Category Archives: Technology

Genius, pure genius

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From the Guardian report:

Last night, Britain’s most prestigious design prize was awarded to a plug. At a ceremony at the Design Museum, the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award was carried off by an unknown Korean who only graduated from the Royal College of Art last summer. Min-Kyu Choi was probably not the first person to notice the disparity between his Macbook Air laptop (thin enough to slide into a manila envelope) and the plug attached to it (so bulky you need a duffel bag). But he was certainly the first to sit down and redesign the plug so that it folds flat. This piece of electrical origami says all you need to know about the power of designers to transform our everyday world.

The company set up to produce the plug is here. As someone who also has a MacBook Air and is driven wild by the idiotic UK standard plug, I’d like to order one. Actually I’d like to order about ten. They would make terrific gifts for my geeky friends.

Chatroulette and common sense

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The moral panic du jour is about Chatroulette, and it’s tiresome. When reading some of the commentary that’s mushroomed around it I suddenly had the urge to see what danah boyd had to say about it, partly because she’s thought more profoundly about social networking than anyone else, and partly because she’s a rock of common sense in these matters. And, sure enough, she has a thoughtful post on her blog. Excerpt:

What I like most about the site is the fact that there’s only so much you can hide. This isn’t a place where police officers can pretend to be teen girls. This isn’t a place where you feel forced to stick around; you can move on and no one will know the difference. If someone doesn’t strike your fancy, move on. And on. And on.

I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for. So I actually think that the ChatRoulette version allows you to move on with greater ease, less guilt, and far more comfortably. Ironically – given the recent media coverage – it feels a lot safer than any site that I’ve seen that’s attached to a name or profile with connections to people or identifying information. Can youth get themselves into trouble here? Sure… like in most public places. And there are definitely youth who are playing with fire. But, once again, why go after the technology when the underlying issues should be the ones we address? Le sigh.

There’s also an interesting interview in the New York Times with the kid who created ChatRoulette. What caught my attention is this excerpt.

Why did you start Chatroulette?
I was looking for a site like this, one that would let me chat randomly on webcams, and I couldn’t find it, so I thought I would try to build it.

How long did it take to build?
It took me three days. I built it on an old computer I had in my bedroom.

Then what happened?
Well, at first I showed it to my friends and they criticized it; they asked why anyone would want to use it. So I went onto a few Web forums and asked people to try the site, and I got 20 people to try it.

How many users do you have now?
Well, after the initial 20 users the site doubled and it continued to double every day since then. Last month I saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day. It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.

What were you thinking while this was happening?
I woke up one morning and checked my computer and saw all of these news articles about Chatroulette. I yelled to Mom to come and look at my computer. At first she was very nervous, but she doesn’t really understand it very well and asked me why I’m not going to school.

This resonates because I’m working on a book at the moment which is largely about how mainstream culture still doesn’t understand the essence of the Net. I’m arguing that a useful way to think about it is as a global machine for generating surprises. The Web was one such surprise; Napster was another; malware yet another. Chatroulette is a surprise in the same tradition: a smart idea implemented by a smart kid, at virtually light speed, using an old PC and in his bedroom! And without having to ask anyone’s permission. It’s an example of the explosive creativity enabled by the architecture. No wonder the Daily Mail (and New Labour) has such a hard time comprehending it.

Waiting for the iPad

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The iPad is coming (beginning of April in the US, late April in the UK) but nobody has the faintest idea what will happen when it arrives. All over the computing industry, manufacturers are frantically trying to get their own iPad-lookalikes ready. HP has got one, apparently. No doubt ASUS has too. Google is rumoured to be working on an Android slate. And so on. Up to now, there’s only been a niche market for tablet devices (despite Bill Gates’s historic conviction that they would be the New Big Thing.) The $64 billion question is whether the Apple product will rescue the industry by creating a whole new product category — between the netbook and the laptop/desktop.

