A Story Before Bed

I've been a fan of Jackson Fish Market's work since before they existed. My first Radar post about them talked about founder Hillel Cooperman's personal food site, Tasting Menu, which was and is amazingly detailed and hunger-inspiring. Jackson Fish has the same, or higher, quality of work -- software craftsmanship that makes each of their sites immediately identifiable and distinct, graphically full and compelling.

I'm totally gaga, though, over their new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of those things that parents and grandparents will flip out with happiness about while everyone else scratches their heads, but as a new parent, finding it made me feel like a special delivery had arrived expressly for my daughter.

The idea of the site is to make it easy for people far from kids they love -- grandparents in another city, parents on a business trip, soldiers in training or deployed -- to read a story to a child. But you really have to watch the demo video to see what a jewel of a product they've made. The reader's face and voice are appear, picture-in-picture style, above a full image of the book being read. As the reader goes from one page to the next, the book animates pages turning along with them. The child can go back a page or skip ahead, and the reader keeps up with them. You can try recording a reading for free, and pay only if you choose to save what you've recorded. (Note: they're currently running a sale for new books, $4.99 each instead of the standard $6.99, through December 25th.)

As a business, the site is interesting to see. They're making deals with publishers to have the full content of their books available on the site -- not just the text but all of the pictures and layout. I wish that more publishers had signed up (the site just launched), and if you're a children's book publisher reading this, get over there! But nonetheless they have a good selection of books and I find it easy to see publishers getting excited about this as a venue. This is how publishing is going to make a real move to the web -- not with DRM and lawyers but with beautiful new ideas for how to share stories.

For the future, in addition to getting more publishers turned on to this, I'd love to see them make it possible for me to send a prepaid credit to a family member so they can record a book more easily, and maybe make the registration steps easier (those CAPTCHAS are tough on some grandparents' eyes). The experience of the site, though, is so amazing today that I'm happy to get on the phone and talk a relative through all the steps.

My daughter's happy reaction at seeing relatives -- or me, when I'm traveling -- on iChat makes the webcam in my laptop worth the whole cost of the machine. We read her three books every night before bed, and the idea of one of those being by a "guest reader" from afar is wonderful. This is one of those ways of connecting people that I can't help but be excited to see. Kudos to Jackson Fish.

Peter Seibel's Coders at Work

My friend Peter Seibel's new book Coders at Work (published by Apress) went to press today. I've been reading a preview copy he sent me, and it's fantastic. The book follows the style of the earlier Apress book Founders at Work, presenting interviews with notable programmers, asking them how they work, about their careers, their thoughts on the software profession, and whatever other topics come up along the way.

The book works in part because Peter is himself an accomplished developer (his previous book, Practical Common Lisp, won a Jolt Award), making the conversations lively and topical. Beyond that, though, he chose as subjects (with help from a Digg-like voting system he wrote while planning the book), and was able to get interviews with, an incredibly interesting set of people who work on quite a wide range of software projects. Some, like Jamie Zawinski, contribute what are essentially battlefield memoirs (in Jamie's case, from the early development of Netscape); others, such as Joshua Bloch (Chief Java Architect at Google), are more contemplations on the art and science of programming. Many questions come up repeatedly -- how people got started in programming, how they fix difficult bugs, what working style they like with others, whether they've read Knuth (himself an interviewee) -- and the breadth of the answers to these core questions is fun to see. You're left feeling that you've spent several hours with a wonderful group of mentors: some that you'd rush to agree with, others that push you away from your habits and comfort.

One of the other core questions Peter asks is, what books would you recommend to help a developer learn programming? For me, this book joins my short list -- it takes you away from the limitations of learning within a single company or community, and shows you the breadth of experiences that can make someone a great developer. I'm very happy for my friend that his book came out so well, and recommend it very highly for anyone who develops software. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Bravo, Snaptalent

I really liked the original Snaptalent product (sort of an AdSense for recruiting). Apparently the product didn't succeed -- I can imagine working on a recruiting product during this recession must have been frustrating. I'm even more impressed, though, with how the Snaptalent team decided to shut down the company: by posting their post-game analysis on their home page:

Its been a tough call, as we had enough capital in the bank to last for two years. The decision has primarily dictated by market conditions and opportunity cost which in aggregate would mean we probably wouldn't have been able to show the kind of results we wanted to make this a big company in this market. There are a number of reasons behind that decision and a number of lessons, which I intend to articulate here in this note.

