Commentary – Page 73

Start-Up Nation

Andy Oram at O’Reilly RADAR writes: One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government. … In this blog I’ll summarize … Continue reading “Start-Up Nation”

Andy Oram at O’Reilly RADAR writes:

One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.
…
In this blog I’ll summarize the traits that that the authors find make Israel a successful incubator for innovation, distinguishing between traits that other countries can emulate and traits that seem uniquely embedded in Israel’s historical and geographic circumstances.
…
I’ll lay out three observations that came to my mind while following the authors’ argument: the importance of hard data, flipping axioms, and the creative role government can play.

The traits Andy mentions are summarised below. Go to the article for a more detailed discussion.

A loyalty to the entire community that goes beyond personal success.
A sense of dissatisfaction. To innovate, one must be convinced that things are not good enough the way they are now.
A Do-It-Yourself approach to technology, which perhaps is one manifestation of the afore-mentioned innate dissatisfaction.
A culture of challenging authority.
A determination to succeed against all odds
Interdisciplinary agility.
A tolerance for failure.
Providing young people with arenas to exert responsibility.
A fruitful mentoring relationship between venture capitalists and new entrepreneurs. Injecting money into new ventures (as so many countries do) is not enough
Government policies friendly to startups.
A truly open-arms approach to immigrants, who bring not only fresh perspectives but a high tolerance for risk.

I commented:
Coming from another nation transitioning from a traditional skills-based economy to a knowledge economy. When you compare Ireland and Israel, there are several comparisons.

A divided country, history of conflict, large international diaspora.

But there is one major difference. Ireland may have received funding from it’s diaspora but it did not receive the sort of funding that Israel received from the US DoD budget spending. The impact of the military budget combined with the impact of the diaspora is nothing to be sniffed at. I’m not saying that Ireland wants or needs DoD money – quite the opposite – but the impact of this investment seems to go unmentioned above.

My interest is, however, in Ireland, North and South. We’d welcome interactions with the Irish diaspora internationally – get in touch with the Start Virtual Incubator in Belfast or the Greenhouse Startup Incubator in Limerick – two private enterprises dedicated to helping Ireland transition to the 21st Century.

Last night I dreamed…

Last night I dreamed about a family holiday at the Palma Nova Hotel in Majorca from 25 years ago. I was 12. My first day I spent entirely in the pool. A Spanish lad a foot taller than me stole my football and when I got it back, he punched me in the head until … Continue reading “Last night I dreamed…”

Last night I dreamed about a family holiday at the Palma Nova Hotel in Majorca from 25 years ago. I was 12.

My first day I spent entirely in the pool. A Spanish lad a foot taller than me stole my football and when I got it back, he punched me in the head until my eyes bled. I had to be rescued by other hotel guests. I still bear that anonymous guy a considerable amount of hostility.

During the holiday I was smitten by a girl called Karen who said she was from Newtownards. At age 12, that could have been the moon for all I knew and I was much too shy to do anything about it.

My last day there, a pretty Spanish girl who I had barely spoken to, gave me a card and told me she was in love with me. I was horribly embarrassed because she did this in front of 50 people on the coach. As I said, I had hardly spoken to her (though I remember the hotel ran a game for kids which involved multiple tasks – including feeding a partner with bread and chocolate milk while blindfolded) and remember her name was Carmen. I wish I’d been more gracious but I was still a kid.

It’s funny the things you remember most about holidays. And funny the things you dream about.

This doesn’t have anything to do with technology, entrepreneurship or even iPhone. As I said to Mike Cane last night,

It can’t all be ingenuity, vision and wisdom. Have to keep a good balance. Make sure there’s plenty of crap in there.

A Room with a VI

Marty writes about VI: VI is an empty room. It needs painted, stud walls, electric points, heating and people to help do all of those things. It needs energy and creativity, ideas and heart. It will need money but for now it has enough to get by. It needs a good internet connection to give … Continue reading “A Room with a VI”

Marty writes about VI:

VI is an empty room. It needs painted, stud walls, electric points, heating and people to help do all of those things. It needs energy and creativity, ideas and heart. It will need money but for now it has enough to get by. It needs a good internet connection to give it tentacles to the world. It needs five businesses willing to take a risk at being all they can be. Why five? Because AirPOS, my spin out, is VI (1) and I’ll be on this journey with everyone else. And I’m very very excited about that.
…
VI has no business plan nor a strategy. It has no board of directors. It has no logo. We’re incubating the incubator too, if that’s not too surreal, and its success will be tied into those within its walls.

