Several startup companies have sold e-book readers in the past, but none successfully.  Sony is the only other large company to have tried.   Assurance that a risky new technology is backed by a company that won’t disappear is important for mass-market adoption, giving Sony and Amazon an advantage.  This is especially important for devices that consume media, as the device’s utility dwindles without new content.  Amazon is especially well positioned to offer media for Kindle through its complementary assets.

Amazon’s established relationships with book publishers are extremely valuable to Kindle.  Book publishers control e-book content.  Amazon’s history of selling physical books has earned them the trust of almost every publishing house, ensuring easy access to electronic versions of books. In addition to existing e-books, Amazon’s scale gives them leverage to encourage publishers to release electronic versions of books.

Beyond that, Amazon has rare technology to make electronic versions of books available with far less work on the publishers’ parts.  Amazon has spent years scanning physical books to enable a feature called “Search Inside This Book” on their website.  Along with Google, they have one of the only large archives of scanned physical books in the world.  This enables selling e-books for books that publishers don’t even have original electronic copies of, with rights negotiations as the only remaining barrier.

Innovators have been jibbing together their own e-book readers out of laptops and PDF files for years.  Early-adopters look for concrete advantages like the ability to search books.  Med-students give Kindle rave reviews for this capability.   The easy availability and portability of dozens of books appeal to the small segment of truly voracious readers.  Kindle seems to serve these early segments well.  To cross the chasm into the mass market of the early majority, Kindle must make the experience simple and reliable.  Kindle’s wireless data connection sets it apart from all previous e-book readers.  By leveraging Sprint’s nation-wide 3G cellular data network, Kindle can load content without the operator even owning a computer.  Thus Kindle dodges the inevitable complexity that arises anytime a PC is involved.  This, along with Amazon’s well-established customer service, promise to make Kindle much easier for the early majority to accept.

Kindle seems well positioned for acceptance by the mass market.  If successful, Amazon will need to balance publishers’ need for DRM against consumers’ desire for open content.  The music industry has exposed these issues but certainly not solved them.

[This is another recycled homework assignment.  Something to keep y'all entertained while I'm in New Zealand!]

The music recording industry is in trouble.  Disruptive changes in music playback technology have seriously reduced demand for their mainstay business, physical CD sales.  CD sales comprise 80% of the industry’s total revenue, but have dropped sharply in recent years.  Last year sales dropped by 19%, and the channel is in danger of freefall as retailers start to re-allocate store space currently assigned to CDs.  The industry’s hopeful replacement revenue stream, digital downloads, looks like it will only replace a fraction of the loss.  What went wrong?  How did an entire industry fail to keep up with technological innovation?

The recording industry’s value in the economy comes from providing consumers access to great music.  The value chain includes discovering talent, developing the talent to create and record great music, and distribution of that music to consumers.  The early stages of the pipeline have remained about the same for decades.  But technology has permanently changed how music is distributed to consumers.  This fact was driven home to EMI management when a group of teenagers were invited to take as many free CDs as they wanted after participating in a focus group, and they didn’t take a single one!  The recording industry has acted as a manufacturer of physical goods.  But really their business is in licensing Intellectual Property (IP).  When it was inconvenient for consumers to reproduce high-quality recordings the distinction was unimportant.  But today physical distribution of recorded media provides a tiny fraction of the value in the music value chain.

Music IP is legally controlled by copyright.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology has been used to enforce licensing agreements on digital recordings files.  Until 2007, the recording industry only sold digital music with DRM, in an attempt to control copyright violations.  The great irony of DRM that has prevented its acceptance by consumers is that by restricting the use of the legally distributed digital music, DRM makes the legal product lower quality than the illegal product.  The lack of consumer incentive to use a lower quality product, combined with the impracticality of enforcing copyright agreements on individual consumers makes the appropriability regime in the distribution of music to consumers very weak.

We can think of innovation in this content space as the creation of compelling new music.  A hot young band with a new album or style of music has an innovation they want to commercialize.  As discussed earlier, the appropriability regime with consumers is quite weak.  The value of the labels’ distribution assets are waning, putting the band in the position of the attacker’s advantage according to Gans’ and Sterns’ innovation framework.  The band should go it alone and seek novel distribution techniques, ignoring the incumbent labels.  The appropriability regime is less clear with respect to incumbent labels – the album itself is well protected by copyright law since the legal recourse is straightforward against a large recording company, but a novel style of music is unprotectable.  So a promising band considering partnering with an incumbent label should consider how easily the value of their art could be expropriated.

