Thoughts on iPad, Kindle, and future eReaders

On a mail list I frequent, there were two separate discussions about latest offering out of Cupertino, the iPad.

One of these was about how we unwittingly mortgage our future when we favor closed systems over open ones, and the long-term implications this has for consumers as a whole. That's the subject of another post I'll do another time..

The other discussion thread was about the future of eReaders and eBooks. Since someone on that thread was asking and I'd meant to post on the subject for a while anyway, it seemed time to make some notes. I did so, but then let it sit again for a while. Then this past weekend, I found myself on a sailboat in the Sea of Cortez with Craig Mod, author of this fantastic post on Kindle's implications for an e-book future, and that inspired me to dust off the notes and get them into this post.

I should note at the outset of this hefty list of ideas that not all of them are mine. I stand on the shoulders of (blogging) giants. Craig's and a number of other good posts that stimulated ideas are listed at the end of this post.

Also, I should note that I don't own a Kindle or an iPad. I very much wanted a Kindle (I'm a display technology afficionado and it uses e-Ink!) but opted to hold out because after using a friends a few times, I was disappointed by how much more it *could* have been. In the case of the iPad, the same is true to a lesser degree - it's got the Apple magic - but I feel it still misses as an e-Reader.

So, here I present some ideas in the hope that I can contribute to the conversation and someone will build a better mousetrap (maybe better cheese for the mousetraps is a better metaphor?)

What purpose do books serve?

They serve as many different things to different people. They are containers for ideas: communicating them in a fashion that is both broadcast from author to community and one-to-one conversation between author and reader. They are social objects: Giving a book as a gift or loaning one to a friend says something about both parties and the relationship between them - and augments that relationship in a way - the book is both adjective and verb in that sense. They are part of one's identity: Think of the proudly displayed library many people have.

In this sense, the Kindle seems to have only thought about the book as 'idea container'. As Craig pointed out in his post, there's a whole topic of form vs formless content that isn't addressed well. But beyond this, Amazon and Apple and their ilk are treating the book like it's a thing to be consumed, but no attention is payed to the social aspect. What if I want to share the idea I learned with others, or disagree with it, or debate it? The Nook considered the idea of loaning/gifting books to friends and then did the best they can dealing with publisher licensing silliness, but even then they only thought of it in very limited context.

A clearer example can be found in comics. Scott McCloud said that much of the magic in comics happens in 'the gutter' - the space between the panels. People are excitedly talking about comics on iPad, but mostly about how they might improve (animate, annotate) what is displayed in the panels or the way the panels are displayed. Who's trying to re-think and improve the space between the panels?

How do we consume books?

The e-Ink solutions aimed squarely at the chief complaint about reading on screens - that it's harsh on the eyes. LCDs and CRTs (remember those?) emit light, and which has to contend/compete with whatever environmental lighting is being reflected off the display. the e-Ink solutions depend on using (reflecting) environmental light. Like the dead-tree versions, you can't read them in the dark. Conversely, they work great in direct sunlight where LCDs don't.

Still, this seems like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making the electronic page as readable (or more readable) than paper. Is there an equivalent of ClearType? Can the rendering of fonts be done differently based on reader viewing angle? Could a camera determine your reading angle and do perspective correction on text so that it appears perpendicular regardless of reading angle (Anisotropic ClearType)? Can the reader use an accelerometer and/or camera to do image stabilization like video cameras do, for readers on a bus or train? Can the bezel have built-in lighting that shifts based on viewing angle (an intelligent booklight)? Maybe tracking with eye movement?

Also, I don't know the specifics of the e-Ink technology causing it, but the "XOR-ing" of the display on page refresh is just horrific. That has GOT to go. At the surface it looks like something solveable with software (and by throwing more memory & compute at the problem) - tracking the state of the framebuffer, comparing the existing one to the desired result, and only spinning the pixels you need to (is spinning the right term for eInk pixels?)

We also consume books differently based on location (at least sometimes). Can geo-location play a role here? If the device sees I'm in bed, default to the novel I was reading last night before falling asleep. And then use the camera to sense if I've fallen asleep and power the device down.

Books and Geolocation

I'd like to see books annotated (by author, editor or crowdsourcing) with geographic data relating to events of passages). Let me walk the streets of London or Paris and follow the paths of characters of favorit books. Conversely, when I'm in a location I find interesting, maybe let me inquire about what books have taken place there in whole or in part. My iphone or ipad should beep when I walk past a location and give me a bit of trivia related to books I've read, much as a friend would; "Hey, this is where that shootout took place in that murder mystery you finished last month".

