iPhone: How Big Will It Be?

Shamelessly cross-posted from the work blog.

We don't deal much in Apple products at ENLLC. But we do deal in cell phones. We are a proud, U. S. Cellular dealer. And we are technology watchers and this blog is dedicated to distributing our technology wisdom to our customers and the rest of the world. So...

The introduction of the iPhone has been the most-hyped product introduction since... well since the Mac really. But does it live up to the hype? Early reports say, mostly yes. Does it have some quirks and shortcomings that all first generation products have? Certainly. The non-user replaceable battery is a biggie. But on the whole reviewers seem to agree that it is just as cool and paradigm-changing as the marketing hype makes it look. And quite frankly, if the thing does 80% of what is looks like it will do in the ads, as easily, it will going to do some major paradigm shifting. It is "a breakthrough," in the words of WSJ tech commentator, Walt Mossberg.

The iPhone's true measure will probably be more greatly felt a few years down the road, when the exclusive deal with AT&T expires and when the second (third?) generation iPhone starts to really move into the masses, when and if the iPhone installed base starts to push into say, the tens of millions.

How major an innovation is the iPhone? Well, let's look at a recent New York Magazine profile of Steve Jobs.

With the iPhone, in particular, he is hurling Apple into foreign waters. His motivations for doing so aren’t difficult to discern. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion cell phones are sold worldwide every year; in terms of scale, ubiquity, and relevance, it’s the mother of all consumer-electronics markets. The chance to upend this sprawling industry, bend it to his will, is one that Jobs, being Jobs, finds irresistible.

Apple’s competitors, by contrast, find the prospect of the iPhone terrifying. “The entire fucking Western world hopes that it’s a case of imperial overstretch,” says the CEO of one of the planet’s largest communications companies. “But everybody is quietly saying, er, what if people want to buy a $500 phone? What if, er, people have been waiting for a device that does all these things? What if this thing works as advertised? I mean, my God, what then?”

Indeed. What then? What if Apple starts moving iPhones in numbers comparable to the iPod, at 16 million a month.

What then is that the mobile computing industry -- and increasingly, that is what cellphones are morphing into; Apple has merely finished the job that was started by the Blackberry and the Treo -- is going to have to get really serious. Serious about innovation, serious about quality, serious about customer service and serious about interface design and function.

One of my favorite business bloggers, Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture, posts the big lessons and hard questions that are going to be asked not only of cellphone companies, but of all of us who run businesses in the wake of this.

1. 1. Committees Suck: The old joke is that a Camel is a Horse designed by a committee. As we have seen all too often, what comes out of large corporations are bland-to-ugly items that (while functional and reliable) do not excite consumers.
   
   When a company decides to break the committee mindset and give a great designer the reins, you get terrific products that sell well. The Chrysler 300 does not looks like it was designed by a corporate committee. Think of Chris Bangle's vision for BMW -- and its huge sales spike -- and you can see what the upside is in having a visionary in charge of design.


Better pick a damned good one, though . . .


2. 2. Present Interfaces Stink: How bad is the present Human Interface of most consumer items? Leaving the improving, but still too hard to use Windows aside for a moment, let's consider the mobile phone market: It was so kludgy and ugly that the entire 100 million unit, multi-billion dollar industry now finds itself at risk of being completely bypassed, all because some geek from California wanted a cooler and easier to use phone.


What other industries may be at risk?


3. 3. Industrial Design Matters: We have entered a period where industrial design is a significant element in consumer items. From the VW Bug to the iPod, good design can take a ho-hum ordinary product and turn it into a sales winner.



4. 4. R&D is Paramount: While most of corporate America is slashing R&D budgets (and buying back stock), the handful of companies who have plowed cash back into R&D are the clear market leaders this cycle: Think Apple, Google (Maps, Search), Toyota (Hybrid), Nintendo (Wii). A well designed, innovative product can create -- or upend -- an entire market. Even Microsoft did it with the X-box;


What other companies have the ability to disrupt an entire market?


5. 5. Disdain for the Consumer can be Fatal: As we have seen with Dell, Home Depot, The Gap, Sears, etc., the consumer experience is more important than most corporate management seem to realize. Ignore the public at your peril.

End of the Music Business As We Know It, Part XVI

One of the themes of this blog is how technology is changing our society. Unbeknownst to most people, a life-and-death struggle for the future of an industry is occurring in the area of the audio-visual arts businesses. The ability to digitize their products changed forever the face of the huge book, music, television and movie industries. The conglomerates who largely run those industries are having some very difficult times coming to grips with the changed realities of their circumstances.

