Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
About this Site
Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
The funniest Super Bowl ad was probably the FedEx bit with the caveman saying "it's not my problem" FedEx hadn't been invented and the other caveman's package got stomped by the dinosaur. (Although my 14 year old son howled at the Diet Pepsi Jackie Chan set-up, with a Diet Coke getting squished as a "stunt double.")
The most important ad, however, came at the end. It was a fairly straight ad, although (like everything else about the game) horribly overdone. In it a man with a cellphone walks through a world populated by sports of all kinds -- baseball, football, basketball, NASCAR and track all going on around him.
It was a house ad, really. It was for Mobile ESPN. ESPN is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC, which ran yesterday's game.
So why was it important? It was important because neither ESPN, nor ABC, nor even Disney owns any cellular assets. They don't hold frequencies, or towers, or run networks. They are re-selling.
Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile has already created billions of dollars in equity value through cellular wholesaling. Others want into the business. It's a good business, good for the wholesaler, and good for the network (usually Sprint) doing the wholesaling.
Yet this is the business the Bell companies have spent the last decade destroying when it comes to Internet access. They ignored the promises of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. They killed all the CLECs, claimed they didn't have to wholesale on "new builds," made everything a new build (even cutting copper to guarantee it) and topped it off by getting governments on the state and federal level to sign-off on the scheme.
NOTE: I'm promoting this to the top today because of its comment thread.
When I first interviewed Richard Wingard back in September, I thought little of it. He seemed to have a clever way to research basic research, using individual investors. He promised new technology enabling video compression on cellular and dial-up lines. Cute.
Then some of Wingard's investors started commenting here. The number of comments grew and grew. They've turned this comment thread into their own little clubhouse, swapping takes and rumors on the company's promised sale, which in the interview Wingard said would happen some time this year.
Interesting. Enjoy the thread, and if you're part of it, thanks for visiting. We do other stories.
Richard Wingard has figured out a way to fund cutting-edge technology with angel investors, and hold them in their investments for nearly 7 years. (The picture is courtesy the University of New Hampshire alumni association.)
Wingard runs Euclid Discoveries, which is working on an object-based video compression technology he says will deliver 10 times the performance of MPEG-4, enough to "turn your iPod into a DVD player."
And he's done it all with angel investors, who are best-known for backing only early-stage customers. Wingard has rejected the entreaties of venture capital firms, saying their time frames for pay-outs are too short. Yet he has succeeded in getting angels who will wait as much as 7 years for a private auction of his technology, and a distribution.
It’s part of the future, no doubt. It’s even part of the present.
But the assumptions that Internet traffic is growing mainly in response to video, that Internet-capable networks must give video 99% of their capacity, or that Internet Law must be changed to accommodate video are fictions.
The Video Fictions are relics of the pre-Internet age. They’re wrong for three reasons:
Video is passive -- When you’re watching a video you’re watching, you’re not interacting. The Internet is all about interaction. It’s about ideas. It’s about interruptibility. It’s about cutting your attention into as many pieces as you can, multi-tasking in order to do more. Video takes all your attention, and demand for it is limited by audience attention.
Video is expensive -- A quality blog item, like this one, can be created by one person in a few hours. A quality video takes the work of many people over many days, and bad video takes just as much time to make as good video. You can’t have both good video and interactive video. Good video just takes too long to make.
Video has plenty of channels – Most of your cable bill is taken up by worthless nonsense already. There isn’t enough quality programming to fill the DirecTv and Dish Network satellites. Broadcasting has worked for almost 90 years. All these deliver more programming at far less cost than the Internet ever could. The Internet, as a video medium, is best served for tiny niches, with low demand, and it already does this.
The assumption that “the future of the Internet is video” is driving just about all the stupidity we see among big companies and policymakers today.
There are video applications which have value on the Internet, but they don’t need the bandwidth or Quality of Service (QoS) up-sells of true video. Videoconferences are of value (sometimes) and video VOIP calls can be of value (to long-separated family members). But the idea that we need the Internet to watch the same TV that comes to us via satellite and cable is nonsense.
There are also some applications that can use QoS standards, and payments. Interactive games can use QoS, especially when players are going against one another in real time. Medical applications can use QoS, although those applications that really need it should be done in clinics or hospitals with ample bandwidth, not the home.
Meanwhile, there is an enormous, and growing bandwidth shortage in the average Internet home. I face it every day. Why?
The Media PC ain't gonna happen. The "walled gardens" of the cell companies are going to come down. The telcos' plans in cable are non-starters.
All these huge corporations are subject to the Content Chimera, the idea that networks are pipes for selling content to people, and that it will all "converge" somewhere.
This is nonsense:
TV standards are moving toward those of movies. None of the "Media PC" offerings at CES took HDTV into account.
Networks are not pipes for selling content to people. They are two-way bit pipes. The future is synchronoussymmetrical, not asynchronousassymmetrical.
It's not all going to "converge" in any particular place. We will seek to consumer entertainment where we are, with whatever attention we can give. But we also create, we communicate, we interact. Different levels of attention require different types of devices.
The Content Chimera goes nowhere. It's the technology version of the Oil Chimera that now drives America's relations with the world. The solutions in both cases are remarkably similar.
Interactivity.
The "choke point" for the content market is NOT in production, or distribution, or marketing. It's in each one of us. It's in the time we have to consume, and the attention we can give to creation. Creation of content, by its nature, involves the consumption of older content, and the laws must reflect this, or they're economically non-productive. (Energy creation and consumption must similarly become a two-way street, all of us creating what we can from the Sun or wind or heat around us, and the current grid evolving into something remarkably like the Internet. But that's anoither show.)
Mike over at TechDirt picked up this story yesterday and noted that Helio, formerly SK Earthlink, could use the lesson to pick up some market share here. He's right.
But the example shows just how far away we are from rational government policy in the U.S., and how easy it would be to make radical improvements with just minor changes to that policy.
If the Bush Administration would put its foot down and DEMAND network neutrality, the Bells would quickly shut up about violating the policy.
If FCC chairman Kevin Martin were to go to the March CTIA convention and say, for instance, that walled gardens are wrong, and that the industry would be wise to do away with them, it would have a major impact. Especially if he were willing to back up his soft words with a big stick.
The big hoarders of spectrum -- phone companies -- are choking on what they already have. Prices are going to be down.
The key word in the above paragraph is hoarders. The phone companies are acting in regards to spectrum just like teenagers grabbing free music from the Internets. They're barely using what they have.
Consider the MMDS spectrum space. This was originally sold for cable television back in the 1990s. Then it was inherited by Sprint and MCI, for broadband. Is it being used? Uh. no. Yet it's extremely close (just a little "south" in spectrum parlance) to the highly-popular 802.11B region.
What will it take for people to get the hint? You get more economic growth, more innovation, and more taxes, more of everything in the long run, when you deregulate the spectrum, when you allow anyone to use it subject to basic rules on non-interference which can easily be implemented through technology.
I always wanted to write that headline, and finally got the chance today.
Om in this case is Om Malik, whose broadband blog has become one of my regular stops in daily newsgathering.
Om's view? Speed doesn't matter. Who cares if it's 1 Mbps or 2 or 10 or 20? The applications are all the same. What are you going to do with it?
Well in one sense he's right. The faster speeds being sold and claimed by cable and Bell companies right now are bogus. I switched to cable a few months ago and I'm switching back. The cable claims it's running at 5 Mbps, but not really. It's like a hose that sputters and drips. Sometimes it works at that speed, but usually it doesn't. When it comes to such things as latency and real throughput, an ADSL line, like the one I had before, is faster. (I'm sorry Earthlink. I'll hurry home as fast as I can.)
