Feeding the Puppy

3rd Year Physics and the problem with Google Wave

Ain't this the truth?

 

(Via Zoe P)


Huge, almost feverish anticipation swept the internet when Google wave was announced.  The reality some weeks later is that people seem to be:

i) waiting for an invite

ii) have an invite, but haven't had the time or inclination to stop what they're doing and 'wave'...

iii) have an invitation, have tried it, but found no-one they want to wave with for any real purpose, so stopped using it

Why?  Well, I don't think it's a 'product' thing...

What is Google Wave?

Ok, a quick recap and opinion on what Google Wave is... having tried it (I'm part of iii above), it's clearly going to be a useful improvement on email.

Going back to my third year physics, conventional email is essentially a series circuit.  If one bulb goes, the whole circuit stops working.

 

(pics from here)

In terms of email, to maximise collaboration between 4 folk you'd send it to someone, who forwards it to someone else, who then sends it to someone else, and it arrives back in your inbox with input from everybody.  Then everyone's input is included.

If someone doesn't send it on, the circuit breaks, and nothing happens... until, like Christmas lights, the bulb is replaced.

In comparison, parallel circuits don't need every bulb to work in order for the others to keep working.  The others keep on working until you eventually replace the dud bulb.

 

If you attempt to make traditional email systems a 'parallel circuit' (usually by including everyone in the email all at once), then you undoubtedly end up with a disparate set of people's input strewn across different emails...

You get multiple iterations of the email, sometime simultaneously, which isn't really all that collaborative... and more often than not, he who shouts first shouts loudest in email chains...

Anyway, it's clear that Google Wave has been created to get over this problem, and it's clear we could do with something to help us over it... but why hasn't it taken off?

A fairly rubbish launch strategy

Google have launched things very successfully before using the 'limited invites' method... just think how precious Gmail invites were, and the great word-of-mouth that the service received from those who had it.

But why is it not yielding similar success for Wave?

Well, of course, it needs everyone to change system.  If you were on Gmail, you could still talk to people in with work, hotmail, yahoo or other email accounts.  Gmail spoke the same 'universal language' as the other systems, so still let people connect.

Wave's not like that.  It demands that everyone signs up to Wave in order to do stuff together.

And here's the problem... if you have a limited invite system in place, but need everyone in any group that want to 'Wave' together to have an invite in order to make it work properly, then there's going to be an issue...

...essentially you've designed a beautiful parallel circuit, but you're only letting one bulb use it at a time...

 

Fixing the problem

So, how can they rectify this issue?  Obviously they don't want everyone testing it at once... I'm sure there's all sorts of load testing issues and refinement stuff they're up to.

But perhaps they should change the way they distribute invites, or change the language they use to do it? 

Ask people something like 'want to collaborate with others on Google Wave?  Then write a quick outline of the project, give us the emails of the peopel you want to collaborate with, and we'll invite them for you...'

Rather than inviting people as individuals, invites teams of people as 'projects'.

And then all of those people will be able to see what Wave can really do for them...

Barcodes, Perfect Competition, and the future of shopping

Barcodes?  The future of shopping?  Is this some weird sort of retro post?  Like when the newspaper does 'today in 1972...'?

Because, of course, there's nothing new about the barcode... it was first tested in US supermarkets in the sixties.  As technology goes, it's as old as the hills. 

 

So how on earth can it be the future of shopping?

Because what matters nowadays is not the barcode itself, but the reader...

Supermarkets (and now other high street chains) have been putting the control of scanning in the hands of customers for a few years now... not as an advantage to the customer, necessarily, but as an automation of a job that used to be done by checkout assistants.

(...the economic labour market implications of this helps explain why the five members of Girls Allowed had to find alternative employment...)

 


It's not really a move that's putting the customer 'in control' of course... the important part (price comparison with other possible competitors) is locked away. 

With developments such as this, and through years of watching shop assistants at work, we've all been taught by the shops how to scan barcodes... 

However... imagine you could take that barcode, and scan it with something else... something that lets you compare prices across every outlet, order it online... and essentially through market forces means that the price you pay becomes as low as possible...

Well, that scanner is here.  And it costs £1.19.  And it's an app for the iPhone 3GS called Redlaser...

 

It works like this; you fire up the app, and it uses the camera on the phone to take a picture of any UPC barcode you hold in front of it, as the video explains...

When I first heard about it, I expected it to work on things like books, CDs and the like... but then I tried it on baby milk...

 
...which quickly told me that our local pharmacy were charging £1.19 for something that costs £0.58 in Boots.

I still can't quite get my head around just how big a step this represents in the way our economy works... but it's taken me back to my Economics degree and a thing called Perfect Competition.

Like many things in Economics, Perfect Competition was just a theory based on unattainable assumptions... infinite buyers & sellers, costless transactions, zero entry/exit barriers and so on

...read the wikipedia entry here for a full explanation)...

