Review - Taiwanese phone builder HTC has been tempting its fans with the Universal handset since the beginning of the year. The prospect not only of Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM/GPRS connectivity but also 3G, and with them a landscape-oriented display and full QWERTY keyboard, not to mention Windows Mobile 5.0, has fuelled interest in the machine since T-Mobile announced in February that it would be offering the machine on its network.

2:50:18 AM    comment   

A valued reader directs me to take a peek at this coolio product (pic reproduced with permission):

It’s called the nabjac, which stands for “Not a box – just a connector”. What is does is upend the concept of the TV set-top-box (STB) by building the whole thing into a connector.

So, what does it do? Our correspondent says:

…it is built on top of a TV SCART connector, using an old low-cost, high-volume MPEG2 decoder. In addition to SCART it has an Ethernet port, and a connector for an infrared detector. It has very limited inteligence, it decodes MPEG2 streams by itself, but for menus, EPG and browsing it does a VNC session to a “smart” Linux server.

So it is a “dumb” edge device, connecting as a VNC terminal to a “smart” server also on the edge of the network.

(VNC is a way of displaying text and graphics from another computer remotely.)

I just love this kind of innovation, gently shredding vertically integrated business models into prosciutto-thin horizontal slices. Stick this device on your TV, get your program information from anyone you like. No need to be locked into the provider of the actual media signal to get your metadata. Want to receive your IMs on your TV too? Just click here to enable…

Every function is now up for grabs by third parties.

Shame it’s precluded from the outset in all those DRM-infected HDTV appliances that outlaw reintermediating any information flow, ever.

2:49:49 AM    comment   

In a spare moment I whipped together this little diagram that tries to explain in pictures what I’ve probably failed to convey in many thousands of words.

It’s certainly more illuminating that the arm-waving “Power of 3” stuff in eBay’s investor relations blurb. There’s magic happening somehow in the arrows in their diagrams.

So, what’s the message? Really, it’s quite simple. Marketplace enablers can be defined by the breadth of goods on offer, and the depth of support for the transaction they offer. The picture shows how eBay, Amazon and Google are currently positioned, and how Skype might be positioned in future. The edges are “clipped” because not all transactions go to the maximum depth; e.g. not all eBay auctions are settled via Paypal, and Amazon sometimes hands off fulfillment to 3rd parties. (The eBay region is made translucent — I hope it’s still obvious which bits are eBay despite the colour transition.)

At one extreme, Google has a very broad business base (any commercial transaction that can have an unambiguous keyword associated with it). But it doesn’t do much beyond that.

At the other extreme is Amazon, which will encase your goods in gift wrap and even deliver them to you personally when it comes to certain digital goods.

eBay falls in the middle. Its business model is narrower and shallower than these extremes, but perhaps encompasses a greater “commercial land area” as a result.

The purpose of the Skype-eBay deal is to push eBay into a broader realm of things for sale. For instance, if you want legal advice today, Google is the only place to go search for it. Want a reputable lawyer nearby? Sorry, the eBay reputation system doesn’t help you — yet.

The many articles on “pay per call” models for Skype tend to miss the bigger picture. Skype isn’t constrained by PSTN circuit technology, so previously unimagined transaction-supporting functionality can be integrated. Only by looking at the increased breadth and depth of a Skype-eBay transaction environment can you see where the value lies.

I expect Google to continue its strategy of expansion along a different axis — the set of “search moments”. I have previously argued that Google missed an opportunity to deepen its business model by acquiring Skype.

Currently Skype’s business is a thin, empty line along the bottom of the diagram. Infinite width, zero depth. US$4.1 billion is a lot of money for what amounts to a risky experiment. But the prospect of re-defining the experience of how consumers and businesses talk to one another is an exciting one. For someone it may even turn out to be a lucrative one, and not just Skype’s management and investors.

2:47:10 AM    comment   

Had it not been for Sprint’s decision to sign-up with Qualcomm when it was getting started on Sprint PCS, Qualcomm would not be the behemoth that it is today. Think of it as a decision that rivals IBM’s decision to go with Intel processors instead of Motorola silicon and using Microsoft’s DOS on its PCs. I made this point in my story of Qualcomm for Business 2.0. It was the kingmaker.

Strangely enough, as mobile broadband becomes a reality, Sprint finds itself in the same position. Investors Business Daily says Sprint is experimenting with mobile WiMAX, IPWireless and Qualcomm’s technologies.

“Most of the world is unhappy with Qualcomm,” said Barry West, Sprint’s chief technology officer. “They feel that its licensing model is egregious. “No one else is in our position right now … We have all the assets. We have a vision of wireless interactive multimedia services.”

This is the first time anyone this senior from the CDMA/EVDO camp has openly criticized Qualcomm. South Koreans companies are also complaining about Qualcomm, and are pushing WiBro hard. Sprint, it seems might be turning up the heat on Qualcomm. I think it is more of saber rattling than anything. We have already heard reports that Sprint-Nextel is going to use the MediaFLO system.