But in the broader sense, he's full of, well, the remains of holiday food. Because just as faster chips meant new applications (and interfaces) in the 1980s and 1990s, so faster broadband can mean that today.
One of my favorite Web bugaboos has always been bloatware. (This cute guy came up in a search for the term, but he's a blowfish, delicious batter-fried with tarter sauce. Like an aquatic drumstick.)
My first run-in with this imperative was over a decade ago now, at the old Interactive Age. The art director wanted to force folks to go through her home page before getting to my daily news hole. The home page was pretty, a mock-up of each magazine's cover. But it was bloatware.
Bloatware wastes time without providing value. And it's creeping into the Web again.
America's biggest tech companies are focused today on the problem of creating, not technologies, but platforms.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Intel and Microsoft and Cisco all rose to prominence with platforms. The first two had "WinTel," a marriage now on the rocks (Windows works fine with AMD, Intel will make Apple chips). Cisco had the Internet platform.
These companies changed the world. But the world is a funny place, a "what have you done for me lately" place. In business, it's a "what are you going to do for me next" sort of place.
Microsoft, like it or not, has defined a platform strategy. To that extent, Windows still works. The problem is seen most visibly at Cisco and Intel. Let's tackle Cisco first.
Mapquest, the AOL-owned first-mover in online mapping, is about to fall.(That's their map of Cancun to the right.)
The Clue here is an AP story that looks like it was ordered-up by the AOL marketing department, but which can't resist showing cracks in the veneer.
The headline is about Mapquest pushing mobile mapping (which is good). The unwritten story is how Mapquest may be signing carriers to exclusive deals that keep rivals off, something that is possible since mobile "Internet" service is not Internet service at all, but private networks controlled by carriers.
Still, there are big problems revealed here, such as:
A few simple questions are all that's needed to knock this one down like a last-second Hail Mary:
The Media Center PC spec has been a market failure.
Nothing here about who's going to make these boxes. Notice?
TV displays, in the age of HDTV, have moved miles from the standard PC aspect ratio.
The fact is the actions of watching TV and using a PC are different. With a TV, you're mostly passive, except for that remote in your hand (and we know who you are). With a PC you're constantly active.
There are two salient points about the Sony scandal you will only read at Mooreslore. (Or at least you'll read them here first.)
The first point you've already gotten. Who's behind the scandal? It's not a Japanese.
It's a U.S.-based executive, Howard Stringer. He became chairman and CEO in March, after heading up the company's film and TV units. (He was pictured in my previous note on this topic.) Before joining Sony Stringer was at another American company, CBS.
Stringer is the key to the motive. Go back to that first link again.
As manager of the U.S. Operations, Stringer cut back a total of $700 million a year since 2001, and overhauled the studio operation by cutting TV producer deals and sharing costs on films.
Stringer reached his position of eminence by cutting budgets and cutting deals. Previous Sony chairmen were Japanese gadget heads. Stringer is a card carrying member of the American Copyright Autocracy.
The motive, then, is a simple truth about DRM systems.
DRM systems aren't about software. DRM systems are about hardware.
One thing which unites the previous two stories here is that they are both about computer interfaces. (What is this? You'll learn after you click below.)
The iPod is a computer interface, as much as Apple might protest this. The addition of a screen completes the transition from radio to TV, and from storage device to computing device.
Microsoft Office is, if nothing else, a basic user interface.
The Web is a user interface. So is your e-mail system, whether POP3 or Web-based. The cellphone is a UI.
The point is there is more going on in this space than there has been since I first got into this business, over 20 years ago.
Jakob's more right than he knows. The user interface we've used for a long time now is broken. As I've said here many times, a computer is not a TV set, a tape recorder, and a typewriter. The computer is what is in the middle.
The first attempt at that, he adds, will be in the next version of (wait for it) Microsoft Office.
The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.
I don't know how far this will get. We already have elementary versions of this interface in blogs. Blogs are based on templates, which specify typefaces, page design, and other elements before the writer starts to work. Here at Corante, these specifications are made centrally, and all Corante blogs look similar. That's also the way it works with such community network services as Drupal. Drupal calls such designs "themes," and the theme you choose for your community is the design every user gets -- reader, writer or administrator.
But it's not something I want. It breaks the first law of the original design.
Quite simply it's an attention hog.
The older iPod, with its clickwheel design, required you to look at it only on occasion, when you wished to change the order of your songs, or find a new one.
The new one, with its insistent color screen, demands your full attention while the device is playing.
This is not a problem with Apple. It's in the nature of video. It requires full attention.
Palm has been faltering for years. Even before it split off from its operating system unit, PalmSource, it was losing market share in big hunks. Palm was killed by steady investment from Microsoft, which took away its corporate market, and by mobile phones, which took away the rest of the market.
The fact that Palm owners are going to be orphaned, left without upgrades, is not even tragic, since Palm for years has offered a Palm Desktop program that lets users transfer their files directly to a PC.
What's happening is that Microsoft, which continues to flail about in the mobile phone space, is putting out yet-another mobile phone, and dragging the Palm name along for the ride. Palm has nowhere else to go, so it's going.
But this is not big news. Want to know what the big news is?
Back in the 1970s most people who were at the age I'm at now were convinced these "PC" things were going nowhere.
It was left to teenagers -- teenagers -- to lead the world into the future.
Young people are essential to technology because they approach problems without preconceptions. Their new eyes often find solutions where older eyes find nothing but problems.
Take the problem of hit and run drivers. It's a big problem. But there are so many hurdles in the way of a solution -- privacy hurdles, timing hurdles, etc. -- that corporations just haven't tried to do anything.
Well, some kids at York University at Toronto have done something. Cameras and sensors were combined with a mobile phone into a system that snaps the car who hit you, and sends the owner an MMS message immediately.
It's primitive, it's not even a product -- it's a class project -- as Techdirt notes. But it's a prototype, something that can be productized and easily sold at prices car owners will accept.
This is the dirty little secret of science, that most scientists make their breakthroughs at relatively young ages, and then spend the rest of their lives sliding through on their reputations. How old was Einstein when he came up with general relativity? He was in his early 20s. (That is him, at the top of this item, from the Space and Motion Institute.)
Don't just bring in young people. Listen to them, give them autonomy, give them whatever you have to. Just get them.
There are benefits to age. I know about many of them. But there are also benefits to youth. And the best teams know how to mix the two.
Last week's tirade by Motorola CEO Ed Zander, set alongside the nasty noises about Apple from music publishers , Microsoft's noise about its entry into the market and iSuppli's autopsy of the iPod Nano design all point to one salient point.
Apple's friends are foreign.
Over half the device's hardware cost is going to Samsung, which supplied the flash memory. Samsung is giving Apple a 40% discount on that memory, according to iSuppli, meaning Apple can cut its prices on the existing device if sales remain soft. The iSupply analysis does not reveal who supplied the plastic case, which is drawing strongly negative reviews.
Here's a story that illustrates well the time we're living in. (The picture, from Pravda, shows Indian and Pakistani nuclear sites. Its meaning will become clear in due course.)
I had a meeting scheduled with a programmer for around 9 AM. I booted up my computer, and as soon as it came up Google Talk woke up with "hi" from Tariq Mustafa.
I immediately began trying to set up Tariq with my boss here in Atlanta, who was on his own IM connection, to get our meeting started. As I did so the doorbell rang, and in walked a co-worker, who promptly sat down at my home network to join in.
Apple has released iTunes 5.0.1, which it says fixes problems found on iTunes 5.0.
