Android design standards - Finally!

Google just announced design standards for applications on Android. Having three different Android devices at home, I have first hand experience of the UI fragmentation on the platform. However, Google needs to go beyond Android for design unification. Google is broader than mobile, and having design consistency is going to be crucial for a standard user experience across all Google properties.

Consider the Gmail app, and in particular the menu item to “Report Spam”, for example. I use three different flavors of GMail, and the design across the three avenues is not only non-intuitive, but inconsistent. Even with an abundance of access, I have yet to develop the sort of muscle memory that I would associate with the typical Google user interface.

On the desktop, it is part of a grouped threesome, and looks like a happy stop sign. And it's relative position remains the same whether I am in the inbox view or the message view. That feels like a UI that I could get used to.

On my Galaxy SII, the SPAM icon looks like an alien, with a varying location on the menu. When I select a thread from my inbox, it shows up as an option in first menu page. When I am within an email, however, it takes two menu clicks to get to the option.

Finally on my Thrive, it is an option available only on the overflow menu. While that might say a lot about how good Google thinks it's filters are, it still makes for a very annoying user experience.

Three form factors, and three different ways of thinking about Spam. It is time Google thought about design standards for across it's solutions, and not just for a platform.

Sense of accomplishment

IKEA has always fascinated me.

It isn't just a case of aesthetics - I am not one to care for much in that department. Nor do I have a particular affinity to particle-board furniture. Rather, what attracted me to IKEA was the fact that they offered a rare commodity - a frustration-free sense of accomplishment.

Case in point. We recently bought a regular ol' sofa, and while I was setting it up I came upon a very unwelcome sight. The main drill holes that were meant to attach the base to the back, had been drilled incorrectly. I had two options, pack the whole sofa that I had just unpacked after lugging it into the house from the rented SUV and take it back, or drill a couple of holes and fix it myself. Naturally I chose the latter.

That is when the problems began - the biggest drill-bit I had was too small for the bolts. When I got the pilot holes in, they were slightly off where they had to be. And to make matters worse, I did not have a long enough cord for my drill and had to constantly switch to the nearest power outlet. In short I spent more effort and derived more frustration drilling two holes, than I did finishing up the rest of the assembly.

I am sure most of that has to do something with me, but that is beside the point.

Contrast that with the IKEA experience. No holes to drill, no tool bigger than a screwdriver and every nut & bolt accounted for. Nevermind that every board I pick up is little more than saw-dust compressed together with glue; or that the mirage of the perfect IKEA room can never materialize in real-life. What IKEA sells is the experience - one that starts from impossibly perfect model rooms, to the warehouse with meticulously numbered aisles and bins, to the involved yet easy construction.

A frustration-free sense of accomplishment.

The price of freedom?

Interesting post floating about the last few days, from the blog understatement.com, giving a different spin on the fragmentation issue that has plagued Android phones since the beginning. While iPhones get the OS up to date periodically, Android phones are essentially at the mercy of the carriers and the device manufacturers.

The post outlines the impact of this fragmentation on users, developers and the security of the phone itself.

The biggest impact though, I think, is in actual sales. Selling an outdated phone means you have fewer people who want to now commit to a two-year lock-in. People are still buying the iPhone 3, because they know that it is a phone that is actively being supported by Apple.

And yet, for me, there is another aspect of this that is not obvious from this picture. The world of modified software.

CyanogenMod calls itself an aftermarket firmware for Android phones. Essentially it is a modification of the Android OS, which, unlike the iOS, is Open Source. It provides additional features, not available to stock Android devices. But more importantly, the capability is not forced like with a jail-broken iPhone, but using pieces of the original Android OS itself.

Yes, the fragmentation of the Android market means I am going to delay my purchase till I am sure I am getting a version that is going to last me for at least two years. But it is also the price I am willing to pay - for a device that is actually mine.

At least for now.

Local start-ups on the WWW

BodyShopBids.com is an interesting website, with a lot of potential. If you are ever in an auto kerfuffle, and need some body work done, this seems like a great way to get some bids to fix the damage without a lot of driving around.

I recently got into one such scrape myself, and when a friend suggested this site. I was naturally overjoyed. So, I created an account, took photos of the damage and created a report.

As it turns out the site is predominantly focused on the Chicago area, and did not have too many body shops signed up near me. While the guy from the company who called me up was definitely super-nice about it, the whole experience got me thinking of the travails of start-ups that connect physical world with that part of the world online.

