*michael parekh on IT*

ON LIGHTS GOING GREEN

SLOW AND STEADY

The New York Times has a good piece outlining the promise and challenges of LED lighting (Light Emitting Diode) to change things for the better for users and the planet.  First the promise:

"Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & Company cited conversion to LED lighting as potentially the most cost effective of a number of simple approaches to tackling global warming using existing technology..."

"LEDs are more than twice as efficient as compact fluorescent bulbs, currently the standard for greener lighting. Unlike compact fluorescents, LEDs turn on quickly and are compatible with dimmer switches. And while fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which requires special disposal, LED bulbs contain no toxic elements, and last so long that disposal is not much of an issue."

And then some of the challenges:

"Though the United States Department of Energy calls LED “a pivotal emerging technology,” there remain significant barriers. Homeowners may balk at the high initial cost, which lighting experts say currently will take 5 to 10 years to recoup in electricity savings. An outdoor LED spotlight today costs $100, as opposed to $7 for a regular bulb.

Another issue is that current LEDs generally provide only “directional light” rather than a 360-degree glow, meaning they are better suited to downward facing streetlights and ceiling lights than to many lamp-type settings.

And in the rush to make cheaper LED lights, poorly made products could erase the technology’s natural advantage, experts warn."

The technology driving this innovation is changing rapidly, so that we may see some of these metrics change markedly for the better in the near-term.  In the meantime, LED lighting does seem to be the low-hanging fruit in going green.

ON DOWNSIDES OF UNLIMITED TEXTING

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

I'm always amazed at the way a young person these days seems to be able to text away at seemingly amazing speeds on the numerical keypad of an otherwise ordinary cell-phone.  And come away thinking how cool it is that they've been able to learn to do that, much as I had to learn how to type on a QWERTY keyboard at their age. 

But this cautionary piece in the New York Times about the potential downside of unlimited texting by teenagers especially, raises some other aspects of this phenomenon.  First the context:

"Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation."

All this may be too early to blame just on texting, as the piece goes on to emphasize,

"The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop."

Another thing for teenagers to learn to do in moderation, as if the list wasn't already long enough.

ON A DIFFERENT TAKE ON MEDIA

OUT OF THE BOX

As always, Robert X Cringely has something different to say about where TV might be going in the world of bits and iPods.  He focuses first on Apple's cash reserves:

"Apple has at this moment just under $29 billion in cash and not many good ways to get a reasonable return on that money.  Only Microsoft has more cash than Apple and Microsoft is being pulled in a lot more directions so Microsoft doesn’t have Apple’s flexibility.

What will Apple do with that money?

Most of it will remain unspent is my prediction, but I’m guessing we’ll shortly see $3 billion or so per year go into buying Internet rights for TV shows — not old TV shows but NEW TV shows, shows of all types.

TV production in the U.S. is approximately a $15 billion industry.  An extra $3 billion thrown into that business would change its dynamics completely.  Most production isn’t done by networks but by independent producers who are hungry for revenue and risk reduction.  Three billion Apple dollars spread around that crowd every year would buy Internet rights for EVERY show — more than every show in fact.  Whole new classes of shows would be invented, sapping talent from other parts of the industry.  It would be invigorating and destabilizing at the same time.  And because it is Apple — a company with real style — the new shows wouldn’t at all be crap programming.  They’d be new and innovative.

And just as the artistic heart of TV shifted to cable with HBO in the 1980s, so it will shift to the Internet and Apple."

Worth reading the piece in full.

ON THE WEB IN PICTURES

DIFFERENT TAKE

I've been warming up to a new Firefox extension from a company called Cooliris of late (Most other browsers also supported).

It's turning out to be of increasing use browsing the web, both on the computer, and on the iPhone, with the new Cooliris App.  This recent review by Macworld explains:

"...the minds behind the pictorial browser Cooliris believe there’s still benefit to the image as a means for relaying information. That benefit comes in the form of Cooliris’ 3D Wall—a three-high, ever-expanding string of related images and videos that link to locations around the Web.

A look at the free browser plugin gives you an idea of what Cooliris is all about. After installing Cooliris, its icon appears in the Web browser on your computer. Click the Cooliris icon in that browser and you can enter a search term in the Search field and browse sites such as Flickr, Yahoo, YouTube, and Amazon.com for pictures associated with your search..."

