Good insights into the future of Computer Interaction and todays blithe assumptions

take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

HANDS MANIPULATE THINGS

via worrydream.com

Excellent points on limitations of our current magical devices. Highly recommend that you read the original rant from Bret Victor. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

The reality is that there is no more embodied approach for devices extant as yet, with possible exceptions of robotics homebrew/arduino/etc. However these certainly don't have anything like the levels of 'magic' interaction that we're enjoying today with the 'pictures under glass'.

I'm not holding my breath for new approaches any time soon, but longer term ...

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Cool company - BuildAR - building blocks to make Augmented Reality creation easy ...

What will you build?

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays information, images, 3D objects, audio and video onto your view of the real world around you.

Create your own mobile AR projects easily with no development required & link your content to the real world!

via buildar.com

Steps to technology ubiquity - virtualizing the underlying complexity ... Looking forward to seeing more from these guys.

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The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

via economist.com

Ongoing sad times for the local bookstore.

Isn't this part of a larger trend, building 'cloud' / or ubiquitous connectivity and information into all of our lives. The same trend impacting IT across the board. Bringing both disruption of our comfortable ways of doing things, and radical new capabilities?

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Game Theory

It is possible that Richard Thaler changed his mind about economic theory and went on to challenge what had become a hopelessly dry and out-of-touch discipline because, one day, when a few of his supposedly rational colleagues were over at his house, he noticed that they were unable to stop themselves from gorging on some cashew nuts he'd put out. Then again, it could have been because a friend admitted to Thaler that, although he mowed his own lawn to save $10, he would never agree to cut the lawn next door in return for the same $10 or even more. But the moment that sticks in Thaler's mind occurred back in the 1970's, when he and another friend, a computer maven named Jeff Lasky, decided to skip a basketball game in Rochester because of a swirling snowstorm.

via www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu

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A deep diver into the anatomy of premature scaling - lessons for startups and others

via startupgenome.cc

Scaling operations (optimizing for a given product/customer assumption) before confirming that it's _real_ is a bad idea - Startup Genome shows some good data on this for startups, and probably a bad idea for others with new product hopes.

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The end of software transparency? Sculpture showing all the boards that are cut from a single log - 22 Words

via twentytwowords.com

Fantastic sculpture.

It brings to mind that more and more we are operating on the level of the black-box, of magickal thinking, of objects and processes that 'just work' ... until they don't. That computing was once transparent, but is no longer. Consider most of your mobile phone experiences, hopefully fantastic, but when it stops you must find an expert, or replace the now no-longer magickal, now 'imp free' device.

In many ways, this is the goal of the 'consumer' device.

Living in an age of magic made real is very appealing in many ways, we can ignore the constraints of time and space to communicate with our friends and colleagues all over the world. We live in an age where the combination of skills can solve most any problem, as argued persuasively by Matt Ridley in his optimistic talk on ideas 'having sex' http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html. But, increasing it feels like we're losing the ease, from earlier generations, of being able to understand the underlying process, of unpacking all the way down to creating that water wheel, etc. Of being able to tune our own car engine, or indeed to fix our TV. Indeed, it seems that we've become so very good at using modules, at sub-processes, at, arguably, code/module re-use. And where, ultimately does this leave us? How complex an infrastructure might we be able to maintain?

The reality is that this is not a new thing, indeed it has been going on in computing repeatedly as we create a useful abstraction: adders, CPUs, memory, virtual memory, virtual users, virtual machines, and so on. What's new is that we're heading to an age where the outcomes from computing are more and more 'commodity', packaged, wrapped, and protected from meddling. More and more .. part of the world.

This is not a new process. Indeed, the reuse of modules for factories, for commodities, for food, for almost everything in the modern economy is created in such a way. Leonard Read had a wonderful essay in 1958 showing that no one knew how to create 'even' a pencil http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/i-pencil/.

Software is more and more just a component piece for pretty much 'everything'. We can see this in the move from transparency to packaged objects designed to be opaque. This is the transition for software, for computing, to be absorbed, as never before, into the broader economic process.

