He entered. The last ever retail-clerk left on earth. A wide smile on his face, from years of practice, a swing in his step from his regular work-outs. All part of the routine.

The camera-system, also the lighting system of the place, followed his every step—one tiny camera in every tiny light-bulb, giving combined resolutions beyond that of any screens in use today and filming whatever was in the store with more dimensions than the holographic output to date would require. As he reached the music-rack, the one closest to the door, the one most geared towards impulse buying, he passed the security threshold and the system was forced to react—was he an intruder or an insider? Always a fun game to play with this flaky system… He passed the test and personalised systems started turning on all around him.

It started with the music-rack, a 50 metre (150 feet) long pathway surrounded by holograms of artists’ heads performing—sometimes in group-form, if it was a band—and tiny beams triggering the sub-dermal speakers behind his ears to play a song, just right for his mood and of course just out in the charts that week. He sometimes felt he was his best customer, because he rarely left that isle without purchasing at least one song. Another credit down from his, well , limitless credits that he could spend on these things. One thing caught his eye, the Beatles hologram was slightly off-colour, the yellows not quite as yellow as they should be. He knew banging the holographic projector would only make it worse, so he made a mental note to call the mechanic, who could probably calibrate it from his home office.

Next up, the movie isle. He loved how movies had evolved over the years to become a hybrid of a blockbuster movie with great effects, a great story-line that was essentially limitless and could be changed by the viewer as he or she consumed the movie. The movie isle was a mini-experience of such a thing, also targeting his past taste, his current mood, as well as plenty of other variables of course. The result was that as he moved onto the platform, he saw Disney-bunnies playing in the grass around him, and walked along a couple of prehistoric hunters in their furry outfits with, in the distance, their attractive female mates waving at them and cheering as they got closer. He could smell the food as he drew closer, another marketing gimmick, and he was happy that after this came the food isle.

At this point, it should be said the last retail store in the world (also the name of the store) was in fact a great big mall. The difference to other stores that came before? It was run by a single man and everything else was automated or remote-controlled. A consumer would enter and would first be entertained through music and movies, and could then choose to fulfil his primal needs: food, hygiene, etc. The second-smallest section in this store that had everything was the electronics section. People basically had electronics implanted into their bodies or they ran everything off a terminal. There was no hardware differentiation, everything had already been invented, and every software could run on the hardware that people owned from the day they became an adult or when their parents gave them permission. The smallest section of this store was the payment area, in that there was none. Why pay when every credit you need is stored on your person and you can just swipe the product you want and get it?

The clerk had said his goodbyes to the women in his personal film and started down the food isle. Again, a moving platform, on which he could sit this time, with choices flicking across the tables next to him, sushi-style, until he identified his favourite, grabbed it, and munched it down. The platform, measuring his progress and seeing that there were no impatient customers trying to get by, basically came to a standstill, allowing him to eat and enjoy.

This was a typical start of the day and arguably he had the best job in the world. The rest of the time would be spent on support, on dealing with customers that “didn’t get it,” take care of the technical issues that arose even in his technology heaven, and, even, doing some sales, though that was highly unlikely with the kind of data computers already had on consumers, making every product suggestion the perfect one.

The clerk didn’t care where his customers came from or where they went, but he suspected that they lived very much like he did, in an overcrowded apartment block with a big postal area designed specifically to receive all the UPS shipments people ordered online or in his store (mail and those inferior small postal boxes were out-innovated years ago).

The first customer came in and he smiled in anticipation of having to do absolutely nothing, while the customer spent at least 20% of his disposable income that month. Typically, people only came in once a month, if ever, just to get that personal, immersive touch that systems at home and elsewhere would never be able to replicate.

Welcome to the last retail store on earth.

This story was inspired by a recent Macworld article on comic stores vs. iTunes, my blogging on food and retail, and thinking about the future of the physical retail store. Pictures courtesy of the movies “Clerks” and “Thomas in Love.”

Prefer to have me blog in fantasy format? Let me know and I’ll continue to do so!

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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5. The role of the internet for the retail of *physical* goods.

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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If you’re interested in what’s in the pipeline technology-wise in the coming decades be sure to read this report. As previously mentioned, this report is a compilation of articles written by the PhD students of Aalto University (previously Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and University of Art and Design Helsinki).

The topics include

• Future of IT and hardware
• Future of Telecommunication and Networks
• Printed electronics and nanotechnology
• Future of Media
• Future of Living
• Future of Globalization
• Robotics and artificial intelligence

Also, in the appendix is a small diary of our meetings in Silicon Valley.

Normally these kind of reports would cost thousand of euros, but thanks to the Finnish educational system you can get the report right here for free (PDF; 2MB).

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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3. 2 resolutions for 2007: visit a cluster of innovation every year & brush up my programming skills
4. Yet another trip to Silicon Valley?
5. Poll: Decide the future of Tech IT Easy (my part in it, at least)

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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5. The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

To me, the most interesting technologies were 3D and a massage chair that took me under for 20 min. The biggest news story, however, was USB 3.0, a sad state of affairs if 2010 is marked by a tiny, soon to be in every computer, plug (no matter how fast that damn thing is).

Ignoring the massage chair, which I can’t recommend enough, 3D was the hot topic, inspired by, of course, Avatar. Everybody, from Nokia to Nvidia, appeared to have something related to 3D. They mostly had excuses for it—Nokia was pimping its high bandwidth infrastructure for 3D content aimed at TV & telephone providers; Nvida was pimping its 3D shutter technology for consumer PCs; Frauenhofer Institut was pimping its glasses-less 3D technology; and more and more and more—but my end-conclusion, also after trying to explore the potential for a revolution that was Avatar, was that 3D is an excellent gimmick that will draw a crowd to your stand or cinema, but will leave you disappointed 2/3 times.

Ironically, Nokia had the most impressive display of 3D, showing it off on a 15,000 euro JVC flatscreen. When asked for details, however, all they could tell me was the price of the TV and that their bandwidth technology was not for sale to the “likes of me.” Very arrogant, those Nokia folk and it wasn’t just the 3D guy either… Nvidia’s shutter glasses also worked well and I see a real potential for 3D gaming. Frauenhofer’s glasses-less 3D-TV… pah! The problem with 3D is that it’s so easy to do it badly and 3D without glasses is far from ready. 3D with glasses is far from ready!

