Stuff from 2008

Some predictions for 2008

Posted by Antonio 8 months, 1 week 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!

Tags: hackers , buddies , embahs , digerati , geeks
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Small tiny apps loosely disjointed

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 4, 2008)

I've started the year by trying to make a dent in my backlog of small (but useful) webapps to try, beginning with the "help organize your life" category. So in the last few days I've tried: Jott, Iwantsandy, and Remember the Milk, and already I'm feeling overloaded.

All three are all really well done mini-applications that do a single function well, play nice with other pieces of the web (a la Unix tools), and provide clever interfaces that span multiple devices, input mechanisms, and output formats. And yet, why is it that after only trying three of them, I'm already feeling app fatigue?

I think it must have to do with the small incremental cognitive load imposed by each new webapp. Because no matter how similar each of these applications is— after all they are each a way to manage a list of reminders— there are still small differences that impose a small barrier at every use. And despite each site's desire to simplify the interface as much as possible, I've still got to go link hunting across non-standard interfaces every time I want to do basic things like creating new categories or adding a new email address.

I used to think that the old "Office Suite" megaproduct was a function of distribution economics alone; that Microsoft beat out all of the best-of-breed standalone applications because they could bundle all of the products together into a cheaper overall offering and stuff it into the channel. But now I'm realizing that there are huge advantages to this type of integration when it comes to usability (and I don't mean power features like OLE, these new webapps already support their own forms of foreign object embedding). With MS Office, the user had more or less one mental model for how to perform a whole load of related tasks (a model which has been increasingly unified with each Office release)— a huge advantage for those of us just trying to get things done.

Do we need this unification for all of these little webapps to reach critical mass? Maybe. The counter argument would be that the web audience is so big that every application vendor will find his own niche audience, but in a world where sustainable economics depends on advertising (and therefore audience scale), I'm not sure this works. And if we do need this grand unification, will it be brought on by a vendor (Facebook, Google) or by a set of standards (microformats, Yahoo UI best practices)? Right now I'd put my money on the integrating vendor platform a la F8 or Google Gadgets, but maybe that is just because I am looking for the modern day Office-like player. Maybe the rules have really changed on the web...

Tags: buddies , digerati
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If you want your Web 2.0 startup to win, go out and buy this book now!

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 4, 2008)

The best technical books are bits of "frozen wisdom" that can definitely be acquired with enough time and experience. But we evolved from monkeys thanks to our ability to abstract and to learn, so why bother?

"The Definitive Guide to Django" by Adrian and Jacob is a particularly juicy bit of frozen wisdom. As I flipped through its pages today, I recognized so many nuggets that we at Tabblo learned the hard way, which is to say with a mix of the online docs, reading the source, and trial-and-error, as well as a bunch of stuff that I know very little about (internationalization, the admin interface) but am eager to learn.

Just this week in fact, I was futzing with the code on this blog and needed to do something with generic views to further filter my querysets. Though I felt incredibly creative (and Pythonic) in my solution (wrapping the generic view function), I couldn't help but chuckle at the fact that it is part of the "best practices" recommended in the book.

Frameworks like Django are the mortar we web folk use to build our castles in the sky. Like great typography, they should be mostly invisible, supporting the applications built with them. However, Django is great mortar— as everyone at Tabblo will attest— so if you're planning to use it, make sure to get a copy of this book.

Postnote: Our very own Ned Batchelder even makes an appearance in the case studies section, sounding much wiser than the Ned that lost this great burrito t-shirt to a bet...

Tags: buddies
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The OLPC nightmare

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 5, 2008)

The Economist (my favorite rag) has a scorching review of the OLPC XO that unfortunately is 100% right in all of its criticisms. I feel terrible for all of the people that I helped convince to pitch $400 down the drain on this thing; it is slow, buggy, and almost entirely unusable by people with advanced degrees, never mind small children. That said, I don't feel nearly as bad for all of the 1st world kids who've had their Christmases ruined by this plastic paperweight as I do about the kids in the third world whose governments are going to be bamboozled into buying XOs.

I remember having written about the OLPC before so I went back into the archives to see my very first post which was on Negroponte's announcement of the project at the 2005 D Conference. Apparently I was bamboozled as well and should have stuck with my first instinct.

The OLPC's software is just horrendous. The Etoys environment which I was so excited for is too cramped, too slow, and not at all simplified from Squeak Smalltalk. The browser is almost unusable, and the music application has such incredible latency between doing anything and hearing sound that you're more capable of controlling the noise the machine makes by waving your cellphone in front of it. Just about the only decent thing for a 5 year-old to do with it is to play the memory game or to practice typing in a word processor that makes Word 5 for the Mac appear supersonic (and tends to crash).

In fact just about the only thing you can do well with the laptop is drop it— which is good because I promise that after a couple of hours with it, you'll want to test its resilience to impact.

The OLPC foundation would do better using its clout to buy Eee PCs and tweaking what is a much more usable system overall. Or even getting old laptops reconditioned and re-imaged with stripped down versions of their original operating systems.

As always, Fake Steve says it better than I could.

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Hacking hardware

Posted by Antonio 8 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

Tags: digerati , geeks
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Annoying robotic flies

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 7, 2008)

Continuing on the hardware theme for the week, I was recently captivated by Adrian Bowyer's presentation at POPTech last year on self-replicating 3-D printers. Still very early on, these 3-D printers are essentially glorified glue guns mounted on harnesses that can use them to squirt out three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. The really neat hack to his work however is that the printers can "print" most of their own parts thus placing the devices themselves on an exponential, evolution-like curve where the random mutation role is played by people tinkering with the printers to make them better while the evolutionary cycles are fueled by these same people posting the improvements back to the Internet.

Imagine what technologies like these would do to another project I found this weekend at the Harvard microbotics lab, a robotic fly which can be manufactured cheaply and is almost exactly the size of a real fly (see the video).

How annoying is it going to be when robotic flies are capable of self-replicating and evolving on their own?

Tags: buddies
2 Comments

Now with comment juice

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 8, 2008)

I used to think that blogs were interesting because they represented an individual's raw voice unfiltered by editors and undisturbed by distractions. Thus I saw the introduction of comments into blogs as a weird adaptation from the land of forums. Pings and trackbacks seemed like a much better way for people to carry on a conversation in the blogosphere.

Unfortunately my characteristically Betamax instinct was on the money yet again, as it turns out that most of the people I want to carry on a conversation with aren't interested in the distributed computing showcases. When combined with the constant chiding that I take in the office for a) writing ridiculous things in this blog and b) not providing a vehicle for talking back, I've finally been worn down to a nubble. As of tonight, this blog is now commentable.

As always, I have to give credit to the wonderful Django framework (and it's sparsely documented Freecomment sub-framework), along with the very useful comment-utils (from James at the B-List) which provides Akismet filtering and basic moderation in a nice and transparent way. Trackbacks may not have won the day, but it's nice to see that web services like Akismet are now used as simply and plainly as one might have used a third-party library two years ago.