I've written one of those notes before (when a company I was running in 2001 shut down), but I just sent it to our investors. Posting their thoughts on the company and market allows everyone to learn from their experiences. Bravo.

I look forward to seeing what they do next.

The Promise and Peril of MobileMe

Anyone tried MobileMe? Last night, I signed up for the free trial, got it syncing between my laptop and iPhone, and was incredibly impressed by how well and quickly it worked. An appointment added on one nearly instantly showed up on the other -- so much better than having to fire up iTunes to have my schedule in sync. The power of the cloud! Or whatever. You know, useful.

Then, today as I was running late for a meeting, I opened the phone app and saw "No Contacts." Uh, what? All of my contacts had been deleted from the phone. They were still on me.com and on my laptop, but what I had with me was a phone with no contacts...not useful.

I fired up the support chat window on me.com and went through a half-hour session of trying to get things working. At the end of that I gave up and am deleting my account, and hoping a manual sync (you know, with a cable and stuff) will restore my contacts.

Any similar experiences, or better? MobileMe seems like such a great idea, and one with such promise. Having it fail so completely on the very first day seems like such a miserable outcome. You can't help but be impressed with the parts that work; it is incredible engineering and design all around. That's no comfort when your data disappears, though. I'd love to hear what others have experienced; hopefully I'm an outlier. (For the record, I do have over 2,200 contacts, which I guess is a lot compared to other iPhone owners I know.)

App Growth, PalmOS vs iPhoneOS

There's a chart I've been meaning to put together for a while to explain why I'm expecting the iPhoneOS to be the dominant mobile platform for at least the next decade. I've been thinking of the role third-party applications played in helping Palm maintain its mobile platform dominance for about that same period, from 1996 to 2006. If you believe Palm apps were a primary cause of Palm's long-term success against Microsoft and other competitors -- apps which were far more awkward to install than iPhone apps, which had a far narrower range of interface or capabilities, and which for a long time didn't even have a network connection to use, and yet which still spawned the term "Palm Economy" to describe the developers making money off their sales -- then what has happened on the App Store over the past year should make the case for the iPhoneOS's dominance. Here, looky:

Over a ten-year period, the PalmOS grew to support about 29,000 apps. The App Store passed that mark about 10 months after launching, and by now has probably doubled it. Developers, developers, developers!

This NY Times article about Palm having trouble winning developers over to its new WebOS platform for the Pre seemed wistful to me considering the lead PalmOS had acquired and has now lost. I don't think that the Pre's design or keyboard -- nor, for that matter, the openness of Android, which I'd personally far prefer (here's why) -- can effectively compete with a platform that has so many developers excited about it, as iPhoneOS does. An ecosystem creates dominance, and Apple has succeeded at that in an incredibly impressive way.

I'll be interested to see if the new hardware interfaces in iPhoneOS 3.0 help Apple to build a hardware ecosystem, too. If so I may double the length of my bet.

Sources for the numbers in the chart:

• PalmOS:
• Dec. 1998 ("thousands")
• Aug. 2000
• Apr. 2001
• Jun. 2002
• Oct. 2003
• Apr. 2004
• Mar. 2006
• iPhoneOS:
• Jul. 2008
• Sep. 2008
• Mar. 2009
• Apr. 2009
• Jun. 2009

Four short posts: 12 May 2009

[Stealing Nat's "Four short" format again...]