I don’t get the obsession with not wearing glasses either. First of all, they’re roomy, which means that you can wear them over existing glasses, they won’t make the claustrophobic more claustrophobic, and they’re disposable. Putting on glasses in the living room is kind of like turning off the light when watching TV.

Last, but not least, I liked lcReflex, which developed an interesting, if not very portable contraption, that makes applications on a computer screen three-dimensional. It involves something they call a Stereomonitor, two screens joined together at a 90 degree angle (one front-facing, one on top facing down) and a semi-transparent mirror in the middle. Put on glasses and you can manipulate an image of brain in 3 dimensions, which should be very interesting for, eh, brain-scientists and playing 3D Tetris.

What’s fairly clear is that we are very close to having 3D in our living rooms, whether it’s for playing games or for watching (selected) TV-shows and movies. But 3D has the same problem that HD-DVDs and -TVs have, which is that it’s insanely niche. You can’t play everything on it and you need some pretty expensive equipment to play it. That combination doesn’t justify much of an investment in it.

The best chances for success belong to companies like Nvidia, which produce consumer-priced solutions for consuming content. Add to this that it is (relatively speaking) fairly easy to convert digital content from 2D to 3D. I very much see the next stage of gaming to becoming 3D.

I’m much more bearish on video-media. Great that cinemas have found a new revenue stream to subsidise their troubled existence. Great that 7 out of 10 filmmakers are considering to make their next film in 3D. I don’t think cinemas have to worry about living rooms competing with them on that level anytime soon. While the need for a big screen to enjoy 3D is a myth well-worth breaking (and it soon will be in gaming), it is still a powerful way to experience a movie and something you can sell at €/$ 15 a pop. Home-entertainment still has the expensive technology problem and the fact that BluRay DVDs simply aren’t selling to anyone except Playstation 3 owners.

As mentioned, 3D’s gimmick power is strong, but that will wear off after having 3D technology in your living room and hardly any media to consume on it. It’s much better off in cinemas where the growing few pay a few bucks more to see space debris floating above their heads, or on consoles where the price of a 3D add-on is hardly more than buying a Guitar Hero guitar.

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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1. How Technology has pushed us into a Zone that is neither Real nor Unreal
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I still wonder if in a hypothetical scenario when every book and publication is digitized into an e-book and every reader only uses his gadgets to read the digital content instead of having a printed version on a paper. Will this be a much Greener situation to one we have right now? There are  views and opinions prevalent in media which are more of equivocal nature. E-readers aren’t typically marketed as environmentally sound, but their environmental impact is now becoming a topic of discussion and research.

Point of Views : Expert’s View on e-Readers

At least Don Carli doesn’t thinks so, according to him e-Readers aren’t Greener than print (which is a common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory of evolution of an e-Reader ). Actually few days back I had an opportunity to read an interview with Don Carli on News Media Innovation, Convergence and Sustainability.

As far as print media is concerned it could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones all have a cost of operation, cost of manufacturing and cost of disposal. When Compared directly to the book, a Kindle produces 168 kilograms of carbon dioxide compared to 7.46 kilograms for a book.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Point of Views : CleanTech Research based on Scientific Evidences.

Another interesting survey report from CleanTech Group which published the report based on life cycle analysis of a Kindle e-Reader. The research and media company drew on existing studies to do a lifecycle analysis and found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are far lower than traditional book publishing.

As reported  in the analysis, “The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books over the life of the device,”.

Finding a conclusion to this article seems difficult:

eReaders are capturing media attention and there appears to be significant latent demand for gadgets that can replace printed media, but mainstream adoption still remains years away. E-reader device sales and eReader content revenues are still rounding error in relation to print media revenues. In a survey of attendees at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 40% predicted digital book content sales would overtake traditional printed book sales by 2018, but over 30% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales, and 66% said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

With universities like Princeton and six others already testing the technology in a pilot, I hope e-Readers will make their way to schools and workplaces  replacing traditional paper books. Ultimately, it comes down to how an e-reader is used. If a person continues to buy books and print periodicals and doesn’t recycle the product, the environmental impact could potentially be negative.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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I’m not trying to provoke you by being so dismissive of flash, even though I feel a lot of people really really hate how the iPad turned out. I am only writing out of my own current and past context and reserving final judgement until it’s in my hands.

My context is several. I was born into an age when there weren’t any personal computers. As a matter of fact, Apple had only just been conceived when I was born. I grew up without computers, until I got a toy Amiga at 13, and a very buggy 1st PC at 15. It ran DOS mostly and crashed a lot in Windows 3.1. I mention this because people in my generation suffer from a curse. We were forced to learn a zillion crappy commands as teens, which made our parents and family members consider us computer geniusses and not a week goes by when I don’t get at least 1 question about a bug in a computer. Last week, I spent maybe 5 hours trying to get a Wifi card to communicate with an Internet radio, I will have to set up skype VOIP at my parents’ house this year and who knows what else.

My no. 2 reason for getting an iPad? To give it to my parents and save me future headaches (knock on wood).

My no. 1 reason is different. Last December, my MacBook was lost on a train. I’m using an older MacBook from work at the moment and digging this iPod Touch a lot. In many ways I do more on the Touch now. It has its flaws of course, and no it has nothing to do with “openness” or flash. The screen is too small and there are times (less than you would think) where I need a physical keyboard.

So picture my context. I travel a fair amount, I think the MacBook is not always neccessary but the Touch/iPhone is not always enough. The Touch meets my casual gaming needs (serious games, that’s what consoles are built for), it kind of meets my wordprocessing needs (still typing on the Touch …). So why on earth, for that price, wouldn’t I want an iPad?

Truth be told, I was considering getting a sleek MacBook Pro to replace my lost MacBook. But for years, I’ve secretely lusted after a shiny iMac as well, never being able to justify having both a laptop and a desktop. The iPad is not a standalone PC. It needs to be synced with one (every week or so). But it also gives me a chance not not restrict computing to a small 13-15″ screen and buy a “real” computer so that makes sense to me.

In my UNIQUE context, the iPad makes sense. In my less unique context regarding my parents, it makes sense. 2010 is hopefully a year of less computing headaches and more of just getting things done.

the end
Vincent

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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Generating the electricity needed to power those computers requires hundreds of power plants that produce billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Many of those machines sit idle for 12 to 16 hours per day, burning electricity, but not doing any work, because businesses habitually leave their computers running overnight.So how much does this one click matters? Here is an awesome report published by Harris Interactive some time back.

