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An Apple Show-and-Tell article

Aug 4, ’06 9:22 AM

NYT article that is really just a summary of a couple of posts online — is this the value of old media, makes the about.com purchase seem a lot more forward looking!?

An Apple Show-and-Tell – New York Times On Monday, Apple’s Steve Jobs will take the stage at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). And he’ll have a lot to show and tell about. Skip to next paragraph Pogue's Posts The latest in technology from the Times's David Pogue, with a new look. Go to Pogue's Posts » Apple has already said that he’ll take the wraps off of Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), an operating-system upgrade whose significance seems greater because of its proximity to the release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Apart from that announcement, nobody knows what Apple will be showing at WWDC. But Apple’s innovation engine never sleeps, and it’s been at least a couple of months since anything new emerged, making me suspect that there will be lots of pent-up products on display next week. Further evidence comes in the form of two leaks. First, somebody snapped a photo of a banner at Apple’s booth, chock-a-block with photos of new Apple products. The most intriguing one is a 64-bit Power Mac. Second, somebody either leaked or “leaked” this list of new Mac OS X 10.5 features. I use the quotes in case the list is fake — this is the same rumors Web site that “leaked” Apple’s “plasma TV” last January—but the list feels genuine to me. Incomplete, but authentic for what’s there. More Articles in Technology »

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Packing up and heading home

Jun 30, ’06 2:56 PM

Time to go home

Heading home, with yellow dog

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Getting texting / SMS

Jun 27, ’06 12:51 PM

After 5 months of living here in Europe I am finally understanding why SMS is mobile telephony in Europe. Estimates I have heard range from 50% to 80% of time spent on the phone is spent sending text or SMS vs. talking on the phone — very different to the us where approx 30% of mobile users use SMS. For Europeans this stuff is obvious, texting is mobile telephony. The reasons I have heard why SMS is so popular in Europe were (a) economics (its cheap and calls are expensive, and you dont pay to receive SMS’s as you do in the US), (b) standardization of data formats drove network effects, a lot of people text so a lot of people text back (c) cultural acceptance of texting and uneasiness with intrusiveness of voice calls in public and (d) little fingers… No wait that is a reason I heard SMS is popular in Asia (?!@), that one, doesn’t apply to Europe. Ok so, these are important enablers but there is more going on. Things I have observed living here and using SMS are:

Basic interactions w/ your cell co. here demonstrates the benefits of texting

In order to use a cell phone here in Europe you need to text or at least read a text. Use of the device for telephony (the reason why most people still buy phones) educates data usage — in the US, SMS is often an added feature that you pay for. Not so here, in Europe its standard. Couple that with the fact that most people prepay it Italy. Lots of reasons for it, but its the norm — so when you load up some time on your phone your carrier sends you an SMS with details. Like wise when you are out of time your carrier sends you an SMS with the calls you have missed (since your phone isn’t working), when you have a voice mail you get a text with details, when move carriers (cross a border) you get a text, you get the idea. And this is before you sign for any special services — anyone for world cup goal alerts?

Ease of use and other product features are different

SMS’s seem to have better threading here in Europe. I want to get back the US and see if this is just a setting on my device, but the default here is that messages are threaded. That makes a difference, messages are more conversational, more fun and more useful. Coupled with the threading they are well archived, so you end up starting a new SMS based on the last one you received from the sender. And SMS’s clearly minimize the social gestures that a phone call requires. You dont need to inquire “how are you”, “how was your weekend” or any of the other standard social niceties that phone conversations often require – you communicate what you need. This might fall into the cultural bucket. Maybe there are more social niceties in language here — that are required on the phone and SMS short cuts them. But SMS’s are short, and on top of that they are very fast. I couldn’t find anything but anecdotal data on this but my experience here is that SMS’s are delivered with greater speed and reliability than in the US. In the US messages can take hours to be delivered, here they usually arrive in a minute or two.

Europeans don’t love voicemail

It seems that voicemail isnt nearly as popular in Europe. At first I thought this was because my Italian is poor that I opt to use SMS instead of voicemail – but I found out that this is what most people do. It seems that Europeans, or at least Italians, don’t use voicemail that much. There are some clear advantages — most importantly the visual interface of SMS is a far faster method of scanning messages than a voice inbox.

