This one’s a somewhat lighter post, mainly a few observations about how, of all things, New York City weather, social networking and mobile technology all seem to gel quite effectively these days.

Last week, just back from the ITP Spring Show at Manhattan’s Tisch School of The Arts, I took a quick break strolling across Union Square, on my way to Yaron Samid’s latest NY Video 2.0 meetup event.
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The other day I wrote about the New York subway (my favorite impromptu research panel), and a few “hang outs”, still more comfortable reading a real book rather than their e-version.

Of course, despite some anachronistic readership, the world of e-books continues its expansion undeterred. 

The latest: Online retail giant Amazon.com announced, the library of books available for it’s Kindle branded e-reader will now also be available on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

Why is this big? 

If you hear yourself or anyone else equipped with either Apple-branded portable, we’ve all started asking what’s on it, as if asking what’s on television or on the radio.

Couple that with the by-now impressive depth and breadth of repertoire available for either device, Apple portables are anything but shy compared to, yet again, television or radio.

In other words, the iPhone / iPod combination of devices has become a media platform in its own right.

For Amazon to jump on board makes perfect sense.

More on the subject:

Amazon’s Apple Deal: Kindle Cannibal? (Business Week)

Amazon releases Kindle for iPhone, iPod Touch (LA Times)

Amazon launches Kindle application for the iPhone (TechCrunch / Washington Post)

First Look video: Kindle for iPhone (cnet)

I was recently invited to a Microsoft Developer’s Conference here in New York, and along with the muffins and the buffet lunch buffet was served a heapin’ helping of Azure, Redmond’s nascent cloud computing platform (currently in beta).

Despite the downside of potential privacy and network performance issues, cloud computing offers a lot of advantages (scalability, cost effectiveness, and ease of maintenance,  to name just a few).  This makes internet based, service-oriented computing a very attractive option (especially for small to mid-size businesses) – so we (along with almost everyone else) expect to see cloud computing continuing to gain traction.  In other words, more of your local CPU cycles are going to be moving from your desktop or local server (both probably Windows machines, I might add) up into the cloud.

Somebody’s cloud, that is – but whose?

Microsoft would prefer it to be theirs, thank you very much.  However, there are two primary competitors also in the marketplace: Google (with its Application Engine), and Amazon (with its EC2 “Elastic Computing” service):

• EC2 allows customers to rent a variable number of instances of virtual servers,  which the customer configures as needed and then installs applications on.  Originally limited to Unix and Solaris operating systems, Amazon now offers Windows Server and several flavors of Linux as well.  High marks go to Amazon for flexibility, but maintenance and overhead is as almost as high as if the servers were in a standard data center (albeit a really nice data center…)
• Google’s App Engine takes a different approach – in short, there’s less maintenance and overhead, but also less flexibility.  The service is currently limited to applications written in Python, which users administer via a web console – the underlying operating system(s) are protected and shielded from the user.   App Engine is currently in “Preview” mode (Google having evidently singlehandedly worn out the term “Beta”), so pricing is not yet known.  More importantly, it also remains to be seen whether Google will make other programming languages available besides Python.

The idea behind these two services was to leverage largely pre-existing server capacity, infrastructure, and expertise.  Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t happen to have a comparable worldwide network of internet-optimized server farms laying around unused, and they do like to think big out there in Redmond – so they are throwing the long ball on this one: at last week’s event, I learned about plans to build out 20 immense Azure data centers strategically located around the world (Microsoft is literally fork-lifting in shipping containers full of servers…)

Together, these data centers represent a $20 bil investment – which by coincidence, almost matches the $20.7 bil Microsoft holds in cash reserves – can you say “betting the farm”?   (If a less PR-challenged company was undertaking something this impressive over the next year, I think we’d be hearing a lot more about it…)

Azure Technically, what I like about Azure is that it’s more of a true single “cloud operating system” than either Google’s service (too opaque) or Amazon’s service (too fragmented).  With Azure, you’ll be able to run Microsoft’s managed code (such as ASP.net and C#), Microsoft’s native code (C++ ), and via .NET, you can also deploy Java and Ruby apps – or any combination of the above.  At the same time, the underlying system housekeeping (and most importantly, the overall failover, data storage, scalability, and load-balancing) are all Microsoft’s problems – so it would appear to be the best of both worlds.  However, I feel the real value-add of Azure has to do with these 20 planned data centers and with the effectiveness of the Azure “Fabric Controller” at managing them – if done well, it could be pretty spectacular.

Hence the title of this post:

The Most Important Person At Microsoft… To the extent computing continues to move from the desktop up to the cloud, Azure will be critical to Microsoft’s future – and since the Azure team is only about 150 people, that does narrow it down a bit (sidebar: according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s well-known research, 150 also tends to be the maximum size for effective human social groupings across a surprising variety of cultures).  But back to our “Most Important Person” award: is it Azure team leader Ray Ozzie?  Nope.  Is it either of his lieutenants Amitabh Srivastava or David Cutler?  Nu-unh.  Steve Ballmer?  No sir.

