Posted by Antonio
1 week, 5 days ago (Aug. 24, 2008)
If you are at all interested in how personal computing spent its toddler years, go and check out Gamasutra's history of Atari. It is not particularly well written, and is a bit disjointed, but it is the only complete story that I've seen of Atari, the casual gaming powerhouse that started it all. Among some of the great nuggets I got from the piece:
* even when you've got an insatiable appetite to serve (as was the case with early video games), it takes time to ramp up: Nolan Bushnell and team were both patient and very smart about iterating quickly. And this is despite the fact that they didn't "program" at all (not in the way we understand it), but instead wired transistors and worried about vertical and horizontal blanking to get their games to work. The next time I bitch about the iPhone's relatively weak documentation for development, I am going to remember how these guys had it— and yet, they were still agile.
* content companies suck, but you can route around them: corollary, when you are a young company, avoid lawyers and law suits— you may be legally correct, but the process will bleed you to death. When Atari couldn't license Jaws from Spielberg, they just made a shark game that looked like Jaws... and cleaned up in the market. When everyone started copying their TTL (transitor to transistor logic) arcade games thus violating their intellectual property, they sought to play a market-cornering strategy with suppliers instead of lawyering up. These guys had hair on their chests, balls, and probably hairy balls too!
* big companies are where startups go to die: something I didn't realize was that Atari sold relatively early to Warner, the media company, for much too little money ($28MM). I have always wondered why they seemed to have missed PCs altogether when they had the 8-bit 2600 in the market, and both Steves (from Apple) worked there. Turns out the suits at Warner were more interested in stuffing the channel and reaping rent from the gaming consoles than investing in the exploding personal computer market. When you stop thinking about product and market, and start thinking about the channel and the profit margins, hire the MBAs, call it a commodity business, and get the eff out!
Posted by Antonio
1 week, 6 days ago (Aug. 23, 2008)
My new favorite section of the New York Times (a blog-like tech section called Bits) has a piece on the plummeting prices of what they call "Netbooks," or ultra small portables with low-end components and even lower prices. Netbooks belong to a new category of products called M.I.D.s (Mobile Internet Devices) which are apparently selling like hot cakes because of two intersecting trends: mobility and ubiquitous Internet access.
MIDs as a category are hard to ignore which is why every major PC vendor is now playing fast follower to those that led the way (even we at HP are now shipping various versions of the 2133). Most look like small laptops (though some like the Nokia 800/810 tablet push the form factor beyond that) which implies having to have small fingers or loads of patience to be productive, but this is a small price to pay, especially for kids.
I'm a believer. The only thing I'd love to see as part of the emerging MID category is a permanent, bundled in, Internet connection, much like the Amazon Kindle's. If the Bits piece is correct and prices could soon hit $199 on the standalone devices, $399 might just be enough to incent one of the EVDO carriers into a 2 year term of service. And that is before considering some of the more compelling subsidy models. For instance, if I were Larry or Sergey, I'd look to sponsor a device like this targeted at schools in exchange for nothing more than making them Google branded (sure beats the pants off of flying around in a master-of-the-universe customized 767.)
Imagine how compelling that might make the device for the millions of school kids in the US who attend crappy public schools and have no broadband at home. A relatively standard PC (unlike say a pie-in-the-sky reinvention of personal computing a la OLPC) with a permanent net connection might be just enough incentive to get kids interested in treating these much like the kids in Stephenson's Diamond Age. Then we'd just have to get started with the really challenging bit— writing the primer's software!
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 6 days ago (Aug. 16, 2008)
RRW has a nice piece of how today's hottest developer "platforms" have a degree of closedness which we would have never tolerated, covering the social network sites as well as the iTouch platform. Others have been on this point for a while (for a great read, check out Zittrain's very approachable "The Future of the Internet"), but as we throw our hardware into the tire fire in favor of vendor-controlled "clouds" with little in the way of documented SLAs and APIs, and we pinch our way to glee on the iPhone 3G, it's good to spare a few cycles to folks like Zittrain and Doc who are advocating that we bear a little pain to stay in control.
A friend recently gave me a giant tome worth reading if you think there is nothing we can do, "The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey," which covers the best articles from 20-odd years of the magazine by the same name. The best part of this giant compendium is the section on hacking Ma Bell, the ultimate closed platform from back in the 70s (I discovered that this is where 2600 got its name). Most of these hacks were actually illegal (as they resulted in loss of revenue for the phone company), but the spirit of the endeavors was awesome— and it is interesting to note that this same spirit was then channeled by folks like Woz into the birth of the personal computer industry without which there would be no iPhone today, or even perhaps a commercial Internet. I'd hate to lose this ethic in the name of "democratizing technology" for the mass market.
Last week I installed Linux on a craptop which I'd gotten through work and discovered just how much overhead XP still takes (Ubuntu runs way more smoothly for those interested in a free upgrade to their 2133s). I did it for because I wanted to install Billix (a cool sysadmin swissarmy knife toolset) on a USB stick I carry around and realized that like a frog boiled slowly I had ceded of my locally controlled Linux command lines to VPS accounts to the cloud without realizing it.
Will I drop my Mac-flavored, Quicksilver-enhanced, candy-colored UNIX for daily use in favor of this much more open hardware/software that I control? No way. It's been 5 years since I used a Linux laptop on a daily basis, and even if I could get over the loss of well-integrated, anti-aliased GUIs, I've become far too addicted to adjunct technologies that have emerged since then and are still poorly supported under Linux (802.11n/g, Bluetooth, EVDO cards, etc.), but with my 2133 booting Ubuntu at least I feel like I've got an escape valve when little brother comes knocking.
Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 5 days ago (Aug. 10, 2008)
My brother was recently telling me about grounding my thirteen year-old nephew for 3 weeks. He lost his ability to invite friends over, watch TV, play Xbox, and even putter around on his laptop. Despite this, the kid remained surprisingly smug about his prospects for the next 3 weeks bored. Apparently his dad forgot to take all of his screens away— and with his iPod touch still in hand, he felt that he had beaten the rap's worst consequence: being disconnected.
Having just finished reading Cory Doctorow's wonderfully entertaining tale of teenage Geek culture in his polemic against the Patriot Act and all of our loss of privacy in recent years, I was again reminded of how fast kids can take ownership of new technologies in ways that leaves the grownups scratching their heads and... just generally feeling old.
Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," has a really rich description of this world being conquered by teenage geeks, one that struck me as both incredibly realistic, and quite telling of how the first post-PC, post-Internet generation expects to be able to own their electronic fates— from media to communications to the interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds, the narrative serves as much better guidepost for what is coming than all of the artificial "teenage panels" that seem to come at the end of every tech conference these days ("what will you kids pay for?" is always my favorite dumb question at these), or even the ethnographic academic studies that always seem to conclude that kids really like to "socialize."
In the book, three teenagers wage war on an out-of-control Homeland Security by employing crypto, open source, hardware hacking, and social engineering, all without seeming like the contrived movie characters who are always a little too glib, a little too knowledgeable. In fact reading the book on the 25th anniversary of War Games is fitting, for not since Broderick's everday geek have I seen such believable kid-hacker characters, and enjoyed so thoroughly the honest portrayal of self-discovery and confidence building that comes from twisting technology to tweak the system.
Update: The real world imitates art with kids hacking the MBTA, "arphids" and all...
When I first read "The Pragmatic Programmer" back in 2000, I remember being bowled over, not because there was any one brilliant insight, but because there were so many suggestions proposed by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt that succinctly described what I knew to be some of my better habits without really knowing why. It was almost as though they were reaching inside my brain and explaining things that I somehow understood without knowing why.
With what may come to be known as that book's sequel, "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning," Andy Hunt does exactly that— reaches inside your brain to take you on a mystery tour of it, from theories about skill acquisition (the Dreyfus model), to explaining how insight "bubbles up," to suggesting how you might improve various cognitive facilities. I've just finished the "beta 7" version of the book (available as a PDF for $22, but don't worry, with these guys beta 0.01 is much better than most publishers's final product), and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to any fans of PragProg, and even to any non-programmer involved in any kind of intellectual work who is curious about how their wetware (brain) works under different circumstances.
One note: the book will be even less relevant to software engineer's direct tools than PragProg was (though that still didn't stop PragProg from being the best book written for software engineers since "The Unix Programming Environment"). Think of it instead as the famous lost manual to the superhero suit in the TV show Greatest American Hero— except that instead of being the instructions to a super-powered suit made by aliens from space, this book will serve the manual for something much more important— your brain.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 1 week ago (July 30, 2008)
Great op-ed piece in the Times today that argues the case for the FCC to get out of the pocket of the telco lobby to hopefully open up some spectrum.