The recording industry has focused too long on a part of the value chain that is no longer economically relevant.  They should look to other industries for inspiration as to how to create value in an environment where content and innovation are created more openly.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

"Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped
out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

On this point I completely agree with him.  This idea was a key point I made in my recent Ignite talk on Transhuman Morality.  We’re going to wipe ourselves out.  But as far as what we should do about it, Stephen and I disagree.  He sees space travel as the route to salvation.  This planet is getting burned up, so we’d better find a new one, so the logic goes.  I think this line of reasoning is unrealistic and even reckless.  The idea that we can stop worrying about saving this planet is the reckless part.  Having an out like this encourages people to act irresponsibly.

The reason why it’s unrealistic is more subtle.  I said at Ignite that we won’t be flying around in space ships visiting other planets like in Star Trek, and people hassled me about it.  I know this is a little heretical for a futurist to say, but I believe it.  I should clarify a bit: I think it’s likely we’ll visit the other planets in our solar system — there’s plenty of useful matter here that we can mine and put to good use.  But a physical conscious entity leaving this solar system is tantamount to suicide as far as any relationship that entity could hope to maintain with the culture here is concerned.  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet only 20 years away puts this idea into perspective.  Even if we could make a trip at an average speed of half light speed, (a reasonably aggressive goal considering the need to accelerate and decelerate) a round-trip would take 80 years.  80 years ago the world saw the first telephone trans-atlantic telephone call.  In another 80 years, many believe we will have hit the information singularity meaning who knows what will be here.  Return would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly pointless since the world one would return to would be completely alien.  Leaving to colonize?  Possible I suppose, but good luck.  And at that point I really don’t think there would be any motivation.

My main point is that by the time we have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, we won’t have physical bodies any more.  The robot revolution will be complete.  As a society we will be much more concerned with creating faster computers in which to store our consciousnesses than with whatever we think we’d achieve by leaving the solar system.  Colonization might take the form of transmitting executable programs that represent our personalities into deep space with the hopes that some society will pick them up and try to execute them on whatever hardware they have.  Or perhaps sending out a nano-seed that knows how to build a receiver to pick up such a signal.  But it’s hard to imagine sending a physical copy of the data that represent our personalities in a format that’s compressed enough that it could be executable, while including the plans for making a more powerful computer to run on.  If we were at this stage, the only reason to do so would be because we had converted all the physical matter in our solar system to become information processing machinery and we needed more raw material with which to represent our thoughts.  That day may come, but it will not be soon.

So I agree we should continue to pursue space exploration, because it helps advance technology.  But it is not a way out of our pressing environmental concerns.  The world needs geeks to transcend beyond biological bodies.  But geeks need hippies to keep the world around for long enough to get there.

[Vomet comet picture courtesy of Kevin Boydston.]

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience.  Everything should be back to normal in a few hours.  (If you’re reading this, it almost certainly is.)

When I was on vacation recently I realized I was close to being put into a similar situation.  When traveling abroad, I’m always keenly aware of what happens to me if my stuff gets stolen or otherwise lost.  I always follow a best practice of keeping my passport, plane tickets home and cash very close to my body in a place that’s not easily accessible.  On this last trip I realized that if I were left with just these things I would likely have no way to contact my friends and family back home.  Where we were, there wasn’t much internet.  Just about the only phone numbers I have memorized were those of my traveling companions.  Mom?  Dad?  Best friends?  Nope.  They’re in the phone.  And the phone could easily get lost or disabled.  (I should be so lucky as to have to replace that piece of junk.)

When I realized this, I copied down some key phone numbers onto a piece of paper in my money belt.  Not a big deal, but an interesting realization about how much of my working set has been externalized.

Normally I preach that network time is so much more reliable than manual, independent clocks that drift.  But today is totally different.  I’m trying to figure out what alarm I can set to wake up in time to get to the airport.

I can’t trust my "smart" cell phone.  No way that thing’s gonna get the time change right.  It’ll probably start spewing smoke at 2am tonight, based on its crappy behavior at the last DST switch.

