I was attending a LAN gaming session (aka. real “social gaming”) with a group of friends a while ago. Last time, we spent a lot of time installing (and updating) games and trying to get computers to find each other and I had to borrow someone else’s computer. This time, we were quickly up and running and I could proudly play on my MacBook Pro.

Sure, I had installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp on my Mac, because while VMware Fusion was okay for Tales of Monkey Island and even Torchlight, it just doesn’t cut it for hardcore gaming. The only game that I had any problems running over Bootcamp was, oddly enough, Postal 2. Otherwise, I was equal among my PC using peers. I had dreamed about this day.

But what really made things easy for all of us was Valve’s Steam, a gaming portal/service.

The iTunes model strikes again.

Steam ...for the rest of us

We have passed a long time the point where new games are automatically better than older just due to technological improvements. We were still playing games we played over 3 years ago, and some of them were “old” even by then, like Unreal Tournament 2004. The reasons for this are Windows XP and DirectX. These two technologies have enabled a decade of games that are still playable almost without any emulation. The biggest change is happening right now with multicore and 64bit CPUs.

What Steam has done is basically something that other forms of entertainment could learn a lot about, if they could get over their stone age business logic and hunting down their customers. PC game piracy has always been a problem and one reason why PC gaming today seems to be an afterthought to console gaming. Steam (and other similar services, like Impulse) mostly eliminates the piracy problem with a central authorization structure, but yet provides added value to the customer. You only need to install Steam on any computer and log in and you have access to all your games (provided that you have the bandwidth to download the over 2 GB that most games today use). This is something that isn’t possible with iTunes and only recently was possible with Spotify.

What really sets Steam apart here from other entertainment industry offerings is actual value for users. What Steam has done, is really catch the long tail of ecommerce, even though the concept of long tail has long since gone out of fashion. By being able to sell couple of years old games that are virtually impossible to find anywhere (legally) and for a fraction of the price is just amazing. I was able to buy Psychonauts, the most amazing game ever, for just 2 euros and even at the normal price of 9,99 euros it’s 1/4th of what it did cost on the shelves (and it still costs around 15 euros on Amazon). After the Steam’s holiday sales during Christmas, I found out that I had bought many games, mostly because the price was right.

Other benefits from using Steam is that all your games are automatically updated and even for some games, your progress and settings are saved in the “Steam Cloud” – allowing you to play seamlessly on multiple computers.

But there aren’t any games for Mac

The year 2010 turned to be a pleasant surprise for gamers, especially for those, like me, who have switched to Mac. First, Telltale Games announced that their games would be available for Mac as well. This was excellent news for all Sam & Max and Monkey Island fans who would no longer need to boot up VMware Fusion.

And, sure, there have always been Civilization IV and The Sims 3 for Mac, but having new, native games for Mac was excellent news. Clearly a certain threshold has been breached and the amount of gamers living in self-denial on Mac is now large enough that the market is suddenly viable.

Nothing could have prepared us, the people who still reflexivly keep our left fingers on WASD and use multi-button mice, for the annoucement from Valve that both Steam and Valve’s game engine Source would be available for Mac.

Now, I don’t see that this will mean that soon Mac OS X would be equal gaming platform with Windows, but it does warm my heart. I know that I still need to boot to Windows to really enjoy gaming. The reason Telltale and Valve have been able to pull this out is based on their choices to use cross-platform frameworks (like OpenGL) instead of Windows-only technologies like DirectX. You also need to keep in mind that both Telltale and Valve seem to have target audiences that use Macs and have both targeted certain niches, the former makes high quality “casual” adventure games and the latter high quality first person shooters for more “hardcore” crowd. It is unlikely that other game developers or publishers will follow suit. For a true revolution, Microsoft would need to not only port DirectX to Mac OS X but also develop it at same pace with Windows. Looking at Microsoft’s track record with Mac software, this is even less likely than playing Left 4 Dead natively on Mac looked a couple of months ago. The more likely scenario is that as hardware gets faster and emulating a graphics card gets more efficient, running even the most recent 3D games in VMware Fusion starts to be feasible. A possible scenario is also that through technologies like OpenCL, PC games aren’t as dependent on GPUs and DirectX as they are today.

On the other hand, this shows how Apple’s decision to invest in cross-platform frameworks like OpenGL, OpenCL and WebKit can really pay off in the long term. It also shows that being nice and having something like Bootcamp can be an advantage. I was really surprised how easily I could install Windows 7 on my Mac and how Apple had provided drivers for everything.

What Steam proves is that to succeed on the internet, you really need to be familiar with your customers and understand their needs and truly deliver superior experience and added value to them. This is nothing new, but somehow the rest of the entertainment industry seems to think that they can still get away with last century tactics.

