THINK / Musings

My wife got me a Chumby — interface is surprisingly well done, this is how you authenticate the device — clever, you can see the pattern across the room, no typing necessary:

Thursday afternoon, August 2nd: Fotolog operations team sent me the following photo of a shipment of a Sun 6540 disk array. Essentially our new backup system:

The equipment on the bottom was damaged, the boxes were stacked (inspite of Sun stickers saying "do not stack") and the entire package was wet, from what I gather not soaked, just wet.  

Backup is important to Fotolog — with 280M photos, billions of guest book messages and a vendor mess up a few weeks ago that corrupted our guestbook database, this wasn't what we needed.     But what started as a mess turned into a customer service story from the gods. The Sun team went right to work, through the weekend — by 9.24pm on Monday (2 working days) we had this sorted out and the shipping details for the replacement boxes.

Shortly after getting the picture and alert from my CTO I forwarded it to Jonathan Schwartz at Sun, asked for his help in sorting this mess out.    Within hours I got the following note back:

—————————–

From: Jonathan Schwartz .

Date: August 3, 2007 12:30:10 AM EDT

To: John Borthwick .

Subject: Re: Contact info

Instantly - stay tuned.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out - we will get this right asap.

Jonathan

—————————–

Instantly is a tall order but by Friday morning things were moving, they moved all weekend and by 9.24pm on Monday we had shipment details for the replacement boxes.   Great service, no finger pointing, no discussion of why and who let this happen — the organization and everything I saw was focussed on execution and getting the client (us) the drives.  

Communication was excellent the team sent frequent updates and Schwartz checked in periodically to make sure things were on track.     I know Schwartz from college days, but we haven't spoken since I left Time Warner — this was essentially an email sent into the dark morass of corporate America, which yielded fantastic results, way better than I could have expected.   I dont have the time to cull through the emails but I noted one from Schwartz cc'd a core customer service group email — suggests he has setup a mechanism to respond to issues like this, building processes like this is hard, particularly as you transition a huge business.   

Good stuff is happening over there at Sun.

Big changes at Fotolog last week — we shipped the new Fotolog memberpage.  It is written in Java, an update from the old PHP code that goes back to the founding of the site.   Results are coming in and it looks like significant performance gains across the board.  

First the member experience has improved — the new page is cleaner and has a faster response time.   But in addition, we are now serving the site on less than half the boxes that we were using.  

Registrations are up — over the weekend we are seeing our daily registrations up over 35% given the improved performance and a requirement to register to post a guest book message.  Revenue lift from Google is trending up approximately 15% given additional contextual data from the guestbooks. 

This new code base will allow us to innovate much more on the member experience — that is why we made this change — we did expect to realize some other benefits.  But these across the board immediate gains are far broader than I expected.  

I am trying out the Canon TX1 hybrid cam. I am a big fan of hybrids — for the past couple of years I have used the Sony DSC M1 hybrid. This Canon promises a lot and thus far seems to deliver fairly well. The Camera is very stripped down and easy to use — but the ergonomics aren’t as good as the Sony, harder to hold and shoot with one hand. Stills are 7.1 pixels and other than the flash (which is weak) the stills are good. The face identification software does a really good job of finding faces — less clear whether the adjustments it does once it has found faces is worth much, but that strange allure of technology recognizing a human feature is enough to make one think it must be have some value.

Video is just weird. Canon promote this as an HD hybrid and sure enough the video is 720p, 16:9, 30fps. But it records in M-JPEG (Motion JPEG - basically a string of jpeg images?!). Hugely inefficient at encoding, gives you approx. 13mins of video on a 4 gig card? There is the advantage that you can pull a still from the video stream, which is kinda interesting if you want to wade through a gazzillon frames for the 1/30th of a precious second. But why M-JPEG, Divx or MPEG4? I suspect they wanted to (a) save on licensing fee’s — and (b) make sure the camera wasnt too good at doing video. The tension that hybrids have for Camera manufactures persist — if its too good then people wont need to buy two devices. But the choice is an interesting testament to how the plunging cost of storage continues to radically effect technology standards.