The content industry — especially the publishers of high-end magazines — is also waiting with bated breath to see what happens. Will the device rescue print from having to go down the cul-de-sac of web paywalls? That’s why publishers are so interested in putting out their publications as Apps rather than sites: doing it that way means that there’s a way of charging for content that consumers apparently find acceptable. The problem, of course, is that that gives Apple another chokehold on online content: everything has to go through the iTunes store, and Apple gets a cut of all the action thereon.

So this is a strange time: a huge industry is holding its collective breath to see if a single company will change everything. Will the iPad be a game-changer, as the iPhone has proved to be? Or will people buy it and then wonder — after the novelty has worn off — if it was worth all the fuss? Nobody knows.

LATER: It seems that Apple is barring UK customers from pre-ordering the iPad.

Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award

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Hooray! Business Week reports that:

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the 2009 A.M. Turing Award to Charles P. Thacker, for his work in pioneering the networked personal computer.

In 1974, while at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Thacker built a prototype of a desktop computer, called the Alto. It featured a number of innovations that have since become commonplace on PCs, including a television-like screen, a graphical user interface and a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editor.

“The Alto was an amazing accomplishment,” said Charles Simonyi, who worked with Thacker at PARC and contributed software to the Alto. Simonyi later went on to head up Microsoft’s application software group. “The idea was to design something for the future, when the component prices came down. And that worked perfectly: The prices did come down and the design was correct.”

In an interview with IDG, Thacker recalled that the Alto development was led both by himself — he handled the hardware side — and Butler Lampson, who developed the software. The original prototype cost US$12,000. “This was a time in which $12,000 was a lot of money,” he said.

The researchers saw the appeal immediately. Simonyi said PARC employees and associates would sneak in at night to use the Alto to carry out mundane tasks like assembling Parent-Teacher Association newsletters or writing up a Ph.D thesis. “It was the first computer used by non-computer people for their own personal ends,” he said.

The innovation was not limited to the computer itself. "We had a system. We had the computers, the network, the laser printers and the servers all hooked up together," Thacker said. “That was the real benefit in my mind, that we were able to put together an entire system.”

The award also recognizes Thacker’s work in helping develop Ethernet, as well as his early prototypes of the multiprocessor workstation and the tablet personal computer. The secret to staying innovative? “You try to hire people who are smarter than you are,” he said.

It’s difficult to over-estimate the importance of what Thacker and his colleagues created.

This was a working system in 1973! It had everything that we take for granted today. And it was what prompted Steve Jobs to develop the Apple Macintosh.

The uses of processed wood pulp

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There was a good deal of ballyhoo a while back when Amazon announced a deal with some fancy Ivy League schools (like Princeton) to give students free Kindles preloaded with textbooks. Well, guess what? According to The Daily Princetonian, things haven’t gone according to the Bezos script.

Less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.

On Wednesday, the University revealed that students in three courses — WWS 325: Civil Society and Public Policy, WWS 555A: U.S. Policy and Diplomacy in the Middle East, and CLA 546: Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome — were given a new Kindle DX containing their course readings for the semester. The University had announced last May it was partnering with Amazon.com, founded by Jeff Bezos ’86, to provide students and faculty members with the e-readers as part of a sustainability initiative to conserve paper.

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

One professor, Stan Katz, who teaches Horvath’s class, said he is interested in whether he “can teach as effectively in using this as in using books and E-Reserve material and in whether students can use this effectively,” adding that “the only way to find out is to try it.” One of Katz’ main concerns is whether students can do close reading of the texts with the new device.

“I require a very close reading of texts. I encourage students to mark up texts, and … I expect them to underline and to highlight texts,” Katz explained. “The question is whether you can do them as effectively with a Kindle as with paper.”

eReaders are a classic case of a technological solution looking for a problem. They are useful for some purposes — like avoiding RyanAir baggage fees. But they’re not a general-purpose solution to every reading need. The most interesting thing about the Princeton experience is that it rather punctures the widespread assumption that eReaders would at least be good for disrupting the expensive textbook market.