There are some problems shipping can solve, but for something like this, the only answer is a Groupon-scale company. And without the scale, it is life between a rock and a hard place. Do you advertise your limitations on the site, and have potential customer's lose interest? Or spend a lot of time on the flip side, telling users that the service is not available in their area?

While you figure that out, I'll be hoping BSB comes soon to a body shop nearby.

+1 and the persistent Like

+1 is Google's latest attempt at cracking social. After the famously obscure Orkut, and the disaster that was Buzz, it was about time Google got it right.

With +1 Google seems to have gone about social differently. +1 is a highly scaled down version of a social network - the opposite of Facebook. Facebook built the interaction feature-set first, then used the Like button to spread it. Google's approach seems to be focused on building out the +1 button and eventually coalesce the rest of its sharing services around it.

+1 has two things going for it - it is persistent and contextual. Persistent because unlike the Like button, the core idea for +1 is not to broadcast the action to everyone. When you "like" something, that act itself is shared by Facebook. Which works for Facebook, because communication is what Facebook is all about. But +1 is more persistent; it hides in the sandwich layer between web-content and you - the search engine.

Persistence is important, because this shifts the playing field away from conversations - which Facebook and Twitter are good at, to algorithmically mining history - something Google is great at. This is where context comes in. Google owns your landing page on the web: the search results. It is a powerful page, and is also contextual. Unlike the static Facebook, Google's use of +1 can morph itself to add context to what you are in the mood for at that time. Unlike a cacophony of likes, you instead get the few +1's that are highly relevant to what you are doing at that time.

This is the strategy that worked for Google in ads, and the bet is that it will work for social as well.

The problem for Google's social has not been building out social feature sets. The biggest impediment has been changing the nature of social to fit with Google's strengths. +1 could well be the game changing strategy that Google so desperately needs.

Rare but spectacular

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is reminder that natural disasters have a magnitude of their own, and irrespective of where they strike, there is not much we puny humans can do. All the technology one can deploy is, at best an early warning, at worst a dangerous sense of false security. At the end of it all, one can only hope the human cost of the disaster is minimized.

I am still hoping that things start to get better soon, especially for the tens of thousands that are without basic amenities in sub-zero conditions. But through it all, I cannot but help consider certain aspects about the general reaction to this disaster. It is difficult to be objective when human suffering is involved, but here is an attempt.

During the first couple days of the disaster I realized a certain detachment in me with regards to the earthquake and tsunami. As if the news did not really get through to me. It was not until I took pause at the details emanating from the various news reports did the full impact of the disaster sink in. I realized that I was, unconsciously, tuned out to disasters on the news. Like the boy who cried wolf, our media is obsessed with keeping us abreast of everything, as if it is critical for my survival. When every day and every headline is blared out at the highest volume, how can one distinguish between the latest antics of a movie star and a disaster that is impacting millions? When every news programs promises to "follow the latest developments" for me, it is increasingly difficult to determine what news I care about.

The markets, predictably reacted by falling. Both the Japanese markets and US markets moved in step with news emanating from the disaster zone. But for all the rationality of the markets there is a very little linkage between the actual economic impact of the disaster. The image on the right is an example of the (ir)rationality of the markets. The real question is not whether the market is rational, but the fact that this is yet another drum beat into the echo chamber of the daily news cycle. Yet another source of ominous calamitous predictions of impossibly dire consequences.

The third aspect, which is also the reason for the title of this post, is Nuclear power. Most news coverage has been (mis)using terms like meltdown and radiation exposure, because they sound great on the evening news. What this does is two things. Firstly it takes away from coverage of the real tragedy, thousands needing basic necessities along with the real rebuilding that needs to happen. Secondly it helps bring about suboptimal decision making for our future, due to the inherent bias we have to fear the rare but spectacular.

Power generation is a dangerous endeavor, be it wind, coal or nuclear. Even though wind generates less than one percent of world's power, it accounts for a fatality rate of 0.15 deaths per terawatt-hour. Compared to nuclear power which accounts for 15% of world's production and accounts for 0.0009 deaths per terawatt-hour. Coal, on the other hand, clocks in at 161 deaths per terawatt-hour. This is a similar bias as seen in the argument for lack of safety in air transportation.

As a commentator on Marketplace puts it...

