View all entries in the 'Emergent' Category

Hip pre-fab homes… with built-in networks I hope

by eleanor on 23 May 2005 @ 11:51 am in Emergent   ++

How weird is it that people who attended the Sunset Celebration Weekend stood in line for +2 hours just to file, Lenin-mausoleum style, though a pre-fab home, the Sunset Breezehouse? They did it last year, I heard, and certainly did this year. The queue was enormous, though I didn’t think take a picture. So you’ll just have to believe me. You can see photos of the display here (via Flickr). Mike and I cruised by, but did not wait in line.

Is it the “green” vibe? An acknowledgement that it’s the land that’s most important out here, or what?

It seems a Silicon Valley extension of a pre-fab fascination that we saw in a Business 2.0 write up on prefab London penthouses - created by lifting units onto rooftops. Interesting business model in light of the increasing chatter about how now it’s not just a question of getting Fiber to the Home, it’s about the bandwidth that will necessary within the home. I daresay prefab could help out.

But you’d need some serious manufacturing chops here. I told my little old dad about this, and he, a retired GM chief draftsman, said he always wondered why GM never got in the business of pre-fab buildings, considering their supply chain and competencies. If we are looking at cars as platforms (in all senses of the word), it’s true that houses follow along nicely.

Participate: 4 Comments | Trackback

Blogging vs journalism: stacacotto viewpoints vs. synthesis

by eleanor on @ 11:16 am in Emergent   ++

Back when I was doing tech research for NEC, I spent more of my day among the “trash tech pubs” than blogs. By that I mean the EWeeks, ComputerWorld’s and the like. The trash isn’t perjorative, but rather reflects how the free-sub mass-mail dead-tree copies just tend to pile up before being trashed.

Lately I’ve de-emphasized them in favor of blogs, and have ruminated on the contrasts.

I don’t hate these pubs, but they are what they are: vendor-push, press release and advertising driven. That means they were something I used in the same sort of way that the guys in the movie Men In Black used the supermarket tabloid: there’s truth in there somewhere, if only we can sort it out. As critical thinkers, we have to take everything with a grain of salt, but as with all boosterism, I view these guys as hype creators. [My jaded view is that as individual bloggers gain a monetary stake in the equation, they join this bunch. But that’s not bad: more data that’s readily parseable and digestible helps clarify markets.]

Let’s take one example around Digital Identity. A couple weeks back Mike posted on Marc Canter’s talk at Mobile Monday, with Marc pre-pimping his work for Microsoft around the Digital Identity World conference (you can get some of his take here). Lots of people talked about the conf, but I never pulled out anything substantive (could be my error).

However, in going through my feeds, I see that EWeek has come through with more information about Microsoft’s plans here.

And I wonder if that’s part of the difference between blogging and journalism: that blogging is self-motivated, only about things that interest a person, whereas “covering a beat” brings a charter, mission and measurable criteria (completeness). Conversations are great for developing things, but for the many themes that we just need to be aware of, it’s helpful to have gain a snapshot 360 view brought by the “distanced observers” that journalists have traditionally striven to be.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Satellite satellite - where are you?

by eleanor on 24 Feb 2005 @ 12:41 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Mass customization has given way to extreme personalization as content streams are now sliced thin enough to allow individual subscriptions. Blogging, podcasting, Tivo, OnDemand, iPodding, mobile entertainment and satellite radio all gyrate around the commercial opportunity that is giving people the content they want when they want it.

In the last few weeks, I’ve heard Orb and MobiTV (Idetic), spoke with the folks who make Sling Media and Slim Devices, makers of the SqueezeBox. The message is like a drumbeat: consumer-content-consumer-content.

Put on top of that the increased feed-reading capacity brought by my new Treo650+GPRS. I see that Doc’s shopping for a new car radio and Fred Wilson has a business take on the Tivo problem, riffing off Om’s do-an-Apple post which kicked off so much chatter that I sipped at in my other feeds. Further evidence of the march can be seen on if you hit Fred’s Tivo post directly - I bet your adsense will be as appropriate as mine was: I see an adsense serve for DirectTVvia RapidSatellite and his house ad for an HDRadio.

The same theme is everywhere - not surprising with 3GSM and Demo just having taken place. I like Jonathan’s take on 3GSM and SAPVenture’s Jeff Nolan’s take on Demo (along with the Blogging Demo blog).

I’m still reading though the Fast Company piece on Sirius v. XM that was pointed out by at least one of my feeds. It’s so hard to keep track of what’s interesting when perusing via mobile. Blazer and Bloglines are great together - but I wish the Bloglines interface as seen by mobiles had a checkbox to save posts rather than a per-post link so that you could submit several at a time. I also should see if there is a way to make Blazer have tabs so I could open other pages.

That’s (the hype and flutter, I mean) normally just par for the course, and not a big deal, but it’s funnier when I turn to today’s Wall St. Journal ($reg req’d) and see that some of this impact has begun to chew through to the profits of the big boys:

Viacom executives predicted that this year will be one of transition as the company reworks its mix of assets. It “will be remembered as the year of the reinvention of Viacom,” Mr. Redstone told Wall Street analysts on a conference call.

That reinvention includes shedding assets, including at least 40 under-performing radio stations and its Canadian movie-theater chain Famous Players. The company is also considering selling its theme parks.

Viacom now owns 185 stations. It plans to sell stations outside smaller markets so it can concentrate on its outlets in big cities. In the quarter, radio absorbed a $10.9 billion noncash impairment charge, leading to an operating loss of $10.7 billion, compared with operating income of $252 million a year earlier. Even without the charge, the radio unit’s operating income fell 9% to $231 million in the quarter. Radio revenue for the quarter was $550 million, compared with $551 million.

Game, match, and set. This is what happens when 20 minutes out of 60 are commercials and all the programs are pre-recorded. How can anyone be surprised?

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Explaining co-authoring shenanigans

by eleanor on 11 Feb 2005 @ 1:11 pm in Emergent   ++

This post is an attempt to offer some perspective on perhaps the world’s first almost-realtime collaborative blog post. Gosh, feed readers, you can’t say I don’t deliver; but I won’t insist on invention rights.

As I blogged about Jybe the other day, Jybe brings some interesting possibilities. Brian and I were chatting via his tool (you can chat while you browse together, which has the advantage, for you folks still trying to appear fully diligent at work, of not looking like a normal chatwindow) on what sorts of stuff you can do.

Today I’m interested in its potential to allow collaborative editing, a sort of cheap and dirty SubEthaEdit or MoonEdit. I thought I’d log us into my blog running on WordPress, which from his end meant that he had to log in too. So I created a new user for this kind of play, jybe, and off we went.

Our first post is already (unfortunately - haha) public. We had some confusion over who owned the db entry which just had to be solved - wham - by a publish-to-the-wild.

Brian (who doesn’t have a blog, so perhaps consider his mic-check a real throatclearing) is now in the Jybe account adding some more content and context to our first shared post. Which, in the spirit of things, I will probably go back and do something to as well.

Jybe allows super-cheap conferencing and shared browsing, which is great for brainstorming and threshing through ideas. I’d like to hook it into shared capture of some sort.

Brian is going to think more on the db end, and I’m going to get him set up with his own Wordpress install so he can understand the workings, but I’m really not sure what will be the result of this. In some ways Jybe is a more inherently wiki-friendly application — any time you can have multiple people editing, you should have versioning. Hmmmmm…….

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Jybe plugin - cobrowsing/collaboration

by eleanor on 9 Feb 2005 @ 3:00 pm in Emergent   ++

Secrecy is such a pain in the ass; it requires a longer attention span that I typically have the luxury of supporting. A couple weeks ago, I was invited into a private beta of a cool product, at which time I really wanted to blog about it but couldn’t. Since it’s been public, it’s been an entry on my to-do list that keeps getting trumped by bigger, longer issues. But this is easy, so I’ll just do it now.