I disagree with Marty.

We do need paint, stud walls, electric points, internet access, desks, chairs, cork-boards, whiteboards and people to help make all of this work. And some of those people need to have energy, creativity and ideas and we want to help the people find their feet and make something of their ideas and creativity. But VI is much more than an empty room.

I snapped these pictures a couple of days ago:

Can you see it?

This room is filled with heart.

It’s leaking out the non-double-glazed windows. It’s seeping through the bare floorboards. It’s flowing out the main door and flowing down the sinks and toilets. This room is filled with so much heart that it’s alive.

In the coming weeks we’re going to have a paint party there. We’ll be there from early, hoovering up the dust and detritus, starting to paint over wood and bare plasterboard. We’re going to have power points and lights installed. A phone line will bring annoying ringing noises as well as sluggish ADSL broadband (until we raise enough money to install a leased line).

We don’t have the funds to maintain a large building out in the middle of a wasteland. We don’t have the budget to refurbish this building into a modern office suite with glass walls and an entire videoconferencing suite. We don’t necessarily have the connections to be able to call a President by his first name or have his Special Envoy over for tea. But these things don’t matter and they shouldn’t matter. We have heart to spare.

If you think of us as a competitor then I pity you. If this rag tag bunch of hobos with nothing but a little cash and a worn-out old clothing factory is a competitor then you’ve got a serious problem and you should seriously look at what you have there.

I’m thankful for a few people who have, perhaps unknowingly, pushed me to this. David, Marty, Aidan, Jason, Alex, Rob, Simon, Ian, Bill and others. Some of you will know why, some of you won’t – but all of you have contributed to me putting something on the line and making something happen. You’ve all helped and I hope you can understand that you deserve some of the credit here.

This is just the beginning.

The Multitask Myth

For years and years we’ve been buying new computers with faster and faster processors in an attempt to get to the supposed nirvana of all actions taking place in an instant and never having to wait for anything. Of course that dream died and now we’re frantically adding additional cores to the devices we use … Continue reading “The Multitask Myth”

Multiple cores don’t, however, make it easier for humans to use computers. My father has a lot of difficulty managing his open windows on Mac OS X (due to being partially sighted) and will probably never work out how to switch applications properly.

There must be another way.

While I think that Apple hasn’t done it 100% right, I do think the future of modern computing devices is going to be in providing good task control. We have to remember that there already is a movement towards single-taking. For example: Writeroom – distraction-free writing software (which was extensively copied for other platforms.).

In watching users at work, it seems that actual tasks are the things people manage to fit into a work day in between checking their email and Facebook status. If you can’t run more than one app, is there an argument that productivity might rise?

Some folk may believe this is Apple Apologism at it’s worst – and they’re partially right. But Writeroom shows there is precedent. I’m excited about the potential for elegant apps which would be cramped on an iPhone but which would be able to flourish on the additional screen space on an iPad. All said, I expect a form of multi-tasking to appear with iPhone OS 4.0 – perhaps a combination hosted service with push/pull – but something nonetheless.

Fragile Assumptions

I just read this brief blog post from BrainStore which is designed to help people visualise thinking about the future. They say to let them: invent “Headlines of the Future” for the industry or topic you are working on? It puts them in the shoes of a different group (journalists) and generally produces great insights … Continue reading “Fragile Assumptions”

I just read this brief blog post from BrainStore which is designed to help people visualise thinking about the future. They say to let them:

invent “Headlines of the Future” for the industry or topic you are working on? It puts them in the shoes of a different group (journalists) and generally produces great insights that people can relate to better because they are more familiar to them.

The example they give is:

This is a process that beings by eschewing assumptions. For example: lots of people have a concrete preconception of what makes a personal computer. They have severe difficulties in accepting notions which are outside of their paradigm. And it’s not just in computing. By challenging assumptions which are supposedly fundamental to the current stream of thought, we can find new ways to innovate.