While I agree that bandwidth may be as important to our emerging information economy as oil was to the industrial one, we'd do well to keep in mind that digital + wireless essentially means that in the long run there should be no scarcity of bandwidth, and that as such there is no natural way for carriers to form a cartel to control supply. Sure rolling out 3G and LTE/4G costs a lot of money in infrastructure up front, but these costs can be recouped in short order. More importantly, the semiconductor companies and Internet powerhouses (think Intel and Google) are well incented to find ways to make cheaper technologies like Wimax work, if only the government gets them the spectrum.
My favorite part of the piece: the title, OPEC 2.0, helps to really contextualize the issue of open spectrum to the regular Joe currently paying $4.30/gallon for gas.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (July 20, 2008)
Everyone appears to love my little Japanese friend Tengu which I received as a belated birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law. Essentially a Tengu is a USB-powered set of LEDs that make faces depending on the ambient noise. So when you play music, Tengu "sings along" with you (as he is doing in the picture here).
It's an interesting reaction people have to it; upon first hearing what it does, almost everyone says "that's it!?!" surprised by the fact that it needs to plug into a computer at all (which sadly it only uses for power). But after watching it for a little while, observers become entranced in trying to determine the pattern of its various facial expressions. It speaks volume not only to good toy design (from what I can discern from the packaging it is Japanese only) but to the power of our natural anthropomorphic tendencies. When we see what we recognize as vaguely human, we tend to bond with it at an emotional level, no matter how silly the device is.
Having seen the mesmerizing power of the Tengu, I now want someone to build a Tengu does something more useful with its host's networking capabilities. What about taking a page out of Ambient's products and showing a happy Tengu when the market is up and a sad one when it is down? Or better yet, what about combining data from the Internet with some sort of locally derived sensor data to provide context-relevant mood swings?
Perhaps this is a perfect Arduino physical computing project...
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (July 19, 2008)
A couple of months ago my brother-in-law gave me an advanced copy of "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0," a "business history" of Web 2.0 by Businessweek reporter Sara Lacy that I promptly threw in the trunk of my car due to a) the fact that I don't like business books and b) because Lacy had just had quite a snafu at SXSW during an interview with Facebook's Zuckerberg.
Well this morning while unpacking a car full of kids at the beach, I realized I had nothing else to read and decided to give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend it heartily to anyone interested in the history of tech and business, and particularly anyone who cares about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
Lacy follows the genealogical tree from the dot-com boom into the Web 2.0 ecosystem and does a really good job of extracting insight from what must have been countless hours of interviews with founders, entrepreneurs, and executives. Among the better pearls of wisdom: the dot com bubble created a whole load of entrepreneur-friendly capital in the likes of Peter Thiel and his Founders' Fund let Web 2.0 entrepreneurs bypass the typical challenges of VC-based rounds of funding, and focus instead upon building early traction.
The best thing I can say for the book is that as a reporter, Lacy does a good job of portraying the characters she covers. Having met a bunch of these guys during the course of Tabblo (as potential advisors, investors, etc.), I was really struck by how well she "gets" what they are about, and how good of a job she does at telling apart the people who are in Silicon Valley to make money, those who are there to battle internal demons, and most importantly, those who go there to dent the world.
I've never been a huge fan of the term "live web," often used to signify all of the quasi-realtime communications streams that let people swarm and collaborate around particular issues. But it is in fact the combination of these plus Google that have made hacking on things much more interesting. The great collaborative outboard brain makes everything easier and better.
I remember exactly 10 years ago this summer discovering Linux, and more importantly, how because of the tech savvy communities around various parts of it, Linux made UNIX not suck anymore. If some byzantine feature got you tripped up, no matter how arcade, there were always loads of places to turn to for help, without counting Alta Vista and Google which were themselves magical oracles on all of these topics.
If you want a reminder of what it was like to say, deal with Solaris or Windows NT, have a look at what iPhone development is. Outside of some high gloss Apple documentation, and one paltry mailing list, you're stuck figuring it all out for yourself (which I think helps to explain why the current crop of AppStore apps are so mediocre in quality).
Come on Apple, don't go against the grain of the web...
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (July 19, 2008)
Apparently clouds dissipate because of two primary reasons: because the air temperature rises or because the moisture in the cloud falls. When it comes to the metaphorical cloud that is Internet-scale computing, this past week seems to have given us both.
The temperature of the air started rising with the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G, and more importantly, Apple's foray into cloud services with its MobileMe productivity suite. Stumbling through scaling issues, synchronization problems, and general uptime challenges, the company started by two Steves under the "one man, one machine" mantra proved yet again that providing scalable server-based platforms is a whole different challenge from creating intuitive and edible interfaces and devices, and that maybe— just maybe— we ought to leave that work to the pros.
And just as all of us were turning MobileMe off, and reverting to our trusty old Gmail accounts, Google goes and shows us just how fast the moisture is dissipating with its most disappointing quarter to date. AdWords— the best model to date for subsidizing cloud infrastructure— does not appear immune to general economic woes. To add insult to injury, some people are out declaring that software-as-service businesses have to "slog it out" to build sustainable advantage, and predictable revenue streams.
To all of this I say: meh. While Apple may never be a truly credible purveyor of cloud services (along with a host of other big tech companies including the one I work for), some infrastructure players will figure it out— slog or no slog— and help us transition to this next phase of computing. And for the business model hiccups? This is a 10 year transition at the very least, and and such it is marathon and not the kind of sprint that has yielded such great speculative financial bubbles.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (July 11, 2008)
Engadget's "International Launch Lineblog" reminds me of those hopelessly feel-good early 1970s/80s Coca-Cola commercials where the company would play that "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" song and show scenes of people from all over the world running in fields and smiling at babies. It's a pretty awesome cultural event when you think about it— around the world today, loads of people from all over the world are going to be getting in line to get their own piece of the Apple magic.
On the other hand, it kind of makes me wonder whether it is only through such a consumerist activity that we can have shared cultural events these days. I guess buying stuff has taken over the role of religion and even media as the great cultural shared substrate?
Hmm, well between that and the low battery life, I'm not sure the iPhone 3G is for me...
I've held off writing this post for a while, mostly because I was afraid it would seem like too much inside baseball for me to talk about how photo sites (which Tabblo attempted to be a superset of) basically still suck almost a decade after the first one launched. But the combination of recent usability testing I attended with my own frustrations using Tabblo and Flickr have overflowed the dam of self-restraint, so here goes.
Three Major ways in which photo sharing sites still suck
Most photo sites are still not geared towards pleasing the most important user, the person giving you their valuable time to see yet another album of your kids doing X, Y, or Z. Why is it that the predominant model for consuming photos online is a contact sheet interface (a grid of X by Y photos) along with a clickable "large" version that is often way too small? Sometimes you might get a half decent slideshow too, though these are very un-webby, and after you've seen 2 of any one theme, you've seen them all.
It is interesting that back in the day when Tabblo could freely call itself a photo site, this is the reaction I'd get from people when I'd talk about this consumption interface challenge: 20% of users would get it right away but 80% of people would give me this "huh?!?" look which was meant to make me feel loony. Here is the example I'd use to escape from Loontown: imagine that you bought a copy of National Geographic but instead of the beautifully art directed layouts of the articles, you'd have all the text of the piece followed by a number of contact sheets of all of the photography followed by a page per photo of all of the individual pictures. How many issues would you subject yourself to before canceling the subscription?
Most photo sites don't have fast enough interfaces for the author, especially around photo organization/selection: Try dealing with a collection of 25,000 images to get all of the pictures of a family member for a birthday. The best of the desktop applications can barely do this (and those are the GPU accelerated ones) to say nothing of how far behind the websites are. And manual tagging is only going to take us so far as it is in effect one of many kludges that enable batch operations (a poor substitute for snappy direct manipulation and search).
On this particular challenge, I would have thought that we would have made more progress by now, but as it turns out, I think most people see the assets stored/created on a photo site as a read-only projection of their photo library which tends to live on their home computer. This allows users to leverage the storage/CPU of the local machine for the heavy lifting, and use the web for sharing and output fulfillment. Apple's iPhoto is perhaps the best example of this: books, cards, and calendars can be assembled 100% on the client out of the entire photo library, and manufactured through a set of partner services. This makes activities like collaborative editing and composition more difficult (though not impossible), and sharing is at best very vanilla on dot mac these days, but it may just be something we have to live with, especially because...
