*michael parekh on IT*

ON CUBE SQUARED

YOUNG AT HEART

Pulitzer-prize winning auto critic Dan Neil of the LA Times has some interesting things to say about the Nissan Cube, starting with the following:

"And then there's the air-hating box of ugly, the 2009 Nissan Cube.

The Cube is to aerodynamics what a collapsing bridge is to Olympic diving, what slipping on an icy sidewalk is to "Swan Lake," what poached dirt on toast is to a gourmet breakfast.

It's a travesty, a mockery, a baleful parody of auto aerodynamics. Nissan Motor Co. says the design was inspired by a "bulldog in sunglasses." My question: Which end is wearing the sunglasses?"

You'd almost think he doesn't like the thing,:

"Of course, it's not supposed to be beautiful, if by "beautiful" you mean sleek, lean, porpoise-like. That's a very old school, geezerly car aesthetic that simply doesn't resonate with a lot of young people. For echo boomers and millennials born from 1980 to 1990, beautiful is counterintuitively clumsy, affectedly unsleek, modular and angular, as in Wii consoles, iPhones and the large, squarish heads of the Jonas Brothers. It's no accident that Nissan has tagged the Cube its "mobile device."
To bring you up to speed a bit: The Cube is a huge hit for Nissan in Japan, and now -- given a projected upswing in the small crossover segment in the U.S. -- the company has homologated it for the North American market. Built on Nissan's B-platform chassis (used in the Versa and Sentra), the Cube is powered by a 1.8-liter, 122-horsepower four cylinder; offers a choice of automatic or six-speed manual transmission; and is nicely equipped for $13,990, including stability control.
Why is stability control important? Because the Cube is aimed at relatively inexperienced drivers, those 18 to 25 years old. I would never let my new driver on the road without stability control. Seriously."

Here's why the car is a bit different than most, even cars like Toyota's Scion, aimed at the youngest driving demographic:

"Though I am several decades beyond the target audience, I get it. The Cube's interior -- the faraway windshield, the nearly vertical windshield pillars, the open seating, the airy cabin and towering headroom -- is more studio loft than economy car.

For a car only 156.7 inches in length, over a wheelbase of 99.6 inches, the Cube is Alice's looking glass of unexpected vastness. There are trays and flat surfaces carved into the doors and dash, places to throw stuff. There's a kind of flower-box divot built over the dash and bungee straps built into the doors to hold things such as pens, iPods, sandals . . . what-everrr.

You might think all the headroom would go to waste -- I could wear a large raccoon on my head while driving, no problem. What I found is that with the open space, people in the back can comfortably carry on a conversation with the people in the front without feeling like they are breathing down their necks. So the car is uniquely social, which is how the kids like their media too."

He ends with the following:

"With a little more money, kids can step up to the Krom package (pronounced "chrome"), with 16-inch alloy wheels, a thumping six-speaker stereo with iPod interface, tastier upholstery and interior lighting. At less than $20,000, the Cube Krom seems like a genuinely decent value.
With high style and an even higher coefficient of drag, the Cube seems to have what it takes to captivate the living-in-the-parents'-basement set. How far it will reach beyond that demographic, I'm not sure. It sure is boxy.
Raccoons for everybody."

Indeed.

ON A MUST-HAVE iPHONE APP

THRILLING READ

The single best third-party App on the iPhone (or the iPod Touch) showed up today, at least in the view of this avowed book geek.  As a long-time fan and user of Amazon's Kindle (and now Kindle 2), and now an eager user of the new free Kindle iPhone app from Amazon, I heartily recommend people try this new App out, whether they own a Kindle or not. 
Walter Mossberg describes all of this well in detail in this review today:

"As I predicted in my review of Amazon.com’s Kindle 2 e-book reader last week, the giant bookseller has moved quickly to make the 240,000 book Kindle catalog available on other devices. On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app.
Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog."

He goes on to add:

"...it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does.
It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone."

CNET has another review of the software worth reading with some additional details.

I'd add that Kindle books, at least for now, are generally less expensive to buy than their physical counterparts, partly due to Amazon subsidizing many titles.  Most of them are available for $9.99, with many paperbacks available for far less.
In addition, since the iPhone is generally with me at all times, it's very convenient for a quick access to any book in my library I'd like to peruse at will.
With free samples of many books available for download on to an iPhone/iTouch, I'd recommend giving the free Kindle App a try.