Some Numbers Worth Understanding

A mid-sized company with nearly 10000 PCs,  wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight. By turning these computers off, an employer can keep more than 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere.  Across the nation(read USA), this adds up to more than $1.72 billion dollars and almost 15 million tons of CO2 . When calculated using EPA’s  Green House Calculator the emitted Carbon is equivalent to  Annual CO2 emissions of  4  coal fired power plants.

As of April 2007,  145,800,000 Americans have full-time jobs. 72 percent of all employed adults regularly use a PC for work purposes at their jobs. Combining these findings suggests that more than 104 million workers reach the end of the work day with a PC to shut off—or not to. Next most important things is to analyse the reason for this type of behavior from the office goers.

Workers Attitudes behind this Wastage:

In an enterprise like situation, when asked whose responsibility it should be to save energy in the workplace, 28 percent of PC users said it should be down to management or the IT department. More than half (53 percent) said they were not at all concerned about their companies’ carbon footprints, indicating that effecting change in “shut down” practices at the behavioral level might yield disappointing results.

Making Business Out of IT:

Almost all the industries (be it mid or large sized) are facing similar challenges of harnessing maximum output with minimum power and infrastructural expenditures. And with global recession the idea of Cost cuttings also include supervised use of Power and Infrastructures in the enterprises and commercial centers. No  company likes to waste money. On the surface, the financial impact of 24-hour computer power consumption may seem insignificant compared to traditional concerns such as payroll, supply, and rent—but the waste is actually substantial. A few important findings from enterprise point of view :

• Energy costs—typically 10 percent of the corporate technology budget—could rise to as much as 50 percent in the next few years.
• If not exaggerating, a good  Power management software can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 80 percent, allowing companies to save between $25 – $75 per desktop PC.
• Turning off PCs, with their heat-intensive power supplies, will also reduce the load on air conditioning equipment, leading to even more energy savings.

If you are working in/for an enterprise, its your responsibility to turn off/hibernate  your PC when you are not working. On the funnier side, Gary Hird, IT strategy manager at UK retailer, John Lewis, says “I joined the company in 1989 and one of the first things I noticed was that every light switch had a sticker next to it, reading ‘switch off, you’re burning my bonus” .

But on a Serious Note “It takes between 60 and 300 trees to absorb the yearly CO2 emissions generated by a single PC left on 24 hours a day. That means it would take between 1.24 and 6.24 billion trees to absorb the emissions caused by the nation’s office computers that are never shut down.”

Take one step towards being Green, try to hibernate the PC whenever possible.

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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This application brings environmental information closer to the world’s citizens. By simply entering a city name, the amount of greenhouse gases released since 1970 can be visualized. In addition, the main sources of GHG emissions in the year 2005 can be identified: industries (fuel combustion, process and waste emissions in energy and manufacturing industries); transport (road, rail, shipping); residential fuel combustion and waste handling; and agriculture.

As in my last post Jeremy pointed out  “the environmental footprint of their premises, logistics and supply chain, paper and ink consumption, utility consumptions (water, electricity,…), transportation and travels, waste, etc. must also be a point of concern”. Using this application we can definitely get a better view to the complete picture.

How to Use the Application:

• Install Google Earth

• Downloaded EDGAR GHG viewer 2005

Once you have installed Google Earth, install EDGAR GHG viewer and restart the application. Its just a matter of some clicks. I was really excited to see it for the first time. I am attaching a few snapshots that I took today morning. Try it yourself, you will understand how grave the scene is atleast in Europe, China, India  and USA.

Snapshot 1 – US of A.                                                           Snapshot 2 – Europe and Middle East with Africa

Snapshot 3 : Asia.

Representations : The data presented here covers carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorcarbons (HFCs), perfluorcarbons (PFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). In order to compare different greenhouse gas emissions the emissions of individual gases have to be converted into CO2-equivalents. The Green Areas of Map has 0.00 -0.10 G equivalent of CO2 and Black/Blue spots are worst affected areas with or more 250 G equivalent of CO2 .

Personally, I hope this modeled simulation of World Wide GHG emissions will help a lot of people involved in Carbon Foot printing or planning to join the Green movement world wide. Let me know your ideas and reviews about this. The data sets are also available for download (free ) at the link.

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First, the 3D experience. I’m afraid I didn’t like it very much from where I was sitting. And that I learned is one of the keys to watching a 3D flick, you have to experience it just right.

A couple of thoughts on the human experience: You have to wear glasses, you have to sit in the right place, and no one can pass the screen to go to the bathroom or else all is destroyed.

• The glasses: there are generally 2 types of glasses used in 3D cinema, active ones with shutter technology, and passive ones, which are just like regular, slightly over-sized sunglasses. I used the latter. Having biked for 30 min. at full speed just to get to the cinema on time (that’s how geeky I am about this), I found that sweat really didn’t agree with these glasses. The cinema provided me with one of those alcohol drenched tissues, but that definitely didn’t last me through the two+ hour movie. For the rest, I found them a little dark and the image without them was a lot clearer, though of course not meant for regular 2D viewing.
• Sitting just right: so I arrived to a packed cinema, meaning that I had to sit bottom-center-right and also that I have to try to see the movie again in a more empty cinema. To me the viewing experience definitely seemed sub-par and I will have to research optimal placement prior to seeing my next 3D movie.
• Other people’s bladders: so a couple of things disrupted the experience: my seating position, the subtitles, and people passing the 3D screen to go to the bathroom. The latter seemed to disrupt the image physically with the light of the entire image actually changing, and my thought is that they must have disrupted the beamer in some way. And while the subtitles seemed to float as much as the rest of the objects (see next paragraphs), they took away from the illusion of staring into a wonderful 3D world at times.

Generally, I think that Avatar should actually be viewed in an IMAX theater, which has a far larger screen and is designed for 3D, and not a regular cinema converted to 3D, which seems to be all the rage these days. And while dubbed movies kind of suck, I think it may be a better choice for people like me residing in a non-English country.

THE BIG QUESTION: So how was the actual 3D? Apart from the qualms I mentioned, actually pretty interesting! A few years ago, I watched Superman Returns at an IMAX, which required me to put and take my 3D glasses on and off as a green or red symbol appeared on screen and that sucked. But for Avatar, I could keep the glasses on all the time.

