Back where I come from, they like to say that “soccer is the sport of the future, and it always will be”.

You could say the same about internet television.  OK, sure – even as I type this, millions of video streams are being watched by millions of solitary computer users at this very moment – but while some folks (including us) have spent the last few years promising that internet television is right around the corner, the consumer electronics landscape has become littered with failed attempts to deliver the lean-back/multi-viewer/couch-centric user experience we know and love (and how we do love it – in 2010, Americans spent 2.7 hours per day in front of their televisions).

It’s going to happen, though.  Simply put, the benefits to the user (time shifting, long tail content, à la carte pricing) and the benefits to the advertiser (targeted advertising – need I say more?) are just too compelling for it not to.

So here we find ourselves on the eve of CES: time, once again, to predict the advent of internet television.  Let’s see: there’s Google, back with new and with improved Google TV – as well as a roster of hardware partners that now includes the world’s top two TV makers Samsung and LG (they join founding Google TV partner Sony).  And then there’s Apple – we’ve been speculating about this forever, but recent rumors about an impending Apple TV this year have achieved critical mass, based on word from both Apple suppliers and from the at-large tech media .

Make no mistake: internet television is, to use a technical term, The Big Enchilada.  Precisely because the stakes are so high, though, the incumbents (internet service providers, cable companies, cable networks) have been struggling to stay out in front of the  impending disruption (and avoid having what happened to the music industry happen to them).   Up until now, the best way to do that has been to deny these internet television services access to the same top-tier content they’re happy to be making available via your computer’s web browser (more on one viewer’s workaround: here and here).

The next step in the evolution of internet television is not going to have to do with processor speed or Siri voice-based remote controls – rather, it’s going to involve that vital third part of the internet TV equation: content.

The real thing to watch for in the Google TV announcements coming out of  Las Vegas this week will be what content agreements are in place.

It was Google’s inability to ink such agreements (and some less than well-received hardware) that made 2011 a disappointing year for Google TV.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt has high hopes for 2012, though: he was recently quoted predicting that “by the summer of 2012, the majority of the televisions you see in stores will have Google TV embedded.“  That’s a pretty bold statement.  After the disappointing 2011 Google TV has had, it’s hard to imagine Schmidt going out on a limb like that without having some new top-tier content agreements up his sleeve.  And as for Apple?  Building an internet television has been their obvious next move for at least the past few years.  Why is it only now that it (finally) appears imminent?

The answer to both questions could be that that new business models for internet television content licensing and distribution have recently been ironed out – and we’ll be hearing about them later this week.  

Google Forms are great: they’re dead simple to build, and they can be accessed on the web via Google and (through the use of <embed> code) any other website as well.  Support for email publishing is great, and Google Forms work seamlessly with Google Docs spreadsheets.  It’s been my experience that within small and mid-sized businesses that are already using Google Apps, the internal use of Google forms has become routine.

What’s interesting, though, is that you tend to see them being used much less often out there in the wilds of the public internet.

That’s because Google Forms have one major weakness: unlike within the Google Apps ecosystem, public submissions are completely anonymous – so there’s no way check against users submitting multiple responses to the same form.  Granted, it’s not an easy technical problem: browser cookies are one option, but users can always delete them. Comparing the IP address of each submission against those of previous submissions?  That’s not a perfect solution either: consumer ISPs typically issue dynamic IP addresses, multiple legitimate users could be sharing the same internet connection, and lastly, there are, as always, privacy concerns.

And that’s just the technical side of the issue – from a PR perspective, of course Google has to be very careful about being perceived as being in the business of anything remotely resembling the tracking of users out there on the public web.  Still, it’s hard to imagine why Google hasn’t yet implemented a transparent, user opt-in system to prevent multiple public Google Forms submissions (even if it might reduce the number or submissions).

In the meantime, for all the <embed> code and URL access, Google Forms is essentially crippled as a public web service.

OK, so that’s the web – what about Google Forms sent via email to a private finite set of known respondents?  Here, the privacy issues (both real and perceived) are much reduced – and technically speaking, identifying data could easily and securely be embedded within the ‘Submit’ link contained within each email – but yet, even privately emailed Google Forms responses are completely anonymous (and therefore uncontrolled) as well.  As a result, a Google Forms email survey subject could ‘game the system’ by clicking on the ‘Submit’ link in their single email any number of times.

Conclusion   As a public web service, Google Forms has great potential – but addressing the unique/multiple submission issue would involve technical challenges, privacy concerns, and a potential for third party misuse that are clearly beyond Google’s comfort level.  As a result, any serious use of Google Forms remains limited to within the Google Apps platform.

Sure, a nod has been made towards the public use of the service (Google URLs, <embed> codes, email distribution) – but it seems that Google’s comfortable with letting Google Forms remain merely a Google Apps value-add.

In the meantime, here’s a completely anonymous (and therefore completely meaningless!) Google Forms survey for you.

Vote early, vote often!

I’ll admit it: I’ve never uploaded a video to YouTube, I’ve never subscribed to a YouTube Channel, I’ve never (ok hardly ever) used it to discover video (vimeo is more to my taste for long-tail/user-generated online video).  In short, I was never a big YouTube user  (it turns out YouTube is a big Brian Ales user, but that’s another story).

Then a few days ago, I received an email from Google regarding my seldom-used YouTube account:  I had until December 20th to log on and upgrade to the new YouTube, or my account would be deleted.

Deleted?  That’s one aggressive upgrade policy.  But when das Google sends you an email with a link to click on, you click on it, right?

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It’s interesting how online banking in Germany differs from online banking in the US…

Arguably, they’ve been at this electronic banking thing over here longer than we have in the states – in fact, the routine writing of personal checks ended in Germany sometime well before the end of the last century.  But while the move away from paper has progressed much further here, funnily enough you can’t do any personal online banking at all in Germany without one very important sheet of paper: a TAN list.

A TAN list is a numbered list of unique codes (usually 50 per sheet).  Each time you make a transaction online, your bank’s website prompts you for a random code from the list (i.e. “Please enter code number 43“).  The idea is not only to present the user with an additional authentication challenge – a simple “What is your first pet’s name?” type of question  accomplishes that – but to also make that additional challenge unique to the transaction.

Why is a transaction-specific authentication challenge important?  It’s a way way to fight keystroke logging software – malicious code capable of quietly recording each and every keystroke you type (including, of course, passwords).  Until recently, my US bank had been addressing the key logging issue a bit differently, requiring that I enter an additional “Security Key” by clicking on the keys of a virtual onscreen keyboard.  That avoided the physical keyboard (and thus key-logging), but the problem remained that my single Security Key was static rather than unique to each transaction.  As a consequence, if just one of my transactions was overseen (or screen-recorded), I could still be compromised.

…which is why they just changed over to the system shown below:

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I have a few  friends who’ve had ID chips implanted in their expensive purebred pets over the years.  I’d always thought of it as a vaguely creepy, almost comically yuppie thing to do – until we found ourselves having to do just that in order to legally bring our cat (of somewhat more humble animal shelter rescue origins) with us when we moved here to Berlin.

Since the chip in question is only about the size of a grain of rice and is completely undetectable lying somewhere under the loose skin behind his neck, I had completely forgotten about it.

Until I noticed the uniforms worn by the wait staff at a trendy Berlin café I was at the other day, that is…

QR code  Originally developed on Japanese automobile assembly lines to keep track of individual parts, QR code represents the state of the art in bar code technology, and is capable of storing textual information much more densely than the old-school vertical bar codes found on your groceries.  With the advent of high-quality smartphone cameras and QR code-scanning mobile apps, the square pixelated images have started showing up in print ads, billboards, catalogs, and signs everywhere, as consumer-facing businesses have co-opted the technology for marketing purposes.

Technical takeaway?  QR code makes the transfer of a small but meaningful amount of data from a physical object to a machine over the air possible.

User experience takeaway? Your cellphone is learning to read.

All well and good – but seeing these codes plastered across uniforms worn by humans rather than on inanimate physical objects – well, it reminded me a little bit of that chip inside our cat.

After thinking it over a bit, though, I think it’s just an example of technology as fashion statement – like simulated “shark fin” car antennas, merely an affectation more about conveying a certain level of affluence and technological hipness than anything having to do with actual functionality.

That would make the whole thing a bit silly, wouldn’t it?  Still, less silly than the alternative: imagine patrons actually trying to use these codes, frantically pointing their smartphone cameras at the backs of waiters and waitresses as they quickly pass by, hard at work in a busy café – all in an effort to get the menu or website URL onto their mobile devices.

That, to me, would be not only silly, but a little sad, too – and might just be what too much technology would look a little something like.

Some people are really bothered by imperfect grammar.  Other people can’t stand the sight of people chewing gum.  I don’t share either of those particular pet peeves, but there is something that really gets under my skin: usability-challenged software.

Which brings me to Microsoft Outlook, an application a lot of us spend the better part of our adult waking hours using (I know – kinda sad).  While setting an Out of Office message on the 2010 Mac version the other day, I was struck once again by how even a simple operation can be made needlessly limited and confusing.

In Outlook, the sending of auto-reply messages to internal and external senders is independently configurable – well, sort of.  See the “Send replies outside my company to:” checkbox to the left?  It’s greyed out unless the user has first selected “Send out of office messages“.  In other words, the assumption has been made that nobody could ever possibly need to auto-reply to an external sender if they weren’t already auto-replying to internal senders.

Two things…

• First of all, what a curious and arbitrary assumption to make.  Imagine you’re a worker who typically gets a lot of external email traffic, but those emails need to go unanswered while you work against deadline on an important internal project that demands routine and timely internal email.  Now imagine that as a courtesy to your clients, you’d like to send them an auto-reply for a day or two until the deadline is past.  Not an unreasonable scenario – and just the thing for an enterprise email client that allows independent external and internal auto-replies, right?  Well, with Outlook you’re still out of luck.  Memo to designers: before you impose an operational hierarchy on the user, make sure there’s a reason for it.
• And how about at least clearly naming the options as implemented?  Would it have been too much trouble to correctly label the  “Send Out of Office messages” option “Send Out of Office messages inside my company“?  That would provide a helpful hint to all the harried office workers out there that the options towards the bottom still need to be checked and filled out before heading out on that vacation.  And another thing: if you take the trouble to inform the user that external senders will only receive one auto-reply, why not display whether or not the same is true regarding email coming from internal senders?

How big a deal is this in the grand scheme of things?  OK, not too big – but maybe this kind bothers me only because it’s so unnecessary.  I mean, here’s the thing:  software development, like math, is hard.  The folks creating these applications are highly intelligent.  Why is it that all too often (this is by no means limited to Microsoft, by the way) the easy things – the ‘low hanging fruit’ of simple usability considerations – are overlooked by engineers?

It’s even more difficult to explain in the face of abundant evidence that when a product does get usability right (dropbox and iOS come to mind), it turns out to be not only good for users, but good for business as well (for more on that, see our recent post on Sony and Apple).

Google+ has been around for a few months now, and while the company is keeping typically quiet regarding the hard numbers, most web traffic analysts estimate that as of November of this year, something north of 50 million users will have created Google+ profiles.

How many of those users are actually active on the service, though, is another story: in our (admittedly anecdotal) experience, a lot of these initially enthusiastic early adapters have tapered off on their Google+ usage pretty dramatically (and even if every single one of these 50 million users were still highly active, that’s still only a 10th of Facebook’s user base).

Inertia?  …strongly in Facebook’s favor.

What’s a scrappy little upstart like Google to do?

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I recently attended a management conference held at the Park Plaza Hotel.  You know, the Park Plaza on Wall Street – in Berlin.

The Park Plaza on Wallstrasse – a month ago when I was first sent the event details, I was struck by the presence of two such iconic big-money New York names in a Berlin address.  That didn’t prepare me, though, for the wall covering I found behind the desk at  reception:  a larger-than-life photograph of three businessmen reaching skyward in ecstasy, as money rained down upon them – their faces equal parts surprise and delight.

Although there’s nothing subtle about the image itself, I was at a complete loss as to exactly what message this curious choice in wall covering was intended to convey – and now, a week and a half later, as current events conspire to make it a more unfortunate choice with each passing day, it only baffles me more.  A playful and self-deprecating comment on unfettered capitalism that went a bit too far?  Not likely, given the German aversion to playfulness and self-deprecation.  An earnest and aspirational celebration of undeserved and amoral corporate profit?  Not likely, given the German aversion to undeserved and amoral corporate profit.

No, it remains a complete riddle to me, the image on this wall.  I mean, are we expected to read something into the fact that these are US dollars (and not Euros) raining down on these supposedly European businessmen, or is that merely the result of using a US stock photography service?  Or a more interesting possibility: are the three masters of the universe  depicted here intended to be American?

As you can see, I’ve thought about this a bit – and here’s another (at least partial) explanation I’ve come up with: the hotel happens to be in Mitte, a former Jewish ghetto in the former East Germany that’s since become maybe Berlin’s most expensive real estate, home to not only a thriving art gallery scene but also to a thriving  internet startup scene (the local Groupon clone down the street was recently acquired by Google, and the online audio hosting company around the corner has become a Berlin startup media darling – complete with an investment from noted technology visionary Ashton Kutcher.

So maybe that’s it – and maybe that’s also why this image feels like such a throwback to the late 90′s (in fact, it would be hard to think of a more loaded image to represent the high-water mark of a good old-fashioned US-style tech bubble than this).  In the end, though, I’d like to think that as remarkable as it is, the interior design of this one particular hotel reception desk is an anomaly – a blip.  I’d like to think that the admirable aspects of the German character written about so well by Michael Lewis in his recent Vanity Fair piece on the country’s exposure to the US and European sovereign debt crises will also come in handy here in Berlin – as the city navigates its way through an increasingly frothy startup market.

It was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

It’s been a few weeks now since the local elections here in Berlin – elections in which the Pirate Party won almost 9% of the vote, enough to help unseat Angela Merkel’s state coalition – and you can still find a few leftover Pirate Party election signs here on the streets and sidewalks.

Take, for example, this specimen I came across on Frankfurter Allee the other day.  As an American for whom the the term ‘grassroots‘ has gradually become almost completely devalued (the result of  having been appropriated a few too many times by a few too many well-established mainstream political interests), I found this sign remarkable.

Spray-painted and stenciled, obviously homemade, yet in support of a political party capable of impacting elections in the capitol city of the most powerful country in Europe…  It occurred to me that this sign (literally sitting  among some tufts of grass, no less) is what ‘grassroots‘ really looks like.

But what of this term ‘pirate‘?   While the official Pirate Party platform includes support for net neutrality, free public transportation and the legalization of marijuana, the traditional meaning of the term ‘pirate‘ in the context of the internet has had to do with something else completely: the free sharing of intellectual property such as music, films, and software in violation of existing copyright law (in fact, the Pirate Party has hosted servers for one of the most popular bit torrent tracking websites: the Pirate Bay).

So being a pirate is a Bad Thing.  Right?

When it comes to technology start-ups, the answer would seem to be not necessarily:

• Going all the way back to 1996, the TV adaption of the book Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer was titled “Pirates of the Valley“
• A year ago, Michael Arrington of  the popular technology website techcrunch.com wrote a piece equating the term ‘pirate‘ with the term ‘entrepreneurial‘.
• More recently, when it came time for Google to chose a venue to announce the imminent appearance of their Google Voice service here on European shores last month, they chose a new start-up/entrepreneurial conference being held in Köln.  The name of this conference?  The European Pirate Summit.
• There’s now even a paperback out there entitled “The Pirate Entrepreneur: A Pirate’s Guide: ‘How to be Wildly Successful in Business‘” (ordering yourself a book from Amazon on how to be a pirate strikes me as possibly the least pirate-like thing a person could do – but hey, that’s just me).

Yep – in fact, the internet is awash with a growing  number of pirate-entrepreneur analogies these days.  It would appear that  just as the term  ‘grassroots’ has been co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended in the US, the term ‘pirate’ is in the process of being co-opted to mean something more mainstream than originally intended here in Europe….