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Andreessen - Why Software Is Eating the World => Perez - the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages ...

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In an interview with WSJ's Kevin Delaney, Groupon and LinkedIn investor Marc Andreessen insists that the recent popularity of tech companies does not constitute a bubble. He also stressed that both Apple and Google are undervalued and that "the market doesn't like tech."

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

via online.wsj.com

Nicely argued techno-optimistic view on the future for software from Mark Andreessen.

As it happens, I agree with his view that we're reaching a new plateau of productivity with software. I found it striking that his argument is a point in time illustration of the forecast from (the worth a read) "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" from Carlotta Perez in 2003 about the relatively predictable cycles of adoption and economic shift for major technological innovation and the expectation, as one of her reviewers put it on Amazon that we "are in the last throes of a technological bubble and just preceding the next period of productive improvement and profit from the disruptive technologies in the 1990" Check it out http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843763311.

Interesting times for the software 'game' ...

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Adventures in Capitalism: The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value

Links to this post

  The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value

Word on the street is that Dropbox is about to raise a major round of financing at a $5 billion+ valuation. While some will cry “Bubble!”, I think there's a different lesson we can learn: Usage = Value. Let's face it–Dropbox isn't the ...

Posted by Chris Yeh at 11:55 AM

Create a Link

via chrisyeh.blogspot.com

Usage + 'Stickiness' = value
Dropbox is a great example, it's baked into too many day to day personal processes to be easily displaced.

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Citrix Startup Accelerator - what's new and different?

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Apple now driving SmartPhone growth in USA?

via blog.nielsen.com

The ongoing battle between Android and Apple for mindshare.

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Inspiring - visual thinking video on Michael Wolff from Intel (via @maverickwoman)

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The cloud (xkcd)

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Skype ID will be a slipstream online login for Microsoft

via businessinsider.com

I found the news that Microsoft is acquiring Skype interesting. Major acquisitions like this have all sorts of unexpected implications and ripples across many markets.

The blogosphere has been alive with the discussion over whether the acquisition makes sense or not and the sorts of things that Microsoft might do with the Skype technology, much of which is pretty cool, but in general somewhat hopeful. There's also been some discussion over Microsoft 'buying' customers. While the acquisition is certainly multi-faceted, I suspect that buying customers is just about sufficient to justify the deal.

First, consider the value of an online customer for various types of business - the chart above gives some ideas - I'd tend to assume that the annual value of a given online user to Microsoft is somewhere between Google and Yahoo, both being advertising driven, let's say $10 annually. Given which, it is well worth spending somewhere well North of $10 for each customer acquisition.

Skype apparently has 107m users who use the service at least once a month, and 663m registered users. Microsoft is paying $8.5b for the privilege of access to these users. Microsoft is paying as little as $8 per active user. However, conversion rates would dictate that only a portion of these users come across to the Microsoft services (if 10%, that's $80 per user!).

However, I think that the conversion rate could be much, much higher. If we consider that one of the major challenges to customer acquisition is the effort involved in setting up a new account on a new service (I've called this friction in my last post).

Imagine if Microsoft were now able to do away with that process for new users. Rather the user, many of whom stay logged into Skype 24x7, is automagically provided access to the Microsoft online properties as a result of their Skype authentication. Indeed, one might modify some elements of Skype to make this an easy and perhaps natural extension of the Skype experience.

Notice that this scenario not only builds the user/customer base for the Microsoft online properties, but it also gives Microsoft a new way to compete with Google in creating data profiles of very large numbers of users.

Does this make sense to you?

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Friction free computing

Posted by Michael Harries on May 9, 2011

Does your software reduce friction?

Last week I used the Mac App store to install Citrix receiver for OSX. This is a such a streamlined experience. Start the app store, login with iTunes credentials, and I’m ready to go. Installing the receiver itself was trivial and it worked immediately. It was easy to purchase a bunch of other apps as well (Such as ‘ommwriter‘, another great simplicity app).