The 3D itself wasn’t the pop-out kind either, rather it was like you were looking into a window at 3D objects. In one scene, Sam Worthington’s character was exploring the alien jungle and looking at some exquisite flowers and it felt to me like I was standing opposite him looking at the same objects, which was nothing short of amazing!

I liked 3D a lot in slow scenes like this, but fast scenes such as battles were a little harder to follow. Cameron tells one hell of a story though, which drew you into the picture regardless.

Topic 2: Motion capture
The actual revolution that this movie is supposed to herald is the new kind of motion capture used, called performance capture. As far as I understand it, it allows for a few innovations in film making: accurately capturing face movement, having real characters interact realistically with virtual ones, and, for the camera person, seeing in realtime the result of the performance capture through the camera’s viewfinder.

THE BIG QUESTION: did it work? Hell yes!!! You notice it first with the female antagonist, Neytiri played by Zoe Saldaña (I had no idea!), who is completely “performance captured,” and whom you fall in love with within a few minutes. Her face shows an amazing range of emotions, from anger to joy, that demands an emotional response from the viewer. The last time I found myself infatuated with a virtual character was in King Kong, where I felt real sympathy with this fantastical character that Peter Jackson brought to screen.

Topic 3: the environmental message (limited spoilers ahead!)
Yes, one of the strongest themes of this movie was preserving a planet, respecting it’s inhabitants, both plant and creature. It was very powerful, I thought, but some people may consider it as preachy.

The problem with this message is that following it would require us to abandon 99% of our technology and return to a lifestyle more connected with nature and I’m very sceptical that this could ever happen, certainly not in time for this century’s crisis.

What Avatar manages to show is that the human race, through it’s relentless need for progress and profit, will always end up destroying that which exists in order to create something new. Avatar condemns our race to a “dying planet” and it can’t send a sadder message than that.

In Conclusion:
Above all, Avatar is an Action and Sci-Fi flick, and a good one at that, but it also makes you think, which many of Cameron’s movie seem to do. Definitely a re-watch for me, both on the silver and the small screen.

Rating: 7/10

Vincent
(p.s. minus the added formatting and picture just now, this post was written on an iPod Touch, forever dispelling my notion that typing on a touch screen is impossible. It did lead to some typos & grammar errors, mostly caused by it’s 95% useful predictive spelling engine.)

The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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Yes, we have all been busy doing things like moving to different countries and continents, starting companies, starting and changing jobs. I think Cecil is even well on his way to becoming a e2.0 authority, and judging by Fidji Simo’s tweets, I think she’s developing herself into an expert in retail—on-, off-, and hybrid forms. And that is amazing news and exactly what I always wanted from Tech IT Easy—a “workforce” that is productive outside of Tech IT Easy and contributes to its members’ lives on- and offline as well.

Which is why I still encourage anyone interested in technology and its commercialisation to join us, to develop and contribute their thoughts and expertise!

All that aside, what more can I wish for our readers and bloggers on this Christmas day? For one, I wish for a better 2010 and I am 100% certain that it will be. We all got a little roughed up in 2009, but what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger! The Internet Boom & Bust… pah, I laugh at its impact: it lead to Le infamous nouveau Web, aka Web 2.0, aka the one where 37Signals had to remind us of the revolutionary idea of charging $$$ for products. I also laugh at Enron, as all its promised consequences of accountability haven’t affected the upper-tier of management one bit (and maybe never will).

But I don’t laugh at what is happening today, I’m happy about it. Between the magnificent state’ification of banks, the “new/old” lean approach to doing all business, and the threat of global warming, it’s another warning shot at us, the complacent human race who thought they had it all under control again. The world isn’t perfect and I hope that every one of those bumps bring us closer to making it better.

All cynicism aside, we live in a time where information is at our fingertips, where collaborative filtering and neuroscience help us better filter the relevant stuff to the top, where we can still publish news at a click, which is still an amazing concept, and where we all have GPS in our hands today, and augmented reality in our hands tomorrow. Yay, the innovative mind and yay, it’s practical outcomes!

Merry Christmas everyone and if you don’t hear from us before the 31st of December, have a great transition into the new year!

Love,

Your Tech IT Easy team:
Alex, Jeremy, Steve, Fidji, Georgia, Cecil, Vincent, Kari, Manu, Lucien, Matthias, Raj, Raphael, and Remy

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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In the book a group of doctorate students from three universities in Helsinki wrote cross-disciplinary visions of what certain IT innovations will break through by 2030.

The future is notoriously difficult to predict and the future of technology even more so. So, I’m pretty sure that any predictions we have made for 2030 are going to be wrong. There are some things we can be pretty sure about and try build on them, though. For example, technology will get better. The western population will grow older. Fusion energy will always be here in 30 years.

My second group wrote about intelligent or smart machines on how we see that there are some non-technical barriers that have to be broken before we can see robots and machines everywhere. Some of our ideas are also presented at the 26C3 conference under the title “Here be Electric Dragons: Preparing for the Emancipation of Machines“. So, if you’re in Berlin around Christmas, go and listen to our fantastic ideas.  Unfortunately I can’t make it there, but my co-author Lorenz Lechner will be there to entertain the audience.

One of our core ideas is that for autonomous (or, as we put it, ultimate) machines need rights. One reason for this is that normal product liability is not enough if these machines have AI dictating their decisions. If giving rights to machines sounds strange, it shouldn’t. In a sense this is comparable to human rights and the idea of corporation as a legal entity, where the corporation and not the shareholders are legally liable for its actions.

The follow-up question is of course how to manage the risks that autonomous robots pose? We are pretty good at managing all kinds of risks. One approach is to design fail-safe systems. The other is using insurance.

One of the challenges is that the machines of tomorrow and even today are more and more dependable on the software. We can’t end up in a similar situation with robots as we have done with commercial software – no guarantees whatsoever (see for example the capitalized(!) section 17 of a Microsoft EULA or similar section 16 of GPL). We believe that through an insurance of sorts, these sections could be shortened two capitalized words, DON’T PANIC, instead. Preferably in large, friendly letters.

Also, we believe these issues are urgent. The actuality of the technological development was really nicely illustrated by a recent xkcd comic (note the mouseover text). We have also discussed about this subject previously on this blog, Vincent already wrote about the relationship between man and machine early this year.

If you can’t make it to 26C3, here’s a copy of our paper “Augmenting Man”. We are currently in process of refining it and trying to pimp it for other publications.

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The opinions expressed within this blog are those of the authors alone. ©2011 Tech IT Easy. All Rights Reserved.

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Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

This morning at the gym, I overheard people talking about the recent e-mail leak from UK’s Climatic Research Unit. Paraphrasing, the discussion went something like this. “…I read from the news that they have exaggerated the numbers.” “Yeah, I never could believe that the sea levels could rise by so many meters.” And off they went talking about heatwaves in the Middle Ages and other stuff, probably trying to assure each other that everything is just fine.

Ars Technica does a good job, as always, explaining how the e-mail leak means probably nothing. And anyway, the scientific community has ways routing around fraud  – which, you have to keep in mind, is not the case here.

At another occasion, before the e-mail leak, in a bus an older woman wondered “how can they measure that the sea-levels have risen by a fraction of a millimeter. It’s so tiny.” I almost wanted to tell her about the DNA, carbon nanotubes, integrated circuits and other wonders of science in an effort to explain that, yes, “they” can measure things even if they are really small.

I’m seriously worried that these people secretly wish that the whole climate change is just a bad dream, and that they have a confirmation bias to believe all evidence that disproves that our planet is in peril – that status quo will prevail.

Yes, I’d also like if the whole climate issue was just a bad dream. But no e-mail leak or even a group of fraudulent scientist (which, once again, isn’t the case here) does not disprove the massive amount of evidence that we have for an accelerating climate change. What’s going on is a good example of our cognitive dissonance at work. Maybe it’s easier to justify why you’re not doing anything to counter the problem, if the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and TV news aren’t really helping, going for flashy headlines instead. True, the scientific community has a bad track record trying to explain things to laypeople, but sometimes things are a bit difficult – especially when they are as complex as the climate of a planet.

In fact, it seems that television can make things worse, as this video from a Sarah Palin’s book-signing shows (see 7:00 for the kicker). People, instead of trying to even rationalize their arguments themselves, just throw catchphrases to explain their position. My favourite? How polar bears must be removed from endangered species list so it would be easier to drill for oil in Alaska.

I’m really, really worried.

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PC OSs are in the same boat. As much as I like Mac OS X, if it didn’t run the apps that I needed to be productive or unproductive (you know, media & games…), then the chances of me getting a Mac are zero. Any new OS maker is in the same boat, having to think about both their OS and the apps that run on it. A hardware maker designing an OS would have to think about all three dimensions (+ all the other stuff: consumers, partners, etc.).

I think I was fairly down on Android as an OS and fairly up on Chrome OS (COS), long before it either came out. I’m still sort of down on Android and very much up on COS. The reason is for once not hardware or software, it’s the changing world of telecommunication.

I haven’t been silent about my feelings about mobile operators. They’re not good, mostly for people in Europe that travel internationally a lot. And just when some positive movement is happening in terms of mobile and sms roaming charges, we now get Internet roaming, where operators still find plenty of opportunities to gouge consumers. It’s not unusual to pay several Euros/dollars/pounds per MB for instance, which is o.u.t.r.a.g.e.o.u.s.

As such, when I saw the ASUS EEE and all the other Netbook models being offered with subscriptions, I was skeptical. But what I didn’t think much about, because I wasn’t a user at the time, was the opportunities that ubiquitous internet (within roaming reality) offered: by buying a subscription with a laptop you are in fact instantly online, which makes any argument against a NetOS moot. It completely opens up the road for a NetOS maker, like Google, but also like Nokia, RIM, Palm, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to build an OS that entirely operates on a connected backbone. This is the opportunity that I see Chrome OS exploiting and why I think it, as well as the iPhone netbook/tablet if it comes out, will be massively successful.

I still don’t like the idea of hardware enslaving itself to telecom-operators. But I think we really can start thinking about a cable-less world a few years from now, with all the implications (no more offices, augmented shopping, etc.) that it can bring.

Yay mobile net. Yay Net OS.

/ Vincent

(Picture: city in clouds, courtesy of www.crestock.com)

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Just uploaded this Enterprise-2.0 presentation. Title : Enterprise 2.0 : leveraging collaboration platforms to foster knowledge, innovation and productivity.

Best to see full screen

Target audience is upper management.

The objective is to address key issues faced by organizations built around knowledge : management of not only knowledge but also innovation and productivity. First to see the current limitations with the tools and processes in place and then to see how collaborative platform and enterprise 2.0 approach can offer competitive advantages to the company.

I have not been really convinced by the material available on the topic. Mostly too buzzwordy and flashy, this often scares upper management out. Most of them then subsequently relate E2.0 to consultant-dollarmaking-vaporware material, hence the dedicated section in the presentation.

Besides, in my view, these presentations usually go from the existing social applications (and their many exciting features) into the enterprise. In order to convince management, they should rather go the other way round : from enterprise real problems to how they can be addressed by social software platforms.

Mostly influenced by this excellent presentation by Mr Enteprise 2.0 : Andrew McAfee at PARC (link). Also by many of the videos, books, articles, blog posts refererred to in TechItEasy and Heavy Mental.

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So here’s what I propose.

1. form a group of tech/business enthousiasts (aka regular readers)
2. find a platform (e.g. mail, but I also favour the private wiki where texts can be shared privately and easily edited)
3. share ideas for blog posts and drafts and discuss those internally
4. release, not often, but qualitatively good pieces on technology / business / etc.

Why do I call this the Paul Graham model. Take a look at his essays. Under some of them (e.g. the Ramen profitasble essay), there’s a thank you to people that helped him edit the piece.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you’re interested in collaborating, either publicly or anonymously, and/or happen to know a good platform to do this on, leave a comment or send us a mail.

Thanks,
Vincent

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I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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A good friend of mine, Zihni Ozdil from the Netherlands / Turkey, Historian Extraordinaire, is now publishing his wisdom online. If history, politics, and culture (“beyond the superficial”) is something you find interesting, I encourage you to check it out. On his site, I found an article entitled ‘the real Evil Empire,’ which, ignoring the provocative title, deals with the interesting topic of the cold war and the ‘demonification’ of Russia and communism at that time.

Yesterday, I had an interesting discussion with some Canadian Swedes that moved to Florida with their kids and had trouble finding a school. The only way, it seemed, to guarantee that their kid ended up in a good one is to have an A-class school in your district (which you can find via a website that profiles attendees according to race and economic background… wow…) and to have paid your electricity bills. It worked out well for them, but clearly suggests the underlying problem of a long-term selection bias.