Upload of photos is still horrendously broken, and getting more so as image resolution increases. This is what made me think of this topic in the first place again. Watch a novice user uploading photos and you will get all sorts of understandable errors at the boundary of the desktop and web metaphors. They will drag pictures into the browser window and have them open locally. The will go looking on the website for their C: drive. And perhaps most alarming, often times they will not know how to find their images on the local filesystem in the first place (which points to how expired the desktop metaphor is). Watch an advanced user and you will literally see the hair falling out of their head as they deal with the challenge of sucking a watermellon through a straw (the physical equivalent of uploading 12MP images via a 300kbps asymmetric cable connection). While there are solutions to this problem (a software agent running on your PC uploading everything, wi-fi camera cards, etc.), most of them fall short due to intermittent connections and the challenge of organizing/finding photos once they are living online (see above).
Until we as an industry (camera makers, browser vendors, OS vendors, output vendors, etc.) fix these problems, photo sites are going to remain relegated to the backwater of 4x6 production while the rich hybrid solutions (of which only iPhoto really works) continue to take output share while not really advancing the state of photo sharing. It's a shame too because of how inherently social story telling via photos could be.
Good piece in a well-named InfoWorld blog, "Fatal Exception," on how all of this emphasis on richer UIs for web applications may be unwittingly forcing the web away from what made it great in the first place. Maybe it is the fact that I've been reading Zittrain's book this weekend about how our taste for glossy devices/experiences is causing us to unkonwingly eff up the generative (open) nature of the Internet (ironically, I am reading the book on my very closed Amazon Kindle), but with all of the Silverlight/Flex/GWT stuff landing inside our browsers these days, I tend to agree. Basta to the ever increasing richness of client applications inside the web browser.
Here is an example: there is a new web application called Flowgram that everyone keeps pointing to as the next twist on screencasting. Through a combination of Flash and URL refreshing, you can be taken on a tour of a set of "live" web pages that are clickable and whose embedded objects can be interacted with. Seems pretty cool right?
No, actually it is kind of annoying. Sometimes you just want to dive into the content at your own speed, in your own way and yet, from what I've seen of this seems all but impossible in Flowgram. Despite the fact that there is a timeline scubber thing you can use to jump around, the refreshes are far too slow— far slower than it would be to just load the underlying sites. For instance, I have been looking forward to seeing/watching/reading a presentation on Facebook's photo-related infrastructure, but because I've only found it on Flowgram, I've abandoned it twice, probably never to return again.
The web is great because it is so lightweight— let's try to make sure we don't throw that particular baby out with the bath water.
Tomorrow: why photo sharing sites still suck (including the one we built).
For the 4th of July I dedicated myself to Adam Greenfield's manifesto, Everyware, which argues that computing is about to disappear into every day objects that we will interact with without being conscious of the fact that they represent the post PC era of personal computing. The book is broken up into a set of "theses" that should really be called observations about how people behave in a world where every object is connected to the network and capable of serving as an input mechanism (sensor), a display mechanism (output), or both.
The best reference in the book is to a 1996 paper out of Xerox PARC on "calm computing" which basically argues that we will be able to deal with the information/data overload better in a world where we can interact with information/data via our regular contact with physical objects. Maybe, but only if these objects don't end up becoming the manifestations of Google AdWords 2.0, giving us an apocalyptic Minority Report-like future where every surface becomes a new opportunity for displaying an ad.
Everyware ends on a positive note by pointing out that we (as in regular every day hackers) are being given the tools to control our destinies through open source software, and more importantly open source hardware like the Arduino kits that are popping up all over the place. As folks like Jonathan Zittrain make the rounds warning us about losing control of our digital futures as we fall prey to the glossy experiences of the iPhone or the Xbox, it's good to remember that we can still assert our independence by voting with our tinkering.
When I bought my Macbook Air, I debated for about 20 seconds whether to spend the extra grand on the solid state drive. On the one hand it was the bleeding edge, and I've now come to realize that laptops last long enough and evolve fast enough to be worth spending the extra cash up front. What decided me against it was not saving $1,300 (though this helped), but what I call the VW Bug theory of technology purchasing.
When you are buying technology in an industry which is driven by mass market economics (which center around price/performance), it never pays to buy something off of a new branch on the evolutionary tree— at least not in the first generations. This was the genius of the original 1960s VW bug; because it used tried and true car technologies, its economics were riding the tail end of the experience curve. Ditto for spinning hard drives— because a few manufacturers have made billions of them, they've been able to learn how to optimize all of the critical metrics: density of storage, speed of access, and power.
I was worried that the flash speed of access improvement wasn't going to be significant enough, but as it turns out according to Tom's Hardware this week (one of my favorite hardware review sites), SSD drives suck a lot more power out of your battery than you might have thought. In fact, a lot more than those moving platters.
This is not to say that eventually all notebook hard drives will not turn to flash— I think they absolutely will. It's just that the first few generations of this technology will take a few black eyes. Maybe that's why Apple is now dropping the price of the Macbook Air.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 30, 2008)
This year at the D conference Michael Dell was asked whether he was worried that the shift towards cloud computing would affect his PC business. Despite not usually seeming like a visionary, Dell gave a great answer. He said that over the last 20 years, every time bandwidth increases, it was his observation that so did the need for processing power on both sides of the pipe, and that because of that, he felt pretty good about the future of his PC business.
Just look at the iPhone or the N95, two mobile phones that pack a tremendous amount of processing power per ounce of weight. Despite being even more suited a a class to offload work to servers in the cloud, smart phones as a category seem to be growing more powerful in their display technology (hardware accelerated video), processing technology (Intel Atom), and general peripherals (5MP cameras, GPSes). Not only are these devices being packed to the gills with more transistors than a mid 1990s PC, but developers are rushing to PC-like development environments like the iPhone's and Google's Android to take advantage of the additional horsepower instead of just writing web applications for the increasingly more powerful web browsers that come with these things.
And it is not just about local processing power; the latest issue of Wired has what will no doubt become a classic piece by Kevin Kelly on the emergent distributed 12-million-teraflop computer that all of our gizmos are getting wired up to make. In the piece, there is a great chart that quantifies the shipped quantities of various different devices with CPUs at their core: from PCs to DVRs, from cellphones to cameras.
Now everyone knows that there are roughly 3 times more cellphones than PCs in the world today, but the stat that I found more interesting is that there are 44 times more PCs out in the wild than servers. Though I realize that it is probably difficult to define what a "server" is in today's world of quad-core x86 machines, the magnitude of that difference brought to mind the delta between storage at the client tier (in offices, in people's homes, at school), and the storage "in the cloud" (i.e., S3).
Even if you assume that the typical x86 server has 13x more storage than the typical PC (a terabyte of addressable storage versus a measly 80GB because you have to factor in the installed base more for the PCs), you are still talking about something on the order of about 100 million petabytes for the client tier and less than a third of that for the cloud tier.
Anyone who has tried to back up a photo collection to a cloud service like .Mac, to say nothing of a music or video collections, knows this at a gut level. The challenges with storage in the client tier have always been consistent addressability and reliability, but in a replicated and distributed world (a la Kelly's megacomputer), we might just be able to make better use of all of those petabytes.
Processing and storage made the PC revolution the juggernaut that it has been. It is why we've come to expect the interactivity native application developers running into the smart phone space are clamoring for, and it's why the dark matter of today's computing environment is composed of billions of hard drives, powered and accessed in a massively distributed way.
It is going to be a while before the cloud catches up with that (datacenter economics and bandwidth being what they are), and until it does, we might all be careful of falling elephants.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 28, 2008)
These paper prototypes of popular websites (via Waxy Links) are absolutely charming. I've always loved drawing paper interfaces because of the way that they help to clarify thinking about what is important. On paper you never have the space (or in my case the skill) to get specific about the details that ultimately don't matter as much as the one or two key actions on each screen.
In fact, I've often wondered why there are no good computer-based prototyping tools— or at least ones that approximate the best qualities of paper. Using Photoshop to prototype interfaces is like using a jackhammer to make ice sculptures; with enough practice you can do it, but there has got to be a better way. Over the years, I've found some tools that help to wireframe (Visio, OmniGraffle), but all of these are still too cumbersome and provide little if any help in terms of interactivity. It is no wonder then that some in the web design community are advocating jumping straight to HTML from paper.