That was fun, but at much the same time I was dragged into the morass of reinstalling some other apps off DVD, network drives and the web. Having to find license keys, credit cards, and navigating different installation scripts.

Talk about different worlds.

This is a great example of frictionless computing. It rocks. And it doesn’t sap my energy on an activity that should be simple. Why waste creative focus on mundanities? If there’s any task that should be automated, it’s one that affects so many people, and costs productive time.

So, my question to you. Does your product or startup reduce friction? Are you making it easy for people to use your IT service? How much inertia do your customers need to overcome to get started? How much can you replicate the out of box experience of the Mac app store? This is the age of consumerization; The user is king; and there are any number of alternative distractions to the task of learning to find, install or enroll, sign in, let alone drive your software.

Citrix gets this simplicity. Do you?

via citrixstartupaccelerator.com

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Test-prep startup Grockit teams with charter network KIPP to gamify school | VentureBeat

If only schools were addictive like Farmville, maybe we could fix our education system.

That’s the thinking behind a partnership announced today between the high-profile charter school network KIPP and test-prep startup Grockit, which applies social gaming principles to studying. Grockit is backed by, among others, Marc Pincus of Zynga, the company responsible for our nation’s mass addiction to breeding virtual cows. Like Farmville, Grockit incorporates social-gaming elements such as badges, points and leaderboards, as well as live chat and rewards for social interaction to draw its users in.

via venturebeat.com

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Four square style check in with level up ... like getting to level 80 in WoW

no matter how successful SCVNGR became, it was going to have trouble ensuring that people kept coming back to the local businesses they were checking-in/playing at. So he started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as they continue to come back to a restaurant. Priebatsch doesn't say it explicitly, but it's pretty clear he sees LevelUp/SCVNGR mashup as the company's future. "Pure checking-in isn't going mainstream," he says, "Mainly because it gets boring." LevelUp is a way to get around that.

via tech.fortune.cnn.com

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Tablet market playing by netbook rules or by mobile phone rules?

In terms of manufacturing, the age of tablets is different from the age of netbooks mostly because there is no way to make a cheap tablet. You only have a certain, finite amount of space inside a small tablet case and, more important, tablet PC parts are expensive and often custom-built. Touchscreens are expensive because mother-glass manufacturers see Apple buying up their stock and they hope to make a killing. Flash memory is expensive because, well, Apple bought it all. And the tablets themselves are expensive because Apple set the prices. If Motorola could have gotten the Xoom below $250 I’m sure they would have but, given that there is a more popular alternative out there that costs twice as much, playing a scorched-earth pricing game would leave money on the table.

But manufacturers can’t “beat” the iPad because they’re still playing by netbook rules. As Stephen Elop said, there will soon be “200 tablets” on the market and only one clear winner. But hardware manufacturers are like sharks – they can’t sit still. They need to produce products constantly, no matter the popularity, and as a result, on the aggregate, no one device they produce out of the other 199 can touch the reigning king. It may sound hyperbolic but it’s true. However, they’ve been surprisingly reticent to produce many tablets. I’ve heard it said over and over: “If RIM had released the Playbook a year earlier, they would have owned the space.” Instead they announced early and hemmed and hawed and then released a device that is potentially superior to the iPad but, in practice, little more than a smooshed out Blackberry smartphone.

via crunchgear.com

Nice insight from the supply chain side.

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There Are Now More Free Apps For Android Than For The iPhone: Distimo

via techcrunch.com

Great data. Particularly the balance of free versus paid applications across iPhone versus Android. Does this mean that direct pay for applications is less effective in a 'Googly' experience, Or does the Android app business model make it more appealing to provide a free application that is monetized elsewhere?

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Android market doesn't pay?

Undesirable customers

Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable.

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?

(This is also a major reason why I have no plans to enter the Android market.)

via marco.org

Android is winning the numbers game - no surprise - it's free and very capable. But we all know that that this is not the main story. I find it fascinating to explore how these worlds diverge even as the headlong rush to mobile proceeds.

