Picture phones will change the world

I have had so many conversations with people who say that they don't get why it is interesting to have a digital camera built into a mobile phone. To this question I offer the typical example of parents on vacation taking pictures of the kid and sending them to the grandparents. But I have also offered the suggestion that putting power into the hands of the people always causes social change and ask people to think about what happens when thousands or millions of people can take a snapshot of injustice and instantly broadcast to the world.

Now comes the BBC with an example of this social implication of picture phones.

People thought that the Internet was going to be a new publishing medium -- like television, a way for large media brands to package and distribute content for the consumption of the masses. While it has become an interesting publishing medium, the interesting things that have created the most volume in usage on the Internet have not been when a few central nodes publish to all of the leaf node consumers but rather when all of the leaves become self publishers and start talking to each other without the need to have a central node mediating the conversation. Personal home pages were an early example and blogging has taken this to another level.

The bias of phone companies was to believe that these new mobile devices would become another broadcast medium, allowing central nodes to present information to all of the end consumer leaves. I believe the real transformation will come, however, as it did with the Internet when the end nodes become the publishers.

HP =everything is possible

Perhaps HP should reconsider their advertising campaign. Or at least the way in which it is being executed. Some clever person in their advertising department decided that HP should sponsor the CNN Technology section -- a column length advertisement in the right hand side of the page reads " = everything is possible " and then the HP logo. The idea seems to be that one will read the technology article and see the HP ad, associating the marvel of technology that CNN has reported with HP's prowess in computing.

Unfortunately for HP, not all articles in the Technology section are positive.

Take this one for example, about a man who stalked his girlfriend using a GPS device... Is that how HP is helping to improve the world?

The Very First Blog

I was thinking about the medium of blogging, and what an interesting vehicle it is for individuals to express their ideas when it occured to me that I had run into a very similar concept in my youth... and it made me think that the idea of "blogging" has a pre-Internet print precedent in the concept of the "fanzine." Way back in 1975, an interesting little publication called Alarums & Excursions began circulating amongst folks who enjoyed playing role-playing games (dungeons and dragons and other games of this genre). The idea was simple -- anyone could write for the publication -- the requirement was just that each contributor had to print up their own pages of the publication, as many pages as there were expected subscribers. Each writer would then mail his or her printed pages to Lee and Barry Gold who would assemble the pages of all contributors and send them back out as the next issue of the magazine. Each author's pages would look a lot like a blog page -- a series of disconnected thoughts on different topics reflecting the author's interests. Amazingly I find that the publication is still in print and has come out every month but one since 1975...

Woefully behind

I certainly am falling further and further behind. For loyal readers here is a content tease -- updates coming soon on the Lessig conversation and on the Kurzweil inquiry...

Archives and permalinks...

My archives and permalinks should be working again, but please use my new domain tedshelton.blogspot.com

New URL

I have moved my blog to BlogSpot, Blogger.com's hosting service. The URL is tedshelton.blogspot.com in case you'd like to go directly there, rather than through the bogus register.com redirector service... I'll have to get that fixed as well... But one thing at a time! At least I am back on the air...

Unreliable server companies...

The company that has served up my blog for the past several years, SiteAmerica has finally gone completely AWOL. It will take a while for me to get my site back in order and find all of the old image files, so please bear with me.

Is Comdex Still Relevant?

Charlie Cooper says NO -- Comdex is dead. So did my cab driver here in Las Vegas. My cabbie believes that there are even fewer attendees this year than last -- the post Sept 11 Comdex. And anyway, as he points out, Key3Media is going bankrupt, aren't they?

Well I'll offer a contrarian viewpoint, and since its Vegas I will offer odds. There will be another Comdex next year. And the show will grow again. But it will be a different show than the one Charlie Cooper cut his teeth on as a young tech reporter. Or actually it will be the same one -- a sort of "back to the future..."

You see, Comdex lost its way in the world. The thing it has always done well, still does well, and will do well in the future is bring together the people who make up the distribution channel for computing products. Resellers, VARs, distributors... the feet on the street that sell technology products.

And the people who get it most are the people who live in the center of that channel. Publications like CMP Media's CRN -- Channel Reseller News. At Comdex this year, the most important event on Monday night was CRN's Industry Hall of Fame -- presented by CRN, and Comdex jointly with the Computer History Museum.

And this year the inductees were a little different from past years. In the first five awards shows the hall of fame has honored such industry greats as Steve Jobs and Andy Grove and of course Bill Gates. Who joined these titans this year?

Michael Krasny -- founder of CDW Computer Centers

Izzy Schwab -- CEO of D&H Distributing

There were a few "industry" folks (manufacturers) recognized as well -- Jerry Sanders of AMD, John Chambers of Cisco, Michael Ruettgers of EMC, and Gary Starkweather of Xerox (the only science guy). But the message that all of the inductees had was -- the distribution channel matters. That's what made us successful -- all of the people selling these products.

