It's in the Bag! The Apple Tablet Computing Device

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 26

In the past 25 years, the personal computing revolution has evolved from tethered (desktop) to luggable (portable) to joined-at-the-hip (mobile).

Via the iPhone Platform (including iPod Touch), Apple has set the bar for mobile computing by seamlessly integrating computation, communications, and media across hardware, software, and service layers.

No less integral, Apple has significantly evolved ecosystem development models by cobbling together developer tools, media relationships, marketplace/e-wallet functions, one-click software distribution, explicit platform governance, and a simple, but compelling, approach to sharing revenue with developers.

But, the pièce de résistance has been a touch, tilt, sensor, and virtual keyboard-based user interaction model that has rendered the traditional physical keyboard plus WIMP-based model (i.e., windows, icons, menus, and pointing device) as so last century, the proverbial horse-and-buggy to Apple's Model T.

The end result is that the iPhone has become the first truly personal computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was, a truth that bubbles to the top again and again when you talk to the 50M (combined) iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

Thus, the core thesis of this article is two-fold. One, that while Apple remains committed to cultivating its position in the legacy desktop /portable segment via the Mac, they understand that they will never be the leader of the PC market.

Two, given their dominance in mobile computing platforms, Apple will expand upon their iPhone strategy by attacking an "undefended hill" (an HP axiom) that's less hospitable to desktops/portables; namely, the bag-carrying consumer (think: purses, backpacks, briefcases, and the like).

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iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 5

There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.

MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to disappointment that goes with being dubbed an 'iPhone Killer.'

BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.

No less, Apple has levered its market leadership position with iPhone (and the iPod Touch) to create a halo effect on the rest of its business, generating bottom line results that are industry-defining (see analysis of Apple's Q4 results HERE).

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, shaped by the history of Apple vs Microsoft during the PC Wars, tells us that Android is 'destined' to be bigger than the iPhone worldwide.

And to be clear, would-be iPhone slayers are indeed establishing strategic positions that have the potential to become compelling and differentiated within the mobile market. Examples include:

• Android: We are more open than Apple;


• RIM: We are more enterprise-ready;


• Palm Pre: We are more web-native;


• Android, RIM, Nokia, et al: We are a heterogeneous device platform.

But, alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Many of the above solutions are at a functional stage where they still fail to deliver a 'more than the sum of the parts' experience - at a time when Apple is clicking on all cylinders from a product innovation and new product pipeline perspective.

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Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 30

"It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another...In four short years, the 'talkie' will completely subsume the silent movie." - from The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman

The "Come to Jesus" Moment for the Book Business
In the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people read anymore?

Web content, video games, iPhone apps, Facebook sessions, YouTube videos, iTunes libraries, and Hulu media programming drive significant portions of our clickstream activity throughout the day.

Talking on the phone, emailing, and other forms of messaging sop up huge chunks of our free time, too.

As a consequence, book sales are stagnating, and have been for some time (this coincides with declines in all forms of print media - news and magazines included).

In big box retail land, Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble, is on life support. The independent bookstore is a shrinking breed, with less than 10% of the market.

Meanwhile, Amazon is the book industry's boogeyman, given their market share and proximity to the customer's wallet (the all important "billing relationship"). And the Kindle e-Book reader has the potential to entirely dis-intermediate the book publisher or, minimally, exert even stronger pricing power over them.

More terrifying, the book industry has no idea how to effectively market a book in a world devoid of bookstores, save for the hail-mary of an Oprah recommendation.

"Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter," says one powerful agent. "Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them."

And owing to a decades-old "consigment logic," unsold inventory is "remaindered." This is a euphemism for the practice of shredding unsold books and magazines. Not exactly green-friendly.

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The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 8

Somewhere between the realm of Personal and Shared media lies the realm of the Universal.

The realm of the universal is the Library of the Commons, a global repository of user-generated and crowd-sourced media and information.

Services that logically nest in the Library include: Amazon, Yelp, YouTube, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter tweets, Bit.ly items, Scribd docs, Expedia, Google News, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, iTunes, the App Store and any other services and/or information sources that 'just work.'

In other words, these are services that have defined the 'IT' to the point that we can now pretty much take their utility and availability for granted (typically via API access and/or embed codes with some form of customization wizard).

The Genesis of a Library

So how did we get to this place in the story? What gave birth to the Library of the Commons?

No one formally deigned it so, but from the countless me-too services borne of the dotcom and Web 2.0 land rushes, the above-referred services are the ones that cultivated the biggest audiences, grew the richest ecosystems and inspired the deepest engagement levels.

In Darwinian terms, these are the survivors, whose structures and workflows have been defined and refined by time/experience.

As such, they are generally well thought out, holistic and integrated, but more to the point, have large, engaged user bases.

Thus, the Commons presents a riddle. Almost as if inspired by Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game', the riddle is this.

If all of these services yield a smorgasbord of best practices, why not systematically emulate them so as to...FEDERATE them?

Put another way, what if a time came when people ceased trying to perennially re-create the wheel, and instead, started to 'decompose' these services; to empty their function sets from whatever nesting they were contained within; and to re-apply them into new contexts supported by a now federated data flow proxied within the Cloud.

Couldn't the composite feature set be exposed switchboard-style to enable any number of custom services and client apps?