Some of these (such as “No More Keyboards” are easy to envisage with the adoption of touch-screens and some of the brain-activity work going on in our local universities – keyboards could already be a thing of the past. But what about screens? We’ve seen a concept computer from DELL which doesn’t have a screen, it has a projector by default. Or how about a wearable computer which feeds data directly to a video headset. What about non-visible user interfaces like on the iPod shuffle? Or one which uses aural or haptic clues?

It isn’t quite as easy as just taking each statement and looking at the inverse – but rather to examine it for fragile assumptions.

What if…

(To compare: iPad has a 1 GHz processor running an OS that is quick on a 600 MHz processor. It has a 9.7″ screen running at 1024×768. It is 13.4 mm thick (0.53 inches) and weights just 0.68 kg (1.5 lbs).) Related posts: Subnotes iPhone. 4. MacBook Pro arrives. Powerbook goes to deserving soul. So, … Continue reading “What if…”

Here’s to the Crazy Ones…

Related posts: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose Who’s in your Monkeysphere? 18/100 Just Jump Into Podcasting – Heres How The Box of Crazy

Legacy

The width of our modern cars, Hummers notwithstanding, is descended from the width of Roman chariots. Now while this has been debated as coincidence by some, the fact remains that rutted roads would have been very awkward to drive on if your car had a signficant width difference. Some people go so far as to claim this development was by edict – but it’s much easier to understand the mechanics of the situation. These things were more than coincidence – they were common sense. They didn’t happen by edict, they happened because their developers had a challenge and had real world problems to deal with.

In Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”, he treats us to another example. Victorian railroad tunnels were re-used for the modern London Underground system. Sadly the tunnels are sufficiently narrow that while they can accommodate the trains, they can’t accommodate an air-conditioning system without a serious amount of rework. Which means consumers end up with a hot and stuffy travel experience in one of the greatest cities in the world.

I’m told, but can’t find a reference, for the 20 kg (40 lb) weight limit on carry on items being due to stagecoach limits?

I see this in computing. In 1984, everyone thought that the Macintosh was a step too far. Computers had black and white (or green) interfaces. And twenty-six years later, we’re all using more or less the same interface. While it would be easy to blame the market leader for a lack of innovation (and even easier to point at them as a cause of stagnancy in the computing industry as a whole). We’ve not come a long way from 1984. We have files, we have a single mouse pointer. Yes, our computers are bigger, faster and more colourful but we still poke with a single finger at our files and and pictures. Our computers can do a lot more – but these things are tasks – we don’t see much of the operating system when we’re playing a game nor when we operate a word processor. The Operating System becomes simply a way to access these tasks and for the most part we only perform one task at a time. We don’t write a novel while we’re playing a game. We don’t tend to design elegant infographics while we’re also mixing a sequence of music to accompany that infographic. We do one thing at a time.

Where this breaks down is in the simple mechanics of tasks versus ‘apps’. I keep most of my music on my iPhone and play this while tapping out emails and tweets. However if I want to use a service like Spotify, then I have some problems. Spotify is an “app” on the iPhone and only one “app” can run at a time which means I can listen to music from Spotify or I can write email, but not both. For me, that’s not a pain but it is why I suggested ‘backgrounding‘. I’m not too worried about Spotify because I don’t use it – but I can see more of this in the future – where there is a need to hook into a service in the background and there will be a solution in place.

The resistance to task-based interfaces is perplexing though – especially from the crowd who lauded the appearance of Wizards – software designed to make certain tasks easier – not designed to help productivity itself but rather to overcome the increasing complexity of computer operating systems. So let’s envisage a product representing the next stage of computing, the removal of that complexity – not the obfuscation of complexity behind a Wizard, simply the removal of it.

What would that product look like?

iPad

OK, so the iPad was announced and the official line from the wife is that if I am in the US in late March, I’m to pick up three of them for the house and if I only come back with one, I’m a dead man. They will fit my usage profile with the software … Continue reading “iPad”

They will fit my usage profile with the software out of the box. My usage pattern is essentially email and web. And when you add the apps that will easily port over from iPhone (by, uh, just installing them) then the remainder of my needs will be filled. Arguably some apps will work better on iPad (like the previously mentioned iSSH).