I was frankly surprised at the number and vehemence of responses to my earlier item about iTunes 5.0 The reason? Reports on the problems have gotten very little traction in the mainstream press.
George W. Bush must envy Steve Jobs in some ways. Kanye West, who famously dissed the President during a Katrina fund-raiser, actually sang at the Apple iTunes 5.0 announcement, and didn't go off-message either. This story is being carried mainly in the blogosphere, where there are currently 176 posts under iTunes 5.0 problem (although not all are on-point).
Instead, Jobs and Apple continue to be hailed as heroes in the mainstream press:
Well, sort of. You may, instead of buying Microsoft Office, suscribe to Google's GMail and have a rudimentary office system with a gigabyte or two of storage.
But to say Google is going after Microsoft, the way we said Microsoft was going after IBM, is really to damn with faint praise.
Google isn't aiming at Microsoft, or at IBM. It's aiming at the entire computing-telecommunications complex, building out what I'll call the Google TeleComputing Environment.
The idea is to take advantage of not only the Internet's ability to disintermediate clients, but its ability to disintermediate the phone network at the same time, and to do this in an entirely open source way.
What do I mean? Here are the ingredients:
Universally-accessible applications, based on search.
Universally-acessible networks, at broadband speeds.
Universally-competitive systems, worldwide.
Google is flattening the world. More on what this means after the flip.
Below is a typical Feedburner RSS ad, which appears in Newsreaders but not on Web pages. We'll discuss it after the flip:
UPDATE: After this was posted, Feedburner vice president-business development Rick Klau wrote the following. It is directly on point (as the lawyers say):
While I can only speak for FeedBurner, we only splice ads into feeds for publishers, on behalf of the publisher. We never splice ads in a feed that the publisher didn't ask for, make money from, or know about, ever. It's the same type of model as web advertising solutions that you use on your site, and you make most of the money.
FeedBurner is a publisher service. We only perform those services on a feed that a publisher wants us to perform, and that goes for everything, whether it's splicing ads, applying a stylesheet, or tracking statistics.
No blog site manager running our service can be unaware that their feeds have ads in them because it is impossible to get ads in your feed at FeedBurner without either directly contacting us or selecting the AdSense for Feeds program and providing us with all the details needed to splice in those ads.
Users are reporting that not only doesn't the software work, but they can't back out of it, and can't load older versions, once the upgrade button is pressed. Some complete computer failures have been reported.
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, reported on this to Dave Farber's Interesting-People list today:
I've personally now seen two systems that have fallen into this black
hole -- no working iTunes, no working QuickTime, and attempts to
install older versions (even just of QuickTime) fail miserably, even
after complex (and in some cases dangerous) attempts at cleaning out
the leftover muck. It's really a mess -- reminds me of early DOS
days.
Every decade of computing technology can be summarized fairly simply. (That's an Apple ad to the right.)
The 1950s were the decade of the computer.
The 1960s were the decade of the mini-computer.
The 1970s were the decade of the PC.
The 1980s were the decade of the network.
The 1990s were the decade of the Internet.
The 2000s are the decade of wireless.
It's now clear that wireless technology defines this decade. Mobile phones are opening up Africa as never before. WiFi is making networking truly ubiquitous.
Walk or drive down any street, practically anywhere in the world, and you will find people obsessed by the use of wireless. Behaviors that in previous decades were shocking -- walking around chatting animatedly to the air for instance -- are now commonplace.
What's amazing, as we pass the halfway point, is how far this evolution has to go, and how easy it is to see where it can go:
WiMax to link islands of WiFi, and to make true broadband mobile.
Interlinks between cellular and WiFi networks.
Devices that truly take advantage of wireless broadband.
Applications that work automatically, with wireless as a platform.
Where Bill Gates bests Steve Jobs, and always has, is in his willingness to build ecosystems.
Windows is an ecosystem. Microsoft is the biggest fish in that ecosystem. Since 1995, Windows has been eating the other fish in that ecosystem, but fish do that. It's still an ecosystem.
Apple has never been comfortable with living in an ecosystem. Apple builds products, not ecosystems. There were never any second-source Macintosh hardware producers with Jobs in charge, and they were all killed off when he returned.
Every day I find limits in the local Web. Right now, for instance, I need a USB Bluetooth connector for my laptop. It's on the Staple's Web site, but delivery is three days away, and it's not at Staple's. It's on the Best Buy Web site, but it's not at the local Best Buy. I'm going to Fry's tomorrow (a 40-mile roundtrip) and if it's not there I'll have to wait for delivery.
All this driving would not be necessary if local inventories were rourtinely tied to Web sites (as they sometimes are at BestBuy.Com). That's one Local Web application.
Essentially this ties together the obsolete telephone network with the Internet Verizon is actually selling and tells customers it's the same thing. It pushes fancy PBX capabilities on residential customers who don't need them. (Just to make things a little better, it locks them into its cellular service, too.)
The FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) can be easily seen in the phrase "DSL modem." DSL is a digital service. It doesn't need modulation or demodulation to trick an analog line into taking a digital connection, which is what a modem does. It is an oxymoron.
Dave Burstein wrote in to say this is a Westell device. Westell has a long history of making things on-demand for phone companies, so Verizon gets all the "credit" for this piece of nonsense.
What's ironic is I happen to know Verizon was talking to Netopia two years ago about a massive contract for DSL gateways that would have been far superior to this piece of nonsense. (Here's a 2001 press release, delivered in the early days of the relationship.) I have one of these gateways in my house now, a review unit. What would have made them powerful was a promised co-branded service providing full security to home users, saving them as much as $200/year on "security suites" from various software vendors. (There are currently no Netopia press releases, going back to 2002, referencing Verizon.)
More on what a truly clued-in person feels after the break.
It's advertised as a "peer to peer location service" combining "WiFi, cellular and GPS." But what exactly are you supposed to do with it? Where are the applications that will get Navizon's money out, let alone a profit? No clue.
Back in the 1980s, Wall Street played a game on Microsoft's duo of Gates and Ballmer, demanding "grown-up supervision" for the then 20-something computer software duo.
Fortunately, Bill and Steve did not take the hint (get lost). They kept their stock, kept control, isolated a succession of adults, and finally came out the other side, billionaires and still in control to this day.
Well, I think Google has now outgrown its grownup.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin not only founded Google, but set many of its most important standards. They understand Google's corporate direction in their bones. But, like Gates and Ballmer back in the day, they were forced by Wall Street to get "adult supervision" in the form of Dr. Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt is, at heart, a computer scientist, and a good one. He is known as the "Father of Java," for his work on that language while at Sun. Then he went to Novell, and nearly rode the thing into the ground. (This should have been a hint, boys.)
While a straight look at technology and the desires of consumers could lead you to these conclusions, they're dumber than dirt.
Let's start with the first one.
Even if people start leaving their laptops at home, laptop sales are not threatened by mobile phones, because laptops are replacing desktops. It's basic ergonomics. Where does your lap go when you stand up? If you're standing, or walking, you can't use a laptop, you have to use some sort of handheld device. As PDA functionality moves into phones, as the two markets merge, then, yes, phones become the handheld of choice. But that doesn't mean they replace laptops. It means they replace PDAs.
I'm a big fan of both Marc Canter (right) and Joi Ito . (NOTE: The picture, by Dan Farber of News.Com (and ZDNet fame), was taken off Marc's blog.)
They're both brilliant. They're both A-list bloggers. They're both rich. I've known both for about two decades.
But I think Marc has a vital Clue Joi has missed, about one of the most important trends of our time, the rise of the open source business process.