To put some meat on the conceptual skeleton, consider the following exercise that I recently did:

A decomposition of Craigslist and TripAdvisor yields deep profiles that are accessorized and interconnected via context traversal flows, such as categorization routines, places, events, airfares, posts, pages, ratings, discussion threads, offers, jobs, businesses, products and personal listings.

Craigslist offers up 36 different sub-types of items For Sale; Services represent another 19 sub-types; Jobs 41 more; Discussions, another 72. And so it goes (including Housing, Personals and Community) across 175+ geo-locales.

TripAdvisor is an instance of this model that overlays a set of time-tested workflows specific to the relatively complex task of planning a vacation.

These workflows make it easy to match a travel plan to specific tastes, requirements and budget - regardless of the information traversal path you pursued to being ready to get pricing on desired travel dates.

Could these same workflows be re-purposed for researching and then purchasing other similarly complex products or services?

I will come back to that thought, in a moment.

The Rise of the Infodex

What is de-composed, can be re-assembled, and thus begins the Infodex.

The Infodex is a kind of next-generation Rolodex, with aspirations to grow into a real-time marketplace.

What exactly is the Infodex? It is comprised of three parts.

Part one is a listing tool for linking to content, creating a metadata wrapper around media items and encapsulating the above-referenced services (i.e., Yelp, YouTube, WIkipedia) into listing containers that define and expose the methods that one can interface to the media item (framework integrity stuff).

Part two is an indexing engine so that, once simple rules are defined, your media libraries and the information in the listings themselves becomes 'self-organizing.'

Named picture types (globes, animals, historic or famous images), for example, could be a federation of multiple picture services (Flickr, Photobucket, Getty Images) and 'discovered' pictures from past queries.

Looked at from this perspective, the goal, in part, is to establish a cloud-based, crowd-sourced Dewey Decimal System built around the outcome of facilitating better searching, compositing, cross-indexing, sharing, archiving, and analytics functions for specific media and information 'types.'

Part three of the Infodex is a unified runtime player that is congruent with the information flows of the mobile broadband age; namely, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and Web (Javascript/Flash embeds/Adobe AIR) based viewing/playback environments.

One simple example of a basic type of function that might be propagated across all of these environments is the Three Item Topical List (e.g., Top Three Favorites or Three Most Related Items). Define once, propagate everywhere.

A core assumption of the model is that both the media player and the service integration layers are open-sourced. This ensures that the user experience is uniformly good across all of these services, and pushes proprietary-ness higher up the stack, thus raising the floor for all comers.

A final thought. Google became Google by indexing the web. Couldn't the next generation extend this approach by being federated, crowd-sourced and context-specific (i.e., media, information and service aware)?

Are their obvious best practices for The Commons? Obvious gotchas? What about the Infodex?

Related Posts:

1. Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons


2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication


3. The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

Touch Traveler: London, Paris and only an iPod Touch

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 26

Recently, I spent two weeks vacationing in London and Paris with only an iPod Touch for communications and connectivity.

As I wanted to honor the fact that the trip was to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary, my wife/I didn't bring either a mobile phone or a PC/Mac.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that this was a wise thing to do, but it's what I did, and this post captures the good, bad and ugly of the experience.

First off, the revelation (for me) was how much the Google Mobile Maps App on iPod Touch completely changes the equation when traveling. Touch-based control with a virtual keyboard is the perfect UI for zooming in and out of geo-locales, and Mobile Maps offers a workflow whose predictability and logical structure both de-mystifies and anchors foreign travel.

Moreover, Maps allows you to visually navigate in Real-Time (very different from the experience on my Blackberry), all the while push-pinning favorite destinations, and determining routes in just a few clicks. It is the consummate reality augmentation application for travel, a sort of "magic compass."

Case in point, is a context traversal function whereby you search for and find a destination. Right clicking on the pin reveals listing info, and left clicking takes you into Street View, revealing a 360-degree panoramic view of the target destination.

Street View provided a form of error-correction since you could visually confirm that a given destination was indeed the right destination, an extra bit of piece of mind when visiting a new area.

Candidly, I wish that Maps was even more autonomous about capturing my real-time travels and indexing them, as then I would never need to re-trace my steps, not to mention the entertainment value of being able to replay the day's travels at a later time.

Similarly, if you could somehow overlay your interaction data with that of locals, professionals (e.g., Fodors) and other travelers, you could create a very potent social fabric that is data rich, and can be filtered on parameters such as user-generated, professionally mastered, crowd-sourced and/or curated.

To frame this one, let me give you a specific example from my trip. I was walking through St-Germain in Paris when I had a flashback to the last time I was there (eight years before).

Back then, I had eaten at this incredible sandwich place nearby St-Germain. The restaurant made their own breads, had good sandwich combinations, and was an earnest, warm place. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember its name or specific location.

I remembered, however, that the sandwich place became a retail chain in New York. (It's good, but nowhere near as good as the original shop.)

While I couldn't remember the name, I did remember them having a branch near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, so I opened the Yelp app on my iPod Touch, and typed in "sandwiches" near the geo of Rockefeller Center, and up came Cosi. (Note: Yelp had limited data for London and none for Paris).