Last week came two new benchmarks in their changing worlds. One, Country Star and former American Idol winner, Carrie Underwood, became the first artist to debut a song in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with no physical CD sales. Her cover of the Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You," is an Apple iTunes exclusive download and hit the chart at number 6 last week.

Secondly, Warner Music, one of the "Big Four" studios, announced losses of $27M last quarter. The company announced a restructuring plan that includes the layoffs of over 400 employees, mostly in the... music sales and distribution area.

All of this comes as retail brick-and-mortar CD sales are down up to 25% in the industry, (Source: Sound Opinions) but while single-song music sales overall (that includes retail downloads, such as iTunes) are UP. But, there is no way the single-song 99¢ sale price of "I'll Stand By You," can ever make up for potential loss of the the $17.00 or more for a physical copy of Underwood's CD, "Before He Cheats."

None of this is going to bottom out for the music industry until they learn that they are no longer in the business of:

1. Physically making things that are cheap to manufacture but which produce large margins at retail, e.g. compact disk recordings.


2. Controlling the agenda with regards to being able to definitvely pick hits (through control and manipulation of Radio-the traditional music taste-making medium) and thus justify their multi-million dollar investments in such artists as Ms. Underwood and her recordings.

They need to come to grips with the fact that they are in the business of distributing bits (not atoms) with (fortunately) very low production costs and (unfortunately) very low margins -- which can be readily copied by people who don't want to actually pay for their product.

Sadly, this leaves very little room for middlemen in the music business, which is being taken back over by... musicians.

Last summer's End of the Music Business As We Know It benchmarks were the debut of the Gnarls Barkley song, "Crazy" as the number one song on the U.K. Charts without a CD released and (now) star Lilly Allen's songs charting without a recording contract.

What this means is that for the first time in a long time, music fans and consumers are making markets in music based on perceived merit as opposed to the dictates of studio execs. Exciting times for music lovers and music makers. Exciting times too for music executives, but only in the Chinese sense.

Video of my Ignite IT Talk

The video of a very impromptu, very truncated version of my presentation to small businesses, Small Business in the Networked Age, is up. I gave this at the Ignite IT conference in Ames in April.

Link to largish Windows Media File.

21st Century Campaigns - Polling and Cell Phones

Over at MyDD.com, Matt Stoller has been picking apart how polls work, or don't work in the 21st Century. In his latest installment he looks at how traditional land-line telephone polls are becoming more and more unreliable because of the increasing size of the wireless-only household. This goes back to my post last month on Technology and the 21st Century Political Campaign.



In the MyDD article, Matt references a couple of close congressional elections last cycle:

Candidates like Eric Massa and Larry Kissell came very close, and with DCCC support, could have won their districts. In the case of Kissell, I've talked to two people in high level party positions - one local to North Carolina and one in DC - who told me the same thing about why they didn't put more into that race. Polling. They did polls one or more weeks before the election, and it just looked out of reach by six or more points. In a case where you are moving resources around the country, it's hard to make a call to support someone like Kissell when your data says otherwise.

Eric Massa ran in New York's 29th CD against freshman Republican, Randy Kuhl and lost 48-52. Kissell ran in North Carolina's 8th DC against three-term Republican,Robin Hayes, loosing by only 329 votes.


The takeaway fro this then is twofold: One, traditional telephone polls are becoming less and less accurate. This is because of overall declining response rates -- people refusing to participate -- and because of the decreasing pool of voters with plain-old-telephone-service (POTS). Second, the decision-making of the national parties, which depend heavily on polling data will probably miss a lot of pick-up opportunities in grassroots-heavy congressional elections.

Now, more than ever the oft-uttered plea of the insurgent candidate to ignore the polls actually has merit.

Technology of 21st Century Political Campaigns

I refuse to talk yet about "the race." I will however, dedicate some time to meta-campaign blogging. This started out as a quick reply to Mark Laggin's post on Technology and 21st Century Caucus Ops, over on Bleeding Heartland. It basically turned into a post in its own right.

The paradigm shift we are starting to see is in the decline of one-to-many "broadcast" communications methods as an effective voter contact and voter persuasion tool. Mark talked about phones. Phones are especially vulnerable for two reasons.

One, the proliferation of cell phones, Internet telephony and the lack of centralized directories for both begins to limit traditional phone campaign methods to the a diminishingly useful or relevant legacy PoTS (plain old telephone service) universe.

