« April 2003 | Main | June 2003 »
May 28, 2003
Email problems fixed
I was out of town the past five days, and somewhere along the line my email gateway got out of whack. Things seem to be working now. If you sent me a message recently and it bounced, please re-send it.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 22, 2003
I wanted to just call it 'Yesterday'
Anticipating a post-Web, post-PC world is my latest column to appear on CNet News.com.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 21, 2003
Camera phone stats from Business 2.0 column
"Since January, T-Mobile users have sent more than 1 million photos to one another. Sprint PCS (PCS) president Len Lauer recently said that camera phone owners send an average of 15 pictures a month."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 20, 2003
Worm tracking
I've received more than 35 copies of the "support\@microsoft.com" email worm the past two days. They go straight into my spam filter so I don't notice, but that's a pretty substantial total. Remember when these worms were big news?
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
I guess that means they liked it?
The Kevin Werbach Experience. AKA, what I did during my 26-hour trip to Amsterdam. Or at least the part I'm willing to talk about. (via David Galbraith)
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 19, 2003
Time is Running Out...
The deadline to save $300 on registration for "Supernova" is this Friday. Don't miss the opportunity to join Joi Ito, Clay Shirky, David Isenberg, Kevin Lynch, Cory Doctorow, and an amazing list of fellow speakers and attendees in the Washington DC area on July 8-9!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 18, 2003
Power laws in action
New York Times: "Google now conducts 55 percent of all searches on the World Wide Web." (via "Scripting News")
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 17, 2003
Call to Action on Copyright Reform
Lessig forgets himself and gets all optimistic on us, and look what happens.
Seriously, Larry is fighting a good fight. Requiring copyright holders to pay $1 for renewal after 50 years, as the legislation he proposes would do, is a very reasonable compromise that would help reinvigorate the public domain. I encourage you to do your part in making this a reality.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 16, 2003
Thinkpad X31 notes #2
Finally had time to unpack my new IBM Thinkpad X31 laptop and transfer files onto it. I'm now on the return leg of my first long plane trip with it, and overall, I'm relatively happy.
First, the good news. The Intel Pentium M works as promised, deliving excellent performance with great battery life. The speed-up from my older X20 is quite noticeable. The battery life is roughly four hours in real-world use, going up to seven and a half with the snap-on extended battery. I made it through the whole Philadelphia-Amsterdam flight with juice to spare.
What I'm not completely satisfied with are the ergonomics. The keyboard is better than any other Windows utraportable, but still not as good as the previous generation Thinkpad. The most annoying thing is the wrist wrest underneath the keyboard. It's shorter than before, and the front edge is more steeply beveled. I usually find my wrists sitting right on the sharp corners of the machine, which is not the most comfortable experience. But I can live with it.
The X31 is basically a retrofit of IBM's X30 ultraportable with the Pentium M / Centrino, which means it may not take full advantage of what the new CPU allows. In contrast, IBM's mid-range T40 was redone from the ground up. I'm guessing that the X40 will fix the things I don't like... but I'm not willing to wait.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 14, 2003
Scott Rafer: "Particularly in Europe,
Scott Rafer: "Particularly in Europe, the trend towards municipal [WiFi] sponsorship is accelerating and must be watched closely."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
EFF on spectrum policy
Thanks to Cory Doctorow (way to go Cory!), the Electronic Frontier Foundation has jumped into the critically important battle over wireless spectrum policy. Here's a summary of comments in one FCC proceeding from several key players.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
McKinsey takes issue with decentralization
McKinsey Quarterly: "Yet a decentralized infrastructure, though more flexible, is not only 20 to 30 percent more expensive than a centralized one but also less reliable. Although decentralized models now prevail, the pendulum is swinging back toward centralized control."
Needless to say, I disagree with this analysis. But since it costs $150 for the premium membership required to read the full article, I don't know where the conclusions come from.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Gory details of social network software
More good discussion on Joi's site about LinkedIn.
I invited a bunch of people into my network on the service in order to get a feel for it. I'm not yet convinced Reid Hoffman et al have hit the mother lode, but they've made a start. The question is how well and how quickly they can evolve.