This new thing is called Jybe - which is a co-browsing plugin for Firefox and IE. It’s distributed by a Houston startup with tech that came out of Rice University Advanced Reality. I met Brian Hoogendam, its CEO, at Gartner’s big, expensive fall love in, Symposium/Xpo in Sun’s Java session (giving full credit for his scrappyness, he said he actually snuck in - wish I did that, I’d still have travel budget left!). He asked some really provocative questions about how they, as a venture-backed startup, could leverage the viral nature of open source while still being true to the profit motive implicit in their receipt of investment (that’s a hell of a paraphrasing), which piqued my interest. They’ve developed a real-time collaboration technology that was aimed at the Microsoft Office apps, but which didn’t seem to have much exit besides acquisition by Microsoft, so they were wisely looking at other options. So these guys had some cool tech with a limited market in their inital area, and they were looking to recalibrate - this is just the sort of story I like.

And I’m really impressed with what they came up with. It’s very cool, letting you easily collaborate with someone by looking at the same thing at the same time, with a parallel chat window. It’s also set up to enable free web conferencing, just upload your presentation to the net (they have space if you don’t have a server out there), and take them through it.

Before you click away, thinking it might not work under your platform, know that it does work under Win, Mac and Linux (even if the requirements section is still confusingly worded).

I use it with Moz and there are some issues with tabbed browsing (which they’re working on). If they get this so that it stays on one tab, I would start a session and keep it open, and share it with my friends. It would be very fun to have a shifting window of links, so that when I cruised by I would see a page that my friends suggest.

This is getting back to the idea of serendipity that Steve Gillmor was discussing at our EBIG SIG last week (blogged here). This is the kind of serendipitythat would appeal to me - incorporate some of the push element back into the mostly pull model of the net. I probably should want to click on more of the links that are presented to me, shared over IM or email or in a blogpost (without context), for if my friends suggest it, it’s probably worthwhile. But often I don’t, simply because there is no context. That’s the model where I’d like to just serendipitously happen upon it open in my browser.

I think there are a lot of places this could be used - especially in the world of shared workspaces like wikis. I have a friend who was working on a wiki startup and they were trying to code in simultaneous collaborative editing (instant WYSIWYG) and that was hard; including this tool in your wiki tool, or just encouraging users to download it, would solve that problem in a cheap and dirty way.

There were other ideas I had, but that’s probably what kept me from posting this - so I’ll just stop. Try the tool yourselves, and let me know what the applications are. Email or aim/jabber me with your session and let’s check it out. I could imagine this being a base for a shared (though somewhat protected) serendipity engine.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Toward an intelligent, personalized InfoRouter

by eleanor on 2 Feb 2005 @ 12:45 pm in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

We had a very good session with Steve Gillmor at last night’s EBIG Blogging SIG. Eric Rice recorded it and you can grab it… later - probably at ITConversations when Doug’s had his way with it.

I’ve done a lot of thinking around this area, and this session helped coalesce it into something that’s really turned into a product proposal. I’m not certain of its feasibility, but it has the advantage of a pointing towards supporting a for-pay business model. Let me know what you think.

Finding information is a specialist’s task now. Those who have time, dedication, and interest are responsible for most of the content out there; they pick up topics and point the collective mind toward the issues and debates. But it is essentially duplicating the model of the newspapers, where a group of tenured people with vested interests in the content and issues. The vested interests come both from their position as power brokers - which they necessarily seek to maintain - and from their relationship with their advertisers.

I propose there’s room for a Google News for blogs. The purpose of this would be two fold. Like an community, we need a mirror of ourselves. The whole has gotten far too large to parse, but if we can recognize the valuable content in our own interest domains, it is a small step to wonder how we could reduce the cost (economic cost here - currently it’s time) of sipping from the broader spectrum of blogs.

For lack of a better model, I’ll key off of Google News. I see an interface where we would group topics in several possible ways - by topic, by source, by type. We need to pull content out of the individual blogs and put the conversations back together. By grouping a theme or meme, with its threaded discussion featured below, we can get a quick sense of who is making contributions along the lines of discussion. This will allow easy access to the threads of the conversation, and bring back some of the beneficial aspects of a mailing list (while still ensuring that individual owners maintain control of their microcontent).

I see there as being several steps involved as both a reader and contributor. As readers and passive participants, we seek stay current with group thinking (otherwise you drown in info, and just have to give up and pick it up later). As contributors and shapers, we seek to inject our thoughts on the world, some in a free-frame context and some in a directly conversational way in response to current discussions. To enable these two critical functions, we need to speed access to information. The quicker we can disseminate good content, the quicker that content can be built upon to move the world along. We need to get past the echo chamber effect to shift from a manual idea transmission system to something more automated.

I see four use-cases that would solve some of my problems with all this information. I’ll set them out as four strawmen applications that I think can and would be best delivered by one provider; there could be competing providers that would deliver the same sort of service, optimized along different lines to serve different markets. These applications could easily serve as a bedrock of an actual business model for the providers who would step up to create them.

Interface and Presentment: 4 use-cases

These cases are essentially different slices or queries of the data set that companies like Technorati, Feedster, PubSub and even Google are already mining. This would be an application that provides the interface to mine and present this data to users in a to-some-degree customizable way. If I could code, I would envision this as a portal style site, with each use-case having a tab or section. Most of the screen would be devoted to displaying results along each query. The use-cases I see are below:

1. What’s abuzz?
2. What are my trusted sources and friends saying?
3. What’s new on my interests?
4. What do I want to learn more about today, this moment?

Leveraging the Hive Mind

“What’s abuzz” would be like Google News. It would be like a weather report for the blogosphere to show what’s going on now. Ideally, like Google News, it would be updated about every 15 minutes. I would love to see this incorporating some of the concepts of 10×10 while stripping out the repetition. We’d be presented with a meme — ideally in the original source post, for context’s sake — then with the names of the blogs who have carried on the thread. These could be ordered according to pagerank or Technorati metrics. These comments will serve to show how amplified the meme has become. The Scoble comment would be like the New York Times article in Google News, and might satisfy the “what do I need to know about this” need. Listing several (10 or more, just list them right as names with commas in a line) would allow people to get a sense of who’s participating and if they need to dive in deeper. As the meme expanded a topic might move to the top of the list, and the commentators names would change, just as we see in Google News.

The biggest benefit of this would be to get an “at a glance” view of the blogosphere. I’m not the least interested in politics, but might want to know the raging debate. With all the talk of citizen journalism, I’d like to see some examples of grassroots news coverage, though I’d never seek it out as a real feed. I’m sure there are other areas where there’s lively stuff going on that I don’t know about. For me, this would be a serendipity engine. A window into the world of the constant blog bake-off.

This could also be (as a sign up service) pushed out in something like an email, or as a feed with each new entry (though you’d prob have to click thru to get the current view of commentators?).

FOAF-Screening the Blogosphere

“What are my trusted sources and friends saying?” gets at using our network to do filtering for us. Most of us consume feeds via aggregators, where we subscribe based on a personal criteria. Most of the feeds we have came because we know the person, have come to respect their work, were recommended by a friend, or run across frequent mentions of the source. Right now it’s a manual process of checking each feed.

And our feeds are pretty personal. Most of us track a wide range of topics, and each of us assigns different importance to each info source. There’s Technorati cosmos ranking, but not all of the classic Gladwellian Influencers are tracked that way, and definitely not all of our friends. Some might want to have a Technorati filtered view of the world, and that should be allowable. But this would be simply something like an enhanced aggregator view. Your feeds now, made more useful.

Filtering for Interests

“What’s new on my interests?” centers our focus on specific topics we are tracking. Right now, we must scroll down through content in our aggregators. Posts have varying levels of interest. Some feeds we’ll want to read all the posts, others all the headlines, and still others, only when the headlines match our interests. This third use-case is a different slice on the aggregator view, mashing some aspects of subscribed searches with FOAF-Screen filtering, and possibly with personal interest/attention sensing. This is where I’m vaguest, both as to the technical feasibility and as to exactly how much of a standalone case it is versus #2.