Here's why I think that.
Joi has put a lot of money into SixApart, which runs Movable Type, which powers this blog. It's good stuff. But it's being left behind because it is, at heart, proprietary. It doesn't interconnect with other software. It isn't modular, scalable, and it can only be improved by the SixApart team.
In other words, it doesn't take advantage of the open source business process, and thus there are whole new worlds it hasn't been able to scale into. It's not a Community Network Service (like Drupal), and it's not a social networking system (like MySpace).
Marc, on the other hand, has just released GoingOn. It's a new engine for digital communities, like MySpace. He launched with Tony Perkins, who will use the system as the new heart of his AlwaysOn network (no relation to my wireless network application idea of the same title).
Marc calls GoingOn an Identity Hub, something to which other identity systems can connect. (It's interoperable with Sxip Networks, for instance.)
But Marc also understands that his stuff can't be the be-all and end-all. Let him explain it:
NOTE: That's the royal crown magnolia from mytho-fleurs.com. Like it? It's yours.
A long evening spent reading Lasica's book brought the title to me: King of Irony.
Remember, this is a book. Thus it is subject both to a book's business model and its rights regime.
Want a copy? $25.95 plus tax and (if you buy it online) shipping get it for you. Or wait for it to appear at your local library. Or borrow one from a friend, free. Or wait some months for it to appear in a discount bin, or a remainder lot, or a garage sale. The price you pay is a function is a function of the time you're willing to wait for it.
What can you do with this book? I typed an excerpt today by hand. The length of the excerpt, again, is a function of time, and the cost of my time to produce it, unless I want to string it out a page or two. In that case, technology might be deployed -- a scanner -- plus a few minutes with the scanner's OCR software, some cutting-and-pasting, and voila!
Want to steal some more? Production costs are going to get you. A Xerography process may give you a bound book for just a few dollars, if your order is small. An offset process costs less per book, but the order in that case must be bigger. I guarantee the printer will want to know you're a Wiley fella (or lady) before they take the order.
And we haven't even cracked the cover yet. Easy to see where Lasica's crown comes from.
The service will be sold under the name Web'n'walk, with Google.Com as the designated home page. (Yeah, I know, in the real Internet world you could change the default to, say, http://www.corante.com/mooreslore. But one step at a time.) New devices, with larger screens, will also be sold as part of the campaign.
The decision is critical, because up until now all cellular providers have offered only their own "walled gardens," sometimes using a small i (for Internet, customers think) on their phones, but in fact offering only a tiny fraction of the Internet connectivity customers are used to.
But as phones move to offering true broadband speeds, and some users use cellular broadband on their PCs because of its better coverage, this is finally breaking down.
It will be interesting to see how, and when, T-Mobile starts advertising this feature, and what Verizon and Cingular will say (or do) in response. T-Mobile, while owned by Germany's formerly state-owned phone company, is the smallest of four major operators in the U.S.
The recent theft of 40 million card numbers at CardSystem Solutions is a turning point in the identity theft wars.
Previous thefts involved third parties, insiders or numbers left in bins, things that are easily fixed.
The CardSystems case stands out, first, because it happened at an actual processor and second, because it involved the use of a computer worm.
My wife works at a payment processor in Atlanta (most processors, for some reason, including CardSystems, are based here) that has (knock on wood) not been hit (yet).
The only unfortunate thing here is that the writers of the release on this interesting report call the area eHealth.
My problem is not with their intent. A rose by any other name and all that. My problem is that the term eHealth is stifling, limiting. It minimizes what is actually happening, and isolates wireless network applications to one small field.
I have been criticized soundly here by the early leaders of the blogging business community,(Pictured is one of these leaders, Jason Calacanis. From Vertikal.Dk.)
And why should these people listen? They have what they consider success. I'm a "low traffic blog." If I'm so clever I should be doing it, not talking about it, right? (Right.)
But the plain fact is, most of today's top blogs are using the wrong business model.
Their model is a media model. I tell you, you listen, and maybe I advertise to you on the side. This is what newspapers do, what magazines do, what radio does, what TV does.
But is the Internet a newspaper? Is it radio or a magazine or TV? No, it is not. The IN in the word Internet is short for Intimate. So why then should a business model imported from one of these other industries be appropriate? Only because, like TV entrepreneurs in the late 1940s, you can't think of a more appropriate one. You don't have the right vocabulary. You weren't born to this medium.
What would work better?
The community business model would work better. This is driven, not so much by what bloggers want to say as what their readers want to say. There are many high-traffic sites now using the community model -- Slashdot, Plastic, Groklaw, DailyKos. What they have in common is true community software -- Scoop, Slash, even Drupal.
The problem (and this is the nut of the issue) is that most of these community sites have deliberately shied away from having a business model. The only site I mentioned above that has a true business model is Slashdot, and Slashdot is so unusual people with an editorial background can't get their arms around what that business model is.
Despite his ponytail and his sometimes counter-cultural language, despite being what I like to call a Truly Handsome Man (it's a brighter term for bald, people) Ted Waitt was always a follower, not a leader. (The picture is from a 2002 profile in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Argus-Leader.)
Waitt was Gimbel's to Michael Dell's Macy's. He wanted to be Pepsi to Dell's Coke.
But computing lacks the stability of the retailing or the soda business. So when Waitt announced his resignation today (at 42 it wouldn't sound right to call it a retirement) it wasn't big news.
Waitt and Gateway did well in the 1990s, following Dell into mass customization. He made his big mistake when he tried to out-think Dell, opening a chain of retail stores that caused $2.4 billion in losses, according to The New York Times.
But I personally think the mistake was more basic than that.
I didn't blog much yesterday because I was researching the state of play in Always On. (The illustration is from Georgia Tech.)
I had a book proposal before Wiley rejected out of hand. But when I then suggested to step back and do a book on RFID for the home, I got real interest. Just make it a hands-on book, I was told.
Thus, the research.
As regular readers here know well there are many Always On application spaces, that is, functions fit for wireless networking applications.
Medical monitoring
Home Automation
Entertainment
Inventory
Absent this understanding that a unified platform already exists so that all these applications can be created together, what is the state of play specifically regarding Radio Frequency Identification? (Or, if you prefer, spychips, although since I'm talking about home applications you're spying on yourself.)
When journalists blog, when we ask hard questions, dig for facts, and take mistakes seriously, well then yes journalism can happen on a blog. (Cartoon from Cox and Forkum.com,)
But a blog can be a diary. If you invite just a few people to post, and those same people are all who can read it, a blog is groupware.
A blog can be a community. Let a lot of people offer posts, organize the comments, add polls and ratings.
I'm not just talking about RSS items that are in fact links to ad pages, but RSS items that, while containing links to stories, have additional ads inserted into them.
Now there's another, far more dangerous abuse of the RSS system, phony links.
Phony Links are RSS items from registration-only sites. Most U.S. newspapers are now requiring registration. RSS feeds from these sites now go to sign-in pages, not to the stories themselves. In other words the link is a bait-and-switch. It doesn't go to content, but to a sales pitch.
Evidence is increasing of a backlash against mobile phones and the behavior of those who over-use them. (The image comes from a page on celliquette from Indianchild.com.)
Increasing numbers of people are actually faking calls, either to embarrass people, impress them, or just make them go away.
The most popular ringtone? It's the sound of a ringing phone says MatrixM, which has no reason to lie about this since they sell ringtones.
The heavily-hyped IDC mobility study indicates nearly 20% of mobile consumers consider themselves "minimalists," with basic needs, no desire for frills, and a great need for comfort and simplicity.