A lot of chatter about the iphone — just read Dave Winer's piece — lots of conspiracy theories about how real the Job's demo was and people are starting to focus on the question of how closed the platform is.  Jobs has said that the platform will allow third party development but it will be "restricted" and managed — like ipod games.  Apple believes that in order to get a product into market — out of the box — end to end control of the hardware and software experience is the easiest and fastest way to deliver something that works to users.   This worked in the case of the ipod — it wasnt the first MP3 player to hit the market, it was just the first to work as seamlessly as it did, from the device to the pc.   There are smart phones of many flavors out there today — but they all require a lot of setup, maintenance etc.  The iphone is clearly going to be different — take a look at the Pogue's list of what is does and doesnt do.    

Last year I lived in Italy for six months and I made some notes about what an insanely mobile the country was — 57M people with 70M cell phones.   There are more mobile phones here than fixed lines, estimates are that 18% of the population have cut the cord (chk). Kids and couples walk around listening to cell phones playing music, like 30 years ago people would walk around listening to a radio.    Someone we know was chatted up by a waiter at a restaurant — for follow up, he offered her a SIM chip instead of offering his phone number.   SMS is everywhere and its far more conversational than in the US. The rates and pricing plans push people to SMS.    Wifi is fairly available and the cell co's are clearly nervous about voip / skype - 3 (Hutchison Whampoa) has an offer in market for $15 a month unlimited voip calling to over 25 countries from your handset.    And in Italy Apple has next to no presence (as of 06 they had no stores and next to no market share).  In Italy Apple has next to no presence (as of 06 they had no stores and next to no market share).

Over time the iPod functionality needs to merge into the phone.     Yet Apple has created a business model that is based on tethering hardware to software and reaping all of the margins on the hardware.    The result is that music that I have "bought" on iTunes isn't transportable to other non apple devices.   I really haven't bought it, its a rental agreement - with the a right to listen to that music on 5 apple pc's / devices.  Jobs knows that the ipod is close to its peak and its time to move the ball — the question in my mind is whether open and unlocked alternatives — palm, symbian, rim and even linux phones can out run Apple. 

The pressure points are in my mind (a) apple's dependency on the ipod and its related business mode — the iphone needs to have everything the high end ipod has (focus will be on music, video and phone — watch how they execute on core ipod features (eg: access to itunes store from the device (which today is not available), music and video sharing (also not available)) and then non ipod functionality.    The phone is a messaging device, music and ipod functionality needs to balanced against great messaging capabilities — voice and text (Phones outside of the US are used more for messaging that voice — calling them phones is a cultural artifact — they are messaging devices with voice as a secondary features)   (b) apple's tie to cingular (2 years), and the associated restrictions this brings with it (re: no voip, open wifi roaming, no HSDPA/3g, requirement for a 2 year contract, no unlocked alternative etc.)  (c) the tension between a closed end to end platform with controlled innovation vs. an open platform with distributed innovation and lastly (d) the execution of the hardware / device and the lack of a keyboard.  If this is mostly a media device Apple will miss the broader market. 

I have no doubt people will buy this product — it seems like a beautiful piece of hardware and simply postioned as the highest end ipod it will find a market –  just like the nano or video ipod.  But neither the nano or the video ipod defined a new category — they were devices in a long stream of innovation that started with the orginal ipod.   The iphone needs to define a whole new stream of innovation independent from the ipod.  And the business model will likely also have to evolve — in more developed markets (south korea the flip has occurred to a subsription model, $5 a month for all the music you want / can eat).     I am going to be watching the pressure points listed above to see whether similar to the ps3 vs. Wii the lowend offer some real alternatives, without all the restrictions that Apple's business model now imposes on it as the category leader - the mobile world needs to see some real innovation and what I saw last week suggests that not going to come from Apple. 

