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The everything-else-being-the-same principles of Safely owning Gadgetry

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:48:28 +0000

This weekend, I was faced with the important principles surrounding the owning of gadgets, such as my current laptop. I should add a disclaimer, I’m at an age where I have to be super-responsible for my life and there really is little excuse to make (many) mistakes. And when I woke up in a hotel-room without my laptop, I wanted to bang my head against a wall (if my headache wasn’t already big enough). Luckily, it all worked out in the end, but it sure gave me a reality-check.

So gadgets, by which I mean anything that costs in excess of €200 and more probably in excess of €1000. How do you keep your gadget habit safe? Three things that really-really-really matter:

Common sense: I don’t need to explain this much, but not leaving expensive stuff unattended is probably rule 101 of common sense. That said, we are all human and common sense will never protect us 100%.
Backups: I’ve had 2 moments of stress regarding my laptop in the last month. The first was installing Snow Leopard, which didn’t make it very clear whether I was upgrading Leopard or formatting the whole drive. Luckily it was the first, but it was stressful for about 30 min. The second was when I couldn’t find my laptop waking up and had 2 hours at breakfast to reflect on “how important are those pictures/documents/memories really?” Nothing with bits in it is really life-changing in my experience, but still it kind of feels like an extension to our human brain.
Theft insurance: I currently pay about €200 per year on this, covering about €5000 of property and, at my age at least, it’s a real stress-reducer, especially with things that can easily get lost. You can think logically, you can backup, but having to buy a new laptop out of your own wallet kind of sucks.

So, just a short message to all the gadget lovers out there. Technology rocks, but so does a little insurance. If you have any ideas of your own of how to keep your gadgets safe, feel free to share in the comments.

Vincent

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A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:40:07 +0000

OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

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"Smart Products"

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:22:12 +0000

Not my title, hence the quotes. “Smart Products” is the name of a 2006 Ph.D dissertation by Serge Rijsdijk, which I just purchased in a bookstore—I didn’t know you could buy these things. I’m fascinated with this concept, so much so that it was the reason for choosing Sony as my first serious company to work for, and why I worked in several projects / startups that dealt with interesting matters of industrial design. On this blog, I approached the topic a few times, with blog posts about “creating relevance,” about creating software for right-brained people, and probably some other things that I can’t recall at this time.

Before I go on, a little quiz. Which of these do you consider a smart product?

The one-buttoned iPod? Is the iPhone a smarter product than the iPod? Why?
The financial derivative, which was designed by many smart rocket-scientists?
A bicycle gear-system that changes automatically, according to elevation-angle and intensity?

Think about these before you go on. Essentially, what a smart product means to me, is one that is able to interact with smart* human beings (*: by definition, ALL human beings). I would also say that a smart product adapts to the context of the user and does not force the user to adapt to it (though that, for the moment, is very wishful thinking).

An iPod, while on the surface a stupid device with a single button, is smart enough to just do the job we need it to do. It also has as a smart back-end that allows for a wide variety of content to be streamed through your device. An iPhone does the same job, except that it does more and it allows for two-way interaction: smart. A financial derivative may be smart by design but, from my understanding, it is a type of smartness that is incompatible with what humans consider smart, i.e. what makes sense to them. It does not speak our language, hence we should probably kill it (I fear the day that aliens come to our planet). The argument that it is designed for a different type of person, the financial genius, doesn’t apply either, considering the current crisis. The auto-gear system for bicycles, which I made up, but probably exists, is smart because it uses environmental intelligence to make our life easier. But in order to be able to do that, it must not make mistakes or else it becomes a very stupid device—there is a subtle line between smart and stupid, when speaking of technology… or biking.

Serge Rijsdijk has a much more complex definition of smart products, namely that they fit one or more of following seven dimensions:

The ability to co-operate: by which he means co-operating with other devices. He has an interesting quote from Nicoll (1999) who thinks that “the age of discrete products may be ending.” An example of this is a PDA that co-operates with a printer (or more modern: a camera that co-operates with a printer)
Adaptability: by which he means the ability to learn and improve the match between its functioning and its environment, e.g. my example of auto-changing gears or a thermostat that collects data about room and outer temperature and uses that to fulfil its user’s wishes.
Autonomy: meaning that the device can operate without interference from the user, e.g. some of those autonomous lawnmowers and vacuum-cleaners we keep hearing about.
Human-like interaction: as the term states, interacting with humans in a fashion that feels natural to them (I use a more broad description than the author). An example given is car-navigation, though I don’t exactly consider that a successful smart product yet—at least, the nagging voice telling you to “turn right” is not necessarily a characteristic of smartness, if you ask me.
Multi-functionality: i.e. a single product fulfilling multiple functions, such as a modern mobile phone. The fact that the iPhone has been so destructive to incumbents in this market would suggest that here too the definition of successful smartness need not necessarily always fit.
Personality: meaning the product’s ability to show the properties of credible personality. Examples given include the Furby, the AIBO, and (don’t laugh) Microsoft’s paperclip-assistant. My only experience with personable non-organics would be in the films: King Kong, Transformers, and Wall-E, all of which induced an emotional response in me. The AIBO was fun to play with at Sony, but, back then, not even close to the level of a dog. Still, I was sad to hear it has been discontinued. And I’ve killed many a virtual pet or plant (including that stupid paperclip), I’m not very sad to say.
Finally, Reactivity: i.e. the ability of a device to react to its environment in a “stimulus / response manner.” An example given is the Philips Hydraprotect hairdryer, which lowers the temperature of the air when the humidity of the hair decreases.

His thesis is focussed on the one issue that smart innovation is all about: how consumers react to smart products. I hope this post has made you think about it! More on this fascinating topic as I get to it.

Vincent

Eulogy to my Sennheiser PX 200's

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:18:10 +0000

This may qualify as the most ridiculous post, I’ve ever written. But it’s a Sunday. And I felt it simply had to be said. Headphones are, to me, a vital part of our society and, at the same time, they are so prone to failure, that it may very well be the biggest pain (read: need for improvement) I’ve ever felt during my life.

I’ve used headphones since I was 14 maybe, back when my first Discman was made out of metal, contained four batteries, and weighed about the same as a satelite-phone (if those still exist). I’m sure if I turned it on today, it would still work. Headphones, however, are a completely different matter.

Headphones have evolved and devolved in my life. I started with the sucker-buys: super-multi-tripple-bass-boosting Sonys. But no matter how many I bought (all earphones), they all broke after a few months, at the latest. That was, on average, a good €20 thrown away every time.

Finally, I got fed up and plunged down to €3 headphones, the kind that lie next to the chewing-gum in your super(tech)market. I figured, why waste money, and instead buy in bulk and replace every few weeks. It worked pretty well for a while… of course the sound is nothing to write home about.

Finally, when I got my first & only iPod, three years ago or so, I discovered the Sennheiser PX200‘s.

The upside:

Not too expensive; paid €60 on the first purchase, and €25 on the second. I generally don’t think people should spend more than that for what is essentially a perishable good.
Came in white—matching the iPod.
STURDY – that’s right. Except for a few design-flaws, these are the most sturdy headphones I’ve ever had, the first pair lasting nearly two years; the second about a year.
Sound-insulating: that way I enjoy the music for myself, and don’t bother anyone else.
Stay on when I jog—important, as I jog 4 times a week.
Great sound.
Very portable—fold into the size of a pair of sunglasses.

The downside:

A few design-flaws related to the wiring. If you close it a certain way, it actually cuts into the wiring. Also I just broke my second pair, because the wiring at the base, close to the plug, somehow broke… very annoyed with that, and wires in general.
Insulates you from the rest of the world. Don’t try biking on a busy street with this sucker.
Insulates you by making you look like a freak. This picture from 2 years ago in Barcelona says enough (well, actually the gigantic sunglasses don’t help either). Wearing these kinds of headphones really shouts out that you don’t want to talk to someone.

After breaking the second pair, I’m saying good bye to perhaps all headphones. They brought me much wisdom—80% of my iPod consumption is from podcasts with interesting people and on interesting subjects. They made me high—running with them is not only super-comfortable, but the sound is excellent, and helps getting your endorphins pumping. But they also made me anti-social, where I should be saying hello to my neighbours, I put on my headphones when I leave the house, forgetting everything around me.

Maybe, I’ll get another pair, I don’t know. Maybe when the next episode of ‘Stanford’s entrepreneurial thought leaders’ or ‘iInnovate’ comes out and I just have to learn something new. Maybe… and maybe I have to go cold turkey, smell the roses, listen to the wind, smile at the nice people around me, and reserve my sound-consumption for a club or a stereo. I’m sad now; an era is perhaps over.

But maybe, you have discovered the ultimate, never-breaking, super-multi-bassboosting headphones yourself? In which case, SHOUT IT OUT in the comments, as I want in.

Vincent

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