Social Networks and eReaders

I'm not sure I can think of a form of media that cries out for social network integration more than print. People get very attached to books, and even at the most basic level make a fairly significant time commitment to them. And yet consuming books is usually a solitary act. The book club lets people share the experience, but by constraining when they consume the books and when they discuss them. Forums aren't good at connecting people through existing relationships and you need to find the forum rather than it finding you.

A few ideas of what I'd like to see here:

• Let me layer my some or all of my reading on top of *ALL* my existing social networks. I might want to share my sci-fi reading with everybody, my kids' books with my local PTA and also family, and my business reading with my linkedin group.
• Virtual book clubs are an obvious idea. One could imagine extending this to having discussion topics around particular passages - supported by annotations people make while reading (more on this later).
• Group together findings based on these networks and reading histories ("of the group of you that agreed with this passage, we find you evenly divided on whether you agree on this related work...")
• Let the author engage in conversations directly with the reader if they so choose. "What did you mean by this section here?", "This passage moved me!", etc.
• Let me select a ~100 character quote from a book and automatically tweet it to friends with the source and a shortened URL to the book itself.

Of course authors and readers engaging in conversation leads very quickly down two paths of discussion. First is just how "fixed" a book should be. The second is that of business models. More on these in a moment.

Finally, there's a whole other line of thinking we could explore if all social networks weren't fundamentally broken. I did a lengthy post on this a while back, but the short version is that a relationship is a noun not an adjective.

The living book

The idea of an ebook leads inevitably to a collision between the living nature of information on the Web, and our traditional idea that books are fixed expressions of ideas. There won't be one answer as to the question of what the right hybrid is between these two views. I would like to see though, a few things evolve out of it.

• Give the author the ability to dynamically update books - and provide the reader with the ability to know about that change. A hybrid of footnotes and edit history like you see on wikipedia. One could imagine examples where the original version might be a matter of preference (say a novel or poem) and examples where this history is itself informative (say views on String Theory in a physics text).
• Citations and references to papers could now be forward-looking, not only backward.
• There are whole classes of types of annotations that could be imagined. Imagine a progress-slider on an equation to show it's derivation as a step by step animation. Or a time-line slider for a murder mystery that would let me leap around the text. Or a social graph or family tree of all the characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, etc. Of course each of these things could be author-driven or crowd-sourced/authored by fans.
• Books could evolve to leverage web-based application platforms. Letting someone view a location in a book (say Normandy beach on D-day) and let the reader get a first person look at the landscape involved in the story.
• There's room for a whole meta-game around books, reading and an individual or social network's collectively library. Xbox Live acheivements for the librarian set. Better yet would be to have an open platform for building meta-games. Think of teachers making scavenger hunts through the texts of their students are assigned.

Business Models

This is where my biggest beef is with both the Kindle and the iPad. They are razor-n-blade models. Closed systems that insist that the use of the device comes with the use of THEIR store on THEIR terms.

This has a host of issues not the least of which is a lack of competitive pricing for consumers "buying" books. More important to me is that it comes at the cost of hindering (or at least, not encouraging) innovation in the areas of stores, books, business models and licensing terms.

Beyond that, there's a long-term cost to society of allowing these closed models to become the prevalent ones. They become codified in our laws as the norm (DMCA, ACTA, etc). But that's the subject of the other topic post I alluded to earlier.

I beleive there's a real opportunity here for someone to get into the device game while opening the platform to all comers commerce-wise. Google, perhaps? PC OEMs? Microsoft?

Whether closed or open though, I'd like to see flexibility offered to publishers and authors to experiment with different licensing schemes and business models. Cory Doctorow has ranted about this a number of times (1,2)

Discovery

Here again, both devices have made attempts at improving discovery. Amazon through their recommendation engine and Apple largely by following in Amazon's footsteps. This is something but it so little compared to what could be done here. Don't show me what other people bought - show me what they bought and LIKED. Don't show me what just ALL other people bought, but those that share similar sentiments regarding books we've both read.

DRM

In short, it's ass. I get why it's happened, but at least let authors/publishers opt out of it so that someone can show that maybe the sky won't fall. This isn't just about portability between readers and devices, though that's part of it. The fact that I can't cut and paste text is extremely frustrating.