Last night, meeting the Canadian Swedes, where I was also in the company of a Russian and a Japanese, I noted that it was strange that while both Russia and Japan, being superpowers in their own right, have infamously challenging education systems, which result in some pretty smart people graduating from either country, the US does not seem to follow that pattern, at least not at the high school level, and certainly not across all demographics. Yet, by all accounts, the US is a superpower, if not the superpower of this and the last century.

My post today is not about comparing countries’ education systems, it’s more about the strategic purpose of education. Many people don’t know this about me, but I don’t vote and I don’t generally care about (regional) politics. To me, our planet should be one country, where anyone can move and work anywhere, and services don’t have to be moved just because you physically moved  XX km/miles to another country. But I do recognise the power of competition and how that can lead to excellence. Versus a ‘group think’-like mediocrity where everyone just tries to be like everyone else and no one exceeds. So, in a way, I endorse a system of divided regions, because I think it leads to competition and thus excellence.

Education plays a strong role on the competitive advantage of nations, as it does in certain companies. Last year, applying to a lot of consultancy companies and working as one myself, I was struck at the importance that the accumulation of knowledge plays in this industry. If I were to start my own consultancy, continuous education of the staff would most certainly be a cornerstone of the business strategy, because knowledge is your product as a consultant.

I know that this thinking plays a strong part in government circles as well: how to make your/our country as strong as possible, not (just) in military terms, but in the sense of knowledge, mostly measured by the no. of graduates and the no. of patents that are published every year (as well the commercialisation thereof, which doesn’t go quite as smoothly).

I know that the no. of graduates coming out of Chinese universities is tremendous, and the no. of patents coming out of US ones is among the highest in the world also. So clearly, the US, superpower extraordinaire, is doing something right. I don’t however entirely understand why the primary/secondary school system is so abysmal then in the US. My only explanation is that, in academic circles, there are no national boundaries, and a Russian researcher can just as well (if not better) produce patents in the US as anywhere else.

There are other dimensions to the US superpower status as well, of course. It’s a military superpower, it is a cultural superpower (in terms of films, music, and literature), it has a large consumer-base. These three dimensions—safety through military strength, an easily adopted culture, a consumer’s paradise—also have the effect that they serve as an attraction point for outside academic or other talent. And while other countries may have strong educational bases, the other aspects are perhaps ignored just a little too much, still making the US a prime export location for knowlegde.

In the strategic literature, there is the concept of the resource-based view, which stipulates that company strategies are nothing more than a collection of resources, some of which are internalised and some that are not. I think that in the context of the US and education, the resources that must be internalised are those that lead to the commercial exploitation of technological advantage, which sounds abstract, but basically means making sure that the best technology/knowledge is produced in-house and generates economic benefits in-house as well.

But there other resources that must most certainly not be held onto in-house. These include standards, which facilitate the assimilation of knowledge. In education, the standards that we use are the bachelor-master-phd system, which can easily be studied in different combinations and locations. And text-books, which as many students know, are often from US-origins.

In many ways, the cultural exports from the US—movies, music, literature—are nothing more than the spreading of a standard, that of a language and a way of thinking, which makes assimilation of outside talent easier. And as long as that outside talent is used for the benefit of the US, in the form of patent exploitation, the US benefits, even if their own primary/secondary education system is quite uneven.

As mentioned, I don’t care about politics, country-differences, or governments. But if my logic is correct, I wonder if a metaphor exists for commercial superpowers, i.e. companies that are market leaders and remain so by attracting the greatest talent and finding ways to turn that into economic benefits.

Organisations are not complete economies like governments are and also have the benefit of being mobile—by law they are considered single persons, which have residence, pay taxes, etc. just like everyone else. So, as long as they obey the law, they can choose where they stay and choose to ignore local conditions, much like, I theorise, some governments do, instead focussing on the bottom-line: attracting excellence and turning that into profit, while keeping ‘unnecessary’ expenses as low as possible. Well, at least that is the stereotype of an organisation, while pressures have certainly lead some to adopt a more socially-responsible attitude.

Clearly, the question of talent, whether attracting or training it, remains a vital one for both countries and organisations. But I don’t think there is necessarily a correlation between talent and local conditions.. at all.. though local conditions do play a part in the quality of life, or lack thereof, which affects the talent’s in question desire for a certain location.

Vincent out.

(Picture courtesy of thehindubusinessline.com)

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On my last blog, on food & retail, I ended with a conclusion as I don’t like long silences and having people guess what’s going on.

The short answer to that is that I will be taking an extended leave of writing for Tech IT Easy as I currently have other professional and private matters to focus on. My definition of extended leave is not that I will no longer write, just that I will write when there’s time and inspiration, but no longer on a daily schedule.

I still very much love to put my thoughts to paper, so expect a post whenever the mood hits me. For the rest, I don’t speak for anyone else on Tech IT Easy, all of whom are busy as well, and I sincerely hope that they too will find it within themselves to keep you (and me) updated on their thought progression when they find the time.

Vincent out

I’d say, thanks for all the fish, but instead I’ll leave you with the most amazing video of fish I’ve ever seen.

Kuroshio Sea – 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world – (song is Please don’t go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

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The human body is a machine and everything, from hours in the day, to food and exercise, to making money, to relationships, are all pieces in the machine of life. There’s only so many hours in the day is a well-familiar phrase to most of us and reflects the difficulty in balancing different activities and responsibilities, with some just falling off the map.

I am not saying that I plan to stop blogging, but I do think that we all need to make choices in our lives which will affect other, previous ones, like domino blocks.

Dynamics…

I just bookmarked a blog post on delicious on forming sales teams in a startup. It’s a good one and you should all read it. As I tagged and bookmarked however, I immediately thought, hey, I’m pretty sure no one on my company will read it. Why? Maybe because we already figured it out… Maybe because we figure stuff out as we are doing it… Your choice.

Blogging or any kind of writing for public purposes brings several complications to business people:

• it is public knowledge, meaning that the competitive advantages are slim: I don’t think this is a major factor, as most innovations are combinations of different ingredients that may or may not be public knowledge. Great artists steal, as they say.
• Writing is processed explicit knowledge from something that was previously implicit and needs to be made implicit again by the reader for it to be useful in a practical context: I’ve written about the knowledge-generating company and the knowledge spiral twice before. Another phrase, “You can’t help yourself, because your *self* sucks!” also comes to mind.