...but the one assumption that is close to becoming fulfilled by Redlaser is Perfect Information; prices and quality of all goods in the market are known to every seller AND every buyer.

Perfect Competition as a theory has many ramifications... but perhaps the most important is this; it becomes impossible in the long run for any company in the market to do any more than cover their costs.

So for instance, if I have perfect information about everyone who sells Aptamil baby milk, and there is no 'transaction costs' which set any seller apart (e.g. I can order from all store in bulk via the internet), then I'll always just order the cheapest one. 

 


Which means for both the retailer (Boots) & manufacturer (Aptamil), I'll only ever give them the least possible money for the baby milk. 

If everyone did that, for every product, that manufacturers and retailers would only ever break even, as market forces will continually drive down prices...

(Now, that's not of course how everyone behaves now... but it's got me thinking of something that's worth a separate post.  And I think there's more implications for the Perfect Competition hypothesis from the internet too, but I'll go in to them on another separate post too...)

So we'll all have perfect price information, but what about the other half of Perfect Information; the quality of products? 

How can we possibly begin to share the information about a vast array of products across society in a way that bypasses manufacturers and retailers...

...oh, hang on, right you are...

 

Whatever it is you're buying nowadays, there's a discussion/forum/review on the internet from other people which will guide you as to the quality of the product you're looking at. 

What does it all mean? 

Well, in a world where people have access to Perfect Information about just about every market, what implications does this have for branding? 

Is traditional branding a mechanism that only works to protect price premiums in a world of imperfect competition?  Will I find out about the quality of products from other people, then the cheapest place to buy it via mechanisms like Redlaser?

I'm certainly going to be thinking about this a lot more in the weeks to come... probably at 4:00am when I'm feeding James with all this bargain baby milk we've been buying...

A Kindle Killer? Why bother?

I just saw this on Mashable... Barnes  & Noble (US book retailer) are launching a 'Kindle Killer'... it's called Nook apparently...

 


There's a huge part of me that's becoming increasingly sceptical about the whole eBook market (especially at the prices people are asking for them).  For various reasons...

"It's like the iPod for books" say some folks.  Well, no it's not.  The iPod was different.  It replaced other expensive devices (walkman, discman, minidisc etc) that people had to carry to listen to music.  A £200 iPod replaced a £110 discman or whatever.  That's a good deal.  Paying $279 dollars for a Kindle or Nook where no device existed previously... doesn't seem like a good deal

Then there's 'e-ink'... the ability of the Kindle et al to 'look like a printed page'.  Wow, you've spent all that time, energy and money to make something that looks like a static printed paper page.  Brilliant, well done.  You've just given everything on your device the exact same limitations that printed books have...

But the major thing bothering about me is that fact that the tablet is coming...

 

And not just Apple; Microsoft, Dell, Asus, Toshiba... everyone will make a tablet, like every phone manufacturer is trying to make an "iPhone"...

When tablets become competitively priced, you can pick up an device that let's you do everything an an eBook lets you do and everything a laptop does to boot (edit documents, surf the web, watch video et etc)...

...then why would you bother buying an eBook?

Winning the eBook war is a little like becoming the king of the dinosaurs... it may be good for a while, but something big's coming to make you all extinct...

Post Divisionalist Thinking

Mark at PHD in San Francisco posted this up that he found... a chart of predicted media split up to 2020.

It's a good chart, and handy for presentations (though in my opinion a little too optimistic that by 2020 people will still be spending more time watching TV than using the internet).

But the box in the top corner for me is telling the real story; by 2020 80% of the hours we spend with media will be 'digital'.  Which, let's be honest, might as well be all of it.

Faris pointed out the other day that even if a medium isn't digital, people will use digital things to 'augment' it themselves anyway.  Sharing their thoughts on the X Factor through facebook, twitter, forums etc.  They take non-'digital' media and make it 'digital'.

And he also pointed out, rightly, that it's increasingly irrelevant to keep using the term 'digital'.

We need more 'Post Divisionalist Thinking'.  It's not 'digital' and 'traditional'.  You can't separate the two on a media plan, or indeed for the people you're trying to reach out to. 

At the risk of sounding trite, it's all just stuff.  Things that you, as a meadja person, use to try and connect people with companies.

We didn't group the old stuff together because it was all made of atoms, or all broadcast over radio waves.  So we shouldn't group the new stuff together because it's all made of digital bits.

Adidas, iPhones and all those photos you take

I bought a new pair of trainers yesterday.  Like five of the last six pairs I've bought, they were a pair of 'classic' style adidas.  I took this picture with a blog post in mind...

But what was the blog post to be about? 

It might have been a discourse on brand loyalty, of course. 