Here is a lazy web idea that might help experience designers: how about a software application that let folks scan in their paper prototypes and then manipulate them with simple drawing/animating tools via point and click. The result would look a lot like Ambrosia's SketchFighter 4000 game (in the best of circumstances) but it would give the prototyper both the speed of initial design that paper provides, and the ability to quickly iterate and animate on the computer. With a few fancy filters, one might even be able to start formalizing the digitized paper prototype by replacing the hand-drawn geometric shapes with real polygons.
Back in the 80s, Dan Bricklin developed "Dan Bricklin's Demo Program" for prototyping text-based applications. Though I've never seen it run, I understand from people that used it that the application developed a cult following among early PC application developers. This scanned paper prototypes application might just fill the same need for the web generation.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 27, 2008)
I love TED talks. If TED wanted to package them up and sell them as a premium cable channel, I would gladly pay for it (and watch more television as a result). One of the best talks I've seen there in recent time is Ben Zander's, "Classical music with shining eyes." Zander, for those that don't know is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and a part-time motivational speaker. In this 20 minute presentation, he mainly talks about the power of classical music; however, at some point around the 15 minute mark (don't skip ahead, it is worth it, especially if you like Chopin), he begins talking leadership in a very frank and novel way.
I am not one for "leadership kumbayas—" frankly I find most of that stuff to be a crutch that people use ploddingly and to their organization's great detriment. But to see Zander talk about his key realization as a conductor, to experience him in full story-telling glory, is an experience that stands far above any MBA course I've ever been in. Go invest the 20 minutes!
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 27, 2008)
Bill Gates is retiring today. Love him or hate him, everyone agrees that he's had an incredible impact on the technology industry by commoditizing the Intel architecture and driving terrific economies of scale over two decades of the PC's growth. Even those of us on the Mac get to benefit from his plan of putting a computer on every desk.
What is most amazing to me about Gates's career though is how he managed to stay at the helm of Microsoft as it grew from small languages/consulting shop to the world's biggest and most successful software company— all the while remaining very close to the nuts of bolts of the core products. Lots of people tell great stories about his intimate knowledge of all of his company's projects; my favorite tale though is the one Joel Spolsky recently wrote for Inc. Gates's zeroing in on the details of the date functions seems so at odds with almost every senior executive I run into at HP these days. If I had to guess, I say that most of these "implementation details" here are often stuck somewhere between a program manager and an offshore software team and certainly not anywhere near the top of the company.
Bye bye Bill— I'm not quite sure what's going to happen to Microsoft without you (though I'd bet on bad)— but you've had quite a ride!
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 1 week ago (June 25, 2008)
GigaOm had a good review of HP's recent entry into the mini laptop category created by the Eee PC, the HP 2133. I was most intrigued by the premise of the post which was that this new category of laptop should be more than just a shrinky-dink version of a regular laptop, and instead be geared towards "cloud computer" activities.
Since I recently got one of these computers to use as a travel PC (to show I can fly the appropriate flag when in customer territory), my interest in this line of thinking was particularly piqued. Here are my thoughts on this notion of the 2133 as a cloud computer:
From a hardware perspective, the HP 2133 miniNote is a wonderful machine, especially given its low price point. It's built like a tank and feels like it could take much more of a beating than my relatively sturdy Macbook Air. Of the 3 HP laptops I've had since having joined the company, it is by far the most "designed" one, and despite whatever anyone says about the Via C7-M chip being JV, it is plenty fast. The screen is really teeny, but it is bright enough and sharp enough. And it's got plenty of ports.
But then there is software. The machine I got runs Windows XP which is snappy enough and stable enough to do real work. However it suffers from two major flaws: 1. it takes too long to boot, sleep, and resume, which in 2008 is sort of like a car without ABS, and 2. it provides zero support for bumping the type size up on applications and the OS at a global level.
Given the tiny screen, this last concern is what may kill the 2133 for you. Even if you have relatively fresh eyes, some of the more text rich applications are almost completely unusable over more than 10-15 minutes at a time (at least without enduring a headache). Outlook 2007 for instance, is just too small to read comfortably. The machine ships with an HP utility that lets you bump up some of the font sizes; however, in my experience it seems to affect only window titles and random dialogs. Maybe the Linux version is better, though I doubt it.
However this is one place where being a "cloud computer" really does help. Because all of the best web apps tend to respect font resizing in the browser correctly, and because Firefox 3 seems to remember when you change the default size the next time you visit the site, Gmail, Google Reader, and an handful of other Web 2.0 apps are really able look great on the machine's diminutive screen— quite usable in fact when paired with the machine's awesome keyboard. It was surprising to see web apps beating the native client— at least until you stop to think that the machine is running an 8 year old OS!
I don't know that I'm quite ready to give up the Air for the 2133, but I could definitely see using it for a subset of limited "cloud like" tasks.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 2 weeks ago (June 22, 2008)
Just finished reading Charles Stross's latest novel, Glasshouse (incidentally the first fictional work I've actually finished on my Kindle), which is a pretty entertaining sc-ifi novel. As usual with Stross, it is full of great science that makes you wonder what life will be like in a universe where we can back ourselves up, travel faster than light, and change physical bodies at will.
My favorite thing about this book though was the way in which the author throws in all of this running commentary about what life was like in the late 20th century (the glasshouse is a prison set in our time period), and specifically this particular bit on why the 21st century marked the beginning of a dark age before the "acceleration:"
"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For erasons of commercial advantage some of the largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quanitites of useful materials in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.
This bit ought to be music to any of the digital pack rats that read this blog. A while ago I thought I had this problem licked— I'd periodically burn gigabytes of files to CD, then DVD, and finally the cloud (through services like Amazon's S3). Recently though I was looking for an 8 year-old tarball of some source code from a previous life (Memora) and spent 2 days searching only to find that it was useless because of how utterly impossible it would be to re-create the build environment.
As we throw away old technologies— be they build environments, old OSes, or even web services that have lost their way (I've been thinking a lot about this as it pertains to Flickr given the recent exodus), we might stop to think just what it would take for the kind of virtualization that would save us from Stross's dark ages.
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 3 weeks ago (June 16, 2008)
Nick Carr has a thought-provoking piece in the latest issue of the Atlantic which argues that how we read and consume content online is changing the way that we think. The staccato nature of reading online, scanning text and skipping from link to link, Carr argues, causes us to turn away from "deep reading" to a fast food equivalent— a grazing of content— that ultimately threatens our ability to think deeply on any particular matter. As he writes at the end of the piece:
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
I worry less about the threat that all types of long form reading going away— it is far too seductive a means of escape for enough people not to stick around for a while— than I do about implication that we are jamming this new diet of content grazing in all facets of our lives. As content and communications blur together and our computers and devices encroach upon the previously empty white spaces of our daily routines, we may indeed be giving up a really valuable asset: the ability to think intensely and without distraction about particular issues which may not be what we are getting paid to think about.
Judging from the comments the piece has elicited, I imagine that quite a few people are beginning to feel this way, at least when it comes to our changing content consumption habits. I'm not ready to declare it a net-net bad thing, but it is worth remaining aware of the trend so that our ability to think doesn't suffer from a boiling frog dynamic (turn the temperature up slowly and the frog doesn't realize it is cooking alive).
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 3 weeks ago (June 14, 2008)
Three lessons, from simplest to deepest:
1. That "live blogging" stuff requires the right template, and the blog format just wasn't right. Talking to folks that followed the live updates, it turns out that it's kind of annoying to see 140 character "title posts" which are paginated 5 at a time. Oh yeah, and Twitter still sucks; due the fact that their API was overwhelmed and I was using it to post there after posting to my blog, I got some really bad duplication problems.
2. Apple is finally getting the whole cloud thing, and more specifically, there are at least some folks there that have gotten the AJAX religion. I remember 3 companies ago being there to pitch one of their experience folks on a web-based music server, the summer before the iPod, and way before the current crop of really capable Javascript/DHTML engines. This designer, let's call him John, told us that apps in the browser were a passing fad, and an ugly one at that. And in a way, in 2001 they were, but these days Apple is dead serious about it (so much so that they are willing to spend cycles pushing their Javascript engine to the front of the pack). There were plenty of sessions related to web apps for Safari for deployment on both the Mac and the iPhone and little of that typical second class citizen feeling that Apple is known for (Java/Cocoa bridge anyone?)
3. That Apple couldn't achieve escape velocity and get out from under the carrier-runs-the-world model that mobile computing is subject to in the US sucks— it sucks really bad. While people may be excited about the new $199 price tag, there are going to be so many old problems in going back to that model. The awesome iTunes activation model for the phone? Gone. The way you could just gift iPhones to spread the cult of Apple? Not without stealing the recipient's identity. The impunity with which you could trash your iPhone knowing that for $250 Apple would give you a new one? No mas. And perhaps most importantly, the critical missing functionality like IM or unfettered access to the 3G network? Not likely, not as long as they might potentially undermine some Guantanamoesque carrier business model.