I have spent a week getting a pots number to call forward to another number. I set it up on verizon.com, took 4 days to complete the order, once it was done the number no longer worked. I called and after 25 mins on hold I got to a very perky tech representative — he checked it out, said it was setup wrong through the system. He went and made some adjustments — I swear I heard wheels turning in the engine room — another 15 mins later we were done. With the caveat that I need to call again nxt week to set it to ring straight through (right now its on 4 rings and then it will forward, and only the business office can change that rule).

Vonage, grandcentral, skype, pick your voip — this take less than 3 mins. to update. Hmmm that sure is one smart network.

I have been using the fon service for about two months now. One of the things that surprises me is the ratio of bits going up vs. down. This is where I stand:

August: 1108 hours - 6617.03 / 3305.65 Mb (dl/ul)
July: 681 hours - 5885.6 / 3907.02 Mb (dl/ul)

The up is considerably more symmetrical than I expected. In July the ratio is approx. 1:1.5 in august 1:2. And the media we push up is photos and email not audio, not video. In the never ending discussions i participate in about bandwidth and bandwidth usage I rarely hear people discuss how symmetrical one pipe/service is vs. another. IP based video is pretty much all coming down today — over the coming years if people start to post video the way we post photos today we are looking at symmetrical usage. Granted we usually dont care about when the bits go up as much as when they come down, but still I would never have expected these ratios. Note where we are located there hasn’t been any sharing of the router — so this is all our usage.

Just read Cringley’s piece about Grouper, its surprisingly thin. The purchase is about a research — Lynton made that clear in his statement - but with no brand its going to be hard to extend it beyond r&d, something Cringley seems to think is eary. Also wasnt grouper all about p2p and sharing of personal media? Thats what the client / media player is all about. The media have respun this as another video sharing site — but Felsner’s and Samuels vision started in a very different place. Will be interesting to see what Sony really bought and where they go with this. Sony really needs to drive and open up innovation on the software layer - from walkmans to phones to psp’s to connected cameras and playstations — offering users a means to share and manage personal media is a big opportunity that Sony have thus far failed to deliver on.

Why cant I tag movie clips as I film them on my camera? There should be a simple scroll wheel interface into a user defined set of keywords that I could select and tag as I capture media. The relative cost of capturing, or acquiring media continues to drop at an astounding pace — but this has shifted the cost of media from storage, processing etc. to organization and presentation.  Grouper anyone? Another example — have you tried openlcr? Openlcr is a web based interface to offer software services for cordless phones — ringtones, weather, upload contacts etc.  Its abismal — useless, and expensive to boot.   Why arent CE companies adapting to software based innovation? I think the problem is generally grounded in the history of the consumer electronics business. Most of the traditional businesses grew through innovating of specific hardware based functionality. CE devices were traditionally all about making thousands of minute pieces of hardware work in tandem. Yet CE as an industry is getting pressured from the edge by both the low cost manufacturing base, the realities of solid state and the advent of software based innovation, in essentially dumb devices.

Given that the Grouper purchase was made by Sony Pictures its likely they too bought the video sharing meme and wont capitalize on the rest of the opportunity, but there could be much more here than just another video storage / sharing site.

I ordered a macbook pro from MacMall on friday.    Shortly after placing the order I got a call back from the salesperson saying they had to redo the order and ship windows separately due to an agreement signed the previous night with Microsoft.    Seems Apple is now a full fledged OEM — and has agreed to not sell windows unbundled. Will be interesting to see what happens when 10.5 is shipped and bootcamp is standard with the OS, will Windows also become standard, given the gap between retail and wholesale prices - I suspect it might.

Cringley piece on Apple’s boot camp is worth a read. I think he overrates the importance of the OS — its yesteryears battle. And he under rates the importance of tightly coupled experiences for Apple and the Job’s team. I don’t believe Job’s is interested in having OSX run on OEM PC’s. Apple advantage today is a tightly coupled, CE like experience.