reDesign

Some interesting reads from the last few weeks:

• Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo on the cognitive surplus (Web 2.0 video) - Author Clay Shirky spoke recently on how much could be done if only a fraction of the time spent watching TV is put to other uses. He estimates that 2,000 Wikipedias could be created with just the time Americans spend watching TV in a year. (I just clicked off the TV to write this post.) While Shirky focuses his talk on production of content, all that production also has a significant effect on consumption. Time is a zero-sum game. The time I spend on Facebook or reading about Jon’s exploits in Russia is time I’m not spending with TV or traditional media. And for every producer, there are at least 10 to 20 consumers.
• Larry Page on how to change the world (Fortune) - Google co-founder Larry Page lays out the challenges we face in changing the world. The core problem is that not enough people and companies take risks. Part of this undoubtedly is due to the risk/reward systems in most companies. Innovation (and the people who chase it) are often the first to go when belts need to be tightened.
  I was at a conference last week where Erik Jorgensen of Microsoft demoed some amazing technologies in mapping, such as 3D map tours. A questioner from the audience, a Microsoft shareholder, asked what the ROI was. Fortunately, Microsoft and Google do well enough in their core businesses that most investors give them the freedom to innovate.
• ‘CSI’ sleuths out Microsoft’s latest technology (USA Today) - CSI:NY producer Anthony E. Zuiker is teaming with folks at Microsoft labs to bring bleeding edge technology to viewers. (And no doubt frustrating real life criminalists with increased expectations.) Last week’s episode featured Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. CSI:Miami used variations of Microsoft’s Surface computing. Microsoft isn’t the only one in the CSI product placement game; many of the pictures processed by the Photosynth technology in that episode were taken with iPhones.
• Honda system to warn motorists of crime hotspots (AFP) - In-car navigation systems and PNDs are getting more data rich all the time. On recent Acuras you can get Zagat ratings. With a Dash Express PND, you have access to Yahoo! Search results. Now, in Japan, your Honda can tell you when you’re in a dangerous neighborhood. I suspect that fears of redlining and disparate data sources will keep that from happening here. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising Dash users use create and share localized feeds for such an app.

This week’s interesting reads:

• Futurist: Digital TV’s Mixed Signals (CQ) - Congressional Quarterly takes a look at the impact of government action/inaction on the development and adoption of technology. As we near the Feb. 2009 date when analog broadcasting in the United States will cease, CQ looks back at what happened when television first came in to being. Similar blame/credit could be assigned to the government for the division in the United States between two incompatible wireless technologies. via Mark Stencel
• Don’t Fear Starbucks (Slate) - What happens to mom and pop coffeehouses when Starbucks moves in to town? According to the piece from Slate, business increases. As Starbucks educates local audiences on the value of high-priced coffee, independent coffeehouses benefit. I prefer independents because, unlike Starbucks, many of them have free WiFi. via Robert Franklin
• Apple’s Piping Hot Innovation (Forbes) - In related coffee news, a recent Apple patent filing describes a “wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cellphone.” In theory, you’d be able to tap a button on your iPhone as you’re driving to Starbucks to place your order. If only it would tap into the nav system on your car to know that you’re headed to the Starbucks and save you that button click. Hmm… where’s my patent attorney?
• 10 Questions for Richard Branson (TIME) - One of my favorite billionaires talks about global warming, risk taking, the state of the music market and dyslexia. “Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no,” Branson says. The podcast of the interview is worth a listen.

The iPhone has quickly become the ultimate communication device for many. With a few tweaks, it could easily become the ultimate navigation device.

Creative Commons image by stevegarfield.