And what’s it good for? When looking at current events it’s an easy way to get a general idea of what the hot events of the day are based on the number of related images you see. Cooliris is also a wonderful way to browse image-centric sites such as Flickr as the interface is beautiful and shows off images to their best advantage. And, like Cover Flow, it’s a good way to browse catalogs of items as you would at many online emporiums.

The Cooliris iPhone application works similarly to the desktop client, though it’s not as full-featured as it doesn’t currently include a Shopping component. But its general operation is the same."

Think about it as a very visual StumbleUpon, an old favorite to serendipitously discover cool content on the web.  Cooliris is a different way to experience the torrent of content on the web.  And yes, they do have a blog.  The company has done a particularly good job making the software and service easy to install and figure out for first-timers.  Recommended.

*Image source.

ON A SOLAR ADVENTURE

GOOD FUN IN THE SUN

Like millions of kids before me, I was enthralled by Jules Vernes' Around the World in Eighty Days.  So of course this modern-day version of sorts caught my eye.  Wired.com explains in this piece titled "Around the World in a Solar Boat":

"A seafaring band of scientists, engineers and yachtsmen with an obsession for Jules Verne and clean energy are building what they call the largest solar boat in the world, a $13 million catamaran they hope will take them around the world next year.

Construction is well underway on the 98-foot-long vessel, which will feature 5,059 square feet of photovoltaic cells. The project is being funded by Rivendell Holding AG, a Swiss firm that invests in renewable energy, simply to prove it can be done and the shipping industry can reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.

The team plans to circumnavigate the globe at the equator in 120 days at an average speed of 10 knots. Should they succeed, Planet Solar will set a maritime milestone. Solar electric pleasure boats have been tooling around lakes for awhile now, solar electric ferries are increasingly common and a solar electric catamaran called Sun 21 crossed the Atlantic in 29 days. But so far no one's made it around the world in a solar electric boat..."

"Solar boats are a viable form of transportation for the future,"  Delia Collardi, a spokeswoman for the project, told Wired.com. "Our society is too dependent on fossil fuels, which are in limited supply and which are causing measurable negative effects on the earth's atmosphere. It's now time to demonstrate the potential that renewable energies have to offer in the area of mobility."

The piece goes on to add:

"Collardi says the vessel will have enough power to carry skipper Raphael Domjan, the 37-year-old founder of Planet Solar, and navigator Gerard d'Aboville. Both men are accomplished sailors and adventurers who, according to a press release, "want to be the Phileas Fogg" of the 21st Century.

Fogg, of course, was the adventurous main character Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne's novel about a man who travels by train, balloon, steamer and even elephants to circle the globe in record time and win a bet."

The project goes on to add a grand historical gesture:

"Verne's great-grandson Jean Verne has signed on to the project, which organizers say represents "humanity's hope for a better future."

The route for the trip is still being finalized, but it's supposed to come through New York.  Can't wait.

ON A THOUGHTFUL TWITTER POST

SECRET SAUCE

My friend Gil Dibner has a great post putting the recent breath-taking success of Twitter in perspective, for both ardent Twitter fans and newbies.  Twitter's success is something I posted on a few days ago.  A couple of highlights from Gil's post:

"It’s become very clear that Twitter is a runaway success. There are lots of reasons for this, but I want to concentrate on the two that I think are the most interesting:

1. Twitter lowered the barriers to UGC effectively to zero. This, in my view, is the underlying reason for the massive adoption. Twitter is not really a medium for consumption. It’s a medium for expression – and its really really easy. What’s more, the fear factor is reduced to almost nothing because even if you say something stupid, it quickly dissolves into the endless stream of tweets and disappears. While its very possible to write brilliant tweets…most tweets are far from brilliant…but who cares? We’re participating. Ever since Geocities made it possible for “regular people” to start expressing themselves on the web, we’ve been witness a trend towards ever easier platforms and formats for online expression. Twitter is quite possibly the ultimate expression of that trend. I’m all for the success of Twitter, but god help us if Twitter lives and the NY Times dies…
2. Twitter demonstrates the power of centralization. Talk as much as you want about openness and distribution, but Twitter is really about centralization. Yes it’s true – users create the content in a distributed fashion using any number of interfaces – but that content has value only because others know where to go to get it. If the Twitter phenomenon wasn’t highly centralized, it would have no brand value, no value as a real time search engine, and no value as a platform for brands or individuals trying to reach an audience."