I would like the ability to view blogs according to my interests - a sort of categorizing feeds as one would categorize posts. Without getting too much into specification, this would potentially leverage both post categories and Technorati tags to deliver results. For example, I would like to view posts grouped by topic - do some reading on mobility or search or Linux. This would in some ways have the attributes of subscribed searches like PubSub, where you currently must subscribe and personally accumulate data to later mine. I want access to everyone else’s stored PubSub type searches, or if at all possible, I would like to do new ones - create searches that can be run each day anew, either during off peak times or preferably, at will (I equivocate because I understand there are processing issues - this stuff could easily be the basis for pay services — +poof+ a business model is born!).

The FOAF-Screen would come into play in presenting the information to the user - where the entries could be ordered by points, taking (optionally) both their FOAF-Screen (their OPML list or some other device) and the larger Technorati cosmos ranking of the source. I’d really like to see the ability to dial these up or down - to favor my people or the commons’ view. Do you want to see what your friends think on this or do you want to see what the ‘accepted wisdom’ is on a topic.

Searching: the Fresh vs. the Best

“What do I want to learn more about today, this moment?” takes into account that we’re always catching up on something; there’s always a new meme out there. This is even more of a problem as we start to look beyond serving the blogging community, and shift our focus to the needs of the early mainstream markets. This calls for a panel for freeform search, akin to the PubSub searches, but allowable in real time. I think that for a first pass to see quick results, it would be perfectly acceptable to repurpose the queries that are used to deliver the “interest” results to people in use-case 3. The model of farming and harvesting makes me comfortable with the idea that most of the ad hoc searches would be comprised already by people tracking them: memes are usually in development long before they reach the awareness of the median user. For queries that don’t have an exact match already stored in the system, alternatives could be presented. A custom search could be offered to be run immediately, perhaps at a small cost or else for free during an off-peak time.

In this searching function, I would also like the flexibility to adjust between freshness and highest authority. The purpose of searching is to maximize reach; there are cases where searching should extend all the way to the end of the long tail instead of getting caught up in the hump of acknowledged authority.

What’s the goal of all this?

The goal of all this is to transform the current state of information farming into a more mechanized process. Metaphorically, we need plows. Machines are good at that. They can count words, links, and even with the right taxonomy behind them, help to chart mental maps and meme flows. This is not about computer-determined interest. This is using computers to reflect what the hump of the long tail is interested in (#1), what people I’ve voted for are interested in (#2), what I’ve said (or exhibited) an interest in (#3), and what I’d like to learn about. This is automating the hard work of trawling by hand, which, in my philosophical bent, is prejudiced towards those how have and can spend the time doing this. We need the ideas of the casual observer. We cannot build up this information glut so that only full-timer, specialists, experts, journalists, and job seekers can participate. Even though I am to some-degree one of those people now, I can’t keep up with my wide range of interests. What access do we allow the hobbyist, who’s interested but can’t spend (what is it now, Scoble, 4 hours a night??) the time keeping up.

We can’t forget that we want to keep up with all this, to help ourselves, our companies, our projects, or sometimes make the world a better place. We take the time to do this because we know that there are great contributions out there, ideas and tweaks that will make a big difference. Places we can make a ton of money or transform an industry or a workplace. We have to make getting those ideas out as easy as possible.

And this isn’t all altruism. If finding takes less time and effort, we can read and absorb more. Once we absorb more, we can think on it more effectively. We might have more time and impetus to respond and participate - to inject back into the community. I can’t tell you how many posts go unfinished or unstarted because I don’t have enough time. If getting good info moves away from subsistence - a daily activity that takes up most of one’s allocated time - to transformation, it’s like we’ve powered a new Renaissance. It’s like the difference between starting with a live chicken and sitting down to chicken parmesan. The raw material is converted into something that’s immediately digestible (sorry vegetarians - just think soup). All this time is saved, and we can spend that time like Michelangelo did.

We eat our dinner, and then go off to our studies to think, then we write. We are more productive at doing what humans do best; and we harness computing power to do what it does best. With the enhanced perspective brought by a fuller picture of the blogosphere, we have a wider base for ideas. When we do write, we can be more thoughtful and complete. Our additions are snapped up and fed back through the system. The cycle is sped up, and churn is reduced. Concepts can be more thoroughly polished and we can “get somewhere” faster.

I just wish I could really code…. :-)

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

BoingBoing’s Image Ads Gone from Bloglines Feed? Yay!

by eleanor on 28 Jan 2005 @ 1:41 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I searched this out before posting, but I’m not that good at finding stuff like this. Maybe Bill Flitter at Pheedo would know about this - it’s his bread and butter.

I am almost completely sure that there were image ads carried in the Bloglines feed of BoingBoing at some point before today. I can recall them maybe 2 weeks ago, when I last checked.

Now they are gone. And I love it.

Why? Because of the content of those ads. I almost went so far as to blog about how much it irritated me to to see the decidedly borderline “Work Unsafe” Suicide Girls ads on the BoingBoing site. I rationalized that they gotta eat (both BB and SG), and I could just as easily read the feed with Bloglines and escape the ads. But my plan didn’t work — I still saw the same ads for the saucy vixens.

I thought about posting that I just didn’t think that mode of advertising is kosher for the kind of experience I want to have on BB or during my daily news crawl using Bloglines. But why take the trouble just to sound prurient, overly sensitive, and cranky-feminist? I just stopped reading BB and suffered through being a little less cool.

But it is worth the trouble to throw out an “atta-boy” - especially while these models are still developing (no pun on the SG chix was orig intended, but now I think it’s funny — even though most of them look my age). We all know that pR0n in all its forms sells, and SG is just a bit more defenisible because they’re part of the culture. But given how boy the culture is - having the most obviouys representation of female contrbution being some girl’s luscious cleavage is not a positive thing.

So I don’t know if this was something Mark Fletcher at Bloglines did, or if the folks at BoingBoing stopped it, or even if it is just a temporary glitch. Two thumbs up from me.

I have no idea what other feedback these guys have gotten, how extensive a debate this has been either internally or externally. I just know that I withheld my feedback, and just happened to notice you fixed the thing that had kept me away. This is a decent lesson in “take the feedback you receive seriously, because it likely represents the thoughts of a lot of people who don’t bother”.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Thinking thru AttentionXML before EBIG SIG next week

by eleanor on @ 12:38 pm in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

Next week, the EBIG Blogging/RSS SIG will focus on AttentionXML. It’s important and useful. Come and find out what it’s all about. This time we’ve got Steve Gillmor to share his view on this tech, where he thinks it’s headed, and what it means.

I’m still learning about AttentionXML, so my impressions may change. I’ve played with Technorati’s demo and haven’t learned all that much. I’d like to take a more customized approach to AttentionXML rather than follow the simple (haha) Technorati approach of ranking by links. That reflects both my work as a researcher (seeking out the new, or at least not the fully-processed) and a sort of renegade sense of populism.

Yes, populism is different than popular; we need to be democratic rather than exclusive. This is especially the case when we are discussing systems that make information decisions for us. Humans are best at surfacing ideas; systems are best for counting mentions. I will depend on algorithms really only for the stuff that I don’t care about. My usage of Google News is a great example. I can safely say that it’s changed my life: I now have that modicum of Hollywood and sports info I need to pass a social Turing test.

It may be my own barrier, but so much of blogging seems to be referring to the popular kids. That’s nice, but I only need to see Engadget or TechDirt once a day (which I typically read there), not endless links without real commentary, just pointing out what Russ happened to post today (when I started writing this at 8:00am I discovered his site was hacked this AM by Spanish apemen. Very cute! I mean, Poor Russ! I saved a copy here) .