Is it Jerry Seinfeld?  Wrong again.

In my opinion, the most important person at Microsoft is Debra Chrapaty, in charge of the Azure data center infrastructure – because while Azure is currently being tested within just a single Redmond data center, how well Microsoft’s Fabric Controller will manage the Azure cloud as it expands to 20 geographically-diverse data centers is both the initiative’s largest differentiating factor and its largest unknown.

(By the way, Azure represents yet another step in the Privatization of the Internet – more on that here.)

(And here.)

(And here.)

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.

As part of my ‘other life’ as a music composer/producer, about a year ago I was invited to give a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in studio production.  To teach my approach to mixing, I decided to bring the individual tracks from a recent piece I had done – almost 30 discrete sound files with one instrument or part on each, that together made up the piece as a whole.  These were then remixed by the students during the workshop while I coached the sessions – not only a great way to demonstrate my personal production and mixing methodologies, but (somewhat unexpectedly) it was also very interesting to see how others approached and altered the material.

Now consider the Web 2.0 model, in which there’s no longer just that one-way street running from server to client – instead, communication occurs in a more reciprocal and viral manner.   Well, as it happens, there’s a near-perfectly analogous phenomenon going on with recorded music: much as I had done, artists are making the individual elements (or “stems”) that taken together comprise their finished recordings freely available online – to to be freely downloaded, deconstructed, altered, and remixed by anyone who cares to.  The power of today’s personal computer and the ubiquity of multitrack digital audio applications such as Apple’s included-with-the-OS  Garage Band make this possibility for everyone, not just us recording studio types.

It appears Thomas Friedman was right, the world is getting flatter….

A few examples:

• Easily 20 years ahead of its time, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 release “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” was, at the risk of understatement, a groundbreaking record (just ask Moby, who built a career on his 1999 homage, “Play”).  Concurrent with a 2006 Bush of Ghosts re-release, Byrne and Eno made stems of several tracks available to the public and hosted an online remix competition, in which remixes could be uploaded back to the site and then voted on – results of which can be heard here.

• Kudus to Warner Music Group for going along with Byrne and Eno on the open licensing.   Radiohead, on the other hand, having had abandoned their traditional major label to release their latest album “In Rainbows” online themselves this year, could do whatever they pleased with the material – which was to simultaneously give away stems of the track “Nude” online for a similar remix competition.  The response from both professional DJs and producers as well as the general public was described by the band as ‘overwhelming’ – so much so, in fact,  that another track (“Reckoner“) was subsequently given away for remix as well.

Think of it as “open source music” (in fact, Byrne and Eno used the same Creative Commons license well-known in the open source software community to make the stems available).

I’m not a gamer – for me, though, (and maybe you?) this is a great way to have some fun with your computer. Try it out sometime… a little bit of creative playing around is good for you.

Net Neutrality.  Up to now, the conventional definition of the concept has been that internet service providers shall be prohibited from “blocking or slowing content from some applications or companies” (as quoted from a recent NetworkWorld article).  Arguably, the definitive infraction against this particular notion of Net Neutrality was Comcast’s recent ‘managing’ of Bit Torrent traffic via the insertion of spurious connection reset packets.

However, the whole issue the issue of Net Neutrality (at the last mile between the ISP and the consumer, at least) is rapidly becoming a moot point: in preparation for the expected explosion of demand for longer-form video over IP, most major carriers are now scrambling to assemble and/or acquire proprietary content delivery networks (CDN)s to avoid the ever more congested and unpredictable system of routers out there in the public cloud (a recent post about just what Google, Microsoft, and Verizon are up to can be found here).

So while your neighborhood ISP might maintain a commitment to Net Neutrality itself, the real action is well upstream, as major corporations join already established CDN players such as Akamai, Edge Networks, and Yahoo’s Cloudfront to distribute and/or cache digital media content out along the edge of the cloud, in effect forming competing private mini-clouds to minimize the role of the public internet itself.

Put another way, in the purest sense of the term, Net Neutrality has already become something of an anachronism – not due to any localized slowing down of unfavored packets at the ISP level, but due to a globalized speeding up of favored packets on CDNs, before they ever reach the ISP.   A recent Wall Street Journal article touches on just this nuanced distinction: according to Google, their recent proprietary internet/CDN initiatives “do not rely on the carrier’s unilateral control over the last-mile connections to consumers, and also do not involve discriminatory intent“ – and even the independent public interest organization Public Knowledge (whose directors include internet academic and Obama advisor Lawrence Lessig) now maintains that “caching in no way is a part of the Net Neutrality issue.”