So if you're an RSS-only reader, hit the V key and come visit, stay for a while, and leave a comment or two.

Just not the guy who used to comment on my last blog— I don't know what V-ONE-AGRA is, but I don't think I need it...

Tags: buddies
38 Comments

Software is still a good business!

Posted by Antonio 8 months ago (Jan. 9, 2008)

Both Matt Webb and the Economist this week are ruminating on the economics of the software industry. Matt has a interesting post which basically argues that there are other more compelling revenue models for building enduser software than the straight-up license (a lesson which I learned well while book-enabling the iPhoto application while the rest of the consumer image management space was cratering). He covers ads, subscription fees, and some other models, making a whole bunch of interesting observations along the way.

It was the piece in the Economist though that really made me laugh. Especially this juicy bit on why the SaaS (software as service) business model just isn't as good as its progenitor:

Vendors of conventional enterprise software made a killing by requiring customers to pay a high licensing fee upfront and then charging them for maintenance. Web-based firms, by contrast, have to make do with subscription fees.

We need to stop taking for granted that just because software vendors were able to maintain obscenely high margins for the last 30 years, it means that this should serve as a baseline for all software related businesses going forward. In the consumer space specifically, Microsoft's ability to extract rent for that layer of value seems to me to have been a historical accident— one that made Bill Gates very wealthy in the ensuing 30 years— but not necessarily one that can be relied on going forward. I know less about the enterprise space, but would be shocked if the same microeconomic force of marginal revenue trending towards zero wasn't in full swing in the age of the Internet, open source, and software-on-demand.

Instead we have to get used to saying that 22-30% margins are actually a great achievement, and that the era of crazy absurd software profits (though not growth, as Apple is showing), is now behind us. And the bonus is that in the process we get to repurpose old business models (atoms!) and invent new ones.

Tags: buddies , digerati
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On the iPhone's mojo

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 4 weeks ago (Jan. 10, 2008)

And for this month's best techno-porn, look no further than "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry" in this month's Wired. In it, Fred Vogelstein tells the inside story of the development of the iPhone, from its guts to the crazy deal that Apple got from AT&T, to the bumps along the road. As with all great tech-porn there is a fair bit of dramatization in the piece, but it does make three really interesting observations:

1. Steve & co saw the coming crunch on their near-perfect monopoly on the iPod and decided that to get ahead of it by going to a media-playing phone well ahead of when their business was impacted by it. This is something that I've heard a few times from VJ, my boss here at HP over the last few months: you have to innovate the next big thing when you're on top and can still afford it, not when you're managing an empire in decline. That said, it is extremely difficult to get big companies to do this especially when they are as arrogant as Apple, so kudos to them.

2. I love the idea that even as it was going to market, Jobs knew that the Motorola Rockr was a camel (a horse designed by a committee). Senior executives that engage with their product— from how it comes out of the box to how it feels to how it breaks— are really really rare in my experience. It's why you often get such goofy products from big companies so I 100% buy that it is a big part of the secret to Apple's success.

[ One quick aside: in 2005 while at the WSJ D conference, I arrived late (as usual) and went to get my badge only to see that there was a technician working on one of the HP PCs that had been set up for registration. It was one of the first all-in-ones and he had flipped it on its side and was closely examining the bottom of the case in the empty registration hall. Before I had time to figure out what the hell could be wrong with the computer than would manifest on the outside of the case, two executive assistants straight out of Entourage came in and whisked the technician away. Imagine my surprise to figure out that it was Steve Jobs who had someone ended up alone in the registration room and had wandered over to one of these machines to inspect it.]

3. The piece only hints at this general point, but one of the most amazing things about the iPhone is how well the hardware engineers timed the development of the mobile components such that they hit a perfect balance between CPU speed, performance, and battery. It's been my experience that in other consumer products with long multi-year development cycles, the hardware folks either radically under-estimate Moore's law, or worse yet, over-estimate it and end up with pokey and over-priced devices.

Overall a great read for junkies of Cupertino's shenanigans.

Tags: buddies , digerati
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Use that mental time machine

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 4 weeks ago (Jan. 11, 2008)

Jon Udell has a nice short post on a Businessweek article that tries to argue that innovation is just as much about refinement of ideas as it is about breakthrough concepts. As Jon quotes:

The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one.

While I'm not sure I completely agree with the claim, I do love this notion that "any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old." This statement is a neat twist on something that I heard from one of the Sun founders at a talk while I was at Stanford (I can't remember if it was Andy Bechtolsheim or Bill Joy) about how you should keep notes about what you think will happen in technology 5 years from now so that you can go back and see the bias in your predictions.

Jon closes the post by mentioning the web-browser as a good example (invented just over 10 years ago, big over the next 10 years). I would add: cloud-based consumer data services, auction-based e-commerce systems, and search engines as three vectors for what we might see as having even more of a significant impact over the next 10 years. What do you think?

(Thanks to Eddie who pointed the piece out)

Tags: buddies
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Robots everywhere!

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 12, 2008)

Since this was CES (and therefore gadget) week, I figure I'll close it by talking about a gadget that really does feel useful enough to go mass-market.

If you are a fan of seeing how we perceived technology might affect our lives 50 years ago, you should head over to the Internet Archive and check out this advertorial film made in 1939 by Westinghouse called "The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair" where the promise of "mechanical brains and robots" manifests itself primarily through the automation of domestic chores. It's kooky and campy (you have to love that long before NAFTA there were still people afraid of job decimation) and mostly wrong as it seems that very few domestic chores been automated... at least until iRobot's Roomba.

A friend who had a much earlier model a few years ago declared it "just shy of useful." Fortunately in the intervening years iRobot has improved on the design (3 subsequent generations) and shipped 1 million of them to cleaner homes throughout the world.

For those who have not heard of it, the Roomba is about 1.5 times the diameter of a frisbee and about 4 inches tall (for getting under counters). It comes with a base station and a timer which kicks it off vacuuming any flat contiguous surface. It is bag-less and doesn't have a huge receptacle (so it needs frequent cleaning), but surprisingly it works just as well as a human with an Electrolux. At the end of the cleaning cycle, it finds its own charging station and parks itself awaiting the next scheduled vacuum task.

It is truly a mechanical engineering marvel. It's durable, agile, and even when it chews up a toy it can't swallow, you can take it apart with little effort and not even a glance at the instruction manual.

The more remarkable thing though is how quickly you adapt to having a Roomba in your life. After making the mistake of running it during the middle of the day ( thus prompting the kids to play a game of Lord of the Flies with it), it now runs only at 1am doing its thing while the rest of us sleep. You go to bed at night with Cheerios on the kitchen floor and poof— the next day they are in the little receptacle at the machine's rump. It sounds simple but it feels amazing.

Having this kind of automation has naturally made me think of other things that could be automated. iRobot has launched other home robots: one that mops and one that cleans gutters, but I am more interested in the tasks I actually do: opening the mail, turning off all of the lights at night, emptying the dishwasher, sorting the recycling, etc. It would be great if the building blocks that have taken iRobot 10 years to build (and some nice military contracts building bomb-finding robots) were available for new small startups to experiment with doing these types of things.