For my purposes, I am interested in cursory understanding of what’s new and “in play”, but mostly on my interest du jour. And when I’m tracking along, I’m looking for perspectives and kernels of thought. I worry that using the model of popularity to fuel AttentionXML will turn it into a hype machine. AttentionXML has to do more than the Technorati-counting-mentions approach. It has to cover not just the huge spikes of the daily churn, but also (if I am ever going to trust it) to point to things that I, given my interest and aims, should pay attention to. I really hope it doesn’t end up being some sort of blogoid “Daily Planet”, some dynamically generated version of that Tony Perkins AlwaysOn blog magazine - my nominee for dumbest idea of the year (info via Jason Calcanis’ blog). The Technorati tags take us a big step in this direction (though I still have to begin applying them beyond category tags).

These things have to be architected with attention to both how we use the blogosphere now, and how people will want to use it as it matures (because it’s not right now). Buzz tracking centered around *who* is talking about it is just one use case.

For my work, the most critical use case is freshness of the information on a topic. Finding out what people are saying *right now* about a given topic is what I seek almost every day. This is independent of the “authority” of the person and the current buzz (another use case is to graph this over time). For example, that’s how I use Feedster’s blog search for that. It’s true that Mike now works there, but I gave the same input to Kevin Marks of Trati back at the Dec SF geek dinner. I’m not certain, but my ideas might have flowed into their search changes made the next week, but it didn’t seem to do what I wanted, and I’ve never had a chance to follow up with Kevin.

Yet another use case (one I find particularly worthwhile) is to integrate something like AttentionXML with social networking so I can tell what my friends are interested in. For mobile, I have a certain group of friends who would, through their browsing behavior, unearth really neat things. Same for my friends who sew. I would like to trust my network to help me browse and read, in a way that is more than just reading their blogs.

That’s the sort of reason I could see going into the thinking behind SixApart buying LiveJournal : LiveJournal makes the community aspect easy. Perhaps somewhere in there they can come up with a way to atomize the inherently stream of consciousness, multi-topic nature of blogs so individual posts can be linked back in to some metaphorical discussion list. Some people do this now and are really good at this. But I find this distributed conversation hard to manage.

I’m happy the concept of Technorati tags seems compatible with the del.ico.us model. Del.ico.us is important and I keep steadfast hope I can ever get in the habit of using it. It’s either going to be a million entries for me - a real link blog, or it’s going to be the cream of the crop. I guess it will have to be everything because my desire to only make meaningful entries (which already go here, most of them) has just held up the process. Another thing to do today.

So amusingly, just after my autism post (written yesterday, but was unable to reach network), we might be watching the switch from the think and stew to me actually doing work. That and my antibiotics kicked in.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

How can we tap into all this audio content?

by eleanor on 23 Dec 2004 @ 5:07 pm in Emergent   ++

I hate podcasts and other captured audio on the web - it just doesn’t work for me. To really listen to someone speak, I find I need to be able to see them - watch their lips move and their overall delivery. The only way I can deal with it is to transcribe it, which I did here for the recent Udell podcast on IVR applications and here back in August for the Meta Group talking about Workplace.

What a pain. Sign me up for that magic speech transcription technology you were looking for when you find it. Transcription is very tedious, but personally, it’s the only way I can stay focused on the content.

More seriously, the culture of podcasting may very well drive innovation in this space - nothing like having the innovators’ commentary marooned to get them focused on a problem! When I was at BloggerconIII (some talks of which are available via ITConversations audio stream), the session on podcasting addressed this topic. What was strange was that several people, Dave Winer (conference organizer and very influential among bloggers and podcasters alike) declared that he intended never to provide transcripts for his podcasts at iPodder.org. Steve Gilmor, ZDNet editor and columnist and participant in the eponymous Gillmor Gang (to learn more about it, and see an example of the “navel gazing” that I find to be characteristic of this kind of group, see their blog) said that they did one transcript of the show, shoving the task out to India, but they were not happy with the results. The message from these two guys was that podcasting would stay audio only, and people would just have to sit through it.

Now, I’ve said that audio doesn’t work for me personally, and that’s my bias. I’m not the only one though - this has been discussed by Marc Canter and Tim Bray. You can see Udell’s response here. Tim’s phrase “four guys talking” captures my problem exactly.

I don’t intend to be hypercritical here, but it’s important we look at what this mode of interaction means - what it allows and requires both for the creator and the listener. The creator - as we saw in Jon’s case with the IVR conversation - benefits by just recording the conversation, doing the necessary processing (which is work and requires special equipment - but it’s also tech tinkering, which is fun more than tedious), and serving it. They can share the content directly, without needing to mentally pre-process it. Listeners benefit too, as Jon says himself, by having direct access to the full context of a conversation, rather than have it distilled through the views and the prejudices of the interviewer.

It’s true that text is lossy, but in podcasting we often just think about the benefits. The costs for the users are fairly high. Skimming is impossible. Searching is impossible. Pacing is out of control - if it’s too fast, you must go back (which is very cumbersome given the poor interface of the web plugins I use here, but might be easier on, say, an iPod); if it’s too slow, you’re stuck. Take Eric Rice - podcaster extraordinaire - for example. Now I like Eric personally, but he is a showman. He loves podcasting because it puts him in control of the pacing and the delivery. Listening to his podcasts, you can tell he is a radio personality, and it is his personality that he’s sharing in these ‘casts. So Eric shows us that the line between content and entertainment blurs with podcasts. And that’s great for all the people who tune in to talk radio. But wouldn’t it be better if this media were indexable, searchable, and fungible….. more like text.

Reading this page - I bet that you don’t read every word. No one does. But with audio, the words come to us as delivered. You can’t skip to the bottom because it’s not “there” yet; audio doesn’t exist in our minds until we hear it and process it. Anyhow, this is getting too far off the path, but it’s important because I’m not hearing much discussion on this to temper the hype around podcasts. Sure, it’s democratizing broadcasting and making it so that newcomers like Eric can get famous and people like Adam Curry, a sort of washed-up icon of the 1980s, can get “airtime”. But it’s also proliferating information that’s hard to consume and which requires time - the most scarce resource of all - to consume. I mean, what are we supposed to do with these? Where is the context?

So there’s a problem, but this problem is one these guys will want to solve. After all, while they do want to control the “experience” and delivery of their unique content, they also want to see it reach the widest possible audience. They’re not famous, or influential, or rich if no one is “listening”, if the ideas are trapped in audio. And there are people like me and Tim in the world, never mind the non-native English speakers and the deaf for whom this data is not accessible.

This first wave of podcasting is important, but it needs to be integrated into the rest of our information architecture - and right now that means text. Fortunately, since these guys are at the forefront of technology development, this problem will get solved. In fact, this might be one of the first applications for the speech applications that IBM recently open sourced. Or maybe these guys will pick up a copy of ViaVoice and get started training it.

:-)
Though during my research on IVR tech for a recent research request, I did find this Gartner report that discusses the state of audio search technology (back in 2002, so it’s surely more advanced now). It sounds like the technology exists, it must just be expensive and difficult to implement. Sign me up.

Updated to reflect proper grammar - Without being coy, I’ve gotten used to sloppy proofreading since my audience has been mostly Japanese. I’ll have to proofread now that us picky native speakers are tuned in.

Participate: 4 Comments | Trackback

Transcript of Jon Udell podcast on IVR

by eleanor on @ 4:10 pm in Emergent   ++

Transcript of Monday’s podcast on IVR applications, a conversation between Infoworld columnist John Udell and Ron Owens, director of software application engineering and professional services for Intervoice (audio here) .

