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...

Guardian Activate Redux: Werner Vogels (Amazon)

I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July.  Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it's a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day... I'll post up one video every few days or so...

Werner Vogels, Amazon - "Your worst nightmare on the web... you throw a party, and a MILLION people come... how do you cope with that?"

The area of cloud computing is increasingly fascinating... people are creating things around computers that they may need a phenomenal amount of storage space and processing power... but only for a brief period of time.

For instance, the Google Monopoly game which launched over the last week needed a lot more server power than they expected it to... and as such crashed on and off for about a week.  They've just had to restart the whole thing all over again today...

I found Werner's talk huge interesting, because of the comparison he draws between computing nowadays, and electricity in days of yore.

Companies in those days needed electricity to do whatever it is that they made money from.

Werner's example is a brewer in Belgium, but we have our very own relic of this age in the Gym breakout area in our building...

(It's a particularly rare example controlled by table football...)

Think how mad it would be nowadays to run your own generator for a resource that comes out the wall, on tap, whenever you want it.

That's essentially the proposition for 'cloud computing'... computing that becomes a resource to be scaled when needed, and switched off when it's not.

It touches on a previous post about working spaces I wrote a while ago... when computing becomes as free and easy as electricity to access, it'll be interesting to see how we all work together.

Gadgets, Spotify, and more nails in the coffin

Once upon a time, everyone presumed that content was king.

Recently though, I've been wondering about that... content is only king if you have some way of extracting value from it...

Let's think about the music industry.  Of course, it's been a while since I posted anything on the massive changes the music industry is having thrust upon it unwillingly.  I guess I thought I'd leave it alone for a bit...

Anyway, I was maintaining my previous stance on buying CDs... being in a band with lots of musician friends, I liked to think that people still valued music, that it was still worth something to people.

But a few things of late have made me see that the actual value of music has plummeted so far that... well, I don't know how much longer we'll see anyone making money out of recorded music.  And if that happens, I guess we'll wave goodbye to record labels too...

So what's tipped me over the edge?

Well, the first thing is that the CDs that occupy the corner of our living room, all five hundred or so, aren't really worth anything any more...

Helen decided she was going to divest herself of some of her CDs.  I (being the hoarding, collecting type) would never countenance such a thing, but their Helen's CDs, and she decided that since she never listened to them any more their stay in the Willshire household had come to an end.

So she went onto Music Magpie, a site that offers to buy your old CDs if you are done with them.  Their offer for Helen's 15 CDs?  £5.76. 

Yes, less than two pints of beer.  A Charlatans album, apparently, is worth about 30p.

So the music that we own already is of value to us, but not really anyone else it seems. 

It seems kind of foolhardy to keep adding to this pile in the corner, especially given the other routes opening up where you can legally get music...

Which brings me to the second thing that's changed my world lately; the Spotify iPhone app.

Spotify as a computer-based application didn't really do anything for me; it's not really where I listen to much music, and so played around for a while before I got bored.

The iPhone app is a completely different kettle of fish; it allows you to download and cache up to 3,333 songs onto your iPhone, and take them with you wherever you go, for as long as you like.

It costs £9.99 a month.  So roughly the same as an album.  I've only had it for 3 weeks, yet I've downloaded around 20 albums, listened to them, and then stopped listening to the ones I didn't like that much (once upon a time, I'd have been stuck with a purchase...).

It's basically like having a library card for a record shop, and you can borrow things for as long as you like.  

All very well, you may think, that sorts the commuting music... but what about when you listen to music at home? 

Well, a package from Amazon arrived today that sorts that... a new Sony mini hi-fi system with an iPhone docking station on top...

(yes, perhaps with a child on the way it's not the time to be buying gadgets, but it was only £120 which we paid for by selling an old amp and mobile phone on eBay...)

What's so good about it?  Well, because we've got a decent wi-fi signal around the house, the iPhone can play any of the songs directly from Spotify, through the system, into the house.

It's very nearly replacing the need for CDs at all... sure, Spotify isn't an all inclusive service yet (though it does have six million songs, which will keep us going for a while...).

But what the whole set-up has done has turned my mobile device into something that moves with me wherever I go, allowing access to music via either internal storage or straight from the cloud. 

It's beginning to sound very close to the delightful technological future we've been promised for years.  So, what does it all mean?

Well, firstly, things aren't looking great for the recorded music industry... 

If someone like me, who was until three weeks ago still buying CDs, is now listening to three times as much music at a fraction of the cost I used to pay, then whilst Spotify's claim that their main target is piracy, in fighting that battle the collateral damage may just be to wipe out the little money the record labels were still making from selling folk like me CDs.

