The cell phone has been fodder for art projects for a little while now. Here are a few pieces I’ve come across recently – a few personal favorites…

This is an installation by a Boston artist by the name of Rob Petit. At the very least, you’ve got to give him credit for meticulousness – and the sheer number of discarded phones he uses in some of these pieces says a little something about how ubiquitous, disposable (and environmentally unfriendly) the devices have become. For more images of his images, go here. – this is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about cell phones.

    
Here we have an installation from the European art/technology collective informationlab.  “Cell Phone Disco” is basically a grid of sensors and LED that allows users to draw shapes with their with their active cellphones.  OK, maybe the concept strikes me as a bit shallow (an impression reinforced by the unfortunate title), but I think approaching technology with a certain amount of playfulness is almost always A Good Thing – and indeed the installation has proven very popular, showing across Europe and in several American cities as well.

   
I like cars. Like most car fetishists, there are a few websites I enjoy wasting a little time with from every so often, and one of my favorite bookmarks is rinspeed, a Swedish auto design firm with a soft spot for vintage Porsches.  At this year’s Geneva Auto Show, Rinspeed is showing the electric concept car the “ichange.”  What’s cool about the ichange is that most functionality (iginition, lights, ventilation, etc.) is controlled by an iphone app.  Not only is leveraging the power of a smartphone the driver already owns rather than building out a full traditional dashboard is an interesting take on green design – it also insures you won’t be able to make calls while you drive!

Televisions and set-top boxes with embedded network interfaces are coming, that much is agreed upon.  What’s up for discussion, though, is just what the user interface is going to look like – an “internet video-only” implementation that places a premium on simplicity and system stability, or a full-featured “browser for the couch” allowing full unrestricted access to the internet.

Gordon Campbell, a 30+ year veteran of the semiconductor design and marketing industry with stints at Honeywell, Motorola, Intel, and several start-ups under his belt, calls the former approach “hogwash.”   According to a recent article, his current company Personal Web Systems (no web site yet)) plans to bring a device to market later this year allowing full unrestricted access to the web (the company also has plans to subsequently offer that same functionality to CE manufacturers on a single chip).

“This generation doesn’t want their hands tied behind their backs. They want the same experience as with a PC (on their TV)“, Campbell states.

I think he is precisely wrong.

Television web browsing has been tried many times before, with little or no success – and although today’s increased broadband penetration and (more text-friendly) HD screen resolutions suggest perhaps it’s time again to make yet another pass at it, the bottom line is that average folks just do not want a lean-forward PC experience on their TV, thank you very much.  And even if they did, there would be user input device issues to solve (keyboard on your coffee table, anyone?), challenging security issues to deal with,  and (in contrast with computer users), zero tolerance for crashes and restarts.

I could go on and on – but in short, I feel it’s a mistake to assume that internet access necessarily dictates a full PC/web browser paradigm – for example, consider twitter, skype, IM, even iTunes – all examples of succesful non-browser/non-PC dependent internet applications, none of which “this generation” would consider “hogwash”.

Once you explain to them what the word “hogwash” means, that is.  

To sum up, the consumer electronics industry has discovered the internet – and these new devices are not going to need (or look anything like) a PC or a web browser.

For better or worse, the TCP/IP protocol (and the internet it makes possible) will not remain the exclusive turf of the computer industry for very much longer – a point some in the industry are slow to see.

What’s going on? 

Of the ten or so people sitting immediately around me on the New York subway from 14th to Wall Street, an impressive seven riders actually read a book!

Yes, actually reading hard and soft cover books, one page at a time, without the help of an iPod, or Kindle, or any other digital hand-held device.

Although completely anectodal (and statistically irrelevant, I know), behind my impromptu mini sample of “analog” readership, is there more than meets the eye?

Hey, it’s probably just a push back by a few, against the omnipresent popularity of overly slick and shinny digital rich media players packaged in 21st century form factor and UI.

Or maybe it is a case of “it’s the economy, stupid”.

People reading relatively inexpensive physical books today may be an indicator that previously released Zunes and iPods are now considered way to pricy.

My money, though, is on a different point: My seven fellow straphanges have either re-discovered the age-old value proposition of printed paper, or never actually abandoned their love for it.

To them I guess, when reading a real book, the tactile experience is unqiue and remains unmatched compared to any digital e-reader counterparts.

There’s also a certain emotional bind to turning pages manually, one by one. 

Oh, and if you are into dog-ears, try that with an Amazon Kindle – can’t be done.

Long story short, companies have long started working on e-paper and e-readers to recreate similar effects, but none seemed to have cracked the code on sufficiently simulating the organic experience of holding and reading an actual book. 

