The Economist on Ndiyo

From the Economist‘s current Technology Quarterly survey…

WHAT is the best way to make the benefits of technology more widely available to people in poor countries? Mobile phones are spreading fast even in the poorest parts of the world, thanks to the combination of microcredit loans and pre-paid billing plans, but they cannot do everything that PCs can. For their part, PCs are far more powerful than phones, but they are also much more expensive and complicated. If only there was a way to split the difference between the two: a device as capable as a PC, but as affordable and accessible as a mobile phone. Several initiatives to bridge this gap are under way. The hope is that the right combination of technologies and business models could dramatically broaden access to computers and the internet.

Perhaps the best-known project is the one dreamt up by a bunch of academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge. The scheme, called “One Laptop Per Child”, aims to use a variety of novel technologies to reduce the cost of a laptop to $100 and to distribute millions of the machines to children in poor countries, paid for by governments. Nicholas Negroponte, the project’s co-founder, says he is in talks to deliver 1m units apiece to the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand. But across the Atlantic in Cambridge, England, another band of brainy types has cooked up a different approach. They have devised a device that allows one PC to be used by many people at once.

The organisation is called Ndiyo (the Swahili word for “yes”), and was founded by Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former researcher at AT&T. “We don’t want to have cut-down computers for poor people,” he says. “We want them to have what we have — so we need to find a better way to do it.” The system exploits a little-used feature in operating systems that permits multiple simultaneous users. Ndiyo’s small, cheap interface boxes allow multiple screens, keyboards and mice to be linked to a single PC cheaply via standard network cables.

This allows a standard PC running Linux, the open-source operating system, to be shared by between five and ten people. Computers today are many times more powerful than those of just a few years ago, but are idle much of the time. Ndiyo is returning computing to its roots, to a time when they were shared devices rather than personal ones. “We can make computing more affordable by sharing it,” says Dr Stafford-Fraser, as he hunches over a ganglion of wires sprouting from machines in Ndiyo’s office. In much of the world, he says, a PC costs more than a house. Internet cafés based on Ndiyo’s technology have already been set up in Bangladesh and South Africa. Mobile phones are used to link the shared PCs to the internet…

Google is the new Yellow Pages

Thoughtful post by Robert Scoble

Like TechCrunch I too noticed that Yahoo dropped like a rock today and wondered what that means for Silicon Valley. Why is Yahoo in peril here? Banner ads.

Ford, for instance, has literally stopped spending anything on non discretionary things. Just one company can have a huge impact.

So, what’s discretionary? Banner ads.

You know, those colorful banners that you’ll see on lots of sites, particularly old-school sites.

So, why isn’t Google seeing a huge drop like Yahoo did? Easy. Google’s income relies on text ads that only pay when people click on them.

Those “cost per click” kinds of ads are NOT discretionary.

This reminds me of the 1980s when I helped do the advertising for LZ Premiums, a now-defunct camera/appliance store in Silicon Valley. Advertising for us back then in the Mercury News was discretionary. We did it only when we had some money from a camera manufacturer that was slated for advertising. Our ad in the Yellow Pages, though, was NOT discretionary. Do that and your business would almost stop.

Google is the new Yellow Pages. If a business stops doing Google advertising it might as well just fire everyone and send them home.

That’s the difference between the advertising world today and the advertising world back in 1999.

Later… James Cridland disagrees:

I agree with ‘Google is the new Yellow Pages’, but don’t agree with the Scoble-ster that “ad banners are discretionary”. And here’s why.

Advertising in Yellow Pages (or Google search) is for people who say “I know I want a Ford Sierra, but I don’t know where to get one”.

Advertising in car magazines (or Google AdSense on car sites) is for people who say “I know I want a new car, but I don’t know which to get”.

Advertising in the newspaper (or untargeted ad banners) is for people who say “I didn’t realise I needed a new car, but now you come to mention it…”

The crucial point is that what Scoble says is ‘discretionary’ advertising – in the newspaper, or radio, posters, or even ad banners (to a point) – are all difficult to measure in terms of effectiveness. I can’t buy anything through a poster; but the effect of outdoor advertising is undeniable.

