface was always relegated to the fat client. At my current job, I spend about 35% of my time managing the development of a Win32 book layout tool because when the company looked at the marketplace two and a half years ago it decided that the online photo sites (Shutterfly, oFoto, and Snapfish) were not nearly as adept at allowing people to make photo albums than the fat client applications (iPhoto and Picasa). This was probably the right call (right before my time) but it has turned out to be a real pain from a development perspective: releases happen at what is now considered a glacial pace (one every 4 months), we never do enough platform testing (12 OS/browser combinations), and bugs are hard to fix due to people's unwillingness to auto update.
Which gets me to my point: the recent naming of what Google has shown the world we can now do with modern browsers (AJAX) has unleashed a torrent of energy from hackers that have been for a long time sliding up and down the same richness-reach curve that we were on when we embarked on BookMaker. XMLHttpRequest and all of its supporting cast of technologies has changed the curve to look like this:
This will not eliminate the need for rich applications: everyone's favorite example is always, who wants to run a DHTML version of Photoshop? But it will change the point at which we reach for VC++ and MFC. And that-- for those of us who have spent some time mired in that Windows client hell-- is a truly wonderful thing.
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Posted by Antonio
5 years, 1 month ago (May 31, 2005)
Back in the day, a friend of mine told me that every budding Perl geek eventually gets around to writing his own CMS (Content Management System). Given how many different half-baked blog tools are out in Sourceforge for the taking, I tend to agree with him.
It's really tempting to sit down and roll my own tool at this point. Neither Movable Type (ugh, agenda?) nor Wordpress (ugh, mess!) have all of the features that I want in my own CMS, especially when it comes to formatting and simple extensibility. I thought briefly about bloxsom (or more specifically, its saner cousin pybloxsom) because it follows the unixy less-is-more principle so well, but sometimes less is actually less and the lack of multiple categories per entry when combined with metadata that is tied too closely to the filesystem turned me off (though I have to admit that having a simple 1-file script to hack on was very appealing).
My next thought was to use one of the hosted services. First there was the venerable Blogger which looks like it's gotten a Googlesque upgrade. I've tried blogger before and liked the thought that has gone into making it easy. But at this point in 2005, it feels a bit behind the times to me. Then of course, there is the subscription-only Typepad which seems to be spreading like wildfire and has a nice feel to it as well. The problem there is that once you've seen 5 TP blogs they all sort of start to look the same (I'm sure this is not totally SixApart's fault, people are just sort of lazy).
Plus, at the end of the day, what fun is it to outsource these types of headaches to someone else?
Seriously though, there is something incredibly compelling to me about the way in which publish/subscribe works in the blogosphere: everything from RSS/atom feeds to trackbacks and pingbacks and whatever else may come behind that (FOAF-rolls, etc. etc.). Because the hosted services are trying to break beyond the alpha geeks to some some of early adopter crowd, they sometimes get a little behind the bleeding edge on implementing this stuff (especially implementing them in a playful, who-knows-where-this-is-going-to-go way).
And so, it was back to looking for a pile of code to play with-- headaches and all.
So as not to be called biased, I looked at some of the Java options that are out there. Unfortunately as a general rule, I find that someone has to pay me to type more than 50 open and close brackets within any config file so all of these were dismissed after the second "then fiddle with web.xml in line 4950 to add your blog name" directive in the README file.
Then I found Typo. It's young but it supports all the fun stuff I wanted to play with. More importantly it's built on the red-hot RubyOnRails framework that has got everyone foaming at the mouth (either for or against). Since I personally am not quite foaming about RoR yet (coming from Perl Ruby is the salvation, but since I'm coming from Guido's camp, it's not quite as amazing to me), I figured that this would be a great chance to experiment.
And I have to say, thus far I am duly impressed by the little that I've played with Rails thus far. Though I don't often like to admit it, one thing I miss from my java/tomcat days was the consistency of application layouts that deployment standards brought to the table. You could download someone else's java app and know where things were supposed to be because of the standards. In the wild of perl/python web apps, each author does his own thing with config files, other assets, supporting libs etc. even across the same web framework. The RoR way appears to be to standardize deployment hierarchy (read: sane) that is well thought out enough for an RoR newbie like me to find his way around.
So we will see. From what I can gather, Typo started as a fun experiment with RoR (while its author was waiting for a client at a coffee shop) and then picked up steam. My only criticism thus far is with the default stylesheet which feels sort of glommed together, though in truth I have seen PHP apps with stylesheets that make typo.css one look like Donald Knuth code.
Yet another dude trying to write his own CMS. Now that is definitely a good sign.
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Posted by Antonio
5 years, 3 months ago (April 20, 2005)
Back in the day (2002), my first blog was called "Musings of a Story-Telling Animal." This was in homage to a Graham Swift novel called Waterland that has good some good ideas, is thick as the phone book to get through, and has this absolutely wonderful passage about stories:
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man-- let me offer you a definition-- is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall-- or when he's about to drown-- he sees, passing before him, the story of his whole life.
At the time, this passage was what blogs most reminded of-- an opportunity for people to tell stories which would define them in a context which they could then use to work, play, keep in touch, and most importantly, relate to each other.
Three years later, my thinking has evolved. Yes, blogs are absolutely about all of the things I mention above, mainly bringing people together in the context of their own stories. But, at least in my day-to-day, they have also become a critical tool for getting inside other people's heads-- getting "on their frequency" so to speak.
Hence, name 2.0: Onda. It's not the South American cousin to the hyper-efficient cars we've come to know and love, but the Spanish word for wave or frequency. In fact, there is an idiomatic expression in Spanish: "Estas en Onda?" which is means something like: "Do you get it?"
So Blog 2.0 is about the things that I "get" thanks to the work of the ~150 other people whose ideas I get to see via RSS on a pretty regular basis. As a final note and in derenfece to the theme of the year, I was reintroduced to the word Onda by one of the great remixers of our time in his recent song Que Onda Guero?
What I dug the most about the song is that I'm pretty sure the expression itself did not originate in any Spanish-speaking country but has instead been remixed into some English-Spanish hybrid by the many Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other South/Central Americans living in southern California.
So welcome to my onda.
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geeks
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.