I’m of the opinion there’s considerably more gray area here.  But no matter – since the public internet will simply not scale to meet the anticipated bandwidth demand once short-tail (mainstream) premium digital media over IP becomes widespread, both carriers and content owners will increasingly invest in proprietary content delivery networks – and as consumers buy into the mass-market internet video offerings made possible by these high-performance CDNs, the very concept of Net Neutrality will seem increasingly quaint – and the “internet” as a whole will come to resemble the American health care system: multi-tiered and largely privatized.

So to the extent long-form video over IP ultimately enjoys widespread mass-market success,  the innocent ideal of a truly egalitarian and fundamentally neutral internet is destined to end, no matter what your local ISP’s policies are.

Don’t shoot the messenger…  

Who knew? Porn on the New York subway. But then again, wasn’t it inevitable?

The place: A crowded afternoon N train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. The culprit: a Sony PlayStation Portable held by a young man sitting and watching in solitude, yet surrounded by plenty other strap hangers trying to get home.

What exactly happened here?

The first thing that got me was the audacity of it. With his PSP packed with genuine XXX fodder, simply put, what he was watching was nothing short of hard core pornographic visual certainly not intended for public transportation.

The next thing I noticed, no one seemed to pay attention. Hence – at least for the duration of my ride – no one seemed to mind.

What about the woman next to him, seemingly asleep? Another nearby busied herself reading, of all things, scripture. There were plenty  of other men and woman immediately around us while others got on and off the train.

Now, I know New York subway commuters have long learned to mind their own business.

But the video that unfolded in front of all of us (the sound was muted) clearly lowered the bar on anyone’s standard of privacy; clearly was so out of the ordinary that for it mere ostentatiousness I figured someone would have to bring it up.

Above and beyond my own discontent about the young man’s obvious lack of social skills, I quickly found myself rather intrigued by something else in this – the apparent disconnect between device and audience.

What used to be a consumer video experience “curbed” by the lack of technology’s reach, a TV set and a VCR simply didn’t lend itself to any practical use in full public view.

This kept anyone’s viewing choice a private matter. No matter how sexual, violent, or mundane the footage was, consumption and intent remained locked inside the home.

Fast forward, today’s “anytime anywhere” video consumption capabilities have changed the playing field. The new paradigm: Anyone’s personal video experience is super-portable, devoid of any particular time, place, and for that matter choice of companion viewers.

Think about it.

Sprint Nextel recently started delivering WiMAX-enabled wireless broadband service powerful enough to give you downlink speeds of 25 Mbps or more while driving down the highway.

Essentially an open pipe into and out of the World Wide Web, it’s going to be interesting to see what passing cars are watching in the back seats once content is no longer limited to wholesome satellite subscription services or Disney DVDs brought along for the kids.

And what about in-flight Web access, such as the service recently announced by American Airlines for select domestic trips?

No matter whether on a highway, on an airplane or inside a subway car in New York, what’s OK for the person to the left of you might be unacceptable to the one on the right.

Clearly, with the pervasive nature of digital content and enabling delivery devices, the meaning of “privacy” is undergoing change.

As to my personal opinion, I am in favor of self-regulating one’s public conduct. Anything beyond that might quickly collide with core principles such as net neutrality or freedom of speech.

Still, our old-world definition of privacy seems to be changing as more of our new world trends towards digital and portable at once.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.

Who knew? A Twitter feed, large on a flashy screen, during a live conference workshop Q&A.

While attending the recent Web 2.0 Expo software love fest in New York, what struck me, those Twitter posts came from audience members right in the same room, only steps away from a microphone and free to pose the same questions to everyone “organically”.

Rather than raising their “analog” hands and voices, they opted to type questions into a digital device.

Afforded seeing everyone’s “twittered” questions come in live, this seemed info overkill, distracting from the verbal live discussion unfolding at the same time.

Later, walking past the Web2Open area (set up for free-wheeling “anti-conference” discussions among peers), more participants seemed tied to their handhelds and laptops then actually talking to each other face-to-face.

All in, to get real people to engage in real meetings was never easy.  With the advent of Web 2.0, could we have added yet another layer of complication?

No doubt, despite its relatively short existence, Web 2.0 (the trend, not its name-sake conference) has had fundamental, positive impact on consumer digital life.

But during this industry conference, the community of evangelist and software architects seemed surprisingly stuck between “old world” idiosyncrasies and “new world” paradigm. (In all fairness though, some Web2Open discussion certainly did take place).

In his most recent testimonial ad,  Sprint CEO D. Hesse makes a valid point. ”Technology is only great when you know how to use it”.

Web 2.0 Expo attendees certainly know how to “use technology”.

But even to the best of us, it seems still somewhat awkward to navigate both analog and digital worlds simultaneously – especially if both are “anywhere, anytime” and “always on” to reckon with.

