Kindle lights a fire?

A lot of the reviews of Amazon's Kindle have been remarkably upbeat, given the usual derision meted out to e-book readers.

Amazon have been innovative and have pulled off something that I was beginning to think I would never see. Now that it's happened, I wonder if it is the start of bigger things?

I'm not talking about the design of the Kindle, or its use of E-Ink to give long battery life, or even the fact that it can download e-books directly; all of which are definite points in its favour.

The key thing about Kindle is that Amazon have managed to come up with a business model that puts the carrier in the 'dumb pipe' corner. Amazon collect the money, the customer buys a book, they don't care how the book gets to the Kindle, it just does.

This model is usable everywhere in the world (via wholesale agreements) and has to be the way companies that produce & aggregate content will want to reach their customers.

If the Kindle required a subscription to Sprint or AT&T or Orange, Vodafone etc, etc then it would not work.

The operators that start signing these kind of deals will be the more successful ones, because all operators traffic will start to migrate to these kinds of services.
If I'm making a VoIP call, I don't expect to get charged for the bytes transmitted, just for the length of the call. If I download a video, it's not how many bytes it is, but how recent and popular the film is that determines the price.

The data cost is, or should be, fixed (tending towards zero). The value of the content is the marginal part. Operators have had their chance to be the Voda-zon or Orange-hoo and they haven't even come close to creating a compelling service. It is now time for them to accept it and move aside to let others provide the content people want.

Let's hope the Kindle really is the start of a new age where companies can bundle the delivery cost of their services & content (worldwide) in a single price. I still think the day is coming when you buy a device with subsidised/free connection, rather than the other way around.

You cannot be Serios!

I've said this before, email is being slowly strangled by the amount of Spam that finds it's way around the network. Ok, I can filter most of it out, so I don't have to look at adverts for V1@gra and various sex sites, but my gmail spam folder has 21,000 emails in it, which equates roughly to the amount of spam I get in a month.

My idea was that we should be paying for email. Hardly revolutionary, and most people would say it'll never work, but the trick is that we're not trying to make money out of email, we're trying to raise the marginal cost above zero. Spam works because the marginal cost is zero (or very close to it). By limiting the amount of emails that can be sent, the value of any email increases. If every verified individual received an allowance of 1000 emails per month, the spammer's job would become a lot harder, but most normal people would not be impacted.



Seriosity have taken this a stage farther and created a currency that can be used for emails sent within an organisation. The sender attaches a 'value' to the email that can be seen by the recipient in order to gauge the importance of the email. Because the sender has only a limited supply of 'Serios' (the currency, not a type of breakfast cereal!), they have to budget what they send. So, only emails that are very important have high Serio value.

Presumably the boss has a lot more Serios than the junior employee, therefore they can spam their employees with worthless tripe on HR issues (aside: HR departments should have a fixed limit on the level of importance they attach to mails - about 2 ought to be enough!)

It's an interesting application, and I think that our work environments will get much more like games in the future. People are able to handle much more information and pressure in the game situation, it makes sense to have reality simulate the game, rather than the other way round.

TechnoGolf

I was just playing down at my local course and there have been a few changes recently. Golf is now embracing technology in a big way.
The whole course is now covered in WiFi hotspots at the tees. Instead of scorecards we were given Nokia N810 tablets running a scorecard application and course information. Clicking on the link for each hole gives the yardages and using the inbuilt GPS marks your current location on the course. Clicking the wings icon takes you into a fly-by video of the hole. The video did take a little time to display, even though things are now improved with Flash 9.
The application syncs with the server back in the clubhouse whenever we are in range of the Wifi (most of the time), giving us the latest scores from all the other competitors on the course. There's even a 'real-time' leaderboard.
Drinks and snacks can be ordered 'online' from the clubhouse, and of course, they know where we are because the GPS location is also synced back!
It is possible (though somewhat tedious) to record every shot using the GPS to plot the lines from start to finish and the application can learn which club to select, based on your past performance with the club. Personally I'll stick with instinct for that.
The only problem was giving back the Nokia N810 at the end of the round...