Next, I fired up the Maps App, typed in "Cosi," and a pin dropped on the map.

I clicked on the pin, and it confirmed that I had been staying less than two blocks from this place for the past week! I then left-clicked, and saw a picture that took me back eight years.

Lunch? It was everything that I remembered.

Meanwhile, another App that we used throughout the trip was Facebook. My wife and I were sharing one iPod Touch, and Facebook really delivered in terms of being very easy/seamless to log into and out of our respective accounts, not to mention providing (relatively) full access to Facebook's services.

In fact, it was through Facebook that I loosely tracked the vacation that my brother and his family were currently taking in Israel, Jordan, and Greece.

I had some short exchanges with my niece, and there was a reference to a London overlap, but it didn't seem like the times meshed.

Days later, my wife and I are walking from the Kensington Park area where we were staying to Harrods in Knightsbridge.

45 minutes later, we are ogling over the sweets and pastry section of Harrods (if you have never been there, it is a spectacle; they have everything). Suddenly, a voice chimes out, "I didn't think they let your type in here." I turn around, and it's my brother and his youngest son.

It turns out that he had tried to call me the night before to let me know that he had changed his itinerary, and that they were going to be in London while we were there. But, I brought no phone so I never got that message.

Similarly, he had emailed me, but it turned out that he sent it to an address that is not received on my iPod Touch, so I never got that message.

Finally, he had gotten the wrong hotel information from my parents (we booked our room just days before we left), and so he couldn't leave us a message at our hotel either.

Yet, just hours after landing in London, here we were face to face at Harrods in London.

Kismet, to be sure, but I am left wondering whether technology helped (the Facebook exchange with my niece), hindered (wrong emails, unanswered phone calls), or was simply a neutral observer in this outcome.

Keeping it real, one paradox presented by relying on the iPod Touch as the sole connectivity device was that connectivity was, by definition, intermittent since the iPod Touch depends upon ready access to Wi-Fi for connectivity, a sketchy bet for mobile travelers.

In London, this meant that 99% of the time, I had decent Wi-Fi connectivity at my hotel but no connectivity when mobile. This was key as we walked a ton, and took the Underground a lot (it is a great service).

Not having reliable connectivity in mobile contexts crippled some of the utility of Google Mobile Maps since it essentially removed the Real-Time goodness of the app. Moreover, it crimped the ability to search for nearby restaurants when on the move.

By contrast, in Paris we were able to grab onto "gray" connectivity within 5-10 minutes of trying to do so. This, at the very least, gave us a sense of intermittent connectivity being reliable.

Gray connectivity was captured two ways. One was via a discovery of Wi-Fi connections within the Settings tab, and jumping from one connection to the next until we found live access. Primitive, but fungible.

The second was that we discovered a service provider that offered different tiers of Wi-Fi access on-demand, including a "20 Minutes Free" option, which was like getting a lucky board game roll.

Armed with some sense of being able to queue up requests, messages, grab map views and the like, geo navigation became tactile, a virtual, but distinct, overlay to our physical navigation.

The ability to visually follow block-by-block, and see the storefront of a business blocks or miles away was very powerful.

At times, it felt like Mobile Maps was a divining rod pulling us to our destination.

What was almost magical was how Maps seemed designed to watch proactively in the background for a live connection so it could autonomously update location data when connectivity was intermittent.

I was more than once surprised to discover that Maps had used a sliver of momentary connectivity, and updated location with no prodding from me.

That said, it seems that Apple could make MobileMe even more essential for iPod Touch owners by bundling into it a Boingo-like Wi-Fi Universal Pass so at least queue-level store and forward services can autonomously be negotiated for the mobility-oriented user.

A couple of final notes: One is that my wife realized tremendous utility in using the Notes App to capture daily food & water intake and other related health data. This was a simple, powerful, and recurring workflow for her.

Two is that during the trip I finished my first Kindle book on the iPod Touch, 'Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.'

I absolutely loved the fact that when I found myself with a five-minute slug of time (waiting in lobby, bathroom, at coffee), I could read a chunk of pages and click out as easily as I had clicked in (since the Kindle App automatically bookmarks where you left off).

It, like the iPod Touch itself, was a perfect travel companion.

Related Posts:

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2. Nine Essential Truths for Entrepreneurial Success


3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems

APPLE is EVIL, You're All Fanboys and other half-truths

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 32

There is a meme afoot. Apple is evil. Its arrogant ways and dependence on the cult of personality are to be its demise. Developers are said to be unhappy. And, Apple Secrecy Doesn’t Scale.

Google-ification is the way, the RIGHT way.

The Apple Way can’t possibly persist ad infinitum.

You Apple fanboys; you just don’t get it. Ol’ Steve (Jobs) is fooling you again into buying his sugar water.

You’re just too dumb to realize it.

But, you know what? It’s a crock of sh-t!

In the here and now, Apple's success is unparalleled, and the engine is humming better than ever on multiple vectors - products, margins, developers, profits and consumer engagement.

Simply put, the goodness of Google-style openness, and the good tidings it provides for consumers and creators, does not in anyway invalidate, lessen or neutralize the effectiveness of Apple's proprietary, integrated, secretive, totalitarian-style approach.

Contrast Apple’s product birthing, operating discipline and market realization process with…ANYONE. That speaks volumes, I think.