Then maybe we'd end up more like the Middletons.

Tags: buddies
3 Comments

What does happen to all of those old cellphones?

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 13, 2008)

The New York times has a great piece this morning on the 1 billion cellphones that are sold in the world every year and where they go to die. The problem of e-waste is something that the big tech companies seem to have woken up to across all sorts of devices, but the author, Jon Mooallem, argues that cellphones are the most pressing problem given the sheer number that are shipped every year, and how quickly both technology and fashion turn over the installed base.
I recently unpacked a box of old cellphones that contained the 5 old phones that I've had from 2003-2007 and currently do not use at all. My first thought was to try to figure out a way to use some of the components in these old phones for some of the physical computing projects that I want to take on in 2008 (after all, a bluetooth serial radio chip costs $60 and each of these phones has this functionality buried somewhere inside it). However, when I couldn't find anything online about how to repurpose them in such a manner (why is this so easy for all of the terrorists on 24 to do so but nearly impossible for the rest of us?), I then briefly considered eBay before realizing that with the exception of the 6 month-old Nokia, it probably wouldn't be worth the hassle. My next thought was this big bin they have in our office's cafeteria that claims to recycle the phones, but having recently read Bruce Sterling's provocative book "Shaping Things," I decided I had to know a little bit more about what would happen to the phones after I deposited them in the bin.

This is where the NYTimes piece shines— it does quite a bit of good reporting on how there are a number of for-profit ventures mining the phones in an environmentally conscious way for precious metals, or reconditioning them for secondary markets. Without giving too much away, I love the idea that by melting down phones, this Belgian company called Umicore gets to manufacture $24K bars of solid gold.

Governments are very good at providing structure that keeps companies from doing the really bad things, but in my mind, it is private efforts like these— motivated by profit— that are ultimately going to help us out of this environmental morass we are sinking ourselves into.

Tags: buddies
22 Comments

Tomorrow, I'm going to the Macworld keynote

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 14, 2008)

I guess it's one of the perks of working at the world's biggest tech company— if you shake enough branches, you can find some kind soul to take you along with them.

If you are an Apple fanboy, check out this very blog tomorrow. If I get in with my computer and EVDO card, I will try to give as close to a live update of the keynote as possible!

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On to the keynote...

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 15, 2008)

Thanks to the east-to-west coast time shift, I got the pleasure of a 5am run down the Embarcadero today. There was this crazy fog that made it impossible to see more than 50 feet ahead— so thick in fact that if it was a Hannah Barbera cartoon someone would have been cutting circles out of it with a knife.

As I ran I was thinking about how the last time I saw Steve Jobs speak live was in January of 1999. I remember because I had just gone back for my second semester of grad school at Stanford and was wholly disillusioned with the concept of more school. He was announcing the color iMacs and naturally some Apple folks had arranged all of the different colors in a semi-circle behind the speaker's podium. I remember his two messages: 1. that people were ready for simple computers that looked great and just let them do their stuff (which at the time consisted mainly of connecting to the Internet), and 2. that after a year back at Apple, his biggest surprise was not how many bright and motivated people were still there (he expected that), but how much wasted effort was taking place, especially under the auspices of "research," or as he called it at the time "science projects" a term that has stuck with me since.

I also distinctly remember sitting next to some guy who was getting his Phd in something that sounded completely foreign to me, "VLSI modeling" or some such thing, who totally pooh-poohed the entire talk. His two retorts were that "simple" was a marketing slogan and not a strategy and that cutting R&D was death for any real tech company.

Look at things now: $200M dollars of research later, we've got the iPhone, the iPod was a phenomenon, and even on yesterday's flight out here I counted just as many Apple laptops as I did Wintel machines.

He said it best himself in a commencement talk he gave to the Stanford undergrads six years after that talk I saw:

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Now off to the keynote prep...

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Macworld Summary: better late than never

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 15, 2008)

So much for posting from the keynote. Thanks to my having rushed out of my hotel room, my EVDO card stayed behind and— as usual— AT&T's crappy EDGE network let me down. I was thus relegated to sending Twitter updates only about four-fifths of which made it to the site (for a humorous blow-by-blow, see here).

So the news is out: three new products which I would buy, Time Capsule (a .5/1.0 TB drive attached to an Airport Extreme for seamless backups through Time Machine), Apple TV 2.0 (along with a movie rental service that makes sense), and the MacBook Air. Brief thoughts on each of them:

Time Capsule: hark! the era of the home server has finally arrived! It's a great idea to start from backup and the features/price is right on this one. My one nit would be that Apple needs to find an intelligent software solution to partitioning large libraries (specifically iTunes and iPhoto) and doing a sync on/off from Time Capsule so that we can deal with our ever expanding digital lives and our ever shrinking laptop drives. Pure backup won't do it alone.

Apple TV 2.0: The movie rental service totally makes sense and I suspect the cooperation of 11 studios will allow them to crush all of the competition, but the most significant thing I saw in this product is that it finally brings place-shifting into the mainstream. Just like Tivo allowed you to timeshift content from when it was aired, and Apple TV 2.0 (plus iTunes, iPods, and iPhones) are going to let you start watching something on one screen and seamlessly transition it across 3-4 different screens as you consume it. It sounds geeky, but in an era when people are increasingly consuming content on laptop screens in bed, or entertaining kids through iPhones, it could be a killer feature.

MacBook Air: I had a chance to get into the exhibit hall 30 minutes early and let me say that this machine should go straight into an industrial design museum. It's almost like one of those Escher optical illusions when you pick it up— since the keyboard looks and feels real-size, you find yourself turning the machine around to look for the rest of a bulk that is just not there. The screen in bright and the "remote disk" stuff is timely as I find that my optical disk is almost useless these days. Overall I have two nits with it: first, the 64GB of solid state disk seems really pricey (something which Apple may not have a lot of control over) and even the 80GB disk won't be enough unless there is a software tool made available to partition iTunes and iPhoto libraries (see above). Second— and this may be the deal killer for me— there is no clear and easy way to use an EVDO or other 3G card in the machine. Why Apple didn't just bake this one in on the machine must have something to do with their AT&T exclusive, but as I struggle even now to get a Wi-Fi connection to let me in, I can imagine just how heinous this machine might be for road warriors used to the pleasure of EVDO.
And finally, what of the keynote itself? It was unlike any computer conference talk I've ever seen— much less geek and much more revival/rock concert. And to see Steve in his element is something fierce. He is poised and folksy at the same time— calm and good humored (even when the Flickr demo he was hoping to be the big close on Apple TV 2.0 borked on him) without seeming arrogant about the crazy success they've achieved over the last few years. My favorite moment was when he spoke candidly about how Apple TV 1.0 had been a flop and about how for 2.0 they had gone back and listened to exactly what the users wanted. Very block and tackle but also a sign of the more mature, wiser, elder statesman that he has become.