I can’t trust the alarm in my Sonos, which usually wakes me up to KUOW.

I spent a while racking my brain to figure out which of my alarm systems was actually disconnected from the net.  It took me a while to remember, but my good old clock radio is disconnected.  As we approach the singularity and the world slowly wakes up, this problem is just going to get more pronounced.  Which is why we need to move to central configuration for things like this that can be changed by policy.

My advice: don’t trust any reminders coming from devices running on network time for the next 3 weeks.  If punctuality matters to you, double check everything against your wrist watch.  Unless you got one that runs windows.  (Sucker.)

First, a little computer science background.  Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine.  This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write.  The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different states based on its programming and input.  It is programmed by a huge state transition table which says "if you’re in state X, and you’re reading symbol Y, then write symbol Z, move left n spaces, and switch to state W" for all possible states and symbols.  It turns out that with a long enough tape and enough states this device can do just about anything you think of a computer being able to do.  In fact, computer scientists have shown that every modern computer system is functionally equivalent to a Turing machine.  That is to say all modern computers are Turing complete.  It’s useful because it’s simple enough to prove theorems about.  Some important things we know about Turing machines and anything which is functionally equivalent to one:

• Turing machines are deterministic — given a set of inputs they’ll always reach the same output.
• It’s impossible to reliably predict whether or not a program on a Turing machine will ever finish.

I see two ways to interpret the question of whether or not a human brain is Turing complete.  The first one is "Can a human brain perform the same functions as a Turing machine?"  I think that given a pen, paper, and enough patience the answer is clearly yes.  But that’s not the question that interests me.

As a transhumanist, the interesting question for me is "Can a Turing-complete computer perform the same functions as a human brain?"  This question is important to me because if the answer is yes, then it is possible for a computer to simulate a human personality.  That is to say uploading of a human consciousness into a computer is possible.  I’m going to dodge the detailed analysis of this question today, and get back to it in a later article.  For now, let’s assume the answer is "Yes" and see what that implies about free will.

Remember that theorem that says Turing machines are deterministic?  That is, once you start it going with a given set of inputs, that it’s always going to reach the same answer?  If this were true for us as humans, then we would have no free will — our actions would be entirely determined by our current state and our surroundings.  We might think we are making choices, but in fact a fast computer could run the same calculation and tell us what our answer would be before we thought we had decided.  So by this logic if uploading is possible, then humans have no free will.  Troubling, eh?

Fortunately, I think the above analysis has a flaw.  Let’s dive down a little deeper into neurochemistry.  Neurons fire as a result of electro-chemical processes.  Basic chemistry tells us that the rates of chemical reactions are deterministic based on concentrations of the relevant input chemicals.  But if you took stat-mech then you learned that these predicted rates are actually just statistical averages and that they’re only accurate if the brazillions of molecules involved happen to collide with each other at a constant frequency as they randomly bounce around in solution.  And quantum mechanics tells us that this apparently random bouncing around is in fact, to Einstein’s chagrin, truly random — god does play dice with the universe.  (I’m not sure I completely buy this, but I’ll have to save that for another article too.  Yes, I know that the Bell inequalities were experimentally observed in the 1980’s but it still sits funny with me.  Sorry grandpa.  More on this later.)  Because of this randomness, the instantaneous rate of any chemical reaction will vary randomly, while still averaging around the classically predicted rate.  So the upshot is that neurons don’t behave completely deterministically, but that the exact timing of neurons firing has a truly (quantum) random component to it.

Now this implies quite firmly that our brains cannot be simulated by a Turing machine since Turing machines can’t act randomly, and thus wouldn’t be able to properly simulate the randomness of neurons firing.  But if we modify a Turing machine slightly so that a spot on its tape read a different random symbol each time you check, I think we’re good.  Given this, it seems reasonable that a modern computer that has a source of truly random data could simulate a brain.  Some have argued that we need quantum computers to simulate consciousness, but I don’t think so.  (Again, more on this later.)

Computers are pretty good at generating psuedo-random data internally, and by listening to the outside world (hard drive vibration, microphones, etc) can generate what is probably actually random data.  If true randomness is really important, we can build small accessory cards that sample thermal noise on
a resistor and produce large volumes of truly (quantum) random data.  Some advanced cryptographic systems do this today.  So it’s totally possible today to build this modified Turing machine that also incorporates random input.

