i want an iPhone
Friday, June 29, 2007
But not as bad as some, apparently. In NYC, people were lining up as early as Monday morning for the Friday debut of the iPhone in stores. I understand the anticipation, the excitement, and the sheer want of having a new gadget, but it makes me wonder: How can someone sit outside on a New York City street for 5 whole days? Never mind that this week, there were thunderstorms coupled with hot and unbearably humid weather. I hope the iPhone meets these people’s expectations. The propensity of it not meeting expectations, of course, is unlikely. Read any review on the phone, and you will find yourself in the mind of a child in a candy story. CNET reviewers, New York Times’ David Pogue, and Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg all hail the phone to be the greatest thing since sliced bread – or maybe the iPod – while glossing over some of the limitations AT&T, its sole service provider, creates. The utter mania the iPhone has generated reminds me of a time before anything “i”. It all began with iMacs, which came onto the scene when computers were purely functional and void of any artistic characteristics. Its cuteness led us to look at our desktops as decoration or “computer couture”, as my fiancé, the IT guy, calls it. Then came the iPod, which completely revolutionized the way we experience music and so reason would suggest that the iPhone possesses huge potential. The success of Apple’s technologies is of course two fold. It was not only due to great design, but also to fantastic marketing. The build-up for the products is managed just right, the news touches upon all the desired messages and the advertising is right on point. I couldn’t have imagined the iPod experience better than it is portrayed in its ads and the Mac vs. PC commercials created the personalities we will forever attribute to the brands. But while Apple is the frontrunner, articles on the wireless industry reveal a grim reality. Take Marty Graham’s article in Wired. In it, Marty talks to seemingly clueless wireless service providers about their thoughts on the needs and wants of their customers. Brian Finnerty, Director of Device Development for Sprint Nextel, said: "What do customers want? We have no idea. As an industry, we're like robots -- we go toward the light and we pile up on it." What a sad state of affairs. Thank iGod for Apple. Labels: advertising, Apple, buzz, Marketing, Public Relations
IPv6 and the Convergence Box
Sunday, July 02, 2006
I remember the days of channel-surfing TV. The classic scene from Toy Story 2 comes to mind, where the Pig is flipping channels, passed the one he wanted, and said it's too late and he had to go round again. You could flip channels as fast as you hit a button.
What happened? Well, that was the old-fashioned days of analog cable. Now, we have digital cable and channel guides. The slow channel-flip seems to be connected to the MPEG stream decoding process. I'm not entirely sure about this, but my understanding is that the video stream is encoded for size AND that only one-in-10 (or so) frames carries the full image required to "tune in". Therefore, you've got processing time factors AND time interval "quantization". You can't instantly tune in a channel.
While channel guides are great for getting an overview of what's on TV that appeals to a certain part of your brain, it just doesn't appeal to whatever animal instincts that liked channel surfing. I miss it. There's just something about visually SEEING what's on in a rapid sequential overview that ensures you're not missing what you REALLY want to be watching.
I'm sure that this will be fixed in time. And people are aware of the problem. I bought the HDWonder card for my PC from ATI, and after doing some research about why the interface was terrible, I discovered that they intended to do an "automated" channel surf, and present you a thumbnail of everything that was on, but gave it up because of performance issues. But none-the-less, if graphic cards folks are thinking this way, we can only hope that Motorola, Microsoft, Scientific Atlanta and Sony are thinking this way too.
I feel the digital convergence coming--at least in the home. The desire for one wireless box that does it all is so strong you can walk on it. And I don't think it's only me. I see the XBox 360, PS3 or something from Motorola wrapping in the HD tuner, the gaming console, and a rudimentary computer for email, word processing and the like. The days of the TV not being suitable as a PC monitor are over. Pull up a chair, and fire up Word!
Everything old is new again, and the way the Commodore 64 was so massively popular in its day, coming virtually from out of nowhere, so will this convergence box. It simplifies our lives by making you not need to be a genius to wire up your home system or have a PhD to operate the universal remote. Better yet, it will be built into the monitor as a plug-in console, so it's truly wireless. No need for an extra box sitting somewhere! Bluetooth or something like it will connect it to your controllers and speakers.