ON FULFILLING VISIONS

UNEXPECTED FUTURES

Microsoft over the past few days has gotten some buzz with some cool videos on what technology has in store for us over the next decade.  This piece in BoyGeniusReport elaborates:

"At the recent Wharton Business Technology Conference, Steven Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, unveiled the latest future montage video from Microsoft Office Labs.

The video, known simply as 2019, provides a sneak peek at the future according to Microsoft. The widespread use of surface and touchscreen devices coupled with ubiquitous wireless connectivity provides a future worthy of any science fiction novel.

It is an interesting watch and will be even more interesting as the future unfolds and we see which of these technologies come to fruition."

The video, running almost 6 minutes is definitely worth watching. 

Microsoft's name comes up only at the very end, implying of course how the company hopes to enable a lot of this future for us, and presumably profit along the way.

The whole thing made me think of a series of ads that AT&T ran in the early 1990s, with the tag-line "You Will".  YouTube has a 2-minute montage of these ads in case you need a refresher:

Again, it's amazing how much in those videos has come to pass, but it's also instructive how much of this future was made possible by companies that didn't pay for those cool ads over 15 years ago.

ON TINY GEOLOCATORS FOR BIRDS

MIGRATION UNPLUGGED

Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated about the prodigious migratory capabilities of birds.  Recent innovations in tracking these patterns by scientists are dramatically adding to our understanding of the migration pattersn.  As this New York Times story start out reporting:

"Birds are famous for airborne speed and endurance. Some have been clocked flying 60 miles per hour or more. Others make annual migrations from Alaska to New Zealand, nonstop."

"But for scientists, tracking birds as they perform those feats has been an intractable problem.
Now researchers think they have cracked it with a novel device — a tiny bird backpack that contains sophisticated sensors and weighs less than a dime."
The new technology has opened up vast new possibilities for bird researchers. Already, it is yielding surprising findings — for example, that some birds fly even faster than previously thought.
But its real importance, biologists say, is the opportunity to unlock mysteries of bird migration that could help preserve species threatened by habitat loss and climate change."

Here's more on the technology itself, pictured on the left in this BBC News article:

"...at a 2006 conference, the British researchers said they had miniaturized their sensors to 1.5 grams. “That for me was a magic number,” she said. “I could put it on a large songbird.”
The instruments Dr. Stutchbury uses actually weigh even less and sit on a bird’s back, just where the hips are.
Each sensor is about the size of the nail on a person’s pinkie. “There’s a little loop that goes around each leg,” she said. “It would be like you wearing a backpack.”
"...The research, reported Friday in the journal Science, involved 34 birds, but only 7 were recovered with their sensors.
Still, the work “is an important step,” said David W. Winkler, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where he said researchers were developing similar techniques. “This represents a whole new level of accuracy,” Dr. Winkler said.

The tracking system relies on instruments called solar geolocators that collect and store data on where the birds are in relation to the sun.

Researchers remove the sensors, download the information and calculate where the birds were, and when they were there."

As this Washington Post article explains, the data is not received real-time:

"The devices could not transmit data in real time, but they recorded the exact time of sunrise and sunset, allowing the researchers to download the data later and calculate where each bird was on any given day."

The results have been surprising to say the least:

"Analyzing the sensor data, the researchers found that their birds flew two to six times faster going north than south — up to about 370 miles in a day, which she said was much faster than had been thought. A female martin flew almost 5,000 miles in 13 days, including 4 stopover days."

The first study has resulted in round-trip tracking of seven birds, for the first time anywhere.  More studies are apparently under-way, and should go a lot further in helping understand this fascinating subject.

ON BESPOKE vs. READY-MADE

MASS MARKETS

Newsweek has a provocative article on the value of "Bespoke" vs. ready-made in it's recent issue.  First some definitions:

"Bespoke" has a great deal to answer for.

Not since "executive" or "deluxe" has a word been so monstrously distorted, abused and otherwise mangled into near meaninglessness. Today it seems that any object with slightly more pretensions to exclusivity than a hamburger can be labeled bespoke.

The irony, of course, is that in theory you can "bespeak"—"commission to be made," according to my Oxford dictionary—a burger.