One key area of difference is in the apps. Indeed, Marco Arment goes so far as to include the Android market as one to avoid as they are unlikely to pay for an app. (The rest of the article is also worth a read.)

I'd love to hear your impressions.

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Niche play du jour - a 'Public Folder for Gmail.

Google Blew It – And This Startup Seized The Opportunity

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry | Apr. 26, 2011, 9:03 AM | 8,660 |

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Microsoft Exchange, the company's enterprise email suite, has this feature called Public Folder that enterprise users love that lets them share an inbox.

Businesses have been clamoring for that feature in Google Apps, Google's web-based rival to Microsoft's enterprise productivity software, for years.

And now French startup RunMyProcess has built it, calling it Shared Inbox.

RunMyProcess says it integrates neatly into Google Apps because it's on Google Apps marketplace and, at $10/user/year, is cheaper than Microsoft Exchange. RunMyProcess CEO Matthieu Hug tells us that they built the feature, which is massively used in enterprises for things like customer support, because of countless customer requests. He tells us it's a big reason why companies are afraid of switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google.

This helps Google, but it's a bit embarrassing that a startup had to build a feature that should be part of the main, standalone product. Some enterprise customers complain that Google doesn't pay enough attention to their requests, and Google's cloud-based offering have failed to make a big dent into Microsoft's huge enterprise software business.

Don't Miss: Who Said That? 10 Unbelievable Quotes From Microsoft Execs →

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via businessinsider.com

Leveraging cognitive shortcuts from one (well loved?) app into another.

I find it fascinating that features like this, from a technical standpoint pretty much trivial, and for most of us just not part of the email experience, are often a key part of business processes.

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Android more desirable than iPhone! Difficult to believe ...

via blog.nielsen.com

I find this a fascinating outcome - yes, Android should be very successful, but I find the higher levels of desirability suspect given relative market positioning. Possible reasons:

* Availability at relatively low cost -- yes (and getting cheaper)
* Usability - hah - not really
* Saturation advertising -- great to bump up wireless data usage, so very appealing to carriers
* Link to Google (for many synonymous with 'internet')

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Amazon and the cloud rules of engagement.

Amazon’s outage in third day: debate over cloud computing’s future begins

April 23, 2011 | Dean Takahashi

7 Comments

As Amazon’s web services outage passed its third day, the debate on the future of cloud computing is underway. The outage is costing web sites such as Reddit and Quora considerable losses as users turn elsewhere to get their social media needs met.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service hosts thousands of major web sites that rely on it to serve pages to users. And users rely on these services to store their personal accounts and data remotely. So when the EC 2 service goes down, so do the web sites, and that means users can’t log in to access their data. It’s a big hiccup for an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014, according to market researcher IDC.

The duration of the outage has surprised many, since Amazon has a lot of backup computing infrastructure. If Amazon can’t safeguard the cloud, how can we rely on it? So the debate begins on the future of cloud computing and what to do to make users and companies put their trust in cloud vendors such as Amazon.

via venturebeat.com

While painful, this is a healthy transition. Infrastructure as a Service is part of the IT toolkit, but requires a healthy does of risk assessment. Without signals that warn of risk, it's all to easy to collectively overcommit to an approach, and finish up with another textbook (sub-prime style) system collapse.

Startups (and resource constrained) have no choice but to accept limited redundancy or single points of failure, but enterprise computing requires that redundancy be designed into the system. This is the point made by George Reese of O'Reilly, overstated, but apt http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment....

My view - this is part of our collectively learning the upsides, downsides, and rules of engagement for shared 'cloud' resources.