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Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

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As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

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The compass functionality is still a bit underutilized

The media seems to be a bit obsessed with hardware, iPhone and its “killers” and software (“apps”). This is technology after all. For me, much more interesting phenomenon are applications. I’m not talking about software but more generally what we use the technology for. In “Salmon of Doubt”, Douglas Adams put it well that “[we] are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” I believe that iPhone and what have followed since it are enabling just this. I also believe by just being “stuff that works” was the feature that made iPhone what it is today, while Nokia was fiddling around with technologies.

When I’m talking about mobile phones as Human-World Interface, I’m not really talking about augmented reality. For most part augmented reality is just hype and worst of all, it was just technology. There was some cool factor in being able to see where the London Tube stations were, but all of a sudden it seems like people are far more interested in “monetizing” the technology instead of looking for applications.

Instead, in my view one of the examples of how iPhone gives you an interface to the world around us are the public transportation guides. With access to your location, you can easily check out when the next bus or tram arrive and what bus or tram you actually need to take to get wherever you’re going. I think that the applications for more specialized uses are more interesting, like snipers using iPhone for calculations and doctors using it for stethoscope. For me, Human-World Interface could be summarised as the ultimate universal remote for the world.

I think we’re finally arriving to the vision of a PDA. What the things we used to call PDAs a decade ago were crucially missing were mobile internet and user contexts (fe. location). One important part is also a universal information exchange protocol, and for most part the Web fills that role on modern phones. Right now it would look like instead of general-purpose web, one-application “Apps” are the way to go. I don’t think this is a sustainable way forward, though. It works as long as you only focus on one device (like the iPhone) and you believe in an Apple monopoly, but if/when in the future we have forward-incompatible iPhones and plethora of smartphones running Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android, you might be better off falling back to the common Web.

Google’s opinion is that the Web will eventually win, but you have to keep in mind that their whole business depends on that. In the short-term, there’s still loads of money to be made in Apps, but in the long-term investing in the Web will pay off. It is however quite hard to justify investing for the long-term unless you have boatloads of capital, but Google’s planning to be here for that long. There’s no money to be made in infrastructure or technology per se (as RSS and Atom have shown) but once you have an application that depends on them, it all pays out (but you really need an application that has or adds value, not just a fancy feed reader/parser).

One of the still-in-R&D technologies for smartphones is Near Field Communications, which would enable one to (finally?) use one’s smartphone for paying for public transportation or at point of sales. Unfortunately this stuff has been so long in the pipeline that it might really be a technology in search of a problem. It is however a foray into the world where we would use our smartphone to interact with the world.

A similar idea of replacing one’s wallet with one’s mobile phone has been one that Nokia et al. have at various times tried to push, but like NFC, the main problem is that the advantages are not really significant (yet?) and there are serious drawbacks compared to the things you actually have in your wallet. For example, the credit card you have in your wallet is probably almost universally accepted, unlike mobile payment. Overcoming this rather crucial shortcoming is a chicken-egg-problem, however for mobile phone manufacturers. The companies that should develop this stuff are the credit card companies.

The same thing goes for everything else, like using your phone to open your garage door. The two things that need to happen for a universal remote for thw world are open technologies (in this case an API for your garage door), which in turn requires a business case for the companies to open up their interfaces. Only then is the Internet of Things possible. I believe that for Internet of Things to emerge, there’s little point in just identifying everything around us, but also interacting with them. Other than implants, mobile phones seem to be the best thing we have to do that.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has said that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and for him, it’s vastly superior to what Kirk had in Star Trek. I’m not as optimistic about iPhone of today, I’m sure there’s going to be much more cooler things in the future. Of the things that we have right now, I have to agree.

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I’m in a book. The course I took last year finally materialized into physical from couple of months ago. I’ve no idea if this book is actually available anywhere, even in a digital form. Well, at least I got mine.

In the book a group of doctorate students from three universities in Helsinki wrote cross-disciplinary visions of what certain IT innovations will break through by 2030.

The future is notoriously difficult to predict and the future of technology even more so. So, I’m pretty sure that any predictions we have made for 2030 are going to be wrong. There are some things we can be pretty sure about and try build on them, though. For example, technology will get better. The western population will grow older. Fusion energy will always be here in 30 years.

My second group wrote about intelligent or smart machines on how we see that there are some non-technical barriers that have to be broken before we can see robots and machines everywhere. Some of our ideas are also presented at the 26C3 conference under the title “Here be Electric Dragons: Preparing for the Emancipation of Machines“. So, if you’re in Berlin around Christmas, go and listen to our fantastic ideas.  Unfortunately I can’t make it there, but my co-author Lorenz Lechner will be there to entertain the audience.

One of our core ideas is that for autonomous (or, as we put it, ultimate) machines need rights. One reason for this is that normal product liability is not enough if these machines have AI dictating their decisions. If giving rights to machines sounds strange, it shouldn’t. In a sense this is comparable to human rights and the idea of corporation as a legal entity, where the corporation and not the shareholders are legally liable for its actions.