Interesting fact: one in five people surf the internet with the radio on. I therefore argue that radio advertising has a direct link on Google’s fortunes – after all, how else would people know what to search for?

Saturn by night

Taken last July by cameras on board the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. From the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day site. The link for this image is here. The blurb explains:

In contrast to the human-made lights that cause the nighttime side of Earth to glow faintly, Saturn’s faint nighttime glow is primarily caused by sunlight reflecting off of its own majestic rings. The … image was taken when the Sun was far in front of the spacecraft. From this vantage point, the northern hemisphere of nighttime Saturn, visible on the left, appears eerily dark. Sunlit rings are visible ahead, but are abruptly cut off by Saturn’s shadow. In Saturn’s southern hemisphere, visible on the right, the dim reflected glow from the sunlit rings is most apparent. Imprinted on this diffuse glow, though, are thin black stripes not discernable to any Earth telescope — the silhouetted C ring of Saturn. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 and its mission is scheduled to continue until 2008.

Here’s a funny thing…

GMSV reports that

Asked to testify Sept. 28 before the investigative subcommittee of House Energy and Commerce are Board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn; HP legal counsel Ann Baskins; Larry Sonsini, a prominent Silicon Valley lawyer who is HP’s external lawyer, and Ronald R. DeLia, a Needham, Mass., private investigator and operator of Security Outsourcing Solutions….

Note the name Sonsini. Larry W. Sonsini is a senior member of the prominent Silicon Valley legal firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. But, curiously, the firm’s Web site makes no mention of their Chairman’s exciting forthcoming appearance before Congress.

Later… I’ve just come on Dan Gillmor’s view:

If I was running either the Chronicle or the Merc, I would be assigning my best investigative folks to look deeply into Sonsini and his law firm. The story has been done, but never in the depth I suspect it deserves….

Dan has covered the Valley for years and is one of its shrewdest observers.

More on Sonsini here.

50 years’ hard

Something I’d forgotten — the hard drive had its 50th birthday the other day. IBM introduced the 305 RAMAC computer (shown here) on September 13th, 1956. It was the first computer to include a disk drive — named the IBM 350 Disk File. The file system consisted of a stack of fifty 24″ spinning discs with a total storage capacity of about 4.4 MB. IBM leased it to customers for $35,000 a year. How times change.

NHS vs. Harley Street: no contest

Lovely column by Vanora Bennett on how her grandad was finally cured of his belief that private medicine must be best because you’re paying for it.

And, within 24 hours of excellent treatment, the problem was solved. At lunchtime the next day Grandad was sitting up by his bed, doing the Times crossword and chatting with the nurses, as cheerful as anything. He wasn’t coughing at all.  “Dr Wu took me off the medicine and put me on something else,” he said happily. “I haven’t coughed once since she did.”

It was that simple – a bit of intelligent, disinterested medical care from an NHS doctor who wasn’t looking at a fee of thousands of pounds – just a person in need of attention and reassurance. Despite all the cuts that the Royal Free has been suffering, it can still do better for its patients than the smartest of private care…

Surprises ahead?

My colleague, William Keegan, thinks that Tony Blair may be preparing to spring a surprise. He reports that a close associate of the Prime Minister has told friends that he is concerned about his own future because Blair could be gone ‘in a fortnight’.

When people who know the Prime Minister’s mind begin to panic about their future, there must be at least a chance that Blair is thinking of bowing out at the Labour Party conference in Manchester next week. It would be a dramatic thing to do, and, with recordings of Laurence Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer now on general release, he might learn a few extra tricks from that master of final appearances. Suddenly there could even be sympathy for him. It would surely be preferable to dragging out the agony for a further nine months of pregnant expectation. In effect he could be emulating Denis Healey’s apocryphal speechwriter who, according to that formidable ex-Chancellor, once left his minister in the lurch: when the latter turned to page four of his speech, all he found were the words: ‘From now on you’re on your own, you bugger.’