Izzy, of D&H Distributing, told a great story. He talked about how his father had founded the company as an RCA distributor. And how in 1986, RCA was acquired by Thomson, a European company. Well Thomson didn't understand the value of their distribution channel and so within a year they cancelled all of their distributor agreements nationwide with 30 days notice. As Izzy pointed out, this action destroyed RCA's (Thomson's) market share, a mistake they are trying to recover from to this day.

For D&H though, it was a rebirth -- they applied their sales experience and channel presence to the computer industry and are now a $900 million business. Not just taking orders but creating demand and selling into that demand.

Comdex just needs to remember this lesson. Its about the distribution network. Its about connecting manufacturers with the resellers and VAR's and distributors that actually sell the manufacturers' products. If Comdex can re-focus on this key market that it serves, maybe it will be reborn just like Izzy's company was.

Lessig blogs back

I am a few days behind (things have been busy) but I wanted to get at least some brief comments back on Lawrense Lessig's latest response in our long running debate about "opaque creativity."

Lessig reasonably criticizes my rhetorical device of suggesting that placing source code in the public eye is equivalent to a writer having to make public the thought process behind his/her work. But in doing so he ignores the underlying argument and the analysis of what "derivative works" means in the case of software.

One of the valuable parts of this discussion for me has been in refining my thinking on this subject. I have had an intuitive feeling that there is something wrong in Lessig's call for source code escrow -- and not the least of which is my concern about giving governments too much power. I have some more work to go in my thinking, but I am close to having a good formulation of the core issue. Here is an attempt at a clear statement of my thesis:

Software is not a narrative. Software is a machine

Narrative is not quite the right word (it doesn't capture songs for example) but it is getting close. Where Lawrence Lessig and I agree is that copyright law intended for narrative forms of creativity -- books, movies, etc -- is not adequate for software. Where we disagree is what the remedy should be. Lessig would require that the machine be given away for free after some period of time. In my view this appraoch is too extreme. That it gives away the algorithm along with the implementation and that software developers (like mechanical entrepreneurs) should not be required to give away their algorithms.

I will spend some more time on the formulation of this and post a longer note soon.

Snark Hunting

One of WordLab's creators, Jay Jurisich, writes with news of another naming and branding blog that he has created. Called Snark Hunting. This site seems to mostly cover news of interest to the brand brainstorming crowd.

Brainstorm Brand Names

Here's a blog that is also a resource and a database for people brainstorming slogans or brands -- WordLab -- not only is it useful, but it is a lot of fun. I rate this one a "must visit."

The most interesting item on Day 3 of NMIC

A terrific presentation by Nokia's internal group that studies consumer behavior -- these guys have done an amazing amount of research and have developed a really compelling model for thinking about how people use mobile devices. They have a number of "dimensions" that they use to segment different people's behavior around the use of mobile technologies. The devices that they introduce, like the 6800 that I wrote about yesterday, are defined by analyzing the intersections of these dimensions and identifying clusters of consumers that behave in certain ways and have certain needs for mobile devices. I can't possibly do justice to the full model and Nokia has in any case promised to put this presentation on the web -- so I will link to it when it is available. In the meantime, here are some of the dimension characteristics as a teaser:

Open vs. Controlling

Receptive and Belonging vs. Individual and self esteem

"Mind styles" that these two dimensions produce -- enjoying, exploring, managing, exploiting, controlling, defending, bonding...

Style dimension -- appearance -- premium vs. fun vs. active vs. fashion

functional dimension -- writing vs. reading vs. relationship management vs. talking...

capabilities dimension -- amount of memory, screen size, user interface, programmability...

Phone Categories that these dimensions produce -- Imaging, Gaming, Classic...

The future vision of Nokia is that "...I will have my phone with my set of applications and you will have yours and they will really be entirely personalized to each of our needs and will look nothing like each other..."

This creative segmentation which allows for devices which will become completely personlized is a tremendously powerful vision. One interesting aspect to me is what a sharp contrast it is to the way in which Microsoft has guided the evolution of the PC -- narrowing down the possibilities to a single, fairly uniform platform. One Nokia person commented to me that he and his colleagues were discussing the issue of the PC volume having plateaued at 400 million devices and why this was -- perhaps if Microsoft had adopted this experimental and fully open and configurable approach that Nokia has adopted, that the PC world would look quite different, with a much wider array of solutions adapted to different requirements...

NMIC Day 2 -- Coolest new gadget...

Nokia has rolled out an amazing number of new products today -- all extremely cool. How about a video survelliance camera that is also a GSM/GPRS phone and can transmit images directly to your phone using MMS? How about a "music stand" which has speakers built into a phone recharging station... Here is a link to Nokia's site to look at their new gadgets. But my award for the coolest new gadget goes to the Nokia 6800 -- a phone with a full keyboard like you have never seen before! Here are pictures that I took with my Nokia 7650 camera phone... First you can see the phone in its "one hand" mode -- looks like a normal phone, right? But then it OPENS... with a section lifting up from the keyboard area. This section continues to open up until it flips all the way over the top, allowing you to turn the device into a horizontal position and use a full QWERTY keyboard with two hands... The screen automatically flips orientation when the keyboard is opened.