This last one is the big take-away for me; in short it means that we're going back to a world where we rent our mobile computing experience and hope that our feudal overlords (the carriers) dole out the features at a decent enough rate.
As I was flying back, it occurred to me that two groups of folks who I've enjoyed lampooning over the last few months, the iPhone jailbreakers and the Android people, may actually be really important as we move towards evolving the mobile experience in spite of carrier interests. So please please please go hug one of these lovable rebels who live by their own rules ;)
Posted by Antonio
2 months, 4 weeks ago (June 8, 2008)
I am going out to California tomorrow and if all goes well, I'll be dropping by the keynote at WWDC to see what goodies Apple has in store for us. Last time I went to one of these, one of the most fun parts of the experience was trying to get the word out to friends and family back home in real time— the rabid Apple fans— about what was being announced by Steve on stage. I quickly discovered that Wi-Fi is totally useless at these events (because everyone else is trying to do the same thing), and that the only truly reliable messaging layer was SMS which really meant that all I could do in terms of group broadcast was Twitter. However during Macworld back in January Twitter dropped 50-70% of my updates and duplicated a bunch of the ones that made it through, no doubt because everyone else sitting in Moscone was in the process of trying to do the same.
I am quickly discovering that Twitter just doesn't cut it, not only because of its scaling problems (especially around events like these), but because I've got a lot of people in my life that have no interest in joining Twitter, and even when they do, find it difficult to stay engaged. These folks do come to read this blog though, so tomorrow's experiment is going to be to use the Onda as a sort of Twitter stream.
To do this, I wired in a web service called Textmarks into this blog. Essentially Textmarks provides a neat gateway between SMS and http where you can send a text with a keyword that can fetch the contents of a URL for automated replies. My current plan is to text short messages that will then become blog post titles with no bodies. This should create a Twitter-like experience for anyone using an RSS reader, and for those that don't, a simple refresh of the main page of the blog ought to provide a running stream.
I thought about having each of the SMSes update just one blog entry to minimize the noise on my RSS feed, but it occurred to me that this would break the way that RSS is supposed to flow content around the network. Also, asking people to subscribe to an RSS feed tied to one blog post seems a little goofy.
Instead where I decided to get was in adding an email-to-post mechanism where I can send an email with a photo and some text to a particular Gmail account that then generates a blog entry with the picture parked at Amazon's S3 (I could have used Flickr but wanted to play around with S3). Most mainstream blogging platforms have email-to-blog so there is nothing really novel in this (we had a little-publicized feature at Tabblo that did something similar that I loved, however it didn't survive the move into HP's datacenter); what really struck me about the exercise though was how relatively simple it is to wire together all of these pieces. In a couple of hours it was easy to speak IMAP to Gmail to get my photo and text out, use S3's relatively straight-forward HTTP interface to deposit the image, get a fast and (hopefully) reliable Textmarks SMS-to-web bridge and composite the whole thing as an entry into my blog for general consumption. For distribution, RSS does the rest. As a nice bonus, I've also used the Twitter API to put pointers to the stuff that will go up here into my Twitter account, though in a non-blocking way as the service will most likely suffer another outage tomorrow.
In this great new world of the web, these experiments are relatively cheap. Most will fall way short of being useful, but I suspect that it is only by messing around with all of these pieces in a loosely coupled way that we'll bump into something really interesting.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 30, 2008)
Just came back from D6, the conference that Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, and the rest of the Dow Jones staff put on for the tech elite. While not as awesome as past Ds have been, D6 was still head and shoulders above almost anything else on the conference circuit. Though it was weird how both Apple and Google were noticeably absent from the official program (though most speakers brought both companies up several times), and the Yahoo-Microsoft thing got far too much airtime, there were some real standout speakers— chief among them Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of Dow Jones who all but endorsed Obama and condemned the Alaskan elk within 5 minutes, and Melinda Gates, who was the perfect model of what large-scale modern philanthropy should be.
For me the best part about D is never rubbing shoulders with the titans of industry (I never know what to say), but the thought-provoking interview style sessions that Walt and Kara are able to bring to the stage. This year's thought-provoking highlight was Jeff Bezos talking about the Kindle, especially in contrast to all of the other media execs.
The Kindle, Bezos told the crowd, was built around the notion that long-form reading is actually incredibly valuable and therefore something that we need to shepherd into the digital age. He was very clear on this fact: books provide a different kind of intellectual engagement that all of these quick-hit blog posts/emails/tweets/etc., and as such we need to make sure that they find their footing and are able to flourish in the era of ubiquitous networks, many screens, and constant interruptions. He said that he thought it might take a decade to perfect, and that it was a big bet— but that Amazon was ready to sign up for it.
Contrast this position to Barry Diller, Howard Stringer, and the countless other media tycoons who spent their time on stage talking about how they were going to continue to slice and dice their content to fit smaller and smaller chunks of it on more devices and more networks. The term "webisode" (which I hate) came up several times as some sort of a bastardization of a television episode that is meant for consumption on a YouTube like experience.
This inexorable drive to cut content down to fill every last chunk of white space in the day is something that I am not sure is entirely a good thing. Witness the conference itself: I was as guilty as about 90% of the crowd in filling up the less engaging bits of sessions with iPhone browsing and emailing. In short we seem to be willing to lose our ability to focus, trading it against the adrenaline-induced high of constant content consumption. In this light, Bezos's fight on behalf of long-form content seems like one worth taking on.
In an ironic twist, part of the schwag given to use by the sponsors and partners of D included a fast-paced and funny novel called Hooked by Matt Richtel, which I happened to read on the way home. It is centered in the tech industry and Silicon Valley, and well worth the read. Without giving too much away, I will mention that the central twist is rooted in this very debate about attention, focus, and the crack that is constant content consumption.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 27, 2008)
It's easy to hate wireless carriers but in the world of Internet-connected smart devices, their investment in ubiquitous data networks is enviable, despite whatever the tree-hugging wifi-for-everyone folks might want to believe. Because— as is always the case in the consumer space— it comes back to user experience.
I wanted the wifi devices to win but mostly because I can't stand the notion of physical objects that we buy coming with a subscription. However, the Amazon Kindle (about which I will have loads more to say over the coming months) shows device manufacturers a potential path forward: lock down the user's ability to abuse the network and absorb the wholesale price the carrier must be charging in the price of the device. The Kindle benefits from an annuity business model of its own (as a user you have to keep buying books for it to remain useful) so Amazon is well positioned to take the risk of eating the subscription cost up front, but we are beginning to see other examples where device makers are willing to bundle the cost of the data subscription up front.
Take my favorite recent example as evidence that even a low bandwidth ubiquitous cell connection really makes all the difference. When the Chumby came out, I jumped at the chance to get one, mostly because it seemed like such a cool idea (open source hardware that was "Internet native" through its Wi-Fi radio). However, despite the promise of a blank screen that could be programmed with as many channels of content as I could imagine, there were product limitations that quickly reduced Wallace (you get to name your Chumby) to a screen about the local weather forecast sitting right above my bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, every couple of weeks, Wallace had a bad habit of falling off of the wireless network, partly because of the product's betaness (recent firmware upgrades have made this a little better), but indubitably also because my wireless network is just not that reliable.* And every time it did, I'd look up to see the weather only to be slapped by the Chumby equivalent of the BSOD, a message telling me that it had lost Internet connectivity.
When this happens to a laptop, it is a problem that gets fast attention due to the fact that there are often a bunch of other activities taking place that require a working Internet connection. Single purpose appliances don't have this luxury though— they need to just work and when they don't, they are no longer appliances but IT hassles.
Enter the Brookstone Weather Wizard, made by a local company called Ambient Devices which has become an expert in low bandwidth Internet-connected devices. It is uglier, less capable, and much less cool than the Chumby, but at half the price, it does a brilliant job of serving its single function well. And best of all, it comes out of the box "networked" (the only change I had to make was to tell it that I was not in Providence but in Cambridge). In fact as a user, I don't even have to care how it gets its data which makes it such an easy replacement for all of the meteorological gizmos that came before it.
Interestingly enough, Ambient used to sell their devices along with a subscription, a model which ensured that an Ambient Orb that had been given to me at a conference became instantly dispensable the moment I wanted to display data I had to pay a recurring fee for.