• Owens – Well, essentially what we do is, you can think of it as self service automation primarily accomplished though voice recognition. So if you look at companies that utilize websites or other things in terms of a self-service strategy, our goal is to make voice an additional channel to that self service automation so that clients can use these systems to gain access to information, conduct business, complete transactions.
• Udell – Right, so basically the IVR story. So why don’t we start with applications, because these discussions can tend to get a bit abstract. I’m just going to read off the ones you listed as packaged applications. This one is interesting, you have something you call an identifier, which is evidently an IVR-based password changing application. Is that correct? Why don’t you talk about how that works, and what’s happening on the back end to enable that?
• Owens – So we’ve tried to create a few applications that are geared to a horizontal market that are reusable, that allow the interface into client databases but essentially go through a series of questions to identify who the caller claims to be and then authenticates via either knowledge or speaker verification whether they are who they claim to be.
• Udell – So when you say “speaker verification”, is the point here that this is multifactor authentication and one of the factors is verification including voiceprint?
• Owens – Yes
• Udell – Now is this in use anywhere now? I’ve never run into this, but it’s happening out there in the world someplace. Where is this being used?
• Owens – It’s actually used at Ameritrade, and we have done press releases with them so we can talk about it.
• Udell – Oh, because I actually have an account at Ameritrade, which I have not visited for a long time. Now if I go there, where would I find this feature?
• Owens – They actually implemented it when they purchased Datek. So I’ll be honest, I’m an Ameritrade client, but I am an old Ameritrade client, and I have never accessed it via the telephone either, but I believe it was given as option to the Datek customers that were converted and they went through an enrollment process. It’s one of the largest customer facing verification deployments that’s available.
• Udell – Now the voice print is subject to replay attack if it’s captured, right?
• Owens – Actually, the voiceprint itself, what gets created is not anything that exists in terms of a wav file that can be reverse engineered. It’s just a series, it’s a numerical representation that’s housed in a database. You could break in and steal all of the voiceprints from any company that’s out there and you have something that’s absolutely worthless.
• Udell – OK, but if I speak the magic phrase on one hand, or if I play you a recording of the magic phrase on the other hand, you, listening, aren’t going to know the difference.
• Owens – Well, it depends on how you capture the recording.
• Udell – OK well, let’s talk about that a little, because that’s interesting.
• Owens – Well, if you capture the recording with high quality microphone and it’s a digital recording that you play back over the phone, you might be able to spoof the system, but sometimes they’re still able to detect fraudulence because some of the systems say ‘this is too close to the original, so it must be a fake’. There’s a certain amount of variance each time we speak a word is expected.
• Udell – Interesting, interesting. We’ve sort of gone down a rat hole - this is extremely interesting, but I want to back up and get the larger context as well. So can we broaden this out to the kinds of services that your platform makes available to developers, kinds of tools that are used to build these IVR applications and the environment that all this fits into in terms of application servers and standards like SALT and VoiceXML
• Owens – So to start at a platform level, we have platforms that support VoiceXML 2.0 and SALT standards, the Microsoft speech server. From a development environment…
• Udell – Well, can I just… probably most people are as vaguely familiar with those two things as I am so… I mean, to prepare for this call I went back to refresh my memory as to what’s going on.
• Owens – That doesn’t entitle you to ask hard questions, though. (laugh), so can you explain.
• Udell – Well it seems like we can’t have anything in this century without a war between two competing standards, right? And it’s almost ludicrous, it takes you 5 minutes just to get to the members’ page of the SALT Forum on one hand, and the members’ page of the VoiceXML Forum on the other hand. And the icons tell the story. In fact, I’m on those pages now, and I’m looking at the SALT forum and see Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Phillips, ScanSoft and Comverse. And on the VoiceXML side – AT&T, Lucent, IBM, Motorola, HP, Oracle, Verizon, and a couple of others. What jumps out at me is hmm… phone companies versus not. Not knowing anything about the politics, obviously you guys have to play both sides of the fence, but I’m curious if it’d be possible for you to condense all into a brief overview.
• Owens – It’s possible for me to give you my opinion of the whole situation and where it stands. So, first thing that I try to tell clients is that there was a lot of publicity on VoiceXML a couple years ago and how it was going to revolutionize voice automation and that you had to have VoiceXML to do voice recognition and a lot of other things. The bottom line is all of those justifications for doing it were hyped. Because we actually had speech recognition systems literally years before the first VoiceXML companies were in existence, and some very sophisticated systems too. What VoiceXML as a standard did do is introduce some application portability and extension outside of call center space, moving into it infrastructure space — how to make it available and accessible in visual media, how to extend web pages into new channels – how do you connect self service on internet with telephone – how people want to get services. SALT came in when VoiceXML was getting near 2.0. VoiceXML was trying to do for voice what HTML did for the web [make it usable and presentable]. SALT was even more explicit, to make it multimodal [allow interaction with web pages via multiple modes]. SALT is less of a linear programming language than VoiceXML, it’s much more like a XML namespace that can be woven into XML or HTML documents. VoiceXML has much more of its own syntax and own tool environment. [therefore it is more embeddable into existing tools and infrastructure]
  Intervoice has its own VoiceXML browser conformant to the VoiceXML specifications, where you can view all VoiceXML files developed with their tool or others. The browser takes and interprets the file and turns it into instructions for the IVR. The same thing happens on SALT side – Microsoft provides SALT browser here, but the underlying technology is the same underneath, just the parsing technology comes from Microsoft. In both cases it’s streamed into output that is neutral for consumption by the IVR software. Intervoice has their own IVR, which is both a virtual and physical machine that drives their IVR functions. Microsoft’s SALT browser is the equivalent of IE, takes SALT documents and converts them into something that is digestible by voice [IVR].
• Udell - To what extent is it possible to build an application once for multimodal deployment? Can you write webpages that can be expressed vocally with one code base, does it meet Microsoft’s vision of SALT?
• Owens – Not now, not many consumer devices ready to take this input as multimodal. We don’t have phones where you browse to an item and then speak commands into while browsing the web [use both a cursor and a voice command in an arbitrary manner]. It’s still Microsoft’s vision, but they’ve realized that people are going to start with using simple speech recognition first and as consumer devices catch up to take advantage of the functionality, then they can build and extend out to more multi-modality.
• Udell – What does supporting Microsoft Speech Server mean for you?
• Owens – Basically we sell it as a solution – Microsoft Speech Server and our system work together. We can also use Scansoft ASR and also Nuance ASR for speech recognition technology. On it’s own, Intervoice’s system will give you touchtone DTMS interactivity, but no voice. They do not have own ASR engine, but [that’s ok since they are enabling the first real commercial applications] – speech server is theoretical until you have Intervoice making it commercially viable deployment. They make it into application companies can use.
• Udell – What does your product really add?
• Owens – Speech servers do not connect to telephony on their own. They won’t take a call, can’t handle calls, their progression through the system, transfers, CTI – we provide telephony or IP infrastructure. [In their scenarios] the application is driven from application server, which calls into the Intervoice server. Intervoice brings in speech recognition as needed, sending the utterance off to the ASR engine for processing, and then handling the returned response and the general infrastructure.
• Udell – I’m trying to understand the architecture, are pictures or a schematic available on your website>
• Owens – Probably not, we’ll have to talk to the marketing people.
• Udell – Let’s talk about applications. Tell me about the Amtrak system. What is the architecture?
• Owens – Calls come through call center and hit the switch. Then they’re greeted by IVR system and the application walks caller through getting info they need. The speech recognition component is ScansoftASR running on a separate server. The call flow is mapped out with prompts, responses are captured, the transaction goes against database to get info required [the schedule], then the data is transformed into concatenated speech and played back for the caller. This is built with Intervoice’s tool called Envision, which can develop code either in their legacy proprietary environment or VoiceXML-standard compliant code. It’s GUI-based with a drag-and-drop tools and pre-built components – things like dates, digits, already there to help focus on the logic flow.
• Udell – If wanted to reduce the GUI model to text, can you? [I have no idea why this is important]
• Owens – Yes, the system does output VoiceXML as text that you can view, after it’s been generated. If you’re using Microsoft’s Speech Server, it can be output in VB.NET, ASP, C# out of Visual Studio with Speech Server modules.

  Intervoice offers professional services to help create usable and effective voice implementation. It’s tricky to create a model that works for voice, not just a voice reading all the options on a given website. The mode of interaction determines what info should be presented how. We resell ASR products, and provide layer of integration.