I want the ability to share annotations with friends and a network at large, I want to highlight sections of text (not just the text, but it's context as well) and flick them off to google to flag for further learning/reading, or flick them off to a workspace where I'm working on a presentation.

In summary

It's clear that these devices offer benefits over the traditional book, despite having a long way to go to equalling the dead tree's readability. That's to be expected given that we've been working on 'version 1.0' for hundreds of years.

While they improve readability though, I hope they'll also start to work on improving the things a paper book CAN'T do.

Further reading

Here are a few posts I highly recommend reading (if pressed for time, choose them over this post):

• Books in the age of the iPad, Craig Mod, March 2010: A ton of thoughts on layout, typography, and purposes books serve. Among other things I thank him for crystalizing in my mind the idea of "Formless" vs "Definite" content, a concept I'd been thinking about but couldn't nail down the way he did. His follow-up piece is also must-read.
• Random Thoughts about the Kindle, Seth Godin, June 2008: First of his two posts riffing on what Kindle is and what it could be. Money quote: "Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book"
• Reinventing the Kindle (part II), Seth Godin, February 2009: His second post on the subject, conceived mainly while wearing his marketing hat, with a sprinkle of 'how could social networks make this better'.
• In addition, it was Dave Edery who opened my eyes to thinking of the Kindle as a game platform, which of course it can and will be.
• Also, this presentation summarizing Portical's research project into the usage of books and ebooks had a few ah-ha's that make it worth reading.
• Additional fuel the the fire from Cory Doctorow's many posts on the Kindle and the iPad. Many of them related to the other topic I alluded to above, but some of which pertain to things I'd very much want in an eReader. (1,2)

Yakuza on Yakuza

Lisa Katayama & Jake Adelstein bring us a pretty unique game review, Sega's Yakuza 3, as reviewed by three members of the Yakuza (who all walk away pretty impressed with the game's accuracy).

Book Review: Our Days are Numbered

I bought this book on a recommendation*, and it turned out to be a bad call. I was expecting something like a cross between Freakonomics and Jim Blinn's Corner series, taking every day observations and taking a mathematician's view of the subjects. The author sets out to do this, but they bulk of topics are far too lightweight. Ranging from geometry to solve carpet area (really?) to a high level view of fractals. I did manage to glean a bit of info from it (e.g. why it takes four rather than three satellites to accurately triangulate a GPS location), but mostly it wasn't of use to me.

Might be ok for a high school kid or for someone with little math, but otherwise pass.

Our Days Are Numbered

*One of the downsides of using my Amazon wish list to manage my book consumption queue is that when I add a book on a recommendation, I later don't remember who it was that gave me the recommendation. :-/

A couple digital distribution points of interest

Sighted today, two different - but related - items on digital distribution:

1. Amazon noted today that Kindle sales of books have surpassed hardcover.

"While our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books--astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months "Bezos says

Different than games you say? High price premium at launch - check, hit driven - check, most titles consumed once - check, atoms resellable buts bits are not - check, etc.

Still think people won't give up their shiny DVD?

2. Gamasutra had this story on Gamestop looks to Netflix for Online Business Cues.

Of course the last retailer with a boat-anchor of retail outlets that looked to Netflix for cues was Blockbuster, and it didn't work out for them so well. So good luck to you, Gamestop!

And the money quote:

"...The world won't be all digital tomorrow, even though that's what people are claiming. In this business, users still want physical content." said CEO Paul Raines.

Hey Paul. See item #1 above. KTHXBAI!

A couple VC Gems

I have a few of the better (I think they are, anyway) VC blogs on my feed reader, and just recently did some catching up.

A few snippets caught my eye:

1. Ben Horowitz, on "How we picked our first cloud investment" makes this point:

...the first attempts to build applications in the cloud from companies such as Corio simply fork-lifted the leading on premise software and moved it into the hosted environment. While this sounded like a good idea to many VCs at the time, it turned out to miss important details and advantages of the cloud...

Reading this should spin your gears if you are thinking lately about OnLive, Gaikai et al. (And thinking about it further, you might see why I was saying early on that MMOs are a really good customer for these services - Already architected for the cloud, just the network stack sits at a different point in the pipeline). Regardless, key point is that content that is ported is always second-rate compared to content authored from the outset for a platform.