In Blair’s position I should certainly want to leave the stage as fast as possible and let the rest of them sort it out. Recent events in the Labour Party are worthy of Honore de Balzac, specifically the passage in Cousin Bette where we are told: ‘Complaint, long repressed, was on the point of breaking the frail envelope of discretion.

‘Oh, that frail envelope!

Myspace or his space?

This morning’s Observer column

Opinions vary on Rupert Murdoch. Some see him as the genius who has built the world’s only truly global media empire; others as the Tyrannosaurus Rex of mass culture. Playwright Dennis Potter despised him so much that when he was dying of cancer he christened his tumour ‘Rupert’. In between are a lot of media folk who spend every waking hour wondering what Murdoch is up to – and what he will do next…

The path to 9/11

Hindsight, as the man said, is the only exact science. I was thinking of that while I watched the two-part TV drama, The Path to 9/11 which was screened by BBC2 on September 10 and 11. It was a gripping production in which Harvey Keitel played John P. O’Neill, the FBI counter-terrorism chief who was on the track of Bin Laden and was, ironically, killed in the attack on the Twin Towers. The film-makers came clean on the fact that the production was a dramatisation of a real-life story, and that it had involved “time compression”, but also claimed that it had been extensively informed by the findings of the 9/11 Commission. The implicit message was: “We have to declare that this is fiction, but really it’s very heavily rooted in fact”.

The Commission’s report revealed that there had been a great deal of scattered knowledge in the US intelligence and law-enforcement communities about the activities of Al-Qaeda in the years running up to 9/11, but that a variety of factors — including inter-Agency rivalry — had prevented all these scattered ‘dots’ from being ‘joined up’. In fact the Report revealed an astonishing number of unjoined dots. The film then took a selection of these dots and wove a compelling narrative from joining them up. It tells a story of a group of dedicated public officials, led by O’Neill, who knew what Bin Laden & Co were up to and wanted to stop them, but were prevented from doing so by a variety of factors — including bureaucratic turf wars, but also (interestingly) the Clinton Administration’s caution and apparently over-zealous adherence to the rules of international law. (There were also hints here and there in the narrative that Clinton’s difficulties with Monica Lewinsky had had an enervating impact on the drive to counter Al-Queda.)

As I watched the story unfold, the hidden message became unmistakeable: the US had been endangered by three factors: inefficient intelligence and law enforcement efforts; respect for national and international law; and a Democratic president. The film was thus, in effect, setting out a justification for everything the Bush regime later implemented.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to smell a rat here. As the Washington Post put it:

According to the movie, Osama bin Laden — now the most wanted man in the world and a terrorist whose role in the 9/11 atrocity is not in doubt — was virtually within the grasp of U.S. intelligence operatives twice during the ’90s, after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Islamic extremists left a truck bomb in the center’s underground parking garage — hoping, the film says, that the blast would knock one tower off its base and into the other.

Weak-kneed bureaucrats declined to act upon the opportunities to seize or kill bin Laden, the film also says. But the docudrama doesn’t stop at criticizing generic bureaucrats — which would at least have helped sustain a nonpartisan aura — and aims arts specifically and repeatedly at Albright, Berger, then-CIA chief George Tenet and others in the Clinton administration, most of them made to seem either shortsighted or spineless.

Clinton himself is libeled through abusive editing. A first-class U.S. operative played by Donnie Wahlberg argues the case for getting bin Laden while the al-Qaeda leader is openly in view in some sort of compound in Afghanistan. CIA officials haggle over minor details, such as the budget for the operation. The film’s director, David L. Cunningham, then cuts abruptly to a TV image of Clinton making his infamous “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” remark with regard to Monica Lewinsky. The impression given is that Clinton was spending time on his sex life while terrorists were gaining ground and planning a nightmare.

It would have made as much sense, and perhaps more, to cut instead to stock footage of a smirking Kenneth Starr, the reckless Republican prosecutor largely responsible for distracting not just the president but the entire nation with the scandal…

A little digging was all that was required to show that the film’s subliminal message owed a great deal to its provenance. Here’s Max Blumenthal on the background to the production:

“The Path to 9/11” is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report…

An interesting question — as yet unanswered — is how the BBC came to screen such a farrago of misrepresentation.