... a 9-plus Richter scale earthquake and tsunami represent about as extreme an event as any nuclear reactor could ever face. If the danger from this shock is contained, nuclear will have passed its most extreme test. It's like the movie "Apollo 13" -- this is either nuclear's worst disaster or finest hour.

There is so much that we can understand, learn and admire from the people facing incredible difficulties in Japan. The best we can do is help in our own way. The worst is fall prey to the constant drumbeat of fear and let the rare-but-spectacular determine how we decide to live the biggest chunk of our rather mundane lives.

Update: An unbelievably awesome rant from TechCrunch, about the hysteria surrounding the nuclear "apocalypse".

Science, Engineering & Technology

I guess I first got the idea when NPR decided to introduce a culinary story, and referred to modern cooking methods like using foams and freezing as "scientific" cooking methods. I guess I did not understand why cooking on the stove was un-scientific. Or worse, scientific being used as a synonym for modern? Or new fangled crazy?

Close on the heels, I lost it when when someone referred to using a custom XML schema as new technology. And ETL as a brand-new capability.

So this is my attempt at helping bring a little sanity back into the use of terms like science, engineering and technology.

Wiretapping Net Neutrality

Came across an interesting article the other day on NPR. The article talked about the difficulty in implementing a wiretapping law in the age of the communication capabilities of the Internet. The audio is embedded below.

In the old days of wired telephony, communication happened when a fixed wire carried voice from the speaker to the listener. Wiretapping during this era was literally tapping a wire. The fact that communication took a pre-determined route between the participants made wire-tapping technically simple.

It was this pre-determined route for communications that, during cold-war, led to the development of the Internet. Ironically, the original requirement for the internet (having no fixed path, and therefore no single failure point) makes intercepting communications that much more difficult.

Communication on the Internet is a vague concept. Anything can be, and is, communication. Sending email, downloading files, instant messaging, viewing websites, watching video or having conversations via Skype - it is all a form of communication. Not to mention the continuous chatter of all the devices on the network, constantly talking to each other. Hence any law that deals with eavesdropping is challenged by a target that is designed to withstand the very thing that is required of it. The NPR article does a great job of identifying the problems of any intercept solution - loss of security, misuse, and the loss of privacy.

I think there is another aspect, that links back to the idea of network neutrality. The nature of network neutrality means that anyone can build a tool that can use the Internet to communicate. With the widespread availability of communication and encryption libraries, means that building a small tool that can only communicate with copies of itself is trivial. The only way to prevent this would be to prevent the user of the Internet by applications that are not explicitly authorized.

In other words, a neutral network, makes successful eavesdropping extremely difficult, if not impossible. The only way to have an "Intercept Solution" that works is to have a network that is directly involved in what is flowing across it. Forget corporate greed stratifying the Internet. In the long run, it might still be the need to eavesdrop that might trump the case for network neutrality.

Kindle for a skeptic

I like the smell of books. I like the carefree grip of a paperback, and the sense of accomplishment as the lighter side gets progressively heavier and vice-versa. I love having a bookshelf, with a solemn procession of books with shiny covers, adding to a collection of fond memories. Which is why the e-book revolution was, like Facebook, part of the technology basket that I stubbornly refused to embrace.

Until the wife broke our no-gift pact to buy me a Kindle 3 on Valentines' Day.

Notwithstanding my personal misgivings about ebook readers, the Kindle is a gorgeous gadget. The third iteration of this iconic reader is practically calling out to be held, switched on, and just be read. Everything about it seems natural somehow - the weight, the matte finish, and even the color of the print on the device (it is a dull brown and not a bright white which could potentially interfere with the eye). I couldn't wait to get started.

But about five minutes into exploring the new device, I felt a familiar sense of foreboding. Everything about the Kindle was designed to sell me ebooks from Amazon.com and I wasn't yet ready to ditch their dead-tree cousins. All I wanted to do was upload some of the pdf files I had with me onto the reader and test it out. Instead I had to spend time figuring out the difference between the @kindle.com and @free.kindle.com addresses. Then understand formats, and what could be converted and what couldn't. And most irritatingly, what I was going to be charged if I used Whispernet as opposed to a USB cable to throw files into my Kindle. This precisely is what I intensely dislike about these ‘simplified’ approaches to using something I just bought. I bet the idea was beautifully designed by an engineer, monetized by a suit, stratified by a marketer and documented by someone that did not give any hoots. Yes, in the end it works, but it is not pretty trying to get answers to silly questions when all you want to do is take it for a test read.

