Month: March 2003

News Readers

Leslie Walker discusses the current crop of news readers (RSS aggregators), kaming the point that “the technology behind news-reader software represents another way to navigate the Web besides search engines, portals and bookmarks.” Among the favourites: NewzCrawler.

A few other points made:

I see news-readers as adjuncts, not replacements, for Web browsers. The idea isn’t to divert you from Web sites as much as to let you scan more sites.

Stripping the graphics and layout from sites and extracting just headlines means you lose important visual cues about what the site creators deemed most important.

I expect the next generation of automated news-readers will allow far more sophisticated filtering to present headlines that match our personal information cravings.

PC Upgrade Drivers

The next PC upgrade cycle for consumers is likely to be driven by the demand for entertainment, PC games, photos, video and music, according to NYTimes.

As the average price of a new PC continues to fall – to $835 last year, roughly half the outlay of six years earlier – an army of power-hungry software programs are beginning to explode the boundaries of what those computers can do.

Those who see the tide turning make this case: high-performance applications like Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition are transforming computers into ever more sophisticated music studios, digital darkrooms and video-editing bays – even so-called entertainment servers that can record and play back television shows with the touch of a special remote control.

But such uses require up-to-date operating systems and processors. And the very volume of digital photos and music that consumers are using PC’s to store and transfer to and from other devices is also feeding a demand for bigger hard drives.

“An ever increasing multitasking lifestyle and a set of killer applications in music and video as stand-alone products are definitely driving greater appreciation for power,” said Ralph Bond, Intel’s consumer education manager. He said that owners of low-powered computers only three to five years old often face a phenomenon he calls the “multimedia oven”: the computer becomes so overwhelmed by a power-intensive task like making a music CD that it cannot do much else for an extended period.

TED

Forbes writes about the Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which took place recently, where the “central theme was Rebirth, including sessions on Resilience, Emotion, Creation and, on Saturday, a final one on Hope.” TED had its abundance of tech talk:

Jeff Bezos, lean and keen, gave a perky presentation on how the digital revolution has barely begun. Sliced bread, the standard against which other innovations are touted as “the greatest thing since,” popped up in 1928 but didn’t catch on for 15 years. “It was a complete, total failure,” rescued only by the debut of Wonder bread, he told the crowd. He showed a 1917 Sears ad that exhorted, “Use your electricity for more than just light.” “That’s where we are” on the Web today, he said. “Every idea begets another idea. If you do believe it’s the very beginning, then you’re incredibly optimistic–and I am.”

Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson talked up the promise of nanotech, the futuristic manufacture of teensy machines, chips and components at the invisible, submicroscopic level.

Juan Enriquez, director of Harvard Business School’s Life Science Project, invoked the promise of the densest of memory chips: a microscopic organism called amoeba dubia.

China’s Handsets Market

The Chinese are buying 60+ million handsets annually, and this has now gotten the attention of many domestic manufacturers. There are 36 companies making handsets, leading to prices falling by 30% per annum. The domestic brands are flourishing because of their strengths in distribution – a story that was repeated by Legend in the PC business earlier. Writes the Economist.com:

Besides their grasp of Chinese tastes, the main advantage of the locals, in both PCs and handsets, lies in distribution. Whereas the global brands can outspend the locals for billboard space in cosmopolitan Shanghai, the domestic vendors have networks that reach deep into the countryside. Almost every town, for instance, has a TCL branch selling TVs; these branches now offer handsets as well.

The handset-manufacturing industry looks likely to repeat a pattern that China has already experienced in white goods, refrigerators, television sets, and many other consumer goods. First, rising incomes make a gadget affordable to millions. Next, the market booms, and companies, irrespective of what industry they originally came from, rush in. Then, the market becomes crowded, and the consequent overcapacity and competition lead to price wars that wipe out profits.

TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: Blog Directory

How does one make the Blog Directory happen? One can do this in a couple of ways. First, by asking bloggers themselves to state what are their expertise areas. This can be specified by the BlogMeta.xml file we discussed earlier. This can be verified and enhanced by looking at the links flowing between blogs (via blogrolls, story links) and doing an analysis of these links. This will help identify the popular bloggers. Then, by seeing whom they consider as experts when they link, it may be possible to get to the next level of expertise. Second, by involving the community and getting readers to rate, rank, review and classify bloggers. Taken over a large number of readers, an emergent expertise classification of bloggers will get created. This could then also be combined with the first approach to create a community-enabled expertise mapping of bloggers.