There are two issues for any social networking service: scale and functionality. It's a prototypical network-effects business -- there's only room for one eBay, and the first one up the mountain wins. But to scale beyond the early adopters, especially with competition, these services have to do something valuable and create a good user experience. LinkedIn's core service -- trusted business introductions -- is useful but not, I think, a killer app. If the company does its job well, its may stumble on a real killer app, as PayPal did. (We know one good app for social networking is dating, but that's a different market.) There's really no way to understand the possibilities of social software other than to build networks and watch what unfolds.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 13, 2003
Must be a trend
I don't know why, but I'm suddenly getting numerous requests to run text advertisements on my Bare Bones Guide to HTML Website. More in the past three months, in fact, than in the previous five years.
The only explanation I can come up with is that Google is causing a huge upsurge in small-scale text advertising across the Web. Not just an increase, but a tidal wave. If so, it's a latent trend that isn't being picked up, except as it affects Google itself.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining about the added revenue!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Superconductive Relationships
Ray Ozzie: "What's incredibly exciting to me is that a confluence of factors e.g. ubiquitous computing, networking, web and RAD technologies, the state of the job market - in essence, loosely coupled systems and loosely coupled minds - have created what amounts to a petri dish for experimentation in systems for social network formation, management and interpersonal interaction. An exciting time to be exploring what may happen to social structures, to organizations and to society when the friction between our minds can be reduced to zero ... to the point where we can truly have superconductive relationships."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Carrying the open spectrum torch
I'll be speaking today at a forum on spectrum policy hosted by the FCC, State Department, and NTIA (part of the Commerce Department). There is a Webcast available at the link above. Wish me luck!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Photos of FCC Chairman Powell
Photos of FCC Chairman Powell checking out wireless technology demos yesterday.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2003
Comcast's forthcoming PVR
USA Today: "Samsung will make decoders with built-in DVRs -- which record TV shows to a hard drive, making them far easier to use than VCRs. Set-top units for other TVs will access that hard drive. Ucentric Systems will provide the software to sort through TV schedules and help users select shows to record. What makes the Comcast system different from DVRs such as those from TiVo and ReplayTV is its ability to piggyback on the cable system to create a home network. That eliminates the need for extra connections or equipment."
At long last, the personal video recorder (PVR) market is heating up. Tivo hired respected NBC exec Marty Yudkovitz as its president, AOL Time Warner is working on its Mystro service, Comcast has already launched some network-based PVR features, and now this. Among other things, I'm glad to see Ucentric get a big customer win. I wrote about them some time ago in Release 1.0, but was wondering if they would make it.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Broadband over powerline
I want to believe that broadband over powerline will work, but I have to say, I'm skeptical.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cutting the cord
Wireless substitution (using a mobile phone as a primary line, and not subscribing to wired phone service) is a big deal for the telecom industry. It will get bigger.
Philadelphia Inquirer: "[T]elecom industry analysts estimate that 3 percent to 5 percent of all wireless users are cord cutters, a figure that could increase to 10 percent in the next few years. And for the highly mobile 18- to 30-year-old demographic, some predict that half of all cell-phone users will have some period in their lives when they will get along without an old-fashioned phone. Already, probably 10 percent of them live without them, said Keith Mallinson, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a market research firm specializing in telecommunications."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 10, 2003
Emergent Emergence?
Wiki version of Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy paper.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Exponential Weblog growth?
Jarrett House North: "We could be on the cusp of an exponential explosion in weblog activity, driven by the virtuous cycle of blogging: publish - subscribe - read - comment - publish."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The geeks meet the librarians
Tim Bray: "It's Time Long past time, in fact, to take the worlds' OPACs, and especially WorldCat, and build a general-purpose research tool for everybody; with this and Google we would really be covering the bases."
Read the entry to understand what Tim is talking about. One revelation for me: Dublic Core (a significant metadata standard) must refer to Dublin, Ohio, not Dublin, Ireland!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Digital Workstyle
Gary Boone expands on my comment about Apple and the digital lifestyle, by asking what this means to the business world.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
LinkedIn Discussion
The comments thread on Joi Ito's blog about LinkedIn brings up many critical issues for online communities and social software. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, chimes in a few times.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 9, 2003
Mayfield-Shirky Cage Match
The subject? Power law distributions on LinkedIn.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Naval Ravikant on key technology drivers
VentureBlog: "There's plenty of room in the future for new technology companies."