Another seldom discussed point, which is amazing considering all the point-to-point broadband video services popping up, is how significant IPv6 is going to be. The next generation Internet supports something that is exactly akin to broadcasting over the airwaves, called IP-multicast. This is significant, because it is the last remaining piece forcibly preventing convergence. Let me explain.
Broadcasting is called broadcasting because you're blasting the same signal out to everyone with a tuner that can receive it. It's a very efficient way of communicating, because one outbound datastream can be tuned in by millions. But everything starts and stops at the same time. On any given channel, everyone is essentially watching the same thing. There is no variation. Today, TiVo and PVR fixes that. But it's fixing a problem we shouldn't have in the first place. Why can't you just ask for any program you want at any moment you want?
And that gets to the way things work on today's Internet that doesn't support broadcast. If you were to send out TV programming the way it is now, you need a separate discreet datastream for everybody who is watching. So, if 1000 people are watching at the same time, it's 1000 times more data than with the broadcasting model. But you can start, stop and pause whenever you like. Everyone's datastream is different, and there is a high degree of customization possible.
And that takes us to how things are going to radically change once the next generation Internet is widely deployed. It will take a whole bunch of Cisco routers being upgraded, but once it's done, broadcasting similar to today's dish networks or public broadcast TV will be brought to PCs... or tuners... or convergence boxes--whatever they're going to be called.
And instead of having to watch the SAME broadcast as everyone else, there will be TiVo-like features built into this box, displacing time as you like. And instead of one broadcast per day of your favorite program (or 5 per day of many cable channels), hot programs will be broadcast hundreds of times per day. Coupled with the TiVo-like features, you will effectively get the experience of true on-demand TV of anything that's "released". The concept of the TV Channel Guide goes away entirely, and all that remains is what moment new episodes are made available. And if the whole world rushes to the latest Lost episode, there is hardly any more strain on the system than if it were one person tuning it in. And there will be different viewing profiles for different family members, because data storage will be virtually unlimited in your home system.
Add to this the fact that "pod" technology like whatever Apple's iPod evolves into will "peel off" a portable copy of whatever is on your home system, so viewing in multiple rooms of your house, or on the go will never be a problem. The pod will be able to update itself with ad hoc Internet connections that it can acquire on the go. And it will have the resolution of ePaper, so it will also be your college text books, your newspaper, and your paperback novels. Voice recognition will be improving all the while, so the need for a keyboard constantly drops. And if Sony has their way, it may even be able to liquefy and be folded up and stuck in your pocket when not in use, only to seamlessly unfold to rigid 8.5 x 11 when flicked on.
All this rambling from missing Channel Surfing! Well, in my lifetime it will be nice just to see some form of the convergence box arrive, so we won't need Electrical Engineering degrees and a weekend put aside to hook up our media centers.Labels: Apple, Microsoft, Motorola
NextNY Google Event
Friday, June 30, 2006
Yesterday (technically, 2 days ago now) I went to a Google / nextNY sponsored powwow in the Google offices at 40th & Broadway here in New York. There was a limited 100 open slots for this tech talk, and I was lucky enough to get one of them. Ambar Shrivastava, a co-worker of mine was notified by his friend, Rishi Khanna, about the event. I was lucky enough to get spot 88 that opened up. I hadn't met Rishi before, but I ended up waiting in line next to him. He asked what were the chances, and I realized way too late that the answer was 1 in 50.
Anyway, Google made us all sign the standard non-disclosure then proceeded to put us through a public relations event to promote the New York Google operation consisting of 500 people and that we should feel free to talk and blog about the whole event. So here I am doing just that. They just bought a huge facility in Chelsea right next to where I live, which they did not talk about at all, but I get the idea that the whole Broadway office will be moving. They explicitly said that they are hiring advertising sales people in their large market segments including automotive and a couple of others. So, if you're in sales and want to work for Google in NYC, get hopping. Or is that hoping? Either way.
Representatives from Sales, Engineering and Product Management spoke. Marcus Mitchell gave an intro, followed by Dominic Preuss, Tom Thai, David Eun and Dennis Crowley. Tom Thai's presentation consisted of a long tail diagram showing the profile of their ad clients. A few very large clients existed at the head, namely Sony. There was a fairly big middle, then a textbook case of the long tail. I'm feeling like Chris Anderson, seeing long tails everywhere, but Google's sales of AdWords to the tiny marketers of the world must truly be one of the best long tale examples I can think of. The product is digital and inexhaustible.