1. I went to Google and searched for a non-location-specific term today (I can't be more specific since the search was for a birthday present for my wife, but let's pretend it was "baseball cards," since that was the general form -- a noun with nothing geographically-specific about it). On the first page of results was a list of shops in my neighborhood that sell that thing (in our pretend example, baseball card trading stores). The specificity of the local results was quite good. Now, I know full well that my IP address identifies my location all too accurately, and that Google and many other sites track that information -- and I've known that for a long time. Nonetheless, seeing my neighborhood right there in the search results made me want to never use any Google site again. Call it "uncanny valley" or "rubbing your face in it" or whatever you want -- it was just too close to home in the most literal sense. I'm off trying Yahoo Search as an alternative -- not that I have any reason to believe Yahoo treats such data any differently, but simply because having alternatives is a good thing. (For the record, I'm a noted privacy freak and I don't pretend to speak for anyone else on this topic. I know that resistance is futile. I continue to believe that there is a great divide on sensitivity about privacy -- you've either had your identity stolen or been stalked or had some great intrusion you couldn't fend off, or you haven't. I'm in the former camp and it colors the way I view and think about privacy online. It makes me indescribably sad to see how clearly I and others in my camp are losing this battle.)
2. I'd really like to end up on Wrong Tomorrow for predicting that the iPhone OS will be dominant for the next decade. Who knows? Prediction is completely impossible, which is one of the things that makes life fun. The tech industry seems particularly predictable, though, in that it just keeps acting in waves. The iPhone OS seems to be playing its cards right. Go ahead, commenters, freak out like you did the last time I said this. :)
3. I noted to a friend the other day (while encouraging him to go work there) that I measured Twitter's value by seeing Tweetie (an awesome iPhone Twitter client) ascend to one of the four apps in the bottom bar of my iPhone. Those bottom bar apps are the ones I use all the time (the others being the phone, SMS, and email apps). Tweetie replaced Safari, the web browser, which is pretty amazing as a symbolic shift. No other third-party app -- including my own company's app -- has made it into the bottom bar for me. Who says Twitter isn't valuable?
4. In contrast, using Twitter makes Facebook like watching repeats on local TV when you're home sick. I really hope the automated and out-of-control cross-posting comes to an end soon. Facebook wins for posting private messages and having inline replies; Twitter wins by letting you see the data some way other than through the official orifice (desktop clients, iPhone apps, SMS, etc). I would accept separate message streams for different types of data; or the death of Facebook in my friend group -- whatever. Unfortunately I doubt I'll get either wish.

Four quick posts: 11 April 2009

[I love Nat's "Four short links" format and am ripping it off to try to get myself blogging again. Instead of links, these are four blog posts I've been meaning to write but haven't.]

1. It turns out Facebook is not completely useless if you're married! And no, I'm not talking about the world's most overvalued Scrabble platform, and I don't mean "I'm in an open relationship." Instead, I was shocked this week to find that Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing private photos. I've considered myself a member of the Flickr generation for some time now, but when posting pictures of my daughter, I set them to "Friends and Family" only. My Flickr contacts seem to get pictures mostly via RSS, and since no RSS message is posted for private photos, they never see my shots. Facebook, though, by making their Newsfeed a site-only feature, brings people to their site every day, which in turn lets them see my private postings. I posted a picture on Flickr and wound up with zero favorites and one comment (as it turns out, from a Flickr employee who happens to be a contact); I later posted the same picture on Facebook and got 8 favorites and 11 comments. Flickreenos: you should put a message in RSS feeds that says, "Marc just posted a private photo -- click here to see it." Or, you know, add a Scrabble app.


2. Is there any doubt the iPhone has totally won the mobile platform war? I don't really get why Palm is even bothering to launch the Pre. "It's the App Store, stupid." It took the original Palm OS about 12 years to reach 50,000 applications developed for Palm OS; in under a year, the iPhone OS already has 25,000 applications available. The App Store promises to fulfill many developers' dream -- to work alone and strike it rich. Palm is competing by trying to match the UI, and that won't work. The Android team made a smart move recently by working on a home automation platform; changing the playing field is probably their best bet.


3. Related: the App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it's a feature. If you can't get an app approved until it's working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you're much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right. That raises the quality level across the App Store. Palm is talking about lowering the bar for development of apps, and I bet that will fill their platform with crap-ass, low quality one-offs, and people will learn to distrust apps as being valuable; instead they'll just be widgets.


4. Nearly all of the things that have gotten me excited online over the past year involve making media faster and easier to consume over the air (OTA): Boxee, Roku, Kindle for iPhone, even sad-sack Hulu. A lot fewer Amazon boxes are showing up at my house, even though I'm buying plenty of media from them through Kindle and Roku. OTA-media FTW! Now we just need a DRM revolution so I can actually own this stuff instead of getting a lame-ass license.