2. Lightspeed Venture Partners has this post (2 months old now) estimating Zynga revenue at ~240M for 2010, down slightly from 2009.

a) It's a fairly thorough model, and they have the spreadsheet shared on google docs if you want to tinker with it.

b) The graph of Zynga's revenue over time sure made me think of Dave Edery's inevitable misery pitch.

Anyhow, something to noodle on.

5 Things I'm Thinking Right Now

I've been very busy at work. Other than taking some time to write a few notes up about E3, the blog's taken a back seat right now.

However, Alice did a post on her current thoughts that I thought might make a nifty meme, so here are 5 Things I'm Thinking Right Now. (What are 5 things YOU are thinking?)

1. The time is right for a explosion of funding models. Over the past few years, we've seen things like funding disaggregated from the other facets of publishing, we've seen government grants, Indiefund, Kickstarter, and others. But when on one hand projects can raise $10-20k on Kickstarter based only on a good pitch - and large projects can do retail pre-orders for millions, months in advance (GoW3 went on pre-sale *10* months before release!!), it seems there's a lot of play in the middle. If gamers are willing to part with $60 6+ months in advance just to ensure they get a copy on release day, are they willing to part with $100 a year in advance if it gets them an advanced copy and possible repayment from the developer? Seems there's a lot of room for play (and opportunity) in between these two extremes. (Right now pre-orders are rewarded, if at all, with a piece of DLC. Couldn't they come with a royalty or dividend check?)
2. There's a new wave of growth coming. While down at E3, I ran into a number of industry veteran friends who've quit posts at large companies to pursue their indie interests. Then in the few weeks since E3, I've had four different friends (from very different areas of the tech industry) call me for feedback on their startup pitches. Maybe this is just symptomatic of post-recession exuberance? I don't know, but I put it to a friend that I felt like I was seeing a bunch of surfers waiting on the right wave. I'm suddenly seeing a bunch of people paddling hard to catch a wave I don't yet see, but there must be one coming.
3. An explosion of graphics capabilities is good and bad for game devs. This deserves a much longer post, but the short version goes like this: People are becoming accustomed to sexy UI (iphone, ipad, win7, consoles - all doing UI leveraging GPU transistors to do visuals). As this trend continues, graphics vendors are going to be putting more graphics power into devices across the board (good for devs) but the 'top customer' dictating the requirements for these things is not always going to be the game developer (bad for devs?) and there will be wide variance in solutions (not just performance, sometimes DIFFERENT - like the stereo3D gap I mentioned in my E3 post).
4. We are vastly underestimating the 'next wave of social'. Alice touched on this in her post, talking about how current social network games are only touching the basic 'slot machine/food pellet' buttons in folks. However, here are a couple things to think about: (a) There's a lot of money being poured into chasing Zynga's tail lights. Some companies will pour that into game design, production quality, and technical innovation - all of which will explode genres and offerings. (b) The console vendors have all learned a lot from MS's effort with Live. Last round we got a very basic stab at social with friends list, acheivements, messages, multiplayer, etc. Remember, this was a console shipped in 2005 and shipped before that. Pre-facebook-hysteria. The set of capabilities to trump that next time around has to be a pretty high bar. OnLive had some early glimpses of this at E3, but you could riff on this one all day. Forget Gamerscore and MS Points. Give me GamerWhuffie.
5. This time the phone is for real. By that I mean that we've been hearing for years that "The phone will be the leading device connecting people to the Internet". To which many have replied, "well sure, if you count texting, or very basic services, or voip". The reality is that Apple reset everyone on what high-end phones are expected to do, and low-end phones will follow in short order. First-world, money-spending consumers are going to use phones more than PCs in many cases, and so there's a real market there. The Apple vs Android will look like a blip when we look at the bigger picture years from now.

OK, back to work now!

A belated E3 2010 post

E3's been over a little while, but work's been *crazy* lately so I'm only now getting around to posting some thoughts.

The show got big again this year. Not much sign of recession other than on the faces of some friends who's studios either were casualties or are still standing after a grueling year. Signs seem to point to things being up though, and that's a good thing.