The coming issue of Business Week features a short story on the Internet of Things, or Machine to Machine (M2) applications, which this blog calls Always On.
The story focuses on cheap cellular radios and industrial applications.
The story misses the opportunity and the market.
It's a good example of the Intel failure noted below because if no one is going to tell the story a reporter can't write it.
Cellular can enhance an Always On application, making it mobile and ubiquitous. If you have a heart monitor in your shirt you don't want to die just because you walked outside the reach of your Local Area Network.
But these are enhancements. And the industrial market is just the tip of the Always On iceberg.
The big money, as I've said, is based on the wireless broadband platform.
It's true that wireless broadband isn't seen as a platform now. It's seen as an end-point. It's seen as a way for you to link your PC to broadband resources. It is seen as an extension of an existing IP protocol. And a lot of people are waiting for IPv6 to tag every device with a unique number before getting excited over linking such devices.
This is very misguided. You can build true PC functionality into something that runs on rechargeable batteries for just a few hundred dollars. Instead of placing the processing of applications on a desktop PC that's turned off, or a laptop that might be taken away, this puts processing for these new applications on the network itself.
The answer is attention. The world is entering an attention economy.
In many ways this is not news. What's news is how we're bifurcating our attention -- splitting it into parts -- and how media must now compete for slices of it. (Would this item get more hits if I called it The ADD Economy?)
It's a worldwide phenomenom because cellular or mobile service is worldwide. Mobile service competes well in the Attention Economy. Watch people chat on their phones while driving. (It's like elephants tap-dancing -- what's amazing is they do it.)
If your company runs all its Internet traffic through an internal server, and that server runs Microsoft Windows, then you're vulnerable to a new type of hack known as DNS Cache Poisoning. (The illustration here comes from a Brazilian blog, marketinghacker.br.)
The alert went out about a month ago. The idea has been around for a decade, but it's now being adopted by sophisticated criminal gangs.
Here's how it works.
Criminals break into a Windows server caching DNS requests for an Intranet, then insert instructions redirecting users to poisoned pages. The 12-digit IP address chosen by the criminal is thus linked to a chosen Internet address, and requests for Google.Com (for instance) could go to a site that downloads spyware or key-logging software in the background.
Both Sony and Microsoft have recently announced efforts to "jump the iPod" with video downloads.
Neither effort is serious, in terms of 2005 serious. Both are attempts to place markers on the future and gain agreements with the content industries they think will mark the future.
And this is just what's wrong with them.
You don't open up a new market by focusing on the seller side of the transaction.
You open up a new market by focusing on the buyer side.
The attempts by Macromedia officials like John Dowdell (right) to explain this away speaks to a growing lack of ethics within the Internet business community.
Over in New Orleans, the assumption at this year's CTIA show is "The Next Big Thing" is video.
Video clips, sold like ringtones. The mobile Web is TV, just as last year's mobile Web was radio. (The picture is from the story linked-to in this paragraph, at PocketPCMag.com.)
I think this is wrong-headed thinking.
That's not to say video won't have a place. It will, especially where desktop Internet penetration is low. Within a few years, I suspect, we'll see a "mobile BitTorrent", because the kind of video that will be in highest demand will be that which is most likely to be suppressed, and not shown on TV.
But video still isn't the Killer App for the next wave. Video is going to remain a niche.
Then, a decade ago, he morphed into an entrepreneur, doing stuff at the intersection of virtual reality and gaming. The media left him behind and left him alone. (I met him at a few trade shows during the dot-boom. He should have been a pathetic figure. He wasn't.)
It seems Robertson has a talent rare among entrepreneurs, the ability to make lemonade out of lemons. He explained what happened to the Onion AV Club. It was a piece of blinding entrepreneurial insight.
It's easy for someone to criticize Wind River's strategy as an attempt to maintain proprietary control in a world of open source, but the fact is there are opportunities here for the Always On world that need to be explained, and then seized.
Fact is Wind River's VxWorks is the leading RTOS out there. RTOS stands for Real Time Operating System, folks. An RTOS is used to make a device, not a system. You find RTOS's in things like your stereo, and your TV remote. What the device can do is strictly defined, and strictly limited. Your interaction with the device is also defined and limited.
An RTOS is not a robust, scalable, modular operating system like, say, Linux. And over the last few years, Wind River has been creeping into your world. VxWorks is used in most of your common WiFi gateways. This limits what they can do. They become "point" solutions. You can't run applications directly off a gateway, only off one of the PCs it's attached to.
This is true for hardware, for software, and for services. Future hardware designs must make it easy to connect, hands-free. Software must have intuitive user interfaces, as simple as speech. Services need to be spur-of-the-moment.
A lot of the mobile services I see today violate these principles big-time. They're based on Web interfaces, and thus have a limited time horizon. The key is to get inside the phone, so you're bought as soon as the customer thinks of buying.
Intel says its Wireless USB is going to eliminate Bluetooth. (Bluetooth image courtesy Babok Farokhi.)
It's faster, has less interference, and it's just better.
Uh-huh. Maybe that's all true. But even if it is, that will take time.
Bluetooth has taken over a half-decade to reach its present level of prominence, and many mobile phones still don't have the capability -- despite cool applicationsl like Hypertag being written for it. (Thanks to point-n-click and Billboard for that link.)
I have headlined this Moores Law of Market Acceptance because, again, there is none. (It's like Moore's Law of Training.) Market acceptance is a human process, involving many actors.
The rate at which a new technology is accepted and replaces an old one depends on how revolutionary it is, how nimble its sponsors, and how rapid is the replacement within the older market.
Even the tone of their press release is, in my opinion, abusive.
Everyone knows that iTunes allows a user to play purchased music tracks to up to 5 computers, without repaying the money, under the condition that the computers are registered. The computer registration involves a process of identity verification in which a user is required to key in into the computer the correct Apple ID and password he used to purchase the song.
This is certainly a patentable technology. If iTunes does not patent it, there must be a very good reason for them not to do so- someone else has patented this.
The whole case points to what should be a major reform in the patent laws.
High Tech Computer of Taiwan has sold versions of it to most major European cellular outfits. The Windows Mobile device features a QWERTY keyboard which can fold into the device, making it a touchscreen PDA. It also has two cameras (one still, one video), Bluetooth and WiFi standard.
Haptics recreates touch and texture artificially. If your kid has a "force-feedback" joystick on their computer game console, they're getting a taste of haptics. Northwestern, USC and MIT are among the universities doing research in the field. (The image is from USC.)
It's vital that something like haptics comes to mobiles because, in a hands-free environment, you can't depend on just sight and sound. Bringing other senses, like touch (or smell) into the mix allows for communication to happen invisibly.
It's also vital for haptics to come to mobiles because this is a huge (in terms of installed base) platform. If the coding and messaging can be delivered in this space, we're talking about billions of users. And we're talking about a universal language.
Giants fall all the time. In an earlier item today I mentioned one such fallen giant, the playwright Arthur Miller.
Computing also has giants, and we're all diminished when one of them falls. As Jef Raskin has fallen.
Jef, who died of cancer recently at 61, will be remembered as the "father of the Macintosh." He gave the project its name, and he pushed it within Apple.
Since the collapse of Lernout & Hauspie, voice has been diminished as a computer interface.
But it makes sense. It's hands-free. It requires training, meaning it brings some security with it by default. I continue to believe in it.
So does IBM.
Igor Jablatov is the man behind IBM's voice strategy. He's based in Charlotte, and has a blog, which mainly prints and links to stories and news release relating to VoiceXML. (Jablatov now heads the VoiceXML Forum.)
The Voice Extensible Markup Language brings voice into the Web standards area, and it's important for that reason. But what's more important is the extension of voice into specific vertical markets. IBM has started with things like cars and consumer electronics, and next plans a move into CRM.
These aren't the markets I would have chosen, but for now voice needs to choose markets based on their money making potential, nothing else. And I trust that IBM has done that kind of analysis here.
With Bluetooth viruses causing all kinds of havoc, and forcing millions to close the open ports on their phones, it seems strange to be writing about a "Bluetooth Network" connection.
Here's the deal. Wideray customers put kiosks in the stores, and when someone comes over with a Bluetooth device they can feed whatever they want -- games, demos, product details. (It also works with Infrared or WiFi.)
I have used the system at trade shows, and its effectiveness is limited by the client device. If the device has limited power and storage, the effect of the download is minimal.
But, with even Nokia Symbian phones attaining the power and storage of older PDAs, this is changing. Wideray now supports Microsoft and Symbian, as well as Palm devices.
From Medgadget comes word that Always On was a theme of the Demo conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, last week, even if they didn't use the name.
One such exhibitor was Lusora, a San Francisco outfit that claimed to be in the security business, but also introduced a medical device.
It's all quite wonderful, but there is one big problem.
Standards.
Lusora's medical gadget uses Zigbee, and its hub, on the surface, looks proprietary, even though it's based on industry standards like WiFi and TCP/IP.
I could be wrong. I hope so. I've contacted their PR folks to see if they can be helpful. And I'm certain they can be.
If I were a rich man I'd want some of these new Oakley Bluetooth sunglasses.
Of course, I'd need the prescription version. And I really like photograys. And have you got that in a bifocal model?
As you can see there is a way to go before Motorola's Cannes fashion statement turns into a really big market. Yes, there are cool-types who will grab on to this, so they can walk down the street gabbing away, like well-dressed homeless. But how many are there? And are all these fashionistas going to be satisfied with just these Oakley wrap-arounds?
A better solution, to my mind, would mount this user interface on the frame, with the electronics hidden in one of those cool eyeglass retainers 49er coach George Seifert used to wear? (That's George, left and above, and you may be able to make out his retainers. From the Seifertsite on Earthlink.)
The mobile broadband business is at what Gandalf called "the pause before the plunge." Enough equipment has been deployed so broadband can be advertised. The time has come to define the experience and see if any money can be made from it.
In a New Yorker profile of chef Mario Batali (left) there's a wonderful scene of Mario rooting around a waste pail, looking for what the author-turned-prep chef has tossed away.
Our job is to sell food for more than we paid for it, Mario lectures him. You're throwing money away.
Apple Computer is the greatest exponent today of what I call Batali's Clue. Your job, as the maker of products, is to get more for your creation than the cost of the electronic "food" that goes into it.
It's a vital Clue because components in the Moore's Law age spoil like dead fish on a wharf.
Here's an example plucked from today's headlines. (Well, the ad pages.)
It's about "pseudo-ADD" and continuing efforts by employers to make knowledge workers pay closer attention to what they're doing.
If they really want to help they should stop interrupting us with meetings, with memoes, and (sometimes) with bosses poking their heads in our doors to see how we're getting on.
Two can play the distraction game. But wait, there's more.
Yesterday, I wrote about how the PDA was rapidly being transformed into the smart phone, so the rumors of the PDA's demise are somewhat exaggerated.
I actually wrote that while looking at a post from Palm Addict about a possible new Palm design. Sammy McLaughlin was virtually hanging about the Patent Office (he's in Manchester, England but the Internet lets you do that) and found an application , from PalmOne, for a device that looks like a "candy bar" phone but flips open to become a PDA.
The digirati are in a fury today over claims by an outfit called i-mature which claims to have solved the problem of age verification with a $25 device that checks a finger's bone density to determine just how old you are.
The image, by the way, is from Vanderbilt University, which has no affiliation with either Corante, i-Mature, or this blog. It describes x-rays of a finger taken at different power settings. Go Commodores.
RSA announced "a joint research collaboration" with the company. But there is skepticism over exactly how precisely a bone scan can measure age, and the more people investigate, the more questions they raise.
I have written a bit on RSS here, often wrongly. (The illustration is from the blog of Andrew Grumet, who brings the complexity of video feeds to the process.)
I have bemoaned the delivery of ads via RSS, both as content and within feeds, as "RSS spam."
My complaints were misdirected, as I learned. The problem was not in the feeds, but in the reader. After I patiently explained my problem to my newsreader maker, I was told "we'll work on it."
And what is my problem?
My problem is I want all the real news and commentary on the field I cover, and that's all I want. You don't get that with a simple keyword field.
As always in technology, problems are usually opportunities turned on their head. New start-ups are emerging that hope to use RSS as a true intelligence gathering service, instead of as a garbage in-garbage out collector.
What they say is what I've said, that separating wheat from chaff is very difficult. They are going about that in different ways. Rojo is doing it privately, just letting a few people in, while Bloglines is doing is publicly, creating a versoin of Google's PageRank algorithm.
Many companies re-sell cellular capacity. It's a simple branding exercise.
Earthlink is the first to enter this business with a vision. The vision comes from founder Sky Dayton, who kept the chairman title for years after leaving for Boingo, but has now relinquished it to run this new joint venture, SK-Earthlink. (Glenn Fleishman interviewed Dayton and has a great story on him.)
Dayton's vision, since the beginning, has been based on the idea that spectrum is plentiful, that WiFi can be connected, and that a telecom firm doesn't consist of wires and switches but software and marketing.
Earthlink itself is based on the idea of re-sale. Its dial-up service rides on top of the existing phone network. Its DSL offerings are based on the same networks. It's not a stretch.
So, what's the vision? Jump over there with me and I'll tell you.
MSN Search is not bad, for a Google clone. That's cruel and wrong. It's not a clone, because there is just a ton of stuff missing. Newsgroups are missing, shopping is missing, a directory is missing (although Google itself now hides that behind a "more" button.) Yes, Yahoo is better.
What you get are Web, images, and news. The main news page (previously seen at their MSNBC site) only lists one story, then adds the word "similar" which leads to a limited search of official and licensed media. They're using Moreover to get behind some registration firewalls.
It goes by the name of the Eyeborg (Adam's an inventor, not a marketer). It takes a picture of the scene with a digital camera, then translates the colors to sound with a computer program.
Best of all, the first one cost under $100 (well 50 pounds) to make.
Steve Stroh pointed me to a John Perry Barlow piece (that's Barlow, at right, from his blog) illustrating the power of the medium as few stories can.
It seems that Barlow was recently jolted by a random Skype phone call from Vietnam. He got to know the caller well because she shared a wireless broadband connection with some neighbors. Thus he was able to talk with her, see her work, see her photos, to learn all about her, without leaving his desk in New York. Then he got a similar call from China, and later one from Australia.
Here's the bottom line:
One doesn't get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.
I wrote this for the GreaterDemocracyblog, but I'm also posting it here, because I can.
The software you have on your PC determines what you can do with it. The software a campaign or political movement uses reflects what it can do.
The biggest mistake Howard Dean made in his 2004 campaign wasn’t his attacks on Gephardt, and it wasn’t the scream. It was his software’s failure to “scale the intimacy,” to give the 1 millionth, or 10 millionth, campaign participant the same features, and the same sense of belonging, given the 10th and 100th.
Throughout the campaign, and even to this day, Dean and his Democracy for America have relied on Movable Type as their interface with supporters. MT is a good product, but its interactivity is limited. You enter an item on the blog, and comments flow from it in a straight line.