The whole piece is worth reading.  I'd also recommend bookmarking Gil's site TechTLV, for future reading.

*Image source.

ON THE BEARINGS OF A BOOK

BEYOND THE COVER

Here's something I ran into today that should be of interest to any fan of books, either reading them, and/or buying them to fill up one's bookshelves.  Author Peter Sacks wrote this piece in the Huffington Post a while ago**:

"I received an interesting invitation the other day. It was from Marshal Zeringue. Marshal runs a wonderful website called the Campaign for the American Reader, and he has a blog that he calls the Page 99 Test, which is based on this Ford Madox Ford quote: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Marshal's challenge, if I cared to accept it, was to respond to the Ford quote regarding page 99 of my new book, which he had just learned about in a magazine.

At first, when Marshal asked me to do this, I read page 99 and thought, "Oops, it's not very sexy." There were a lot of other pages of interesting writing and storytelling that I would have picked to reveal my book's whole. But I discovered that Ford Madox Ford was right in a sense. I looked more closely at 99, and there it was, the genetic code of my book. In fact, I could pick any page at random, and I would be able to find the same strands of DNA that held my book together."

The blog he refers to is interesting to peruse, offering at the very least a quick way to get impression of a book mostly by the author applying the page 99 test to his/her book.

It's not unlike how most of us decide on a book in a book-shop, or how in recent years, we've been able to see sample pages of books digitally on Amazon for a while with it's "Search Inside" feature.

Incidentally, a minor problem comes up trying to apply this test to books on e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.  Since the Kindle's software translates all the "pages" in a book into a location code, so that readers can change the size of the type up or down at will, there are no hard and fast page numbers, and thus no easy way for the reader of a book in one Kindle to cite a "page" number to another.

For that matter, there's no easy way to cite a reference from a Kindle book, a topic that will surely become more important for researchers over time, as this discussion in the Amazon forums indicates*.

But picking on one specific page to judge a book by more than it's cover, is an interesting idea.

P.S. *Suppose a possible solution for this might come with the way to highlight any page in a Kindle book, and have that translated into a page number in the hardware and/or the paperback version of that book, at the touch of a button, all done in software.  The action would be similar to getting definitions for a word in a Kindle book today, but would just give the page numbers in a "real" book, to use in citations.

** Image source.

ON GOING FROM TWITTER TO FLUTTER

FUN & FICTION

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how Twitter's 140-character "micro-blogging" limit was critical to it's overnight success.  Now Slate takes this idea further in a "mockumentary" and introduces us to "Flutter":

Part of what makes this so funny of course is how close it is to something that could very much be real, especially the bit about text streaming across one's glasses.

ON TWITTER'S SHORT WAY TO VICTORY

BREVITY MATTERS

Joshua Schachter, has a terrific post up today titled "On URL Shortners":

"URL shortening services have been around for a number of years.

Their original purpose was to prevent cumbersome URLs from getting fragmented by broken email clients that felt the need to wrap everything to an 80 column screen.

But it's 2009 now, and this problem no longer exists.  Instead it's been replaced by the SMS-oriented 140 character constraints of sites like Twitter. (Let's leave aside the fact that any phone that can run a web browser and thus follow links can also run a proper client, and doesn't have to hew to the SMS character limit.)

Since TinyURL, there has been a rapid proliferation of shortening services."

The post goes on to explain the many reasons why this has both short and long-term negative consequences for the web.  There's also a growing discussion on Techmeme, with good responses from folks like Dave Winer, Jason Kottke and others, on other technical issues around this approach and possible technical solutions to address them.

But taking a step back from the technical pros and cons of shortened URLs, one needs to understand the core merits of Twitter's 140-character limit, necessitated by it's initial focus on SMS text services, that then lead to URL shortening become a necessary mainsream evil. (Search Engine Land has a timely review on the rapidly growing field of companies offering this service).

That 140-character limit meant that publishers of content had to learn how to be brief and to the point in their messages, regardless of how much they wanted to express.