Short version of E3 was absolutely nailed by Penny Arcade and by Zero Punctuation:

So, E3 in short form:

Motion Control: MS and Sony *finally* show up with their Wiimote-killers. Sony's is a Wiimote with better accuracy (camera input to add some multiplayer capabilities) and MS's is the more ambitious Kinect. Why did it take so long? Because both companies went through the Five stages of competitor acceptance: "It'll never work", "It's a fad", "It's a novelty that appeals to a niche", "well, they'll never beat our installed base numbers", and finally "holy crap, we need to build us a wiimote!". Add product development on top of that, and you get five years of Nintendo first-mover advantage.

Ironically, there was a bit of ho-hum as maybe people are tiring of Wii style motion control and were hoping for dramatically better but didn't see it? At the very least, the hype has subsided from "In the future all games will be played this way!" to "It's good for some types of games"

Stereo3D: Sony's doing stereo on TVs with glasses, tapping their performance headroom to engage with developers and to the full cinematic immersive thing. Nintendo on the other hand impressed folks with the 3DS, which is using a lenticular filter/display to do no-glasses, single-player viewing.

One interesting point that I haven't heard anyone talk about (which I should do a longer post on at some point) is that the type of content that will lend itself to the handheld Stereo3D (DS, plus people are talking about doing this on phones, etc) will likely be different content. Rather than think stereo3D movies like Avatar, think macro-lens style close-ups of small objects.

I'll have to think about what that means for developers. Also, it makes me wonder where on the spectrum PCs will end up. Are they single viewer devices?

Onlive: There stuff looked good. Lots of interesting features that are one-up over consoles (e.g. jump in/out of spectator mode). Of course, the real question is how it runs in the field.

Favorite game of the show: A toss up between Pacman: Battle Royale (Warlords meets Pacman for a 4-player competitive arcade deathmatch), and Miegakure, a brain-twisting FOUR-dimensional puzzle-platformer. There’s a video here, but you won’t get it until you play it (and even then, it’s doubtful!)

Best graphics of the show: Many people claimed PS3’s Killzone 3, but I thought that was mainly cinematics and presentation. Personally, I thought Mafia 2 on PC was outstanding. I heard that Id’s Rage was awesome as well, but didn’t get to see it.

Best Game that wasn’t on the showfloor: I went to the Indiecade BBQ on Thursday and got to playtest Chris Hecker’s SpyParty , and even this early it’s a temple-sweating, nail-biter, multiplayer game.

Best Random Art Encounter: I was walking down the street after dinner and happened upon The Vader Project

Slush(y) Fund: Piggybacking Bits on Atoms

Someone put this on my radar on Facebook today:

Zynga and 7-Eleven partner to bring game content to ice cream, Big Gulps

Short version is: Buy ice-cream, comes with a code, redeem code in-game for virtual items.

Gimmicky, right? Wrong. Brilliant. OK, why?

I wrote some time ago (wow, 3 years ago!) about how kids "connected toy" products like Webkinz and other entrants were bundling services with a toy.

The most brilliant thing about this is not that "you get a game with the toy!" or vice versa. The way to view it is that the physical product allows the virtual item sale/subscription/etc piggyback on a channel that the customer understands. And if that gets you over the hurdle of a massive number of customers not having credit cards or being afraid to type them into a browser, then it's well worth the cost of the plushy (or in this case slushy).

I'll bet that we're going to see piggy-back revenue models like this (you can call it a promotion, or a bundle) are going to grow significantly.

One way to accelerate it would be to think about ways to remove the friction of having to enter a lengthy code while in front of the PC. Maybe it's texting the code from your mobile to automatically credit your account, or a unique bar code you hold in front of your webcam?

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how well this does for Zynga. I'm betting it's going to be copied a lot

Better, not simpler

I love this presentation from Daniel at LostGarden on the design of RibbonHero, his MS Office learning game plug-in. I love the point about culling features and complexity being an answer, but the wrong answer. The right, but difficult, answer is to help people to master the complexity.

Wordcamp 2010 public

View more documents from danctheduck.

Can Gucci teach game devs about innovation?

Really good talk by Johanna Blakely on innovation, remix, and the lack of copyright in the fashion industry. Punchline is that the industry can't use copyright to protect innovators, and yet, they innovate. Lots to think about here. Great talk.

Book Review: Fables Vol 1

Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile is a graphic novel I picked up after hearing two different friends recommend it. It takes place in New York where the characters of fairy tales, cast out from their lands by an evil demon, are forced to live undercover among regular folk.

I thought the premise was original, but the story (from the first volume anyway) not all that remarkable. Where there really is some gold is in the remix of the characters. Snow White as the tough as nails matriarch running the show, Prince Charming as a deadbeat gigolo, etc.

The characters alone make it worth giving the first volume a try. I don't think I'll be continuing, but that doesn't mean others won't find it their cup of tea.

Book Review: The Big Short

I ripped through The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine in a few days. I'd been told it was a easily digestible take on the recent financial crisis.

What I didn't expect was something that frightened me like a horror novel. For such a dry topic, he really turns it into a page-turner.

Some folk have critiqued the book for over-simplifying the topic. Little blame is placed on government, for example. The blame is mainly placed on improperly structured incentives and lack of risk prevention systems in Wall Street firms. These concerns are probably well founded. Nothing is so cut and dried, for sure.

That said, it's a good lesson in how companies - especially large complex ones - can get into real trouble when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and in how leadership has a responsibility in both understanding their businesses and making sure the systems are in place to make sure those businesses don't run off the rails. Bottom line: If the buck stops with you, do you understand your balance sheet, and do you feel confident that the people and systems that report information into it are honest and correct?

I recommend the read, though be forewarned that you may find yourself pulling your money out of your mutual fund afterward and shoving it under your mattress.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Book Review: Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution is the best business book I've read this year, and may one of my top favorites of all time.

Many books have been written about intrapreneurship, the incubating of new businesses or products inside large companies. This is the first I've come across that looks at the causes of success and failure when those incubation projects are brought out of the back room and re-integrated into the larger fabric of the company.

It's at this point that many fail, and they do so for a number of reasons. This book looks at a number of case examples and illustrates what things were done right and wrong, and more importantly why this is the case.

The book hit close to home with me because there are many examples (both good and bad) that resonated with the Larrabee project I came back to Intel to work on. This aside though, I found it relevant to many efforts I've seen at Intel and Microsoft and at other companies through conversations with friends.

If you work at a large company and are interested in the dynamics of trying to bootstrap new products or businesses within those walls, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book.

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution

Behold: Nature

Awesome timelapse footage of the volcano in Iceland:

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

App demonstrates Facebook privacy pains

Following up on my last post, a friend developed this:

http://youropenbook.org/

Go there and type a few keywords in that you figure people might want available to friends like "parole officer" or "DUI" or "Lost my virginity". I'm certain most of these people have an idea this is being made available to the world.

Also, danah has another awesome post on the subject.

Thoughts on the Facebook privacy outrage

Many are expressing a lot of angst about Facebook's privacy policy changes over the recent months. Here's some essential reading on the subject:

Matt McKeon has done an awesome bit of data-viz porn on the subject to help folks grok how FB's policy has changed over time. You can go play with it here. (As a bonus, Paul L pointed out to me how Matt's released source to the app to do this). Here's a snapshot:

If the above gives you the 5-second dump on what's changed, then the incomparable Danah Boyd's lengthy post on the subject will then let you simmer on the implications. Danah is one of the smartest people I know of looking at what SN's mean to people and how society is being shaped by them. Her post is essential reading for everyone. Period. So are a number of the posts she links to.

Talk of course has turned to whether there is an alternative to FB, and whether they've overplayed their hand. People are looking to alternatives and wondering whether someone can use this as an opportunity to topple the unstoppable giant*. A fave underdog in recent days is Diaspora, a Kickstartr-funded project that used the angst to raise $145k in 12 days (from >4000 people, 9 of which gave over $1k) - that's a lot of protest money.

*which is silly. How many times have we heard "no one can stop the unstoppable (yahoo, GM, Microsoft, Everquest, Genghis Khan, etc)"?

The idea of an alternative with more user-centric privacy controls is interesting, as is the idea of a distributed network like Diaspora's attempting.

My own opinion is that if people really start leaving FB in droves, or if regulators start getting heavy-handed (Danah points out that they are sniffing around), then FB can choose to dial back their policies. They'll be OK on this front if they do so soon enough.

It won't matter though. I still believe that FB is going to collapse under their own weight - and by that I mean the narrow, limited way in which they link people, and the band-aid solutions they have to add on to try and work around this. As I've pointed out at length before, the problem is that Facebook doesn't understand the difference between an adjective and a noun.

Google Chrome Speed Tests

There are a couple remarkable things about this bit of marketing.