In particular, he lists:
- Internet traffic continues to double every year for the forseeable future
- CMOS image sensors are doubling in density every 18 months
- Liquid Crystal Displays and Liquid Crystal on Silicon are increasing panel size and density, roughly doubling every two - three years
- Solid-state non-volatile memory is doubling in capacity every 18 months
- Improved power management and new batteries are increasing effective battery life by about 20-30% every year
- Wireless networks are doubling in capacity every 18 months
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 8, 2003
Victory over spam?
John Udell says that SpamBayes does a good enough filtering job to allow him to declare victory over spam. I'm skeptical, though I've had relatively good results with PopFile's Bayesian filter and I'm sure its algorithms can be improved upon. I plan to try SpamBayes as soon as I can; for now, it's only available as an Outlook plugin or by using the CVS binaries, which I don't want to deal with.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Millennial Net -- low-cost ad
Millennial Net -- low-cost ad hoc wireless sensor networks. At first glance, this looks like a competitor to Ember, which also came out of MIT. (Via Jeremy Allaire)
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
HP Labs European project on
HP Labs European project on semantic blogging, spotted in connection with the BlogTalk conference.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dave Winer on Decentralization
Scripting News: "We talked about decentralization and followed where it led. The end of monoculture. Everything points to it. Why? Distribution of culture used to be expensive, decentralization (ie the Internet) has made it virtually free, esp when done on a small scale."
Dave hits the nail on the head. Decentralization is the theme of "Supernova" because it's such a fundamental driver of the important social, economic, and technological changes we're going through.
Like any epochal change, the details get more nuanced, and thus more interesting, the more you consider them. In this case, it's true that decentralization and cheap global distribution of information breaks down monocultures, but it can also overwhelm local cultures that were protected by their isolation. Satellite distribution lowered the cost of beaming US movies and TV everywhere, thus creating a dominant US media.
It cuts both ways. As distribution has gotten even cheaper, the same trends have allowed Japanese cultural artifaces such as Pokemon to dominate America. The Net gives local and independent content creators the ability to compete against the domainant corporate media, not by building walls but by leveling the playing field. And just around the corner is the greater leveler of all: ubiquitous unlicensed wireless communications.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Baby steps toward home media nirvana
EE Times: Microsoft R&D efforts seek to bolster home networks. (Via Marc Canter, who saw it on a couple other blogs)
Microsoft is taking on the second-order challenges to make networked digital home media a reality. Not just linking up the devices, but coordinating the assets (movies, songs, etc.) stored on them. It's one thing Steve Perlman's Rearden Steel box did on its own platform. Ultimately, the standards need to transcend the boxes.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband for home media
The ultra-wideband community is looking to position UWB as the dominant technology for moving media streams between devices in the home by making it into "wireless Firewire" (Firewireless?). UWB has some characteristics (including high bandwidth and low power) that may make it better than WiFi variants for these uses. It's quite possible that four classes of unlicensed wireless technology will all thrive -- WiFi, UWB (aka WiMedia), Bluetooth, and WiMax (802.16) -- though Bluetooth may be the odd standard out.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Intel's wireless vision
The Register: "The endgame, says Intel, is 'reconfigurable, intelligent CMOS radios'."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 7, 2003
Apples and Oranges?
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, explaining why his company may not cut cable modem prices to match Verizon's recent DSL price reduction, says, "We don't think that cable modems and DSL are necessarily comparable."
Funny, when the question is whether cable companies should be required to provide open access or "network neutrality" for their cable modem systems, companies like Comcast point to competition from DSL. They say they have no market power because customers can choose between the two technologies, and telephone companies are required to allow competitors access to their networks.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Spam changing email
Back in December, I predicted in a Slate article that a large percentage of email users would adopt whitelist, or "challenge-response" software, to combat spam. Looks like it's happening even faster than I expected, if this Earthlink announcement is any indication.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
LinkedIn is a new business
LinkedIn is a new business networking service from Reid Hoffman, formerly of PayPal. Looks pretty slick.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Overwhelming force
If it's true that AOL has 400 people working on Weblog software, it's a very bad sign for AOL. Most of the popular Weblog tools were written by a handful of people. The basic functionality just isn't that complex. Throwing hundreds of programmers at a problem is what big companies do when they lose the innovation gene. (From "Scripting News")
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Camera phone update
I'll say it again. Cameras in cellphones will be ubiquitous in every major market within a few years. According to the New York Times, NTT DoCoMo has sold 10 million camera phones in Japan, and they now represent 60% of its handset sales.