SMS is asynchronous and interruptions are managed by the receiver

The fact that SMS is asynchronous and this offers a whole new dimension to communications on your phone, messaging isn’t dependent on state. You can manage how, when and from you who you want to be disturbed. SMS gives you more control over communications. You can do the something similar with voice and caller ID / voicemail but given that SMS is pushed to your phone, the interface is so much quicker to navigate. Whiles this is primarily an interface point — its worth nothing given the paucity of good software on phones. SMS and associated messaging functionality is well placed on the cell deck and well designed for high usage. The metaphors are similar to email, so if you use one switching to the other is easy.

As users and carriers make decisions about how to manage data on devices (on and off deck) its interesting to watch the progression of SMS in a mature text market. Here in Italy the incumbent (TIM) understands SMS well. They seem to be also watching leading indicators from Asia which suggest that a combination of a forward thinking technology strategy with aggressive marketing can keep *voice* arpu, flat to up, let alone data arpu. Data from South Korea suggests this is possible.

Granted the fact that everyone uses it and you dont need to inquire whether you can SMS someone is the single most important detrimantn of usage. But there is more going on here than meets the eye. Understanding the phone as more of texting device vs. talking device changes one’s perspective of whats important in terms of mobile communications.

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History, Mussolini

Jun 16, ’06 3:36 AM

We were driving up in the hills near a small town called Mezzegra yesterday. Outside of a villa there was this small cross with Mussolini's name it. Someone had placed flowers by it. As the photo's of Mussolini on wine bottles suggest he is far from demonized. A wikipedia search turns up that this is where Mussolini and his girlfriend were executed before he was taken to Milan.

Note, he was caught in Dongo on his was to Chiavenna where he was trying to board a plane to Switzerland. Weird, this is so close to Switzerland, he could have driven or walked from Dongo or Mezzegra.

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Local, how local can you be?

Jun 4, ’06 6:42 AM

 Happydent
Living here in Italy has made me consider what defines the boundaries of local and how my concept of local is changing.     Here everything is very local – local to a degree I hadnt appreciated to date.  By local I mean within the region we live in Italy (Lombardy) and more often than not the 20 sq. km around us.   People here think local, produce is local, relationships are local.   Many of the people who live in the tiny village we are in have never left Lombardy.  Very few have ever left Italy.  Most people dont speak a word of any language other than Italian.   Considering that we are 15 mins away from the Swiss border, 45 mins from Milan, 3 hours from Florence, this surprised me.    
People seem to relish how local life is here.   Last week someone was explaining to me that much of the milk that we buy here is from cows about 15 mins up the road.   Some friends told us that each year they pick olives from their olive trees and take the olives to Lenno where a local producer of olive oil (great oil btw) weighs them and gives them bottles of oil in exchange for the olives.   There is a trade off made between choice and quality.    There is often little choice, each item comes in a flavor determined mostly by what was available.  What is fresh.   But while daily choice is limited there is more variety.  

There are vegetalbles that we have never seen before.   One day back in Feburary my wife bought at the market a green vegetable that was somewhere between asperagus and an artichoke. Often we cant even get the name sorted for some of these items — different people seem to call them different things — the name for this one was erbetta, another one is called la barba dei priest  (the priests beard).   In the US there seems to be a need to replicate experiences, a need for consistency (are these needs or are they artifacts of a culture of consumption that makes us think they are needs?). Here there is little need for this.    Life maps pretty tightly to the seasons, one month its brocoli the next its appargus and thats about it.  It strikes me that is a lot more texture to a life lived like this.  

Down the street there is a butcher who sells among other things butter. His butter unlike anything I have tasted before. I cant really explain it.   The combination of the texture and the taste is unbelievable – its butter like nothing i have tasted.   Made just up the road.   Maybe I dont pay enough attention to taste — I never thought there could be so much diversity in a thing like butter.  I thought butter was butter, now I differently, so do my kids, they will ask us, butcher's butter please.