That one issue with iSSH essentially conveys the only real issue I had with iPhone – it’s a phone. It’s not going to be the best device for everything but the iPad solves a lot of the concerns with the iPhone as a general computing device. The screen is much larger so we can see the utility of a touch interface which can accept more than three fingers. We can see the new metaphors which free people to learn new methods of interacting with their computers. There are some recent iPhone metaphors which have inspired delight – such as the drag to refresh in Tweetie 2 for iPhone, the way you can grab and drag maps in the Maps app and the dice manipulation in Rory’s Story Cubes (based on the Award winning game). With all of these apps and more – we have to wonder what the additional screen space will do for the user experience. Important to note that the iPhone is 320×480 at around 160 dpi and the iPad is 1024×768 at around 130 dpi – so text will be in theory a little fuzzier at the same point size than iPhone but as the text will likely be larger, it should be, in theory be clearer.

What else..

From MacRumors

A shared file directory is provided that will mount on your Mac or PC. This is presumably how files such as iWork documents will be transferred to and from the iPad. iPad applications will be able to access this shared directory.

This is a relatively big deal, if correct. Not only is it the way to get your docs into your iPad, I’d presume that it will sync with MobileMe’s iDisk.

And if applications running on iPad can access this directory then we’re going to see a slew of apps which will be able to use WiFi and Bluetooth to swap files. This (OBEX) is something we can’t do on iPhone but we can with the Mac and other mobile phones. Maybe we’ll see other services being pushed – other than Pages files and images.

And yes, this potentially drags iPad (and maybe iPhone with OS 4.0) into the realms of where every other mobile has been for years.

And lastly…

I have to consider what will come in the accessories for iPad. We’ve already seen the Keyboard Dock, the Dock, the leather Case, the Camera Connection Kit – but what about the third party opportunities

Air/Auto adapter – this is an obvious one. I’m guessing that existing adapters will work. Those folk sitting up at the front of the plane will need it for the long haul flights.
Extended battery sleeve – we know how good these are (with the best I’ve seen coming from Mophie) and I reckon we’ll see extended battery sleeves for the iPad as well which will add bulk but also an entire day of operation. Those folk sitting down the back of the plane will need these for the long haul flights.
Case with built-in keyboard – different to the case above, this is a hard case which either has a bluetooth keyboard or a keyboard with a Dock port cable attached (and a USB cord for charging). There were dreams of these back in the day for the Newton.
Back of headrest holster – when you’re facing an 8 hour drive from Stranraer to Southampton, you need entertainment for the kids in the back of the car. What better than an iPad loaded with 20 movies, 50 games and a GPS so the kids can see where we are and where we’re going and that should help us avoid the “Are we there yet” refrain.
Wall/desk dock mounting arm – you can mount an iMac on an arm, so why not an iPad? Put it beside your bed to charge overnight and act not only as your alarm clock but also your clock radio and your late at night reading lamp with built in book!
Camera tether – whether a tether over WiFi or Bluetooth to an iPhone camera would be possible or whether there’s a hack to get a webcam attached to an iPad via the 30 pin port and a special ‘video’ dock – I think it might be worth it. I can see why it wasn’t built in but I would also hope for a lot more data input devices to be attached by the dock port.
Double iPad case – establish a communications protocol and use one as display and the other as input (Thanks, Aidan). Why do you need this? WHO CARES. It’s got double the awesome!
Scientific Instruments – they won’t convince the crazy people who believe in Genesis but I’d love to see a sensor bank which attached by iPad tether. Why do I need this? No idea. But I’d love to see it and I’d pledge to buy it too.

To be honest, I see the iPad replacing laptops and desktops in lots of other circumstances where people use screens to interact and do not have to do massive amounts of data entry. Lawyers, doctors, students, teachers, estate agents – all sorts.

Am I being Apple Fanboi Hysterical here? I don’t think so.