• Udell – I’m trying to understand what specific value you bring…
• Owens – Technically you need to control telephony card, which our products do. If you didn’t have us, you’d need to build that to allow transfers, passing protocols, passing instructions to flow commands to CTI. You’d need to build monitoring system to watch the history of calls and the overall flow. On the services end, we provide expertise to move through [connect] business goals and translate into call flow and create the backend transaction model. We have the business logic and business rules to build voice applications for customers [that work…. Udell really didn’t get the value of the company at this point, and Owens was not doing a good job pitching it, as you will see the conversation takes a much different turn in the next exchange]. We take data out of the enterprise systems our customers have and link it into the process to create a full voice solution.
• Udell – Looking through my list, we’ve talked about a lot. What have we not talked about yet?
• Owens – Usability. Whether it’s usable or not determines success of project. [The voice of] “Amtrak Julie” was a deliberate product, constructed with impact and branding in mind – here characteristics, personality, age, demographics, and nuance. You must have the voice and the text and the script and the words match the expectations of the callers when they call. You can read a lot in the area of “persona development”. The key factors determining [the appropriate] voice are the customer age demographics, the formality of the prompts, selecting the gender, and trying to convey something consistent with image of the company. This is part of the design process we take our [professional services] customers through. Our voice user interface design engineers take the goals of the business – typical ones are to get the shortest length of call possible, highest possible automation rate, and the highest possible customer satisfaction – and balance that with what end users need – enough instruction to feel comfortable (which may lengthen the call), easy access to a rep if call doesn’t fit what self service system is designed to handle, but not so easy that people won’t try to use the system – customers want to keep the caller satisfaction level up but don’t want them to feel trapped in the system. Intervoice’s engineers take the end user goals and the organization goals and try to strike a balance. That’s what creates the personality of the system, how the scripting is done and how the logic flows. This gets tuned over time, since like the web page, the system is tracked as people use it.
• Udell – What are the kinds of opportunities for packaged applications that haven’t been seen in the past but are becoming possible going forward?
• Owens – What we’re trying to find is an area where… if you think about how Microsoft products work, if you’re working in Excel, PowerPoint or Word, you look for consistency of tools – File, Edit, Save, etc. That’s our definition of a horizontal function – it is always the same process to accomplish common goals. If you look at voice, horizontal applications are where companies don’t find a competitive advantage to be the world’s best. Like in changing your address, there’s no market there to differentiate yourself. The reverse is actually true – having the same process across all, say, credit card companies, is a benefit. Customers can learn over time that there is a common way to go about this common task, even though it is with different companies. Utilities and magazine subscription companies have this [address change] problem too. Familiarity will drive increased acceptance of automation and successful task completion. Then this is not just for address changes, but things like identify verification, password resets, things that cross multiple industries. Things for which voice is an appropriate, or even the preferred medium.
• Udell – When is voice the preferred media for data-driven interaction?
• Owens – It’s very interesting – all the data I’ve read shows there is no end to transactions that people want to complete over the phone. It’s kind of like the debit card phenomenon resulting in the death of checks – there are fewer checks going through financial institutions, but banks spend a lot of money on the increased level of financial transactions [driven by debit cards]. A net balance. The internet and phone are not so much substitutes, because, depending on circumstances, you might choose one or the other no matter what your preferences are. But really what that means is that companies have to deal with more interactions with their clients. Clients have more ways to interact and it’s our (Intervoice’s) job to make sure that they interact successfully and profitably for the organization.
• Udell – This reminds me of earlier when we were talking about multimodality with Microsoft’s approach with Speech Server. I want to circle back on one point. In addition to possibility of being able to interact with a webpage through direct manipulation or speech, there is this underlying notion that you’d like to develop an interface once, one interface, that would be at least minimally accessible by phone. The web may be preferable, but that it would be possible to interact with it by phone if necessary. To what extent is it possible to provide in a relatively automatic way at least minimal access to functions on a web page out of a development environment that is not dual-track (don’t have to build it twice)? Developing it twice is very hard, every time you do it two different ways it’s a huge impediment unless have an extreme motivation [i.e., because of the cost, effort and time of maintaining two applications].
• Owens – I’m going to take a slightly different view, and I may be biased, but I draw a different demarcation from the one you did. At the application server level when the data is being served up to either be presented to a web page, at that point, that data in that format can be presented to a voice system – that’s the demarcation of commonality and I think that companies who try to skip, either on web page development to make it a very clean and user friendly presentation layer via the web, or a very clean and aesthetically pleasing voice interface, if they try to skip at that presentation layer – they’ve made a critical and strategic error. Where they want to make the investment in the commonality is to make that data available. Once that data’s available, if it’s in an XML format – the cost of the presentation layer relative to that infrastructure if minimal.
• Udell – The point is well taken, and is actually the point I’ve been making, for, well, years now, which is that ultimately it is just a historical accident that we have so much presentation logic that is directly intertwined with the production of html. The point of the web services philosophy is to separate those two things, that in fact, in my view, if everyone could just switch a flip tomorrow, we’d all be better off if every web-facing application is encapsulated as neutral xml which is then rendered by html production technology, which could also be rendered by voice production technology.
• Owens – Exactly. It’s no different than the spaghetti code in COBOL we used to do years ago. Theoretically, we should have made all those host interactions in a modular form that could have been called from multiple applications, even though there’s no analogous presentation layer the principle is the same. Did we violate that? Regularly. We embedded the access and the data into whatever we were trying to accomplish. And it always has and always will cost companies millions. We’re at the point now where standards themselves don’t solve problems for companies, the implementation of standards can help accelerate a lot of things and help companies to be efficient and take advantage of it, but VoiceXML infrastructure for some clients won’t be the fix unless they do exactly what you said. And that takes some time to figure out how am I going to get the data and share that data across multiple channels.
• Udell – Nothing new here. Just common sense.
• Owens – Common sense that’s incredibly uncommon!

#end#

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Google V. Microsoft outlooked in MIT’s Technology Review

by eleanor on 20 Dec 2004 @ 6:13 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT   ++

This month’s (January 2005) Tech Review has a lengthy piece where Charles Ferguson, veteran of past battles with Microsoft (founded Vermeer, maker of FrontPage, in the midst of the browser wars) looks at What’s Next for Google. The piece is well worth a read, as it puts the current search environment (the overview of which is a draft post I’ve never had time to complete) in perspective - both as the next frontier and as the setting for a standards battle.

One point I think Ferguson did miss was when he wrote,

Two Google employees (both of whom prefer not to be named) told me that Google’s leaders believe that the company’s expertise in infrastructure—knowing how to build and operate those 250,000 servers—constitutes a competitive advantage more important than APIs or standards. This could be a major, even fatal, error. Microsoft can certainly obtain or cultivate the skills necessary to operate large-scale computing infrastructures; indeed, it already operates MSN, with nearly 10 million users.

is the whole of the Gmail and Blogger initiatives. Looking at those two projects, Google is moving to host and support (and technically, thereby, own and control access to) customers’ data. It’s this aspect of Google’s business that goes beyond simply the operational wherewithal necessary to operate this infrastructure, what Gartner called “Tera Architectures” in a Symposium 2004 presenation, Tera Architectures Emerge from the Lab. In terms of testbed for development of new algorithms and advertising schemes, as well as adding that personal element that John Battelle noted as being missing from Google when it’s compared to Yahoo! in these two posts: here and here. We’ll see how it plays out.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

IBM R&D projects (or, I want WebFountain)

by eleanor on 3 Dec 2004 @ 5:25 pm in Emergent   ++

InformationWeek has an interview with Paul Horn, Sr. VP Research for IBM. They talk RFID (specifically probing at IBM’s chip strategy, the point of which eludes me), and about a very interesting search tool called WebFountain.

InformationWeek: What are some of the other innovative projects IBM’s research and development division is working on today?