(n.b. the moral of this story is; never eat any strange looking mushrooms that grow on golf courses! )

Middle Earth

I've always felt that the alliance between mobile operators and handset manufacturers was on the way out, or at least should be on the way out.
Operators want consumers to pick their network, handset manufacturers want consumers to pick their equipment, but the consumer picks both based on factors that are often superficial.

The place where an alliance between these two works best is where there is a set of services that 'just work' straight out of the box.

As the connectivity barriers and costs become lower, the pre-provisioned services become more important. But how can the operators and handset manufacturers differentiate themselves when voice, data & messaging are essentially basic features?
The operators have nothing, they are just the pipe, which makes it surprising that the handset manufacturers are prepared to acquiesce to their demands.

An alliance between Nokia and Facebook or Sony Ericsson and MySpace would make a lot more sense. Preloaded application that lets you interact with the community from the handset.
[Update: I did a search on the web to see if someone had already done this and found Ben Arents site ]

The Facebooks and MySpaces (and LinkedIn, Xing etc) are the new networks, and they don't care which IP provider you choose. (There's obviously MVNO potential here, but it needs to be done right - and I've never seen one done right)

If you were an Orange or a Vodafone and you were faced with one of the combinations above, how much would you pay to be on the ticket?

It can't be long before the operators lose their power over the handset manufacturers, and that will make the world much, much more interesting.

You've got mail!

Or 'Thoughts on the Postal system'

I am away from my house in the UK for long periods, and I don't want the post office to forward my mail on to the country I'm in. Firstly, because it would probably be prohibitively expensive, and secondly because it is around 80% spam.
However, registering the fact that I am out of the country with official bodies, such as the council, the IR and DVLA etc, is next to impossible. They will send me one letter to my foreign address, then revert to my UK address afterwards.
This leads me to the verge of prosecution for non-response and non-payment of various trivial amounts and nearly always ends up in me shelling out fines when I do visit the house in the UK.

Given that the Post Office have to do some scanning of the mail anyway, as part of the sorting process, why don't they offer a service where you can see your mail online and then request a delivery when you need it.
I could also select the obvious junk mail (from prior offenders) and choose not to have it delivered at all. The following features would seem to be relatively simple to implement:

• All bills/financial demands franked with a special Post Office stamp or barcode (can be delivered as software to sending companies)
  
• Other types of content franked with similar codes to enable classification
• E.g. statement of existing account
• Special Offer
• Urgent attention required
• Scanned Image of envelope held online
• RSS feed for all mail arriving at the Post Office
  
• Mail retained by Post Office until requested by customer (or threshold reached)
• Return to sender/Not known at this address/Forward to; can all be done online before the mail even gets delivered
• Less deliveries, so Post Office saves money
• Less crap mail, so customer is happy

This is no more than a mail filter, in much the same way that we filter email.

It's surprising, given the cost of 'last-mile' delivery, that the post office haven't investigated integrating the mail delivery into the online world.

Personally, I would rather have everything delivered electronically, but I suspect that we won't see Tax and Council Charge demands being sent to our email addresses any time soon.
Still, a register of house addresses and default email addresses associated to them might make it easier for companies to contact individuals who are abroad or who have moved to a different physical location.

Why I hate CD/DVD and DRM! by Jessica (age 2 3/4)

For someone of only 2 and three-quarters, I have a pretty large collection of DVD/VCD/CDs, probably about 70 or 80. They range from cartoons to music videos, educational shows to feature films.
Most are original, but there are a few picked up at Thai street stalls. Hey, I live in Bangkok, it's hard to be an angel!
The thing is that my favourite DVD is 'jeng' again (broken). My daddy says it's because I keep dropping it on the floor standing on it, covering it with various sticky substances that are on my fingers, and generally abusing it. He says he's already bought the DVD twice and he's not going to buy it again, I even tried the old 'hysterics' routine to no avail.
So what am I to do? Why do these things break so easily? Everyone tells me we live in a digital world where music and video can be sent over the internet virtually cost free, so why do I have to go out and buy another DVD after I get the first one scratched??
As soon as I can work out how to get stuff for free online, I'm going to stop buying DVDs, they're not good value and my 'investment' (well, daddy pays!) is not protected, because DRM ensures I can't copy the damn things.
If they gave me a T-shirt or a toy or something unique that I could only get by buying the DVD, then I might reconsider, but the music or video itself is just digital goods and the cost should be tending towards zero as the distribution costs tend to zero also.
I'm definitely going to ask Santa for some software to crack the CD and DVD DRM, so I can make as many copies as I want and not have to worry about dropping the disc or getting it covered in Jam.
Maybe I'm just naive but it seems that in a digital world, a medium that is susceptible to scratches and general wear and tear should not be the major means of secure content distribution, but then what do I know - I'm just an ignorant child consumer...