Of the presenters, all of which were interesting to varying degrees, Dennis Crowley's ending presentation was the best. It's just such a great story where he was a dot-com'er who went back to school for a business degree, and as his senior thesis project did a project called Dodgeball. It was/is social networking software that you email from your cellphone to tell it where you are. It then proceeds to let your entire "real life" social network know where each other are, so you can all gather after work, or whatever. But the point is that him and his partner had little need or motivation to monetize it, and through serendipity, ended up talking with Google folks who got excited about it, and acquired his 2-person company, and he's now a Google employee. He was a really personable guy who could have gone the entrepreneurial route, and chose Google. It's a mixed bag. He's got the awesome resources of Google to tap, still gets to live in NYC (he was an NYU'er), but now has to compete for those resources with everyone else's 20/10 projects.
Ahhh, the now commonly known Google 70/20/10 rule states that 70% of your time goes to the "core" job, consisting mainly of search and AdWords. 20% of your time goes to things related to your main job, and 10% can go to just about anything interesting. This turns Google into a part-time incubator. It reminds me a lot of Motorola where competing GMs compete to turn different technologies and product lines into nearly autonomous companies. It is a strategy of keeping that special edge that Larry and Sergey brought to the picture as young guys. It's tough to preserve that edge as your company gets large and established, and more and more is taken for granted.
I talked with a delightful woman in the pharmaceutical field there about how companies like Google had to be on constant guard for the business equivalent of geological sudden catastrophic liquefaction wherein your entire foundations suddenly disappear beneath you, swallowing up an entire city before you know anything was wrong. What if Apple didn't make the Mac, and subsequently the iPod? Steve Jobs is a person who totally understands sudden obsolescence is moments away for any high tech enterprise. 70/20/10 is Google's attempt to inoculate against that disease. Not everything needs to be a revenue generator, but it does need to keep the users coming back!
Another aspect of 70/20/10 that I later realized is how it breaks up over a business week. If you assume a 5 day work week (not always true, I know), then 5 into 100 is 20. So each workday is 20%. So one day out of 5 can go into anything you want that's related to your main job, but is not your priority. And a half-day can go into anything at all, no matter how off the wall. And in a culture of super-geeks that have a day-and-a-half discretionary time, it creates interesting super-geek-politics, lobbying at lunch for your engineer buddies to work on your 20% project instead of the next guy or gal's. It creates something like a Darwinian idea farm, which I'm sure has emergent behaviors. Certain ideas create excitement or boredom. I heard rumors that Google never cracked the music nut because Sergey just wasn't that into music, and the 20% projects along those lines never got the resources, leaving Yahoo an awesome opening… but who knows.
Anyway, even though it had the tinge of a recruitment effort, it was still a great event to attend. We all went drinking afterwards at Stitch bar on 37th Street, and went a little too late into the night. I ended up taking the next day working from home, finishing up the video. It shifted my wake/sleep cycle a little too late, as this 4:50AM post probably shows. Good night.Labels: Apple, blog, Google
Is the MIT $100 Laptop GooglePod?
Friday, November 18, 2005
Well, I think the biggest news of the past couple of days has been the $100 laptop from MIT. Sure, it's not a reality today, but 2006/2007 is not a long way off. The price of a Windows license is almost as much as the entire hardware, so of course this thing will be Linux-based. They even passed over Mac OS for it. Such a laptop used in developing nations will result in entire generations of computer-literate low-cost members of the global workforce, which will result in more contributors to open source projects, and so on. Add the rumored solar-powered/wind-powered Internet nodes that could provide virtually free WiFi for these virtually free laptops, and you start to get the picture. And if you look close at the funders of the MIT $100 PC project, you will see none other than... Google! Could this be the ubiquitous GooglePod next generation Yellow Pages? Just crank it up. There's not a lot of room for premium OS pricing. And this announcement just happened to coincide with Microsoft rumors of a completely ad-based free version of Windows. Times, they are a'changin. And that's music to the ears of this old Amiga fan. Labels: Apple, Google, Microsoft
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