The second factor is linked to the first. The inability to reach additional voters outside the PoTS universe leads to more intense competition for those voters using the tried-and-true methods campaign staff know. This leads to what we saw in 2006 which is the almost complete alienation of voters to any phone contact and utterly diminishing returns on phone contacts.

I believe that by 2012 or so the traditional phone bank and telephone-based voter I.D. campaign techniques will be almost completely shunned by voters and practically useless to campaigns. To which my reaction as a voter is, "Hallelujah!"

I think that what begins to replace these phone-based methods (and other broadcast methods, see below) will be a lot more palatable to voters. In the place of the PUSH of traditional campaigns intruding on our lives will be more of a PULL by voters self-selecting a few campaigns that they would like to be contacted by or to investigate themselves. Campaigns are no more immune to the technoculture change being wroght on the rest of the business world, than any other idustry. They are however, very conservative and risk-averse institutions. I think we will see more Dean-like "break-from-the-back" incidents as insurgent campaigns embrace these models as front-runners/incumbents overlook or dismiss them. Although, it looks to me like both the Edwards and Obama campaign "get it."

What's to get? The hallmark of the new business and marketing paradigm is: decreasing relevance of one-to-many broadcast models of communication and increasing relevance for many-to-many "bazaar of conversations" models. In this case, we can think of a phone bank (or more, precisely the loathed robo-call) as crude broadcast methods. Think of a world where TV and Radio did not exist and phones were the primary means of communications.

This also affects conventional broadcast communications methods. As the TV and radio viewing and listening audiences splinters more and more, as more and more content consumers move away from the traditional one-to-many, time-specific model of TV and radio to time-shifted, commercial skipping recorded consumption, TV and radio advertising buys are, again going to become much less relevant. In fact, it is already starting to look like a lot of campaigns would get more attention from voters if they would just put all the cash they spend on TV and radion and just make a pile of $1 bills and burn it then post the video on YouTube.

We have seen how these trends are going to play out and what forms of campaign communications will replace the legacy methods. Website interactions in a social networking context (e.g. MySpace and MyCandidatename pages -- both the Obama and Edwards campaigns are executing this well. More advertising that is released straight to web. More varieties of advertising. A rising tide of small dollar donations will result in a sort of candidate futures market. Voters will give small amounts early to two, three or more candidates they think are worth seeing more of.

We will also see more reliance on affinity campaigning. Campaigns will encourage staffers and volunteers to spread the word among their affinity groups, be these churches, service clubs, community organizations, or just one's social circle. This begins to produce a large group of self-selected interested voters. Remember the old Breck commercial? "You tell two friends, and they tell two friends..."

What all of this means of course are that the financial barriers to entry get lower and the money race assumes less importance. We will see more and more break-from-the-back candidates-of-the-moment.

DRM House of Sand Begins to Fall

I'm in Cedar Rapids taking care of mom. But do check out the coverage of record label EMI's decision to drop digital rights management (aka DRM, aka "copy protection," aka crippleware) from all songs it sells through the iTunes Music Store.

This comes after Apple CEO, Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry urging them to drop DRM because it does little or nothing to hinder piracy but does a lot to alienate customers.

This story follows the typical technoculture shift cycle of: enabling technology -> market disintermediation -> erosion of traditional business models. The kicker is that since the introduction of the enabling technologies (digital music, compression, broadband Internet) the traditional companies have been fighting their disintermediation tooth and nail, trying to use legislation to turn back the clock. Hence the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to attempt to copy or to even try to figure out how the company goes about preventing copying of music (or videos, or ebooks) that you have paid for.

It has been obvious to everyone except the recording, TV and movie industries that these courses of action were unsustainable. Now, at last we have the first crack in what has heretofore been a solid wall in the entertainment industry with EMI being the first major to cave in. The others will stand on the sidelines and wait and see. But I think that their line will not be able to hold and we will be able to mark this as the beginning of the end of the old entertainment industry. What will replace it will be a new kind of market where customers are trusted and ala carte content becomes a commodity.

Cory Doctrow: Internet Killed the Novel

Cory Doctrow, is one of the leading young SF authors, former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and is currently a lecturer on electronic media at U.C. Berkeley. He is also a contributing editor to BoingBoing the greatest blog on Earth.

In a new article in Locus magazine he predicts the death of the novel as a popular art form -- not its death altogether mind you. Yes, You Do Like Reading Off A Computer Screen. You just don't like reading novels when there is other, more interesting fare to be had--just as you don't spend much time sitting around the campfire listening to a blind poet chant all XXIV books of the Iliad any more:

"I don't like reading off a computer screen" — it's a cliché of the e-book world. It means "I don't read novels off of computer screens" (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It's like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.