Kindle Above the Level of a Single Device

Hey, I'm happy to see this in the news today:

Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch. Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers.

I complained about "The Kindle Hardware Tax" earlier. Glad to get a tax cut. Thanks, Amazon.

Now, about that DRM......

Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight

[A note to start. My company, Wesabe, is funded in part by a venture firm, Union Square Ventures, which is one of the funders of Boxee, a character in the drama described below. That said, I've never met or spoken with anyone from Boxee, and have only ever talked to Union Square about them to ask for an invite. I don't have any access to any inside information about Boxee. This post is based instead on the time I spent working at Lucasfilm from 1997 to 1999. Well, really, the following isn't based on Lucasfilm itself, but instead on my conversations with the major studios (of which Lucasfilm is not one -- Fox/Disney/etc., who control distribution, are) about this topic of video on the Internet, which was just starting to be hotly debated at the time.

Some of the comments below also come from participating in discussions about copy protection and Divx, which, if you'll remember, was at that time a self-destructing DVD-like format that would let the studios control how long you could watch their entertainment. No, seriously, it started to self-destruct when it was exposed to air and these people all thought it was certain to win over DVD. Wrong, but instructive.]

The secret to understanding why Hulu's "content providers" -- and boy do they love being called that -- have instructed Hulu to block Boxee users from their "content" -- again, not what they would call it -- isn't some big secret. In fact, it was broadcast during the Superbowl, in Hulu's excellent Superbowl ad:

[Update: I'm told you can't see that embedded video unless you live in the US. If you don't, can you see this YouTube copy? I'll laugh if that works. Let me know. Update again: Yeah, you can watch the Hulu ad from anywhere on YouTube. That's awesome. It's even Hulu's YouTube account that posted it!]

Here's the relevant part, as spoken by Alec Baldwin:

Hulu beams TV directly to your [sardonic gesture to the camera] portable computing devices, giving you more of the cerebral-gelatinizing shows you want, any time, anywhere, for free.

Emphasis added: portable computing devices. Not to your TV -- from your TV. To your dumb-ass laptop, you smelly, hairy, friendless, gamer-freak nerd. (Sorry, I hate to talk about you that way, but that's how they think of the Internet. I think you smell great.) To your TV is something completely different, and from the "content providers'" point of view, completely wrong. Aren't Apple and Tivo and YouTube bad enough as it is?

Boxee was featured in an awesome New York Times article one month ago, with a picture of their product on a big-screen TV, and Hulu's logo clearly visible in the upper right corner. I can almost hear some lawyer somewhere in Hollywood screaming, "I thought Hulu was a WEB SITE! I do NOT see a WEB BROWSER in this PHOTOGRAPH!" at the sight of it. Boxee's blog post on the controversy says they heard from Hulu about this two weeks ago; I'd bet Hulu heard from that lawyer two weeks before that -- the morning the article appeared. Those calls are fun.

You'd think the "content providers" would know already this -- Boxee -- would happen; even with Hulu gone from Boxee, I can still watch Hulu on my TV, albeit with a much lamer interface. Hooking a computer to a TV is easy enough. Maybe they did know, and just waited to see how Boxee would get along until it got too high-profile to ignore. I doubt it, though. Most entertainment lawyers don't go for the idea, "Let's allow it for a little while and see what happens." They instead argue, "Let's stop it immediately and see if we have a better option we can control more, later." I'd guess Hulu had a deal to show "content" on computers, and the "content providers" balked when those computers started talking to their precious televisions.

So why does Hulu exist at all? Hulu must have seemed like the "better option" for getting people to watch TV ads on their computers -- better, perhaps, than the iTunes Music Store selling the same "content" piecemeal and getting price control over video as they have for music. Or, perhaps, than YouTube, selling and showing ads without the studios necessarily involved in any way. Let's control ads on the Internet by putting them on our "content" through Hulu, an entertainment industry company, not a smelly nerd company. Great. It's a plan.

Maybe BitTorrent came up in the discussion, but I doubt it -- BitTorrent is for smelly nerds. This isn't about you folks. This is about the mass market. Those people can't be disrupting their TV watching with some WEB SITE they saw in the NEW YORK TIMES.