Horn: We have a project where the computer can crawl the Web similar to Google, but instead of [relying on] a keyword search, it reads the text, understands the text, and allows you to mine the context, not just keywords. The researchers bought back this idea because they looked at all the unstructured information on the Internet and tried to figure out how to get value from it.

InformationWeek: How could a company use that technology?

Horn: You could use it to manage the brand. We did this for a record company and discovered the buzz in chat rooms was a terrific indicator of future record sales. The buzz in the chat room started and within two weeks the record sales [in a specific local region] increased. The software, Web Fountain, is a prototype piece of research software that requires many servers to scan the Web. With the software, companies can manage their brand, predict future sales in a specific geography, or determine what attributes will push sales higher or lower. But this is a combined research and consulting service, because once companies gain access to this information they [will want to] reengineer their business processes to have the correct products in regions at the right time.

InformationWeek: Could this type of research turn into a business unit or division within IBM Global Services?

Horn: It could. We have 13 of these micro-practices that are embryonic, incubating service applications. The Web Fountain research application is part of Text Analytics, which is one of the 13. If any are successful, we can make them part of the consulting services business.

I want Web Fountain. Now.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Doomed pay-by-cellphone scheme discussed in The Wall Street Journal

by eleanor on 1 Dec 2004 @ 3:12 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

More from The Wall Street Journal - this time about cashless payments via cellphone:

People in Watertown, Mass., who lose their wallets have a friend in cab company owner Moe Taha. He is happy to give them a ride — as long as they bring a cellphone.

Watertown Taxi uses a service called MobileLime, provided by Vayusa Inc. of Newton, Mass., which allows passengers to pay for a ride by dialing a number on their phone, pressing a couple of buttons and then giving the cab driver the last four digits of their phone number as they leave.

Back at the taxi company’s shop, software provided by MobileLime completes the transaction. “It’s a genius idea,” Mr. Taha says.

Now I don’t know how hard they had to look for this improbable example - but it’s fascinating to know that it exists. The cynical question I have is about the probability of losing a cell phone compared to the probability of losing a wallet!!! I hear frequent stories of people losing their cell phones, as anecdotal as that is.

I think they need to seriously re-evaluate the problem case they are trying to address here. Selling on the convenience of … what exactly? I wanted to type ‘almost hands free payment’ - but ‘hands free’ is not what we’re talking about there. Selling the service to cabbies that don’t always have the infrastructure to easily manage credit card transactions is probably a better bet, but still a hard sell (as the reason most cabbies don’t have the infrastructure for credit card transactions is because they prefer cash).

The piece continues:

Closely held Vayusa already has teamed up with about 80 companies in New England to support MobileLime, and 7,000 individuals have signed on to use it. [ed note - why are we reading about this when only 7K people have signed up?? Is there that little to write about???]

ViVOtech Inc., a closely held company in Santa Clara, Calif., also has developed software that could be installed in cellphones to handle payments by credit or debit cards designated by a user. The approach requires a special device at a store’s checkout station, which could be installed for roughly $150, as well as use of cellphones that have a technology called near-field communication, which uses radio waves in a special frequency to send data over the space of a few inches.

Phones with near-field communication technology are being developed by Philips Electronics NV and Sony Corp. Philips recently announced that Samsung Electronics Co. will begin equipping its cellphones with the technology as well.

Now, the NFC technology is emergent and will be important, but it will take more relevant applications to drive adoption. Let’s hope they’re bubbling up out there.

Participate: 1 Comment | Trackback

Cutting edge tech is consumer tech?

by eleanor on 29 Nov 2004 @ 9:33 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’m starting to pay attention to consumer tech because I have to: consumer tech adoption is a subtext to many of the themes I’m tracking.

Blogging is an inherently populist, human activity - its very ethos is to make editing pages easy enough for junior high girls and soccer moms. The uber-kewl iPod has, in a sweep, legitiimized the portable digital audio market (probably as much by providing a legitimate place to purchase music for mainstream users via iTunes) and become a fashion and lifestyle accessory. Then we have podcasting, the nascent phenomenon (of which I remain highly skeptical - I struggle with the aural format and hate talk radio). Then we have projects like Creative Commons, with their groundbreaking work with Wired to distribute a free ‘rip mix burn’ cd with major artists under the CC license, and also projects like OurMedia which are trying to create a ecosystem around CC-licensed media. Then there’s the crazy ringtone market.

I’ve been tracking some of these themes for a while now, but have only gradually become aware of some of the implications of this. I first noticed when I discussed with people their iTunes habits - people I’ve spoken with have been regularly spending $20-30 a month at iTunes. Then I started checking out the wireless service I will want when I get the Treo650 - TMobile’s all-purpose data+voice service package starts at $80/month, to which you can add SMS, video, Hotspots, etc. That’s a tremendous annuity - and just plain astounding. I’ve resigned myself to the fees because of the productivity gains I will enjoy, but am struck that this is presented very casually as the price of entry. Note that NECSAM doesn’t fund cell phone service that extends beyond traditional voice - so this is my assessment as a user paying out of pocket; I imagine many of those who use these services have their fees covered by their businesses so they might have a different perspective (but that’s a bigger issue - see this post for a sense of the general chaos all us mobile workers are bringing to enterprises) .

Then you look at gaming - the launch of Halo 2 topped $125 million in its first weekend - players pay a further $6/month for the service. The gaming industry just held a conference, State of PlayII hosted by the New York Law School - if you can believe it. Prominently featured is the game Second Life, where characters roam through a user-built 3-D environment (I actually signed up for this to see if I can understand what the buzz is about). Check out the blog set up to chronicle the happenings of the online world for a real sense of how deep the consumer connection with virtual worlds is.

What all this bespeaks to us is, in economic terms, a revealed willingness to pay. We can see consumers spending a huge amount of recurring money on new toys and services. Consumers are willing to buy cameras and cameraphones and mp3 players. They’re willing to subscribe to broadband and wireless services to use them. They purchase add-on services and applications to make them more usuable and fun. What an astonishing change - and so much of it is driven by the pursuit of access to information and entertainment.

And there’s data to back this up - all these disparate trends are being mirrored in the purchasing of content online. Consumers are consuming more as they get a taste for the way they can use it. ClickZ, a site for web marketing, discusses how paid content increased by 14% in 1H2004 - hitting $853M in the US.

Contrast this to the state of the industry documented in 1999 by Austrailian Roger Clarke and the change is startling.

Startups and enterprises are noticing and improving their offerings. Last week, at the IBDN Under the Radar event showcasing a handpicked cadre of startups, I was struck that at the number of innovative consumer companies. Roku is selling network music players for the home; Akimbo is offering a video on demand service of old series and niche programming; Mirra sells backup devices. These are all toys that will be found at major US consumer electronics stores like BestBuy.

It appears that a broad trend is emerging - that a fundamental shift has occured between US consumers and their media. As we heard from SBC’s CEO - people of all walks of life are making media their own - repurposing it, sharing it, and documenting their thoughts on it - via blogs or epinions or amazon comments. Broadband adoption and emergence of meaningful applications have opened up a huge new market, and the pursuit of that market is pushing the state of the industry forward.

Just in time too, because enterprise spending growth has shown no meaningful increase.
/p>

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

SBC’s Chair discusses intent to offer integrated cable, cellular, wireline service

by eleanor on 26 Nov 2004 @ 9:16 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting piece with an interview with SBC’s Chairman and CEO, Edward Whitacre. I’ve posted the entire article here for those without subscriptions.

This piece is important for several reasons. First, SBC is 60% owner of Cingular (which is now the merged entity including AT&T Wireless), so this shows that SBC is planning on creating synergy between their wireline and wireless offerings as a strategic necessity. Secondly, he offers valuable insights into the competitive dynamics of the industry.

Even more subtly, I was struck by Whitacre’s assessment of personal technology:

I’m not a real techie. I have a computer at home, but don’t mess with it that often. I mean, what am I going to do with 200 e-mails a day? No, I’m really not very techie, but I can use a computer.