So, assuming we are able to get a reasonably good mapping of expertise to bloggers, what next? For one, we can look at the neighbourhood of bloggers so find other bloggers who may be of interest to us. This can be done by looking at the blogroll of a blog, or the Neighbourhood Analysis that is there in BlogStreet. The theory behind this is that if I am a friend of your friend, we may have something in common to also potentially be friends. What this exercise does is to create a list of bloggers whom one would like to read on a regular basis, just as one reads the morning newspapers or goes to a few websites daily. These bloggers become a part of ones daily routine. (In the case of blogs, one could of course subscribe to their RSS feeds and get the content delivered via an RSS Aggregator.)

Once a cluster of blogs have been identified, then it would be nice to get aggregates on what are the hot topics in this community, what are the new ideas that are being discussed, or what books they are reading. Basically, it is like able to eavesdrop on conversations being held (asynchronously and virtually) among ones favourite bloggers. One can thus create a unique view of the world, through the lens of others, and use those views to build out ones own perspectives.

This can be especially important for those among us who are quite far away geographically from the centre of some of these discussions, and unable to attend the conferences and trade show which give us a sense of where technology is headed. What this cluster of bloggers does is to recreate a permanent, virtual conference around us one which we can enter and participate in at any time. This is how we can bridge the digital divide of ideas. It is what I realise I have been able to do in the past year that I have been reading blogs (and blogging). The benefit is that, for the first time in history, thanks to the ecosystem being created by RSS and Blogs, distance is not a barrier to participation in the flow of ideas and creation of technology.

Continue reading TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: Blog Directory

Auctioneer EachNet’s Success in China

A WSJ story on how EachNet, founded in 1999, has made things work in China. eBay bought a 33% stake in it a year ago for USD 30 million.

Straight out of the eBay playbook are the site’s system of having buyers and sellers rate each other to build trust, and its staggering diversity of products. But EachNet hews closely to the realities of the Chinese marketplace. Many of its services are geared to help buyers and sellers exploit the huge inefficiencies in many sectors of the Chinese economy — exactly what the Internet had always promised to do.

For example, on the EachNet Web site, with its trademark lime-green and bright orange colors, the largest category of goods sold is clothing. Unlike in the U.S., with its national clothing chains that also run their own online operations, China’s clothing market suffers from fragmented distribution and huge price differences between cities. And because clothing bought in stores is often marked up sharply to cover store rental and overhead costs, many cost-conscious consumers shop for clothes online.

Other top-selling categories include computers and consumer electronics, another market characterized by huge price differentials; electronic goods tend to be cheapest in the southern province of Guangdong, which is home to most of the factories where the goods are made.

EachNet relies on the old-fashioned but serviceable postal service to handle the bulk of deliveries and payments between buyer and seller. It uses China’s growing ranks of private courier services, which benefit from a vast pool of cheap labor to deliver goods door-to-door for pennies, often by motorcycle or even bicycle. And it puts a great deal of faith in the ingenuity of buyers and sellers to reconcile logistical problems and endure hassles that might scare off the average American consumer.

“Our model relies on the entrepreneurial nature of people. Buyers and sellers are more resourceful than you think,” says Shao Yibo, the company’s 29-year-old co-founder and chief executive.

Lessons from EasyGroup

David Kirkpatrick writes in Fortune about what one can learn from Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s EasyGroup [via Anand Patwardhan]:

Look for services with high fixed costs, price elasticity–meaning that consumers will typically buy more if prices drop–and the ability to be ordered over the Internet. Then create a frill-free offering that gives consumers few if any choices. EasyJet has only one class of service; EasyInternetcafe ditched its printers because they demanded too much maintenance; EasyCar rents only one class of car and requires that it be returned, clean, to the same location. Says EasyGroup chief technology officer Phil Jones: “We don’t aspire to be all things to all people. We do one thing very well at low cost.”