Too often the term "bespoke" is used as marketing shorthand to delineate another quality level for which more can be charged and which, notionally at least, offers a greater degree of exclusivity."

The piece then goes on to make some points on all this, but this one stood out:

"...just because something is made for you does not necessarily mean that it is better than an object that can be bought ready-made. To return to the burger: perhaps the humble meat patty is best left to an expert like Ronald McDonald, who has many decades of experience and knows how to balance relish and pickle and cheese and bun, rather than going wild yourself and garnishing your own bespoke quarter pounder with, say, mango, anchovies, marmalade, ice cream, toffee sauce and chocolate sprinkles.

Guidance is important; otherwise you go completely off the rails."

That last sentence made me think of how the YouTube culture of the last few years has gotten us all so infatuated with "user-generated content" (aka UGC), which can perhaps also be thought of as "bespoke" content gone wild. 

Perhaps the next stage of content evolution on the web may need some Ronald Mc Donalds trying to put some of this stuff on rails.  Hulu is but one early example of moving in this direction.

ON A WHOLE LOT MORE GOOGLE EARTH

DEEP BLUE

As someone who's long been a fan of relief globes of the Earth depicting the depths of the oceans, I was glad to see this announcement by Google today.  As the New York Times explains:

"Two and a half years ago, the software engineers behind Google Earth, the searchable online replica of the planet, were poised to fill an enormous data gap, adding the two-thirds of the globe that is covered by water in reality and was blue, and blank, online."

As the Official Google Blog goes on to elaborate:

"...starting today we have a much more detailed bathymetric map (the ocean floor), so you can actually drop below the surface and explore the nooks and crannies of the seafloor in 3D.

While you're there you can explore thousands of data points including videos and images of ocean life, details on the best surf spots, logs of real ocean expeditions, and much more.

We were joined at the Academy by many of the dozens of ocean scientists and advocates who helped make this project a reality: friends from National Geographic, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the US Navy, Scripps Oceanography, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to name just a few.

Above all, I would like to acknowledge the work of Dr. Sylvia Earle, who cornered me at a conference three years ago and told me that Google Earth was great but that it wasn't finished (you can read more about that encounter on the Lat Long blog).

As much as I hated to admit it, she was right. We on the Google Earth team had been working hard to build a rich 3D map of the world, but we had largely ignored the oceans — two thirds of the planet. Inspired by Sylvia, the team got to work. I hope you are as excited as I am to explore our new Ocean and all of the fascinating stories and images our partners have contributed.
But that's not all we launched today. In addition to Ocean, we introduced new features that we hope will enhance the way people interact with Google Earth and use it to communicate with the world.

• Historical Imagery: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.

• Touring: One of the key challenges we have faced in developing Google Earth has been making it easier for people to tell stories. People have created wonderful layers to share with the world, but they have often asked for a way to guide others through them. The Touring feature makes it simple to create an easily sharable, narrated, fly-through tour just by clicking the record button and navigating through your tour destinations..."

"For those of you who keep track of version numbers, this is Google Earth 5.0."

The whole thing is very cool and definitely worth checking out.  And who knows, it may actually end of doing a whole lot of good in a whole lot of unanticipated ways.

ON OFFLINE GMAIL

FINALLY
As a long time user of Google's Gmail, I was glad to see the company rolling out "Offline Gmail", even in a 0.1 beta stage.  This VentureBeat post gives some more background:

"In a huge move, Google is rolling out offline support for Gmail users, which means you’ll finally be able to read and write email even when you’re not connected to the web.

Jeez, I’ve been waiting a while for this one. And so have many others.

Even though Gmail adoption has been strong to date, it’s had to play catch up to other popular online-only email services like Hotmail and AOL. In part, it’s growth has been hampered by its inability to work offline.

This move essentially takes the shackles off Gmail, giving it the flexibility to match Microsoft’s flagship email service, Outlook — which lets millions of office workers and consumers check their email both online and offline. The big difference: Gmail is free. This is actually a major attack on Microsoft, because it wipes away one of the biggest technical deficiencies remaining in Gmail.

Yahoo Mail, meanwhile, is the world’s leading online email service. Gmail is just a fraction the size of Yahoo Mail, but this move could give people more incentive to switch.