Now our transhuman dilemma is solved.  The essence of free will lies in the quantum randomness of electro-chemical processes in our brain.  Moreover, it will be possible to upload our personalities into computers, complete with our free wills in tact, by incorporating random processes into the hardware that simulates our brains.  If the computers we upload into are only psuedo-random (as almost all software is today), we will appear to have free will, in fact we will believe that we have it, but we will in fact be total robots.  Now, who can come up with a Turing test for free will?

[[Thanks to Barry Brummit.  This article is a rehash of a couple good conversations we had over New Year's and this morning after yoga practice.]]

But it is of course playing havoc with computer systems everywhere which have the DST rules built into hardware and software everywhere.  (As somebody[ref?] pointed out don’t trust your meeting reminders for those couple of weeks!)  A DBA I work with described the problem as "worse than Y2K" which I can totally believe since this change comes with just 7 months warning, whereas I started writing code to be Y2K aware in the mid-80’s and others started well before that.

I don’t write to this blog often enough for it to be worth anybody’s time for me to re-report news.  There’s plenty of bloggers who do that already — you don’t need me to filter what’s interesting for you.  So I always try to add some personal value in whatever I’m talking about.  The question I’ve been wrestling with here is: How can we avoid this kind of problem in the future?

"Always use network time" is one obvious answer, and for some things that’s all you need.  I don’t trust clocks that are set internally and can drift.  Cell phones, computer clocks (on well-run computers), the clock on my desk phone — all these are set from a reliable central source and I believe them.  But this answer isn’t good enough for any software that has to plan things in advance. Any kind of scheduling or calendaring software needs to know when time changes are going to occur in advance.  So just having the central network clock tell you that the time has changed unexpectedly doesn’t solve your problems.

As I said, many systems have the rules for time changes hard-coded.  To avoid this kind of problem in the future, these rules need to be configurable.  This is basic Software Engineering — don’t hard code things that change.    I don’t know how often this kind of change happens in the world, but I’m guessing it’s not infrequent especially if you take a global view of things.  I expect some countries change their timezone rules about as often as they change dictators.  (If I was a ruthless dictator I’d probably set my country 15 minutes off from my neighbors just to mess with everybody!)

Then the right answer is to move time change and timezone configuration to a central place on the net.  Any place will do, so long as it’s reliable.  It should be highly available and distributed and secure and of course have some well-structured XML format.  None of this is hard — we know how to do all these things.  The consuming systems would only need to ping this service every week or month to see if any thing had changed.  The hardest part of doing this would be avoiding getting stuck in standards body bureaucracy and subsequent scope creep.  Actually doing it would not be that hard.

In the iPhone, Apple has built a completely generic UI.  All the controls are software reconfigurable "soft keys" — you touch a part of the screen that has a picture of a button on it.  This offers a fantastic level of flexibility, allowing them to build a lot of useful functions into a small package.  But soft keys like this are intrinsically limited by the fact that there’s no tactile feedback — you can’t feel the buttons.  Which means you really need to be looking at the device to be using it.  Which means you can’t send text messages from an iPhone while driving.  Some might argue that you shouldn’t even try to anyway, but I’m sure people will try, and I’m also sure they’ll crash trying.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m very excited about this device, and will probably use it as an excuse to ditch my crappy not-so-smart phone.  And I’m guessing that in about 5 years somebody, maybe Apple or MIT or UW, will figure out how to put texture onto a display and solve this problem.  But until then, I maintain that single purpose devices will be better at what they do than generic devices.

So while I’m always happy to go there and get some  hands-on market research and competitive analysis done, or try to close some deals with partners, I’m also generally just as happy to go home.  This year, I didn’t even cruise the show at all, except to go between our booth and conference rooms, which was fine with me.  Until I got home and saw pictures like this…

CES 2007 was the unveiling of the prototype hardware for Nick Negroponte’s $100 laptop, now called XO (or is it OX?), and delivered under the program "One Laptop Per Child" or OLPC. 

I absolutely love this initiative.  I consider contributing to it to be one of the most moral things anybody can do with their lives.  It is one of the only means I can foresee that could help bring the continent of Africa out of poverty — pure grass roots education.  A life goal of mine is to try to help enable children’s education to be limited only by their talent and motivation, not by their surroundings.  OLPC is trying to do this.  Someday soon I hope to help.