So the next question is, how to exploit all those cameras? Wireless photo blogging is one obvious opportunity, along with realtime news coverage, but I'm sure there are other big possibilities.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 6, 2003
Post-PC
When it rains, it pours. This has been quite a week for the emerging post-PC ecosystem. Apple introduced its iTunes music service, which is really more interesting for what it says about Apple than what it means for digital music distribution. Dell announced it is changing its name to remove the word "computer". And on Sunday, the New York times published a marvelous article by Steve Lohr about the evolution of the technology industry.
The common theme is that the ecosystems of the personal computer and enterprise IT are maturing and giving way to something new. Or several new things. What comes after the PC isn't the Internet appliance, or the interactive TV, or the smart phone -- it's all those things and more. The underlying forces are irresistable. Moore's Law continues unabated, but for end-users today's processors don't feel that much faster than last year's. The market is no longer about putting a PC on everyone's desk, or about connecting that PC to the Net, or about wiring up corporate systems, or about giving people tools like email and Web browsers. Been there, done that.
Smart companies like Dell, Microsoft, and Intel that have generated extraordinary wealth by riding the PC adoption curve realize that the ground is shifting. Dell's name change reflects the fact that it, like the others, is branching out to non-PC devices. But that's the least interesting of the three stories this week. New platforms such as handhelds, game consoles, and home media servers have been around for several years.
Apple's iTunes service is more significant. Simply put, Apple is becoming a post-PC company. Everyone scratching their heads about how this will sell more Macs is missing the point. The Mac is near and dear to Apple, but the company has shown several times that it can jettison a core product -- the Apple II, the 68000 processor, the pre-OS X system software -- and reinvent itself. Apple is becoming something much closer to Sony: an integrated digital media company. Sony sells computers, but no one would call Sony a PC company. What it does best is create unique platforms and experiences, then market the hell out of them. That describes the new Apple as well. The heart of the company is the digital lifestyle, not a box. (I wouldn't be surprised if Sony acquires Apple, though similar deals have fallen through before.)
And then there's the New York Times piece. Don't be mislead by the article's rhetoric about tech's "midlife crisis." That's the negative spin the Times' editors no doubt insisted on, because after all, how could anyone say positive things about tech these days? The point of the article is not that tech is dying, or that innovation is drying up. It's that enterprise technology is moving into a new phase. Bigger, faster, and more feature-laden are no longer selling points in the same way. Smarter, simpler, more efficient, and more flexible are the new criteria. It's much harder to make powerful system simple than to make them complex.
The same issue arises in the consumer market. Apple has won plaudits for the user experience of its digital music service. That, more than a novel business model or better deal with the record companies, is what could change the market. EMusic had most of the same features well before iTunes. But there were personal computers before the Apple II, and graphical user interfaces before the Macintosh. Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has a genius for user experience and promotion. In a post-PC or post-technology world, those are two essential skills.
So, onward we go. This is a time of reinvention, not senescence, for the tech industry.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 2, 2003
Supernova speakers
I'm excited about the speakers we've added to the "Supernova" lineup recently.
For example, Merrill Brown, former editor-in-chief of MSNBC.com, runs the RealOne subscription service at RealNetworks, which has nearly a million paying customers for streaming media content. Sriram Viswanathan oversees Intel Capital's $150 million investment fund for emerging wireless technologies. Blair Levin is a top-rated telecommunications analyst for Legg Mason, and former FCC Chief of Staff. Louis Holder is EVP of product development for Vonage, which is making huge waves with its voice-over-IP service. And Mena Trott is the co-founder and CEO of Six Apart, creators of the popular MoveableType Weblog software. They join an extraordinary list including Clay Shirky, Reed Hundt, Jonathan Schwartz, David Isenberg, Joi Ito, and Cory Doctorow.
All of these people have two things in common: They are doing significant, innovative work and they are compelling in person. They will all be in the same room at "Supernova" on July 8-9 in Washington, DC. I hope you will too.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack