Oprah's on Twitter...thank goodness for that!

It's probably fair to say that Twitter officially hit the mainstream, and quite probably jumped the shark in the process, as none other than the empress of "O" - Oprah herself - deigned to join the ranks of the common tweeters a few weeks back. Needless to say, there's a fair deal of debate about this being a good thing or a bad thing... or anything at all. Her arrival certainly brought thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of her faithful to Twitter, but thus far her "tweets" have been less than mind-blowing. I'll be curious to see how long she's doing it herself before passing it off to a staffer. See for yourself here. (by the way, tell her I sent you - maybe my followers will go up. follow me @Tomgimpel).
At 600,000+ followers, it looks like Oprah's not even in the top 10 yet, (Ashton Kutcher battled CNN for weeks trying to reach a million). Regardless, if some sources are to be believed, those numbers probably don't matter a whole lot anyway. According to Nielson Wire blog, "Twitter is suffering from some of the lowest retention numbers of social media services.... lucky if it can manage 30 percent." Which raises the question... what's the point in having that many followers if nobody's really listening anyway? Of course, it's possible that could be said about Twitter in general... but that's a post for another day.

In the meantime, many of the geek faithful who've reigned supreme over the top Twitter ranking spots these past few years (and yeah, I'm talking to you @LeoLeporte and @Scobleizer) have come to terms with their Tweet-celebrity disappearing, and begun migrating to the greener pastures of what many call the "new" Twitter - Friendfeed.com. Friendfeed, similar in concept to Twitter, offers a number of other interesting features including real-time scrolling responses, conversation areas, and filters so you can help weed out some of the "noise" inherent in all these solutions. Despite knocking around with it, though, I'm still not sold on those being key differentiating features. Having realtime scrolling responses to comments might mean a lot to folks with a large following, but I'm not entirely sure it's a big deal to Joe Average. Most of us don't get many responses.. (sniff, sniff). Decide for yourself here.
Then again, all this web migration might just be social media equivalent of the "cool kids table" phenomenon: "Pffft... You still go there? oh, no, that's not cool any more... THIS is where the cool kids sit". Friendster, to Zanga, to Myspace, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Friendfeed.

As usual.. I'm not often at the cool table.

Sun to buy Oracle - Sunoracle?

Man - a lot of things have happened over the last few weeks, and I've been a slacker about keeping up with the blog. Apologies for that. My hope was to keep saving them up for a longer length post, but for one reason or another, they never quite got to the incubation stage in my head. I'm going to try and post them - a catch-up in a few paragraphs, newest to oldest:

Oracle agrees to buy Sun:

- SUN Microsystems has been swirling in a sea of acquisition rumors for weeks. IBM was long rumored to be the suitor with announcements allegedly imminent - until talks broke off a few weeks ago. Perhaps the fix was in all along, but this morning the NYTimes is reporting that Oracle has won out. You can read the article here.
This poses some very interesting questions, but most prominantly in my mind: What happens to MySQL - a robust SQL Server database competitor, available free under the GNU - General Public License. According to wikipedia, MySql has over 11 million installations - all of whom have administrators who are probably asking the same question. "Will Oracle continue to own a distribute a product that is a direct competitor to it's own bread-and-butter platform?" My guess is probably yes, the PR ill-will of the alternative wouldnt' be worth the hassle. But realistically, I wouldn't expect them to dump a whole lotta effort into the deal either.
By the way... Sun - now Oracle - also owns Java and Open office. Same questions apply.
Interesting times.

Crowdsourcing... Advice to designers? Embrace or die.

Update 3/25: shortly after publishing this, Crowdspring.com co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky, and Jason Aiken - Business development manager from 99designs.com left their respective opinions in the comments section below the article. Their comments are listed below the article and are worth noting.

You know things are starting to heat up when the incumbents start pushing back. At last week's South-by-Southwest (SXSW) music, arts, and new media conference, the graphics design community was clearly up-in-arms against an emerging new trend in globalized graphic art and design commonly called "crowdsourcing." The term "crowdsourcing" isn't exactly new, nor does it apply strictly to arts, but to any workeffort built using a distributed group of individuals - often on a global scale like Wikipedia. Still, what's happening here will likely mean significant change for folks in the graphics design world, as well as the people who buy those services. And yes, my artist friends, it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In this model, sites like "Crowdspring.com" and "99designs.com" allow anyone in need of graphics art (a logo, website design, business cards) to post their needs for a fixed price - the higher the price, the more enticing for designers, the more entries you're likely to see. In return, the user recieves entries from graphics artists around the world. Crowdspring.com's model requires a minimum prize of $200, but guarantees at least 25 entries. 99designs.com entry is only $39, but carries no guarantee of a minimum number of entries (update: see comments below). I tried it myself with a logo need for a small start-up I'm working with, and I have to say I was genuinely impressed. In my one week contest, my $200 produced over 60 entries ranging from quite clever to downright awful. Still.. that's the Forest Gump world of globalized sourcing - you never know what you're going to get. In the end, that's still more submissions for less money than any other web design work I've ever commissioned.
The rub, of course, is that for the design community, the game is no longer pay-to-play. Unlike a traditional design engagement, where artists are paid upfront to produce 2 or 3 designs for a customer (which the customer may not like), in this model a designer must put his ideas up first... and may never get paid. This approach - commonly called "spec work" - is generally renounced by the artists and designers who understandably feel that they should receive some level of compensation for their effort just to envision and create the product. I'm here to tell them, that game's over.
Pushing back against trends like this is like pushing jello with a toothpick. It's the same trend we've seen time and time again.. with a different face. In the 1800's, the industrial north of the US screamed of inferior product produced by cheap labor in the South. Later the US decried China's emergence as a manufacturing center, and the world saw IT outsourcing and customer service replacing the touch-and-feel of in-house staff. The "flattening of the earth" as Thomas Friedman called it, is as inevitable as the tides, and work will always move to where production is cheapest. Welcome to the free market.
Of course, this doesn't mean design firms should simply close up shop. Far from it. But it does mean that just being skilled in photoshop isn't going to cut it. And conversely, I don't see major public companies trusting their next Pepsi logo to a crowdsourced medium. But I can see small-to-medium sized businesses, and less-than-critical enterprise IT applications, giving this some serious consideration. Think of your local coffee or pizza shop, landscape company, even your corporate Intranet. Just as do-it-yourself business cards and letterhead replaced the local print shop, options like these are going to change the way businesses approach commissioning design work.
The real challenge to these firms isn't going to be fighting the trend, but adapting to this new model. Embracing, understanding, and demonstrating to their customers that design firms add more value to the equation than just a JPG file. Rather than fight the tide, smart design firms will see crowdsourcing as a new service offering for their customers, or will utilize it to farm out less value-added work - just as accounting firms have utilized offshore labor for trivial tax preparation, or software development consulting organizations have sub-sourced portions of large projects to even smaller offshore firms.

Either way, the"no spec" noise at SXSW comes off as sour grapes. As with MP3's, the genie is out of the bottle. It's time to adapt or die. Our small startup got a great logo for $200 from a gentleman in West Java, Indonesia (yes, I had to Google-map it). That's worth approximately 2,300,000 rupiah, in a country where a good meal is about 50,000 RP, and a decent hotel room runs about 70,000 RP. That's the competition, folks.
Artists: The cheese has moved, and the firms that stick to the old ways will - as Old Fezziwig said "live by the old ways and die out with them." Welcome to a global playing field, bring your game.


---- Comments ----

2 comments:

Ross Kimbarovsky said...

Hi Tom - I enjoyed your post and absolutely agree that just as crowdSPRING has brought new opportunities to creatives and businesses around the world - this is also an opportunity for existing designers and businesses to evolve and find ways to add more value for their clients. We're already seeing design firms using our marketplaces to offer services to their clients and also to supplement their own in-house capabilities. You are absolutely right - the cheese has moved.

Best,

Ross Kimbarovsky
co-Founder
http://www.crowdspring.com

1:09 PM

Jason Aiken said...

Hi Tom,

Naturally...we agree with you and we're glad to hear you were impressed with your crowdsourced design experience.

I should note that 99designs takes its relationships on both sides of the equation - clients and designers - very seriously. We are doing everything we can to continue to grow the business in such a way that provides value to both.

Also...one thing I should correct is that we do offer guaranteed contests.

Cheers and great article,

Jason Aiken
99designs
http://99designs.com

Tom Gimpel said...

Thank-you Jason and Ross for your kind words, glad you liked the post.

Jason - to clarify, 99designs does offer "guaranteed contacts," but from the FAQ it seems that it is not a guarantee to the buyer on receiving a minimum number of entries, but rather to the creatives that the award will in fact be awarded. (99designs also offers the capability to have non-guaranteed contests)

Mother Apple May I?

Apple’s been catching some heat lately over its onerous guidelines for iPhone apps and its inconsistent enforcement of its application standards. I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long. In the last few weeks, some well known applications have been denied renewal due to Apple’s perception of being in “poor taste” or the assertion that the app somehow competes directly with an Apple offering. Amazon's recent release of the "Kindle" app could not include a built-in version of the Kindle store, because Apple prohibits allowing purchases within it's apps. And Apple’s inconsistent enforcement of these rules is not helping it's credibility when it comes to policing its own ecosystem. Trust me, as the store grows, it’s only going to get worse.
Apple’s recent rejection of Twitter client “Tweetie” (later overturned) was done based on the mistaken impression that it used foul language (those darn chickens) - which actually turned out to be untrue. Other applications were rejected from the start, denied for being “in bad taste.” Yet despite Apple's high-fallutin' standards, the Unofficial Apple Weblog still found over 60 apps for sale in the Apple store that simulate “farting”. Apple's policy prohibits apps which contain profanity, yet Apple sells – literally – hundreds of songs with the “F” word in the title. (Technologizer’s Harry McCracken did a great piece on this here – as well as the great picture above.)
Of course, Apple seems to have no problem allowing apps to compete against one another – like the numerous flashlight or tip calculation applications out there. Just as long as nobody competes against Apple itself. And therein lies the crux of the trouble. Competition builds better software, people! Without it, customers suffer. Only an ego the size of Steve Jobs could assume that Apple can write every application it sets its mind to better than anybody else in the world.
Aspiring i-authors with better ideas can’t write turn-by-turn GPS applications – desperately needed on the iPhone – because it’s prohibited. Got a great idea on how to make a better mp3 organizer? prohibited. A better SMS messaging app or a clever voice over ip tool like Skype? Verboten. It just astounds me, (and clearly millions of others who’ve gone to the trouble of jailbreaking their phones to get around this), that the system would be so close-minded. Isn’t this thing actually MY phone anyway?

Perhaps most troubling is the fact that after spending months developing a piece of software for the iPhone, and then having it approved, Apple can still pull it from the store - even after it’s been deployed! Imagine your company is considering writing custom sales app on the iPhone. Do you risk Apple turning it off because they’re releasing a new CRM tool? Or Apple deciding that your app competes with their contacts tool? There’s no corporate software architect in his right mind that would accept those limitations for anything but the most trivial apps. When your choice is to spend money only on things you can afford to lose, you don’t take a serious bet on the platform. And that's a shame.

Either way, it’s probably agreed that the world really doesn't need more tasteless apps, and this isn't about preserving boobies or flatulence on the iPhone. Apple’s ability to pull any app it wants, at any time, for any reason, is simply trouble waiting to happen. It prevents folks from seriously considering the device as a platform.

The fact is, Apple should want as many apps as possible on it's devices! Proliferating inexpensive tools to build and deploy inexpensive software is the perfect way to entrench operating systems and sell hardware. In the early 90’s, IBM-dominated enterprises began dumping their IBM OS2 rollouts for Windows when it became clear that Microsoft’s $39 “Visual Basic” development tool was a viable platform for creating a new generation of desktop applications. Applications development shops exploded with new Windows developers, and IBM was left without a horse or rider in the budding PC race. They never recovered.

I'm confident the iPhone has tremendous potential as an enterprise app platform. But Apple’s controlling mentality is doing more than forcing them to miss out on much larger corporate revenue opportunities. It’s building distrust among it’s authorship – preventing folks from taking risks with it, and making Apple look puritanical and petty in the process.

Then again, I guess it could be worse. At least it's not running Windows mobile.

Kin you Kindle on your iPhone? You Kin now!

Last week, Amazon.com released the successor to it's first generation electronic book reader, "The Kindle" - cleverly titled the "Kindle 2". It no shock that I'm probably a bigger than average geek. But despite ringing endorsements from tech bloggers, the Wall Street Journal, and even Oprah Winfrey's declaration of it as "life changing", I'm not really going through any great case of Kindle envy. I'm still not entirely sure why people want it. I hope Oprah isn't disappointed in me.
Oh, I know the great feature set - a high resolution (though black and white) screen, wireless book downloads from the Amazon store, great battery life, newspapers delivered automatically to the device. But I still scratch my head. Do I need another thing to carry or take on a trip? And at $359, the device is at least half the price of a decent laptop. In fact, it costs more than an Asus eeePC Notebook, and I have yet to see what it can do that a laptop doesn't. Or an iPhone for that matter.
So I was delighted to see Amazon release a free version of it's Kindle software for the iPhone this week. Available as a free download from the iTunes app store, this scaled down version of the Kindle offers access to over 240,000 Amazon books in Kindle format directly on the iPhone or iPod touch. If you happen to own a Kindle, the two stay in sync perfectly - each remembering where you left off and the books are available offline. The new application has a few limitations, such as not being able to read periodicals or purchase new books directly from the app itself (a function prohibited by Apple's terms of use) - but you can hop over to Safari and accomplish the same thing fairly easily. I'm still not sure the whole "e-book" thing is for me, but this is a great way to try it out. Plus you can't beat the price. Download it from the iTunes app store here.

Speaking of books... several weeks ago, Google released it's massive online library of digitized books in plain text format. In doing so, it also introduced a site specifically formatted for mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Google Books mobile offers "millions" of books - both full version and samplings of others - free to any mobile device by simply pointing to http://books.google.com/m . Pretty cool.

Use both apps to bookmark a few classics you never intend to read and see if you can impress your friends.

Windows 7 - the elusive painless upgrade?

I've spent far too much time over the years suffering the pain of a Microsoft operating system upgrade. Anyone who's ever attempted one knows what I mean. You just know it's not going to go smoothly. In fact, OS upgrades are so consistently inconsistent that often we don't even bother trying to upgrade, even when we know it should. Rather than dealing with spotty, inconsistent performance, we concede, wipe the machine, and completely rebuild from scratch - to the point where that approach is most often recommended as the "right" way to do an upgrade. Or we simply purchase a new computer. Of course, it really shouldn't be that way. In a perfect world, upgrades would just work. Sadly in the real-world something always fails to come back from that final reboot: sound cards go mute, wireless networking suddenly disappears, the display reverts to something drawn with a crayon - SOMETHING goes awry.

It's not like Microsoft doesn't try, believe me they do. Their test bed is massive. I've actually visited their software testing labs in Redmond and witnessed things like the "USB test cart of death" - a rolling collection of 50+ USB devices all daisy-chained together into a single plug and inserted into the computer at one time. (I think the lights dimmed when they did it.) Microsoft houses terabytes of real-world customer applications and data that are installed and regression tested programatically every time there's a new build. But the realistic possibility of making sure that hundreds of thousands of legacy drivers work cleanly with millions of lines of new code is nearly impossible. And removing support for that 8 year old ink-jet printer in your home office - while probably fair - is still more customer-unfriendly than most people would like.

Still, everything I'd been hearing and reading seemed to indicate that something was different about the newest version of Windows - cleverly called "Windows 7". First released in beta early this year, Windows 7 was downloaded immediately by millions of enthusiasts. Although it's now closed to new applicants, the test represented the largest beta Microsoft has ever conducted. Realizing that I had a relatively new Vista laptop, and given hope that the common driver model between Vista and Win7 should theoretically reduce upgrade issues, I began thinking "worst case, I restore it to the factory settings". Thus (and yes, I said "thus"), with a good backup in place, caution to the wind, and a newly-burned installation DVD, I prepared myself for the predictable disappointment of something not working for a few months, and installed the beta.

One painfully-long hour later, my new windows desktop appeared... and everything worked. Everything. "This couldn't be" I thought.. and began hunting. SOMETHING's gonna hang. Word, office, sound, wireless networking, development tools, display - everything worked, and worked the first time. I was genuinely delighted. That was over a month ago, and I'm still delighted. Better still... it actually seems faster. From many accounts, Microsoft made reviewing and tightening up bits and pieces of code all over the operating system a key focus of this release. And it pays off. The overall feeling is of an interface that's somehow cleaner and less bloated than Vista. Efforts were also placed on the importance of keeping the visual interface responsive to commands - making it snappier, and giving the appearance that the machine may actually be running faster than it is, while items continue to churn in the background. Of course, that might not be truly "better performing", but it certainly makes the experience more pleasant. If perception is reality, then Windows 7 often seems to run better than Vista. Additionally this investment in code tightening allegedly allows Windows 7 to run on even lower class hardware - and run better on it - than Vista did.

Windows 7 introduces a number of new features, including a newly redesigned task bar and some windowing options, that will be changing how you work on your next PC. For the most part, I like them, and I'll discuss them more in depth in subsequent posts.

While Microsoft still hasn't committed to a final release date, the general consensus seems to point to a date in the second half of this year to capitalize on holiday sales. Equally importantly, I'm sure they'd like to ride out the wave of early-adopter "buzz" that Microsoft has finally done it right this time: that they'd shaken off the misinformed mantle of "vista stinks", and delivered Windows 7 - out of the box - as a beta - ready for prime time. For now, though, I'm still amazed to be running a new Microsoft operating system that ... in beta at least... installed flawlessly, looks better, and seems faster than it's predecessor on the same hardware.

Maybe Bill Gates should have retired a few years ago.

The Information you request is available for a nominal fee...

Some time in the 80's, I watched my father answer the phone, and realized fairly quickly that he was speaking to a survey-taker of some sort. I rolled my eyes... because I knew what was coming. Rather than just hang up the phone, my father politely went along with the preamble before responding "the information you request is available from me for a nominal fee." Telemarketing revenge aside, he had a point. This was his information, and he wondered why someone should profit from it in some way that didn't include him. Or perhaps it was just his way of fighting back at a gnawing feeling that he was somehow losing another bit of his privacy.
On the other hand, I have to admit I've never really been overly frightened of losing control of my "information." Not through any sense of false bravado, but mostly because I've always kind of assumed that most of my information is already "out there" somewhere anyway. I guess I figured it's kind of like stealing a car: if somebody really wants it, sadly, they're probably going to get it. I've written in other posts voicing my concern over what I see as a gradual decline in our collective notion of "privacy", and I've seen friends go through the nightmare of an identity theft. I'm certainly don't like the idea of everybody having access to everything. But the pragmatist in me just sees it as somewhat inevitable. Especially when we give so much of it up so freely ourselves.
Which is why I was a bit startled at the upheaval this week over Facebook's newly proposed - and then retracted - terms of service agreement with it's members. Facebook now counts over 175 million users among it's base, which if it were a country, would make it the 6th largest nation in the world. Facebook management declared eminent domain to that nation this week, with a newly proposed terms of service contract that would essentially give it perpetual ownership to pretty much anything entered into it's system: personal information, photos, friends lists, and more. The resulting protest from privacy organizations and users was swift and immediate. Within hours, the issue was at the top of Internet news headlines, technology lists, and sent Twitter abuzz.
For their part, Facebook explained that the world had gotten it all wrong, and that they, like Google, "meant no harm" - all a big misunderstanding. Yet under increasingly mounting pressure from advocacy groups and members, Facebook repealed the offending TOS on Wednesday, and posted a plea to members asking assistance on crafting a better, more palatable, agreement.
Was this, as one group called it.. a "digital land grab?" or an innocent omission? It's tough to say, honestly, but in the end, does it really matter? What's surprising to me is how willingly members contribute all sorts of what used to be considered "private" information into Facebook, and broadcast it for all the world to see, in the first place. Yes, you can control some of this with Facebook's privacy settings. But while abundant, they are anything but intuitive, and trying to figure out what other folks can and can't actually see, by default or otherwise, isn't an easy task. ("is this person in my network, a friend, external,etc). Given how willingly folks contribute essentially private information into a public system, I'm surprised that there was such a reaction to Facebook taking what it's membership had already handed over anyway. More and more adults, myself firmly included, who should supposedly "know better" are utilizing Facebook to connect with old friends, college classmates, and former co-workers. Fear of data loss hasn't stopped us from continuing to feed it's web of information about us with email addresses, cell phone numbers, professional connections, photos, and witty repartee. So why the hubbub, bub? Isn't the real concern that the information itself is so widely exposed, not who actually took it?
Of course, in the end I'm glad Facebook rescinded, but I have the feeling we're simply prolonging the inevitable. If not now, it'll happen. Some day, some service is going to be perceived as so compelling, so "must have", that folks will accept an even more egregious set of terms simply to be part of it. Especially if it's built in to the TOS from the start. Google already tracks all of the search and browsing patterns you use in it's Chrome browser, is what Facebook proposed really all that much of a stretch beyond that?
Maybe we all should have responded by telling them the information was available for "a nominal fee." I wonder if they would have hung up.

Let's See How Far We've Come...

It can be easy while we're get caught up in the trappings of our currently connected life, to forget exactly how far we've evolved technologically, and the short time in which we've done it. As we meander about a world with ubiquitous wireless internet connectivity in our pocket, feeding our "Crackberry" addiction to email (and lately Facebook), it's enlightening to take a moment and realize... it hasn't been this way very long.

Take a look at this from 1981. Gee.. part of me thinks 1981 doesn't seem all that long ago.
“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem...

Live Sync.. I love a good free tool!

Ahhh... There's nothing better than finding a piece of software that makes it's way into my daily use immediately. Ok, maybe there's a few things better, but it's still extremely satisfying to find a software solution, install it, and watch a problem go away. It also gets bonus points for solving problems you didn't even KNOW you had, or for just providing additional cool and useful functionality. Microsoft had a busy forth quarter of '08 introducing a number of products in beta, and many of them are emerging now. One I think you'll be hearing more about is Windows Live Sync (http://sync.live.com), and if you work on several machines around the house, in the office, or both, I highly recommend you check this out.

Windows Live Sync is a free service from Microsoft that runs on a MAC or PC (or both) gives you the ability to synchronize the contents of multiple folders between two or more internet connected machines. The synchronization can be either on demand or continuous, and once established, synchronization happens almost immediately. Better yet, LiveSync allows you to remotely access the contents of these machines (assuming they're connected) from any other internet connection. If you choose, you can offer that same access to selected friends (via invitations) which can be a handy way to pass files too large for email (and potentially violate your company's corporate policy in the process - so check first).

This tool is perfect for synchronizing your photo or music collection for instance - allowing you to add photos on any available machine and have those photos automatically synced up together into 2 unified libraries. If you do some retouching on a photo on one machine, those changes are immediately synchronized back without thinking about it. LiveSync also works perfectly to synchronize documents between your laptop and desktop, and you'll always have the latest copy with you - or at least accessible. Employees who have both home offices and work machines (assuming your company permits it) can keep work and home documents in both places - and access them wherever they need to be. And it's incredibly comforting knowing that a web-based interface to your files is available should something happen to your current copy (like a laptop crash.. before a presentation... naah.. that never happens!)

Live Sync is based on some technology Microsoft purchased a few years ago called "Foldershare" and has been improved a good deal since then. Still, it's not without it's limitations and gotchas. According to Microsoft, you can sync up to 20 folders (which can contain sub-folders) and each folder can have no more than 20,000 items. It also will not synchronize files over 4GB in size. In practice, I haven't found either of these to be much of a limitation.
I also recommend you resist the temptation to simply point both sides at the "My Documents" folder and let it rip. For starters, that approach simply won't work in some situations - like when synchronizing between an XP machine and a Vista machine, owing to a difference in some of the naming conventions used by both. Attempting a full "My documents" sync will also begin to swap items and folders that should remain unique to each machine or which could potentially cause issues - like offline email folders, and certain application settings. However, by creating a specific folder within "My Documents" for syncing purposes (I called mine "1_SyncedItems" to keep the name at the top) and working there, you can be sure that only the documents you want to keep replicated will be copied.
Remember too that this is "Synchronization" - not necessarily backup, so mistakes, deletes, renames etc count as changes. If you delete a file on one side, in a few moments it's going to be deleted on the other - so think quickly during those moments of "I-didn't-just-do-that" and disable sync in the task bar tray. With any luck, you can use LiveSync to connect remotely to the remote machine, find the file, bring it back, and be in business without much effort. In case you can't tell, I HAVE done this, but you must act quickly. It'd be nice to seem Microsoft offer a user-selectable time delay on replication.
Of course, it wouldn't be Microsoft without some other bizarre confusion thrown in. LiveSync won't sync with network storage devices, even if those devices are mapped to a drive letter on one of the machines. It also will not Sync to Microsoft's Skydrive free web-based storage - again - for reasons that are not all clear. And further confusion reigns when you start comparing this to another Microsoft product - Windows Live "MESH" - a product that APPEARS to do the same thing as LiveSync, plus a few more things like actual remote access (go-to-my-pc) style. Allegedly this is a bit of internal competition at Microsoft and the functionality will all settle out into one product eventually. I'll write more about that when it does.
For now, it works as advertised and I find it extremely valuable. Go sync yourself!

iTunes now DRM-Free - but Apple Style

I hate to generalize.. I really do, but it really seems there's something different about Apple fans. Perhaps it's something resident in their DNA that causes them to wait hours in line for new iPhones, pre-order $2800 laptops sight unseen and untested, and guides their blind faith in the dogma that whatever comes from Cupertino must be good. What is it about so many Apple fans that makes them reach so readily for their wallet, only to get burned a few weeks later? Remember the $200 iPhone price drop 2 months after introduction? (Thank-you sir, may I have another! ) I feel like it happens all the time.

So while I have a hate/hate affair with the iTunes software, I actually LIKE the iTunes music store, and Jobs is to definitely be credited for wielding enough clout to get it done in the first place. Last month, I was thrilled to see Apple finally give up a huge bone of contention - and close the gap with Amazon and the rest of the industry - by announcing it would finally start selling it's music without copy protection (DRM-free). This is absolutely a positive move for consumers and I applaud it. But despite Steve Jobs' famous full-page ad asking the record companies to let Apple go DRM free, the company didn't broker the final deal until long after similar deals has been struck with other providers like Amazon. And nobody had more clout to pull off a deal like that than Apple.
The fact is, keeping Apple's DRM in place was about keeping iPod users locked to iTunes and to Apple during a time when there actually were other choices vying for, umm, viability in the personal music player market. "Leave Apple, lose your iTunes music" was a significant stick to weld. Fast forward a few years now and with iPod market share now at over 70% (over 80% on a dollar basis), it's not exactly a courageous decision. It saves Apple overhead and support hassles, and the truth is there's not really much of a place left to jump to anyway.

Unfortunately, in Apple's drm-free euphoria, you're still stuck with iTunes if you want to keep your drm-protected music playing (legally anyway). Despite the change, if you want to leave Apple and play music you've already purchased from the iTunes store on a non-Apple device - you'll still need need to PAY to take your music with you. 30 cents per song in fact. Do the math (cudos to TechCrunch for doing so here). Let’s see, 6 billion songs purchased from iTunes X 30 cents a song - that's $1.8 billion in potential upgrade fees. Still think this is all about Appley-customer-love-and-goodness?

And until last week, "buying" your DRM-Freedom meant upgrading your entire library at once. That could amount to a significant cost to buy music that you're already paid for. Tech pundit and self-admitted Apple Fan boy Leo Laporte mentioned on his podcast that it cost him over $300 to upgrade his libary to DRM-free, and that Apple's all or nothing approach forced him to upgrade his one-time purchase of Regis Philbin in order to get his Led Zepplin box set upgraded.
Obviously Leo deserves to be flogged for purchasing Regis' music to begin with, but it's clear his scenario was played certainly by hundreds of other early-Apple-adopters who begrudgingly did the same thing. Mostly because Apple said that was the only option.
The good news for non-early adopters is that, somewhat predictably (and wait for the shock here) Apple has relented several weeks late, and opened up a la carte style pricing letting you pick and choose which which songs you want to upgrade. That's, of course, bad news for the "gotta have it now" crowd... just like the $200 iphone price drop was. Except this time there's no rebate for those who jumped early.

As the fellow said at the MacBook "Wheel" introduction... (below) "I"ll buy anything if it's shiny and made by Apple."

Of course it's a joke.

CoolIris is exactly that... cool...

Last week I lamented at some length about the limited offerings for viewing digitally converged media on HDTV's, as well as a bit of frustration that people I know with HDTV's and digital cameras don't really seem to care if one ever sees the other - except maybe on a blind date set up by a DVD.
I'm positive that one of the key reasons for the lack of a clear winner in this field is that is creating a user interface to navigate a thousands of items (be they MP3s, pictures, or files) easily and intuitively is not an easy task. MP3s at least have a somewhat predictable hierarchy that we've all used for years in our record collections: Artist> Album> Song. Add genres and you've got a fairly quick drill-down structure you can utilize. Plus you've always got the fall-back position of doing a text search for the name. Fortunately MP3s are tagged internally in a consistent way, so the music's tag information is carried with each copy, can be extracted automatically and doesn't need to be retyped each time a copy is created.

Historically that approach hasn't worked well with photos in JPG - though geocoding and facial recognition from Picassa, Facebook, and others are helping close the gap.(Another subject for another post). But navigating thousands of pictures is still daunting - especially if you know the picture you want, but aren't sure exactly when it was taken or where. Enter Cooliris.

If you haven't seen CoolIris, go download and try it now. And then, come back. I'll wait.... :-)
http://www.cooliris.com

CoolIris is a browser-based technology that presents a smoothly scrolling "video wall" in an extremely intuitive interface. Slide the mouse left or right and the wall zooms by. If something catches your eye, you naturally slow down, and CoolIris zooms in subtly and predictably. Zoom in a bit more with the click wheel and the selected "monitor" enlarges surrounded by metadata about the video, and play controls appear. Click play to watch or zoom back out and keep sliding.

Stunningly simply, incredibly intuitive, and so very cool. And I think it's the perfect interface for a home media center.

Amazingly, CoolIris runs as a full-screen browser plug-in, which reduces the amount of proprietary code anyone wanting to utilize it would need to write. And the company has created a well-documented API programming interface so developers can optimize their sites to be "CoolIris" enabled. That's a huge plus. It currently works with both videos and photos - so navigating mp3s with cover art shouldn't be much of a stretch. YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, Picasaweb (among others) are all enabled out of the box - which alone makes it perfect for the living room. A list of "categories" on the left - News, TV, Movies, etc add dimensions to the hierarchies it could navigate, and one could even envision "walls behind walls" as an organizational technique.

Today it only runs against items on the web, but that's actually a good thing: it's well known and well optimized. We've been serving up photos via a web server for years. The photo collection in the top image is from my Picasaweb, not my local machine or my network, and it's still wonderfully fast scrolling. But if CoolIris can scroll that library from the web, with a speed that truly pleases, this has a lot of amazing potential over a home network.

Since when do I complain about something one week and get a fix for it the next? My life doesn't work like that.

Where's my convergence? (You promised!)

A few years ago, “convergence” raged as the in-vogue phrase describing the collision of all of our new digital media, converted from its analog form, onto a single computer readable platform. Video, music, photos - all going digital - were marching together first toward the computer, and then, like (insert your favorite military hero analogy here), taking the living room by storm as the last beach head of digital acceptance. Somewhere along the way, though, it seems they were turned back. What happened?
Clearly digital photography has replaced film for everyone – professional and amateur alike. Sub-$1000 widescreen HDTVs, inexpensive surround-sound systems, and Blue Ray players are rapidly making the living room the viewing place of choice for movies. (Personally I’m glad to leave the gum-seats, half-gallon “medium” sodas, and $12 popcorn behind.) Digital music, the original canary in the coal mine of convergence, is now in its second digital generation. The first generation - the CD - is fading to the point that Apple announced more than half of all the music sold this year on iTunes will never have been available on a CD. That’s amazing. Meanwhile, Hulu is breaking viewership records as one of the only legitimate locations to view TV on demand over the web, and YouTube continues to confound by not only surviving, but thriving - despite having no truly identifiable business model. And where do we watch and listen to all this amazing digital media? On a computer screen. Maybe an ipod.
It’s bizarre really, and you've no doubt witnessed seen it. Think of how many folks you know have a wireless network, gigs of digital photos, a huge MP3 collection and an amazing HDTV/Home Theatre setup. Now think of how many of them can actually bring up pictures from their vacation easily onto that same setup? Or use that TV to find a song and play it through that great stereo system. Why is it that our digital photos and mp3s never quite make it to our new “home theaters”? (and hooking up an ipod with a headphone adapter doesn’t count.) How many people do you know have a 5 inch digital picture frame somewhere in their living room, but can’t simply view their digital picture collection or videos on their 50 inch plasma?
I’m convinced there’s still huge market opportunity here, and I don’t want to leave it to the cable company to build into their box and then charge us $9 a month for it. The lack of a device for this isn’t for lack of effort, but perhaps of vision. Over the years there have been plenty of entries into the “media hub” space. Microsoft’s media center, originally a separate version of Windows XP, adopted the “tower PC in the living room” approach and never really took off. It’s now built into Vista and Windows 7, but only records TV with the right hardware. And again, who wants a PC next to the TV? The Xbox 360 performs reasonably as a “media center extender” – but it implies a media center PC somewhere ELSE in the house, and finding items in a large music or photo collection is painfully slow. Plus the 360’s noise, lack of a Blue Ray drive, and gamebox look just don’t fit the media room.
Roku, Linksys, HP and others promised to centralize all your media access into one place, yet none truly broke out. Some interesting alternatives have grown out of the open source and XBox hacking community as options like Boxee and the XBMC (Xbox media center) – now run a fairly impressively on Windows, Linux, and Mac. But again, we’re back to the pc-in-the-living room problem. Of all, AppleTV seemed to have the most promise, and I’m actually surprised hasn’t gained more popularity. But I also suspect that its moderate acceptance, even among the Apple fanbase, is largely due to the painfully closed design of the AppleTv. Hacking AppleTV to let it play something that wasn’t purchased on iTunes has launched legions of websites, and again, Boxee is a stand-out choice here, but it still needs to be installed via an unsupported hack. And there’s no guarantee Apple won’t turn if off for spite.
So what IS the answer? Something different - forget what we already know. The interface CAN'T be a keyboard and bunch of nested folders. It's got to be simple, quick, and painfully easy to use.
Back in 2001 there was a device that, I think, got it - at least for the time: The Turtlebeach Audiotron. Designed not as a computer or hub, but as a piece of home audio equipment, this network-based music player actually LOOKED and ACTED like something that was supposed to be in the living room. The device it could play just about any format, as well as stream music from internet radio. Unlike most of its competitors (then and now) it searched the home network for music resident on any networked PC’s and aggregated them into a its own “virtual” library list, which it kept internally. This key differentiator speeds scrolling large artist lists and search immensely. The front mounted jog-shuttle wheel made music selection as quick and easy as an ipod is today (before the ipod by the way). This cached library approach and wheel interface gave it a huge performance advantage over most of the media-hubs and media-extenders I've tried, and didn't require you to move your music. The tron was an audio-only device so, like other stereo components, it displayed songs and titles on it’s lcd display, not the TV. It also contained an internal web server that allowed the device to be configured and controlled remotely from any browser – the equivalent of the “play to” function Microsoft just introduced into windows 7. Finally while not “open source”, it was at least extensible, and had a published programming interface, which let 3rd parties extend it with add-on functionality – further enhancing its value.
What made it work? It simply knew what it was.. and wasn’t. It wasn't trying to be a PC-on-a-tv. It “got” the idea that we need to start from the living room and embrace the computer, not the other way round. A quick, simple interface that was a breeze to use. While it didn’t output photos or cover art to a tv, that seemed to be a simple clear direction for it's “next generation”. It was also, critically, somewhat extensible by 3rd parties. It had that subtle level of “explorability” which made it quickly usable out of the box, but an underlying base that was more robust. Sadly the company never produced that follow-up, and the original – still working great – still sits in my stereo rack. What a shame.
So where is this mythical converged device? How hard could it be? And more importantly, why don’t people seem to naturally yearn for the ability to view their digital photos on something larger than a 4 inch screen? Where is that simple box, that fits right above the DVD player (or for that matter, built INSIDE the TV or DVD player), that connects wirelessly and uses a jog-shuttle remote to scroll through menus, artists, and pictures effortlessly, that lets me play the song lists and genres I’ve set up in any music software on any of my home’s PC’s, that lets me bring up hulu and Youtube and watch them there, that either records tv shows, or pulls them automatically on demand from the cable company? That displays my pictures and others from the web in high-resolution, quickly, cleverly, creatively, that connects with a simple hdmi connector and costs $99?
Now THAT’S worth waiting in line for. (ok, not really). But, please, somebody, just go build it.. .don’t give the cable company something else to charge us for.

Tale of Two Keynotes (2x the yawn)

Despite what you may think, the beginning of January is actually a hopping time for the tech world. CES - the Computer Electronics show opens annually this time every year in Las Vegas, and MacWorld in Los Angeles goes against it nearly head-to-head. Oddly, the adult video industry's annual convention is also held annually in Vegas this week - not that anybody who would attend one would attend the other of course.
While the list of "expected announcements" was kind of dismal, interest peaked in the blog-o-sphere given that these would be the first ones without either Steve Jobs or Bill Gates giving the keynotes for their respective companies. Gates stepped down from running Microsoft last year, and Jobs and Apple pulled out of MacWorld altogether, though Apple SVP Phil Schiller still gave the keynote. This didn't stop the usual rampant speculation about what might have been kept under wraps, but in the end - it turned out to be, well, not so much.
Both keynotes were largely dull (even by geek standards) with perhaps the most humorous moment happening not in the halls, but in the coverage itself, when the live blog stream from Mac Rumors was hacked and published false news of the early demise of Mr. Jobs. (I thought Mac's didn't get hacked anyway?) Microsoft countered with a blisteringly-boring Steve Balmer keynote that rehashed a number of older demos, included 2 performances by a band called "tripod" that left many scratching their heads, and introduced a 12 year old girl who wrote a game live on stage and predictably whooped the head of the Microsoft gaming division Robbie Bach, who struggled to even turn on his Xbox controller. Nice.

Here's a quick rundown of the announcements I think most folks would care about:

Apple:

• iTunes finally removes copy-protection from more songs, and will make it's entire catalog DRM-free by end of year. I'd be surprised if the song format for downloaded songs would change to MP3 however. I'd also expect the "plus" label currently used for DRM free music on iTunes will probably also go away.
  
• iTunes song pricing will change to either 69 cents or $1.29 - depending on what "tier" the song is in. Any guess as to what tier most of the music you'd actually want to buy is in?
  
• Apple announces a new 17-inch MacBook with eco-friendly battery and 8 hours claimed battery life. Yours for $2800 starting in February.
  
• A new version of iLife with better video editing, facial recognition for photo organization, and spiffed-up garage band for $79 as an upgrade. Music lessons available on demand from celebrity musicians for $4.99 each.
  
• A new version of the iWork suite (for the MS Office hater in your life) goes $79 as an upgrade. Get it bundled as a box set with the Leopard OX and iLife for $169. Add $1 for the Iphone remote control application for keynote (seriously? yes.).
  
• An on-line version if iWork - (iWork.com) similar to GoogleDocs will lauch for document collaboration and sharing. Free now, paid down the road.
  

Microsoft:

• Windows 7 was briefly demo'd with improvements to taskbar and desktop navigation / management. Much touch and media functionality built right it, so expect to see more devices with a touch-focus similar to HP's. No final date announced.
• New "Playto" function will allow you to remotely play a song on a remote device such as the XBox 360 or Roku. Allegedly this will work over the web as well. I'm not sure "push" is the right metaphor here, though, as I THINK I'd rather be standing in front of the device I'm listening to and "pull" music to it. Part of the "Sharing media experiences" thing I guess.
  
• Windows 7 beta is available for download now to MSDN/Technet subscribers, Friday worldwide. Indications seem to be there will only be one beta, so look for a release candidate in early spring.
  
• "Live Essentials" - Microsoft's collection of basic tools for writing, photo management, video editing, and a new msn messenger are available now. A new "what's new" feature will let you aggregate your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and other updates into a single stream here. Kinda cool if you do a lot of Social networking.
  
• Xbox Live will offer real time interactive gaming such as participating in a live version of "1 vs. 100". They claim the new Wii-like avatars are increasing social interaction (umm, sure they are).
• Xbox Live's "Kodu" environment lets you create your own games and play them against others. So easy, a 12 year old could do it (and did so with frightening speed actually).
  

The Day the Music Died... Update

A quick update to the global Zune meltdown from yesterday (read my post below this one).

Late yesterday, Microsoft posted a note on it's website saying that it had identified the cause of the issue as being a bug related to date calculation and 12/31/08 being the last day of a leap year. Their advice, summarized, was "wait until tomorrow, plug it back in, all will be fine with the world." Unless you planned to actually USE your Zune on New Year's Eve.
The good news, if there was any, was the problem fixed itself for the the Zune minions out there without their having to do anything. Microsoft either for that matter. But the reality is that this is FAR too simple a bug to have gotten through a development process.

Come on... Date logic? Really? Leap year logic isn't exactly new, nor does it change much, guys. We've been calculating leap years since - oh - 46 BC according to Wikipedia. You'd THINK this would be old hat by now. And in reality, IT IS! We've been handling it on computers for, what, 40 years? A failure of this magnitude is just stunningly bad form.

If you're geeky enough to want to look at the actual code (and surprise, you can count me in there), here's a nice bit of analysis that "itsnotabigtruck" did over on zuneboards.com that walks through the code. You can see, it's pretty simple. If you want to see the entire routine, it's out there for perusal on Pastie here.

Oh and the bonus? It'll happen again in 4 years. Assuming they don't fix it, or that anyone will even be using a Zune in 4 years. I'm not holding my breath for either.

The Day the Music Died..

OK, yes, I'll come clean. I'll admit it, I have a Zune. And yes, not only do I have one... I actually use one. (Cue the abuse now).

It's bizarre to be defensive about our technology choices, but make that "Hi-I'm-Tom-and-I'm-a-Zune-User" statement out loud and you immediately feel the need to issue a disclaimer... like a used car: "but I only use it to go to church on weekends." And "I didn't buy it... I swear, it was a gift, I won it in a raffle. My parents' bought it for me. My real mp3 player is an Ipod..." Really... Honest.

Ok, the fact is I do use my Zune. And the truth is that while the Zune has some notable uses, it just never quite beat out my ipod for usability - except for one, key difference. It's ability to sync wirelessly. My zune is fundamentally my podcast listener. And it's perfect for that. I leave it in my car, press "sync" on my way out the door as I leave the car, and next time in I've got a fresh set of podcasts for my commute. The ability to sync podcasts over wifi - something Apple just added to iPhone and the Touch, has been available on the Zune for over a year. It works splendly. My Zune never even comes into the house.

So when I woke up this morning and found Twitter all aglow with reports of Zune's dying "en masse", I found mine DOA right alongside everyone else. If case you haven't heard, it turns out that the worldwide collection of 30gb Zunes executed a mass suicide pact sometime just after midnight EST last night, December 31st. (head over there to TechCruch or pretty much any other tech site for the details.) In what's suspected to be some sort of Y2K type glitch (the last day of the year), Zunes spontaneously rebooted then locked up cold, not responding to reboot/reset requests of any kind.

As far as I know, a mass outage of a portable device like this is both unprecedented and, candidly, unbelievable. This just isn't supposed to happen. As critical as I may be at times of the "free pass" Apple seems to get in the press, and as passionately as I hate so much of iTunes, no amount of Apple zealotism would EVER get Apple a pass on this if it happened to iPods. Sadly, just as the Zune platform was beginning to pick itself up off of the wrestling mat with good reviews and rumors of a more-open "Zune phone" on the way... Microsoft shoots itself in the foot with this. Stunning.

Somewhere in Redmond, I'm sure a few managers and developers are spending New Year's Eve polishing up their resumes, but this is likely to go beyond that. Microsoft will remedy this quickly, and I doubt the outage will last more than a few days at most. I suspect they'll even make good; offering free music credit something similar. But in the end, even 2 minutes is too long for something like this, and the irreparable damage to their credibility will have been cemented by then. This is far more than just a good joke at Microsoft's expense. I'm convinced this will become a dagger to the Microsoft mobile device platform confidence that won't be sidestepped any time soon. After all, who in their right mind would to consider a "Zune phone" now? If the phrase "Zune" wasn't already synonymous with second-rate, this seals the deal.

I can hear it now. "Remember when all the Zune's died at one time? hahahha". Zune-a-pocolipse! "You're phone wasn't bricked.. it was ZUNED". "Car won't start? What is it a Zune?"

Let the abuse begin. They've earned it.

A Good Ol' Boy

Don't expect this one to have a tremendous amount of insight into the latest technology. I received some devastating news over the weekend, the passing of a friend and co-worker - not to mention a true country gentleman. Larry Hoffman. aka "Dr. Tiff".
Larry was one of the most interesting, friendly, and genuine guys I've ever met. He defined the phrase "down to earth." He smiled easily, laughed often, and never took himself too seriously. He was a walking collection of stories... those he told, those he made up, and sometimes those that just happened to him. Those he simply "was." And he would hate that I'm writing this.
I first encountered Larry when he came to work at GMACCM to build out our imaging center. As Larry would tell you, he "hailed" from the backwoods of North Carolina, near Asheville - but most folks would pick that up from his accent before he mentioned it. Larry was a self proclaimed "good-ol'-boy" and immensely proud of his "rebel roots." He took much grief living among us in the "Nawth", and jokingly retaliated by referring to the civil war as "that war of Northern Aggression." He loved his home and his beloved horses, and when pressed, would happily enlighten you to the differences between "western" and "eastern" Carolina BBQ, always letting you know, however, that there was only one "true" version. His years in Pennsylvania were always as a commuter though, hopping back home on weekends to be part of his sons' and daughter's life - a family that made him so proud. While at GMACCM, Larry helped put together the industry's first truly paperless commercial mortgage enterprise. We may have built the software, but Larry RAN that imaging center ("make no mistake" as he'd say). The initiative was recognized industry-wide and I was proud to be part of it. It was so successful, in fact, that it led to a business spin-out, and was the first IT project I'd ever been part of that generated revenue - real IT revenue - for it's parent company. While many participated in it's success, it certainly wouldn't have happened without Larry.

Larry was immediately disarming and likable. An accomplished photographer, he possessed a knowledge of the subject that only those of us from the pre-digital era of film and darkrooms would appreciate. If pressed, he would share his gorgeous portfolio, always bashful about receiving compliments. When he fell into the imaging realm of his career, he took to it like a fish to water. His knowledge of scanners, and arcane imaging software like Kofax seemed endless, earning him the moniker "Dr. Tiff". (Tiff's are a document imaging format). Even his personal email address was "IScanTiffs@... ".

Despite his success, Larry was never a guy to live for work. He worked to live - and loved his country home and it's surrounding hillsides. I remember returning to work after vacations one year and trading our experiences. Some of us had headed off to the beach, a cruise ship, or the back yard. Larry headed back to the North Carolina woods he loved so much. He told us "I just took my horse, my backpack, a frying pan and a bottle into the woods to get lost. Six days later I came out." "What'd you do?" we Yankees asked. "Nuthin... bottle was empty though. "

In my time at GMACCM, I travelled with Larry from Ireland to Japan, and many places inbetween, and his disarming style and wicked sense of humor got us through much hard work. Seeing "Dr. Tiff" on the Tokyo subway, wandering through Roppongi, or downing a beer with locals in Mullingar are memories that'll stay with me for life. It was during these trips that we developed the custom of plotting our "some day" trip to Asheville. We'd spend the weekend at Larry's place, listen to good music, eat some really good BBQ and down a few beers. "Come on down, then! I've got plenty of room." That wasn't just being polite. He really, truly meant it. I deeply regret not taking him up on it now.

Larry left our area a year or so ago and moved back to North Carolina. He'd decided to build a spec house - just him and his boys - on a property he owned. It wasn't so much for the money, but for the expressed purpose of teaching his boys building skills. "It's just something they should know" he said. It was while building that house that Larry discovered windmills and renewable energy, and a new career direction. For the last year, he was certified in these technologies, teaching and consulting to others about "green" energy capabilities. He told me how he loved that he was "somehow, giving something back - doing something that feels good." It was also the perfect business to be in this summer when oil cracked $100 a barrel. He told me he was "busy as a one-armed blacksmith" last time I spoke with him, and seemed as happy as I'd ever known him.

Larry passed away in a construction accident this weekend, presumably while working on a project. Thankfully he didn't linger long, but my deepest sympathies go out to him and his family. He smile, his laugh are etched in my memory - and, I'm sure those of hundreds of others.

I'll get to Asheville someday... and I'll have that beer and BBQ.. and I'll toast the man who proposed the idea in the first place. But it will never be as good as it would have been with him. Sleep well, my rebel friend.

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Please take a moment to click on the "comments" link below, to read the tributes others have left to Larry, or to leave your own thoughts and memories. I'll make sure his family sees them.

never could an industry benefit more..

There's a myth - a perception - about IT people that drives me crazy: that we love technology for technology's sake. That we love getting gadgets and gizmos and writing new systems. And it's true, we do like those things - but not without purpose and intent. I don't know a single IT person who gets enjoyment out of firing something up or writing new code without the obligatory thought of "wow, this will be fantastic when used to do this or as part of that." Most technologists feel purposeless-technology is like the old saw about a kiss from your sister: Nice, but it doesn't mean anything.
Which is why hospital IT - or a lack thereof - drives me nuts. Through a bad run of luck over the past few months, I've helped family members being admitted to no less than 5 hospitals and medical facilities- surgery, inpatient rehab, emergency room, outpatient testing, and various admissions and pre-quals. And in every case - every case - I was stunned at how badly information technology - basic data - is captured, managed and not reused in these facilities.
Don't get me wrong, they have amazing imaging and diagnostic technology - cat scans, MRI, low-invasion monitors for heart, oxygen, remote surgical technology that's stunning and state of the art. But that's not IT.
And they also seemed to have the best of intentions. There were rolling laptops galore, and the triage nurse in the ER used a computer-based system to take a full medical history - including drug history, drugs currently being taken, surgical history, family doctor, etc on my father when he visited the ER recently. Yet every single person thereafter - 2 ER nurses, ER doctor, in house doctor, and admitting nurses asked this exact same information. Taking 5-10 minutes each at least. Sometimes writing it down, sometimes not. Never using a computer, never referencing what was already captured - despite plenty of rolling laptops and printers around. When discrepencies were discovered on screen, they were corrected on a piece of note paper, not on the computer. Later, the admitting nurse on the floor upstairs wheeled in a PC and took down the same history, drug use, and family doctor's names as the triage nurse had added to the computer 2 hours before! And this isn't unique to just this facility. This exact same experience was repeated with another family member, at another well-respected hospital, by 3 people back-to-back (nurse, doctor, administrator). They even apologized for it!
Being asked the same questions over and over is not just annoying to patients. It wastes valuable time - time that could be spent doing more critical diagnostic work, seeing more patients, catching conditions earlier. In an ER where minutes can matter, asking an elderly patient to recite the medicines they're currently taking can eat up 10 minutes or more. Do it 3 times and you've wasted 20 minutes! It also introduces the frightening risk of errors. Ask the same question 3 times and - even if answered identically - somebody writing it down can still transcribe the answer incorrectly.

There's no doubt that hospital's have come a LONG way toward reducing medical transcription errors and cleaning up data. But the bottom line is that each of these facilities seemed to lack a process to consistently reuse already-captured, readily available data - something that's commonplace in most well-run businesses. Why? Well, perhaps it's the hospital employee's desire to only have the most recent information, or to simply think out loud. Perhaps it's just old habit, poor process enforcement, or a natural hesitancy to break a routine they know. Whatever the cause, there must be a realization that better data utilization makes the entire organization MORE efficient, not less - if this field is going to progress. Of course, basic data capture isn't as cool and sexy as a slick new MRI machine, but accurate information is still vital to patient care. Never could an industry that has such stunning technology benefit more from the business world's experience about how to better use it.

What are Dash and Telenav missing?

The GPS device market has exploded over the last 12-18 months, and odds are that if your current car doesn't have a GPS device built-in, your next one will, but in the meantime you've already gone and purchased one. I'm also willing to bet that even if you have one built-in, you're probably itching to purchase another one anyway. And with good reason. The devices coming in from the stand-alone market are now faster, more feature-rich, and generally cooler than virtually anything your car's manufacturer installed. Without a doubt, one of the most talked-about features of the new iPhone - prior to it's release - was GPS capability, even if what ended up shipping was less than usable as a navigation device. New portables GPS units are chock full of features (and fluff) like Bluetooth connectivity, photo display, mp3 playback and digital book readers - even traffic updates. But I'm convinced the best is yet to come with these devices.
What seems to be the next inevitable advance in this field, however, is still struggling to get out of the starting gate. Giving these devices their own Internet connectivity and address offers a myriad of truly intriguing possibilities - and companies like Dash and Telenav are desperately trying to make their names on that possibility. The Dash and Telenav use the same digital data networks used by cell phones to allow email and web access, and use them to allow web-based, real-time point of interest search. But that's just the beginning. The really interesting possibilities start to occur when a critical mass of these devices make their way into cars. At that point, groups of cars, all communicating their speed and location simultaneously, can be centrally processed and immediately pushed back to the car - offering a genuine, real-time view of traffic flow. This also makes the devices individually addressable, so destinations or address data can be pushed down to each one uniquely from the web. This means your assistant can enter your next destination onto a website and send that info directly to your car, all while you're still driving. POI databases would be more current and offer far more detail than what's possible today. This is truly the future of GPS.
So what's the problem? Yet, another network subscription. Both of these devices require a separate data connection - and of course, another monthly fee to support it. And while I find this technology incredibly compelling, the thought of another $19.00 a month fee is just too off-putting. And I know I'm not alone.
The obvious answer - for me and everyone else with a smartphone - would be to utilize Bluetooth to share my existing cellphone data connection. This approach is more than technically possible, it's practically easy, and is often hacked into use today. The problem is that for most people, it would mean a violation of their terms of service with their carrier. Most phone companies forbid using a phone's data connection as a "tethered" connection for other devices such as laptops. It also potentially cuts into the revenue model of these growing companies, more than likely driving up their cost.
It's a shame, though, that this kind of short-sighted thinking on the part of the mobile phone companies is going to slow the development of these and other devices that could benefit from being occasionally Internet connected. Earlier this week, the Dash company announced some major restructuring in an effort to try and hang in through the downturn in the economy until the devices take off. I certainly hope they make it. These devices offer the first compelling new thing I've seen in car technology since Bluetooth. It'd be a darn shame if phone company greed took them out before they had a chance to get out of the gate.

Something in the air... err.. cloud

It's had a dozen names: "Software as a service", "software plus services", "on demand", "cloud computing" and others. Call it what you will, Microsoft has been kicking the idea around of a "next generation" on-demand-based software model for years. After initially missing the Internet boat (and most the dock) by a mile in the mid-90's, it's fair to say that Microsoft was one of the first to look beyond "brochure-ware" and begin formulating a vision for using the Internet as a genuine operating platform, not just as a sales tool. By 2000, at a keynote I attended given by Steve Balmer at VSLive in San Francisco, Microsoft was introducing ".NET" - the company's self-proclaimed change in direction, and the beginning of an entirely new strategy in search of that mythical "software as a service" objective. While that holy grail quest occasionally ran hot and cold as a priority, the long-term course charted way back then may have well been fulfilled today in Los Angeles, as Microsoft finally took the wraps off its cloud computing platform - "Azure". (Interestingly, rumors had for weeks pegged the code name as "strata", forcing some to wonder if a legal issue changed the name).
Without a doubt, this was not Microsoft's most memorable product introduction or keynote. The presentation was far too long-winded early on, often unclear, and had a number of just plan weird moments: like presenters taking the stage in unexplained BRIGHT RED shoes and I mean BRIGHT -see Long Zheng's picture here), as well as a product demo called bluehoo.com that I'm still scratching my head over. But still, the concepts Ray Ozzie introduced at this morning's keynote at the professional developer's conference (PDC to geeks) may well be the future of Microsoft in a Web 2.0 world.
What was clear was that the Microsoft Azure platform will offer multiple layers of services, all running on infrastructure hosted globally at - you guessed it - Microsoft. Taken collectively, it offers a platform for application hosting, a DR and capacity-planning strategy, and an application availability/licensing services model that goes far beyond just plain hosting with "rack, power, pipe." The platform approach includes items such as SQL Server services on demand, Microsoft CRM (a clear snipe at Salesforce.com), Sharepoint and Exchange - plus other products previously available only on-premise in company data centers (or via a 3rd party non-Microsoft service provider). Ever aware of their vast developer ranks, Microsoft also introduced a direct integration model into the Visual Studio development platform for crafting and deploying these services - allegedly - with ease.
Of course, everything looks good at conferences, and in carefully scripted demos, and the impact of all of this may take years to fully interpret. Pricing was barely mentioned, and it's clear, for instance, that applications won't just be able to be picked up and plunked down on Azure. They'll require at least some remediation. And even if they could be, will enterprises trust Microsoft to run their mission critical applications? Will IT departments believe someone else can run it "better than they can?" And can Microsoft bring it all in a cost that's reasonable and compelling enough to warrant a switch- an area in which Microsoft seems to continually struggle? Stay tuned. And keep the red shoe polish handy, it may be a while.

64-bit Finally Mainstream? Costco says so.

It's amazing what a few hundred dollars will buy - especially at Costco.

My wife and I were wandering the aisles recently, on the day after a back-to-school night for our daughter's high school. Her school in Bucks County, PA is extremely technologically progressive - including several classes where ALL of the student's information - textbook, notebook, quizzes, projects, tests - are taken on a laptop and in the classroom, using an application on the web. Each class has it's own wiki, and students can personalize their spaces to suit their own tastes and functions. Teachers can (and do) IM students working after hours and offer homework help collaboratively. I hope to do another post about this class, but suffice to say I was really happy with what I saw.
Unfortunately, our walk past the computer aisle in this technology-education afterglow also reminded me of just how long-in-the-tooth our family PC had become. My job has always given me the good fortune of having a beefy, up-to-date, laptop - but our family "Dell" - now at least 4 years old - has been creaking out it's last bits. PDF's don't open correctly, the DVD drive screeches, remnants of thousands of games installed, then uninstalled, clog it's aging registry. Yes, the best option would be to blow it away and rebuild it, but that just seemed like good effort after bad. We're usually not impulse purchasers, but we made the decision right there at back-to-school night that we needed something new.
Trust me, buying a PC at Costco would have sent shivers up my back 10 years ago. But that was then. The fact is, big box does a few things well - and one of them is figuring out popular configurations and moving them at a price good enough to make a profit. They also represent a watershed moment where a technology becomes "mainstream." For instance, for less thahn $800, I was delighted that we were able to purchase an HP machine with an AMD dual-core processor, 4GB ram, Vista Home Premium edition, 500GB drive, lightscribe DVD - and- a 22in LCD monitor.
My only concern: a 64bit OS. I know the advantages of 64bit - better security via isolation, larger memory addressability (32bit cannot address the full 4GB of memory) - but what about compatibility?
Several years ago, I actually worked with Microsoft in a Joint Development Program on their earliest 64-bit introduction on Itanium, even flying to Redmond to meet and work with the team. And - candidly - it was a struggle for both Microsoft and my apps to play nice. Worse, it really didn't improve things all that much - for a lot of reasons that ultimately made sense. So would this experience in the home market with even more oddball software be any better?
Having had it for a month or so, I'm delighted to say I've had virtually NO problems with a 64-bit OS. Everything just seems to work, from basics like Office, Firefox, and Flash, to games and even more secure items like antivirus and child monitoring software. In fact, nothing seems to care that this is running 64bit. The only program that even seemed to notice was iTunes, where it recommended installing a 64bit version rather than the 32bit I had downloaded. (and I am curious why iTunes cares- if anyone knows, let me know).
The beauty of all of this, of course, is that while we were sleeping, 64-bit crept into Costco's back door and is seemingly here to stay. It's compatibility is solid, stuff just runs, and I don't think I've rebooted the machine 3 times in a month. Not bad.
Oddly, I've heard and seen odd articles where people point out things like "well Office only runs as a 32bit app", or "you need to run the 32-bit version of IE to run certain plug-ins" - as though this is somehow a bad thing. In fact, it's just the opposite. These are GOOD things. Legacy apps running in less memory leave more for the OS and other applications. The REAL point is that it RUNS! Of course, some folks will certainly have problems - as they do with any OS. But over time the market will fill in driver gaps and new applications will replace old ones. Still, having a 64-bit OS running here and now, with a solid compatibility layer handling the legacy stuff, gives users an incredibly compelling motive to upgrade. I suspect most people will pick up that box, put it in the cart next to the gallon of canola oil and the baked pita chips, and never even notice that it's 64-bit. Nor will they likely notice after they run it.
If that's the case, kudos to both Microsoft and HP for getting the solution so right.

Google Chrome... ee... ummm

Google's decision to release a browser last month - "Chrome" for the few folks who haven't heard - was met with enthusiasm by some, mild curiosity by most, and I'm sure dread and loathing by at least a few (likely with Redmond, WA as a mailing address). I can generally see both sides of the mythical part-empty glass, and in most things in life I tend to fall on the half-full side. There's a lot to like about Chrome, and hints of intriguing implications down the road.
The new features in Chrome are fairly well documented, so this won't be any kind of full review - you can Google to your heart's content. Truth is, I'm not sure it warrants one anyway. Despite the fact that Chrome is - obviously - a new product, it doesn't feel like one. It feels more like an upgrade to something we're already seen, and that's probably due to the fact that the browser space is, at this point anyway, basically mature. Short of charging off into an entirely new and-as-yet undefined functionality paradigm, there isn't all that much more for browsers to do. INSIDE, I'm sure, Chrome is a highly modernized, new base of code, and its blazing JavaScript performance is probably one of the few visual manifestations of the enhanced innards. But to most end users, browsers offer little more than a window to the web - a commodity. In the end, there's little left that Chrome can use to distinguish itself, and many of Chrome's "new" features already resident in other browsers already released or in beta anyway.
Still, a few things do shine enough to make it worth looking at Chrome. For starters, it's fast. Pages with heavy JavaScript such as Hotmail and, not surprisingly, Google docs, feel much faster. I haven't experienced the high memory utilization that I've heard reported, and from my purely-anecdotal spot checks, it seems to use about as much as Firefox 3. That can be deceptive, though, as Chrome runs it's tabs as separate processes with the idea being to minimize the impact of a failing window on other browser windows open at the same time. As such, a true "apples-to-apples" comparison would need to include all chrome processes. By the way, Google made much-ado about the separate-processes feature during introduction, but it's worth noting that IE8 runs tabs in separate processes as well.
But perhaps one of Chrome's more interesting-but-little-noticed features is the ability to create what they term an "application short-cut". Pulling down the page icon in Chrome, and choosing this option creates a desktop icon for the current page. Nothing new there, granted. But click that icon, and the page launches in a minimalistic frame where only the page's contents are shown (no buttons, menu, etc). Further, the application's position and size are also retained, and the icon shown in alt-tab is the page's own internal icon (as is the desktop icon)- making it sort-of, kind-of, almost like, a stand-alone application.
This is an interesting concept, but what struck me most about this was recalling how Microsoft described almost exactly this behavior in the first few public showings of Longhorn (which ultimately became "Vista") - back at the PDC conference in 2003. "True" applications and "browser" applications would be virtually indistinguishable from one another, with the browser only being a frame around applications - and a security barrier as much as anything. I find it tremendously ironic that the concept never fully materialized in Vista, and Google ended up beating Microsoft to the punch there :)
I really don't see much of a downside to Chrome, except that I realized how quickly and dearly I missed the Firefox Ad-block plug-ins. Yes, there are some quirky, fake-proxy type approaches that mimic the behavior, but none work as cleanly as AdBlock. And the fact remains, Google is an advertising company. Blocking ads (including it's own) can't be high on it's priority list.
The real question still unanswered, of course, is "why?" Do we really need another browser? Is our experience going to be that much better in Chrome? Granted, I firmly believe that innovation occurs most rapidly when competition exists - and Microsoft is probably one of the worst offenders at this, so generally more would be a good thing. But, from a developer's perspective, I'm still too painfully aware of how this creates yet another test target branch: "Write once, test everywhere." It's clear that Google must have some long-range plan for Chrome, but by distinguishing itself the only way it can - through proprietary feature functionality enhancements - it's bound to break compatibility somewhere, likely forcing developer's to write-for-both, or choose one side. Neither of those are good things. Granted, I certainly like what I've seen so far from Chrome, but it's a bit like wandering through my local Best Buy. Sure I LIKE this things... but do I really need them?

Tonchidot - Tagging Real World Real Estate?

Several years ago, after returning from the annual madhouse that is the Consumer Electronics Show, I wrote an internal article describing what I saw as the impending onslaught of GPS-based technologies. I've owned several GPS systems for years, and have always been fascinated with the possibilities of integrating them with business - particularly real estate - applications. In that article, I imagined a converged device and application for Real Estate professionals - brokers, investors, owners - that would allow them to point at a building or property and - utilizing GPS positioning - identify and retrieve available information about that property (ownership, mortgage structure, building occupancy, refinance date, etc).
This year's TechCrunch 50 conference showcased a Japanese company call Tonchidot. Their website isn't much, and if you watch the video of their press conference, their presentation was hampered by the team's struggling English skills (still far better than my Japanese however!) Even the video below is a little unclear - both in quality and content. But what blew the place away was the concept - and the fact that this was live and working - at least for a TechCrunch demo. It's absolutely worth watching.

TonchiDot showcased their SekaiCamera application - an iPhone application that makes possible exactly what I had envisioned above, and so much more. Tonchidot takes maximum advantage of iPhone 3g hardware- including it's GPS, internal accellerometer, video camera, and data network to allow what they call "airnotes" or "real world tagging"- leaving and viewing virtual notes(tags) on objects in the real world.
Usage is amazingly simple. The user holds the camera in front of them as though taking a video - and Tonchedot - recognizing their location and angle of view - displays information about the objects their camera is recording/displaying - as pop-up bubbles directly on the screen! If you've seen Flickr's photo tagging - where you can see highlighted areas of pictures with notations from others - you have some idea of what the experience is like. But imagine it LIVE and real time - with tags moving and retaining their correct location and orientation in space as you move the screen, and new ones popping up as you walk!
TonchiDot's demo highlighted some clever social and community network examples - such as leaving recorded messages for a friend at a given location, or recommending a particular brand of cellphone in an electronics store. And of course, there's always the obvious possibility of location based advertising - virtual signs hanging outside of stores advertising the day's special. But what other implications are out there?
Let's start with mine. Imagine pointing at a building and seeing it's year of construction, ownership, and occupancy by floor - changing as you pan the camera upward? Or pointing at an empty lot and finding immediately who owns it, how it's zoned, or if it's in a flood plain? Imagine a property manager driving through an office complex pointing at a door that needs painting or a fence that needs repair, and leaving a virtual tag "right at the location" so the maintenance worker knows exactly where he was looking!
Imagine the value of having even just the most basic business information (name, address, owner, phone) pumped through a device like this? To look at a door and know what business is behind it? And then being able to annotate that info - i.e. leave a virtual note IN PLACE - for a co-worker referencing it? I could see a sales manager driving around identifying prospects and leaving a tagged note/quote for a salesman. Or a landscape company driving through an office complex wondering who the owner is and how can I bid this work?