My inappropriately named "smart phone" just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset.  But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

Frankly, GOOG is eating MSFT’s lunch on the consumer software front.  But MSFT still dominates in the enterprise, and will for a long time.  GOOG’s model is hosted solutions, which enterprises are really hesitant to deploy.  And with good reason — if you were a CIO would you trust all of your company’s IP to somebody else?  Regardless of what promises they make, I wouldn’t.  So Microsoft continues to turn into IBM.

The two announcements I’m thinking about are Zune and Office Roundtable.  Strategically, Zune is an obvious one: they’re taking on Apple in the music space head on.  And they’re doing it MSFT-style: more features.  I think they’re really cool features and assuming they can make them work in a friendly manner (tbd), will make for a fantastic product.  But it’s worth noting that they’re building it entirely themselves, turning their back on PlaysForSure and their ecosystem of hardware -manufacturing minions.  (Perfect timing for RNWK to release an mp3-player firmware platform — oh wait, we did — but that’s another story.)  So MSFT wants to challenge Apple on their own turf.  Good luck I wish you well you’re not paying your industrial designers enough.

IMHO Microsoft Office Roundtable is exactly the kind of product MSFT should be building right now.  It’s an MS-branded hardware product built for the enterprise.  This is a fertile space that MSFT could completely dominate.  Phones, teleconferencing gear, photocopiers, faxes, whiteboards, etc.  By being the shepherd for all hardware device drivers over the decades, they’ve developed a unique skill-set of interfacing gadgets to PCs.  But more important, selling hardware is a great hedge against GOOG eating into their software business.  Building enterprise office hardware will further cement their hold on the enterprise software market, ensuring that businesses continue to need Windows on all their employees’ desktops.  Even if they’re primarily running Google software!

I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice for MSFT yet or not.  But If I were Ballmer right now I would be thinking hard about how to leverage my device driver and hardware experience into protecting some core aspects of the business.  Not that they should give up on fighting GOOG head on.  I honestly think Live search has a lot going for it beyond Google — for one thing it updates its index really fast, whereas changes on the web take weeks or months to show up in Google.  But that’s just one place where MSFT has caught up because they put a lot of effort and some fantastic people on it.  While GOOG continues to build better more integrated consumer software applications at an impressive rate.

When it comes to installing something free like Ubuntu, it seems that there’s a real "you-get-what-you-pay-for" situation here.  Premium services are highly accurate.  But free services like hostip.info are barely breaking 50% accuracy right now.  But even though it thought my IP address was in the middle of the San Francisco bay, that is at least in the correct timezone.

Hostip.info has the right goal of creating puclicly accessibly web services APIs.  In fact their API is beautiful.  So please, go contribute to their database and help improve the accuracy.  Then we’ll never need to tell the computers what timezone we’re in — they’ll just know.  And we all want the computers to get smarter, don’t we?

Hostip.info thinks you’re in this country:




Wrong?  Please correct it.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

Computers are getting faster and more powerful.  As they do so, they’re helping humans be smarter.  Maybe not invidual humans, as some studies have shown that things like e-mail and powerpoint can actually make people stupider for some definition.  I can see the truth in this by considering several very smart friends of mine who don’t actually remember their spouse’s cell phone numbers.  Because they don’t need to.  Their computer familiars remember these things for them — the external brain.  In combination we get smarter — the synergy of humans and computers or groups of humans connected through computers — whatever you want to call these aggregate life-forms, they are way better at solving difficult problems than any individual human was just 15 years ago, when there was little e-mail and no Google.  In just 15 years, we’ve seen massive improvements in our ability to solve problems!

Moreover, technological change is accelerating.  These changes aren’t going to stop until we have completely overcome biology.  Unless something horrible happens.  Which it could.  To be explicit, I see humanity facing two possible futures on the multi-century timescale:

• Enlightenment by transcending the limitations of biology through technology
• A dramatic, catastrophic, probably violent and painful return to a simpler way of life

Because of this, I feel a sense of transhumanist morality obliging me to dedicate my life’s work to striving for the first option: species-wide enlightenment through technology.

I plan on writing a lot more on this topic.  But I wanted to start by stating a thesis along with a few basic ideas.