Remember that before Twitter, there had been an explosion of mainstream bloggers, where tens of millions worldwide discovered they could publish globally to their heart's content, at large at no great cost to themselves than their time.

The problem was that this meant that hundreds of millions of potential readers had to read all that stuff and try and glean the essence of all these posts. 

This asymmetric reality meant that tons of content would never actually get read.  Readers of course had to spend a ton of time trying to wade through this stuff, and even blog reader software didn't quite help other than just collect the ever-growing clutter.

Twitters 140-character limit meant that there was now forced publishers to think about how they could be short and sweet. 

And made it far easier for tens of millions to consume tweets much faster, scanning dozens at a glance. They could then decide which tweets were worthy of exploring further by clicking on a URL link, whether it was shortened or not.

When the history books are written on this period, we'll likely have a lot more data and analysis on how this 140-character limit really helped Twitter race ahead of so many competitors so fast.

Note that Facebook in it's recent big change to emulate elements of Twitter's feed model, chose to go with a 160-character limit, even though SMS/text messaging has very little to do with how Facebook feeds are consumed.

So whatever Twitter does do address the deficiencies of the shortened URLs, it really shouldn't mess with the 140-character limit. 

* Image source.

ON THE END OF AN ERA...AGAIN

CHAIN REACTIONS

End of an era, this bit of news from Microsoft:

"Microsoft's years-long-running multimedia CD-based encyclopedia product, Encarta, will be history by the end of the year. According to Ars Technica, Microsoft quietly announced the discontinuation date for Encarta to be October 31, 2009. Although the MSN press release doesn't go into too much detail on all the reasons why this decision was made, (nothing about Wikipedia for example), they do mention that the way people look for and consume information has changed substantially in the last few years, which seems like a fair assessment.

It appears that all Encarta properties will be phased out over the coming year. They will stop selling the retail and student versions by June and the online MSN Explorer content will be removed by the end of October. Customers paying for a subscription to Encarta Premium will receive a pro-rated refund around the middle of the year. Technical support, like with most other Microsoft products, will continue for three years after the official end of life.

As we mentioned, although Microsoft doesn't directly implicate Wikipedia as one of the harbingers of their decision to kill Encarta, we can only assume that it is a big part of that decision. Although Encarta's content was carefully curated, and of course factually accurate (which is often more than what you can say about Wikipedia), apparently the cost and availability of instant sources of information online has overcome the appeal of this once-novel encyclopedia."

It's a bit ironic though, since not too long ago, the world of encylopedias almost saw the end of another era, as this piece from Capitalism Magazine recalls from 2000:

"In 1768, three Scottish printers began publishing an integrated compendium of knowledge -- the earliest and most famous encyclopedia in the English-speaking world. They called it Encyclopedia Britannica. Since then, Britannica has evolved through fifteen editions, and to this day it is generally regarded as the world's most comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia.

In 1920, Sears, Roebuck and Company, an American mail-order retailer, acquired Britannica and moved its headquarters from Edinburgh to Chicago..."

"By 1990, sales of Britannica's multivolume sets had reached an all-time peak of about $650 million. Dominant market share, steady if unspectacular growth, generous margins, and a two-hundred-year history all testified to an extraordinarily compelling and stable brand. Since 1990, however, sales of Britannica, and of all printed encyclopedias in the United States, have collapsed by over 80 percent. Britannica was blown away by a product of the late-twentieth-century information revolution: the CD-ROM.

The CD-ROM came from nowhere and destroyed the printed encyclopedia business. Whereas Britannica sells for $1,500 to $2,200 per set (depending on the quality of the binding), CD-ROM encyclopedias, such as Encarta, Grolier, and Compton, list for $50 to $70. But hardly anybody pays even that: the vast majority of copies are given away to promote the sale of computers and peripherals. With a marginal manufacturing cost of $1.50 per copy, the CD-ROM as freebie makes good economic sense. The marginal cost of Britannica, in contrast, is about $250 for production plus about $500 to $600 for the salesperson's commission."

So what the CD-ROM did to print encylopedias, the web did to CD-ROM tomes of knowledge.  At each juncture, the business models that ruled rapidly disintegrated, and new ones took their place...or not.