 Brands here are hyper local.     Go to a resturant and order sparkling water — what you get wont be Pelligrino,  there is barely a Pelligrino bottle to be seen around here.   Its local carbonated, spring water. And pretty much every restaurant we go to has a different brand.   Go the the supermarket (let alone the local aliementaire) and pretty much everything is local.  Not only produce, the basics — kitchen paper, trash bags, wine, drinks, yoguts etc. etc. most of them are Italian brands.   Glad bags, no can do,  wrigleys gum, no such luck (try Happydent, fabulous branding.) …  Maybe Italy is too small a market, non english spearking etc. for the multinationals to have paid it much atttention.   Most of the trade barriers have been levelled with EU membership.   But local is what people want, its what they trust. People spend a lot of time in their communities and so much is done just the way it has always been done.  

If you expand the concept of local to include a local online community I wonder if this is more what markets will look like in the future.   Another way of thinking about the tail vs. the head, but the tail vs. the head analysis is about how the tail is becoming more accessible from a cost standpoint.  Here the trade off's that are so compelling re: scale and efficiencies have not been made.

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Geo tagging and search

May 27, ’06 11:56 AM

Interesting snap shot of data. I took 2 photos and posted them on flickr. Photo's are both of pretty much the same thing. I tagged both of them switzerland, which is the location for both but one of them I geo-tagged with lat/long details. The other one i didnt. 4 days later and the one that is geotagged has 61 views and the one that is not has 1 view (which incidentally was me). People seem to be searching flickr for lat/lon a lot more than I expected. I just added the lat/long to the other one to see what happens.

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The attention game / how long it takes to drop into the vortex

May 27, ’06 11:45 AM

I am intrigued about how long it takes for a piece of media to get sucked into the vortex of net attention. I found an old photo i took that is amusing — Boris Becker was sitting in front of me on a flight to london back in 2003. The photo is only interesting re; what he was reading.

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Machinima, Halo, Google Earth and what film could look like by 2010

May 22, ’06 7:14 AM

Machinima is starting to get more and more interesting as a media form.    See this wonderful intereview with Malcolm Maclaren — a walk in the park with punks impresario.    Or this commmentary on net neutrality — or this parody of the bouncing ball / Sony commercial.    Now take a look at the preview of Halo 3 — and then play around with Google Earth and sketch up for a bit.    The lines between what we know of as media, content, mapping and gaming are going to get completely blurred.

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Geotagging photo’s

May 17, ’06 2:58 AM

Thought I would try to geotag some pictures — results are here.   Its crazy that the device I am using to track GPS has a camera on it but doesnt geotag the photo’s itself.  Have to do it manually, post lat/lon into Flickr as tags.     Hassle aside the process of posting location and mapping it to personal media is fascinating — Google buying Sketchup makes a lot of sense.    Communities of interest will start posting and tracking location and it will transform the travel and local search business.    Wiki of geotagging.  Navteq’s business is going to change.    Thanks to Charles Grillo and Yuan helping me sort through the kinks of getting this working.

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Sharing that OPML

May 10, ’06 2:39 AM

I am playing around with Dave Winer’s OPML sharing platform and loving it. You can see my OPML file listed or more interestingly you can see other people who have subscriptions like mine (you have to log in to see the match vs. mine, would like an option for this to be public). Its great for feed discovery since people have a reason to use real names, and others can discover them (if you have tried finding friends on Del.icio.us you will know why this matters).

Finding or doing something like this has been a personal lazy web project for a while. For a while I would ask people I knew to share OPML’s with me. I tried to manage each persons OPML in a separate folder. Newsgators and Netnewswire did a marginal job of making this data accessible. The folders were present but there was no automatic updating of the OPML (so they were locked in a point in time), there was no easy way to compare my RSS feeds to my friends and there was no attention navigation option (like NetNewsWire has started offering) to give me a sense of whats important to the people whose feeds I am reading (finally, maybe all the attention chatter can be put to use for end users). I ended up having to do a lot of pruning and integration myself, getting rid of the folders, taking other OPML files and grabbing a handful of interesting feeds and leaving it at that.

Winer’s OPML sharing platform open the world up for much richer and more interesting options. Sharing is easy, as is navigation. Its fun to browse through users feeds. I find it a lot more compelling than a lot of the feed search engines out there. Matching the data with identity is the difference. Also interesting to see how little mainstream data is present in the OPML files. Dave’s own list (user ID#3) is one of the few exceptions — I suspect that given all the work he has done re: RSS he is over indexed on tracking media sites for RSS feeds.

Very interested to see how this evolves. This feels to me just like Del.icio.us did at the start. All of the gentle ways that Josh introduced happenstance into navigating tags I hope Dave will offer to navigate feeds. And I want to be able to match this with my reader so I can navigate not only the meta data but the actual articles. Likewise I wish I could plug my podcast feed list into this (the one that is trapped, happily so, but still trapped, in iTunes). And I hope that search navigation options really open up. I hope people will be able to build off this, would be wonderful if it became a platform. There are less than 2500 people sharing files as of now, going to be fascinating to see how it evolves as the dataset grows. OPML is another building block for wiring the flow of lateral data on the web. Finding ways to share and mix OPML files is part of the next stage of evolution of RSS.

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Pesto?

May 9, ’06 12:05 PM

First a disclaimer should an Italian read this. I know pesto comes from Genoa, and no self respecting Italian would order or expect pesto to be good anywhere but in Genoa. But I am not Italian and I am loving the pesto here in the north, albeit it is hard to find.

There are a mix of options for pesto but the ingredients are pretty simple — start with basil and and olive oil, then maybe add cheese, pine nuts, and garlic. Given the simplicity of ingredients the differences are pretty amazing. I am not that into how to make food — but I am fascinated that you can get such different results from so few ingredients.

The best I have had here is at Al Valuu, a small restaurant outside of Tremezzo (see our trek there). They make it with just basil and oil (3 nuts on top, for decoration). The basil comes from the garden outside of the restaurant, thats the first trick they will explain to you, the second is that they crush it by hand with a pestle and mortar. Therein basil and olive oil somehow turns into something magical. You have to do it by hand they explained to me. Above is the owner — vegatables in hand (note, for his soup, not his pesto).
I have found a couple of other places who do great pesto — some with garlic, some with pine nuts, some with parmesan but nothing comes close to the simple basil and oil solution from Al Valuu. There really aren’t standards here re: how to do something — each family, each place has its own way and its up to you to figure out what’s good for you. I love standards, but in this case I am loving a lack of standards.

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GPS tracking, where I am

May 7, ’06 11:33 AM

I am having fun with GPS tracking and posting to the web — tracked a run I went on tonight. Software from Charles Grillio’s (here is his site), he has been great in helping me customize the software for the device. Thank you.
Its a strange feeling to go out and then see where you have been tracked, minute by minute on the web.

To see tracking click here (note / opt for satellite image, I am still off the google grid, just).

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Sky in Europe

Apr 10, ’06 12:49 AM

This register piece is worth a read on Sky’s realtive position in europe — the presumption that sky will dominate multichannel video in europe is held by pretty much everyone here.   Surprising given the progress of IPTV — and the fact that many IPTV providers are figuring out that a me too service isn’t what IPTV is going to be about.   Just like cable differentiated itself from broadcast, IPTV is going to have to differentiate itself from satellite and cable.

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A new ball game?

Apr 9, ’06 3:59 AM

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.

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What technology I am using at home in Italy

Apr 5, ’06 8:00 AM

A couple of friends have asked about what technology we have setup here in Italy. A summary with commentary below.

Connectivity wise we are using ADSL. Cheap, fast european ADSL. We see speeds of 3-6Mbps with very few drop off’s and little maintence. Our provider is Telecom Italia, we have the Alice service. I would have liked to have tried Fastweb but outside of Milan Fastweb is essentially an ADSL reseller — the FTTH offering is in the Milan metro area. Price wise ADSL has several tiers — the lowest is approx. $25 (with promotions etc.) and the highest includes wifi router and voip and is around $38/mnth after promotions. These prices are in line with France, UK and Belgium. Interestingly upload speeds seem to be as much of a selling point as download speeds.  Finally, to share some of this bandwidth goodness I am testing a Fon access point — not a lot of data on it as yet, will post some commentary when I know more.

Telephony wise we have setup a mix of wireless and VoIP options. For calls within Italy we use our cell phones or the home pots line. For cell phones we are using our US phones with Italian prepaid SIM cards. SIM provider is TIM. Coverage is pretty good but not as good as I expected (europeans often complain about US cell service, saying it soo much better here). In buildings, particularly old Italian ones with thick walls, you have no service. Voice service is pricey – driving much of the the text/data usuage. Data usuage is very interesting. SMS is threaded in a manner that I havent seen in the US. And there are many features that on the SIM card that pre load on to the cell phone interface. Most of them are TIM promotional features — local information search for taxi service, or a voice based search/information service (both of which get loaded into your phone book). There are group chat services, some content and entertainment and also payment services. Payfor me lets you pay or SMS funds to another user — either by entering a phone number or by sending an SMS. The phones take full advantage of the simplicity of a text based interface — I have seen far fewer attempts to push usuage into a browser / graphical experience. Likely one reason why next generation/3g adoption has been slow. On the subject of 3g I havent yet tried the wireless VoIP offering from 3 Italia, will post when I do.

Fixed line VoIP wise we have both Vonage and Skype setup. I brought over our Vonage/Cisco ATA box and it was up and running on the network within minutes. It works fabulously well. Offers us a local (917) number for people calling from the US. Almost no issues with quality or drop off. Amusingly our vonage 917 number must have gotton scrapped recently we have started getting telemarketing calls — after 3 years of vonage usuage in the US with no telemarketing calls and now we are getting calls here in Italy from US vendors (consider that these calls are orginating from call centers outside the US, thinking that they are dialing a US resident, an instance of how strange telephony is becoming now that switching is decoupled from location). Most of our usage on vonage is back and forth to the US. Skype is great for calls elsewhere and multiparty conference calls. I got a Linksys cordless skype phone that works fabulously well. Full access to the address book etc. Drop off and quality of Skype calls is good but not great — big difference between quality of Vonage vs. Skype. Note Alice does offer VoIP as part of its ADSL package. As you might expect its not heavily promoted and the main selling point seems to be personal phone lines — it comes with 5 lines / phone numbers. I havent tried this service.

Video wise we arent watching much italian TV. We are using Sling and a couple of IP video services. Sling works surprisingly well. Its an amazing and strange experience to be sitting here in Italy navigating our Tivo box in NY. Its facinating the degree to which I associate interfaces with place — getting on the Tivo from here makes me feel physically like I am in NY — as I said before, its weird. Quality is fairly good, it works great for talking head stuff (jon stewart etc.), less good for drama but its pretty much only the Soprano’s that we watch drama wise. Note we dont watch much TV in the US, and we watch even less here. But I was surprised by how well Sling does work. The quality bottle neck is mostly because of the upload limit on our broadband connection in the US (the stream we recieve is on average 250-300k). That said if we wanted to watch sports, or any fast moving image — the sling experience wouldnt be great.

Outside of Sling I have tried pretty much all the movie download services. Performance is mixed but lack of quality films has been pretty consistent accross services. This is changing (given recent collapses of the DVD and online window) — and now the quality and price of the services are going to compete head on with p2/ bittorrent alternatives. Vongo / iTunes are the best US services I have found. Do note that most of these services are blocked to non US IP numbers so they only work when connected via a VPN. Italian IPTV is starting to blossom. There are services available via the PC and there are services available to the TV. The PC based service is mostly pay per view — there are prepaid card options that are blended with telephony offerings. The TV based service retails as a complete package for $60/mnth — this includes ADSL, telephony services and a basic TV line up. While I havent tried the service it doesnt seem as advanced as Illiad’s offering in France.

I am also watching a fair amount of short/chunky video from youtube, rocketboom and its kin, but thats a whole other subject.

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