At lunch recently Stelios bubbled over with new ideas. Consumers today are even more interested in low-price services, he says, and the technology that makes it all possible has never been cheaper. He hopes to open the first EasyCinema outside London shortly. It will have few employees; customers will print out tickets at home or from lobby terminals and will be admitted by a bar-code scanner. Pricing will vary not by age but by showtime and how far in advance viewers purchase. Holding him up is the resistance of the movie studios; Stelios says he anticipates a legal battle. Other new ideas include a low-cost hotel chain called EasyDorm, an EasyBus service, and EasyCruise. “It’s a great time to have a clean sheet of paper and some know-how rather than a lot of infrastructure already in place,” he says. That was a common theme in the late ’90s; it’s truer than ever now.

Some good ideas for our thinking at Emergic.

2003 and Beyond

Automation Access has a long editorial on the trends that we are seeing around us, and how they will play out. There is also a section which deals with “the road ahead” for Microsoft. Here’s the take on software:

The PC software industry is in the final days of being destroyed by Microsoft, [which] is preparing to drive the few remaining significant software publishers out of the Windows market.

Soon there will be Microsoft, Intuit, and Symantec. While Intuit will put up a strong fight, its popularity is not something Microsoft will tolerate for long. Revenue plans for Microsoft Great Plains do not allow for the existence of accounting software competitors. Microsoft will use Longhorn and .NET to bash and batter Intuit. Symantec will continue because someone has to publish antivirus software, and it isn’t going to be Microsoft (liability issues).

Paradoxically, a strong open source alternative is the best hope for a revived commercial software industry. Much software needed by businesses is simply of no interest to open source developers. As Linux becomes a mainstream business operating system, the market for commercial software running on Linux expands.

The market for commercial software running on Linux is, however, a market for small companies to serve, and will not spawn a “new Microsoft”.

– Slashdot thread

Sony PlayStation 3

For its new gaming console due in two years, Sony is designing a chip based on “cell microprocessor” technology which could, according to Dean Takahashi, “allow it to pack the processing power of a hundred of today’s personal computers on a single chip and tap the resources of additional computers using high-speed network connections” and help it “achieve the industry’s holy grail: a cheap, all-in-one box for the home that can record television shows, surf the Net in 3-D, play music and run movie-like video games.” More:

Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony’s game division and mastermind of the company’s last two game boxes, is betting that in an era of networked devices, many distributed processors working together will be able to outperform a single processor, such as the Pentium chip at the heart of most PCs.

With the PS 3, Sony will apparently put 72 processors on a single chip: eight PowerPC microprocessors, each of which controls eight auxiliary processors.

Using sophisticated software to manage the workload, the PowerPC processors will divide complicated problems into smaller tasks and tap as many of the auxiliary processors as necessary to tackle them.

“The cell processors won’t work alone,” Doherty said. “They will work in teams to handle the tasks at hand, no matter whether it is processing a video game or communications.”

As soon as each processor or team finishes its job, it will be immediately redeployed to do something else.

Programming these consoles would be a daunting exercise!

As one of the analysts quoted in the article says, “Games are the engine of the next big wave of computing.”

Continue reading Sony PlayStation 3

Windows-Unix TCO Comparison

Paul Murphy compares TCO (total cost of ownership) for Windows and Unix, in the context of a small college / university. Numerically, Unix is cheaper by more than 50% vs Windows. There’s more to it than just number, as Murphy writes in his conclusions:

In the Microsoft client/server model, faculty members become part-time PC-support workers, continually interrupting themselves to deal with the latest crisis. This gradually reduces their own view of computing to that of the Windows PC while blanking out their awareness of other options. In many places, this is what we have now. Not only is it wasting a significant percentage of teaching resources, it’s producing a generation of graduates that thinks SAP costs $495 and runs on a PC.

In the Unix model, the computers work. They blend into the background like telephones and power plugs, letting teachers teach and researchers research.

As a result, the direct-cost comparison shows a Unix advantage in the range of 50 percent over five years, but the unquantifiable indirect effects are clearly much more significant. These costs, measured in terms of how well the faculty does its job, play out over the lifetime of the university’s graduates and the careers of its teachers.

Stay with Microsoft and the need to work with the PC will gradually narrow your view of the computing world until all you can see and all you can teach is the hope that the next generation of Microsoft products will magically be effective. Go all-Unix and the computing infrastructure disappears from day-to-day visibility, leaving teachers free to teach their subjects and students free to learn.

– Slashdot thread

It would be good to do a similar analysis from an emerging market viewpoint, and using a terminal-server approach.