There are other, less annoying idiosyncrasies that take a little getting used to. The biggest is the screen refresh when you flip a page. The entire screen goes black, then the letters first appear as holes, and then the holes and print are reversed. Sounds annoying? Well it actually is. And then there is the interface. For the abnormally large number of keys on a reader, any navigating feels clunky. Think blackberry style interfaces without a similar unity of purpose. As I said, these are annoyances. And once you manage to suppress the reflex action of reaching out with the second hand to flip pages things look up quickly.

The screen though quirky, is wonderful for reading. The choice of font (Caecilia) is very eye friendly. You can customize the font size to your heart's content. And it really can be read in direct sunlight, as long as you are not holding it to directly reflect the sun itself. As a reading device, the Kindle is astonishingly well suited.

For me however, the value of Kindle is not in replacing the books on my shelf, but in extending my own sphere of reading. I am and will continue to be nostalgic about my paperbacks. But there are things that a Kindle can do that no dead-tree book can - be alive. Sign up to Instapaper.com and set it to send you daily reading digests makes Kindle the perfect way to read those long articles. Get Calibre and stop fretting about formats. And most importantly, I can now get to services like getabstract.com, click a button and actually have the ability to catch up on the thousands of books people seem to write everyday.

Now if only I could tweet about all the reading I do. Oh wait, I can.

Indian zeitgeist interpreted

Google released their annual zeitgeist, including country-wise insights. The Indian zeitgeist, for me, holds special relevance - fortunately or unfortunately, Google is one of the most important ways that I stay in touch with India. And here is what I deciphered from the results this year.

Bollywood and cricket still rule: Just look at the list of fastest rising people searches, all you have is either heroines and cricketing personalities. Out of the 10 most popular movies - only 2 are Hollywood movies.

Value is most valued: The brands that are successful are the ones provide most value - nokia, micromax, samsung, maruti. And value isn't just price - IRCTC has an incredible proposition (railway tickets online), something that caused it to top the charts in 2009 as well.

Entrepreneurship is alive and kicking: The youngsters want to impress girls, kiss, tie ties, improve their English, build websites and make money. Some are stressed and want to meditate, but thankfully not as much as last year. All pointing to a young populace itching to get out there.

There is a certain sense of brand loyalty: Yahoo mail still beats gmail, Nokia is up at the top, quite unlike their destinies elsewhere in the world. Same with Dell. When brands spend the time, they get rewarded.

Yet people are adopting the latest: I know this is contradictory, in a sense, to the earlier point, but that is India. Facebook, Twitter, Lady Gaga, Twilight are all what we searched for (thankfully, no Justin Beiber).

There is only so much that can be interpreted from six top 10 lists. And I am sure there is enough and more confirmatory bias. But looking at the amount of contradiction I have in one post, makes the gut feel it is just right.

The accent of crowds

One of the most fascinating past of Web 2.0 for me, is the way it paints a study in crowd behavior. When I think about 2.0 sites, one of the biggest differentiating factors is their dynamic nature - where the readers contribute as much if not more than the site itself. And the tone of this contribution is distinct, an accent if you will, of these sites. Consider the following examples:

Slashdot, as the site proclaims, is a site that provides news for nerds and stuff that matters. The site for long has defined a sort of intellectual nerdy sub-culture on the Internet. Before the 2.0 moniker became the fad it is, Slashdot derived more from the comments everyone posted on "nerdy" news stories, than the stories themselves. And the tone on the comments has always been something that defined the site - nerdy, important, focused on being right and mostly brutal and unforgiving.

Woot is a hoot. For an e-commerce site that sells one - just one - item each day at a ridiculously low price, Woot has developed a strong following of users who go out of the way to research each deal. The tone starts with the description that is posted with each deal. Rarely focusing on the subject of the sale, the description is funny, satirical and whimsical. A tone that follows throughout the site into the comments. In stark contrast to Slashdot, your head is now chewed off if you are wrong. User posts are creative, sardonic and dare I say, useful.

Linking to 4chan, if you don't know what it is, is dangerous - so I won't. But the site is basically an image board, where all content is user generated, and no one needs to log in. Reflecting the permissive nature of the site, comments range from the downright obnoxious to the hilarious. There is an underlying element of mischief and theatrical excess. Then there are the memes, in all their wild and unrestrained creative glory. And yes, if you only know of 4chan through traditional media, there is an abundance of adult content, limited to a minority of the boards. Try filtering the boards to "work safe" to get some real value out of the site.

To the original point of this post. Sites like the three above, probably share a large chunk of the same users (no citation for that claim). But each site brings out a different aspect of its users. This accent of the sites, is something that is self propagated over time, but is also seeded by the site itself. A site proclaiming itself to be for the nerds, brings out the nerds. Another name woot, can never let anyone take themselves too seriously. The world wide web, is not so much a fragmentation of users, as it is a fragmentation of accents. And the tone you get in your users is, in all probability, the tone you portray in your site to begin with.

Emergence and Democracy

Emergence is the idea that given sufficient numbers of simple interactions, a relatively complex outcome may result, that cannot be trivially traced back to the simple interactions. Wikipedia, which is itself a great example of emergent behavior, defines emergence as:

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.

It struck me, in listening to coverage of the recent election season, that it should be possible to see voting as the building blocks of simple interactions, which should result in complex emergent behavior when it comes to the results of such elections. Having listened to pundits rave and rant on election results across the two largest democracies, there seems to be very little of this spontaneous complexity. Yes, parties win and lose, but over the generations of going through this process has not, in my opinion, produced a directed long-term behavior transcending local variations. To me that means that we are either asking the wrong questions of elections (and consequently democracy), or lack the tools to recognize emergence, or have democracy set up in a way to never achieve emergence.

The final thought is scary. Especially if you consider that most of humanity (caveats include China of course, but with the understanding that their adoption of democracy is only a matter a time) have hitched their future to this bandwagon. It appears, at least according to the superficial analysis above, that the current form of democracy is not set up to deliver on the promise of a future for humanity. The questions, therefore, are: why is today's democratic setup unable to produce emergent behavior, and what can we do about it.

When I initially thought about this, I had imagined this to be a problem with the lack of bounds for democratic emergence. Because there are so many parameters that modern democracies have to deal with, I figured the setup was not scaling in breadth. But the more I think, emergence has nothing to do with bounds. Emergent behavior changes with the change in bounds, but the behavior should nonetheless exist. Instead, I imagine the following three ideas may describe the reason for non-emergence in today's democracies.

Delayed feedback - emergent systems typically have a feedback loop as part of the simple interactions driving it. Democracy is time-delayed. Instead votes determining government actions occur every X years, while the actions themselves are continuous. This biases voting actions to the most recent governmental actions making the simple actions for emergence flawed.

Representative vs. Direct democracy - most democratic systems involve choosing of representatives who in turn make legislation. This one-removed nature of legislation eats into the continuity of feedback. There are no simple actions that vote on simple outcomes. Instead simple actions now are voting on complex outcomes themselves.

Non-uniform participants - emergent behavior requires all non-directed actions to be completed by similar participants. In other words, all voters ought to be equal. Unfortunately, this is not always so. With the Junta in Myanmar at one extreme of this example and the special interest groups in the US at another, participants in a democracy are never practically the same. This also means, the goal of pure emergence is that much tougher to attain.

This post is by no means the first look at such an idea. Joichi Ito, a Japanese journalist, talked about the idea of Emergent Democracy in 2001, and how blogs were/are going to be the engine towards making it happen. Wikipedia lists a book by Clay Shirky, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In both cases, the organization itself is proposed to be emergent as a result of the Internet.

While it is intriguing (and rather far-fetched) to give up the current democratic setup for the promise of anarchistic self organization of societies - there may be a case for a moderately direct form of democracy leveraging the Internet. And just may be establish a true form of emergent democracy that is actually able to propel human society forward.

Commercially useless

A few months ago, The Consumerist ran nominations and voting to identify the worst commercials on Television. The winners have just been announced. You may disagree with the actual order, but I doubt you will contest the fact that these are annoying advertisements indeed.

Taking the top spot was the loud and obnoxious ad from Staples, featuring the stoned, fit inducing loud-mouth that yells "Wow! That's a low price!" as he examines each and every one of the price tags in the store. If you have missed it for some reason, here it is, in all its grating glory.

The winners circle included a number of other gems, including this category: "Most grating performance by a human" which includes the surprise hit from McDonald's - The (not-until-I've-had-my-coffee) jerk.

Which makes you wonder. What is it that reason companies produce advertisements like this? Why do they think that loud, in-your-face ads are better than more subtle ones? And why is it getting worse?