So, what is the right mix of “synthetic” communications and “organic” conversation at the dawn of the 21st century?

For anyone with interest in the bigger picture behind all of this, during the conference, Intel social scientist, Genevieve Bell, gave an impressive to-the-point presentation.

Wanna’ discuss this further?

Please no analog “old world” calls.

Instead, post a digital “new world” message right here.

Oh wait, why don’t we talk AND twitter ;-)

Currently at the San Diego airport, on my way back from the annual start-up launchpad extravaganza Demo Fall 2008.

While listening for two days to what amounted to over 70 companies on stage – no matter whether US or overseas presenters – I was surprised to see how culturally homogenous the presentation style turned out to be.

Sure, Demo’s organizers (it seems mainly the omnipresent Chris Shipley) pre-determined the permissible presentation format.

But this doesn’t fully explain why the new software pitch of a French executive sound virtually indistinguishable from the one just delivered by his peers from the US, Italy, or India.

Clearly, everyone was free to market their innovation as they pleased. And they certainly did.

To that end, the vast majority of company presentations went something like this:

“The world of digital technology is facing a fundamental (fill-in-the-blank) problem”;
“Hello, I am the CEO of (fill-in-the-blank) company, and I can help”;
“This is how we solve the puzzle posed” (several details plus a live demo follow);
“Thank you, be sure to visit us at our booth”.

With that, overseas presentations were (luckily) surprisingly void of lengthy, Euro-style powerpoints or meticulous “every-detail-I-can-think-of” product descriptions we might expect from, let’s say, an Asian or European engineer.

But how did Demo manage to curb those cultural idiosyncrasies for the benefit of fairly digestible “plain English” start-up pitches, without so much of an attempt to structure things?

To be sure, Demo’s secret sauce is a 6-minutes-only, live on-stage presentation format. No tele-prompters, no reading off cards. Instead start-up representatives directly address a diverse audience of peers, investors, and media representatives to promote their individual wares.

Yet, despite these deliberate limitations, overseas presenters seemed amazingly “at home” and (well) prepared to equal their US counterparts on quick-and-plenty use of American-style rich adjectives and superlatives to get their points across.

As a result, the conference hall quickly filled with verbage insinuating nothing short of “bold vision”, “clear direction”, and that “unshakable sense of purpose” every start-up should have – only here at times delivered with the added sincerity of a Taiwanese, Italian, or French accent.

Begs the questions, are our overseas presenters merely mimicking their US counterparts or is there such a thing as an “American presentation style” that has become as sure an export hit as Apple, Coke, or Google?

Let’s face it, the art of marketing wasn’t invented in Zurich or Shanghai. And marketing starts and ends with words.

As it stands, Silicon Valley start-ups not only deliver tremendous innovation globally, but also the lingo that comes with it. That was new to me.

“We want to hire the geek.” “We’re looking for people who are in touch with their inner nerd.”

By now, this is taken as gospel: HR 101 for the tech industry.  But while I’m not going to dispute the advantages of having a passion for your job, I would make the case that there’s often more involved in creating truly effective technology than software development and electrical engineering – too often, clarity and simplicity in product design (especially at the UI level) are given short shrift, even in the CE space (where one would expect to see a premium placed on such concerns).  That this somehow remains the case despite the spectacular successes of conspicuously elegant and user-friendly products such as the  iPod and google baffles me – of course I can understand how a self-reinforcing corporate ‘geek culture’ can take root at a technology company, but it’s equally clear that a lot of companies building consumer-facing products would be better served by letting a few more ‘soft science’ types into the room when defining their use cases and user interfaces.

In other words, consumer software and CE hardware firms should continue to place a premium on hiring smart people – clear-thinking, logical people – but perhaps a few less technical fetishists, at least in areas that aren’t purely technical (in other words, Toyota doesn’t have the team responsible for engineering the automatic transmission design the dashboard).

Another chronic problem is feature-bloat – solutions looking for problems that are often the result of too many developers going unchecked, all looking make their territorial mark on the product in advance of their next review (a good example of this syndrome is the ever-expanding MS Word application…)

The bottom line: engineering and design are separate (and often mutually exclusive) talents – and should be treated as such. Consumer hardware and software companies should feel as much of a responsibility to design well as to code well.

Some companies in the video over IP sector are getting it right – hulu.com and the Netflix Roku set-top box come to mind (although due an extremely limited selection of available titles, the Roku box will ultimately amount to not much more than a proof-of-concept exercise – with a core competency in DVD rental, Netflix is understandably reluctant to do much more than stick their toe in the digital delivery business for right now – but I digress…)

To put it in quasi-empirical terms – “Brian’s Theorem of Design”, if you will:

• simplicity times (power + quality) = elegance
• elegance squared = user buy-in