1 Comments

We are slowly breaking the Internet

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 16, 2008)

After yesterday's poor performance live blogging the Steve keynote, I spent some time thinking about how frustrating it is to have a fundamentally communications-related service go down the way Twitter did for all of us who were trying to let the world know about what went on during the keynote.

I can't really blame Twitter. The pile-on that they are suffering from as everyone tells them they can't scale is something that any other startup would kill for, and the fact that they are taking egg on their face is to be completely expected. I don't think I know of a single small startup these days that wouldn't be similarly crushed by the load they experience during events like Macworld— in fact, I can almost guarantee that we at Tabblo would have been.

However, the big bummer about the way we use the Internet today is that we are breaking its fundamental architectural principle of loosely couple services that you don't count on for 100% reliability. This was the genius behind SMTP: if the receiving mail server was down for whatever reason, the sending one had a protocol for either finding a relaying service or for backing off and re-delivering later. Unfortunately web services aren't built like this (some of the bigger ones like Amazon and Google are built like this on the backend though which is why they scale, but it takes big bucks to get there).

And you know what? For most web services, this single point of failure design is ok. Just not messaging-based ones. When we use messaging-based services, we expect uptime (witness how annoying Gmail's recent glitches have been), and at the very least, reliability on the message delivery front.

We'd do well to think of this as we shift any time an attention to web services that have grown their own internal messaging systems, or even those that aim to replace them.

I am sure that with microformats, syndication and personal publishing platforms that we own ourselves and host on elastic computing clouds like Amazon's EC2, we can rebuild most of the messaging/publishing-based services that are currently appealing (Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr) but flakey. However, it is going to take time, standards, and the realization that we can in be in control of more reliable online experiences.

In the meantime, just be glad those evil phone companies spent billions building "carrier-grade systems" (well except for AT&T EDGE network which sucks).

Postscript: Dave Winer sort of nails it.

Tags: buddies , digerati
2 Comments

Do you want to play a game?

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 19, 2008)

So using Apple's new movie rental service, I saw WarGames (1983) on the red eye back from San Francisco last night. I had seen this movie a couple of years after it came out but it is much better after say, having learned to speak English. This time around I loved the Matthew Broderick character as his "hacking" as incredibly realistic. Unlike those techno-puffery movies where lots of creative freedom is taken with the technology for the sake of good story, WarGames keeps it real— from Broderick's hacking ability (mostly social engineering really), to the WOPR's dumb-computer weakness that almost starts World War 3 (just about the only part of the early 80s technology that gets stretched as plotaid is the voice synthesizers that everyone has on hand so we can hear the WOPR talk).

It's amazing to think that despite the fact that the movie is 25 years old this year, it gets so much about the way we've come to interact with computers in the network-age spot on. I'm not talking about teenagers trying to hack into military systems, but more the social engineering and playfulness that first gets Broderick and the WOPR locked into their death spiral.

For this reason the movie also made me think about the Udell piece that I recently wrote about regarding how any major technology that we'll be seeing broadly deployed over the next decade has already been around for at least 10 years. Specifically, I realized two things: first, we really need to look back more than 10 years— at least 25 if WarGames is any indication of how people saw the opportunities that came with personal computers back then. And second, that something that I absolutely need to add to the list I made is virtual worlds and simulation environments that live on the network.

In the meanwhile, go rent this movie if you want a really fun "period piece."

Tags: buddies
2 Comments

Wow, look who is 50!

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 28, 2008)

I remember only 3 toys from my childhood (4 if you count my brother's Tintin collection): my Milton-Bradley Big Trak, my Apple II, and my collection of Space Legos. Contrary to what you might think, of the four, I think that Legos went the furthest towards landing me at the startup end of the software industry. Of course there is the obvious reason: discovering the pleasure of making things from an early age— but there is another more subtle reason which may hint at the Lego's greater legacy.

As I was thinking about the way that toys influence the kinds of adults children become on Lego's 50th, I thought of this wonderful TED talk by Lost co-creator JJ Abrams on a mystery box given to him by his grandfather and its influence on his own development as a story-teller. I've long been a fan of Abrams and Lost, so it was a great pleasure to get a peek as to what's made him such a compelling storyteller and to wonder whether those Lego constructions that kids make might not have played a similar role for many of us.

When I think back to the countless hours with my Space Legos— or even when I watch my kids with the new modern version, "Mars Mission," I can't help but think that the true impact of Lego as a toy comes just as much from building as from the play and story-telling that ensues. For hours and hours after completing the spaceships or moon bases, I'd imagine all sorts of adventures for the little yellow men and the worlds which I built for them.

Happy Birthday Lego! Let's see what the next 50 years brings...

Tags: buddies
0 Comments

Learn to demo

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 29, 2008)

David Beisel has done a great service for web ventures in the Boston area with his "Web Innovators Group" gatherings. Though this type of event is commonplace in the Valley, we are sorely missing it here and it's been a pleasure to watch it grow over the last year and a half from about 50 people to over 800.

One thing I continue to be struck by however, is the poor quality of the demos that are given at these events. It may be that David is explicitly selecting for non-venture backed companies (a little rougher around the edges), and it may just be the compressed format (though this being the week of the original demo conference, I'm not sure about the latter), but even when the companies on stage have cool and innovative products, the demos done WebInno generally leave a lot to be desired.

Since, giving a good demo should be secondhand to any startup employee (CEO, founder, hacker, product manager, etc.), here is my 3 step guide to coming up the learning curve quickly (though I don't claim to be an expert, I have given a lot of demos in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of products in my career).

1. Write the story: before you start, open up your favorite text editor and write a one-pager on what you intend to show. Make it less laundry list and more murder mystery. If you don't know what progressive disclosure is, go read up on it, and use this technique to move your story line forward. The number one reason why I often want to put a stick in my eye during demos is because the presenter hasn't thought enough about telling a story and being entertaining. Make it relevant to the audience at every step— which often means skipping the techno-babble and contextualizing features for your audience.

2. Find your own Demo God(s) and study them incessantly: everyone loves Steve for this one, but there are many many others presenters worth watching (go look at all of the highly rated TED talks for inspiration). If you go to conferences, pay attention to presenters that can work with the crowd and watch how they keep cool and on message even when things are exploding. If you are lucky enough to know anyone whose demoing you respect, ask them for very critical feedback. I've been very lucky to have people like Adam Green to rely on for raw and uncut feedback. It hurts but makes you 10x more effective.

3. Practice, practice, practice: don't just think about what you're going to demo— go and sit in front of the mirror and do it. If you're going to be miked, learn how to use the AV system to your advantage. If you need the Internet for your demo, assume it will crawl and work around it. Practice it until you are so tired of hearing yourself that your ears start ringing. There is no such thing as too much practice. Trust me, even Steve does it.

One last thing: if you are not particularly good at this type of thing, try giving demos of products you haven't actually worked on. Textmate, OmniOutliner, Firefox, OneNote, whatever— just step through 1-3 for any one of those products assuming you'll have 5 minutes to convince someone that they absolutely need to start using whatever it is you are showing them. This trick helps to de-personalize your subject and lets you focus on your own performance.