The lowdown on teardowns

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This chart comes from an interesting piece in this week’s Economist on the business of dissecting electronic gizmos to assess their manufacturing costs.

Most smart-phones’ retail prices (before operator subsidies) are around $500-$600. Not all of the difference is profit. There are many other costs, such as research, design, marketing and patent fees, as well as the retailer’s own costs. But the big gap between the cost of building a smart-phone and its price in the shops should widen further as ever more previously discrete components are packed on to a single main microchip. Howard Curtis of UBM TechInsights predicts that as software and mobile services come to represent more of a smart-phone’s overall value, this too will widen the gap between manufacturing costs and selling prices.

What this gap demonstrates is that for smart-phones, like most other electronic devices, most of the value lies not in manufacturing but in all the services and intellectual property it takes to create and market such products. That is something for politicians to ponder: instead of making empty promises about saving ailing manufacturers they might instead consider how best to promote the growth of high-value service industries.

Sobering to think that the Apple tablet will soon be subjected to this kind of analysis.

Mandelson and the laser

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This morning’s Observer column.

Lasers are … a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on “The Quantum Theory of Radiation” about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else – certainly to nobody in government.

Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.

LATER: BoingBoing picked up the column (thanks, Cory) and among the comments there was a link to an interesting article which reminds us that when the first working laser was reported in 1960, it was described as “a solution looking for a problem.”

The banal network

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Travelling over the Christmas break, we had lunch one day in a cheap and cheerful eaterie in the midlands. It’s a good, non-nonsense, inexpensive carvery which, on the day we visited, was thronged with families having lunch. The first thing I noticed on our table was this card. To me, it signifies how far the Internet has come from being something weird and exotic to being positively mundane. When restaurant chains like this take it for granted that many of their (mainly working-class) clientele have a Facebook account, then you know that something’s happened.

I’m reminded of an observation that Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, made in 1999. “In five years’ time”, he said, “companies that aren’t Internet companies won’t be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this prediction. Was he really suggesting that every fast-food joint and shoeshop would have to have online offerings? No: what he was trying to convey was the idea that, by 2004, the Internet would have become a utility, like electricity or the telephone or mains water. Most companies do not, for example, generate their own electricity. But if they’re not on the electricity grid (or the telephone network) then they’re at a severe disadvantage. So every company would, Grove thought, have to come to terms with the new reality of Internet-as-utility.

As it happens, he was a bit optimistic about the time it would take. But this Toby Carvery ad shows how perceptive he was.

An antidote to Kindlemania

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This morning’s Observer column.

A strange thing happened at Christmas. Well, two really. Amazon.com reported that its Kindle eReader had become the “most gifted” product in its vast inventory; and on Christmas Day sales of eBooks on its site exceeded those of physical books. The phenomena are, of course correlated: all those recipients of Kindles needed to buy something they could actually read on the devices. But the combination of the two ‘facts’ has further ratcheted up speculation that 2010 will be the Year of the Kindle and the end is nigh for the printed codex.

If you detect a whiff of what philosophers call ‘technological determinism’ in this, you’re in good company. I have on my shelves a (printed) copy of The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, a wonderful antidote to the irrational exuberance of Kindlemania. The authors conducted an ethnographic study of how people actually use paper in order to reach an understanding of which of those uses might conceivably be eliminated by electronics, and which might not. It should be required reading for anyone showing the early symptoms of Kindlemania…

The Noughties

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Conclusion of this morning’s Observer column.

What all this suggests is that the noughties were the years when the internet went from being exotic to mainstream – indeed, to being a utility. No child under the age of 11 knows there was once a world without Google. Most teenagers cannot imagine a world without Facebook or YouTube. And even the proportion of adults who can remember travel agents is declining fast. Almost without noticing, we have become dependent on the network. Our task in the next decade will be to make sure it remains free and open, rather than the captive of the corporations and governments who would love to control it. Happy New Year!