That’s why in the burgeoning iPhone, iPod touch and (soon) iPad Tablet mobile broadband device ecosystem (46M units, 65K apps, 1.5B app downloads, 8B song downloads, and counting), unless and until there is a better alternative, the lion's share of developers will bitch in the morning and double down in the afternoon...on all things Apple.

All of that said, a paradox for Apple is this. For Apple, it's never about total units. It’s about value, differentiation, leverage and margins. Let others chase unit counts at all costs.

For developers, however, at a certain point it DOES become about units, if for no other reason than once enough numbers are installed on a given platform, it’s market share that is worth pursuing (by building native offerings for).

The part that is invisible is that at some point an Android gets ready for prime time (John Gruber ponders this one well in his post 'The Android Opportunity'); or a Pre-type of device establishes a real beachhead with developers; or RIM gets a clue in terms of an apps/ecosystem strategy, and all of the sudden, Apple is having to play defense. At the present, it is just running up the score.

We really can’t definitely say WHEN the alarm bell will sound. But, to be sure, it’s a WHEN, not an IF.

Why? One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to mobile broadband.

The day is coming, though, and that is a good thing, inasmuch as lack of competition leads to sloth where product innovation matters are concerned.

Disclaimer: I generally (but not always) prefer the type of integrated, fully formed solution that Apple delivers to what feels like a more 'lowest common denominator' oriented approach by Google. Your mileage may vary.

Related Posts:

1. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix


2. The Scorpion, the Frog and the iPhone SDK


3. Analysis: Apple June Quarter Earnings Call

Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 11

Analog (old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution, the net effect of which is to enable publishers to price access to their “toll roads” as they see fit.

Digital (new) media, by contrast, is premised on the assumption that the tools for content creation, selling, distributing and marketing enable meta-professionals and prosumers to create a surplus of “good enough” content.

This content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it.

As such, when the forces of analog media collide with digital media, as they have in music, newspapers, yellow pages, books and magazines (and are beginning to collide in television and movies), a brutally efficient “creative destruction” process occurs.

Simply put, if the digital forces can assemble a “good enough” version of the un-tethered content, then in most cases, the analog media provider is in deep trouble (read: devastating business model disruption).

Understanding Media Disruption

My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been “hollowed out,” reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition.

Why PAY for content that is less deep, less differentiated than I can get online elsewhere for FREE? It's a vicious cycle.

My once-favorite local news station, KRON, no longer has sports on the weekends; it runs more syndicated content and requires that its reporters operate their own cameras to minimize cost. It's definitely struggling. KNBR, which is the sports radio station that I listen to, tells a similar story.

Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages anymore? That would have been unfathomable when I was growing up.

Now, Google is the Yellow Pages.

On some level, it really is as simple as saying that Craigslist killed the classified ads business, which in turn, killed the newspaper business.

The music business was once supremely cool. Records were cool. The whole chain between record producers, tour promoters and record stores was pretty cool.

Remember record stores? Whither Tower Records. Heck, even Blockbuster is standing on some wobbly legs.

Strangely, it's not that the music suddenly is less good. In fact, I probably listen to as much music as I ever have.

It's just that the "disruption" cow has left the barn (and is living in my iPod), and there is no turning back.

In this case, there are just too many incentives for the performers to maximize their online availability and shift their monetization to other sources, like touring and merchandising.

As a result, the music producer/promoter has been pushed to the backseat (for now).

(Un)Differentiated Media

It seems that the only safe havens are highly differentiated media creators that can’t readily be replicated elsewhere, such as the type of original programming one sees on HBO (e.g., check out: True Blood); the vertical/demographically targeted cable channels (where old media distribution rules still promulgate); and big budget movies, where production values (and production costs) are out of the reach of meta-professionals.

That is what makes the furor playing out with AP, all the more interesting.

AP is a syndicated content and news distribution service that makes its money offering infill content to (traditionally) analog media sources.

In the online world, however, the digital form of AP’s fee-based media is fodder for enabling digital publishers to link to, reference and excerpt from these same stories, typically without paying a nickel to AP.

Now, AP wants to turn back the hands of time by limiting/restricting access to and usage of that content.

Meanwhile, digital media advocates are citing fair use, and you just know that this can’t end well for AP, as their product is fundamentally undifferentiated.

That is not to suggest that they have no case, at least karmically speaking, but it's akin to arguing about oxygen. This is the atmosphere that they operate within.

The media industry would have to exercise a collective re-set to turn the tide on this one. Maybe they will, but I am skeptical.

Re-thinking The Audience and Your Product

Extending the conversation further, Fred Wilson’s post, ‘Monetize The Audience, Not The Content’ (read the comments section) presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, I totally agree with the objective of building your business around your audience.

But, I also think that a true solution needs to reconcile how the product or service evolves to achieve differentiation in such a universe; and that is a bigger challenge.

Here, my specific assertion is that while not all content is created equal, a whole heck of a lot of it is fundamentally undifferentiated.

In the case of The New York Times (a high profile pub that Fred regularly writes about), there are a few star writers, but none of which are such must-reads as to drive users to pay for access to them (hence, the failure of NYT's Times Select).

I love reading Frank Rich; Maureen Dowd is pretty entertaining; and Thomas Friedman is thought-provoking. Plus, there are 6-7 other times throughout the month that I find myself reading a Times article.

But, I've seriously never considered paying for access to them, and when the Select thing was in effect, and folks like Friedman were behind lock and key, I mostly forgot about them.

Case in point, whatever happened to Howard Stern after he left broadcast radio? Is the King of All Media even relevant anymore?

Don't tell me how much he is worth now. Tell me this. What happened to his audience?

It's a hard truth, but while there are 10+ good “enough” quality news/opinions sources for every news story of the day (and they are easy to find and well-indexed vis-a-via Techmeme and Google News), there is no "good enough" cheap/free alternative to the Ridley Scott directed, Christian Bale starring action movie.

As such, the NYT’s of the world face a real paradox. Their brand is their content, and without continuing to cultivate their content and innovate the way it's presented, which costs money, they have no durable audience.

Thus, I think a better path is to:

1. Come up with well-defined linkages between online and offline workflows. For example, print subscribers get access to deeper analysis, better tools for saving, excerpting, sharing and finding related content;
2. Create new types of media/engagement units that reward loyalty, communit-ize it, perhaps game-ify it;
3. Re-think segmentation (and pricing) across high-end, low-end, hyper-local, and vertical-specific distinctions, and re-work the product accordingly.

Apple, Record Labels serve up 'Cocktail'

So it seems fortuitous, that as I am updating this post, word filters into the blogosphere that Apple's long-rumored Tablet computing device is due in September (the Friday rumors said Q1, 2010), and that Apple is working with the record labels to re-invent the packaged music experience for the digital realm. Smart!

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting.

Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

New York Story

Ending where we began, creative destruction has had a field day with the media business (and by virtue of its association, advertising as well).

To get to the other side intact, the NYT’s of the world have to figure out what they are that a focused, less expensive blogger, prosumer or meta-creator can’t emulate.

With brutal efficiency, this truth will separate those that can meaningfully, unquestionably differentiate from those that can’t.

Prognosis: more hurting ahead; then the industry finds its footing, begins a renaissance, and gets back on offense.

Related Posts:

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2. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix
3. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations
4. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
5. Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN

The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 7

“Listen to the technology; find out what it is telling you.” – Carver Mead

The DOS-era was marked by a certain style of computing.  It was primitive, largely devoid of graphics, and for developers, an exercise in scarcity management.

In fact, the scarcity mindset was so endemic to the time that it gave rise to the urban legend that Microsoft’s Bill Gates even once sagely noted that “640K (of program memory) ought to be enough for everyone.” (the story is likely apocryphal);

Windows, in turn, gave rise to another computing form, one that was ubiquitous, almost to the point of homogeneity; it was also graphical and added connectivity to the mix, a trend that Microsoft was able to leverage into near-total hegemony during the first decade of the Internet Age.

Now, all of this is giving rise to another era, the age of Mobile Broadband, best exemplified by the iPhone, the first caveat-free mobile platform.

In two short years, the iPhone has enveloped the planet, with a 77 country global footprint, a 40M iPhone/iPod touch user base, 65K apps rolled out, those same apps downloaded 1.5B times and a 100K developer ecosystem.

This got me thinking about Carver Mead’s mantra. If DOS had one form of “native” application, and Windows had another, what then are the cornerstones of a native mobile broadband app?

Put another way; before iPhone, the industry answer to the mobile question was more akin to coaxing a dog to walk on its hind legs than watching a bird fly.  In other words, more hack and parlor trick than true dharma.

The Message is the Medium

Forty years ago, media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserted that the “medium is the message,” as a way of underscoring how different forms of media are imbued with their own contextual forms of meaning.

Yet, as we sit at the waking hours of the Mobile Broadband Era, it is hard not to conclude that it is The Message that is to be the defining characteristic of this era.

Why, The Message?  Simply put, messages have compelling attributes.  One, they can be date stamped and packaged up to elegantly deal with both real-time and asynchronous communication scenarios.

Two, messages can be transported on a one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, man-to-man, man-to-machine, and machine-to-machine basis (e.g., device to server, device to device), facilitating a wide variety of unidirectional, multidirectional, manual, automated and programmatic communication flows.

Three, as Twitter’s simple “140 characters meets open API” model suggests, a message can simultaneously be simple (it doesn’t get much simpler than 140 characters) AND support rich payloads, auto-generate events, catalyze discussion threads, and be designed to make creating derivatives easy, all the while supporting the exposition, partitioning and instantiation of all sorts of Client, Server and Service application hybrids.

That’s why it’s “interesting” that when Google announced Wave, its open source, open protocol messaging platform, the blogosphere’s response ranged from applause to derision and confusion.

In part, this is understandable, inasmuch as Wave represents an evolved sense of what real-time communication flows look like, and sometimes, the most game-changing ideas take a while to germinate (let alone actually execute the value proposition).

Hence, it’s reasonable to expect that they will initially be met with a shrug.

At its core, though, I think that Google is solving the right problem by focusing on messaging, and would suggest that the most basic thing that they can do relative to making Wave a success is to eat their own dog food by writing and exposing wrappers to all of their services directly within Wave.

At its most basic, Wave begs the question of why can't Mail, Maps, YouTube, Gmail, News, Feeds, Documents and Blogger be better integrated within Google?

But beyond that, if Google is serious about Wave they should enable developers (and meta developers – e.g., the former Visual Basic crowd) to build their own Wave apps by compositing Google service functions through one simplified wizard-like interface.

Similarly, Google should take what they have done with shortcuts in Gmail, and expand it to their other products so that users have a palette of simplified scripts that they can call upon in a context-aware fashion with little technical know how (i.e., what can be called in Maps may be different than Gmail or News for that matter).

Then, Google can focus on providing the best client, service, media, search, analytics and developer tools for Wave on a number of platforms, an approach which is congruent with supporting Chrome and Android, while remaining open to iPhone, Windows, the Mac, etc.

And of course, a whole ecosystem of data feed services, tool builders and service providers can piggyback on all of this goodness.

Information Mobility is Superconductivity

Like many people, I am a member of multiple social (Facebook), professional (LinkedIn) and affiliated interest networks (favorite blogs), places where I cultivate my online persona, build a profile, upload content, participate in conversations and manage my connections with friends, followers and the like.

In the old days, I had to create my identity over and over, upload the same content repeatedly and perform unnatural acts to cobble together the sum total of my online efforts in some meaningful way.

But, thanks to services like Facebook Connect, Twitter API, OpenSocial, and “embeddable” flash widgets, I can create, converge and connect locally, but share that same information globally with minimal (or, much less) effort.

This is the power of information mobility, the premise that a user’s online actions, from login and session instantiation to status updating, profile exchange, photo posting, tweets, comments, movies/music buying/watching/rating can be spread liberally across all of their devices, networks and runtime spaces.

It’s about command, control and orchestration of the online “Me,” a domain which touches realms like publishing, distribution, information management, and privacy.

This is why information mobility, when it really kicks in (i.e., is on the right side of S-curve), becomes a self-affirming engine of systemic growth.

Cloud-ification is Upon Us

When mobile broadband is stripped to its core, you are really left with two underlying constructs.  One is the premise of being able to access your media, information and apps anytime, anywhere, and two is the precept that you need fast, perpetual connectivity to make the user experience reliable and robust enough to become mission critical.

This is the domain of cloud computing, a mode whereby software, hardware and service layers are loosely coupled enough that the data, logic and presentation elements of an application can be partitioned (as needed) between local and remote instances.

In essence, when applications are cloud-ified, they gain persistency, federation and derivation capabilities, enabling the same core to be assembled in a way that addresses the needs of specific runtime scenarios, device environments and scaling requirements.

As such, cloud-ified apps become liberated from a single instance or a single client application, enabling all sorts of interesting composite applications to promulgate.

That is why the same Twitter tweet can be presented so dramatically different in a desktop Twitter dashboard application, like TweetDeck, the Twitter.com website and the Tweetie iPhone client.

Similarly, it is the reason a website like StockTwits, which is built on top of the Twitter ecosystem, can simultaneously parse specific tweets pertaining to a particular stock or between members of a given investing circle, and a StockTwits-aware client app, like the afore-mentioned TweetDeck, can automatically create a filtered view of that same data.

In fact, Apple’s rise to it’s current lofty place can be traced to a decision to embrace cloud computing by tightly coupling iTunes (which has a service tier, desktop tier and device runtime tier) first to the iPod, and then to the iPhone (and the iPod touch).

The breakout success of App Store is a by-product of embracing and extending this same model by overlaying interfaces for developers and applications.

Finally, MobileMe takes this same computing model and applies it to a user’s personal data, backing it up, synchronizing it between devices and making it universally available across those same devices via a Web client, a native Mac/Windows client and, you guessed it, a native iPhone/iPod touch client.

But, to be clear, while Apple is the current patron saint of this model at work, we are at the beginning of this wave, not at the end game stage. Apple will not run the table.

Net It Out for Me

I am really bullish on the potential to create new, highly innovative user experiences that are fully native to the Mobile Broadband Era. 

They will be message-aware, information and media rich, mobility premised, and optimized to a specific application, service and/or device.

This is the next wave in its purest form.

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Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 47

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers.

Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse.

One, such a bookish-sized tablet device – I’ll call it the Boomer Tablet – would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range.

Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and “lifestyle” settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.

This is key, because with the onset of age, Boomers’ motor skills have become less precise; their vision has become poorer; and their eyes get tired easier.

As such, the premise of them plugging away on tiny keys and peering into the tiny screen of a mobile device like iPhone/iPod touch is a non-starter.

By contrast, the Boomer Tablet offers a superior input, viewing and playback environment for accessing your iTunes library, personal media, syndicated content services, iPhone Apps and presumably, Mac Apps; something that the 70M+ Baby Boomers in the US who are aged 53-73 would likely find compelling.

Moreover, if Apple put a video camera in the device – not a stretch since they are doing it in the iPhone GS – it could make video conferencing and VOIP ubiquitous in a relatively short time (Skype already has a client for the iPhone/iPod touch). What better way to stay connected to distant loved ones?

As alluded to above, it seems logical that the Boomer Tablet would either run legacy Macintosh applications in an unmodified fashion, or perhaps support a new kind of ‘port-able’ Mac App built around the Cocoa programming framework and powered by Apple’s forthcoming OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard.