From the way I understand is that the Qualcomm’s royalty structure doesn’t really effect the carriers at all. The profits come from the pockets of equipment makers and device makers. However, a lot of people forget that the royalty revenues of Qualcomm are quite small in comparison with its chipset business, which is the yoke it uses to drive down prices of “handsets.”

They sell highly integrated chipsets, that Asian vendors can use to churn out handsets by millions. It is essentially the same tactic Intel has used to get fat off the PC-land. Knowing how Qualcomm works, I am sure they have a contingency plan in place.

“Sprint often tries many technologies,” Jacobs said. “In the end, we tend to see eye to eye about what the technology road map should be.” One of Qualcomm’s reasons for buying Flarion was getting its hands on key OFDM patents. Since WiMax is partially based on OFDM, Qualcomm could ask makers of WiMax gear to pay royalties. Qualcomm hasn’t said whether it plans to do that. “We do believe we have IP (intellectual property) in WiMax,” said Jacobs.

In other Sprint news, Martin Geddes says that Sprint Local could become a major headache for the Bell operators. I think so to. Marry it to some of the other smaller local phone companies, Qwest and SureWest. That is one hefty competitor.

2:40:25 AM    comment   

From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols. The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release; they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.

But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever.

The New New Age

But the yearning for a higher consciousness didn't burst with the bubble. Web 1.0 may have turned out to be spiritual vaporware, but now we have the hyper-hyped upgrade: Web 2.0. In a profile of Internet savant Tim O'Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that "the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet." He quotes O'Reilly: "The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the '70s - except we didn't know it would be technology-mediated." Levy then asks, "Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the successor to the human potential movement?"

Levy's article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly's sweeping "We Are the Web" in Wired's August issue. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a "magic window" that provides a "spookily godlike" perspective on existence. "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity," he writes.

But that's only the beginning. In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power. The Web is becoming "the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds ... We will live inside this thing."

The revelation continues:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture.

The Cult of the Amateur

Now, lest you dismiss me as a mere cynic, if not a fallen angel, let me make clear that I'm all for seeking transcendence, whether it's by going to church or living in a hut in the woods or sitting at the feet of the Maharishi or gazing into the glittering pixels of an LCD screen. One gathers one's manna where one finds it. And if there's a higher consciousness to be found, then by all means let's get elevated. My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.

And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? Is there a counterargument to be made? Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.

Let me bring the discussion down to a brass tack. If you read anything about Web 2.0, you'll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of "the age of participation." Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute can add an entry or edit an existing one. O'Reilly, in a lucid new essay on Web 2.0, says that Wikipedia marks "a profound change in the dynamics of content creation" - a leap beyond the Web 1.0 model of Britannica Online. To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the Web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It's a harbinger of the Machine.

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

Take, for instance, this section from Wikipedia's biography of Bill Gates, excerpted verbatim:

Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (born April 26, 1996), Rory John Gates (born May 23, 1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born September 14, 2002).

In 1994, Gates acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

In 1997, Gates was the victim of a bizarre extortion plot by Chicago resident Adam Quinn Pletcher. Gates testified at the subsequent trial. Pletcher was convicted and sentenced in July 1998 to six years in prison. In February 1998 Gates was attacked by NoÎl Godin with a cream pie. In July 2005, he solicited the services of famed lawyer Hesham Foda.

According to Forbes, Gates contributed money to the 2004 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Gates is cited as having contributed at least $33,335 to over 50 political campaigns during the 2004 election cycle.

Excuse me for stating the obvious, but this is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (who the heck is "famed lawyer Hesham Foda"?) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts.

Here's Wikipedia on Jane Fonda's life, again excerpted verbatim:

Her nickname as a youthóLady Janeówas one she reportedly disliked. She traveled to Communist Russia in 1964 and was impressed by the people, who welcomed her warmly as Henry's daughter. In the mid-1960s she bought a farm outside of Paris, had it renovated and personally started a garden. She visited Andy Warhol's Factory in 1966. About her 1971 Oscar win, her father Henry said: "How in hell would you like to have been in this business as long as I and have one of your kids win an Oscar before you do?" Jane was on the cover of Life magazine, March 29, 1968.

While early she had grown both distant from and critical of her father for much of her young life, in 1980, she bought the play "On Golden Pond" for the purpose of acting alongside her fatheróhoping he might win the Oscar that had eluded him throughout his career. He won, and when she accepted the Oscar on his behalf, she said it was "the happiest night of my life." Director and first husband Roger Vadim once said about her: "Living with Jane was difficult in the beginning ... she had so many, how do you say, 'bachelor habits.' Too much organization. Time is her enemy. She cannot relax. Always there is something to do." Vadim also said, "There is also in Jane a basic wish to carry things to the limit."

This is worse than bad, and it is, unfortunately, representative of the slipshod quality of much of Wikipedia. Remember, this emanation of collective intelligence is not just a couple of months old. It's been around for nearly five years and has been worked over by many thousands of diligent contributors. At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. Those despised "people in a back room" can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition - or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.

Scary Economics

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies that alter the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

2:12:40 AM    comment