Check out the video below to get the concept, but I think this may actually have as much potential - possible even more - as a B2B tool than anything here.

iTunes BSOD on Vista.. of course it's an accident :)

As I watch the heat-up in the Mac/PC wars, I'm struck by a fact many people don't seem to realize. In fact, I've often suggested Microsoft use it in their marketing. Ready? "More people run Apple Software on Windows than on Macs". (Did you hear me that time Redmond?) In fact, it's almost hard to imagine now that there was a time BEFORE the iPod owned the market, when folks actually ripped and managed digital music collections using something OTHER than Apple's iTunes. Sadly most of those have now passed the way of all old bits, thanks to Apple's closed-system approach, DRM, iTunes requirement, and maniacal obsession with control. And while the exact breakdown of iTunes-installs-on-which-OS isn't published by Apple, it's a pretty safe bet I'm right based on Apple owning less than 10% of the market.
What's not hard to remember though, is that that some of those old-now-gone tools were very good, and often offered features significantly BETTER than iTunes. Winamp's numerous cross-fading and volume-leveling plug-ins, for example, or MusicMatch's cover art finder, predated iTunes implementation by years - if they were even implemented at all. And yet despite all that precedent, Apple's attempts to "upgrade" this tool seem to do little more than add new ways of selling the customer more product, and locking them in further, rather than actually improving in the customer experience.
Lackluster feature set aside, last week's release of iTunes 8, brought Apple's open contempt of Microsoft and it's Window's customers to a new low. If you haven't heard (or experienced it), the new release of iTunes 8 caused the dreaded BSOD ("Blue Screens of Death") in Windows Vista for iPhone users. And despite Apple's initial denials (and miraculous fix only hours later), I wonder if there's a jury in the world knowing a thing about software development who'd buy the argument that this was an accident. In the throes of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC wars", with the voracity of Apple's slamming of Vista's stability increasing, the ability to bring a Vista machine to it's knees on demand just HAS a tempting target of opportunity. Of course, if this IS a genuine accident, then it's professionally inexcusable that Apple would not test for it. The implication would be that Apple isn't testing it's drivers or software on Vista at all.
Ironically, I witnessed an oddly similar situation years ago as IBM and Microsoft were knocking down and dragging out the OS/2 vs Windows NT Server wars. At that time, the tide was beginning to turn in Microsoft's favor, and possibly to help accelerate the demise of OS/2 in the enterprise, NT machines which connected to shares on OS/2 machines could spontaneously cause the OS/2 machines to crash. This was, of course, fixed quickly with a patch from both companies, but Microsoft's came with the cautionary recommendation to the effect of "upgrade your machines to NT and this won't be a problem."
Of course, I can't proclaim that this was intentional behavior on either side. And if it IS, it's reprehensible regardless of who does it. But what I DO know is that Apple will never reach the level of enterprise recognition and adoption it so desperately craves until it steps up and shoulder it's responsibility to write and test quality software for the overwhelming majority of it's users - REGARDLESS of what OS they're running. And if they can't, it's in their best interest to pass the job to a sub-company who can.

Quote of the Day - I wish I'd found it

It's entirely likely you have seen this already, but it was simply too ironic to not pass long. Thanks and apologies to Taegan Goddard and the (GOP website) for grabbing this so blatently.

Extra Bonus Quote of the Day

"We do not support government bailouts of private institutions. Government interference in the markets exacerbates problems in the marketplace and causes the free market to take longer to correct itself."

-- The 2008 Republican Party Platform, adopted earlier this month.

Microsoft's reply: "Your a PC?", "Wow so am I."

It's tough being the incumbant anything - politics, management, even advertising. Phrases like "it's lonely at the top" tend to embody that sentiment suddenly found when, after years of generally hard work and struggle, the winner finds that even success has its problems. Incumbants inherently walk around with a target on their back, constantly looking over their shoulder and wondering who's coming up the food chain - looking to eat their lunch, or something else. 

 For years, Microsoft - the clear incumbant in this analogy - has largely ignored the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials.  I'm sure in their "incumbant-thinking" kind of way - somebody at Microsoft marketing is simply reiterating the old addage"we don't want to dignify those remarks," or "stoop to their level" or someother such nonsense. As a result, Apple's campaign - which was nearly pulled at one point for the unlikability of it's main Mac character - has earned itself a place in our hearts and collective concious. And Microsoft has allowed a message that  started simply around "MAC's are cool, PC's aren't," to grow more targeted and vicious - by simply not getting involved.   Apple, sensing opportunity and seizing the moment, did what anyone in a fight does when the other person doesn't fight back. They push harder. And the ads - while always ending with a smile - have grown progressively more ferocious, capitalizing on (or possibly contributing to) the perception of Vista's failing adoption and difficulty to use. 

 Damage now done, Microsoft has finally  decided to rouse it's sleeping marketing department and see what it can do to swipe back at this pesky fly. It's first attempts - with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld - drew reactions ranging from deep analysis to outright mockery - even accusations of racial biggotry by Latinos. At a minimum, it raised eyebrows. And now Microsoft is kicking off what they claim is the always-intended phase II of this campaign, which apparently has nothing whatsoever to do with the first ads. These new ads are purported to take on the "I'm a PC" mantle full-bore, and in fact run with it over the finish line, touting all the wonderful, amazing things PC's can actually do. 

So why spend all that money to create and run those odd Gates/Seinfeld commercials in the first place? What WAS the point of watching Jerry eating a churro and Bill Gate's "adjusting his shorts"?  The old advertising adage "love me, or hate me, but remember me" comes to mind. But I'm honestly not sure which of the three it'll actually be. Probably all of them. But either way, it'll be fun to watch how Microsoft reacts during what may just be it's first time on the advertising ropes. 

 

Privacy - Killed by a Drunken Tattoo?

I am, and probably always will be a technologist at heart. Early adopter, consistent user, a guy who believes that the best gifts come with a cord. I'm also keenly aware of the issues that arise with hyper-connectivity and an online world: data protection, transaction security, and the ever growing concern of identify theft.

Which is why I see a stare with complete fascination at the generation of "millennials" and "post-millennials" - and their seeming lack of concern about what was traditionally called “privacy”. Today's connected teens live their life - virtually - in the public eye, via the web. Every movement, picture, who's hot, who's not, who’s dating who, even their very MOOD is chronicled for all the public to see. And as Google's festidous robots crawl everything that moves on the web, it is all retained - cached - forever in the public eye.

Is this a (perhaps THE) generation who will simply give up on privacy? Have they already done so, or do they simply not understand the issue and the implications? Is privacy as a concept simply doomed to become dated and obscure? Something their parents used to worry about? The web is full of stories (ironic in and of itself) of postings on myspace and facebook being used to turn down job applications, based on conduct observed in their net-based public life. Cellphone videos posted to Youtube by the terrabyte chronicle moments that will be absolute "cringe-worthy" in the years to come. Is it only the voice of someone who's worn an ugly hairstyle or too-terribly-trendy shirt that can see how painful "looking back" can be?

Concern certainly seems to be rising. I was in my daughter’s middle school recently, and saw a poster for the “Think Before You Post” campaign (one is here on YouTube ). This brilliant campaign of videos and posters highlights teenage girls casually posting images on line, and then facing the social impact of that post “living forever.” The truly creepy moments of perfect strangers - clerks, ticket takers, maintenance works - calling this girl by name, asking her "when are you going to post something new", or "what color underwear today" really hit home.

Will this generation reach some social check-point in a few years, where their concern will suddenly rise for an increased level of privacy that, at that point, will be long lost and impossible to reclaim? Will the hastily-posted pictures from Friday night’s kegger become this generations “drunken tattoo” – cool for the moment, leaving the user with some short term pain and longer term regret? I really do wonder.

At least with a tattoo, there are options for having it removed.

Microsoft gets a bum rap

Ok - so I've been accused of having a bit of a Microsoft bias over the years - (a sentiment that I openly protest by the way). However I do believe that regardless of the mechanisms they've employed, the Microsoft platform has done far more good than harm to our industry. I cut my development teeth on some of the earliest approaches to client-server - running on Windows and IBM OS2, trying to connect Sybase with oddities like Microfocus cobol, communiation over named pipe calls, attempting to integrate to Mainframe CICS. They were horrible, horrible times where trying to get 4 vendors on the phone (or liars in the room) to hack out a solution inevitibly dissolved into finger pointing and blame. Microsoft changed that forever. As a budding enterprise architect, Microsoft's standards at least unified my vendor issues, and the truth is in the overwhelming number of cases, the products worked as promised. Regardless of "who invented it", Microsoft standardized the user operating system - at least long enough to allow the business and home computer desktop to truly reach critical mass. It's easy to forget that they standardized the placement of things like "help", "file","print", "right click" and dozens of fundimental interactions that still persist today. They deserve a lot of credit for that - credit they often don't get.

Gimplistic 2.0

Ok - so yes, several years ago when I started my first blog... it didn't last long. I said "I'll keep it up." But I didn't. Not that I didn't love it. The "blogging craze" as it was called in '04 appealed to both my love of technology and my desire to write. I though it'd be a wonderful outlet. And it would have been, except I just didn't seem to have the time. And not long after I started it, with new private equity interests in our company and a outright ban on public communications, I suddenly didn't have permission.

You see, for nearly 10 years I've been Chief Software Architect, Head of Application Development and CTO in residence for a $200+ million commercial mortgage company. Nine years ago the company was a wildly growing juggernaut with a strategic belief in technology. It's technology was run by a visionary CIO, and was not just cited as a clear leader in it's own industry, but was considered by many a model for how "new IT" could be run. Those first 6 years or so were among the most exciting of my career - extremely personally and professionally satisfying. Sadly, several years ago, with a private equity buyout changing the focus from longer-term strategic to shorter-term tactical, things changed drastically. Cuts were sweeping and often ill-thought-out. And just when we thought we were through the worst of it, the mortgage industry fell in a crisis that is still not close to shaking itself out. Currently the company is hunkered-down in a foxhole mentality, feeding off itself and simply trying to survive - as is the entire industry, and hoping things might change... in a few years. I stuck it out as long as I could, and now I wish them well.

So I'm back now with a new freedom and a stronger desire than ever to write and revitalize technologically. I haven't ever strayed far from it and I've continued at least micro-blogging with Twitter (you can follow me there as http://www.twitter.com/tomgimpel ) and still enjoy that platform for certain things - but there's so much more out there. The next chapter in my life might not yet be set in stone, but I'm genuinely excited about the prospects. And that's what's got my juices flowing again.

So let's get started.
Tom

"Often, wrong... occasionally in doubt... never without an opinion"