*michael parekh on IT*

ON A CHANGE OF PACE

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed the absence of daily posts of late, something I've managed to keep up for over four years of writing this blog. 

A couple of reasons are behind this change of pace, starting with some projects of late that have taken up a lot more of my daily time.

The second reason is an my increasing use of Twitter as a publishing platform, which has taken more of my daily cycles over the past few months. 

As you can see from the Twitter posts column on the upper right, I've been fairly busy publishing items that interest me, and hopefully are interesting for readers.  Please feel free me to follow me at www.twitter.com/mparekh.  I look forward to following you back.

As a result of these two factors, I'm experimenting with a slower pace of publishing on this blog this summer.  The plan is to publish something several times a week, but not necessarily every day.  The posts on Twitter though should be at daily pace, barring scheduling and travel issues.

Thanks as always for your readership and comments.  Look forward to resuming a daily schedule on the blog fairly soon.
* Image source.

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 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 A PLAN B FOR SPACE TRAVEL

FINAL FRONTIER

There are a lot of questions of late as to what NASA should really be focused on over the next few years, especially under the new Obama administration.  This piece in the Orlando Sentinel recently reviewed some of the pragmatic options.

But reading this op-ed by Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute really got me thinking different about what our space efforts might be focused on.  First he takes us back to the reality of space that many of us might not have thought about since childhood:

"The fastest rocket ever launched, NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto, roared off its pad in 2006 at 10 miles per second. That pace would be impressive in the morning commute, and it’s passably adequate for traversing the solar system, something we’ve done and will continue to do.

Combustion rockets, like New Horizons, can deliver you to the Moon in a matter of days, Mars in a matter of months, and the outer planets in a matter of years. But a trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million times farther from us than the Moon, would consume a tedious 800 centuries or so. You’ll want to upgrade..."

The piece then goes into the technical, monetary and biological hurdles to take us to where we've really wanted to go ever since we first started to gaze at the stars.

And it gets depressing just like when we first found out there is no Santa Claus.

But he then starts to talk about the glass half full:

"But there’s another technology that’s developing at a breakneck clip, and with which our grandchildren could make virtual trips to other solar systems. It’s called telepresence — a collection of technologies that extends vision, hearing and touch far beyond the corporeal confines of our nervous system.

Consider that in 1965 the Mariner 4 spacecraft made the first fuzzy photos of Mars with a black-and-white TV camera boasting 40,000 pixels. The HiRISE camera now operating onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sports 200 million pixels. It can snap photos of objects just three feet across.

That’s resolution comparable to what’s on Google Earth, which many people use to examine remote parts of the globe or inspect cities known only from the nightly news. Google Mars takes advantage of the high-quality imagery being collected by our robotic orbiters, enabling armchair astronauts to peruse the red planet in considerable detail without the angst of transporting their delicate protoplasm 34 million miles into space.

Photography from the Mars Exploration Rover is so good that the data have been interpreted in an IMAX film, giving audiences a near-lifelike experience in strolling the red planet’s rusty, dusty desert. The Phoenix Mars lander has sent back pictures of individual sand grains. In other words, it’s already possible for anyone to make a rigorous reconnaissance of another planet — even though not a single human has yet stomped his boots in the Martian dust."

Almost like being there, no? 

The whole piece is worth reading.  And then maybe it may make sense for President Obama to think about this more pragmatic mission for NASA. 
Who knows, even Google may want to help.

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 LIVE PRODUCTIONS GOING DIGITAL

THAT'S SLOW BIZ

One of the last bastions of entertainment may finally be dragging itself slowly but surely, from the real world of live performances on to our TVs and eventually onto the internet.  As Variety reports in it's own lingo:

"As legiters seek footholds for old-fashioned live entertainment in the world of new media, the Metropolitan Opera has struck a profitable balance between stage and screen -- and theater orgs have begun to take note.

"The Met: Live in HD," the successful series of live hi-def cinema transmissions of current Met offerings, continues to expand even as the company has been forced to downsize some of its programming ambitions in the current economy.

The growing momentum of the program -- with more than 1.5 million tickets sold so far this season -- has caught the eye of legit orgs looking for ways to boost their brands. Earlier this year, London's National Theater announced a similar series of live cinema broadcasts clearly modeled on the Met's pilot program."

