From fightforthefuture.org/pipa — watch the video, then go to the linked site and make your voice heard.
Posted: January 17th, 2012Another nail in the PC coffin, says Kevin C. Tofel at Gigaom.
He’s talking about mobile virtualization—accessing a PC remotely from another device, like a tablet or smartphone, for those situations that require a full Windows machine. This is impacting PC sales as many users are finding they can do a lot of what they want on the other devices with less reliance on the PC.
Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.
PC sales are down, while tablets and smartphones are gaining traction with both businesses and consumers. And smartphone sales have already surpassed PC sales.
From CIO.com, Apple in the Enterprise: $19 Billion to Be Spent on iPads, Macs in 2012.
A Forrester report this week predicts CIOs will pour $19 billion into Apple products in 2012—$10 billion in iPads, $9 billion in Macs. This is up from around $12 billion last year, where the split between iPads and Macs was roughly even.
I think a couple of things are happening here, neither of which is unexpected.
For one, the device operating system (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, etc) is losing relevance. It still matters of course, especially among most big companies that are heavily invested in the Microsoft toolset, but the new direction is obvious and inevitable. With the ascendancy of mobility both in the workforce and society in general, applications and data are gradually being decoupled from the old desktop OS frameworks.
Also, the so-called ‘consumerization of IT’ is really about a backlash from users who are tired of working with tools that are often second-rate in quality and reliability—like some cheap PCs running Microsoft Windows, and Blackberry phones that have not kept up with Apple’s iPhone or the popular Android smartphones. Increasing numbers of employees get better results with their personal devices, and have begun to demand something better at work. With cheap commodity technology you usually get what you pay for.
The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent.
This is the interesting subplot. Beyond building in some management and security tools in their devices, it doesn’t appear that Apple has made much of a directed effort at the corporate market. I think some of this has been due to Steve Jobs’ insistence on secrecy with regard to product roadmaps, and I wonder if Apple under Tim Cook might be heading in a more collaborative direction with corporate customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for them there.
Posted: January 11th, 2012Well, somebody in Brazil gets it.
In 2006 Gilberto Kassab, mayor of São Paulo, Brazil passed the Clean City Law which banned “every billboard, poster, and bus ad in São Paulo.”
Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like were until they were illegal. “A billboard is media on the road,” she told the FT. “In rational purchases it means less effectiveness… as people are involved in so many things that it makes it difficult to execute the call to action.”
It’s like everyone is competing to see who can scream the loudest, or find the most clever way to say Click Here. I went to a business meeting a few years ago in Aspen and, in addition to the natural beauty of the place, one of the first things I noticed: no billboards, and very little outdoor advertising at all.
Estimates say some Americans now look at upwards of 4,000 ads per day. When is enough enough?
This is the main reason we don’t watch much TV at our house, and when we do everyone in the house knows to hit the mute button when a commercial comes on because most of it is vacuous or obnoxious. I don’t know how anyone tolerates it.
I wonder if any major US cities might ever try Mayor Kassab’s model. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the visual pollution just disappeared one day.
Joshua Kopstein calls out Congress in a Dec 16 post titled Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works — as important legislation (SOPA) is being considered that would impede free speech and give corporations the power to censor. The gist of Kopstein’s piece is that members of Congress not only don’t have a basic understanding of something as important as the Internet, they don’t seem to even be interested in understanding it.
When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting “I’m not a nerd” before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn’t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts.
We don’t need no stinkin’ experts!
One of the controversial methods proposed to counter online infringement of intellectual property is DNS filtering—a technical point, sure, but relatively easy to explain and understand its basic functions. We’re not dealing with quantum entanglement here.
We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us.
We don’t need Computer Science PhDs in public office in order to reach intelligent decisions about things like this. What we need is people who are willing to make an effort to understand a few underlying principles, and how they integrate to form one of the most essential pieces of infrastructure on the planet. Our elected representatives apparently can’t be bothered to learn anything or even listen to those who could simplify a few technical matters for them.
“But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.”
I’m reminded of a quote by Isaac Asimov that sums up a bit of what is wrong with our government and American culture in general:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”
Technology is no longer just the domain of a special class of citizens. It’s central to nearly everything we do now: commerce, entertainment, communications, education, innovation, community. My elementary school-age kids are part of a digitally-connected generation, and they need political representation that understands a little about the world they are growing up in.
Posted: December 22nd, 2011For the science geeks among us: Isaac Newton’s papers have been digitized and posted at the Cambridge University Digital Library. Below is a shot of one of Newton’s pages from Trinity College in 1661. Published to the world for free. This is one of the things I love about the Internet.
Sometimes we do a web search because we want a bunch of results to look through, and this usually works pretty well. But sometimes we just want the answer to a question: we know there is exactly one correct answer to the question, and we just want that—not a bunch of useless “hits” and ads (aka sponsored links) cluttering up the page.
When the iPhone 4S went on sale recently, Steve Wozniak—co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs—was at one of the Palo Alto Apple stores waiting in line, and was interviewed about several things, including the Siri intelligent assistant software on the new iPhone. He made a really interesting comment about the current state of web search: he said that what we often need is not search technology but answer technology.
Rick Webb posted a typical example of search results for “gold price” on Google and also on Wolfram|Alpha (WA). The Google results are familiar—and not entirely useless—but the WA result is an answer (assuming that the search term means ‘what is the price of gold?’). The technology at the heart of Siri uses the WA services, among others, to find and deliver very specific responses to user input. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it is pretty amazing considering how relatively immature the field is right now. This is clearly the future of web search, especially on mobile devices.