But I know what you mean. You don't like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items). But that's not to say that it's not an entertainment medium — indeed, practically everything I do on the computer entertains the hell out of me. It's nearly all text-based, too. Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it's a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it's not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago.

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.

There's a persistent fantasy/nightmare in the publishing world of the advent of very sharp, very portable computer screens. In the fantasy version, this creates an infinite new market for electronic books, and we all get to sell the rights to our work all over again. In the nightmare version, this leads to runaway piracy, and no one ever gets to sell a novel again.

I think they're both wrong. The infinitely divisible copyright ignores the "decision cost" borne by users who have to decide, over and over again, whether they want to spend a millionth of a cent on a millionth of a word — no one buys newspapers by the paragraph, even though most of us only read a slim fraction of any given paper. A super-sharp, super-portable screen would be used to read all day long, but most of us won't spend most of our time reading anything recognizable as a book on them.

Take the record album. Everything about it is technologically pre-determined. The technology of the LP demanded artwork to differentiate one package from the next. The length was set by the groove density of the pressing plants and playback apparatus. The dynamic range likewise. These factors gave us the idea of the 40-to-60-minute package, split into two acts, with accompanying artwork. Musicians were encouraged to create works that would be enjoyed as a unitary whole for a protracted period — think of Dark Side of the Moon, or Sgt. Pepper's.

No one thinks about albums today. Music is now divisible to the single, as represented by an individual MP3, and then subdivisible into snippets like ringtones and samples. When recording artists demand that their works be considered as a whole — like when Radiohead insisted that the iTunes Music Store sell their whole album as a single, indivisible file that you would have to listen to all the way through — they sound like cranky throwbacks.

The idea of a 60-minute album is as weird in the Internet era as the idea of sitting through 15 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen was 20 years ago. There are some anachronisms who love their long-form opera, but the real action is in the more fluid stuff that can slither around on hot wax — and now the superfluid droplets of MP3s and samples. Opera survives, but it is a tiny sliver of a much bigger, looser music market. The future composts the past: old operas get mounted for living anachronisms; Andrew Lloyd Webber picks up the rest of the business.

And attention spans don't increase when you move from the PC to a handheld device. These things have less capacity for multitasking than real PCs, and the network connections are slower and more expensive. But they are fundamentally multitasking devices — you can always stop reading an e-book to play a hand of solitaire that is interrupted by a phone call — and their social context is that they are used in public places, with a million distractions. It is socially acceptable to interrupt someone who is looking at a PDA screen. By contrast, the TV room — a whole room for TV! — is a shrine where none may speak until the commercial airs.

The problem, then, isn't that screens aren't sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren't screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.

The future composts the past. Remember that phrase. You are going to hear it a lot during the rest of your life.

OpenCongress.org: Radical Transparency Whether Congress Wants It Or Not

I've been dying to blog about this site since I saw the beta call back in November. Opencongress.org aims to add much-needed transparency and usable search tools to open the often closed, and intentionally obscure workings of the United States Congress.

It is the first project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, founded by the same people who have launched the Participatory Culture Foundation and it's awesome Democracy Internet TV player. Co-creator David Moore says:

One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress website, Thomas, doesn't do nearly enough to make Congressional information accessible -- meaning that political bloggers didn't have anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn't a way for their readers to get the "big picture" behind an issue. The lack of public knowledge about what's really happening in Congress breeds apathy about political change in general.

OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political insiders and the public by bringing together official government information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org, and more -- to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

I've been on the beta user list and have been noodling around with it since November (December?), and I can tell you it is easy to use to find out what bills are going where. One can quite readily drill down to the excruciating details of bill language; the truly important stuff heretofore knowable and accessible in real-time only by staffers and industry lobbyists who help craft the actual bills.

One of the cooler features are the RSS feeds for the main site blog and for the interest areas that allow headlines to be streamed out to your web browser for quick access to breaking news and events.

Truly, this is a tool that has the potential to realize a lot of the promise that technology trend wonks like me keep spouting about networks and participatory culture. I suggest everyone at least give it a look and bookmark it for future reference.

New Effective Networking Blog

enllc.blogspot.com

I'll probably post the more geek-oriented rants over there. Still will track meta issues of tech and society here though.

The Great "Eureka!" Moment in Cancer Research?