Very cool phone. Also has a color screen... MMS capable of course. Java... And this is just one of a whole group of new phones that they introduced.

Coolest demo of the day

Reporting to you from the Nokia Mobile Internet Conference here in Munich -- the coolest demo of the day was live television playing on a Nokia 7650 over a roaming GPRS data connection! I am not kidding. The crazy engineers at Nokia hooked up a server in Helsinki with a TV tuner card and put TV1 from Finland onto the mobile network! From a 7650 here in Munich we tuned in to watch daytime Finnish television. Video and sound quality was amazing. This is what high speed data connectivity is capable of already today, without 3G -- although I would hate to get that GPRS bill at current rates!

Also, suggestion to Nokia for future demos -- daytime Finnish television is not a killer application... how about a sports channel? I guess TV1 probably wouldn't complain about being pirated though...

UK blocks international calling as well...

Jeremy McGee (an ex-Borlander) writes that:

To be fair to T-Mobile this isn't a situation that's exclusive to the US. Over here in the UK we, too, have to have the call bar lifted on international roaming and international calls.

But Jeremy goes on to explain why:

This is partly because the international rates are (usually) stupidly expensive. For some reason this is especially the case for US mobile carriers. So with debt at the level that it is with mobile telcos I'm not surprised they want to do an extra credit check.

OK, so they want to find out if I can pay for all of those long distance calls. Fair enough. But they should be smart enough to ask about this at activation time, not after I actually arrive in Munich. On the question of US myopia about the rest of the world though, Jeremy had this factoid (have to check)

87% of US citizens don't have passports.

So I stand by my complaint that we need to start thinking globally in the US. How can we be the "world's policeman" and not know anything about the world??

T-Mobile -- when will the US think globally?

I have been a T-Mobile customer since Friday and I am already frustrated with them. And I haven't even made a call yet. But the problem I am having with T-Mobile is also a problem with every other carrier in the US. There are smart people at T-Mobile, but when it comes to thinking Globally, despite being a division of a German company, they get mired in the same bad logic that slows down the rest of the US mobile market.

Here is what happened: On Friday I set up a new T-Mobile account so that I could test the new Microsoft "Pocket PC Phone Edition" and compare it to Nokia's and Sony-Ericsson's Symbian based phones (more on that later). On Saturday I boarded a plane for Munich, where I am now -- for the Nokia Mobile Internet Conference. So I arrive in Munich on Sunday night (local time) and turn on my new phone. But I am unable to get a service provider connection. After I arrive at my hotel, I call T-Mobile's customer support in the US.

It turns out that, even though T-Mobile is a German company and even though the phone they sold me was a dual-band GSM phone, I can't use my US T-Mobile account in Europe. In fact I can't even call Europe from the US.

You see, if you are a US citizen and you want to call internationally, they assume that you must be a criminal. This is the only explanation that I can come up with. I had the same problem a few years ago when I was a Sprint PCS customer, and again when I set up my Cingular account (which I use for work). By default when you get a phone in the US you can only use that account in the US and you can only call people in the US. In order to get this changed, you have to petition an International department which, after an investigation, will decide whether or not an account can be approved for international use.

I guess the theory is that the US is such a large country and market that we can grow up and live out our entire lives without ever needing or wanting to call someone outside the US and without ever needing to use our mobile phones from outside the US.

Unfortunately isolationism leads again and again to a rude awakening when some external event provides a reminder that we are part of a global economy and a worldwide society. Not activating mobile phones for international use is just a symptom of the larger problem. Eventually we are going to have to start training our children to look at the world outside our borders -- and to think about themselves as part of a global civilization.

The Hype Backlash -- Web Services' Turn...

The articles are beginning to appear, like this one at Business 2.0. Entitled "Still Waiting for the Web Services Miracle" the article is a fair complaint that the hype got out of control. And the author even writes that

If you forget the grandiose promises, there are some things Web services are good for right now...

But this is just the beginning of the backlash for Web Services. I expect a lot more articles in the next few months complaining that web services is not all that it has been promised to be...

Time to move on... (Re: Microsoft)

Well, it isn't actually possible to download the court's opinion from their website -- I am guessing due to the large number of download requests... It was heartening however to see (using this nifty tool at Netcraft) that the court is running Linux... But in any case the news is out and the court is allowing the Justice department's settlement with Microsoft to stand. So I guess its time to move on to the next issue...

.NET vs J2EE -- The PetStore Debate

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an independent party create a comparison of J2EE and .NET in order to demonstrate the benefits and issues with each of these two frameworks? The Middleware Company had said that they had created just such a comparison using the PetStore demonstration application. But now Rickard Öberg provides a devastating critique of this effort and others have stepped forward to claim that Microsoft paid TMC for the report...

Microsoft News Flash!

Just received a PDF from the United States District Court announcing that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will issue "Opinions in the Microsoft cases" at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Friday, November 1, 2002. Should be downloadable tomorrow from the court's website.