Imagine:

• You get into your car and put the iPhone in you iCar dock. As you drive, music from the iPhone wafts through your car’s stereo system using either a hard wire or FM transmitter (built in to the dock). The track information displays on the iPhone screen.
• A friend calls. Her picture and number shows on the iPhone screen. The music fades and you’re connected to her over Bluetooth. She invites you to dinner. “Text me the address,” you say. Moments later, the iPhone receives the address and asks you if you want to go there.
• The iPhone shows you turn-by-turn directions on Google Maps. The music resumes.
• The Google Maps traffic data show an accident ahead. The iPhone alerts you and prompts you to re-route.
• As you near your destination, images from Google Street View appear to confirm that you’re in the right place.
• You arrive at your destination and find parking three blocks away. Snap the iPhone out of the dock and the driving directions automatically turn in to walking directions.
• After dinner, you take a picture with the iPhone and upload it to flickr. The location data is automatically added and it shows up on your flickr map.
• You forgot where you parked your car. No problem, the iPhone remembers and guides you back. (OK, this part won’t work if you parked in an underground garage — you’ll get back to the garage entrance, but then you’re on your own.)

Technology-wise, most of what’s needed for the above scenario is already in place. GPS is the key missing piece. You would also want HSPDA to speed up the map data. The connoisseur would want Bluetooth A2DP for the music.

How much will this cost? I’d expect the service to cost $0-$10 a month. Wireless carriers have typically charged about $10 a month for navigation service. Verizon and Sprint have started to bundle navigation services with their high-end data plans.

The incremental hardware cost for the GPS chip is negligible. Apple could tack on an extra $50 and make a killing. Add on early-adopter pricing of $100 for the iCar dock and the $150 is still cheaper than most standalone nav systems.

Portable navigation devices from companies like Garmin, Magellan and TomTom have become hot as prices have plummeted to around $250. I took a road trip last month and a significant percentage of cars had navigation screens hanging from their windshields.

It’s expected that PNDs will become a billion dollar market this year. A GPS-enabled iPhone could rapidly take share in that market.

See also:

• Top trends and predictions for satellite navigation

More on: Apple, Google, iPhone, satellite navigation

If you’re like me, you’ve read way too much about Apple’s $200 price drop on the iPhone. But there’s one more worth reading. Economist Steven Levitt (author of Freakonmics) asks “Should Apple Burn Its Economics Textbooks?” Apple’s
$599 initial price and subsequent price cut was very much in line with economic theory.

But it ignored the fact that customers don’t want to feel like chumps. We typically hate the companies that use elaborate pricing models: airlines, hotels, car dealers. We hate airlines that charge us $300 for a flight when the person next to us paid $150. (That anger isn’t entirely alleviated when on the next flight the situation is reversed.) We hate to pay $300 for a hotel room when we know that someone got a similar room in the same hotel on Priceline for $75. It may be the best economics, but it doesn’t feel right.

My personal favorite is Ticketmaster’s TicketFast fee. For an extra $2.50, you can print out your tickets at home. Or you can pickup tickets at will call for free. I’m saving the venue money by not having to serve me at will call and I’m shortening the line for others. They want me to pay them extra for it? They should be giving me a discount.

Then I do my own economic analysis and determine that it’s worth $2.50 to me not to have to stand in line.

I had a chance earlier this week to try the new Facebook application for iPhone. The app, developed by Joe Hewitt, is a version of Facebook optimized for the iPhone. Many of the core features of Facebook are available on the iPhone, including your profile page, messages, pictures, status messages and your friend’s contact information.

It’s a very well done app that shows off the capabilities of the iPhone as well Facebook. (If you have an iPhone, go to http://iphone.facebook.com to try it out; you can also go to that URL in a Web browser to see the functionality.) A video demonstration is at the bottom of this post.

Currently all of this is done within the phone’s Safari browser; it’s not integrated into the phone’s contacts, pictures or other capabilities.

As much as I love my computer, my phone is where the most important “social networking” happens. The social network needs to be embedded deeply into the phone.

Here are some of the possibilities:

• Pick up a new phone and enter your account information. Your contacts are automatically populated, complete with pictures of your friends. No need to fiddle with re-entering all your data.
• Check the status of your friends before you make a call. If you see that your friend is on the phone, you can call later or send a text message. (Similar to presence on IM.)
• When a contact changes their phone number, the new information is automatically updated. You don’t have to worry about outdated phone numbers.
• Pull up a map of where your friends are when you’re trying to meet up.
• Take pictures and videos and upload them straight to your social network. (flickr, Facebook and others have developed workarounds that accomplish a limited form of this today.)
• Get reminded of events in your network without having to manually add them to another calendar. The reminder leads straight to maps and directions.