It’s the latter that represents the greatest challenge to authors and consumers of their work. I’ve also previously written about the benefit of formal education, which, I think, tries to recreate the knowledge spiral, turning explicit knowledge into the implicit kind, to be used by students in their work later on.

The dynamics of business is that there are expenses—YOU, the team, the office, etc.—which need to be recuperated by your work—the work you do for customers, after which they pay you. It leaves very little time for reflection, e.g. through blogging, etc., and for making things explicit, e.g. through blogging, etc.

I’m still a big fan of Michael Gerber’s E-myth revisited, which is really about writing that franchise manual for your business, so you can both understand the processes happening in your company, and expand on those, by more easily passing on knowledge. It’s Taylorism, of course, or Scientific Management, or any of the other management methodologies that followed in the past century.

But these activities require time, time which people inside organisations usually do not have, and hence prefer to outsource to outside consultants, who then need to make their knowledge explicit and again implicit in the minds and methods of their clients’ organisation.

It’s a real nightmare for people (like me) who think to much and always aim for something higher. And who want to blog. And who want to do good business…

Thoughts?
Vincent

(Picture courtesy of Fisica & Psychica)

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Reasons why Starbucks bothers me include, most of all, that it is not a coffeeshop with a European target-audience. We Europeans have plenty of choice and tradition in terms of coffee, and I have no problem finding a place of atmosphere with some kickin’ coffee at half the price of one of those Americanos (which, btw. taste terrible). The only attraction of Starbucks is for me as a take-away place, but that was not really the aim of the business, as described in Schultz’s book.

Starbucks was meant to be a “3rd Place,” a place where people can temporarily reside that is not their office or their home, and that is where Starbucks, in my opinion, fails. It should also not seen in isolation from other chains, like McDonalds, Subways, and the many “CloneBucks’s” that have arisen since the writing of Schultz’s book—it is basically a manual for how to start your very own Starbucks and, apart from its partnerships, it’s a low-tech business. Right now, when you enter a Starbucks in say, Cologne, Germany, it will look exactly the same as the one in Paris, France, and that act of replication already devalues the concept in my eyes. All Starbucks Cafés are very clean-looking, unlike a Hard Rock Café for instance, which doesn’t make them all that much better than a McDonalds (Café), which serves coffee equally well.

End complaints about Starbucks, a chain I had all but given up on.

The most depressing part of this business is the ease at which McDonalds managed to replicate its basic features, ……… but let’s not forget that the Starbucks people aren’t stupid and learning goes both ways. Clearly, McDonalds (another business, I’m a fan of) has strong process-advantages, which are also quite apparent to the observer and can be benefitted from by outsiders. Something that, it turns out, Starbucks exploited and will hopefully lead to a more efficient machine of a business, while (hopefully) placing the focus back on the “3rd Place” idea.

And now, it has been revealed, Starbucks is trying to get back into that game with its “community coffeeshops initiative.” While I don’t think that this will drastically improve the Starbucks offering, I do hope that it allows for more creativity and individuality down the road.

That said, there is still a lot of room for “3rd Places,” also in terms of building chains of them, they just need to be better designed to actually be a 3rd place. From books, to music, to zen-gardens, people like me are still looking for the equivalent of what was before probably known as the “gentlemen’s club,” by I mean, in an entirely un-sexist way, a place where you can go and relax, alone or with friends.

Starbucks seems to have gotten lost on the path and retreated down to the level of commoditization. It make me wonder if perhaps these types of qualitative initiatives simply cannot be undertaken quantitatively, without losing too much in the process.

Vincent

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At our financial trust, I’m currently filling out a pretty long survey from the Luxemborg statistical office (STATEC) regarding our level of “internetisation.” It’s not easy being digital in a world where you often deal with highly sensitive data, sometimes coming from individuals who do not like dealing with you through digital means. The very word “Trust” in our company description, already forces you to ask the question: can clients trust us using digital communication?

The answer is in most cases No. Go to any bank and try to get significant things done and they want you to sign for it. Same with notaries (and doehetzelfnotaris.nl does not automatise the signing part). The financial sector is particularly stuck in what I would call “the old world,” though not, I would say, without good reasons.

My question to you is:

• is there such a thing as fool-proof communication, which cannot be falsified by any means?
• Is there a surrogate for being there in person and signing your name?

I don’t know of any, but I always assume that our readers are smarter than me.

Chime in, if you can.

Vincent
(Picture of a Robot Accountant. Waah!?)

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UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies.

Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the x- and y-axis and pressure modified that loop. It was an interesting idea, because it didn’t look like just pushing buttons to make sound.

Fail whale at LHS

UCB: Raymond Yee, “Mixing and Re-mixing Information”

A lecture from a course on web mashups. Yee has written the book, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The students need to plan and work on a mashup project. There were lots of interesting ideas, but I was worried that most of them were remixing for remixing’s sake and didn’t add value along the way.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Our contact at UC Berkeley had warned this place was mostly for children, and sure enough, this is a place to avoid unless you’re 7 years or less. Almost as complete waste of time as our Google visit.

We had also pizza available for but no-one from UC Berkeley came (we were too scary). Except one guy, whose name I forget. But he took some of us for drinks downtown, so that was great.

Digital Chocolate / Trip Hawkins

Hawkins really loved "Bowling alone"

Trip Hawkins talked a lot about how leverage is the key to successful business and what are the differences between the supply chain in when he was at EA and in operator-controlled world of mobile gaming. He told how he built EA so that it was NFL who wanted them to use their brand, not the other way around. This is why he sees that his competitors who just put out license games based on movies will ultimately be driven off the market, because they do not control the IP.

He thinks that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and how the rest don’t get it: “If you’ve played around with Storm or Android you know, wow, these suck”. In his view, the others had focused in Features (“What it is”) and not on Advantages (“What it does”) and not at all at Benefits (“Who cares?”).

Digital Chocolate’s game development doesn’t depend on the device, because they change all the time and they can publish all their games in every device. This is the only way to make the business work in the mobile space. Hawkins doesn’t see that there will be any standardization, because that would move the leverage away from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.

He also believes that the social starving that began around 1950′s because of TV is the reason people are so keen on the social gaming and internet services and is the driver for “omnimedia”. His suggested reading are The Innvator’s Solution and Bowling Alone. Even in the old days, he didn’t see gaming as waste of time. When playing, he said that “I was thinking, learning and motivated”.