Wolfram|Alpha is a “computational knowledge engine” that can provide an amazing breadth of data, sometimes cross-referencing several databases and calculating complex results on the fly. If you haven’t yet checked it out, start with the tour and see for yourself what this technology can do. Also, see the examples page to get an idea of the range of subjects where you can put WA to work for you. It’s free.
Many online publications do this really annoying thing with their articles. Rather than putting the entire article on one web page, they break it out into several pages, forcing you to click ‘Next’ over and over to get through it. They do this, of course, so they can show you more ads every time a new page loads.
Apple’s Safari web browser (in OS X Lion and Windows) has a great feature called Reader—clicking on the Reader icon in Safari’s address bar does two useful things:
Other images that are part of the article will still display, but the ads get filtered out. This is brilliant and makes reading on the web better.
Reader presents the article in a subtle pop-up screen and darkens the surrounding page, drawing your attention to thing you want to read. If you hover your mouse towards the bottom of the page you will see icons that let you decrease or increase the font size, email the article, print it, or close out Reader and return to the normal web page. You can also click the Reader icon in the address bar to close it out.
in•no•vate |ˈinəˌvāt|
verb [ no obj. ]
make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products: the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively.
• [ with obj. ] introduce (something new, esp. a product): innovating new products, developing existing ones.
Large organizations often look for big, enterprise-wide solutions to their problems. In some cases this is the right approach (ERP, CRM), but sometimes larger problems can be solved by tackling smaller, localized challenges first.
A couple of actual cases from my work with a big organization:
A few years ago our business unit needed a way to capture and report on employee training hours. The company had minimum requirements for training so we needed to know who had been to training, which classes they took, the number of approved hours for each class, how many cumulative hours they had for the year, subtotals for each office around the country, and we needed the instructor of each class to verify attendance.
Our CIO had talked a little about creating an application for this and other pedestrian business processes, but there were so many other priorities competing for limited resources that I knew this would not get done soon, if ever. So we hired a small development shop to work on it and we built it ourselves for less than $10,000. What used to take a training coordinator four days to do every quarter with multiple Excel spreadsheets now took a few minutes with our new web app.
But the really interesting thing was that shortly after we implemented it we started getting calls from other business units in the company. They had heard about our training management app and they wanted it too. Why? Because most every part of the company had the same training requirements and they were all experiencing the same challenges we were in tracking and reporting. So we shared what we had created, others got the same benefits, and the company was just a little better because of it.
Our business unit needed a way to look up a few data points about affiliate companies we worked with. All of the data existed in several company databases, but none of those databases contained everything we wanted, so the current process required our users to query multiple sources just to get a small dataset. We wrote up some specs for an app that would take a nightly export from the various data sources, parse out the subset we wanted, load it into a single SQL database, and then lay a simple web interface on top of it for our users to get everything they need in one place. Our internal dev team estimated it to be a $40,000 project.
We took our plan and the cost estimate to company leadership and asked for funding to build it. Our conservative ROI calculation came to $140,000 in productivity savings the first year, so it seemed like a slam dunk business case.
Funding was denied. There were other priorities, we were told, and besides this same functionality will be delivered in another system by year end, except that it wasn’t.
Well, necessity being the mother of invention and all, we retreated to the local burger joint to talked about how we could get this app done. I was lucky enough to have a first-rate Project Manager/Business Analyst/Programmer on my team—he brought up an earlier integration project we had done and thought maybe we could reverse engineer some of the work we had done there. As we talked about it and walked through how it might work the light started to come on for both of us: this is doable. It will take some time to do it without a dedicated development team, but we don’t need corporate funding so who’s going to stop us? (By the way, that’s a useful question to ask yourself when you see an opportunity. Don’t ask: can I do this?—instead, ask: who’s going to stop me?)
I told him to get started on it and let me know when he had a working prototype. About two weeks later we sat down to look at the first iteration and the framework of it all was there (and it was built using free open source tools). A few weeks later, after much testing, tweaking and documentation, we delivered the app to 100+ business users—they are still using it today and others in the company regularly ask for access to the application. Total hard dollar cost to the company: $0.
A couple of important things came out of these exercises in innovation:
I understand that these scenarios may not translate directly into other organizations, but the point is that sometimes we just need to get creative within our own teams and look for ways to bring about the change we want. We don’t always have to take no for an answer, and sometimes the smallest innovations can scale up to make a real difference.
Posted: December 9th, 2011Technology Review posted an article about tracking and advertising scripts on the web and Ghostery’s report of the worst offenders. I wrote about Ghostery recently and have been using it in my browsers for several months now.
Website tracking scripts are bits of software code embedded into a web page that run when you visit the site. These scripts communicate with third-party sites to gather information about your visits and track your activity so they can serve ads to you and collect information to sell to advertisers. (Even the referenced article had 12 such scripts that were blocked by Ghostery, see screen shot below.)
But in addition to being invasive these scripts also make websites take longer to load. Some sites have dozens of these things running, causing the website you’re visiting to hang up until all of the scripts have communicated with their respective advertising networks. This makes the web seem slower and worsens the user’s experience.
These tracking tools and the advertisers who run them are a blight on the internet. Ghostery will let you selectively block the common offenders and improve your web browsing experience. Check it out.
Posted: November 30th, 2011