If I was looking into getting into the MVNO business (the companies who buy wireless network access at wholesale to brand it for specific audiences, a la the now defunct Amp'd), I'd look into setting one up that could take some of this subscription risk out of the equation for manufacturers of devices by selling a embeddable radio with a given level of bandwidth for lifetime connectivity at one fixed fee. The economics of an MVNO might make this impossible, so perhaps it would have to be one of the core wireless providers that takes this approach. But as the mainstream consumer moves towards the higher speed 2.5G/3G wireless networks with their mobile phones, there might be an opportunity to flat price all of the old GPRS capacity that is being freed up. And for most appliances, this might be plenty of bandwidth.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 25, 2008)
Almost nine years ago to the day, Po Bronson wrote a New York Times Magazine cover piece on the "Insta-Company," about a bunch on young entrepreneurs hell bent on changing the world by... taking lots of venture capital and building a site for reviewing products— in 12 weeks no less! I had a bad feeling as I read the piece that the beginning of the end was near for the wave of innovation that the early commercialization of the web had spurred (in hindsight, it is interesting to see that there was still another year left to "party like it was 1999").
I had that same feeling today upon reading the blubbery cover piece/blog post/diary entry in today's Sunday magazine, "Exposed," about Emily Gould's sad confrontation with the realities of over-sharing, voyeurism, and brushes with infamy. Frankly, the only way I managed to make it to the end of the article was in a vain attempt to quell my incredulity at the fact that someone thought this navel gazer's drama was worthy of a Times Magazine cover (spoiler: redemption never comes).
Personal publishing and social media are really amazing enabling movements to put in the hands of everyone. There is great promise. But as early adopters, I think we are reaching the apex of this particular pendulum swing. For the last little while I've been mulling over the significance of trying to do something useful/good/meaningful with all that we've learned about social software over the last decade. In fact, just this week, I was delighted by Sarah Perez's well-composed ReadWrite piece, "How to Use Social Media for Social Change," which— while pointing to sort of obvious stuff— still reminds us that there is a reason to be passionate about all of this stuff that goes beyond navel gazing and high school drama.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 1 week ago (May 25, 2008)
A semi-local yokel, Jonathan Zittrain (from Harvard's own Berkman center) made headlines a couple of weeks ago with the claim that all of the devices which we are most excited about (Blackberries, Xboxes, and even iPhones) are actually wrecking the fabric of what has made the Internet such a fantastic substrate for innovation: its openness. Making a distinction between what he calls "generative" platforms, where users can improve the basic function of the platform through open extension points like the Win32 API, and non-generative ones that are built on the back of closed service/appliance loops that only the vendor in charge can control, he argues that we consumers need to be careful of becoming too star-struck by our smart devices.
I prefer to think that these semi-closed architectures actually exist for a good reason (beyond vendor lock-in of course): to allow for the creation of user experiences which delighted instead of frustrate (think of the iPhone versus just about any smartphone built of the "generative" Windows Mobile platform). More importantly, even the most closed of vendors understand that it is imperative to build in check valves for openness into the appliances they make: this is why the iPod can be side-loaded with ripped MP3s and the iPhone can be extended with Safari-powered webapps. Imagine either device losing that capability. Even Amazon's much more closed Kindle platform (more below) accepts arbitrary content through an email endpoint, albeit one that exacts a $0.10 toll per article thanks to the need for Sprint to get paid.
And speaking of those pesky operators, this morning I read a piece by Joi Ito arguing that the mobile Internet may not be such a great place for innovation, mostly because it is controlled by a few carriers which flow profits into a small ecosystem of vendors, whereas on the open Internet, anyone can play. I agree that where network-related profits are concerned, this is the case; witness the rise of all of those 1990s style telecom equipment providers to see how tightly this particular profit pool can be controlled. But this control doesn't mean that network operators can avoid the open check valve existing in their offering as well— in fact, by the very nature of the service they provide, it is baked in. So long as we users can treat them like "power, ping, and pipe" providers (something which has only recently emerged in the US with number portability and unlimited data plans), I'd bet that they will soon find themselves in the unenviable position of the Comcasts and Verizons of fixed line broadband, competing mostly on speeds and feeds.
Call me an optimist, but I have a hard time seeing how in the era of Makers and blogs/wikis/online communities, any of these emerging Internet platforms and data services are likely to lead us to a point where suddenly discover ourselves trapped, incapable of finding the right extension points for what we might want our devices to do. And not only because of the current zeitgeist (we are now the Tivo generation for everything!)— rather, the main reason why I don't worry is because fundamentally the business models used by these platforms are aligned with what we users want: if Apple tries to screw us too badly with a closed iPhone ecosystem, we simply won't buy their devices (incidentally, this is the #1 reason people give me as to why they are not buying Kindles, because Amazon is exerting too much control). The unit of value is the device or service and as users we have to continue to open our wallets for them to continue to succeed. And fortunately for us, in most of cases today, unlike the 90s Microsoft monopoly, we've got credible choice.
If people want to be paranoid of vendors, I'd be more likely to point to places where the user and the business model get cross to each other, as in the case of the user need for data portability and the business of advertising in the recent case of Facebook screwing Google and its FriendConnect. Because they are fundamentally selling targeted advertising, Facebook is likely to do whatever it takes to keep their users' data siloed, and in the process it is the end user who loses. Today this is too abstract for most regular folks to really grasp (though Scott Karp's piece does an excellent job of laying out the key issues), but it is worth keeping a much closer eye on that the emerging connected device platforms.
In the meanwhile, just keep a close eye on those openness check valves.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 2 weeks ago (May 19, 2008)
An observant friend recently heard me on a tear about the surge in historical fiction and commented that my one of my favorite genres, science fiction, was nothing more than forward-looking historical fiction. While this did not cause me to run out to read The Other Boleyn Girl, it did make me wonder why I like scifi so much while having so little patience for the Victorian era. The answer I believe, comes down to the fact that science fiction paints a world that might be rather than one that was, giving us a glimpse into what is around the next corner.
But if this is the metric for success, the science fiction that is closer— often not even called science fiction but other goofy names like "the techno thriller genre"— should appeal more to me. And indeed it often does so long as it doesn't suffer from the fact that it can get really tedious and boring. I remember first discovering the novels of Tom Clancy (which noone in their right mind would consider SF until you get into the military tech stuff he covers), only to be bored to tears by the fifth description of the classified radar system and the nth military acronym (Clancy should have worked at HP where the alphabet soup rages on).
I've just finished a book though which gets right to the core of what makes near term science fiction work really well; it is called Daemon and is written by Leinad Zeraus (more on that weird name later). I don't want to ruin the plot by writing about it here; suffice it to say that this is the best scifi/technothriller/whatever that I have read in a long time. The plot is spectacular, the characters are believable as hell, and best of all, the author starts from a landscape which is very much rooted in today's world and slowly brings in bits of the future in a way that is both believable and staves off the eventual Clancy-esque or Crichton-esque narration that ends up sounding like a parts list for what's hot in Popular Science this month.
During the first dot com boom, I ran into several folks who would brandish dog-eared copies of Snowcrash and talk about how the net was going to bring this world into being "very soon now." A decade later the world that Daemon paints to is much closer at hand. For instance (and this is the one plot spoiler): massively multiplayer online environments, GPS-based overlays into the physical world, hijacked servers, and private equity run amok all figure prominently in the plot— and the way in which they each do is imminently believable.
A word on the strangely named Leinad Zeraus. It turns out that this is the pseudonym of Daniel Suarez, a DB consultant in the Valley who self-published the book through Amazon's Lightning Source partnership. Of course you can't tell any of this from the end-to-end experience: the book can be seen on Amazon and comes via Prime looking like a standard paperback, but according to a recent piece I read in Wired, Suarez and his wife published it and used all sorts of good Web 2.0 tactics to get the word out (getting a pseudonym with good Google juice, reaching out to A-list bloggers) after being turned down by a bunch of folks in the "conventional" channel.
William Gibson is right after all: the future is here; it's just not widely distributed.
Posted by Antonio
3 months, 3 weeks ago (May 12, 2008)
For me, the power of YouTube has always been about one thing: being able to bookmark pieces of interesting mainstream content that could then be forwarded around in email. For every genius amateur video I've been sent, I've had 5 young Asian guitar virtuosos and 100 SNL skits, Simpsons scenes, or Daily Show interviews. Giving chunks for television permalinks seemed novel enough— the next step in the evolution of Tivo even— even if it wasn't the best thing since the web itself.