In a market of such wide and varied choice, to stick dogmatically to one brand shows a really well developed relationship between myself and Adidas, surely? 

Well, kind of.  I just so happen to think the soles are better than Converse, and they tend to be discounted heavily in sales at show stores like Offspring.  The latest pair cost me £35 down from £65.  Being Scottish, it would appear the only thing I'm loyal to is a good bargain.

Or indeed it might have been about apps replacing objects in our lives. 

I used the QuadCamera app to take this shot, which I found out about from Iain.  It takes four (or eight) sequential shots, much like the Lomo Action Sampler:

Whilst the Lomo camera does one thing, uses film, and costs £25, the app costs £1.19 and of course shoots onto digital, meaning you can snap away happily as often as you like until you get the shot you want.

What I think we're increasingly seeing is the digital world continuing to replace things from the physical world; it started with music, of course, then after CDs it'll be DVDs... but the long term effect is that an app can be created to replace what a physical object used to. 

Skimming through my iPhone, I see you can get apps to replace cameras, diaries, notepads, pens, pencils, business cards, books, newspapers, torches, four-track recording devices, maps, dictaphones, percussive instruments, guitar tuners...

Good for me in the short term, of course.  But if no-one is selling this stuff anymore, and no one is making stuff either... then surely there's a big whole in the economy opening up somewhere?

But maybe the post wasn't about that either.


Maybe it was going to be about the sheer amount of stuff we make and share. 

I have hundreds and hundreds of snaps like this that live on my iPhone.  

Matt Jones coined a very nice phrase for it at the PSFK Good Idea conference earlier this year; the phone in your pocket is like a remembering machine that whispers to you constantly 'that's really interesting... you should take a photo of that'.

So I do, and you probably do as well.  If you think about how much stuff (specifically digital photos but other stuff too) we create, save and keep... and then never get a chance to look through again... it's amazing we actually remember about any of it.

We are surrounded by the digital detritus that we constantly create for ourselves, and send to each other.

Which would help explain why I can't really remember what I was going to blog about when I took this photo yesterday...

As predicted... Dell Twitter hits $3m

You may remember (if your memory is better than mine at any rate) that back on June 16th, in the Thousands Not Millions post I tried to predict when the infamous Dell Twitter account would reach $3m in revenue... it's down at the bottom of that post, and it says...

I'll be fascinated to see how quickly @delloutlet's success continues to grow, but a quick supposition makes you think that they'll hit $3m in the next three months...

...in fact, let's call it: by 1st September they'll hit $3m.  And probably $5m by the end of the year.  I'll remember to keep an eye out for it...

 

Well, I've just found out via Faris that on Friday, August 21st, Dell announced that they'd made $3m through Twitter so far.

I don't know to be annoyed at being 10 days out, or pleased that I got so close...

Anyway, the numbers look good, don't they?  18 months to make the first $1m.  A further 6 months to hit the second $1m.  And then just a tad under three months to make the next.

Part two of the prediction ($5m by the end of 2009) looks eminently doable.

Quality bonfire building, Dell folks :)

Hold the R'FID beans...

...first up, I know the post title is an awful pun on refried beans... but hey, if a boy can't use an awful pun on a Friday, when can he..?

Anyway, to the point; the whole RFID tag on supermarket items thing - are people barking up the wrong tree?

Some background...

I wrote a post here which covers this in more detail, but for a while now there's been a lot of stuff around talking about how life would be wonderful if everything sold on a supermarket's shelves came embedded with a little RFID tag...

...so that you could do all sorts of handy things with it.  When you took things home and kept them in your house, an RFID reader in your fridge or cupboards would know what you've got at home, what you need for certain recipes, what you need to pick up on the way etc etc etc.

As I say, read more about it here if you wanna.  It's all very handy, all very exciting...

...but it ain't here in any significant way yet.

And the reality, as this state of the market report from ReadWriteWeb says, is currently quite a way off, for various reasons; the cost of implementation, getting all suppliers to sign up, efficiency of technology and so on.

Whilst we wait for the business world to sort something out with better tech... will we see ordinary people just bodge and hack a version that works for them?

Say what you see...

Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle recently wrote a white paper called Web Squared: Web 2.0 five years on (found via ReadWriteWeb again).  In it, they talked about how RFID might not the way we extract 'identity data' from real world objects:

"A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn't have an RFID tag to join the Internet of Things, it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don't have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality."

So, for example, think about the way QR codes worked... they used cameras hooked to computers (your mobile, most likely) to turn an image into data:

 

So, when you saw a bottle of pepsi with a QR code on it, you could use your phone to capture the data from the code, access the content etc etc etc...

Think what's going on though... all the camera is doing is recognising shapes, colours, patterns.

And can of Pepsi Max is, visually, shapes, colours and patterns too... it's more complex, admittedly, but with the advancements in augmented reality (more great examples of that here) rapidly improving all the time, cameras will be able to recognise packaging as it comes off the shelf.

