Archive for June, 2005

Last day of ciccadas, hummingbirds, and fighting with blue jays

by eleanor on 23 Jun 2005 @ 3:32 pm in Geek   ++

So since March I’ve been working from home and scoping out new projects. Working every day, slaving away with 30 tabs open in Firefox, pondering all the new stuff out on the net, who’s got it and who doesn’t, and what in the world I wanted to do next. Though always interesting, it’s been hard to always make sense of what’s going on, and that’s been a lot of what I’ve been writing about.

But now I have a job, and starting Monday, the hummingbirds, ciccadas and nasty blue jays will just be a if-I’m-lucky weekend diversion. I’ll be ok. I’m actually wickedly allergic to the jasmine that the hummingbirds love so and my herbs will just have to take care of themselves. I will however miss the ciccadas.

I’m just kidding really - it’s a great job, with a real team, and I’m terribly excited.

So that’s what’s been up the last couple weeks as I get everything settled for that. This week is “vacation geek-out week”, full of conferences. I have a bunch of stuff to write up about Supernova and then there’s Gnomedex tomorrow, which should be interesting. As long as I’m not locked in the back room reserved for the paraiah that procrastinated on registration. Ah, the rewards of social engineering.

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Finally, the Amazon Darknet review

by eleanor on @ 3:04 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

While at Supernova, my (disclosure) buddy JD Lasica and I did a video talking about JD’s book, Darknet, on the conflicts between remix culture, Hollywood and Washington. My first citizen journalism experience - what a dilletante.

I thought JD’s book was great, a really solid treatment of the subject. He used one of my favorite approaches to understand a space — a combination of a big picture survey with deep dives to profile specific instances. In this case, it was profiling people and how they were using technology (almost all of the illegal under the DMCA, poor folks) to do new things with media.

And that spurred me to finally do the Amazon review that JD asked me to do weeks ago (only after I said it was a good book!) - so I’ll post it here. Perhaps I should reread the T&C of the Amazon page to see what I signed away, but microcontent is microcontent (is microformats) and it’s all mine. And thus I will repost for you to remix.

In what is essentially a PR war of hysteria (on both sides), JD presents the middle ground, shifting the focus off the corporations and file-sharing teenagers. We learn about real people who, having become accustomed to technology in their lives, adopt it to create a richer media experience. These hobbyists have the tools and ambition to express themselves, except now the law has intervened. Before, fair use was an acceptable compromise because it was hard to make a perfect copy. Now with perfect duplicates, all fair use is suspect, since the tools used to digitally record a few seconds of a song or movie for a remix piece are the same that pirates would use to steal music or, worse, to profitably bootleg. Those tools illegally circumvent copy protection and the act is a crime no matter the intent.

This is the tension JD describes is his book - a world where an absolute law applies to a range of activities, many of which seem perfect resonable and socially beneficial.

JD presents no real answers because as a society we haven’t come up with them yet. Darknet triggers important questions: is fair-use an intrinsic “right”? should it be? what can people repurpose for their own use in a non-commerical setting? how can that be defined/controlled? where are the mechanisms to license use of this content?

JD points us to the root of the conflict: otherwise normal people become criminals in pursuit of creating their own art and entertainment - works as “trivial” as they are culturally important.

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Viral marketing movie preview for bloggers tonight “Yes”

by eleanor on 12 Jun 2005 @ 3:38 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So, I’m pre-posting on this so in case there’s anyone out there that’s interested and doesn’t already know.

Mark Pincus, Marc Canter and Tom Luddy are trying their hands at viralizing an independent movie with Joan Allen (what an interesting forehead she has!) and Sam Neill called Yes in SF by SBC park at 6pm tonight.

An interesting marketing challenge, since the film’s name, Yes, is such an ubiquitous part of speech. That makes it a hard word to viralize, not quite as easy to pickup on as, say, Sideways is when it’s being debated at the next table. Let’s hope that the text based aggregation of getting bloggers and other cool kids to write about it will help.