There is a wise saying in raising venture funding: the demo seals the deal. Think about this next time it's your turn at WebInno.

Tags: buddies , digerati
2 Comments

The day it went pop

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 1, 2008)

I lived through one dot-com crash and all of the associated aftereffects, so I'm not psyched about the fact that the day of reckoning has finally come for this cute little kumbaya we've come to call Web 2.0. Sure on the surface it's just Google being slightly off their spectacular growth trajectory, but deep down we all knew this moment was coming. The wonderfully intoxicating "build critical mass and the rest will follow" buoyancy that started with Flickr and ended with Facebook's ridiculous $15b valuation is about to come to a close, and not so much due to one bad quarter of ad revenues, but because it just couldn't last forever.

Small companies struggling with product risk are now going to have to answer the revenue model question as well, and for good reason. Selling to Google— or even selling to someone else who is afraid that Google might buy you first— has just run out of juice. And unfortunately it has done so right at the beginning of a pretty scary set of perfect storm factors in the consumer economy: depressed consumer confidence, tons of credit risk, looming creep of inflation, and an inscrutable political outlook.

But what to do in the middle of all of this? Get somewhere where you can work on something meaningful with a 3-4 year runway. If you are at a startup, either get cashflow positive or raise a buttload of money soon. If you are at a big company, get on the longest lead time (but critical) project that you can find. Put your head down and just shut out the crap that is about to start flying.

It's all going to be good again— it always is. The challenge is that it may take until 2011 for us to get there. Until then, we can all stop worrying about getting rich and get back to grinding it out. Good times.

Tags: buddies , digerati
1 Comments

Microhoo

Posted by Antonio 7 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 1, 2008)

First Google skids and then Microsoft comes in with an aggressive bid for Yahoo. Oh how we are coming to the end of this Web 2.0 party quickly.

I think it is a wonderful idea to put Microsoft and Yahoo together for a couple of reasons. First, despite what you may think about Microsoft, one thing they know how to do is build software at platform scale, something that Yahoo desperately needs to build the social platform they rightly seem to be intent on bringing into existence. Unlike Google and Facebook, the best elements to Yahoo's social platform were purchased and despite best efforts to bring them together under one Yahoo umbrella, they still feel like really different properties. Hopefully Microsoft can do the Office thing to Yahoo's best properties (Flickr, Mail, Finance, etc.) and make the whole thing feel well integrated. And in a bonus round they might also bring their whole developer-community effort to Yahoo's nascent attempts at building such a thing around Yahoo UI and a few web services.

The second reason why this is a good idea is that Microsoft can afford to take a much longer view on Yahoo's turnaround than Jerry & co. can under pressure from Wall Street. Just as they are nurturing the whole XBox platform, giving Yahoo room to breathe during the creation of its social platform could leave Microsoft with a great asset. Plus, the same could be said for a combined ad platform.

Finally, and despite the fact that this never happened with Hotmail, Microsoft-Yahoo could really deliver a seamless integration between rich client and web services. Every day that passes this becomes less and less relevant (as web browsers get better and people get used to the benefits of the cloud), but it's still going to be a while before we get back to ubiquitous broadband/4G, and in the meanwhile the combination of Yahoo's web savvy (including its recent acquisition of Zimbra) with Microsoft's emerging client platforms (.NET in the mainstream and Silverlight on the bleeding age) could conjure up some interesting brews. This was after all the idea behind the Adobe-Macromedia merger— which seems even more compelling in this case because it is not just two tools companies, but one of the greatest tools companies with a massive audience company.

Since I've been traveling I haven't had a chance to check on what the reaction to the announcement has been; however, I'm sure there are plenty of people who are using Scott McNealey's expression from the old HP-Compaq merger ("it's like two dumptrucks crashing into each other in the night"). While I can sympathize with the sentiment, we might pause to consider how the whole HP-Compaq thing has borne out— vaulting HP past Dell as the marketshare leader in PCs and notebooks and re-invigorating HP's entire PC business.

Might Yahoo not do the same for Microsoft's web businesses?

5 Comments

Datastreams that matter

Posted by Antonio 7 months ago (Feb. 2, 2008)

Fabulous piece by Tim O'Reilly in Radar on why Yahoo deserves to get swallowed by Microsoft. To borrow from Paul Graham, Tim seems to be arguing that Yahoo just never got with the "grain" of the web despite having bought awesome grain assets (Flickr, Delicious). The money quote here:

The other important characteristic of the winners, of course, is that they tap into a data stream that really matters. Owning network effects around consumer photos, for instance, is much less powerful than owning network effects around paid search. So one of the key questions we have to ask ourselves going forward is this: what are the major data subsystems of the future Internet Operating System. Location, identity (and social graph), search (and not just web search but also product search, in which Amazon has a very strong position) come to mind. In a lot of ways, finding the data associated with the old vectors who, what, when, where, and how is a good place to start.

While the jury is still out on whether the "social graph" belongs in this primal set of key types of data that you can build huge businesses around, I completely agree with the others that he lays out. It would be interesting to explore how some of the big Internet trends tend to interesect these different types of data: mobile computing, virtual worlds, custom manufacturing, and emergent online marketplaces just to name four.

Tags: buddies , digerati
0 Comments

Getting back to the distributed Internet

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 4 weeks 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.

Tags: hackers , geeks
3 Comments

On intent and ads

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 4 weeks ago (Feb. 9, 2008)

I've been thinking a lot about intent lately. Or specifically, ever since Google reported their earnings and claimed that they were not as good as they might be because of the failure to monetize social networking inventory to expectations. Of course, this is a complicated way of saying: people just don't click on ads when they are on MySpace and so we don't make money despite having exclusive access to advertising on them!

I don't think it takes some kind of advertising genius to see why this is the case: on both MySpace and Facebook, the link density is quite high: it's often hard to click on the thing you want, never mind a piece of advertising. Additionally anything that is put on those pages is competing with "needs" that are of much higher priority on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely mating and socializing/gossiping (the modern day version of delousing).

But there is another piece around intent which all of us on the web ought to think about, especially if we really are moving to a 95% advertising-sponsored consumer Internet. When I type into a Google search box for some portion of the searches that I run, I am as close as I can be to wanting to buy something without actually being in a store (and I loathe stores). This is why it is much more likely that I'd be willing to click on an ad related to whatever it is that I am searching for. Sitting-forward with the intent to spend dollars is something that I don't see as a regular part of my Internet use anywhere else with two exceptions: eBay, and Amazon. And unsurprisingly, Amazon seems poised to capitalize on this behavior outside of the four walls of their own store with the recent launch of Product Ads.