What I am envisioning is a runtime layer designed to offer formal convergence and partitioning paths between iPhone and Mac systems, enabling application builders to make runtime design tradeoffs relative to a coming Hardware Matrix of Apple device form-factors, a topic which I will get to in a bit.

Contenders to the Boomer Tablet Throne

Before I ponder the Hardware Matrix, let's first look at the contenders to the Boomer Tablet market segment. It really underscores the richness and fertile nature of this market, while providing a window into the strategies of three really great companies (if interested, check out my post ‘Built to Thrive - The Standard Bearers’ on Google, Apple and Amazon):

Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device: Amazon has built a physical device that is focused on doing one job really well – reading e-books. Moreover, Kindle leverages their strong position with print publishers, and of note, Amazon has shown device-neutrality by coming out with a software-only version of the Kindle. (I am currently reading ‘Married to the Mouse’ on my iPod touch. It delivers a solid user experience.)

This Switzerland-like positioning suggests that in the long run, the hardware version of Kindle may be more about Amazon jump-starting the e-book market than aspiring to be a hardware player.

That said, Amazon certainly has the assets (Marketplace, Media Relationships, Cloud Services, Associates) and market credibility if they ever wanted to position themselves as the more open alternative to the iPhone Platform.

Google Android Netbook: In Android, Google has built an open source OS, Middleware stack and SDK for building next-generation mobile devices.

Moreover, Google has a decent track record of cultivating ecosystems through open APIs, product evolution and stick-to-itiveness.

While a primary thrust of Android is outflanking the iPhone gauntlet, a logical fork is the high volume, low-margin Netbook segment, where Google assets like Search, Maps, Apps, Analytics and the forthcoming Wave unified messaging platform could leverage their Chrome browser to collapse the boundaries between desktop, web and mobile realms.

Moreover, as an open platform, Android has the potential to nurture a hobbyist device market around robotics, information devices and kit builders (see my post on Maker Faire for more detail on this topic).

iPhone/iPod touch: The numbers speak for themselves (40M devices, 1B downloads, 50K apps). But, beyond the numbers, iPhone Platform is a game-changing system from a development, distribution, monetization and user perspective, a conclusion supported by my own direct experience – having written 20+ articles on the iPhone Platform; owning an iPod touch; talking to a ton of iPhone App developers; building an iPhone optimized web application (Twiddeo.com) and working with another iPhone based startup (SquareConnect).

As noted earlier, the main downside to the current iPhone/iPod touch, relative to the Boomer segment is the relatively small form-factor.

Needless to say, a bigger form-factor would obviate these limitations, while having the built in leverage of the iPhone Ecosystem.

The Hardware Matrix: LCD v. HCD

Take this one to the bank: the Hardware Matrix is coming.

What is the Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Boomer Tablet and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, all leverage a common SDK, plug into the App Store and integrate with Mobile Me (in addition to iTunes), and you understand that this implies all sorts of hardware abstraction decisions.

No less, this implies Apple partitioning the platform that supports these form-factors between device-specific functions, open Mac-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere, build any kind of apps), and managed/closed iPhone-like runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, formal APIs, and Apple GOVERNANCE policies).

Simply put, the Matrix presents a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decision, and as such this is Apple’s biggest Achilles heel in the next few quarters; namely, how they execute forking (and no less important, de-forking) between form-factors.

Connecting the dots, I believe that Snow Leopard is the conduit OS where these things converge, but that's a total guess, based on the assumption that derivative form-factors are a given; that App Store and iPhone SDK are the best practices approach with the biggest developer ecosystem; and that Apple's best way to win in the Mobile Broadband Era is by making their products work together in a more than the sum of the parts fashion around a common Mac OS X.

And as Cocoa has won out as the programming and human interface model for Apple going forward, they have to already be preparing for this fork.

Why not then grease the skids for all of those iPhone App developers to suddenly wake up one morning and realize that they can sell into the Mac market with very little extra work? Wouldn’t that be a nice upside surprise?

At the same time, you can see how realization of this path brings with it all sorts of lowest common denominator vs. highest common divisor trade-offs, which is why it’s such an Achilles Heel; albeit one with tremendous upside.

Case in point, a recent post by The Silicon Alley Insider looks at how hardware differences between 3G and 3GS will potentially splinter the App Store.

This is why I would say to anyone who wonders why Apple hasn’t jumped into the Tablet/Netbook market yet that it’s because there is a LOT of work to get it right in terms of navigating the Matrix, let alone getting the user experience right.

As to the end game, John Gruber of Daring Fireball described it best in his 'WWDC 2009 Wrap-Up':

The technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled "Mac OS X State of the Union." This year the title changed to "Core OS State of the Union."

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system…But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year.

With Apple, once exclusively the Mac Company, the only constant is change.

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3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 29

A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like.

The View-Master completely predated the advent of electronic toys (it was light powered and human click driven), but it was dumb simple to operate, and the 3D viewing experience was quirky cool. Plus, the content was customizable (just pop in a different program card) and for its time, it was engaging (sound could play on top of each image, making it even more so).

Flash forward, and it's 1992. I am reading Mondo 2000, a long since deceased magazine that was at the bleeding edge of the technology wave that was to come. Total reboot in terms of re-thinking and re-imaging the schema of the possible.