Over the last few weeks I've read a lot of commentary about the recent mobile phone health scares.
Much of it follows the industry line. Even on blogs, the tone seems dismissive. Case not proven, nothing to see here, move on.
But that's the wrong attitude to take. (The ostrich came from a financial planning site.) It's ignorant on how easy it would be to address valid concerns, and even improve the product at the same time.
What seems to matter is the power of the wave hitting your head, the distance between sensitive tissue and high frequency waves, and the duration of exposure. Stick a high-powered microwave brick next to an ear for 10 years or more, it seems, and something's going to fry.
But Moore's Law of Radios shows we don't need that much power. We're better off without it. Frequencies are used most efficiently when you have a lot of very low-power devices -- this lets you put more traffic in less space.
As I've said before, separating the handset from the headset can also work wonders, not just from a health standpoint but from a user interface standpoint. A close friend of mine has had a Bluetooth headset on his ear for some weeks, and now he's hot to replace his phone with something that has more functionality, more expense, that's more like a PDA. This should be good news for the industry.
But by sticking our heads in the sand, by dismissing reports of health effects out of hand, rather than addressing what we can now, the industry is setting itself up for a nasty fall, and many unhappy jury returns.
The Six Apart-LiveJournal merger is not a roll-up.
Roll-ups happen when there is an established way to make money at something. No one has really found a way to make a reliable dollar from blogging.
Not that people aren't trying. There are tons of new blogging programs out there, tons of new file types to blog, tons of new blogs (of course) and tons of new paradigms.
It's an industry in the process of discovering itself.
Here's the short-form. Roll-ups are about money. Without money, mergers are about people.
From reading the statements of the principals, this merger is what I call a "team-building" exercise. The VCs behind Six Apart (the company that owns Movable Type) are trying to build a winning team. That's one of them over there to the left, Joi Ito.
The idea is that you sync the phone to your home using a verison of the old Palm cradle, then control home automation applications remotely using the phone.
This reads like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?
Blogging is instant publishing. Part of the idea is that you're getting a raw feed.
But in fact most blogs are edited. Because most blogs are produced with words.
You don't need Microsoft Word to edit a blog. I am editing this in the blogging window. But for most people, coherence requires a bit of editing. You need to step back, put things in a proper order for the reader, and link what you've gotten so it makes sense as a story told, rather than a story experienced.
You can see this clearly when you see the liveblog of an event. Last year's conventions are a bad example. Because the stage happenings were broadcast there was no need to type what was said and put it out. Bloggers reverted to their normal role there of looking for "inside" stories, and wound up as near-clones of their "big media" counterparts, only without as many sources. They edited on-the-fly to create coherence.
What does this say about other types of blogging, using bigger files like audio (audblogging), mobile phones (moblogging) or video (vidblogging).
Over the weekend C|Net ran a story indicating the Mozilla Foundation hopes to add calendaring functions to its Thunderbird e-mail client (right), turning an open source Outlook Express clone into something more like Microsoft Outlook.
What follows is pure speculation, but this could make Firefox the big story of 2005, and beyond.
A few months ago Forbes had a nice article on NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, and Kei-Ichi Enoki, the man behind it. (Forbes stories are all about heroic executives, since the rich strivers are the only people who matter to it.)
The point, for us, is the direction mobile data services may take after the obvious niches, like e-mail and games, have burned out.
Enoki's answer -- remote controls. Not in the sense of point it at your TV, but in the sense of remote control of life functions. Enoki is turning iModes into electronic wallets, personal shoppers, GameBoy and iPod replacement.
There's also an answer to the item that follow this (and was written a few minutes before):
The BBC has a piece today showing how the World of Always On could be invisible, worn instead of held.
We've already seen undershirts embedded with medical sensors. But Ian Pearson predicts we're going to move, over the next 10 years, to a world of devices imprinted on the skin.
Glenn Fleishman drew a lot of admiring attention over the weekend for his experiment in frugality, trying to see just how little he could pay for the telecom service he needs. (The picture is the thumbnail from Glenn's blog.)
Basically he moved calls to his mobile phone and DSL line, using Vonage and SkypeOut. He also spent $3/month for a Cingular service called FastForward that moves all calls to his DSL when he hits the limits on his calling plan.
Glenn figures he's saving $130/month. (Your mileage may vary.) I wish I could do as well.
He is known to the lay person, if at all, for a program called Mathematica, which has done as much for the acceleration of change as Moore's Law itself.
By boiling down what you can do with mathematics into a computer program, Mathematica freed science from waiting on mathematics to analyze data. The program helps you devise formulae that work, so the results you get are proven. When people would say "it's not rocket science" they were often referring to the combination of math and science required to launch a rocket. Now, thanks to Wolfram, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
Not only that, but Mathematica made Wolfram's Wolfram Research a going concern, a real business. It freed him from the demands of academe. He truly became the elephant that could tap dance. (He's no Gates, but he's pretty good at it.)
Still, as they always say, what have you done for me lately?
Take a real close look at this AP photo and see if you can spot the problem with the new version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft's mobile phone software.
Reviewer Bruce Meyerson missed it, so if you have problems I understand.
Give up?
I understand if you give up because it not only skipped past Meyerson, but it apparently skipped past everyone involved in the design and manufacture of this phone. Otherwise it likely would never have seen the light of day.
Still don't have it? OK, click below for the answer.
Has "the fat lady sung" for Opera, the Norwegian Web browser?
Opera's parent company reported a wide loss for its last quarter. Internet Explorer is losing share, but the share is being lost to Firefox, not Opera.
The question is no longer, do we need an alternative browser? The question is, do we need another browser company?
If you're to take Always-On applications into the world with you, they have to be fashionable. They have to look smart. It would be very nice if they were machine washable.
With all the hoop-de-doo over mobile phones being bad for you, it makes sense that a wireless headset, connected to your phone or (maybe even) your iPod, would make sense.
Since Palm (the hardware company) and PalmSource (the software company) have split, it makes some sense that Palm (the hardware company) might want to become less dependent on PalmSource (the software company). (Image from PenComputerSolutions.)
That's right. Palm is planning on making a version of its Palm PDA that runs a version of Windows. PalmSource plummeted on the news (never mind that it's replaced a 3Com chairman with an Apple refugee) and it's easy to see why.
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea behind TV-B-Gone, a tidy little invention that runs through hundreds of codes for shutting down sets remotely and, eventually, does just that.
The device fits on the end of a keychain and can be slipped back in the pocket after it's used. (Image from Gizmodo.)
God knows there have been many times when I've entered the locker room at my local YMCA, heard some unpleasant show blaring, and wished I had one.
Carnegie-Mellon and Cal-Berkeley are going to spend $1 million in the government's money over the next three years trying to create a general speech recognition chip for the market.
When they succeed, and I have no doubt they will succeed, it will be a true revolution.
IBM has decided to make some of its key speech technology open source. (That's an old Kurzweil AI poster found at Ethicon, a Johnson & Johnson company that could be important in what follows after the jump.)
This is great news, and they're doing it for all the right reasons. The following quote, from a New York Times story on the decision, could have been written by Linus Torvalds himself:
"We're trying to spur the industry around open standards to get more and more speech application development," said Steven A. Mills, the senior vice president in charge of I.B.M.'s software business. "Our code contribution is about getting that ecosystem going. If that happens, we think it will bring more business opportunities to I.B.M."
The power of Windows lies in your ability to create and market profitable applications using it.
Yes, there's a limit. Once Microsoft decides it wants your market, your cost of defending the market will likely exceed any incremental sales from that effort.