My hypothesis is that this is because of the takeover of advertising by the left brain instead of the right. That is the gradual replacement of the creative by the logical. As companies have started to place more focus on linking costs to benefits, the marketing departments have been impacted. Ad spending may be going up, but it is going with caveats - spend only if you deliver. As a result marketing teams are increasingly becoming short-sighted, literal, non-emotive and defensive. Here is how I imagine the conversation for a new advertising campaign goes:

"Why do our sales suck?"

"I don't think we are making a good enough connection with the customer's needs."

"What do the customers want?"

"Our market research says they want lower prices."

"Ok, but our prices are reasonable and low."

"Yes, but our brand perception is not for low prices."

"So we need to increase the linkage between our brand and low prices. I authorize a marketing campaign to strongly increase this linkage. And I will give you pennies to do it in."

"Ah ok. So, we will feature a small set of national ads that feature s guy alternately yelling - 'company name' and 'low price'"

"That sounds great Bob, now why do our margins suck?"

"I think we need to immediately raise our prices."

"Ok, then that is what we will do."

Lo and Behold, this is how you get funding for the worst at on Television in the United States.

The life and decline of WWW

The world wide web, has been one of the biggest success stories of the Internet. So much so that the two are often used synonymously. While the world wide web spawned and initially grew with the Internet, the predominant trend in recent times has been an implicit demotion of the web, in favor of the Internet. In hindsight, it seems obvious the success of the Internet would bring with it the seeds for the destruction of the world wide web.

The terms first. How is the Internet different from the world wide web or WWW? The Internet is the means to connect all of the world's computing devices together, while the WWW is that part of the Internet you access with your web-browser. The world wide web includes every website you visit, in all of its textual glory sprinkled with the innocuous yet wondrous invention - hyperlinks.

The evolution of text to hypertext is perhaps the single most powerful inventions in modern times. With the ability to embed links in text, suddenly it was possible to organize and access information in ways unheard of. A single link was all that separated any two pieces of knowledge. In fact, the two pieces of knowledge did not even have to reside on the same physical machine - as long as there was a means to connect two or more computers together, hypertext would allow anyone to access the information. With such power in the hyperlink, it was a shame not to pursue the goal of connecting all of the world's information stores together, allowing one to link to and access all the information from anywhere. Hence the Internet.

The success of the Internet beyond the initial goal of hyperlink oblivion, was its flexibility. Now that we had all these computers linked together, it was possible to exchange a lot more than just text through hyperlinks. And one did not have to limit the end points to computers. Instead you could connect PDAs, phones, music players or even refrigerators.

Initially the Internet was constrained - by lack of bandwidth. Exchanging anything more than text was painful. With the increase in bandwidth, communication was no longer limited to text. First it was images, then music. The increase in capacity contributed directly to increasing links between text and other multimedia. But this was still the days when downloading a picture meant waiting for it to arrive line-by-line across a phone line.

Even at this point, the principal means of getting to that picture or mp3 was via the world wide web, using your browser. As long as the multimedia was being linked to, the WWW was still the best way to get to it.

Thanks partly to the dot-com boom, there was a massive investment in opening up the capacity for communication across the Internet. This explosive growth in bandwidth, along with retail broadband communication, came the next era of accessing multimedia - streaming it instead of linking to it.

As the Internet grew into real-time capability, it was suddenly possible to cut out the middle man - WWW. Hypertext that began with the humble idea of linking information, had grown to assume the role of carrying multimedia to compensate for the lack of speed of the Internet, was suddenly irrelevant. It was now possible to go around the constraints and freedoms of hypertext. But there was still the need to have something to receive the streaming media - enter web applications or apps.

It is no accident that the era of the apps coincided with the growth in streaming capabilities of the Internet. Apps demand cheap bandwidth. Unlike the robustness of the WWW, apps are built around user experience. And unlike the WWW, apps allow end-to-end control. Doesn't matter if the app was built on the iPhone or popped off a browser, effectively it isolates user experience away from flexibility of the WWW to the immersive capability of the app.

The data is firmly pointing in the same direction. The above is a dated graph courtesy UC Berkeley, but showing the relative drop in bandwidth used by the web as compared to the other protocols. Updated data is available with the Wired article here. Notwithstanding very pertinent arguments to the contrary, the definitive move away from the broad set-up called WWW, into the narrower app-based is an eventuality. Something directly precipitated by the success of the Internet.

Hold your phone my way

iPhone 4 is out.