Another related example: when we started Tabblo, our plan was to affect cost that it takes to acquire a user who wanted physical products from their photos by giving them a compelling creative and social experience around the sharing of their photos to "get them in the door" and thinking about making creative goods. This was in direct contrast to the big 3 photo-sharing sites (Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Ofoto) that spent all of their money driving people through a photo print experience. This past week Shutterfly released its 2007 results and as we crunched the numbers on the data available, we were surprised by how much higher their conversion rates are to printed products (not just prints) relative to the number of page views they see. Note that we never expected that we'd match them page for page— after all, they exist solely for the purposes of getting their users output— but the wide gap in conversion rates showed yet another example of intent rearing its ugly head.

Maybe I am being incredibly stumb on this one (the place where stupid and dumb collide), but I just don't see how over the long term inventing a new form of advertising— as Facebook claims it will to justify its $15B valuation— will get us past this intent hurdle. Even display ads, the bread-and-butter of all of the new media content sites, seem threatened by CPC ads which naturally implies that those sites too will have to worry about the following dynamic: when it comes to serving advertisers on the Internet, it would seem the name of the game is web-as-yellow-pages. As far as the media model goes, everything else might just be filler, or at best, content for the gatekeepers of intent (Google ins some instances).

Tags: buddies , digerati
1 Comments

How early is too early for a kid and a cellphone?

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 4 weeks ago (Feb. 9, 2008)

Having just heard that in this fast-paced world we live in, it is possible for a 5 year-old to be given a cellphone, I got to thinking about this wonderful Economist piece on toys with an ethic. Specifically the piece calls out Lego and Playmobil, Danish and German respectively, and talks about some of what the design and manufacture of these toys says about their intended audiences national cultures.

I'm not sure what handing a 5 year-old a cellphone means for us, or why exactly it rubs me the wrong way. After all I love shoving tech down kids' throats as early as possible (Lego Mindstorms, the OLPC, etc.). But somehow the idea of a weekend day punctuated with the interruptions of calls and smses makes me depressed— after all, it will happen in time anyway, so why rush it?

The counter example is our marginally useful Roomba (a month of real data now) that delights both boys as it scurries around the first floor sucking up dirt and toys alike. None of us can figure out how its random pattern is determined and the boys particularly enjoy trying to "force" it to a particular path (albeit without much success) for hours on end. Not exactly a "thinking kid's toy" but one from which they get a chance to learn anyway.

0 Comments

Book review: The Big Switch

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 3 weeks 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 Twitter— 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)— 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...

Tags: digerati , geeks
21 Comments

Keeping it simple

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 16, 2008)

Despite my having grown to disagree with almost everything he writes, I have to admit that Paul Graham's latest essay "Six Principles for Making New Things" is a great read for makers of all shapes and sizes. In it, he makes an argument for keeping it real simple and not worrying about the fact that the world is going to call you an idiot for being overly simplistic.

Almost everyone that I've met over the last few years in the startup world seems to have fully embraced this new philosophy of minimalism. And even at HP, people with decades of experience in waterfall model software development seem to be getting hip to this jive.

However despite the love-ins for sans-serifs and single-function websites, it continues to surprise me how few people actually follow the philosophy in practice. I've come to believe that for most of us it's about how hard it is to stop listening to that voice inside your head that keeps saying: this is too trivial to be meaningful— I've got to put more meat on it. Management teams yield to it because they want to seem big and meaningful to the market, the press, and especially to their VCs. Engineers do it because they want to work on the "hard stuff" and because the "simple stuff" is somehow beneath them. And yet as Graham writes, time and time again we see the simple and limited winning in the market.

On a related theme, I recently finished listening to the audio book of Steve Martin's awesome memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," and was quite struck by how much his own creative trajectory follows the same path that Paul Graham writes about. Starting from magic tricks and canned one-liners, he spends 2 decades perfecting an act that becomes rich and complex only after thousands of nights playing to crowds of all shapes and sizes. My favorite part of the Martin book (outside the fact that he writes beautifully, reads with gusto and even plays banjo throughout) was seeing how much he was willing to work on what others at first called lame and unoriginal all the while following his gut.

And in fact that is the one thing that I would add to Graham's design philosophy for creative endeavors— that it is not so much about finding the simplest possible solution (though this is often the best place to start), but about listening to your gut very closely... and then not desisting when what your gut tells you leads you to something you're afraid will make you look like a simpleton in front of your peers.

Tags: buddies , geeks
0 Comments

Another killer ingredient: just a dash of humility

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 17, 2008)

The Gmail guy gets into the fray with a very nice blog post on building good products. According to him, the key is humility. You have to be ready to listen to your users, and iterate on what's working while fixing what isn't. Most definitely great "motherhood and apple pie" advice for anyone trying to get the consumer Internet.

In fact the only challenge that I see with this approach is that while it is 100% correct for a product team that has already won (hello Google), it's pretty hard to pull off when you're a starving startup teetering somewhere between insanity and oblivion. The only way to stay productive in that type of situation is to believe that you are somehow better than everyone else— the exact opposite of the humility that Paul Buchheit argues for in his piece. It's why you think you're doing something technically that no one else will pull off, and why you need to believe that your design is just better.

Of course as in all that is worth doing, it's a careful balancing act. You need to think that you are better than everyone else... except for your users. They rule, and if you don't listen closely you're going to end up circling the drain sooner or later.

Tags: buddies
3 Comments

The web as movement

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 22, 2008)

Driving up to New Hampshire in the midst of a blizzard tonight, I was captivated by the swirling snow and thoughts of how the web is quietly turning into a series of flows (blog posts, Flickr streams, Twitters, etc.). It has take many more years than I would have thought: after all, RSS first entered my life back in 2002 on a hot summer day when I made a stupid bet that everyone would be consuming their content via readers inside of 5 years. The two trends driving this evolution of the web: 1. the web as a communications/publishing platform and 2. the atomization of web content such that we care less about "page loads" of information and more about individual atoms (for instance, did you know that every tweet has its own permalink?)

Perhaps the most thought-provoking piece of work on this whole transformation as of late has been Matt Webb's presentation "Movement" where he makes this point and more in describing a new interaction pattern for information (think interactive RSS feeds). His argument stimulates the grey matter because of the way that it makes you think about how the metaphor of the "web as movement" versus the "web as place" changes your expectations for the medium.

There are loads of other folks sniffing around this notion from different starting points. Some see web services as programmable data sources that the elusive mashup serves to recombine in new and interesting ways (Tom Coates did this one best in his presentation "A Web of Data.") Others see the new web being born out of the micropublishing boom (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr) where the constant update combined with the lightweight social network drives the main pattern of interaction. In both of these cases though, we are leaving behind the Geocities/Homestead/etc. view of webpages as static (or even semi-static blogs) and jumping on to the moving web, be whatever may.

It's a big shift— about as big as the one to cloud computing— so I'm not really sure of where it will take us. One thing I do hope however is that it lays to rest the notion of the "destination site" with its registration-based walled garden and constrained experience designed to chases money in the form of shifting ad dollars. Maybe Techcrunch's report of the stagnating Facebook traffic is a harbinger of things to come (though seen from the best possible light all Facebook is is one giant web-as-movement-reader).