All of this is technically possible. The biggest challenges revolve around who “owns” the customer. In the U.S. market, this has historically been the wireless carriers. Some carriers deliberately make it hard to do things like move contacts because that raises the switching costs for customers. Most restrict access to key phone capabilities (such as the camera, GPS) to internal developers.

Doing something like this would mean breaking a lot of the traditional rules. But Apple has done that before.

More on: facebook, iphone

(Video from Rodney Rumford)

Recommended reading:

• Interview With Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, iPhone God (TechCrunch)

I made my visit to the Temple of Jobs yesterday, reaching the Apple store on Stockton Street about 9:30 p.m. The live van for the local NBC affiliate was parked outside waiting for the 11 p.m. newscast.

Inside, the store was relatively empty except for the big crowd around the iPhone display.

What was sparking the crowd? There were working iPhones set out on the counter.

Unlike most wireless carriers that put out dummy, nonfunctional phones, these were real. They were loaded with music, so you could test out the iPod features. You could use the Web browser. Watch videos on YouTube. You could even - gasp - make phone calls!

People were calling their friends — “Guess what, I’m calling you from the iPhone?” They waited patiently as the person in front of them explored the nuances. Every once in a while, someone would walk by proudly holding an iPhone bag.

Wireless carriers can learn a lot from Apple about launching products. Sure, most product launches won’t ever get the wall-to-wall media coverage that iPhone did. (Including a countdown the day before on CNBC ticking away the minutes until the iPhone launch.) But it’s a lot easier for people to get excited about a product when they can interact with it rather than have to imagine what it’s like.

Looking at my Facebook account today, there at least three people who reference having an iPhone, including one who “is worried her boyfriend loves his iPhone more than her.”

The next two years are going to bring big changes in television. Next month, the FCC is going to begin requiring cable companies to let users buy and connect their own cable boxes (instead of leasing them from the cable company). In February 2009, analog over-the-air broadcasts are set to end.

But after spending some time lately with Apple TV and TivoCast, I think the biggest changes are going to come from Internet delivery of content.

Television content has gone through a few transformations already, each leading to more and more niche content. With cable came 24-hour news, weather and sports networks, content that in most markets couldn’t profitably exist in the limited broadcast spectrum. Satellite brought additional capacity that made it profitable to serve smaller ethnic markets like Russians, Indians, Portugese and Ukranians. Tivo brought the ability to watch what you want when you want.

Now Internet TV allows users to get content that would never interest 10 thousand people, much less 10 million. I watch podcasts from CNET, Mobuzz, washingtonpost.com and others on my TV. Yesterday, I watched a 30 minute video of Eric Schmidt at the World Economic Forum on my Apple TV. I can’t imagine any TV network that would broadcast that.

Tivo’s Universal Swivel Search allows you to search across broadcast, cable and Internet content. A search for “LOST”, would theoretically return both the TV show and the podcast. You don’t even need to know where it is; it’ll just show up. (The big difference is that the Internet content will be available within a few minutes, but you’ll have to wait for the scheduled time for the broadcast and cable content.)

Launching a new television network isn’t easy. You have to negotiate for carriage with the three big cable companies, DirecTV and Dish. You’re competing with giants like Disney and Time Warner that can bundle their new channels with must-haves like ESPN and CNN. And, if you manage to get that far, you have to find content to fill the channel.

Internet television opens up the TV screen to anyone with a video camera and a Web server. Some content is already available in HD quality - I watch Mobuzz and washingtonpost.com in 720p. I can’t even get Comedy Central in HD on cable.

The one thing I still haven’t gotten used to is that programs vary in length. Freed from the conventions of television, shows go on as long as they need to. The same show can be 3 minutes one day and 10 minutes the next based on how much they have to say.