Until there is a similarly satisfying “touch and feel” reading experience with e-reading devices, I’d like to assume my seven subway mates probably are the equivalent of vinyl record fans amidst a sea of DVD owners.

Nothing major. Nothing to be concerned about. It’s interesting though, as the e-reader industry seems to still have ways to go.

PS: For those of you interested in “the latest and greatest” innovation in e-books, e-reading, and the like, check out these items:

In case you missed the first one, Amazon Kindle II is coming out

Amazon to offer e-books on Apple devices

Sony going next-gen with its own e-Reader, too

The bookworm project now supported by O’Reilly

Stanza, a prominent e-reader iPhone app

Google Books now officially online

Samsung has genuine interest in actual e-paper

The trend is unmistakable: the consumer electronics industry has discovered the internet, and activities that have until now always involved a “computer” (such as internet video viewing and mobile internet access) will be increasingly done using a new generation of leaner and meaner dedicated CE devices instead.  This is all well and good: arguably, the modern home computer – more flexible and powerful but also more complicated and (let’s face it) maintenance-intensive than ever – is clearly overkill for such activities.  But as the computer justifiably loses the battle to convince us it’s also a CE device, CE devices are in turn left to grapple with an issue of their own: how much and how best to emulate the computer.

I’m talking software deployment.  You buy a computer, it includes a license for an operating system, and you’re free to go and install whatever software (or malware) you want – in other words, “you buy it, you break it” (in a way, an inversion of the “Pottery Barn rule ” invoked by Colin Powell over the war in Iraq).  But what about a smartphone, or that internet-enabled television you’ll be buying within the next year or two?  While the availability of a rich selection of high quality 3rd party applications is in the best interest of both the device maker and the user, a wide open ”no guard-rails” software deployment policy is in both parties’ worst interest: poorly written applications can harm both the user  as well as the brand, and (news flash) the average home user is a lot less interested in taking on that kind of responsibility than many companies in the computer industry have ever really understood.

For their upcoming line of internet-enabled televisions, Yahoo/Intel have addressed the issue by going with a “widget” rather than “application” model: lightweight software running on a JavaScript engine rather than the OS itself.  Taking another approach, Apple (which in terms of revenue has been a CE company with a side business in computers for a while now) has come up with the iTunes App Store: applications for the iPhone (and likely for the Apple TV in the near future) are installed on the OS itself, but must be first vetted by (and subsequently purchased through) Apple.  This offers the best of both worlds: the developer base for the device is virtually unlimited, but nothing’s going to break, and apps are guaranteed to be secure.  In fact, the “app store” model is currently being imitated by other smartphone makers such as Nokia because it’s been so successful and popular with users.

Well, 98% of us, that is – there’s also a growing geek subculture out there that believes they have the right to do whatever they want to with something they’ve purchased, thank you very much – and they’re dedicated to removing the iPhone’s software restrictions – “jailbreaking”, as it’s called.  Although the practice is in direct violation of the iPhone EULA (software license agreement), it’s gotten so widespread now that a Google search of “jailbreak” and “iPhone” currently yields 3.6 million results -and so the two sides (the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Apple) are set to face off this spring.

Apparently, this dispute is subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act , originally meant to fight piracy of copyrighted “works” such as film and music – therefore, it will ultimately fall upon those famously tech-savvy folks at the Library of Congress to decide the issue.  A case can be made for either side – but although I have to admit I’d love the ability to put my iPhone on a network that covers the NYC metro area better than AT&T , I tend to side with Apple on this one – not only because I feel the iPhone EULA puts them on a pretty strong legal footing, but also because I feel that it’s “good and right” to treat software for CE devices differently than software for computers.

One thing is for certain, though – just as developers will continue to write great App Store applications for Apple, others will continue to hack open the system.  What’s unknown is whether Apple go to the length of actually suing users – a tactic that didn’t work very well for the RIAA .

We’ve written before on how ill-suited the personal computer is for viewing long-form internet video – and on the strange inability one often finds in the personal computing industry (and in a lot of new media analysis) to distinguish between how a 2 minute YouTube video and last week’s full episode of Lost are actually consumed.  The point is not lost on the CE industry, though: there will be a deluge of internet-enabled video hardware coming to market within the next 6-9 months (both televisions and set-top boxes), and while the few devices already out there (i.e. Apple TV, Vudu, and Roku) have all been based on closed “walled-garden” models, this new generation of hardware will instead be open, offering the promise of access to multiple internet video sources directly from the couch.

Which begs the question: what should the user interface for a system that aggregates multiple (and often competing) video services look like?  Clearly, a wide-open web browser model isn’t the appropriate solution for what is, after all, a consumer electronics device.

From an application design perspective, it’s an interesting question. Although I’ve already written about the approach Yahoo/Intel are taking with their Connected TV initiative, last week I had the opportunity to speak with Bob Poniatowski of TiVo regarding their upcoming internet video solution (currently in beta testing).  Two things I took away from our chat: (1) TiVo continues to place a substantial premium on UI design and ease of use, and (2) they’ve determined that focusing on a searching (rather than browsing) model neatly solves the problem of how to integrate multiple internet video services into a single cohesive user experience.  In fact, the name of the initiative (to be rolled out later this year as an additional feature on existing Series 3 and HD boxes) is “TiVo Search” – as CEO Tom Rogers puts it, “what Google did for the Internet, TiVo is now doing for the TV”.

It’s all about the search: users will be able to look for short-form content from sources such as YouTube, The N.Y. Times, and The Onion (among others).  As for premium content, if you have an account  with Amazon VOD, CinemaNow, or Netflix, you’ll enter a TiVo PIN on the respective website and be good to go.  However, one caveat: searching on Netflix is not yet supported – like the  Roku device, only whatever “Watch Instantly” titles already added to the Netflix queue via their website are available.

As an example, search “No Country for Old Men”, and you’ll be able to compare, purchase, and view the title from either Amazon or CinemaNow if you have accounts there (TiVo transparently handles any transactions).  You’ll also get reviews and related articles (from the N.Y. Times, for example), and from Youtube, you’ll get trailers, clips and fan raves/rants (Poniatowski likens the YouTube content to that of a “global DVD Extras menu”).  Search Tommy Lee Jones and you’ll get bio information, any other available films and/or television programs he’s appeared in, and again, any related short-form and user-generated content.

In addition, TiVo Search will include a (very TiVo-like) internet video “Discovery Bar” of suggestions based on your previous searches, and will also allow you view images from any computers on your home network… all in all, it’s easy to imagine this being pretty cool.

Things to watch:

• How will TiVo’s subscription revenue model compare to Yahoo/Intel’s Connected TV advertising-supported model?
• How will TiVo’s traditional in-house software development/deployment model compare against the Yahoo/Intel Connected TV “widget” model (and/or Apple TV’s App Store model)?
• When will Netflix “Watch Instantly” content become searchable too?
• Will TiVo expand into the lower end of the IPTV market by releasing a more affordable streaming-only (no HD, no DVR) device to compete with devices such as the Roku?  Having already done the heavy lifting of implementing the search system together, this would seem an likely move.

All in all, this looks to be a powerful and (as one would expect from TiVo) a well-designed long-form internet video solution.  Although TiVo’s market share has been under pressure from lower cost carrier-bundled DVRs in recent years, TiVo Search could be just the differentiating value-add the company’s looking for.

I’m looking over some recent numbers from nielsen online and I’m struck by something: while hulu may indeed be a big fish, long-form internet video is still a pretty small pond.  Consider:

Of the four major broadcast networks, hulu partners Fox and NBC saw the largest month-over-month increases in October 2008:  Fox was up 165%, while NBC (helped by Tina Fey’s triumphant if temporary return to SNL as America’s favorite eye-winking, Russia-seeing hockey mom) saw a whopping 312% increase (by contrast, ABC was up 105% and internet video laggard CBS was only up 38%.)

312 % and 165 % increases over the course of one month? Let’s celebrate – professionally produced long-form video has finally come into its own, right?

Wrong.

From that same Nielsen report, here’s another statistic: during October, YouTube had almost 82 million unique visitors to hulu’s 6.3 million – that’s a factor of fifteen (even with Tina Fey’s Palin sketches driving users to hulu).

A direct comparison between the two by total streams delivered would skew unfairly towards YouTube due to the shorter running time of the average user-generated video – but what the heck, let’s do it anyway, just for fun…  because the difference between those Nielsen numbers is even more stark than you might imagine: YouTube delivered almost 38 times the total number of streams delivered by hulu.

That’s thirty eight times more streams from YouTube than hulu.

Granted, hulu is one well-executed website.  Yet clearly, long-form premium video over the internet still has a long way to go.  What’s the takeaway here?  In my opinion, the answer is somewhat obvious: people don’t want to sit alone in front of their computers for a half hour or more at a time to view long-form video – in other words, the effectiveness of the personal computer as a video-viewing device is inversely proportional to the program length of the video being viewed.

The numbers in this report clearly put Hulu and YouTube in stark contrast against one another in terms of actual usage.  However, it would be a mistake to fail to take into account the fundamental differences between the short form/long-tail (user generated) and long form/short-tail (professionally produced) video viewing experiences – or the fact that we don’t have a truly compelling lean-back device for delivering long-form internet video viewing just yet.  Therefore, it would be a mistake to infer from reports such as this that internet video will remain primarily a short-form UGC medium.

For long-form premium video over the internet, it’s going to take a new generation of device that offers content directly from the couch before we can make any such comparisons.   The user interface on these devices will not be a web-browser, instead it will be simpler and optimized for lean-back media. Companies such as boxee (at left) and Yahoo/Intel are working on just such user interfaces. While I’ve already written a bit on the Yahoo initiative here, Boxee is more recent development. Right now it’s just a Windows/Mac application that aggregates disparate video sources (including Hulu) into a cohesive whole. While that’s pretty cool in itself, what makes Boxee really interesting is that the company plans to bring dedicated set-top Boxee hardware to the market within the next year or so – and in ther meantime, the software can be installed on the Apple TV device today. As I’ve said before, I think the prospect of Boxee on – well, a box – changes everything.

We shall see – but in the meantime, a quick reality check is in order: while well-suited to workplace video snacking, the computer and web browser are inappropriate (and ultimately intermediate) solutions for viewing long-form video – no matter how well-implemented a given website (such as Hulu) happens to be.

Back from CES - the annual Consumer Electronics love fest in Las Vegas,  (OK, I am a bit late posting this) – I am actually pretty psyched about what’s coming down the consumer electronics pike this year.

As CE devices get faster, smarter, and increasingly untethered, the “on-your-terms” digital lifestyle proposition pitched to us for all these years seems a considerable step closer to its “anywhere, anytime” goal.

Yet, despite years of impressive CES innovation hoopla, I continue grappling with a personal observation I lovingly coined the “Star Trek bottleneck”:

CE designers’ propensity for innovation seems directly proportional to their lifetime exposure to, yup, you guessed it – the popular Starship Enterprise television series.

OK, I am kidding. But as with any good joke, there’s some truth to it.

To stick with the Star Trek analogy – short of time travel and “beam me up Scotty” – is there anything in CE land that Captain Kirk and his crew didn’t have that’s not readily available to us in stores today?

There’s the wireless video monitor and the wrist-band smart phone, plus the super-smart refrigerator, remote home security, and a growing number of cute gadgets.

All set in slick form factor, of course, all with build-in intelligence processing more information ever faster. Good ol’ Gene would have been proud.

In other words, it’s as if this past-century icon of sci-fi television continues to haunt our 21st century CE designers to this day.

Of course, I have no empirical data, no scientific studies. Just a pretty good hunch, mixed in with a healthy dose of cynicism, about why today’s CE industry seems unable to think more innovatively about, well about innovation itself.

Maybe it needs a new and decidedly young(er) generation of CE designers to get us beyond my “Star Trek bottleneck” dilemma? One void of stylized sci-fi TV exposure and implicit 60ies and 70ies ideas of what innovation should be.

But than again, no matter what any new group of CE designer may come up with, it still needs to stay sufficiently functional and attractive to consumers, right, or it simply won’t sell?

So, maybe it’s not just about passing the CE design torch on to the next generation, but also about our own limitation as consumers to desire (and then use) something entirely different from what we collectively perceive as “innovative” today? 

So where might we be heading next?

My guess on this, next-gen CE devices will focus on software rather than hardware, and regard bolstering quality-of-life as a key goal.

That next evolutionary step in consumer electronics might then have less to do with form factor (that’s largely covered ;-), and much more with adding previously unavailable intelligence inside and outside existing hardware concepts.

The key driver – and blocker at the same time? Our collective ability to imagine beyond the obvious.

Any of this probably not for CES 2010. But hey, let’s see what CES 2020 will bring.

Consider Sony and Apple – in many ways, two similar companies: both span both the computing and CE spaces, both have intimate connections to a major studio (Sony Pictures and Disney, respectively), and both adhere to closed-end vertical silo business models.  Granted, Sony doesn’t write their own operating systems, and unlike Apple TV, the current Sony internet-video-to-the-television box (the Internet Video Link) is partnered with 3rd party services such as Amazon’s Video on Demand – but in other ways Sony represents more of a closed ecosystem than Apple: while the Apple TV will work with any HDMI-equipped TV, the Video Link will only work with Sony Bravia televisions – and while iTunes is platform-agnostic, Sony’s previous ill-fated internet TV device from a few years back (the Sony Room Link) demanded not only a PC, but a Sony Viao PC.