1) It's Google doing marketing, which I can recall them doing so overtly for other products. Normally it's "offer the feature/product/service, let word of mouth do the rest"

2) It's a *spectacular* way of simultaneously claiming superiority on a feature without having to compare directly to competitors, AND poking fun at how absurd it is to be differentiating on speed of what for most people is 'fast enough'.

3) It's dead awesome.

The digital divide is alive and well

I did two volunteer activities recently that happened to fall back to back. On Friday I gave a career day talk at a middle school in Gresham (town east of Portland), one that I've done in past years. On Saturday, I gave a talk to a different group of middle school kids participating in the Oregon Game Project Challenge,

The first of these talks was about video games & tech careers, the latter was about predicting the future in tech (and how such predictions are almost always wrong).

Having the two talks back to back highlighted the disparity in tech knowledge and access that exists across communities even within a (relatively) homogeneous place like the PDX area. Now granted, the OGPC group was self-selected game enthusiasts. But even with that being said, I saw some kids in the hall doing last minute tweaks on their entry, working on a macbook pro while checking references on a Kindle.

Contrast that with the middle school I was at. Last year, the teacher I was working with explained that the schools computers were used almost exclusively for standardized testing, giving no student time for tech access for electives or homework. This year she bashfully showed me the one room of machines they now have for students... why? because the machines are too outdated to run the latest standardize testing platform and other required software. So students without their own machines have shared, part time access to shiny blue twelve year old iMacs. Discouraging to say the least.

Anyhow, given that the Friday talk was to 150 kids, here's an update to the Q&A I gave at the beginning of 98's year's talk:

• Number of kids who play games: ~98%.
• Number who have a parent that plays games: ~%50
• Number who have a grand-parent who plays videogames: :20% (Yes, the Eberts are dying off)
• Number one title I got questions about: COD:MW2 (2 years ago it was GTA: San Andreas). Someone's not checking those ESRB ratings :-/
• Surprising number of questions about hardware (which do you think is more powerful, PS3 or 360? Is the PC more powerful? Is iPhone more powerful than PSP? etc)

Anyhow, both talks were fun, but it's always frustrating to see some kids held back because of lack of access to technology.

Book Review: Tea Time With Terrorists

I recently finished Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War. The author, Mark Stephen Meadows, and I are on the same mail list and I thought enough of his ideas to buy the book knowing nothing about it. And wow, I sure am glad I bought it.

Finding himself in Europe when 9-11 happened, Mark watched from the outside as our government and media conjured up a boogie-man of 'terrorist' that quickly took on a hype beyond even the events of that day. Questioning what he was being told to fear, and feeling that the best way to deal with fear of the unknown is to make it known, he decided to spend some time meeting some terrorists and finding out what makes them, well I suppose 'tick' is a poor choice of word.

After a little research he settled on Sri Lanka as his petri dish, flew down to the tourist capital Colombo, rented a motorcycle and headed north to the home of the Tamil Tigers and what has essentially been a war zone for ~30 years. The Tamil Tigers having the unique distinction of having invented suicide bombing and exporting that to other terrorist organizations.

Thus begins a very unique travelogue. It's part introspective, part narrative. A look at the horrors people can commit, and the beauty that people can find in living their lives despite this.

Mark comes off as two parts Indy Jones (playing motorcycle bullfighter with trucks, getting escorts at gunpoint, etc) and one part Mr Magoo (leaving the road to investigate a bombed out tank, only to realized he'd wandered to the middle of a minefield).

All the while he approaches his adventures with the type of drink-heartily-of-life gusto to which we should all aspire.

If you are looking for an insight into the mind of a terrorist (he meets and interviews several), a portrait of a beautiful country, or a great story of travel and adventure, this book is for you. It delivers on all three counts.

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War

Book Review: The Universe In A Nutshell

I picked The Universe in a Nutshell an audiobook and listened to it during my commute. It's Hawking's more accessible overview of astrophysics and it's history.

It's a fun and accessible read for those that have an interest in the subject matter, but aren't well versed on it (or have let their knowledge atrophy). I don't think I'd recommend it as an audiobook for commutes though. For one, it's not exactly concentration-free. Secondly, he refers to the occasional diagram which of course you can't see.

There are a couple sections of the book where he talks about thought-trends in the scientific community and how often they fall by the wayside for the next big thing. For a field with a storied history, you'd think they'd learn that their history indicates that each idea has a high probability of not being "the final theory". Kind of reminded me of our own obsession with whatever the current 'big thing' is (microtransactions, facebook, etc).