When thinking about gadget convergence, physics imposes some intrinsic limits.  For example, optics on a camera — right now you need a certain amount of glass to make a decent camera, and this probably won’t change for 5-10 years.  (MEMS mirror arrays will probably solve this problem at some point, but it’s gonna take a while before this is affordable.)  MP3 players are limited by storage or some tradeoff between storare, bandwidth and battery-life.  (Wireless data costs battery.)  But as Apple continues to demonstrate with their disappearing shuffle devices, there’s no intrinsic physical limitation to the size of an MP3 player except for the UI and the headphone jack, and Apple has shown pretty well you don’t need many controls for a simple music player.

But for a great music player it’s all about the controls.  Some say we’re converging on a world where all controls are done through touch-screens and soft-keys.  You certainly can build some fabulous UIs that way.  But until touch screens have tactile feedback, this is not the end of the story.  I operate many of my devices in very sophisticated ways without looking at them.  (Anybody here text while driving?  Be honest.)  Touchscreens can’t give you tactile feedback today.  Sometimes we get fabulous experiences with specialized controls like half-press buttons on cameras or jog wheels with quantized stops.  It’s hard to substitute for holding an ergonomically designed device and knowing how to operate it.  Different devices require different controls, and right now the technology doesn’t exist to genericize that.

Beyond that, when you pick up a generic gizmo, before you can do anything else you need to tell it what personality you want it to exhibit.  "Be a phone now."  When you pick up your dedicated camera, you never need to tell it to stop being an ipod before it will take pictures.  And while some cameras still take a while to boot up, most don’t these days, and they essentially never hang like my crappy "smart" phone does all the time.  These problems of multiple personalities and instability are also major barriers to gadget convergence.  The optimist in me says "these are just software / UI problems and are solvable."  But I don’t think we’ll solve the UI problem until our devices are much better in tune with our emotions, which is pretty far off.  Also, I don’t think we’ll solve the stability problem until we make a fundamental shift in how we write embedded code — something so fundamental I have trouble imagining it.

The single multi-purpose do-it-all gizmo will always have its place.  It’s convenient to be able to carry a single object around that serves many functions, even if it only does a half-assed job at each of these functions.  But until there are several major technological changes, I believe dedicated single-purpose devices will remain the best way for people to satisfy their high-tech gizmo needs.

The designers encourage hacking of both the software and the hardware — I’ve seen chumby-units sown into all sorts of pillows and stuffed animals.  The bread and butter of customization is writing custom flash
modules for displaying information.  For example, right now there isn’t
one for showing the weather forecast — if I knew flash, I doubt it
would take more than a couple hours to fix this.

As a business I really hope Chumby succeeds.  Their challenge will be to make the initial product cool enough that it gets aspirational appeal.  At about $150 retail, it’s going to need some solid functionality or solid other appeal to justify a purchase.  If they succeed there then the company will stick around long enough to bring the price-point down through economies of scale and lower-end models. 

There are a couple of things they could change that I think would make the product more successful.  For example, I think the touch-screen is unnecessary for the majority of useful functions in the chumby, and replacing it with a display-only screen would lower the price significantly.  My personal opinion is that single-use devices will always have a usability appeal over general-purpose configurable devices.  I’d love to see $50 chumby’s that just did one thing.  Then you could put a photo chumby in your living room and a news chumby in the kitchen and a weather chumby in your closet.  Having a battery-powered model that recharded inductively (or otherwise without needing to be plugged in) would also be a great addition to the product line.

The marketing strategy of starting with a fantastic device that is priced high is a great way to define a new market segment.  Sonos is doing this right now to re-define digital living-room audio devices.  Their first product was a $1200 stereo that everybody who used absolutely adored.  Is $1200 too much for a stereo?  That depends.  For most people yes.  But if it’s really great then some people will pay it.  And everybody else will just wish they could afford it.  And then Sonos slowly releases lower and lower end models until everybody can afford one.  Think ipod->mini->nano->shuffle.  It also means that with your first few units your marginal profit is high enough that you know you’ll be able to cover support really well.  This was our big mistake with my first startup.  It’s a solid strategy — a great way to get people to understand a new kind of product. 

The Chumby is a cool idea and I hope they live long enough to pull it off.