In fact I've always been rather sanguine on the prospects of embedded video on web pages (mostly because of the linear consumption challenges that come with any form of rich media). Recently though, I've seen two great uses for embedded video that have brought me back to the conclusion I came to after seeing the New York Times's annotated Obama speech: that video online is more about interface and context than it has ever been on any other screen.
The first, TimeTube, is a brilliant reworking of the standard online interface for consuming video that YouTube pioneered and everyone else copied. Recently I heard an entrepreneur defending all of the cloners of this interface because of the fact that "people are used to it now and find it familiar." However, it only takes 5 minutes of playing around with TimeTube to realize what bad interface designers the YouTube guys were, and how much more is possible when mixing links and videos.
I ran into the second example while performing surgery on my Macbook this weekend. It has now become a yearly event for me to switch out my laptop's hard drive (usually triggered by yet another amazing doubling in HD capacity at a given pricepoint), though I usually loathe the experience of coming to the end of a two hour wrestle with 5 extra screws and no idea of where I should have put them (I've done this now across 3 different laptop models with +/- 3 screws no matter how hard I try).
This year I decided to follow one of the videos that the nice folks from OWC put up for changing various Mac parts and the result was a neat case of the linearity of consumption of video actually helping by guiding me in realtime as I dissected and then reassembled the MacBook. I had to pause and rewind a little in a couple of places, but the overall process was much smoother than its ever been before, thanks to the power of being able to do it alongside my virtual repairman (in fact at one point he got a little stuck, I got a little ahead and somehow managed to miss disconnecting some important cable leading to the laptop's flux capacitor).
I used to think that the bright future of all online video would come when computers could extract meaning from video files and present us with indexes that let us randomly seek to the relevant points, but this week I was again struck by how much usefulness we can still get out of proper contextualization and solid interface design. Go look at TimeTube and think about how this kind of an interface for video navigation could be used to teach more important things than hard drive replacement if you have any doubts.
My old office was above a gas station, in a repurposed low income building where some zoning genius realized that living right above gas tanks was not a life-prolonguing move. There were free roaming mice and occasionally there were water issues. But we had distinct working spaces, large common areas, and the definite feel that it was uniquely ours.
I now work in HP's Marlboro facility, specifically a cube inside the great human veal farm that is at section 18.4 of MRO1, floor 2. Outside of some tweaks that the local real estate crew made on our behalf last year, it's cubesville as far as the eye can see. And from what I've been able to gather from other folks at other big cos, it is pretty much standard for the whole tech industry. This real estate philosophy has accelerated the shift to "remote working" that most of the half million or so workers at HP, IBM, Intel, etc. are taking on to avoid shrinking veal pens (some other genius recently decided that 8x8 feet is spacious and that 6x6 is just fine and that much more affordable).
I paint this bleak picture not to complain, but as a introduction to a great short interview with Brad Bird of Pixar which I came across on GigaOm this weekend. In enumerating the "lessons for fostering innovation," number 6 stuck with me:
Brad Bird: If you walk around downstairs in the animation area, you’ll see that it is unhinged. People are allowed to create whatever front to their office they want. One guy might build a front that’s like a Western town. Someone else might do something that looks like Hawaii…John [Lasseter] believes that if you have a loose, free kind of atmosphere, it helps creativity.
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.
It strikes me that he is spot on, and that for any creative endeavor the constant physical contact is paramount. However, from what I've learned over this last year, the veal farm model of big companies hurts in two distinct ways: first, the packing of people into tight spaces usually extends into miserable common spaces or "efficient" decisions made around bathroom/kitchen locations that are just not conducive to the right type of bumping into each other. More importantly though, making real estate a cost-center to be managed as non-value add creates such a miserable environment that "working from home" becomes a very attractive alternative. And no matter what telecommuting technologies you favor, like porn, the 2d version is never as good as the real thing.
Pour in a little "offshore fever" and its hard to see how you get back to innovation fueled by creativity in these environs.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (April 27, 2008)
I love the premise of Clay Shirky's Web 2.0 talk this year, "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus." Just as gin helped the Victorians deal with the wrenching changes of the industrial revolution, according to Shirky, the modern-day sitcom has helped us deal with the "cognitive surplus" created by rise in free time that 1st worlders benefited from during the second half of the 20th century. It's a great polemic which argues that the participatory nature of the Internet enables us to come out of the content-consumption binge of 20th century television because even if we're blogging about our cats and navels, creating content is inherently more valuable than simply consuming it.
Obviously the idea that any type of content creation is better than simple consumption is a normative judgement. It is one though that lay beneath the foundation of what Tabblo was meant to be from the start, so it is near and dear to my heart. To this day, at the office we argue the merits of Clay's argument on a fairly regular basis, with me most frequently on the side of cat blogs over Desperate Housewives.
That said, I think his attack on "consumption-only" media as just giant suckers of the cognitive surplus is a little harsh. For instance, I'm surprised that Shirky doesn't mention Steven Johnson's wonderful book "Everything Bad Is Good for You" and its analysis of how the best television shows are actually helping to train a whole generation of minds in new ways of coping with ever-increasing complexity of the world.
Similarly, the story of the four year old at the end of the talk who walks around to the back of the screen to "find the mouse" because she expects all media to be interactive struck me as too contrived. As the father of two young boys that straddle the age of his subject (6 and 3), and who are currently obsessed with everything Star Wars, I have a different perspective. Both boys consume Star Wars in at least five different media formats: the original movies, the Lego Star Wars Nintendo DS saga, the Star Wars Guide to Galaxy popup books, actual Star Wars Legos to build and play act, and the games we make up to pass the time in the car. And even at such young ages they have a very nuanced view of when they are supposed to interact and to what degree— but most importantly, they also know when to sit back and just drink in the world that George Lucas has created for them.
Finally, the Star Wars example is also one that spans beyond small children for the following reason: I would be willing to bet that if you took the total amount of "user generated content" that is about, based on, a parody of, etc. the Star Wars Universe and divided it by the total amount of user generated content, you would end up with a meaningful fraction. Which is exactly why we'll always need great story tellers and the mediums which let them shine if we are to take advantage of this supposed cognitive surplus as creators and sharers.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (April 26, 2008)
Could be because I haven't seen a cloud in the sky all week, and it could be because Google was totally inaccessible all morning (at least from Jamaica), but I've got this cloud computing thing on the brain these days. If you really believe that it is a tectonic shift, and that no company will be able to ignore it, read on for my take on the 3 types of cloud efforts, and a couple of associated opportunties:
Core-to-DNA: This is where Amazon and Google fall today. Building out scalable, flexible infrastructure that is up 99.x% of the time is so core to what they do that they just won't be able not to take advantage of the shift in computing. Whether Amazon's more flexible or Google's more prescriptive approach wins the majority of the mindshare is less interesting than the fact that you will always be able to count on these guys' delivering solid solutions. The business opportunity here will be in providing a layer of portability across them so that no one gets vendor lock-in syndrome.
Must-have-for-strategy: Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo are good examples of this one. Each has a pole position in some previously dominant platform, each knows they have to move in this direction, but because it is not core to who they are, they're not likely to execute well, at first anyway. No matter though, because the folks with deep pockets (Microsoft, IBM) will spend whatever it takes to bring the B/B+ offerings to market. They may not scale as efficiently, and they may not be as reliable, but these guys will find some market-power way of gaining meaningful traction.
Wannabes: EMC, HP, big banks, and other utilities fall in this last bucket. These are the companies that know that this cloud shift is a big deal, have some sort of vested interest in being able to play in this domain, perhaps even have a starting move, but are quite simply finding that "clouds is hard!" As a result some will stay (if it is critical to their survival), some will outsource, and some will fall out clouds (if they can afford to ignore it). For the time being however, they will all continue to half-execute, confusing endusers and keeping developers on their toes. Naturally, the near term business opportunity here is the best, as all of these guys will need software to try to keep their clouds running (GigaOm has a nice post of what some of this software might want to target as initial opportunities).
I have no doubt that there will be plenty of movement from tier 3 to tier 2 and back— what I am less clear about is who, if anyone, will be able to move to tier 1 and join Google and Amazon in what will be a very lucrative market opportunity.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 24, 2008)
As much as I've come to believe that Paul Graham has now sucked in too much of his own exhaust to write with as much insight as he used to, his latest essay on "being good" as a directing principle for startups has stuck with me like a sharp chicken bone at a barbecue. At first I wanted to dismiss it, thinking of cases like the OLPC debacle, where people's politics and grand visions for making the world a better place get the best of them. But as I let the essay fester, it began to dawn on me that Paul's "doing good" is just another way of saying that you need to have a bigger mission than just flipping to Google, or even just making yet another photo book configurator.