I am signed up, but am probably not headed back up to SF since we were there all day yesterday for the KRON blogger meet up. I’ve got a bunch of posts to get up, and have the hankering to play with my WordPress install.

So if you’re in SF tonight, jot your name down on the evite, join the crew, watch the film, drink the kool-aid and then faithfully blog.

It’s curious to note that despite signing up and somewhat committing to attend, it’s only now, while searching for a link for you faithful readers, that I bother to get more info about the plot of the movie. Mark’s posts and the Evite just mention Joan and Sally Potter, no Sam Neill: I wonder who the customers of this project are ultimately? Are reputation effects of Sally and Joan enough to carry the film with no further info, or do bloggers just like a party and special sneak preview treatment?

It’s probably a great opportunity: I missed seeing Primer at both Gnomedex and Defcon last year, and haven’t caught up with it since. And that’s been my loss.
Tags - “Yes” film

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Mac moves to Intel as the Windows tax grows heavier

by eleanor on 8 Jun 2005 @ 7:28 pm in Open Source   ++

This is terrible to write, since I’ve mocked friends who’ve moved to Mac as shiny-object-with-a-price-premium-loving poseurs, but I’m starting to consider it.

In the last two weeks I’ve moved to Open Office which is barely adequate, had spam-virii invasive enough in Thunderbird to trigger Norton alarms continually (but ineffectually), and, as the kicker, just now updated Norton which changed my firewall settings sufficiently to knock me off our home wifi.

Since I had to reclone to get back to native WinXP SP2 Bluetooth support, the trial clock on Norton was reset; they will inevitably ask for money to support the Windows tax, and I will refuse and go to Grisoft. So even this rant is about a temporary problem, but it still rankles.

Where, oh where, is my Linux desktop alternative? That dream of running a highly configurable system on commodity hardware?

The newly converted and devout preach alike of the benefits of the BSD infrastructure underlying OSX, but even with Apple’s announcement of a move to the Intel chipset, industry bets seem to be that Apple will keep the system closed. Where does that really get us?

That’s always what’s consoled me about staying on Windows - at least you have a wide range of kit on which to run your bloated, insecure OS. I can go super light with Japanese notebooks, or I could go beefy with a casemodded gaming machine. Just about every peripheral works. Yeah, it’s worse with Linux, but that’s where the world was headed before all the alpha hackers moved to Mac.

With Apple kit, choice is simulated with a coat of paint and dismissed as not being nearly as cool as thinking different (yet so monolithically). Think different, yes, oh yes - different from commodity pricing pressure of the rest of the industry (but not too different). Best a kind of vertical different that accepts the requirement of a matching set of Mac-dedicated components. I admire it as a marketer, but revile it as a consumer; they free as much as they control.

I’ll post this and reboot (as was requested by Norton), hoping that my wifi settings will be restored automagically. I hardly expect success if I have to play with the settings in their tool. Of course I could always disable it and go for the Windows Firewall.

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Fun with the thinking man’s drinkers

by eleanor on 5 Jun 2005 @ 4:08 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

So last night Mike and I had a rocking soirée with 60 or so folks who I can only describe as the thinking man’s drinkers. Geeks and nongeeks, boys and girls - all very cool people.

Despite my best efforts to astonish with tasty snacks, the highlight of the evening was absinthe brought by Robert Rich and his wife Dixie. Side note, Robert injured his right hand horrifically a couple months ago and is blogging about the recovery process. Last week, Dave McClure blogged about heroism the other day, and this is my nomination for heroism in our time.

Many thanks to all who came - we might have something else next weekend, we have a TON of leftover beer. I thought this picture of the 23 different kinds of beer we have left would speak volumes. Yeah, I was playing with my camera a couple weeks ago and left it with the datestamp setting on. Oh well.