A company spokesperson says users of Google’s business software package Google Apps will also be able to view their Calendar offline sometime in “the next couple of weeks.”

Google also has a short video clip how Offline Gmail should work:

Kudos to Google for finally rolling this out.  Looking forward to trying out Offline Gmail/Calendar and seeing them both mature.  Also hope Google gets around to adding this feature to Google Docs as well.

ON A NEW WAY TO GO WIRELESS

CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Like many geeks, I've been waiting for a new wireless data transfer standard called Transfer Jet to finally get close to being available to consumers.  

David Pogue of the New York Times explains how we may be close to finally seeing this technology deployed later this year, with  this review  of an understated, but cool technology:

"At the Toshiba booth at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple weeks ago, a rep showed me a new technology called Transfer Jet. 

I sure hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it’s an upcoming industry standard. Toshiba, Sony, Canon, Casio, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Samsung, JVC and others make up the engineering committee working on it.
It’s yet another wireless technology, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but it requires even less power and has even a shorter range—along the lines of one inch.
Yes, I know: an inch? What good is wireless with a range that small?
Once you see the demo, you’ll get it. You bring a camera over to your computer and touch them together—and a whole memory card’s worth of photos are transferred in a few seconds. No wires, software, password, pairing, none of that. Just touch ‘em..."
"...Since Transfer Jet is extremely fast (375 megabits per second), you could also offload videos from your camera or camcorder this way, too. You could also, presumably, touch your cameraphone to a drugstore kiosk to print the pictures on it; touch cellphones to transfer music; and so on."

This short demo by a Toshiba representative at the 2008 CES a few weeks ago shows how cool this could really be.

Of course it'll be a while before the technology is widely available in a wide range of devices across so many vendors, but then it didn't seem to take technologies like Bluetooth and Wifi to take that long to become so ubiquitous and indispensable.  Here's hoping the same goes for Transfer Jet.

ON SOME COOL CHANGES IN STORAGE

COMING SOON

Regular readers have long known my enthusiasm for solid state drives and their potential.  While the costs of these drives today vs. mechanical hard drives is still substantial and the relative benefits still incremental, there are some big improvements on the horizon.  This ComputerWorld piece explains:

"As solid-state disk (SSD) technology closes in on hard disk drive (HDD) capacity and price, experts say it may not be long before spinning disks are a thing of the past and a computer's storage resides in flash memory on the motherboard.

By making the drive part of a system's core architecture -- instead of a peripheral device -- data I/O performance could initially double, quadruple or more, according to Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at market research firm In-Stat..."

"According to In-Stat, SSD prices have been dropping 60% year over year. Currently, the price of consumer-grade SSD costs from $2 to $3.45 per gigabyte, with hard drives going for about 38 cents per gigabyte, according to Gartner Inc. and iSuppli Corp.

"Two years ago, SSDs cost $17.50 per gigabyte, so it's obvious that consumer NAND flash memory will soon be a true contender to hard disk drives -- it's just not there yet," Gartner analyst Joseph Unsworth said. "I think you need to get to 128GB for around $200, and that's going to happen around 2010. Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage."

Klein argued that using an SSD in its native state, as NAND chips on a board without an enclosure, will reduce cost, weight, power use and space."

The whole piece is worth reading, especially for those interested in some of the technical details.  The rest can just sit back and wait for the real benefits of solid state storage to show up in force not too long from now.

ON THE SCIENCE BEHIND LOVE

LOVE IN RESERVE

John Tierney of the New York Times has a terrific essay outlining some on-going research that seems to get at the scientific drivers of what humans call "love".  It seems it's all about Oxytocin and vasopressin. 
Here's the gist:

"In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding..."

The piece goes into,

"...the benefit of Dr. Young’s research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University.
These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy.
When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex).
After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing."

The whole piece is really worth reading, as is this post on Mr. Tierney blog where he continues the discussion on where all this might lead, including possibly,:

"...a love potion that would promote attachment, like the “commitment pill” envisioned by my colleague Olivia Judson or the “monogamy injection” discussed by my colleague Walter Kirn."

There's a whole lot more science to this love stuff than humans have recognized for centuries.  The question is in the centuries to come, will humans allow a whole lot more love to make up for what the science makes possible to do or not do.