I'm just kicking off the thinking about this, which is to say there is tons more thinking to do. At the end of the day this is likely to touch everything we do online: from how we communicate to how search engines index the web, from how we buy and sell to how we look for recommendations. All coming from billions of loosely joined little pieces moving...

Tags: buddies , geeks
0 Comments

Why RSS readers don't work

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 23, 2008)

Why don't people like RSS readers? I can't imagine how anyone could stay on top of the blogosphere without the use of one; yet even Big Kahuna Bloggers like Doc don't use them, preferring instead to troll through their bookmarks and rely on pointers sent by email or Twitter.

Perhaps it is all about the fact that most RSS reader developers chose to ape the 3-pane interface of the traditional email client (in the hopes of conceptual synergy) and most people just don't want another inbox. That said, this would not explain why even the mail program plug-in readers that put the feeds right into your regular inbox (FeedDemon and Thunderbird) have failed to catch on. Hell even when Microsoft baked RSS reading into Outlook, people barely took notice.

On the other hand, the famous Facebook "Activity Stream" is nothing more than an internal news reader (and as of yesterday, it would seem that it is also an external one). And sites like Techmeme and Tailrank are aggregated newsreaders with a slightly more complex sorting algorithm.

When I think of what works about both of these alternative newsreaders, the conclusion that I come to is that the "add to reader" step (actively subscribing to a feed of content) must deter most folks. If this is indeed the case, then crowdsourcing this step in the process seems like an interesting possibility. Or at the very least, baking the reader into the web browser (which all of the browser vendors have done, albeit in a "one feed, one website" model that seems borked from the start) and then relying on browsing patterns to subscribe and unsubscribe folks from particular feeds.

As I continue to think through "web as movement," I can't help but feel that we've got tons more innovation to do on the reader front, and that we're only now just getting started.

Tags: buddies
2 Comments

The Activity Stream-pendectomy

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 1 week 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.

Tags: buddies , geeks
4 Comments

A quick call on the Rich Internet Platform thing

Posted by Antonio 6 months, 1 week 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 it— 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.

Tags: digerati , geeks
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En route to ETech

Posted by Antonio 6 months ago (March 2, 2008)

Heading to Etech this week which should be a great treat not so much because of the high octane crowd that O'Reilly attracts to this conference but because it seems like with Etech 2008, the conference organizers are taking a turn away from the standard Web 2.0 themes and looking at other places where technology is making a big difference in how people relate to the world (go read Tim's perspective on it).

I am excited about the green-tech theme that seems to be all the rage for the software/Internet people these days, and as a result, I'm looking forward to all of the sessions along that track, starting with the energy literacy keynote. In fact this morning I was reading a piece in the Economist on how all of the prominent geeks in Silicon Valley are becoming green tech entrepreneurs which made me wonder whether in technology there is such a thing as the entrepreneur truly divorced from the type of innovation wave which he exists in. During the explosive early growth stages of the Internet there were a whole bunch of entrepreneurs who came out of PC-era companies and did ok in their 2.0s, but it bears mentioning that there was none of those second timers really knocked it out of the park, and that today's Internet powerhouses are all led by folks who had none of that historical baggage/experience with them.

Nonetheless, it is the rare conference these days that offers the chance for a broad and fresh perspective— which is exactly what I'm hoping Etech will be this year.

Tags: buddies
1 Comments

What I learned at Etech

Posted by Antonio 6 months ago (March 6, 2008)

As I sit here writing this sentence, my brain is consuming about 20 watts of energy. For some reason that seems like a lot to me, until I think of the fact that 3 of me could run on the energy that one of the many 60 watt lightbulb I constantly forget to turn off.

Thought exercises like this one were the natural outcome of attending Saul Griffith's energy literacy keynote— by far and away the best of the keynotes I attended. Underpinning the talk was a relatively simple premise: to put all of the things we do on a constant energy scale (watts consumed) and check out where we might be terribly wasteful (in my case: airplane travel by an order of magnitude, followed by commuting to the new HP offices, with buying too many gadgets as a distant third). His talk was fascinating because of this one act of normalizing data— and has given me a much better view of things than Al Gore's documentary or the various overly complex papers and books I've tried to digest. Watts, watts everywhere (edit: for clarification purposes I should say that a watt is a unit of flow, the real absolute unit for energy is the joule; 1 watt is just 1 joule per second [thanks Paul in the comments)— for everything from running your gas sucking automobile to that can of Coke you are about to drink.

And speaking of wattage, that brain of mine seems pretty efficient compared to the laptop I'm writing this on which sucks up about 40 watts to give me an infinitesimal amount of the processing my puny brain puts out (which according to Kathy Sierra's self-help /feel-good keynote could be vastly improved by less Brain Age and more intense periods of concentration). Why then does it suck up twice the power? According to Stan Williams, from our very own HP labs, because we may be using an inefficient model for computation. In a fascinating talk that made me proud of HP labs, he gave a survey of techniques used to increase computing power to get to computers whose power nomenclature sounds like the Sunday morning special at Waffle House (ExaFlop?). I've never been a big fan of the quantum computing stuff (which according to Williams only has application in crypto, if at all), but I was riveted by his assertion that our starting assumption that computers ought to be built with standard boolean logic (AND, OR, NAND, XOR) might be something that we want to check, especially because we trace its origins back to some 16 year old farm boy named Claude Shannon (famous for his work in information theory) who was getting his PhD at MIT in the 30s. The best part of Stan's talk: how even keeled and practical he sounded about all of the crazy sci-fi shit that is getting done in his lab! This is one guy I am definitely looking up when next at the mothership in Palo Alto.

Flawed boolean logic notwithstanding, it was awesome to see all of the hardware hacking taking place at the conference. Bug Labs and Chumby are neat attempts at building companies out of some of this creative energy, though limited precisely because of commercial constraints. Much more interesting were a number of conversations I had with folks about Arduinos and the whole related ecosystem of camera/GPS/network modules that are springing up around them. The king of cool in this category was definitely Chris Anderson (of Wired fame) with his DIY Drones talk on making full autonomous flying things out of cheap componentry. If I hadn't seen his videos, I would not believe that the stuff in his talk was even remotely achievable by an amateur. Particularly cool was the UAV that he flew over the Google campus to take pictures that he was then able to collage through GPS coordinates captured during flight.

And speaking of GPS, geo was the new black at this year's conference. The number of talks, hallway conversations, and keynote mentions that centered around location hacking were too numerous to list here. It is honestly beginning to feel like understanding how to work with geo-data is the new SQL with this crowd (where is the O'Reilly book on this topic?!?). And amidst this buzz, Yahoo launched FireEagle, a thin piece of geo middleware that lets users register producers and consumers of geodata. Despite the panning the poor guys took on TechCrunch, what they are trying to do strikes me as super cool and important (email me if you want an invite).