At Tabblo we had this: as Eric (our customer guy) reminded me recently, if you look through our wiki (now buried behind layers of HP VPN goodness), you'll see a number of pages that talk about making people more creative in their self-expression, making them better story-tellers despite the normalcy of their everyday lives. Helping the unwitting blogger, empowering the casual publisher, and all of that other jazz we'd talk about at lunch, late at night, and during those moments when we'd feel like big bad world was crushing us.
But lately I've also been thinking about the fact that all of Web 2.0 has been geared towards enhancing self-expression: from Flickr to Facebook and Blogger to Twitter, the whole ride has been about letting people create content that they can (in the best of cases) use as a vector for connecting to other people doing exactly the same thing. In its best days Tabblo did this well because, after all, part of making people feel like creative story-tellers was finding them an audience who was willing to listen and to engage.
As Adam Green has recently pointed out however, greasing the skids of self-expression is just one of the many ways in which the Internet and what we build with/for it can help people. While it is a very good thing that we've all gorged on this particular goal over the last 5 years, the time may be upon us to start thinking about the stuff that is useful and that can actually make a positive impact in the way that everyday lives are being led throughout the world. After all, lord knows we've got enough crises to which we can apply our entrepreneurial energies.
For my part, I've spent quite a bit of time as of late thinking about online group formation and why it is that even on the most "modern" of sites, it still feels so incredibly encumbered, especially when you compare it to the way groups form in the real world. I'm tired of "friending" people, I don't want to "follow" them, and I really could care less about signing up for another "Evite-killer." But I do know that the seeming ease with we can coalesce around a particular task for fun, profit, or just to do good at school, at work, or within our communities is something that still needs a lot of work in the virtual.
This group-forming detour aside, the guys mentioned above may be right— it's time to do something useful, something good and to leave the self-expression behind for a little while.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 23, 2008)
Not much stuck with me from my days at business school, but one of the few things that did was from this wacky book called "The Goal" about manufacturing optimization. In it, the author uses a boy scout troop, and more specifically a fat kid named Herbie, to make the point that in most cases a system is only as efficient as its least efficient component, and that as such, finding this constraint and being obsessive about how to loosen it tends to yield the best results. Pretty obvious I realize, but over the years I've found that it is a great way to think about emerging technologies and new opportunities.
Today Microsoft is taking the wraps off of Live Mesh, a combination platform/service to sync files and application across all manner of devices. It looks like an interesting project, especially because it seems to leverage some form of feed syndication for its transport layer. But apparently it's more than just a project: it is the grand vision of Ray Ozzie and has sucked up about 2 years and 100 people to get to release (which reminds me of Ozzie's previous Project Groove a.k.a Lotus Notes 2.0 which took serious resources to get to sync files between PCs). Despite it being tiny by Microsoft standards, feeding all of those people for all of that time to get file and application preference sync seems a bit excessive to me.
More importantly, are we really at the point where the world now needs Lotus Notes 3.0? Let's see: 1. devices are proliferating, with smartphones leading the pack... check. 2. More and more personal computing is taking place in "the cloud" on websites like Facebook and Gmail... check. 3. There is still a lot of data being locked into the local hard drives of millions of PC users... check. 4. What we are all dying for is a way to sync all of this stuff so that we can stop thinking about desktop or cloud and seamlessly carry on our personal computing tasks from any device anywhere...really?
Back to Herbie the fat kid and the theory of constraints. Where is it that we are really suffering today? Is it in new protocols to sync data across devices? It seems to me that everyone and their mother is capable of designing sync protocols, and that more importantly, Internet pioneers solved this one even before the days of Lotus 1.0. Instead, there seem to be three clear places where we are currently suffering from constraints that might make for "big play" business opportunities: 1. we never have enough bandwidth in enough places (whether it is cable, DSL, cellular, etc.), 2. we don't yet seem to know how to economically store enough stuff in the cloud, and 3. in the case of portable devices, we never have enough power efficiency.
But more sync protocols? Hybrid platform/services that require buying into one vendor's silo? At best, these things seem to me to be band-aids that are trying to get us around some of these constraints instead of through them.
Interestingly enough, normally M&A-allergic Apple today announced the acquisition of PA Semi, a chip company that focuses exclusively on power management in CPUs, seemingly to address constraint #3 in their iPhone platform.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 22, 2008)
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is the media's favorite love/hate boy, vacillating between genius to dolt as his stock price see-saws with the collective effervescence of the Internet's potential. However, it can not be denied that for the last 10 years he's charted a really exciting course in the development of three major platforms: the web as storefront (Amazon.com), the web as underlying fabric for computing (EC2/S3, etc.), and the web/device ecosystem for consuming content (Kindle). This month he seems to be on top again, with great articles in Businessweek and Wired describing both the company's ability to innovate and its cloud computing initiative.
For those of us now familiar with the way big tech companies think, the best quote is one he gives Businessweek on how to drive innovation:
Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off? A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. When [companies] think about extending their business into some new area, the first question is "why should we do that—we don't have any skills in that area." That approach puts a finite lifetime on a company, because the world changes, and what used to be cutting-edge skills have turned into something your customers may not need anymore.
If the last year of HP life has taught me anything on this score, it is that this skills-vs-customer-needs issue is the club that anyone who interested in protecting fiefdoms will use to kill innovative but risky ideas. It has many guises, from "we don't know anything about X," to "how could we possibly get X to Y scale," but at the end of the day it ends up feeling like the same thing: "we're already good at X so why don't we do X+incremental instead of something totally new!" Fortunately, there are ways of mitigating this: buy new skills, bring in outsiders, empower the mavericks, realize that X is going away and freak out— but all of these take time and don't come without pain.
That said, all of this customer-focus goodness also strikes me as a bit glib and this week's Amazon media coverage of the cloud computing initiatives points to why: when Amazon started S3/EC2, there was no way that there were customers clamoring for what they've built. No one came to the front door saying "wow, you guys are at 10% utilization, wouldn't it be cool if you could rent me some virtual servers?" and yet, much in the same way Apple has done time and time again, Bezos & crew were able to see evolving trends coalescing into a solution they thought customers would want.
I'm all for listening to the customer, and I'm certainly all for thinking like the customer, but it's important to realize that— at least in technology— there is something at the moment of initial creation that requires creative insight in a way that listening to what your customers want just doesn't allow. Something about skating to where the puck is going to be comes to mind...
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 21, 2008)
While the embedded video clip has become as common as the animated GIF, littering webpages with colorful bits of video that help to make a point or add color to a blog post. Unlike text however, most rich media suffers from a the linear consumption problem; that is, if what you are doing is scanning quickly, the various bits of rich media become speedbumps in the path of grazing the underlying content. In some cases, the video is really worth stopping for, but in most you end up feeling like you want those 3 minutes back in your life.
For a while now I've thought that this proliferation of linearly consumed media would mean that rich recommendation systems were going to be making a comeback (hello collaborative filters!), but in order to do so, they'll actually have to work (a dubious proposition), and more importantly, we'll need to find a sub-URL way to indicate ratings in a open way that can be used as input by the various recommendation algorithms.
Another approach which I've recently seen used to great success is the mixing of the rich media with solid scannable navigation aids and pointers into timecodes in the video, so that the interested user can quickly skip around. Much to my surprise, it was the New York Times that first showed me the power of this approach with their "live transcript" of the Obama speech on race. Having a transcript that scrolls along in sync to the video is such a simple thing to do, but makes such a huge difference in lowering the impedance mismatch between the text-heavy web and various rich media formats.
Another great example is being built by a startup called Omnisio which allows for the annotation of presentations (a frequent subject of the embedded video clips I come across), along with the slides the presenter is using. They've currently got a bunch of annoying user-commenting features but once you shut those off (from the user control panel), the resulting experience makes watching presentations 100x more enjoyable and efficient.
Just another lesson in how sometimes the simple solution, well executed, can yield great results.
I'm gonna be writing about Google's AppEngine for a while as it strikes me as one of the most interesting moves in the evolution of the web-as-platform that we've seen in quite a while. So let me get the boring stuff out of the way first...
A couple of years ago when Tabblo was a struggling startup in need of any and all distribution, I visited a senior executive at Yahoo who supposedly had a nose for new and interesting personal publishing applications. Our hour together quickly devolved i
Here is a lazy web idea that might help experience designers: how about a software application that let folks scan in their paper prototypes and then manipulate them with simple drawing/animating tools via point and click. The result would look a lot like Ambrosia's 