In one issue, Jaron Lanier is prophesizing his vision of virtual reality (VR). It's a revelation, but it's also too early, and so despite Mattel-scale efforts to commercialize "something" that embraces VR concepts, the VR industry is stillborn (except, as verbally rendered in Snow Crash and Neuromancer, two seminal novels to this day).

Alas, the MetaVerse would have to wait. In the intervening years, there would be RPGs (Role-Playing Games), MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and of
course, Second Life, but virtual reality was just that; more virtual than reality.

Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.

Huh? Did I lose you? Well, let me take a step back.

Hardware Accessories Innovation: A Phoenix Rises

I have harped repeatedly (HERE and HERE) about the fact that the next version of the iPhone OS (and the underlying SDK) will allow third-party hardware accessory makers to build external hardware accessory offerings that take advantage of the software, service and hardware capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch platforms.

Specifically, Apple is opening up the 30-pin connector at the base of the iPhone and iPod touch such that hardware accessory makers can create a software layer that is optimized to take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware in a way that cobbles together with and extends the capabilities of the iPhone Platform. (Side note: Bluetooth-accessible hardware accessories can also take advantage of these new capabilities.)

What this means is a rebirth of hardware-based innovation, a segment that Apple has historically played a leading role in fostering, first with postscript-based printing, then with Appletalk networking (pre-dates Ethernet) and now with Mobile Broadband Computing.

Look at it this way; very soon, hardware accessory makers will be able to leverage the same tools and marketplace functions that have resulted in more than 35K applications being built and more than 1 billion apps downloaded, all the while tapping into a 37 million device global footprint.

What's that worth? Consider this. The iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as "software value-add" to the hardware accessory itself. With iPhone 3.0, this changes. That's a big deal.

3D Mobility: The Rise of the Meta-Platform

Connecting the pieces, there is 3D/Virtual Reality and there is this macro trend of the iPhone Platform becoming more hardware extensible in a programmatic fashion.

My assertion is this: beginning with the assumption that View-Master 2.0 is an achievable baseline in terms of a "good enough" 3D viewing experience, and full immersive VR the design goal, 3D Glasses are a compelling hardware accessory to harness the power, extensibility and mobility functions of the iPhone Platform.

Framing the point a bit further, 3D Glasses are a kind of "meta" platform built to embrace and extend the iPhone Platform vis-à-vis application specific libraries, open APIs, custom tools and of course, the glasses themselves, to enable third-parties to create their own 3D/VR-powered applications.

The clearest way to think about the 3D Glasses Meta-Platform - let's call it X-Ray Specs - is as being a composite of a Runtime Layer, a Physical Glasses Layer and a Cloud Service Layer.

The Runtime Layer is an iPhone application that deals with items such as media control (search, activate, play/pause/forward/rewind, bookmark); communication handling between the 3D Glasses, the iPhone and the Internet; and can execute custom-built X-Ray Specs applications.

The Physical Glasses Layer is the actual hardware glasses that support viewing, playback and output resolution in a "good enough" fashion relative to mass-market cost economics. Augmenting the glasses would be headphones and microphone inputs, with physical controls for simple navigation, modal and settings adjustment.

Finally, the Cloud Service Layer is a hosted service where third-party applications are sourced and hosted, and social communications are sent, tracked, federated, filtered and routed back to the X-Ray Specs Runtime.

In other words, 3D Glasses would do more than 3D viewing. They would also support overlay and immersive viewing applications.

By overlay applications, I mean viewing applications that act as filters, enhancing, modifying or shaping whatever you are doing/viewing by adding information or inserting characters into viewed content.

Imagine watching a ballgame and being served up feeds, like sports scores, news items or other animated tickers, or having video highlights pop up in your view when key events occur (home run hit by a watched player, key match-up between players).

By contrast, immersive applications consume 100% of your viewing perspective, making them ideal for virtual reality types of applications, not to mention shared (social) and passive viewing experiences.

At its most basic, this means View-Master types of applications (i.e., 3D stereogram content), akin to slide shows on steroids; namely tuned to take advantage of easy access to the local media libraries resident on your iPhone/iPod touch and shared libraries accessible via the Internet (and App Store/iTunes).

But how exactly does one navigate virtual worlds in such an immersive realm?

One, they can use touch, tilt and shake as the primary controller mechanism.

Two, voice-based control can be embedded in the glasses, supporting a simple voice dictionary for audible-lizing actions, such as "GET," "PLAY," "NEXT," "PREVIOUS," "PAUSE," "SEARCH," "FORWARD," "BACKWARD," "TURN," "GRAB" and so on. Think: BASIC Programming language for humans.

On top of this, one could easily envision voice-powered shortcuts for accessing and controlling popular apps like YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, Scribd, SlideShare and the like.

So there you have it. The MetaVerse is virtually within reach (pun intended). No less, there is a proven platform the enables fairly creative application partitioning scenarios (between hardware, iPhone and cloud).

And oh yeah, that same platform plugs into a marketplace that can support subscriptions, chapters or levels, not to mention a digital distribution center and e-wallet that reaches 37M users.

It doesn't get much cooler than that. What do you think?

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