So that's my guess about why Hulu blocked Boxee: those ads you see on Heroes are higher margin when you see them on your TV than when you see them on Hulu, and the only reason they're on Hulu is to make money from Heroes when you watch it online, so Apple or Google doesn't make that money instead. They were meant for your "portable computing devices" and not your precious TV. Now go back to the couch until we call for you again.

I'm sure Hulu is totally pissed. They pretty much said just that in a somewhat more stilted way. The real insult, though, is calling the people who made them cut Boxee off "content providers." They might as well have told the studios they are the moral equivalent of the guy schlepping reels around the projector booth. Someone will win this war eventually, they seem to be saying, and you could have helped make it us. Now you have a choice: someone else -- not you, someone smart -- will win instead, or you can change your mind.

That's pretty much my view, too. DVDs (mentioned in the note at the start) became a big boon for the studios, once their crazy ideas about self-destructing Divx discs went the way of the Dodo. The studios have a very long history of betting against technology people want, and on technology people don't want. This is just another such case. The technology people want always wins in the end -- no duh -- and usually benefits the businesses who fought that technology to the death. Here's hoping the technology people want -- Boxee -- doesn't wind up benefiting the studios fighting it now.

The Kindle Hardware Tax

There's a lot of news about Amazon's new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don't want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I'm hoping the early suggestions that Amazon is thinking that way prove true.

I use my iPhone for ebooks all the time now. I buy through Stanza, a very nice app, which is backended into Fictionwise. The buying experience between the two is pretty much terrible -- syncing down to the phone is painful, and having to enter your full credit card number to "unlock" the DRM makes me angry and frustrated at the same time -- but it's certainly good enough to make me excited about ebooks. I recently found myself wetting my fingers to turn the pages of a Stanza book I was reading -- the illusion that I'm reading a book is convincing.

Amazon has an interesting set of choices to make about how to proceed. This market seems like a pretty clear case of Tim's core Web 2.0 idea of "software above the level of a single device" -- do they really believe they can own the ebook device market and the ebook format market? do I really want to buy their hardware to read all the ebooks I read? I'm skeptical. I think if Amazon really makes Kindle books available on any hardware, including their own, they'll win. If I have to buy a $350 device -- or even a $99 device -- carry it, charge it, pay for otherwise free blogs on it, and so on, that won't work for me and someone else will win instead.

My devices have a history of merging or dying. I was an early adopter of the Palm Pilot, but stopped upgrading after the Palm V, which kind of worked for me, until the Treo came out, merging my phone with the PalmOS. That won out until the iPhone, which merged my phone, organizer, and iPod. The Kindle asks me to separate out a merged-in app for the benefit of -- well, what benefit? The display? It's nice, but not nice enough to take on the cost and the bother of a separate piece of hardware.

Amazon has every opportunity to trump the Fictionwise/Stanza book-buying experience -- Stanza's experience certainly isn't "One-Click." Worse, the prices in Fictionwise are higher than Kindle -- not to mention print -- for many of the books I've compared. For example: the last book I read on Stanza, The Art of Racing in the Rain, works out as follows (highest price to lowest):

[UPDATE: after posting this, I noticed that the price on Fictionwise for Stanza (stanza.fictionwise.com) is $2.84 more than the main Fictionwise site (www.fictionwise.com) price. Weird! I've updated the table and comments below.]

Kindle prices in that one case are beating both new and used print prices, and are trouncing the Fictionwise/Stanza price for apples-to-apples comparison. A number of other books I checked are substantially more expensive on Stanza than they are in hardcover, paperback, used, or Kindle.

I'm already paying for cell phone service, so it might well cost Amazon less to sell me a Kindle book than it would to sell the same Kindle book to a Kindle owner, assuming their profits aren't all in the device itself. Presumably they have better price negotiation power with the publishers, based on their existing print book sales, so they might well be able to compete on price for some time. Oh, and: I would totally pay $20 for a well-made Amazon Kindle iPhone app if it gave me access to books at Kindle prices. It seems like costs add up well on Amazon's side.

While the new Kindle upgrade is nice, owning another device is a kind of a tax. They need to care a lot less about the hardware business than they do about the software service. They're positioned to win on the latter and lose on the former.

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