Believe it or not, I can even burn a CD, or I can buy a CD, take it home, and put it in my PC and then load it on my iPod. I looked last night, there’s something like 514 hours of music on it. I have Ray Charles on there, I have Steely Dan, I have the music from “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”

This is an additional datapoint which is fueling a new theme I’m starting to track - consumer-driven adoption (I’m writing a longer piece with an overview of the themes I’m tracking - see .

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Mozilla-based browser Firefox off to strong start

by eleanor on 24 Nov 2004 @ 11:29 am in Emergent   ++

Information Week has a decent round up of the recent browser stats wars. We’ve got a couple different reports with slightly different takes on the numbers, but it’s clear where the momentum is: Firefox is definitely taking market share from Internet Explorer and is surprising in its swiftness.

In a summary of the stats, OneStat.com, an Amsterdam-based Web metrics firm, has Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with a 88.9% usage share (down 5 points since May) to Firefox’s 4.6% and sister-suite Mozilla at 2.8%. That puts Mozilla-based browser share at 7.4% (up from 2.1% in May).

US-based competitor WebSideStory has IE at a 92.9%, and Firefox at a much smaller 3%. Under their model, IE is only down 3% since May. Not a huge difference, but IE share falling below 90% represents a pyschological threshold. So it’s worth quibbling just a little:

Brinkman [OneStat’s founder] attributed the difference between the two companies’ number to a larger sampling size for his data and the later reporting period. OneStat, for instance, claims it monitors Web usage at some 50,000 sites in 100 countries, while WebSideStory says it counts about 600 enterprises as its customers.

“And we did our research just last week,” he said. “WebSideStory’s research is already a couple of weeks old.”

This time period is especially pertinent when you consider that FireFox itself was only officially launched (v 1.0) 2 weeks ago. Since then users have downloaded more than 5.6 million copies of the free Firefox. Based on what I see and hear, I tend to agree with Brinkman that a couple weeks brings a lot of change with all the buzz around Firefox.

I still use the Mozilla suite (since 1999). I’ve spoken with other power users (as I type I have 3 windows open, one of which has 39 tabs open) and they say it’s not quite ready for prime time. Thunderbird (the Mozilla-based mail client) definitely isn’t, and Mozilla mail has finally become stable - I don’t want to play the crashing game. I’ll move to Firefox and Thunderbird together, once they are both stable. Updated: I hadn’t checked on Thunderbird’s status - but today I see that Thunderbird is nearing release and that release candidate 1.0 is available for testing. Full release of 1.0 is set for tomorrow!

I do, however, feel less cool not using Firefox too. In the Bay area, people have Firefox stickers and t-shirts and it is quite the topic of conversation, even (especially?) among the less technical folks. I feel sort of left out of the revolution. Well, I’ll just download Mozilla 1.8 alpha 5 and try my best to feel cutting edge.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Perils and travails of social networking

by eleanor on 23 Nov 2004 @ 3:08 pm in Emergent   ++

David Coursey’s deeply skeptical article from back in August, Beware of ‘Free’ Services, captures a subtle objection to some of these social networking sites. As Coursey says, everything has a price - whether obvious or implicit. I share his deep suspicion of Plaxo - the lame company which offers to spam customers’ contacts with arbitrary email requesting that contacts update their info. This is a personal predjudice, but I have to confess that I tend to think poorly of anyone associated with Plaxo’s email. As a non-user, it’s worse than spam - it tells me someone else has shared my info with a 3rd party. Not to mention the fact that it implicitly says I am valuable to that person only as a correct email address in their database. Maybe Plaxo could fix it by adding a chattier tone to the notes, but its request to ‘please update my info so that so-and-so has it correctly’ leaves me cold.

Services like LinkedIn however do suit me - I use LinkedIn quite a bit. For me it serves as a mental map of my contacts. My outlook contacts are too extensive and fragmented by the categories that I use to classify them locally. LinkedIn serves a useful purpose as a sort of superset category of something that could be classified as ‘people to keep my eye on’.

It could be my position as an itinerant researcher, but I’m not at all bombarded with requests for contact (or then it again, it could be that, as I sense, my network is already interlocked - that would be an interesting analytic tool for LinkedIn to add). I haven’t used it to make contacts either, as I have nothing to sell and usually get information from relationships I’ve developed in the real world. So, for me at least, the business case of LinkedIn in forming new connections has fallen short. It has helped me keep track of and keep in touch contacts I’ve formed elsewhere.

I heard (or read? I forget) that a possible business model for LinkedIn was selling companies access to “the references that are not on the resume” people with whom you have worked, but explicitly did not list as references. Now, how they would sell that access I’m not sure (it sounded more reasonable before I got to putting it down here) - but in that case, I agree that it would be a valuable thing. It’s so costly to mishire that I believe it’s economically benefical to reduce uncertaintly. On the flip side prospective employees can mine LinkedIn to get a sense of the culture and even the personalities of some of their potential colleagues. It’s on the same scale of reasonableness as Googling dates to get the backstory on them. With the data out there, we are better off knowing.

And that’s where I come down on Coursey’s objection - I am ok with the risk as long as I can extract value as a user. Fail to deliver me value, and the contract is broken.

The other social networking companies have failed to interest me. I deemed Ryze worth trying until I realized that I needed to pay $10 a month to get the sort of data I wanted out of it (it is free however to submit a tremendous amount of personal data, and it is free to get contacted by those in your affiliations 0 se here for more info). Friendster is for dating and pure social stuff - and the hype around that one crested when I was deeply skeptical about it as a popularity contest. Tribe might be interesting, especially in light of their partnership with (someone I’m interested in), but then again - it’s a matter of time. I can only invest so much attention in these services. And then there’s Tribe - but you know - I have never figured out what that’s for.

But all this is so much work, and requires investment. Take the last 2 days, for example - it took me the better part of yesterday to input my 60 new contacts into Outlook (granted I was addled with a bad cold). Today I spent time sending followup notes and invites into LinkedIn. While social networking tools make this process easier to tackle in a bulk fashion, they don’t do anything to mitigate the fact that dealing with people on the one-to-one level that is so essential to building and maintaining solid relationships. And that takes time.

Participate: 3 Comments | Trackback

Institute for the Future report on location based services

by eleanor on 22 Nov 2004 @ 4:47 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

The Institute for the Future, a futurist think-tank in Menlo Park has been doing a lot of thinking around location-based services. Check out their report, Infrastructure for a New Geography. Some of it is pretty far out, and of questionable value, but their report of projects and companies involved is useful. Membership in the IFTF is available in the Technology Horizons Program for about $15K a year, with numerous benefits including reports like these, an annual conference and access to thought leaders.
[edited to point to the file on IFTF’s site, rather than to a local copy here, as requested by Sean Ness. It looks like they removed the original blog entry for this file. If this link goes dead, it’s because IFTF removed the file. Note that this price was that quoted for my employer in response to my question, “Exactly how expensive are you?”]

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

Future Salon presents Doug Englebart, inventor of the mouse

by eleanor on @ 1:13 pm in Emergent   ++

I was unable to attend due to illness, but they have a very good summary on this page. This is a very good group of people with close ties to SAP.

Another great example of both the sheer quantity of very interesting events we have here in the bay area, and simulataneously that the attendees do circle back to publish a synopsis of what happened.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback

NorcalBMA Product Marketing/Management Roundtable – breakfast meeting on Blogging and RSS

by eleanor on 16 Nov 2004 @ 10:04 am in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

I run the Product Marketing/Management roundtable for the Northern California branch of marketing trade association BMA. This month we held our monthly breakfast meeting on Blogging and RSS. Bill Flitter, chief marketing guy for startup Pheedo, who blogs extensively about marketing and blogging, gave an overview to our attendees. 21 people attended, and they were very interested. Their questions however tended towards the very basic. You can view Bill’s presentation here. I offered a link to Mary Meeker’s overview of RSS and blogging as a good primer. When she’s interested, you know it’s important.

Participate: 0 Comments | Trackback