The rub to date has not been anything to do with technology or potential receptivity by the market, but business model issues having to do with union contracts.  Variety goes on to explain:

"Performer and stagehand unions were initially wary of the "Live in HD" program as a potential exploitation of its members -- but they warmed up when a deal was worked out that has union members sharing in revenues once the broadcast's production costs are recouped.

"It's a model that works," Gelb says, adding that sales easily outpace the costs of production and distribution, which average around $1.3 million per transmission."

And as one might have theorized, the experiment is broadening the audience for live productions:

"Part of the benefit comes in bringing Met fare to new auds -- a goal shared by an array of Gelb's aud-building programs, including free dress rehearsals and live telecasts in Times Square on the season's opening night.

"We've seen it go from the core opera fans to a broadening demographic," says Dan Diamond, VP of Fathom, the National CineMedia branch that distribs the "Live in HD" series. "It creates a relevance to younger audiences because it's in a movie theater, and it's more affordable."

That rising profile, in turn, feeds into box office at the Opera House itself. Paid attendance, which came in at 76% before such initiatives began, rose to 88% last season."

Who knows, we may see this trend expand to live theater as well, be it Broadway or Off-Broadway.  One of these days the show may yet go on...line.  Perchance to Dream.

ON NEXT STEPS FOR THE WEB

20 YEARS LATER

One of the highlight presentations for me from this year's TED Conference a few weeks ago was by Sir Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the world wide web. 

In his 18-minute talk, he laid out the ground work for what's needed next for the web's logical evolution.  The full video of his talk is now up on TED.com.  Here's how they introduce him:

"20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together."

Liz Gannes of GigaOm summarized the talk a few weeks ago as follows:

"Founder of the web Tim Berners-Lee spoke of the next grassroots communication movement he wants to start: linked data. Much in the way his development of the web stemmed out of the frustrations of brilliant people working in silos, he is frustrated that the data of the world is shut apart in offline databases.

Berners-Lee wants raw data to come online so that it can be related to each other and applied together for multidisciplinary purposes, like combining genomics data and protein data to try to cure Alzheimer’s. He urged “raw data now,” and an end to “hugging your data” — i.e. keeping it private — until you can make a beautiful web site for it.

Berners-Lee said his dream is already on its way to becoming a reality, but that it will require a format for tagging data and understanding relationships between different pieces of it in order for a search to turn up something meaningful."

The whole video presentation is well worth watching. 

* Image source.

ON OUR STATE OF WIRELESS

BUMPY ROAD

The iPhone over the last couple of years has accelerated the trend towards Smartphones by mainstream wireless users in the U.S., both through it's innovation and the intense competitive response by other manufacturers to introduce smartphones with iPhone like features.  The bad news though, as this New York Times article explains, is that the nation's patchwork of voice and data wireless networks, be they 2G, 3G or something else, are still striving to keep up with this trend:

"Oh, the things modern mobile phones can do. They are music-playing, video-taking, direction-providing multimedia powerhouses. But many people have trouble getting them to perform their most basic functions, like making phone calls.

The underlying problem, industry analysts say, is the complex quilt of the nation’s wireless networks. The major mobile carriers have spent tens of billions of dollars on new voice and data networks that they advertise as superfast wireless express lanes. But analysts say these upgrades present major engineering challenges, and the networks often underperform.

The resulting technological glitches have given many owners of fancy new phones the urge to throw them out the window and onto the highway.

For many, the iPhone has become a symbol of the gap between the promise of a powerful device and the reality of inconsistent service. Its owners complain of continual hiccups, particularly in certain cities..."
"...The reasons for the trouble are complicated. Part of the problem is that the companies are constantly upgrading their networks — creating a patchwork of technology on cell towers, and integrating slices of radio spectrum that carry voice and data transmissions.

Analysts said the problem was not unique to AT&T, but was especially pronounced on its network in some cities because of the way its infrastructure was built."

The article then goes on to detail the many geeky ways this state of affairs contributes to many problems for users.

While most of these issues will be sorted out in due time, it's still occasionally worth pondering about the potholes on the wireless highway today.