But Linux lacks Windows' ability to make software profitable. And that is why Windows, not Linux, will lead the next evolution in cellular equipment.
SSEYO has announced miniMIXA, an audio mixer for Windows smartphones.
As part of the roll-out a Reading, England arts festival will use it this weekend to mix what is being played “on-the-fly.”.
This could do to the cell phone market what programs like Musicmatch did to PCs.
The impact could be massive. Ringtones could be created at concerts, and sold right after the show. On the other hand, concert-goers could potentially bootleg the same concert and offer better mixes, free, within hours after the show.
This leads to Dana's Law of Creativity Software.
The cheaper it is, the more people can use it, and the lower the premium paid for poor results.
If you want to see what this thing is capable of, check out these sample mixes for yourself. Or, if you don't have a Windows cell phone, get a taste for the technology by downloading Sseyo's PC plug-in.
Last week, as you may recall I spent some time dumping on the new Danger box. I have also been working with documentation from a wide variety of today’s cell phones. (The illustration is from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, and first appeared in 2002.)
What I have learned is that today’s phones have a wide list of options, in terms of what they’re going to be.
The New York Times has reviewed the new Danger cell phone, under the name of T-Mobile, the cellular operator that will offer it this fall. (The illustration comes from the Times' story.)
The new device carries the name Sidekick II, and the Times likes it.
The secret to turning a blog into a financial success lies in the word community.
Community is what lets a blog scale from one person spouting off into a true online service, with enough traffic to pay the bills with advertising.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (left, from his site) revealed this today on his site, Daily Kos, but I am NOT making a political point here. The most successful conservative sites, from FreeRepublic to Lucianne.Com to Andrew Sullivan, all do the exact same things.
You ever leave a pot of coffee on the counter too long? I have. After several days it starts tasting really funky, and these nasty white organisms start partying on the top of it. (BREW logo from Vayusphere.)
Well, that's what seems to be happening to Qualcomm's BREW development environment, in which Verizon is demanding all applications on its cellular network be written. There's no circulation in a proprietary environment . If the creator doesn't apply regular heat (and risk that nasty, metallic taste) things are going to get funky fast.
Stephen Hawking could not have existed in an earlier age. He is a tribute to his time, and complements it so well. He's awe-inspiring. (He's also a brand, as in the store where I found this image.)
Consider. This man has had ALS, Motor Neuron Disease, since he was an undergraduate. It has progressed far more slowly than in many cases, but it has progressed. Without modern medicine there is no way he could be celebrating his 60th year.
Without modern computer technology he could not function as he does. Which makes him a living laboratory for the next frontier in computing, interfaces.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
Richard Wingard has figured out a way to fund cutting-edge technology with angel investors, and hold them in their investments for nearly 7 years. (The picture is courtesy the 
Video is NOT the future of the Web. (This picture, by the way, comes from 
I always wanted to write that headline, and finally got the chance today.
One of my favorite Web bugaboos has always been bloatware. (This cute guy came up in a search for the term, but he's a blowfish, delicious batter-fried with tarter sauce. Like an aquatic drumstick.)
America's biggest tech companies are focused today on the problem of creating, not technologies, but platforms.
Mapquest, the AOL-owned first-mover in online mapping, is about to fall.(That's their map of Cancun to the right.) 
There are two salient points about the
One thing which unites the 
The Macintosh interface has been around, in one way or another, for 30 years. It has been the dominant computing interface for 15 years.
News that Palm is in the Windows Mobile business is 
Back in the 1970s most people who were at the age I'm at now were convinced these "PC" things were going nowhere.
Last week's 
Here's a story that illustrates well the time we're living in. (The picture, from 
Apple has released
Let me take a stab at explaining Google's grand strategy.
Every decade of computing technology can be summarized fairly simply. (That's an 
Where Bill Gates bests Steve Jobs, and always has, is in his willingness to build ecosystems.
The fastest way to save energy in this country is to build-out the Local Web. (The illustration is from the 
Back in the 1980s, Wall Street played a game on Microsoft's duo of Gates and Ballmer, demanding "grown-up supervision" for the then 20-something computer software duo.
Two really stupid predications crossed my desk this morning. (The image is by 
I'm a big fan of both 
Since I was handing out
T-Mobile has become the first cellular operator 
The recent theft of 40 million card numbers at 
Despite what 
I have been criticized soundly here by the 
Despite his ponytail and his sometimes counter-cultural language, despite being what I like to call a Truly Handsome Man (it's a brighter term for bald, people) Ted Waitt was always a follower, not a leader. (The picture is from 
I didn't blog much yesterday because I was researching the state of play in Always On. (The illustration is from 
Next weekend I'll be at 
In 
I have written before about 
Evidence is increasing of a backlash against mobile phones and the behavior of those who over-use them. (The image comes from a page on celliquette from 
The coming issue of Business Week features 
In 
If your company runs all its Internet traffic through an internal server, and that server runs Microsoft Windows, then you're vulnerable to a new type of hack known as 
Both 
Of all the things that Gator (and its ilk) did, the worst may have been how they corrupted the file download process.
Over in New Orleans, the assumption at this year's 
Of all the American entrepreneurs you read about a decade ago, which do you think is doing the best today?
I don't always agree with Nicolas Negroponte (right), but he made a point in Korea recently that really makes sense. 
Intel says its 
I’ve seen it and seen it. A big company works its butt off to prove a market, and some little guy comes along claiming patent rights. 
Taiwan has the greatest OEMs in the world. They can take your design and turn it around faster than anyone.
Samsung is bringing 
Giants fall all the time. In an earlier item today I mentioned one such fallen giant, the playwright 
Podcasting is the trend of 2005.
Since the collapse of 
With Bluetooth viruses causing all kinds of havoc, and forcing millions to close the open ports on their phones, it seems strange to be writing about a "Bluetooth Network" connection.
From 
If I were a rich man I'd want some of these new 
Microsoft may have as little as a year to take command of the mobile phone platform, or the opportunity will be lost. (Image from 
In a New Yorker profile of chef Mario Batali (
Katie Hafner has a story today 
The 
I have written a bit on RSS here, often wrongly. (The illustration is from the blog of 
Many companies re-sell cellular capacity. It's a simple branding exercise. 
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This is the kind of story that warms the cockles, and hopefully makes today's Friday dog blogging feature make some sense. (Dogs are colorblind.)
Over the last few weeks I've read a lot of commentary about the recent mobile phone health scares.
The Six Apart-LiveJournal merger is not a roll-up.
Motorola has launched a very Clued-in strategy to push Always-On applications.
This reads like a contradiction in terms, doesn't it?
Over the weekend C|Net ran a story indicating the Mozilla Foundation hopes to 
A few months ago Forbes had a nice article on NTT DoCoMo's iMode service, and 
Take a real close look at this AP photo and see if you can spot the problem with the new version of Windows Mobile, Microsoft's mobile phone software.
Has "the fat lady sung" for 
If you're to take Always-On applications into the world with you, they have to be fashionable. They have to look smart. It would be very nice if they were machine washable.
Since Palm (the hardware company) and PalmSource (the software company) have split, it makes some sense that Palm (the hardware company) might want to become less dependent on PalmSource (the software company). (Image from 
Don't get me wrong. I love the idea behind 
Sometimes I get ahead of myself.
IBM has decided to make some of its key speech technology 
The secret to turning a blog into a financial success lies in the word community. 
Stephen Hawking could not have existed in an earlier age. He is a tribute to his time, and complements it so well. He's awe-inspiring. (He's also a brand, as in the store where I found 