It's funny— during the first 12 hours of the conference (which I have to admit I was forced to duck in and out of due to work obligations), I felt ready to declare that it had jumped the shark (especially after Tim's rambling and slightly depressing opening talk). But in the end I'm glad I went, mostly because of the way that an event like this helps to remind me of the for some folks, it is a core belief that anything is hackable (including according to Lesig, government).

More than anything else the crowd that O'Reilly is still able to attract to this event exudes that ethos from every pore. Magazines like Make, blogs, and websites are helping to propagate this more broadly, but seeing it first hand— even if once a year— helps to recharge the batteries that run this 20 watt brain.

Tags: buddies
2 Comments

Mythbusting vampire power suckers

Posted by Antonio 5 months, 4 weeks ago (March 9, 2008)

Fast on the heels of my energy-on-the-brain week in San Diego, I decided to run some experiments with my recently acquired Kill-a-Watt to debunk some myths about consumer electronics and power consumption. What follows is by no means exhaustive, but I figured I would write it up as it has frequently been the topic of lunchtime conversation at the office— with people arguing both sides of each argument as though it were politics and not simply electricity 101.

The basic statement that I was trying to confirm or disprove was that your computer/cellphone/ipod/etc. charger sucks electricity even when it is not connected to a device. Savvy environmental marketers have called this the "vampire effect" or the problem of "phantom power," and truth be told, after I first heard the term, I could never look at one of those cuddly black bricks the same.

So I went around the house looking for as many bricks as possible, putting my Kill-a-Watt between them and the wall source of power and then connecting and disconnecting their associated devices. An aside: For those that don't know what a Kill-a-Watt is (pictured here), it's one of several cheap gizmos you can buy to plug between a given appliance and the wall to measure how much power is being consumed. I'm not quite sure how it works, but quickly testing it on both 60 and 100 Watt lightbulbs convinced me that it worked as billed.

The result: for each of the 13 bricks that I tried, ranging from a wireless phone charger to a MacBook Pro power adapter, the vampire/phantom thing is complete BS. The moment you disconnect the associated device the Watts measured on the Kill-a-Watt go right down to zero. Interestingly enough, this is equally true for low wattage chargers like the iPhone one (~1-2W while charging). It makes sense— after all I'm fairly certain that a fairly cheap circuit on the power adapter can get a good sense of load and just cut the whole power supply off if nothing is connected. As a funny aside, it seems that there is a whole category of "smart powerstrips" that are sold to protect the user against this bunk phantom power thing.

Since I had the Kill-a-Watt out anyway, I then went on to try to prove one of my own wacky theories: that you could actually conserve overall power when using your laptop at home by a) pulling the battery out when you were connected to the outlet and b) never leaving the machine connected after it was fully charged.

My theory about pulling the battery out went something like this: if a machine consumes X amount of power just to run, then also charging the battery at the same time must require X+Y power where Y is whatever it takes to charge the battery. And to point b above, even when the battery was fully charged, there would still be some amount of power required to trickle-charge, or keep the battery topped off.

However, in my very simplistic testing, it seems that with or without battery attached, my MacBook sucked in about 20-30 Watts pretty constantly (the variation being most directly affected by the display brightness). I tried it with 50% charge in the battery, 80%, and even 100% and it just seemed to hold constant in its power consumption in all cases.

Which of course leads me to wonder where the incremental power to charge the battery comes from. My current guess is that the Kill-a-watt does have some standard margin of error (that I didn't see with my lame lightbulb tests) and that this is where the incremental power to charge is being missed.

To end on at least one energy saving tip, for a typical MacBook in sleep mode, the cost of trickle charging is about 1-3 Watts which means that unless you are going on a long airplane ride the next day (or are a power hygiene freak who must have all devices at 100% charge all the time), you will save a little bit of power by pulling the adapter from the machine (though not unplugging it from the wall) when the little charge light turns green.

Whew, ok. With that behind us, I promise to get back to InterWebs topics tomorrow!

PS, if anyone knows of a relatively cheap device that can act as a Kill-a-Watt does but store data points over time for subsequent analysis on a computer, please let me know. My next set of experiments requires more than just eyeballing the display as the junk attached sucks power.

Tags: buddies , geeks
4 Comments

RIP laptop formfactor: you served us well

Posted by Antonio 5 months, 3 weeks 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.

Tags: buddies , geeks
5 Comments

On the data smelter

Posted by Antonio 5 months, 3 weeks ago (March 16, 2008)

Any self-respecting ManGeek ought to love a term I picked up from the Economist a couple of weeks in an article on cloud computing: data smelter. Apparently this is moniker used for the huge data centers that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are building on the banks of the Columbia river in Oregon. Located in the middle of the cheapest power available in the US, the name data smelter is a play on the aluminum smelters that peppered the banks of the Columbia over the last hundred years, but it's also great because it hints at one of the most relevant facets of the cloud computing/web services revolution: the ability for new services to recombine data hosted by other services in novel and interesting ways. We haven't even begun to feel the true power of how transformative this loose coupling of data and processing is likely to be; today's "mash-ups" are barely at the crawl phase of development in what we are likely to see.

And yet, it's worth pausing for a second to think about the cost of the current smelting. The Economist piece cites the Google data center at the Dalles as requiring the power of a town of 200,000 people. Most of this wattage goes to power the compute cycles that Google requires to index the world's information, and in most cases these cycles are well spent by running hairy algorithms that apply the bleeding edge of computer science to extract order from chaos.

But this is not always the case. For instance, at Tabblo, a meaningful amount of our general web traffic comes from Google Bot or one of its competitors. This despite the fact that we have well-structured RSS equivalents that could be polled/processed in a much more efficient way. Ditto for all of the much bigger user-generated content sites— they too have a meaningful amount of traffic coming from indexing bots while at the same time providing feeds that might provide just as much information for searchers while using less bandwidth, fewer CPU cycles, and not as much overall smelting.

The few times I've read any luminaries from Google talking about the semantic web in any shape or form (RDF, microformats, etc.), they always pooh-pooh it with slights like "people don't want to deal in angle brackets all day." And until I started thinking about the energy implications of these data smelters, I was likely to agree— after all, we're all still suffering from the CORBA/DCOM hangover of the last decade where a few vendors bamboozled the entire industry into thinking that an overwrought solution for remote process data exchange was the answer to all of these coupling needs (watch the WS-* offspring for a modern-day equivalent).

But last week Yahoo played a potentially game-changing move with its pledge to support the semantic web standards (microformats, RDF, etc.) across all of its properties. As much I tend to write off Yahoo as roadkill on the Google highway, it's clear that a few folks there are still doing good things for the net and the planet.

If the other industry heavyweights are goaded into following through, we may end up running slightly cleaner data smelters in the near future.

Tags: buddies , digerati , geeks
1 Comments

Steve's love letter to Twitter

Posted by Antonio 5 months, 3 weeks ago (March 18, 2008)

Steve Gillmor has a beautiful essay on the significance of Twitter which is well worth the read. In it, he explains the perfect storm situation that gave birth to the incredible success Twitter is experiencing. In his own words:

The

Getting you on my frequency (onda)

Stuff from 2008