It's sad to see it, but it's more nails in the coffin of an increasingly defunct business model.

The second thing I think is important, possibly much more so than the music thing, is scaling this behaviour change into the future.

What is the media landscape going to look like when people carry around the 5th generation, 160Gb iPhone that plays BBC iPlayer content from the cloud...

...and plugs straight into their TV system at home? 

If this sort of behaviour shifts into the TV model, the changes in that sector will undoubtedly mirror those that the record industry is facing now.

And the thing about TV content is of course that it's a lot more expensive to make than recording music.  Content creators are going to have to think very cleverly indeed to work out how they're going to make money from it.

Content may have been king, but it's increasingly facing a future living like a pauper...

Guardian Activate Redux: Arianna Huffington

I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July.  Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it's a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day... I'll post up one video every few days or so...

Arianna Huffington - "Mainstream media suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, and new media suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder..."

First of all it's amazing that even though it's just under 3 months ago, the things Arianna Huffington touches on as 'happening now' seem so long ago...

...the Iran elections, the very start of Healthcare reform in the US.  The speed with which 'new news' comes at us is astounding.

Which chimes excellently with the point mentioned above...

Mainstream media has ADD. 

It can't focus on anything long enough to make it matter (the sole exception perhaps being the Telegraph's expenses scandal).  Every day has to be about new news, new headlines, new ways to grab attention.

Meanwhile, new media has OCD. 

It keeps going with things, again and again, reinventing, adding to.  Look at how the Kanye West thing is over in 'mainstream media', yet continues to be remixed, shared, carried on across the web... the story doesn't die.

I guess the power of new media, as it develops, will be to keep going not just at the memes and the fun silly stuff, but to start chipping away at the important stuff too.

Hopefully we'll see a lot of it bubbling to the surface around Copenhagen later this year.  Because for the mainstream media, there will just be another big story along the following week

The iPhone, the white screen of death, and Youtube

I had an awful experience this morning, one of those real 'punch in the guts' moments where you see stretching out in front of you a road of high cost, endless customer service conversations, and all through no fault of your own...

...because when I switched on my iPhone, it looked like this:

 

Just a bright, white screen.  THE WHITE SCREEN OF DEATH.

Nothing I did would get rid of it.  At all.

I swore quite a lot.  For about five minutes.

Then...

...rather than trying to find the instruction manual, or head to Apple's site or whatever, I just searched for 'iPhone White Screen'.

 

That top search result was pretty appealing... a solution?  Really?  Brilliant...

I click through, and get a video of RichyRich7777... an American fella filming on his webcam, telling you how to fix the 'White Screen of Death'...

The solution worked, perfectly.  Thanks RichyRich7777.  The sense of relief... words can't capture it

Anyway, it got me thinking.  There's three things at play here which are characteristic of how the internet is changing the customer service model for companies.

Firstly, there's me, the customer.  For whatever reason, I didn't feel that even a company like Apple is going to provide an easy to find solution on their own website.  I didn't search for 'Apple helpdesk' or 'iPhone problem'.  Experience with the internet has clearly taught me that the quickest route to things is to use Google to search on my precise self-diagnosis.

Then there's RichyRich7777, who's the service.  He had the same problem I did, and found a solution.  Presumably he didn't find it on someone else's video, because he felt compelled to save people the hassle of going through the same pain he did and filmed a video himself.

Finally there's Apple, the company.

 

On the search results, they just about manage to sneak onto the first page with a solution on their forum... to a different problem.

RichyRich7777 is providing the service, and has done so for free.  And it works, it's simple.

So what should the company do?  Point people to it?  Recommend it?  Embed it on their own website with the creator's permission?  Or just leave people to their own devices like they're doing now.

What would you do if you were Apple?

10 levels of social intimacy

I've just seen this on the himmelblog (the excellent Tumblr from our man in San Fran, Mark Himmelsbach...)

 

Have a look at all the ways you can connect socially with people using this framework.  Then work out how many were widely used* ten years ago.  I count three.

No wonder everyone wants to talk to people around the bonfire nowadays.

Originally by Ji Lee I believe.

*By widely used, I mean my mum using them.  I'm just waiting for her arrival on Twitter, and she'll complete the set...

Why Facebook bought Friendfeed

Let's be honest, if everyone had known that Friendfeed had been powered by a tiny little Lego production factory, Facebook would have found itself in a bidding war...

Derek observes 'it's just like the Numbskulls'.  Which you may or may not remember...

If you want to learn more about Facebook buying FriendFeed, I'd have a look here on ReadWriteWeb... which is where I found the excellent Lego video too.

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..?