Any parent who ferries teenagers* around at night knows the problem: most suburban house numbers are unreadable in the dark — it’s why I carry a LED torch in the car. Which is what makes this solar-powered solution so neat. Thanks to Michael and Laura for the idea (and for a lovely supper). $19.99 per number. From ThinkGeek, naturally. Can’t find a UK supplier, yet.
* “Dad’s Taxi Service”, as James Miller calls it.
The latest thing from Google.
(Answer: when he’s Rupert Murdoch.) This morning’s Observer column…
Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace, had – as of 9.42am on Friday 30 March – 167,144,385 ‘friends’. This is not because he is exceedingly sociable, but because anyone who signs up on MySpace automatically becomes one of Tom’s friends. By the time you read this, he will have another 500,000. (MySpace is adding 250,000 users a day.)
The MySpace concept of a friend may seem contrived, but is much closer to what a businessperson would describe as a ‘contact’. This may be why the corporate world is gazing anxiously at the social networking phenomenon and wondering if it has anything to offer. Two studies – by Forrester Research, a market research firm, and McKinsey, a consultancy – offer conflicting views…
My BlackBerry 8800 arrived yesterday. It’s slimmer but wider than the battered 7100 it replaces. It’s exceedingly glossy in the way that iPod Nanos are — which means it will scratch easily. It has a QWERTY keyboard suitable for midgets. Mostly it works as advertised, but it has lots of what the O’Reilly crowd call ‘annoyances’. For example, the onboard browser is a pathetic piece of software. And T-mobile’s attempts to keep one within their T-Zones walled garden are infuriating. It’s much more difficult to customise profile settings than it was on the 7100.
The phone comes with an inbuilt GPS system, which seems like a good idea — until one confronts the annoying reality. First of all, it doesn’t come with any maps! No problem, you say — they’re available as free downloads from the BlackBerry site. But then it transpires that you have to hook the phone to a Windows machine to install them.
But hang on — shouldn’t one be able to download maps directly to the phone? Yep — just go to mobile.blackberry.com. But guess what? — the download doesn’t work. In fact, it helpfully informs you that the 8800 is not a supported device! And then comes the coup de grace: there are no maps for the UK! Correction: there are maps for Northern Ireland, but nothing for the mainland. So no maps for Gt. Britain.
In the end, it’s a perfectly useless device except for the one thing that makes it indispensable: push email.
Aside: My colleague Geoff Peters has a term for people like me who use BlackBerry phones and Apple computers: blackberry and apple crumblies.
If I were a frequent traveller I might be interested in this.
Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers as a tool for our own use. We liked it so much that we decided to open it up to our global friends.
If you travel more than five times a year and have friends who do as well, then Dopplr is for you.
How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you’re planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.
Membership by invitation only. I heard about it via Tim O’Reilly, who says it was the nicest thing he saw at Etech.
Nice essay by Charlie Stross. The gist of it is:
publishers don’t manufacture ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra bells and whistles that sells for $350. We’ve had the tech for a $20 (or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they could sell the beast, they’d be churning them out by the bucketload — and it’s perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160×160 green screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The reason nobody makes such a beast is because it’s simply not profitable to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain’t gonna happen.
Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters of the “pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry” theory, until ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore them. And that’s regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and having the cultural artefact — is, well, it’s just bogus.
We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you’re paying $20 a pop. After a year you’ve got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and you’re out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will stay in (they’re set up for the club and they’ve already got a small bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the profits to pay for that first year’s loss-leader.
But 80% of readers don’t do book clubs. I’ve seen my book club sales, and they’re piss-poor (except in France, which is different).
Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter — at least for this generation — for the same reason that it’s near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more than US $24; consumers don’t like being milked.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the link.
Ed Felten’s having second thoughts about his reactions to the famed New Yorker article about Wikipedia…
It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.
It’s a long and typically thoughtful post. In the end, Prof. Felten reaches this conclusion:
In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.
Nick Carr has been pondering some contradictory data…
Some hard data is coming out this week on the adoption of Web 2.0 tools by companies. Yesterday, Forrester released some results from a December 2006 survey of 119 CIOs at mid-size and larger companies. It indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises. Fully 89% of the CIOs said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools – blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging – and a remarkable 35% said they were already using all six of the tools. Although Forrester didn’t break out adoption rates by tool, it did say that CIOs saw relatively high business value in RSS, wikis, and tagging and relatively low value in social networking and blogging.
Tomorrow, McKinsey will release the results of a broader survey of Web 2.0 adoption, and the results are quite different. In January 2007, McKinsey surveyed some 2,800 executives – not just CIOs – from around the world. It found strong interest in many Web 2.0 technologies but much less widespread adoption. McKinsey also looked at six tools. While it didn’t include tagging, it did include mashups; the other five were the same. It found that social networking was actually the most popular tool, with 19% of companies having invested in it, followed by podcasts (17%), blogs (16%), RSS (14%), wikis (13%), and mashups (4%). When you add in companies planning to invest in the tools, the percentages are as follows: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%).
Well, perhaps not exactly. But see what Quentin’s up to.
From Technology Review…
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In another reminder of technology’s quantum leaps, Yahoo Inc.’s free e-mail service will provide unlimited storage space to its nearly 250 million users worldwide — a concept that seemed unfathomable just a few years ago.
With the move, Yahoo will trump its two largest rivals in free e-mail, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., which currently provide 2 gigabytes and 2.8 gigabytes of free storage, respectively.
Yahoo’s e-mail users currently get 1 gigabyte of storage. Yahoo plans to gradually lift all space constraints in May, but it will take several months before all of Yahoo’s e-mail users have infinite storage space.
Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, the fourth largest e-mail provider, began offering unlimited storage for free last summer…
Note the misuse of ‘quantum leap’. It’s almost as prevalent as misuse of ‘decimate’. Sigh.