Accompanied with the usual hysteria about long lines, 15 minutes of fame for gadget experts in the mainstream press, and of course the one feature (bug) that is frustrating its users - again.

This time around, it is the new antenna for the iPhone. Turns out, the steel casing of the iPhone is a proprietary alloy from Apple, that also functions as the phone's antennas. And if you were to touch it a particular way when you use it, then it doesn't work as efficiently and the phone loses reception.

The solution? Avoid holding it that way.

The iPhone is not the first phone with reception problems when in contact with the skin. That said, it feels like somehow it is the user's fault for holding it that way. The tone taken by the company has started to sound more and more punk - not the cool kind, but the irresponsible kind. And this is where it has started to piss some of its most ardent fans off.

It just adds to my initial feeling about the company - they are no longer as innovative as they once were. Instead they are now touting incremental evolutions as breakthroughs while developing an intolerance for a true challenge to their way of thought. I guess they have a right to it, but it is getting sillier by the minute.

Scientific denial

An interesting watch - for a variety of reasons. This is an issue that generally seems to be splitting a lot of educated people down the middle. While no one seems to deny the impact science has had on humans, few seem to want to trust science either.

Maybe it is all down the the definitions. As I grew up, my vision of a 'scientist' was someone in a lab, highly intelligent, educated and motivated, pursuing a topic with a single minded dedication. A scientist, I believed, did not have to deal with the worldly problems & pressures like the rest of us - as if they lived in a sterile environment, just like in their own experiments.

Unfortunately, this is seldom the case. Scientists, live in and share the same world as us. And there is no 'science' that stands alone, in unblemished purity. So when people attack science, or they think they are, they really are not. They are attacking a hybrid cabal of scientists, businessmen, government and media. The reason they are attacking this cabal, is because the cabal is advertising itself as 'science'. When we have scientifically proven face creams, that are more in-your-face than the lack of correlation between vaccines and autism - how can you really distinguish between the two.

I don't believe the intelligent disbeliever is directly questioning science as defined by the scientific method, but what is questionable is the cabal claiming indulgence in and of the scientific method. That is not to say there there will always be someone that will never believe, but instead want to take things to their illogical extreme conclusions. I guess they believe they are 'scientists' in their own right.

Patent end to innovation?

Apple inc has evoked mixed feelings in me. They are the company I respect the most for understanding the every-user. They present the smoothest integration between man and his gadgets. But they are also a company that I will never buy a product from. I wholeheartedly and passionately dislike their closed ecosystem approach.

However they never struck me as lacking innovation - until now. Recently they decided to sue phone maker HTC over alleged 20 patent violations. I am sure Apple believes there is true merit in some of those claims, but when it comes to the interface "technologies", I believe they are wrong.

Apple has delivered everything that the rumor-mill has promised. The iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV and the tablet, not to mentions scores of products on their mac line-up. Now I believe Apple has finally out-run the rumor-mill. They have successfully gotten Jobs out of Macworld. The last thing churned by wasn't necessarily as earth-shaking as hoped. And now the company is busy defending instead of creating the next big thing.

Apple knows or should know, that they have enough of a brand name that they will get the customer dollar votes they deserve - without having to enforce patents to limit consumer choice. Customers that choose to buy a HTC handset will do so because they either do not want to buy Apple, or they cannot get Apple, or because Apple is priced out for them. No one that Apple's victory in a patent suit is going to help them win back.

The reason for the patent war clearly isn't the customer - it is the investor that wants to milk the cash-cow dry. A cash-cow that isn't much into innovation anymore.

Connectivity - Part III

The third milestone in my love for mobile connectivity, happened shortly after I bought my second phone. It was work that demanded I have no personal time and took steps to get me a Blackberry.

The Blackberry turned out to be a very different being, in comparison with my current phones. Everything about it screamed business - no frills; just a steady solid performer. It had everything I wanted to get work done, nothing that would make me buy one for myself. But it was the company that was paying for it, so my decision making process consisted of little more than asking a colleague which handset he recommended.

Thus I came to be in possession of my new Blackberry Bold. The feature list was pretty impressive, not to mention a paid for, always online 3G connectivity. Completing my enterprise activation was a breeze, and within time I had replicated my email and calendar on the perfectly usable mobile device.

The keyboard took a little getting used to. Realizing the power of being fully connected took a bit longer. But somewhere between checking the location of my next meeting without needing my laptop and being able to reply to quick emails at the extremes of each day, I realized something strange - I was no longer fascinated by the new device. In comparison with the time I spent configuring and personalizing my earlier phones - the customizations to my Blackberry were close to nil.