This past week saw some news from both companies:

• Sony announced an expected $US 2.9b operating loss for 2008
• Apple recorded a year-over-year revenue increase of over 6% for the most recent quarter – and this despite the historically horrendous macroeconomic climate of the past few months



It’s an ongoing debate among those of us who think about consumer electronics and technology: closed proprietary platforms vs. open standards-based platforms.  Stability and elegance on one hand, lower costs and increased innovation on the other – two entirely different paradigms.

In addition to their numerous other circumstantial similarities, Sony and Apple both subscribe to the former – so maybe it’s not about the intrinsic advantages of a closed or open technology model (or other factors, for that matter) as much as it’s about the quality and desirability of the product.

If there’s one widely agreed upon fact of life in the still nascent long-form (short-tail) internet video space, it’s that consumers will not tolerate anything close to the advertising density they will for traditional broadcast television:

• A current NBC show on hulu carries roughly ¼ of the advertising that same show broadcast on a terrestrial NBC affiliate carries.

At the same time, online CPM rates are substantially higher than traditional broadcast rates, based on the internet-given ability to target online ads to individual users:

• NBC and hulu can charge over twice the CPM that NBC can charge for broadcast television.

It’s often taken for granted that these two characteristics are both inherent to internet video and even somehow compensatory – yet imagine if we could challenge the first assumption (the relative intolerance for online advertising ): in other words, imagine online video advertising density more in line with that of broadcast video, yet maintaining the higher CPM rates charged for target online advertising…

Now there’s a business model.

How to get internet video consumers to tolerate the amount of advertising tolerated on television, though? To me, the (somewhat obvious) answer is to solve the problem of making the internet video experience itself more comparable to the television experience.

In other words,

I would submit that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of advertising online premium video consumers will tolerate and the fact that (until now) they happen to have been sitting alone in front of a computer at the time– in other words, increase the comfort, ease, and sociability of the experience, and (for better or worse) you can increase the advertising.

Now that’s finally happening, as CE companies start rolling out TV hardware with embedded network interfaces this week in Las Vegas.

Today I read with interest a Will Richmond VideoNuze article questioning whether the current online advertising model will support this new generation of internet-enabled television hardware, and how it might have to change.  What I feel Will misses, though, is that as a result of all this new couch-centric hardware changes the fundamental viewing experience, there will be a commensurate increase in tolerance for advertising on the part of the average internet video viewer.

So as the density of long-form premium internet video advertising approaches that of traditional television yet the online CPM rates remain higher than the effective traditional broadcast rates (because of the internet-only value-add of ad targeting), I feel that the advertising-supported long form short-tail internet video sector has a bright future indeed.

On the eve of the 2009 CES show, perhaps it’s time for a few more thoughts on what should prove to be The Big Story at this year’s show: televisions and set-top boxes with internet access baked in, for direct internet video access.

For the last few years, numerous companies in the ‘computer’ business (on either the hardware or software side) have made repeated attempts to market solutions involving the PC as viable long-form internet video delivery platforms – with little to no success. Lately, though, perhaps enough anthropologists and/or behavioral scientists have been hired to finally convince at least a few of these companies that despite all the bells and whistles, a computer might never be a television after all (as they say in the south, “you can put a brick in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit”).

So while certain companies might have enjoyed a substantial technological head start in internet video, through a stubborn insistence on leveraging the home computer, the opportunity was missed. But no matter: here comes the CE industry – as of Thursday in Las Vegas, it’s their market now.

Apple undertook a conscious expansion into the CE industry several years ago with the iPod (in fact, dropping ‘Computer’ from their corporate name) – is it too late for other computer-centric companies to make a similar move? 

The recent Intel/Yahoo initiative is a particularly interesting case in point.  Both companies, as Yahoo Connected TV vice president Patrick Barry poetically puts it, “emerged from the ocean of the PC”.

Intel Intel has been especially forward-thinking regarding the convergence of the home computing and consumer electronics industries for some time now, having launched the Intel Digital Home Group several years ago.  The interdisciplinary Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of social scientists as well as computer scientists.

Yahoo We’ve been pretty hard on Yahoo lately, but they do have some heavy OEM hitters lined up to implement their embedded internet TV ‘widgets’ system: Sony, TiVo, and Samsung. Also worth noting, the Connected TV initiative intends to follow a purely advertising-supported model, and studies routinely show consumers prefer advertising to subscription fees.  Lastly, yet another issue (and one that holds true for all internet video contenders) is the remote: as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently noted, a Nintendo Wii-like pointing remote will likely be required as internet-enabled television hardware matures.

At any rate, given their recent setbacks, this could be Yahoo’s last best shot at redemption – so look for them to bet the farm (or “throw the long ball”, for you American football fans) on this one.