I didn’t blog about this because I wanted to make sure I knew the people who showed up. And we do, after all, just have an apartment. If you missed the evite, email me and I’ll make sure to add you to my contacts for next time. :-)

So thank you to everyone who came - we had a ton of fun and you were great guests. Our kitchen still is a bit of a mess, but the rest of the place is almost as clean as it was when started.

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Notes from Stanford US-Asia lecture with Prahalad and Barker

by eleanor on 1 Jun 2005 @ 10:40 am in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Here are my Treo-tized notes from yesterday’s lecture in the US-Asia Tech Mgmt. Series at Stanford, which closed out the Spring series. Note that the presentations will be available online here - keep checking.

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Jonathan Barker spoke and focused on China:

• Huge demographic and economic changes: Private property growing, primarily as lease holding from government
  Changing middleclass consumption patterns will have tremendous impact. Adoption of credit and cashless payment systems is coming: there were 200 million bank cards in 2000, in 2004 there are 468 million.
• Chinese consumption is predicted to increase 18% annually for the next X years (versus a static 2% in the US)
• Consumer electronics consumption (not just manufacturing) was $49.6 billion in 2004 (#2 behind the US right now). IDC predicts that will double to $100 billion by 2008. Covers all areas – mobiles, tvs, audio devices.
• Need infrastructure for autos: (missed how many they have now) but in 2020 China’s expected to have 140 million cars on the road – huge impact for cities (urban planning, congestion, pollution), the countryside (highways, gas stations, etc etc) and the nation in general.
• Factors even extend into the non-glamorous: take milk consumption – he showed a chart where per capita consumption went from about 2 (liters?) to 40-50 (liters?) per year. (non-sequitur thought of mine: I had read that many Asians have difficulty tolerating lactose. Is that true? If so would milk consumption be a habit, a sort of acquired taste that would signal affluence?).
• Then he discussed a most interesting bit: China has a metric called the Gini coefficient, which is a ratio of inequality ranging from 0-1, indicating roughly the gulf between the richest and poorest (very interesting – something I recall neither from Political Economy or recent discussions of class in America like in the recent series from The NY Times). China’s is now .46, disturbing when it was just .33 in 1980 (for comparison’s sake it’s .41 now in US).

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Then we had C.K . Prahalad speak on India.

Central thesis: His work is now focused on the 10 countries in the developing world (see one of his slides for the full list, but it’s the usual guys). These countries represent $16 trillion in market potential. To get there we need to adopt the point of view of bottom of pyramid, abandon our own preconceptions and ways of doing business.

The question is what do with the 80% of humanity that’s stayed under the radar of the big global and local companies. hey’re simply unserved and that creates lots of opportunities for tremendous innovation and profit.

He wanted to give specific examples of why and how things work, because it’s very different. Everything about serving this market challenges conventional thinking and assumptions. The price-performance ratio needs to be completely rethought while maintaining world class quality. You need to plan for saleability, selling profitably at $1, not $100. Right now, the NGOs don’t pay attention to scale, everything is done on a regional/national project basis. Industry must step in and build this out.

So back to the question of how to convert 5 billion poor people to consumers. He uses a pyramid to show his 3 themes: global restructuring, conventional strategies and tactics, and the bottom of pyramid (this is probably made much more clear in his book).

This matters because in age of saturated markets, where we are chasing the same 1 billion people with endless product variations, the other 5 billion needs everything, making for essentially limitless opportunity. And it’s not a question of being “backwards”, it’s not about adopting best practices, it’s about finding next practices to leapfrog from being behind to adopting next generation tools. As just one example, India (or some region in India) held a fully electronic poll for their elections in 2004; of course the necessary equipment was transported by elephant, but their elections were successfully held using technology we can’t even get right (or trust, but that’s another story in famously corrupt India). Prof. Prahalad maintains it’s just a project management challenge, and encourages the Stanford Engineering students to bite in and take it up.