At the beginning I attributed this to my trivial approach to selecting it. But that wasn't it. What had changed was me and my attitude towards connectivity. Full mobile capability had quickly become a means to an end. With abundance came transparency - the Blackberry bold held little fascination beyond the emails it carried and the meetings it reminded me of.

I was no longer a connectivity virgin.

Connectivity - Part II

So, after about 5 years the phone - which was probably pretty advanced at the time of its purchase - was woefully antiquated. Not to mention the rough and tumble of time severely tested the paint, plastic and the buttons on the phone. It was time to get into the market for a new phone - and boy was it a revelation. All the time that I had not really paid attention to phone market, a number of new things happened - including the iPhone. But eventually I settled on my new Nokia 5800.

As I worked through the pros and cons of the phone, what struck me most was the extent to which my wants and needs from a phone had changed in the last five years. WAP an not an acceptable speed to browse. Browsing websites no longer meant struggling through text extracted by a lynx-lookalike; full color depiction of sites was expected. Email on phone completed with regular desktop clients in terms of capabilities and features. And having an always accessible device meant newer and more powerful applications. But instead of being overwhelmed, a missing accelerometer could be the reasons for rejecting a phone.

Beyond the physical capabilities, what struck me most was the ability to stay fully connected all the time. As soon as I acquired my phone, I linked my personal email accounts to the built-in email client, linked it up to my WiFi and was catching up on email with friends. The fact that this phone was able to connect to a wireless network, which about a couple of years ago, I couldn't find enough desktop software to support was mind-blowing. In addition, the phone also came with an in-built Global Positioning chip that spoke directly to satellites tearing across space fourteen thousand kilometers away.

And the thing weighed a tad more than a hundred grams or three and a half ounces.

The first mobile phone weighed in at 28 ounces, not including its antenna and only barely made phone calls.

In my mind this was my second generation of the mobile phone. My first phone showed me how to make phone calls, and use a smattering of other services. This one however was a more mature attempt at connectivity. However, I hadn't signed up for the ultimate of connectivity - an always-on network connection. And that would by the third time charm.

Connectivity - Part I

My first phone was bought back in late 2003. It was a Sony Ericsson T610. I remember this clearly, because I was among the last of my friends to purchase a phone. By the time we joined the productive workforce, mobile phones were no longer a luxury. Handset prices had been relentlessly pushed down by the glut of companies in the market, which was almost matched by the competition among the service providers. Before long, pretty much everyone I knew had a phone. And it became not only a connectivity imperative among friends, but became a requirement to keep in touch with team-mates and other business colleagues.

Everybody seemed to be doing it - so I held off - for seemed like eternity at the time, but was only about 9 months. Eventually I caved in. And when I went for a phone, I wanted to take one that had as many features as possible.

The T610 was pretty good for the time - It came with a tiny browser that you could use with WAP to trudge along the information superhighways. It ran JAVA applets - which was absolutely mind-blowing for me (and eventually led to the simple understanding that the phone was nothing more than a different avatar of the computer). And it came with a tiny camera that took 320 by 240 grainy excuses for pictures.

But I was ecstatic. I used every excuse to go online and check movie timings, even if no one else seemed remotely interested in going to a movie. I photographed and cataloged various events of my daily life now that I had a camera always at hand. I used an open source program to connect the phone to my laptop and use it as a mobile router (on WAP). I bought a terminator dongle online to flash the phone to the latest firmware (something that was pretty difficult at the time, requiring special hardware - the aforementioned termninator dongle). I backed up the files, restored them, backed them up again. I built by own ringtone (from the soundtrack of the game Blood)

Looking back, the phone did not do much, but it seemed at the time there was no limits to its capabilities. As it trudged along on WAP, I never stopped being amazed that the phone talked the same networking language as the old world mainframe behemoths - TCP/IP. When it took those tiny, barely recognizable pictures using the built-in camera, it always surprised me that they managed to squeeze a camera in there. I never saw it as the little engine that could, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was an engine in there to begin with.

I ended up using the phone for about 5 years. In the time I traveled across the globe; changed phone numbers at least 5 times; switched SIM cards every few months and generally pushed it beyond its limits. Eventually it's joystick started to give way, a few buttons began developing tantrums and no amount of dis-assembly to clean it helped. It was time for a change.