Thinkcorps

update: I got a look at one over the weekend at a Dell mall kiosk in Portland, OR. I have to admit, it has a nice heft to it, and seems solidly built. BUT —the button configurations are not that well, thought out, and the scroll wheel is too small in my opinion (all the buttons are too small, imo).

I wonder if the Dell designers weren’t thinking too PC-centric. What I mean is simply that a typical PC has a very structured interface with the user—you sit directly in front of it in order to see the monitor and align your hands with the keyboard and mouse. The cellphone has evolved in a similar way, with the inclusion of screens, cameras, and other PC-like functions etc.

However, I don’t think you necessarily want such a structured interface in a portable device like a music player. The primary function of the device is so simple that you should be able to work it from inside your bag, with only a limited memory of its configuration. That was the genius of the original iPod: 4 clickable play control buttons (and menu), one for each cardinal direction, laid out around a scroll wheel (non-clickable), with a clickable select button in the middle. In a pocket, these functions were easily distinguished from each other.

Much more emphasis needs to be placed on the buttons themselves as well—just cause they’re chrome-painted, doesn’t make them good.

Chicago Sun Times columnist takes some cheap shots at cameraphones, while missing the larger point—that networked technologies have real-world social effects.

The fact that cameraphones quality and service sucks currently is totally beside the point. First generation technologies always have bugs to work out.

Camera phone an idea whose time shouldn’t have come

Finally got the camera working on XP last night, after checking for a new version of the windows software. It’s so amazing and wonderful that people do this, as part of their jobs and for fun, and then share the results with the world. It’s not the same thing as open source, there’s strong developer-only reasons for that, it’s more that the net connects us to ourselves more easily—allowing us to discover or rediscover more about ourselves – to do more and be more through tiny, almost insignificant collaborations. Whatever, i’m getting all weepy here.

the dakota is fun. $11 and a soldered up hotsync cable i bought off ebay. its pictures are pretty good actually. i scraped the glue off the lens and messed with it—it definitely has a very small focusing sweet spot—but fuzzy picts are interesting too. the only problem of course is that when adjusting the lens, you have to dl the picts to check your results. technology/antitechnology playing back and forth. the software worked fine, though XP hung on shutdown so I did a system restore. not sure exactly where that problem came from or if the rollback solved it.

the dakota supposedly supports a webcam mode (least one of the chips does), and i’d be interested in adjusting exposure to build a digital pinhole. not sure that’s possible, but i can always hope. who cares? i’m going out to buy another one today.

key reference page: DakotaDigital at maushammer.com

first test shot

way out of focus shot down the hall to living room

Cables are apparently a way for retailers to make some money back off low margin printers and scanners. Buy them from this place (recommended by others smarter than I) and save a few bucks. I just bought USB2.0 and Firewire cables for $3-$4 apiece, even with $8 shipping, I’m coming out way ahead.
http://www.cablesforless.com

If you could fly to work, would you fly along the roadways or would you fly direct?

Ran across this list of predictions today at the blog of Barry Parr (ex-CNET, IDC).

I like the prognostications for increased pressure on CMS companies (how they ever got away with selling a product that wouldn’t work until you paid their consultants to put it together, i will never know), email marketing failing in the face of spam filters (this is a definite), free WIFI (definite also, once merchants do the math). Now, onto the three most interesting, imo:

Computer companies will fail in the consumer electronics market, because they don’t have any understanding of what consumers want, have been turned into followers by Wintel market dynamics , and don’t have the right distribution channels. Apple is the only company that could do it, but loss of focus, low margins and short product lifecycles may make it unattractive even to them.

This is probably mostly true, but there’s a flip-side as well – consumer electronics companies don’t currently understand the digital space—whether we’re talking product design, architecture, functionality, product development cycles, software, or user interface. CE is making strides in this area, for sure, but they are lagging behind. In order for them to really succeed, they need to abandon their old ways in every product category and rebuild with focuses on software and networking—areas that make products easy to customize and improve. Open standards would help this immeassurably, but I’m not holding my breath—the licensing fees generated by the CD have made Sony and Philips quite rich—no one’s going to give that potential revenue up for next-generation blue laser DVDs.

The biggest hurdle IMO? Networking CE is going to be a huge challenge. Consumers are not ready to be their own CTOs, so devices need to be able to connect themselves to a home network intelligently. But beyond that, pressure from entertainment companies to restrict the functionality of these devices could cripple their ability to freely network with all connected devices, creating consumer confusion and frustration.

Where’s the silver lining? Gotta be CE’s adoption of Linux. The great side benefit of having all your devices run Linux is that they should all be that much easier to hack/customize to your liking, with the help of the millions-strong Linux community.

There’s going to be a huge struggle in the coming years as the entertainment industry tries to lock down the entire digital sphere through DRM and hardware controls. The truth however is that the battle is already over—one bad apple spoils the bunch—in this case, any hardware/software device attached to the home network that hasn’t been 100% locked down compromises the security of any device attached to that network.

So, how many PCs with Internet access are out there anyway? ;)

Broadband access providers will begin to exercise their muscle by metering bandwidth and by imposing more limits on what protocols their customers can use, what information they have access to, and what information they can publish on the net.