The theme of “Next practice, not best practice” would come up again and again in his presentation, that emerging markets are huge, demographics (youth) & growth rates appealing, especially versus the aging and stagnating demographics of the US and Europe.

So back to the question at hand, how to marry low cost, good quality, profitability, and sustainability (I might have missed one) at same time, fuse them into each product. He went through a couple examples (but had many more, I’m sure they’re all this fascinating).

• Hospitality in India. Indians love to travel – visiting relatives, religious pilgrimages, whatever – each day 10-20 million Indians use the national railway system. Where do they sleep? Sometimes even on the street (Gershenfeld’s Fab talked about the huge increase in prices of Bangalore hotels because of the influx of foreigners in to spend time at the tech haven – prices like $250+ a night). Prof. Prahalad wanted to do it for 10% of that kind of cost. So what do you do? You figure out what it will look like. They had a team of 6 people (students? At UMichigan or somewhere else? Is probably in the book.) They limited the scope, to redefine the market as being not luxury, not budget. They created a new market, but plotting the four most critical elements on the sides of a cube: space, modernity, price-performance, saleability. These were the self-imposed constraints (I think of them more as imperatives) that could not be relaxed. He didn’t say, but it has to be the case that everything else was up for grabs.

  So the example here is IndiOne, a venture backed by Tata Industries that’s the result of these efforts.

  

  They offer rooms for $20 US and it looks like a modern hostel meets a less expensive European chain hotel. The rooms are appealing, simple and modern. They have showers, LCD tvs, cable, and broadband connectivity. Hotel lobbies have stripped down restaurants. How did they do it? They rethought everything: new training practices, maintenance plans, human resources (hiring, staffing – they do this with far fewer people), and intelligent application of IT at the backend. Delivering more features, at a lower price. And they specifically thought about scale: they chose iconographic elements so they would be portable (and recognizable) globally. This is what 6 people did in 18 months. Ten more are due to be built next year. Their goal was to destroy the status quo price-performance curve, delivering a new kind of value unseen before. Watch out Marriott.

• The second project he described was to increase adult literacy. They chose to focus not on the educational basics of the “3Rs” (reading, writing, arithmetic) but on the 1R of reading. Goal was to quickly get people to read, so they went with immersion type video, not alphabets and piecemeal word construction. [I can say that while using that Rosetta Stone sw to learn Japanese, the immersion was very effective, especially for the kanji; though I did memorize the kana]. Prof. Prahalad said that half of all Indian women are illiterate. Interestingly, from the video he showed, learning to read via computer was greeted with an enthusiasm that was missing from Gershenfeld’s discussion of tech adoption in India in Fab. It might be the difference between just plunking down hardware and in establishing a program and software to do something immediately useful for the population? This venture was put together by TCS, Tata Consultancy Services as a non-profit, non-commercial project. He said something about the software being open source.

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So that concluded the presentation part, the presentations will be online @ asia.stanford.edu/events/Spring05/ee402t/
Then followed some Q&A from the audience. I just captured snippets of the responses of the professors.

• ….Because our standard of living is so high, we miss out on serving everybody. We need to get back to the old ethos of Ford Motor Company, where the goal was to build products that everyone could afford. There needs to be a new industrial revolution.
• Discussing wage inequalities around the world: Information asymmetries lie at root of wage disparities; they will be brought in line once the information is available to all.
• Closing question - highlights of the best opportunities for the budding young entrepreneurs in the room:
  • Barker: In China, there are still lots of dirt roads, very basic opportunities are everywhere. To be successful, you need to learn to finesse the opportunity, to adapt to the local conditions and to not overlook huge potential even though many opportunities are not sexy by Western standards.
  • Prahalad: Invest time in languages and intercultural awareness. Focus on becoming part of global citizenry. In exchange for the opportunity to participate everywhere/anywhere in the world you have the obligation to do something productive, which will improve the world. Develop a personal mission, a desire to leave personal legacy.

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