He recommended that we try Tower Bloxx, their Facebook game. I was a bit disappointed, the game itself isn’t that bad if you want to kill time, but it is really spammy. Not only is more screen real estate spent on questionable ads than on the game, not only does it notify your timeline every time you play the game, not only the “social aspect” is just a high score table of your friends, but it also spams your friends every time you play to add the game. Not exactly what I’d expect from the guy who’s partly responsible for the great games EA pushed out in the early days. I asked why is it that as a former hardcore gamer, the only interesting game I played last year was World of Goo. In his opinion this down to how big corporations work and can’t innovate. If Tower Bloxx is Digital Chocolate’s answer to this, I don’t think it’s just big corporations.

Sun Microsystems / Mårten Mickos

FAQ: "If heating is a problem, why is it black?"

We were given the tour at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. They showed the SunRays and other stuff and it was pretty nice to see up close the Black Box.

Afterwards, Mickos gave us a presentation about open source development and MySQL. He said that MySQL is like “New Orleans” of web apps in that if you want to control an important river, you need to control the important cities and this was the reason Sun acquired them. He also anticipated the question about superiority of Postgres, which is probably asked from him all the time. “When I joined MySQL, Postgres was better. Some say it still is. But who cares?”

He also started a discussion about “Why are web companies so closed?” – a poke directed among others Google, who benefit a lot from GPL software, but due to a loophole in the agreement can get away without publishing their improvements because the software isn’t redistributed. This is what he calls the hypocrisy of open source: “People just want to get stuff for free”.

Like Hawkins, he said that the most important thing for startup business is category-leadership. One advice he gave for Finnish start-ups was “not to be Finnish”: MySQL didn’t have sales offices in Nordics, only in the US. Other thing was that if something sounds good in Finland, it takes 10-15 years for until it’s widely accepted as a good thing, so don’t go to market too early. “There’s still time to make a Google-killer”, he said.

This was one of the best sessions we had, not only because Mickos isn’t there anymore and looks like Sun won’t be either but also because we got vodka and swag. You could see there was an economic crisis, because elsewhere we didn’t get anything.

Nexit Ventures / Michel Wendell

Wendell, from Nexit Ventures, a VC firm interested in Nordic IT startups, told how the VC market works and what kind of mistakes Finnish companies usually make. He told how he ended up in the business of helping Nordic companies make it in the US. Being a VC has lot to do with knowing people.

Lots of interesting discussion, but it was late in the evening and it’s pretty hard to upstage either Hawkins or Mickos.

IDEO

We got a standard theme park tour at IDEO. If you have seen the documentaries on TV or at YouTube, there’s not much to see. I was surprised that they actually avoid any systematic or analytical approach to design and focus more on a holistic, iterative and therefore probably pretty expensive (to the client) approach. As a case study they presented Nokia N-Gage platform they did concept work for. A surprising choice, because not only being old was also a spectacular flop. I guess they thought that being from Finland and the course given by ex-CTO of Nokia, we’d be interested in Nokia or something. If we were, we probably didn’t need to come all the way to Palo Alto for that.

Stanford University / VHIL

At Stanford, we got a nice presentation from Jeremy Bailenson from Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He was talking about the Proteus Effect, or how avatars change humans and their behaviour. For example, even though Blizzard has nothing in World of Warcraft code that gives advantage to taller avatars, they nevertheless level up faster than shorter ones. Also, taller avatars get better results in the Ultimatum Game, the real world height of the human is irrelevant. As I’m interested in behavioral decision making, it was nice to see that it might be possible to do empirical studies in virtual worlds, where we can control many variables that social sciences haven’t been in the real world.

Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto

First NDA of the tour. They showed us some research projects they were working on and had the worst slides of the tour. Most of us came out there frightened how out of touch Nokia can be.

Stanford University / Entrepreneurship Week / “Next Big Thing” Panel

Tim Draper, Tony Perkins and Michael Moe talked mostly about Twitter and iPhone and how making revenue is irrelevant. Draper really loves the free trade. Apparently ad-supported business model is the next big thing.

These guys were either drunk or lived in a bubble of their own. Probably both.

IBM Almaden Research Center / Ray Strong

There's pr0n in it, I'm sure.

Strong talked about how IBM tries to predict the future. First of all, the Almaden Research Center looks like a super-villain’s secret lair from Bond movies (it didn’t help that the guy we met had a Bond-esque name). Forget Google, this is the place to visit. There was the world’s first hard drive in the lobby, which was a nice monument to how long IBM has been in the game.

The main thing Strong told was that it isn’t possible to predict technology in to deep future, only in to the business horizon of up to 5 years. This is what they told to an unnamed government agency that wanted them to do so. As government usually gets what it wants, IBM decided to find a way to do it. They brought in people from academy, futurologists and social scientists. Their approach is half scenarios and half technology landscapes, but their ideation emphasizes backcasting from deep future (>50 years) using trends that can be with high probability assumed to continue.

One problem with scenarios has been that it’s really hard to transform them into strategic actions a company should take. IBM tries to close this gap between scenario planning and strategy by using what they call signposts. These signposts are future events that are both recognizable (when they happen) and actionable.

Strong also talked about how predicting future, it’s important to stay in the qualitative side of things, not only because quantitative side of things usually doesn’t work and might be harmful because of the tendency to use numbers to calculate expected values or other figures, even though they are full of uncertainty and can be harmful.

This was by far the best visit during the tour.

Google

NDA. It was a standard theme park tour. It was pretty clear that Google is exactly as “open” as SEC demands it to be, not an inch more. I guess many for many of us the myth of Google was totally burst.

To be fair, this was the only place where our contact wasn’t executive level so we might have gotten a better experience with a more suitable contact. Even though our host was great and all that, he probably wasn’t the right one for our group.

HP Labs

Runner-up in best architecture for a research lab.

NDA, but they mostly showed published academic research about nanophotovoltaics or something to that end. Our guess is that they didn’t want to tell us anything but out of courtesy showed something. When they talked about things I could understand, they talked about MagCloud and how HP is transforming from a printer and computer company into printing and computing company.

Next day, couple of us went to see the garage (more like a shack) Hewlett and Packard started from and what is considered as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Not much to see, but at least it had some historical value.

All pictures by me. All rights reserved. Originally published in my private blog, but I decided to get rid of it so I republished this thing here for people interested.

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