If Programming Languages were art...

Muli Koppel writes about how we select our Programming Languages based on the credo of their creators, and that each creator can be viewed as a Sociologist or philosopher.
In my case at least, it's a very astute observation about why we use the languages we do, in order to create systems.

You could almost think of each language as an artistic style:
- Ruby : Monet, Zen Art
- Perl : Dali!
- Python: Bauhaus
- Java : Modernism
- JavaScript: Popart
- C/C++/C# : Renaissance
- Rails : A lot of Jackson Pollock's...

When programming it is important to feel comfortable with the language you are using. A function or module is like a piece of prose expressing a concept. Lack of feeling for the language will lead to dull code. Translation is not the same skill as creation, which is perhaps why strict design specifications produce uninspiring code.

It seems to me, reading Muli's piece and the comments, that there are 2 basic types of programmer, the artistic one and the scientific one.
The former is drawn to more abstract, philosophical kinds of languages that give a blank canvas and the latter is drawn to regular, mandated practices and defined boundaries.
There will always be disagreement in which way is the best way to work, the latter group cling to standards and manuals, the former defy best practice and re-use.

There ought to be room for both types, and their preferred programming languages, but I suspect the scientific approach will be more and more dominant as our industry evolves. There's a place for art, but it's usually only an option for the gifted few.

Presence is content management!

Alex Saunders writes some more on 'New Presence'.

I've been thinking about this subject for a long time now, and my conclusion was much the same as Sean's in that people generally can't manage complicated presence.
In discussion with a good friend of mine, he suggested that it really came down to 3 'circles', your family and close friends, your colleagues and acquaintances/friends (but not so close), and then your contacts, in the sense that they are people/companies you have interacted with but you don't necessarily know them. Outside that is the rest of the world.
Each circle or layer has a template that inherits from the outer layer. So in order to make something known to somebody you have 2 choices; move the information out to their layer, or move them in to the layer which has access to the information. Providing a simple interface to what amounts to 'content management' would make it easier for people to manage their 'new presence'.
It also occurred to me that what you need is a personal HTTP server, rather than having it hosted somewhere. I initially started with the view that Jabber would be the model to do this, but I'm not completely sure - it would certainly be a very wierd form of Jabber, plus my experience of Jabber in general has not been that good (Gush fails to connect more often than not).

It must also be possible to direct information directly at a specific person/entity, regardless of where they lie in the circles. By allowing each relationship to be tagged and then to direct some published content to only certain tags, e.g. your electricity company is an entity in your 3rd circle, and is tagged with 'electric', you can publish your current meter reading to the 3rd circle tagged with 'electric' or to the specific entity name that belongs to your electric company.

New Presence is complex and there has to be a default, simple mechanism that is easy for the user to understand, but provides some extra dimensions to todays single-dimensional buddy lists.

Buddy List = Address Book, and every contact that I have in my several different address books and buddy lists, has a defined place in my life, but I don't spend too much time catgorising them. About 3-5 categories is all I could manage. The stuff I'm doing or listening to, or what I think or like or dislike is my profile and I probably have 10 of them at least on different hosts.
I need to take control of my profile through serving it myself (though the storage could be remote/mirrored/encrypted), and then I control who sees what, when.

As a side effect (and something I've mentioned a few times in the past), we don't need DNS, the connection is established as P2P. Only if we decide to include the 4th circle, do we need to register a domain.

In summary, I think this all falls out of the unification of identity, or perhaps that's the wrong term for it. Rather, I mean the unified control of identity; the ability to organise our lives around the sum of our different identities, while keeping the different siloes intact.