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DesignerfWill the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker? - Technology Review

via technologyreview.com

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Natural interfaces? Controlling Prosthetic Limbs with Electrode Arrays - Technology Review

Coiled conduits: The microscopic channels in this polymer roll are the right size and shape for bundles of severed nerve cells to grow through them. The scaffold, augmented with electrodes, is intended to transmit electrical signals between an amputee’s nervous system and prosthetic limb.
Credit: Ravi Bellamkonda, Georgia Tec

via technologyreview.com

Human-Machine connectivity progress. Another step toward 'natural' interfaces?

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Great Innovation is Global

I'm excited - really excited - to have made the move to the Citrix Startup Accelerator from Citrix Labs. So much so that I've moved my family from Sydney to Silicon Valley to make this happen. (We're settling in nicely, thanks.)

Under the circumstance, it shouldn't be a surprise that I think great innovation needs a global focus, which is why the Citrix Global Challenge is critically important for the Startup Accelerator. To kick this off I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the types of technologies and directions that are most interesting for the Startup Accelerator.

The list on the site talks about trends like 'mobile', 'cloud' and 'consumerization'. These are somewhat broad and the flavor of the moment, indeed, most of the breakout companies for the last few years could be described using these terms. To improve clarity I'd like to give an indication of one investment sweet-spot, what I call 'Alternative futures of the desktop.' Citrix has long pioneered alternative desktop visions, and is the leader in Virtual Computing - so new ways to solve the desktop problem are particularly interesting.

Primadesk is our first Startup Accelerator investment. Their vision is to let you "Search, manage and backup your personal cloud data with one simple interface no matter what device you use."

The challenge is that we have too many options for personal data in the cloud.I use Gmail for personal email, but also have old accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo. I have documents in many services ranging from files on the Mac, Google docs, Simplenote, Evernote, and half a dozen others. My backups are a mixed combination of Mozy, S3 (Jungledisk), and my home NAS. The founder of Primadesk recognized that these all act as silos, solving many individual problems well, but leaving severe compatibility gaps.

Primadesk simplifies access to your distributed personal digital assets. Their software gives you a single view of all those silos, allowing you to; search across all your documents and mail; backup from one service to another; drag and drop photos from one site to another. This plays into on of the themes where Citrix has long led: new desktop possibilities, new ways to provide the desktop experience.

If your startup has new approaches to desktop computing, to the use of mobile, or emerging use cases, we'd love to hear from you as we call for Citrix Global Challenge applications in Silicon Valley, Boston, Cambridge, Bangalore, and Sydney.

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Behavioral Economics and Banking - (Tech Review)

"There was a designer somewhere in the process who has thought about every single touch point, every single aspect, and has just made every single moment as valid, as graceful, as appropriate, as possible," he says. BankSimple is due to launch this year.

To design the experience, they looked for insights from behavioral economics, which relies on psychology to understand economic decisions. For instance, it's easier to get people to try something if they have to opt out of it rather than opt in. The team applied this insight to a feature of the bank that allows people to set aside funds toward a particular goal; it's not a separate account, just a line highlighted on the screen with a label like "Hawaii trip" or "new laptop." To encourage customers to try the feature, BankSimple starts them with the goal of saving $1,000 in an emergency fund.

via technologyreview.com

There is something magical about taking a different tack on an existing problem. This sounds very appealing, but I wonder what happens to the user enthusiasm the first time all that hidden complexity surfaces in a SNAFU.

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The disposable Android - Securing All Androids Proves Tricky - Technology Review

Fixing phones properly requires hardware makers to create their own updates incorporating Google's fix; they test those updates and pass them on to carriers, who also test the fixes before pushing them out to customers. Apps for Android devices, including ones developed by Google, could be updated through the Android Market, but system software has to be updated through the carrier's channel.

via technologyreview.com

Android is a great model for adoption, but less so as these complex software artifacts become broadly spread, and poorly maintained.

On the other hand ... for the handset manufacturers, this is a not a completely bad thing -- they'd likely prefer that you throw it away and get a new one.

Indeed, for many people, it will be easier to discard the current phone, and purchase a new one without the limitation. Today this is relatively expensive -- tomorrow much less so. A cheap, disposable access point. Interesting times.

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