 

Then, if we can teach a computer to recognise packaging... can we teach it to recognise the visual signs of how much of the product we have left?

For instance...

I know this bottle of Pepsi is finished.  You know it's finished too.  I wonder how far we are away from teaching a computer to realise that it's finished, or half empty, or has been open for a week so is probably flat...

Because then what you might do is just stick the equivalent of a mobile phone camera in the inside of a fridge door, and when you need to have a look in the fridge... well, you just bring up the iPhone app that connects to the fridge camera and determines what's in there.

Which as my missus will tell you, is going to be a lot more efficient and reliable than sending me to look in the fridge... I can never find anything...

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that by the time RFID gets around to being implemented by creating physical ways of making it feasible and reliable, there may be a non-physical way of capturing and interpreting the same data.

'Twas ever thus, eh..?

Twitter in Augmented Reality

Yes, I know, isn't the world excellent?

From Mashable

Digital Britain - Word Cloud

Bhav and the guys at OPera have spent the last week reading, analysing and writing a 'what's in it for us' synopsis of the Digital Britain report.  All I managed to do was glance through it, and post a funny video.

Anyway, I'll going to read their whole thing imminently, but the first thing I'll share from it is the word cloud.  I'm dismayed by the lack of use of the word 'people', but that's maybe just a current bugbear of mine, rather than something significant...

Thingfrastructure

I've just read this brilliant piece by Matt Jones of Dopplr / Schulze & Webb on what he calls 'thingfrastructure'...

(I found it via Influx Insights, thanks Ed)

Matt proposes that...

"the technologies of rapid fabrication and pervasive networks are allowing the tangible and the intangible to switch places and mingle."

Eh??!

Don't worry, I'm going to 'write out loud' to get my head around it too...

Rapid fabrication - We can make things (real world, physical objects) very quickly, and replace it often.  We don't have to make something in the bulk we used to, with the homgenous consistency we used to, or at the price it used to cost.  Moo cards being a great example; I've just had another set of 100 delivered, with a variety of personalised, different images, at a much lower cost than traditional business cards...

The same technology is beginning to affect packaging, and when 3D printing kicks off properly will really come into it's own...

...so physical objects are becoming updatable very regularly.

Pervasive networks - Through a combination of constant access to the network through a myriad of devices, the low cost of everything from processors to RFID tags, and the design & use of systems to capture information, there is increasingly some information & data capture sitting behind everything we do.  It's also referred to as Ubiquitous Computing (so Wikipedia tells me).

...so everyday actions can provide timely, relevant and useful information.

Now, here's the clever bit:

i) we can quickly make physical things based on the best available information

ii) we can collect the best available information from the things that are in the real world

This means that the real world of 'tangible' objects influences the intangible world of services via the network, and vice versa, as Matt's chart shows:

It means that every thing that is a part of the connected world is more than just a physical object; it becomes a connected, influencing part of the world around us and the services we use.

(and no, I didn't just blog about this because of the Lego slide Matt uses; it's not part of the ongoing Feeding The Puppy obsession with Lego as a brand and a metaphor).

But what would it mean in real life?  Here's an example of where this could go...

Imagine you are about to leave home from work one night, and fancy cooking a curry.  Using your mobile, you’ll be able to find a recipe, and then connect to the refrigerator in your kitchen at home to see which of the ingredients you need. 

The fridge knows what the contents of your kitchen are; there's an RFID tag on each of the items in the fridge & cupboards that identify them, the date they were placed in there, the number of times they have been taken out and replaced (telling you roughly how much you've used, and therefore need).  

The fridge responds with a shopping list.  You take this list, and connect your mobile to the satellite navigation system in your car. 

Your car contacts a series of stores which you could pass by on your route home, and checks which ones have all the ingredients (because all the RFID tags in store act as a real time inventory of stock), which ones are at the lowest prices, and which will take the least amount of time as a detour on your way home.  You get exactly what you want, in the fastest, cheapest, most convenient way.

This is commonly referred to, I believe, as the internet of things, but I think Matt's concept of Thingfrastructure is a great build, because it highlights the need for services in this world, and not just physical things.

Companies in this new world will of course have to make sure the things they produce are great (there's noweher to hide a dodgy product anymore, as Chris alluded to recently).  But it will be the service they create around the things that will make people choose them over a competitor...

So, the smart supermarket could identify what people are using certain products for.  They could start printing the recipes on the back of the next print run of packages.  Or add in photos taken by customers of the meals they created, or tips on how to make the recipe better, or what wine people tried with it.  Or become as competitive on price as possible by creating packs that are the exact size people need for the recipe...

Of course, it all sounds very far away and futuristic... but hey, if the iphone fridge is here already, it may be closer than you think.