*michael parekh on IT*

ON A COOL KINDLE FEATURE

ONE SMALL STEP

I've been an avid user and fan of Amazon's Kindle book reader since the original launch, having now bought and read hundreds of books on the Kindle and the excellent Kindle for iPhone (free) software App. 
One of the big differences between reading a book on the Kindle (either generation) and the iPhone App has been the ability to highlight the content of the book and write notes in the margin as it were (can't do all that on the Kindle App...yet).
But once the notes are in the Kindle, attached to a specific book, they're kind of trapped in there.  The opportunity around making this stuff available on the web is of course a no-brainer.  Today Amazon took a baby step in this regard, as this TechCrunch piece explains:

"Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com. Once you sign in, you can see all your notes.

While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser.

All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing?

Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)?

Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web.  Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction."

Couldn't agree more.  Hope Amazon's listening.

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 SOME WIRELESS INNOVATION

STRETCHING COMFORT ZONES

Looks like the U.S. wireless carriers are finally trying to innovate a bit on the wireless broadband front, judging from the latest from David Pogue.  Well, at least one of them is, as the review goes on to explain:

"...imagine if you could get online anywhere you liked — in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi — without messing around with cellular modems. What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go?

Incredibly, there is such a thing. It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot.

The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.

In essence, the MiFi converts that cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share."

The thing to note here is that this is really far less about technology, than Verizon's decision to tinker with it's existing business model for wireless broadband and offer something that may at the margin compete with some of it's own lucrative offerings in the space.  Indeed, not too long ago Verizon specifically frowned at sharing one of their wireless broadband data modems, as the piece goes on to note:

"Sharing a cellular-modem account was something it strenuously discouraged only two years ago."

Hopefully we'll see more of this kind of thing from the wireless carriers going forward.  Fingers crossed.

ON MORE NETWORKS FOR iPHONE

MORE THE MERRIER

Looks like we may have more than one choice of carrier when it comes to an iPhone from Apple.  Some background in this USA Today piece:

"Verizon (VZ) and Apple (AAPL) are discussing the possible development of an iPhone for Verizon, with the goal of introducing it next year, people familiar with the situation say.

It would mark the first time Apple has produced a version of the iPhone for a CDMA wireless network, which is different from AT&T's GSM technology. Vodafone, co-owner of Verizon Wireless, already sells the iPhone in Europe..."

"...AT&T (T) has exclusive U.S. distribution rights to the iPhone into 2010, though specifics aren't known. The deal was struck in 2006, when the iPhone was still on the drawing board. Many telecom analysts expect AT&T to try to persuade Apple to extend the contract for another year, at least."

Why would a Verizon iPhone be a big deal?  The article goes on to explain:

"Should Verizon succeed, it would be a big loss for AT&T, says Roger Entner, head of telecom research for Nielsen. "Breaking the (iPhone) exclusivity with AT&T is a huge thing," he says. "That would send shivers into AT&T's stock and senior leadership."

The power of the iPhone was on full display last week, when AT&T reported stellar wireless results. AT&T signed up 1.6 million iPhone customers during the quarter — 40% of them new to AT&T. Revenue from mobile data was up almost 40%. Verizon reports results today.

By linking arms with Verizon, Entner says, Apple would gain access to its 80 million customers. While a few may already have an iPhone (some people have more than one carrier), the bulk don't."

The iPhone is well on it's way to being a mobile computing platform for thousands of third-party applications (aka "Apps").  Just this week, Apple passed a billion Apps downloaded milestone.  Making the iPhone available available on more than one carrier is almost a no-brainer for Apple.

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 COBOL'S 50th BIRTHDAY

KEEPS ON GOING

This piece in the Guardian notes the 50th anniversary of a computer language that still runs much of our business software around the world.  The language of course, is "Cobol", aka

"The "common business-oriented language" that has provided 59-year-old Stuart with a career through to retirement age marks its 50th birthday this year. The day to celebrate is slippery - Cobol didn't just scroll on to a terminal one day and ask the user to hit "Compile" - but 1959 is the year that the language came into being.

And Cobol is still in business. According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, "some 70% to 80% of UK plc business transactions are still based on Cobol."

The piece goes on to give a typical use case:

"Mike Madden, development service manager with the catalogue-shopping firm JD Williams, believes so.

Better known for its online stores, such as Simply Be and Fifty Plus, Madden says JD Williams remains highly dependent on Cobol applications. "We have a huge commitment to Cobol," he says. "About 50% of our mainframe systems use it."

Why? "Simple - we haven't found anything faster than Cobol for batch-processing," Madden says. "We use other languages, such as Java, for customer-facing websites, but Cobol is for order processing. The code matches business logic, unlike other languages."

Matching underwear

So, knicker-buying Simply Be customers are greeted by a pretty-in-pink Java interface, but when the order reaches the backroom, charcoal-grey Cobol code takes over the processing grunt work."

The piece goes on to describe how Cobol has continued to thrive behind the scenes, even after the notoriety it received in the public eye around the millennium bug brouhaha almost a decade ago.

Recommended read for geeks everywhere, especially if you had some instruction in the language so very long ago.

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.