I got the YouTube software upgrade on my Apple TV today. As impressed as I was with Apple TV, the YouTube upgrade is a very welcome addition.

From the YouTube menu, you can watch featured videos, highest rated videos, most viewed and most recent. You can also log into you account and see your favorite videos.

The user interface and graphics of the YouTube implementation are as gorgeous as for the other features of Apple TV. The quality of the video varies dramatically based on the quality of the source content. It’s not HD, but some videos were as good as standard TV quality. After watching a video, you get a list of related videos.

The YouTube content available on Apple TV right now is thin. Of the 22 videos I have in my favorites, only 2 were available on Apple TV. The featured video list, however, largely reflects the videos featured on the YouTube homepage.

A search option is also available, though trying to type out keywords using the onscreen keyboard is more trouble than its worth. The search filters as you type providing a list of available videos, saving you some remote control torture if the video you’re looking for appears before you finish typing.

Upgrading the software was relatively painless, but I had to prompt my machine to check for the upgrade. It took about seven minutes total.

I encountered a few glitches: Some of the videos played back without audio. The on-screen keyboard wasn’t always responsive. The search implementation is a little odd; the number of results can go or up or down with each letter entered.

What’s missing? I’d like a way to create playlists for Apple TV from the Web. Right now there is no indication on YouTube.com of which videos are playable on Apple TV (or on mobile for that matter).

If Apple can bring flickr to Apple TV with a similar execution, I’ll be thrilled.

Update: Here’s a link to the Apple press release (thanks Paul). Apple also announced that they will be releasing a custom YouTube client for iPhone.

Related stories:

• Apple TV brings your media to life
• Kill time anywhere with YouTube mobile
• More pictures of Apple TV/YouTube on flickr

I bought an Apple TV over the weekend. It’s quite simply the most elegant, well-designed consumer electronics device I’ve used.

Apple TV works with iTunes to bring music, video, movies, photos and podcasts to life on your HDTV. (In geek terms, it’s a “digital media adapter.”)

You can virtually flip through your music collection and select what you want to listen to. Album art is shown on screen as the music plays. You can play unprotected music or music purchased through iTunes; music from competing services such as Rhapsody won’t work.

In the photos section, photos from your PC are rendered in high definition. The pictures are so vivid that I could watch them for hours. You can choose to have background music as the slideshow runs.

Apple TV also plays back audio and video podcasts, including some podcasts that are HD quality. This opens up a wide new range of content possibilities for your TV.

You can also watch TV shows and movies purchased from iTunes; I haven’t tried either of those.

The software is easy to understand and the graphics are gorgeous. The photo screensaver alone is almost worth the price of the box.

Unlike my new laptop, configuring it to work with my wireless network took just a few minutes.

A lot of companies have tried over the years to bridge the computer-to-PC divide and I’ve tried many of these products. This is the first one worth using. And this is just the first release.

Some of the things I’d like to see:

• A better remote control. Apple TV comes with a very limited remote control. For content libraries with thousands of songs and photos, the remote is serviceable, but not ideal.
• The ability to rent movies from iTunes. I really don’t want to pay $10 or $13 to “buy” a movie from iTunes. Rumors are that rentals are in the works.
• More Internet connectivity. You can watch movie trailers on Apple TV; you should be able to click to get showtimes. You should be able to share pictures with friends.

I’m excited about the possibilities for a device like Apple TV, but I may be one of the few. The signs so far aren’t good — I’ve seen pallets of Apple TVs sitting at Costco. In a recent speech, Steve Jobs referred to Apple TV as a “hobby”. There’s still hope, though: Jobs also announced upcoming support for playing videos from YouTube.

Saw this one on The Tonight Show. This ad focuses on the Internet capabilities of iPhone.

I’d love to know how the Gray Lady got such prime air time and association with the most hyped device of the year. Would’ve thought that Mossberg would get that nod.

Despite the date shown on the initial screen, the New York Times page shown is from October 2, 2006. (Many of the stories ran in print on October 3.)

As with the other ads, the phone part is an afterthought.