I’ll concede there’s talk of this, but I have to believe that we’ve just dealt with the same situation with WIFI hotspots. There’s not much difference, except that there’s simply more unused broadband bandwidth to play with. As far as limits go, I can certainly see providers provisioning bandwidth for new services they can charge for, such as VOIP. However, the more providers keep the flow flowing, the better off they’ll be, and the more money they will make, i think.

More online content will go behind subscription barriers. However, this will be the beginning of a death spiral for those sites. Eventually (after their current management is fired), they will be reborn as stripped-down, highly-automated free sites.

Online content sites are seriously up the creek—and have been since they first started. The idea that you should give away on one hand what you’re charging for on another doesn’t make any sense. It’s led to an erosion of consumer loyalty and increased confusion. My advice: decide what business you’re in, focus on that, and move the Web site budget under the aegis of the marketing dept. At least then, you’ve instituted some controls.

i know him.

headache.

why does cool software come in blue plastic bubbles?

Gizmodo tossed off a brief item on the Neustron media center player. Too bad, this actually looks like a great media center, assuming you’re in the market for one. It seems to play just about everything, and the company has a great-looking DVD player that also plays just about anything.

There are a few tip-offs that can help tell you a little about a company—first, these guys are from Singapore, which means less marketing and legal, and more tech. Clearly, these guys just threw everything into the device they could get their hands on—I don’t even know what RM4 format is. The media center device has ethernet AND WIFI, which is a given that we want that, but most US companies aren’t giving us the option. Look at the back of these devices, they’re packed with outputs.

The bast part, however, is that you can reprogram the DVD player to disable Macrovision and make it region-free from the remote (both unofficially). Take that. Searable database of DVD player info: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/dvdplayers

Memo to Hollywood—again—the cat is out of the bag, the game is over. You lost.

Ad Age article on Tribe.net’s plan to sell classifieds with Knight Ridder and Washington Post Co.

Beyond the fact that Craigslist is an extremely old service that found purchase in the tech-dense Bay area, the article gets me wondering about the effects of commercializing social nets. I’ve noodled around with the social net concept— who hasn’t?—after all the play they’ve been getting. But no one’s really figured out how these networks are going to make money. Apparently, classifieds and dating are all anyone’s come up with. Kinda lame, and low potential as well. The dating game’s been covered, and newspapers aren’t making bank off classifieds, and while Craigslist is doing fine, it certainly isn’t what the VCs were imagining.

All I can think of is that the potential viral effects have investors excited. But the social network is a network connected through a very vague notion of trust—your friends. Most of us trust our friends, at least some of them, but do we trust the friends of our friends? Probably. The friends of our friend’s friends? Maybe, but I can’t see it going much further than that. This trust network tends to dilute itself quickly once you get a few degrees away from yourself, necessitating the kind of enforced, rules-based trust framework that has built Ebay into such a powerhouse. So the trust network is overrated in my opinion.

The reason most people rely on their close friends is that their friends know them and know the subject matter (say, restaurants). When the second party doesn’t know you personally, and you don’t know them, you’re more likely not to trust their opinion—not that you automatically discount it, but you’re going to add it to a database of results from other sources, say Zagat’s or local dining guides.

So everyone’s social network has a defined horizon beyond which the social network effect is eclipsed by other forms of trust. I think we can agree that in general, that horizon is going to more or less surround that person’s effective local area—that being the area in which the individual spends most of their time. Could be San Francisco, could be split between Miami and New York.

Now, this local social network is interesting in its ability to connect, or re-connect, you to your community in a way you’re more likely to respond to than the local giveaway newspaper that’s dropped unwanted on your steps each week. This is exactly what makes Craigslist so compelling. It’s a different view into San Francisco/Bay Area life. It’s also a great resource for housing and jobs and stuff—for me at least.

But the trust that’s built up in Craigslist has taken years to accumulate through the hard work of user experience and word of mouth. The service’s reputation is now extremely good and transactions take place with that trust implicit between the parties. It’s a local thing, much the same as the loyalty that springs up for the Raiders or other local sports teams. My big question is: can you bottle that?

The network effects of social networks are localized by both trust and reality (geographies and population densities). So I think in building a social net, you have to be extremely careful to target the correct markets or be doomed to repeat the mistakes of Webvan and Kozmo, companies that entered low-density markets. Plus, you have to concede that Citysearch, in commercializing local markets, was scraping the bottom of the barrel and did nothing to build consumer loyalty.

Given the rapid pace of technological development on the Web, it’s probably safe to say that within a year, the technology that powers social nets will be commodified, not unlike blogging tech, allowing us all to create our own social nets with their own applications and focuses, and connect them to whatever other social nets we desire. Social nets are in many ways a natural evolution of P2P, so it makes sense that they would build off that tech.

What makes social nets important is that we, the nodes, are in control. Our contributions are what powers the network. Once you give that power up to a central authority by commercializing the network, you’ve polluted the stream. If I trust the network, do I trust the commercial interests who are now inserting their paid listings into the datastream? If I like contributing answers, helping people, will I tolerate my advice being mixed in with sponsored links and ad space?