Compromise: pull and background

I have a deep-seated desire for multi-tasking on the iPhone (and now the iPad). I understand their reasons for not including it and I understand the tradeoffs of performance, stability and user experience. I don’t want to be bothered using an app to micromanage device resources – that smacks too much of using Mac OS … Continue reading “Compromise: pull and background”

And that’s the world you live in with Android and Windows Mobile multitasking. The resources on a mobile device are sufficiently limited that you are forced to manage your apps to maintain the best performance. That’s obviously something that Apple wished to avoid.

In my entirely unscientific survey (which consists of standing about with other geeks and moaning about how we wish there was some multitasking on iPhone), I have come to consider the compromises.

Ahhhh, Push It!
Salt-N-Pepa pre-empted the Apple faithful with the refrain “Push it” when anyone considered multitasking to be necessary. This was meant to be the first compromise – notifications could be pushed from the ‘cloud’ (the new word for ‘server on the internet’) to specific installed apps on the iPhone which gave a semblance of being able to interact with more than one application at a time. You could set notifications based on receiving messages on Twitter, a server being down or anything that can be reported (for example, a GPS with sender sending a Push notification that your car alarm has activated). But – push is one way and limited in scope so rather than just demanding multi-tasking, wouldn’t it be better to consider other compromises?

Pull
If we can push to an iPhone, what about the server setting up a pull mechanism? Essentially it’s a push designed to ‘get’ data rather than just ‘set’ data. That would mean you could have a service running in the cloud which pings your phone for a location update or a state change in a document and updates the server copy. You could obviously set the frequency, you set the amount and quality of data to be pulled and Apple can provide a simple interface. Heck – build it into MobileMe or demand a MobileMe subscription for it – I have MobileMe anyway and they use part of this already for the “Find my iPhone” feature. So – why not extend this and open a Pull API for iPhone and iPad?

Pull puts intelligence in the cloud. It makes you want to run server-based applications which will hold your calendar, pull in your location, intelligently warn you when you’re going to be late. Pull makes a difference by putting apps in the cloud.

Background
The more I think about it, the more I realise that I don’t need true multitasking on a phone or a tablet. iPhone (and by extension iPad) are fast enough that there’s no significant delay in launching apps at all. But I do want some apps to be ‘backgrounded’ when certain events occur rather than quitting. I might want to run Spotify on my iPhone (I currently don’t use it) while browsing the web. At the moment I can’t do this – but if Spotify could be identified as a Backgrounded app so that when I hit the Home button, it goes into the background rather than quitting (a little like the Voice Memos app) and only quits properly when something would directly conflict (like an incoming phone call) or when I tell it to quit by holding down a button sequence (the system in place to quit a running app is hold down the Sleep button and then hold down the Home button). There has to be a simple way to do it and, frankly, it’s a pain that Apple can do it with iPod, Phone calls and Voice Memo and third party developers can’t.

Even just having one backgrounded app would be great – especially when you’re in the middle of something like a multiplayer game – the ability to send a ‘pause’ to the other player because you’ve got a phone call rather than just kicking you out of the game! Backgrounding apps should be a toggle you enable in Settings. Apps that I would background right now would be relatively few but I would consider:

iSSH – for keeping alive the connections I’ve made to servers while I check something on the web (thanks to MartyMc for the inspiration on that.) Losing the SSH connection can be a pain. This will become more important on larger screen devices like iPad.
‘TrafficMob’ – an as-yet unwritten app which just runs in the background on your phone, uses your GPS and records your position every 30 seconds. It then uploads this data to a server which plots the points on a map, crowdsources the lot of them and shows you when and where the traffic snarl ups are.
Skype – this is obvious. Skype is powerful for me because I talk to people all around the world. I can’t currently just leave it running on my iPhone because then I can’t do anything else and it’s annoying when a call comes in on cellular while I’m in Skype as it takes precedence. This needs a real backgrounding option.

And if something does come in, some notification or call or anything – give me the choice to continue what I’m doing rather than divert my attention.

I’m sure that the talented software engineers and designers at Apple have gone through dozens of permutations trying to find the right one. I just hope that something like this makes it into iPhone OS 4. They’ve already got the UI down, it’s now the engineering challenge of making it work.