Cancer research has necessarily moved out of the periphery and into a more central role in my attention budget lately. So, I was fascinated to find the following article in The New Scientist today: Cheap 'safe' drug kills most cancers:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

An Open Source miracle, cancer killing drug?! It IS too good to be true!

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

Here's a funny thing. This evening Liam asked me what cancer was and I told him that cancer was when cells got confused about what role they were supposed to be playing in the body and then they run wild causing all kinds of harm to the body and sometimes death. He thought about it and asked, "Will I get cancer?" In a typical parental move to head off any childish worries I said, "No."

"Why not."

"Because in a few years scientists will have discovered how to make the bad cells not take over the body, and basically they will have cured cancer," was my pat response. Appeals to future cure-all tech are a pretty staple part of soothing kids fretfulness about these sorts of things in our house.

But I really had no idea that we might be curing cancer, like right now. Amazing. Long way to go yet though. If you are interested in following the trials or donating to help the trials begin, follow the link at the beginning of the article to the U. of Alberta and Alberta Cancer Board.

Update: 2.22.07, 0730: Dr. Len of the National Cancer Institute wieghs in with a bit more detail, and with the right amount of caution.

How The Web Is Changing Us

This video from the Digital Ethnography Department at Kansas State University sums up how technology is changing everything.

Internet Founder: One Quarter of World Comptuers Part of Botnet

Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week in which he states that the number of computers participating in a bot network is much larger than estimated. In fact, he asserts that his research shows that of the approximately 600 million computers attached to the internet, 150 million may be infected. Cerf says that almost all of these victims are unwitting, "in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to."

Bots, for those of you who don't know, are a species of malware that do not actively do anything to the host machine. The exist, much like a sleeper spy, quietly on the host until they are issued a command by a central control. Then they leap into action, working to distribute spam or coordinate distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).

What is the purpose of botnets? Profit, of course. Once a person controls thousands or millions of "little beige friends" then they can be coordinated to deliver goods and services to the nefarious. Botnets have been behind the significant increase in spam over the last few months. Flooded with penny stock offers? Thank the botnets.

These botnets can generate astonishing amounts of network traffic, possibly up to 10-20 Gigabytes per second, that can take down any individual domain or even an entire service provider. Many security vendors are now warning that botnets pose a significant security risk to national government and commercial networks.

Solution? Education of users about proper network usage. Investment in proper security software -- there is no such thing as free security. Vigilance and not treating security issues as a ho-hum affair.

Exciting New Pandemic Makes SARS Look Like Flu

From the Guardian: The dilemma of a deadly disease: patients may be forcibly detained.

The country's health department says it has discussed with the World Health Organisation and South Africa's leading medical organisations the possibility of placing carriers of extreme drug resistant TB or XDR-TB under guard in isolation wards until they die, but has yet to reach a decision.

More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa.

But doctors believe there have been hundreds, possibly thousands, more and the numbers are growing among the millions of people with HIV, who are particularly vulnerable to the disease. Their fear is that patients with XDR-TB, told that there is little that can be done for them, will leave the isolation wards and go home to die. But while they are still walking around they risk spreading the infection.

Excuse me? TWO WEEKS?! 98% Lethal?! Charming. Sounds like some kind of 12 Monkeys, sci-fi, apocalyptic plotline. Good thing the entire world is descending upon South Africa in three years for the next World Cup.

Radical Transparency in Journalism

Over at Wired they are starting to practice what they preach in the radical transparency experiment preached by Chris Anderson. Clive Thompson posts his thoughts and asks for comments prior to beginning work on a story on... "Radical Transparency." He is looking for examples of:

The curiously quotidian, everyday ways that life is being tweaked -- and improved -- by people voluntarily becoming more open. That includes: Clubhoppers hooking up with each other by listing their locations in real-time on Dodgeball; mining company CEOs making billions (billions!) by posting their geologic data online and getting strangers to help them find gold; Dan Rather's audience fact-checking his work and discovering that crucial parts of his reporting evidence are faked; sci-fi author Cory Doctorow selling more of his print books by giving e-copies away for free...

Specifically, he says he is working on the following general guiding principles of radical transparency.

Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there's more of it than you can possibly grok on your own -- and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don't bother trying. You'll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead ...

Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you've got online, and invite the world to look at it. They'll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you. You'll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare ... but now it's so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that ...

Reputation Is Everything: Google isn't a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas -- and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling -- and, most of all, linking -- has transformed the Internet into a world where it's incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it's better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let's say you don't want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they'll find ... everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you've said yourself. (Again -- just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there -- your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.

High Def DVD Format Wars: As Goes the Porn Industry

Oh, what the heck. Mote technology news.

It is Beta vs. VHS redux in the fight for dominance in high definition DVD formats. In this corner we have Sony, once again, with the higher quality but more expensive Blu-Ray format. In the other, is HD DVD a product of Toshiba labs and supported by the the trade industry, DVD Forum.

This story pretty much writes itself. But it does get better. Just as in the Beta-VHS wars of the 1970's and 80's, the multibillion dollar porn industry will get the first and most influential vote. But this time, Sony may have taken themselves out of the running altogether. Rumor has it that Sony has vowed to pull the license of any replication house that goes... um, blue.

At last week's Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas (which coincidentally -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- runs alongside the Consumer Electronics Expo), the opinion was nearly unanimous that HD DVD would be the way the industry is going.

Studios cited Blu-ray's expense, a dearth of replication houses and market share as the key drivers. "Blu-ray has superior quality, yes," said a spokesperson for porn outfit Bangbros, "but HD DVD is easier to produce, cheaper to produce and there are more HD DVD players in homes than there are Blu-ray players, for example in the Xbox 360.”

But there may be something more at work. Adult movie producer Digital Playground says it's going with HD DVD because Sony won't allow XXX movies on Blu-ray and will lift the license of any replicator who goes astray. Interestingly, last spring Digital Playground was vocal in its support of Blu-ray for its greater capacity and its presence in the PlayStation 3 game console, so whatever it ran up against must have been a serious deal-breaker. There's no confirmation that Sony is in fact enforcing a no-smut policy, but if it is, Sony must know it's putting itself at a disadvantage. How much of a disadvantage is open to question. Porn's influence vs. other market factors may be overestimated to begin with, and these days the most convenient access to dirty movies is online rather than in the curtained back room of the DVD rental store. For the time being, this race remains too close to call.

Microsoft Vista: Run, Don't Walk Away

Ahh, insomnia. When I suffer, the readers win.

We've been playing around a little bit with the Vista beta at work. But, best machine we had to run it on, a HP dc220 with a Pentium 4 - 2.8 GHz processor, 1GB PC-2300 SDRAM and built-in Intel video would not run the Aqu... um, Aero Glass interface.

The hardware requirements for the full Vista interface are daunting, especially for corporate customers. The Enterpries Hardware Plan requires a 1GHz or better processor, 1GB of RAM and a minimum 128MB dedicated video card. Most corporate PC's ship with video on the motherboard which shares the system RAM.

But the most disturbing thing about Vista to date are the extreme measures Mister Softee has gone to do make sure that you don't do anything with your computer the record and movie industries don't approve of.

Peter Guttman, a security researcher has dug into the innards of Vista and exactly how it keeps you from doing what you want with your computer. He has written a detailed analysis of the digital rights management features of Vista and has concluded that The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the
longest suicide note in history.. A bit of this article is below. (Sorry for the funky line breaks. I couldn't be bothered to fix them at 1:45 a.m.)

However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry
wishes it were possible [Note C]. This conundrum is displayed over and over
again in the Windows content-protection requirements, with manufacturers being
given no hard-and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need
to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The
documentation is peppered with sentences like:

"It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter
of the specification and provide additional content-protection features,
because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content".

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent
over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in.
Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF
(Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Most newer audio cards, for example,
feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction,
and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at
least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide
any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing
protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money
into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be
able to use it with protected content.

Say you've just bought Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon", released as a
Super Audio CD (SACD) in its 30th anniversary edition in 2003, and you want to
play it under Vista. Since the S/PDIF link to your amplifier/speakers is
regarded as insecure for playing the SA content, Vista disables it, and you
end up hearing a performance by Marcel Marceau instead of Pink Floyd.

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content
protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component
video. What if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports
HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that
you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really *does* support
HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually
supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did. As the
site that first broke the story put it in their article "The Great HDCP
Fiasco" (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/) puts
it:

"None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP
[...] If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards
expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920x1080
resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money [...] If you just
spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play
1920x1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your
money".

(The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards
made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia). ATI was
later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception.
As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it
had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually
play Blu-Ray disks in HD format ("First Blu-ray disc drive won't play Blu-ray
movies",
http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/dvdburners/0,239029405,240091720,00.htm):

"Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that
support HDCP, this isn't yet possible".

limination of Open-source Hardware Support
-------------------------------------------

In order to prevent the creation of hardware emulators of protected output
devices, Vista requires a Hardware Functionality Scan (HFS) that can be used
to uniquely fingerprint a hardware device to ensure that it's (probably)
genuine. In order to do this, the driver on the host PC performs an operation
in the hardware (for example rendering 3D content in a graphics card) that
produces a result that's unique to that device type.

In order for this to work, the spec requires that the operational details of
the device be kept confidential. Obviously anyone who knows enough about the
workings of a device to operate it and to write a third-party driver for it
(for example one for an open-source OS, or in general just any non-Windows OS)
will also know enough to fake the HFS process. The only way to protect the
HFS process therefore is to not release any technical details on the device
beyond a minimum required for web site reviews and comparison with other
products.

This potential "closing" of the PC's historically open platform is an
extremely worrying trend. A quarter of a century ago, IBM made the momentous
decision to make their PC an open platform by publishing complete hardware
details and allowing anyone to compete on the open market. Many small
companies, the traditional garage startup, got their start through this.

Including Microsoft itself.

This
openness is what created the PC industry, and the reason why most homes
(rather than just a few offices, as had been the case until then) have one or
more PCs sitting in a corner somewhere. This seems to be a return to the bad
old days of 25 years ago when only privileged insiders were able to
participate.

And on and on... More follows on the hideous CPU overhead required to maintain the security of the playback stream; such as when idle checking the system every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is happening.

I believe that MS is going to experience a tremendous amount of blowback at the consumer level. Maybe not so much at the corporate level. Large corporate customers will be happy with the new deployment and imaging tools and will be content to dial-down the user experience. And of course all those "content protection features" will help make sure that no one is playing DVD's or CD's on the company dime.

And it won't happen right away. No, it will be a year or so down the road, after millions of copies are sold pre-loaded on new comuputers and HDCP and Blu-Ray equipment and content begin to enter the market en masse. Then, as people realize (courtesy of people like me after they bring them to the shop to be "fixed" because they won't play DVDs) that Microsoft has crippled their PC and made their investment in expensive equipment and entertainment worthless... Then it will be torches and pitchforks time.

Norton Ghost Sucks

If you are ever looking for a system backup package and find yourself in a retail outlet looking at Norton Ghost, run do not walk away. I am now at the store fixing my system that has been FUBARED by Ghost for the second time in 6 months.

Also avoid the Maxtor One-Touch backups with Retrospect bundled. Retrospect is another venerable old product that now blows.

I've had a couple of good experiences with Acronis TrueImage 10 and think that's where I'll go next.

The Future Of News In Clinton?

Both on the blog and in my professional life I talk a lot about how technology doesn't just allow us to make huge transformations in our economic and social circumstances, technology demands those changes. The modalities of these changes center around a few central theories and movements:

• The wisdom of crowds


• Radical transparency


• Open source culture

Each of these ideas on their own are subjects worthy of books and journal articles. And they exist. Next to each is a link providing a Wikipedia entry as a place to begin. I'll continue to write and speak on them. But I think it is time for action.

One of the hallmarks of 21st Century Technoculture should be strong, participatory communities not only at the global and/or special-interest level, e.g. MySpace and say, model railroaders, but at the local level as well. After all, what good does it do one to have rich, interactive, global, technologically-mediated experiences and relationships if one’s meatspace existence -- the place of living and breathing -- are devoid of any cohesion, organization or community spirit? Better to bring to bear the tools of the global macro- technoculture to bear on the needs of the microculture of Clinton, Iowa.

Now, Clinton has at least two or three pretty active discussion forums. One is hosted by The Clinton Herald and the other by a private person at www.clintoniowa.com. These forums allow for all sorts of discussion on local topics and sometimes even expand on and add to news stores and allow people to build on shared experience. But one of the drawbacks of bulletin boards is that they often descend into bickering and name-calling.

The bulletin boards could be home to original reporting but by their very technological structure they lack cooperative editing tools and a friendly display format for articles.

The local newspaper, The Clinton Herald, as are all newspapers today, a holdout of a previous technoculture. The idea of a news organization that painstakingly crafts its stories once per day and then manufactures and distributes them on dead trees, frozen in that printed form until the paper molders is totally inappropriate on many levels for the 21st Century.

News is slippery stuff. The idea of a news story, frozen for all time on ink on paper is a product of the 18th Century manufacturing processes that brought us the newspaper in the first place. News stories insist by their very nature that they be annotated, corrected, added on to, and collaboratively assembled.

So, in the spirit of brining 21st Century technoculture to bear on the needs of Clinton, Iowa I propose the following little experiment, an open-source news portal for Clinton powered by Wikinews. Behold the Clinton Wikinews Portal!



Okay, it’s not much. But that’s where you come in. For everyone who has ever bitched about the local news coverage in insert name of media organization here, now is your chance. Know the whole sordid back-story of whatever is going on at the Humane Society? Want more meat on City Council goings on? Need an excuse to go to all Clinton High School basketball games?

Then go forth and report. Gather some facts. Facts, for certain of my bulletin board friends, are provable assertions backed up by more than one source and documentable. See the Wikinews article on Writing An Article. Talk to some people, write a story, check your spelling and grammar and post it.

Only have a few facts to contribute? Post a story in development and let other people put meat on the bones of your story. Find a factual error in a story, correct it yourself.

All of this and more is possible through the technology of the Wiki, the software platform running behind Wikipedia. It is a signature of our early 21st Century technoculture; open-source, transparent, shapeable by the masses.

This is an experiment. Is there enough interest and ability for people to report and analyze the goings on in a town of 27,000? Can it be done in such a way to provide additional information and quality that is not available from the local newspaper? Theoretically, because of space and financial constraints the Clinton Herald will never be able to have the breadth and depth of an active user-generated news site. But the question is, can people be motivated to create their own local news in a town the size of Clinton?

That’s what I aim to find out. I think this project is the perfect vehicle for journalism students and teachers at all levels. No longer chained to budgets for ink and paper, budding young muckrakers are free to go forth to write and report and practice their craft. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reaching out to those of you in the business of teaching writing and journalism. If anyone is going to fully embrace this tool from the get-go it will need to be young aspiring writers.

Later in the week, I will post some links on tips for getting started with Wiki news. It is pretty straightforward and there is a minimum of coding needed in order to post stories. Many of the functions can be accomplished with the press of a button in the editing window.

In the meantime, anyone who is interested in contributing and helping with this project should feel free to contact me at cman@cman.cx

Until then, I’ll close this last post of 2006 with Hunter S. Thompson’s famous tag line: Res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.

Happy New Year.

Google Takes Over The World!

The big tech news over the last day or so is Google buying YouTube for $1.65BN. Certainly a big, fat, hairy deal in the media world and for the future of media disintermediation, as discussed recently.

But lost in that blockbuster M&A activity is the refinement of an older Google service, online word processing and spreadsheets. Google has had free to use word processor called Writely for many months now. No application needs to be installled on the computer and files can be stored online or on the local PC. This week they have added an olnine spreadsheet and opened docs.google.com for business. Search Engine Watch wraps it up but Barry Ritholtz asks the important questions:

Three questions about this:

1) How easily is it to integrate Excel -- a desktop app -- into the website versus a internet-based spreadsheet?

2) Have these free web based apps evolved to the point where they are a legitimate competitor to Excel?

3) How much share can this steal?

This is a far more refined app than I previously perceived it to be . . .

To which I respond in the comments:

Let's look at your questions.

1. If you noticed when you were playing with it, one can import and export not only from .xls formats but also other common file formats. I uploaded a cash-flow statement on multiple sheets here. So, the answer this question is: pretty easy.

2. At the basic and middling-advanced levels -- which is the core competency level of about 80% of the people using these apps -- it looks feature comparable. I don't see pivot tables and graphs... yet. But again, for basic stuff like budgets, pro-formas, schedules and simple statistical analysis it looks pretty good in comparison to Excel.

3. Let's look at Mister Softee's pricing on Office 2003:
Office Student and Teacher (Academic Only) $149.00
Office Basic (OEM Only) $184.00
Office Standard (Lowest Cost Retail) $399.00
Office Professional $499.0o

Google Office: Free.

That said, the Open Office Project has offered a feature-complete, very compatible with Office free desktop suite for more than three years now. The 2.0 release is very good performance-wise on newer hardware. Yet OO (and StarOffice, the Sun Microsystems non-free version for Sun OS) only have about 14% of the enterprise market.

On the third hand. Google has cachet. The Google apps are absurdly easy to use and do not require a download or install. I think this kind of thing just sends big shivers down the spine of Mister Softee.

Bill Gates Will Burn In Hell Pt. 2

Heck, its only been eight-and-a-half months since the last time I had to spend several days dicking around with Windows. So, I don't know why I feel so violated having to restore a system that seems to be have been perversely FUBARed by my backup software!

I have a bunch of cool things I want to write on 4th Generation War and nattering nabobs of negativity but all is in abeyance until I get the home PC sorted.

I'll tell yout this much. This is my next computer.

Hmm, 17-inch or 20-inch?