The follow-up question is of course how to manage the risks that autonomous robots pose? We are pretty good at managing all kinds of risks. One approach is to design fail-safe systems. The other is using insurance.

One of the challenges is that the machines of tomorrow and even today are more and more dependable on the software. We can’t end up in a similar situation with robots as we have done with commercial software – no guarantees whatsoever (see for example the capitalized(!) section 17 of a Microsoft EULA or similar section 16 of GPL). We believe that through an insurance of sorts, these sections could be shortened two capitalized words, DON’T PANIC, instead. Preferably in large, friendly letters.

Also, we believe these issues are urgent. The actuality of the technological development was really nicely illustrated by a recent xkcd comic (note the mouseover text). We have also discussed about this subject previously on this blog, Vincent already wrote about the relationship between man and machine early this year.

If you can’t make it to 26C3, here’s a copy of our paper “Augmenting Man”. We are currently in process of refining it and trying to pimp it for other publications.

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There is a really disturbing trend about environmental issues, outright self-deception that it might not actually exist. People do have this strange tendency, once things go complex, to make up stories that explain why things are how they are. This, in a way, explains why, in this age of reason and science, people choose to believe in things like make-believe medications, which they, in an effort to legitimize them, call “alternative” medicine.

An utterly insignificant little blue-green planet in the unfashionable part of the galaxy

This morning at the gym, I overheard people talking about the recent e-mail leak from UK’s Climatic Research Unit. Paraphrasing, the discussion went something like this. “…I read from the news that they have exaggerated the numbers.” “Yeah, I never could believe that the sea levels could rise by so many meters.” And off they went talking about heatwaves in the Middle Ages and other stuff, probably trying to assure each other that everything is just fine.

Ars Technica does a good job, as always, explaining how the e-mail leak means probably nothing. And anyway, the scientific community has ways routing around fraud  – which, you have to keep in mind, is not the case here.

At another occasion, before the e-mail leak, in a bus an older woman wondered “how can they measure that the sea-levels have risen by a fraction of a millimeter. It’s so tiny.” I almost wanted to tell her about the DNA, carbon nanotubes, integrated circuits and other wonders of science in an effort to explain that, yes, “they” can measure things even if they are really small.

I’m seriously worried that these people secretly wish that the whole climate change is just a bad dream, and that they have a confirmation bias to believe all evidence that disproves that our planet is in peril – that status quo will prevail.

Yes, I’d also like if the whole climate issue was just a bad dream. But no e-mail leak or even a group of fraudulent scientist (which, once again, isn’t the case here) does not disprove the massive amount of evidence that we have for an accelerating climate change. What’s going on is a good example of our cognitive dissonance at work. Maybe it’s easier to justify why you’re not doing anything to counter the problem, if the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, the newspapers and TV news aren’t really helping, going for flashy headlines instead. True, the scientific community has a bad track record trying to explain things to laypeople, but sometimes things are a bit difficult – especially when they are as complex as the climate of a planet.

In fact, it seems that television can make things worse, as this video from a Sarah Palin’s book-signing shows (see 7:00 for the kicker). People, instead of trying to even rationalize their arguments themselves, just throw catchphrases to explain their position. My favourite? How polar bears must be removed from endangered species list so it would be easier to drill for oil in Alaska.

I’m really, really worried.

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I’m starting to think that I’m wayy too interested in maps and geographical coordinates. Things like Google Maps and GPS just make me want to make something great out of all the information we have lying around and put in a map context. I think this is also the reason behind all the location based services, everyone is trying to see what would work. Most of them are fun experiments, but let’s see what sticks.

Finnish boxy architecture, now on Google Earth.

The one thing that reminds me that we do live in a future foretold by all the great 80’s sci-fi movies is Google Earth on iPhone and especially it’s useless feature where you can change the view by tilting the phone. It serves no purpose whatsoever, but it’s cool and feels like “future”. I think Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash really showed the vision what Google Maps/Earth ultimately could become (think real-time satellite feeds).

A while back magical elves -generated buildings started appear in selected cities in Google Earth, which was also pretty cool. Unfortunately these magical elves were somewhat sloppy about the finer architectural points of our human buildings so most of them look like boxes – and, well, some of the 60-70’s era concrete buildings are in fact (ugly) boxes.

So, when Google revealed their new Building Maker, I was pretty much hooked. It allows you to easily model buildings out of aerial photography. And if you’re good enough, those models might just end up on Google Earth.

This tool reminded me of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which was also interesting in how it allowed to harness the human processing capability to tasks unsuited to computers (or magical elves, who don’t grasp our architectural styles). Some might remember how it was used (unsuccessfully) to search for the remains of Steve Fosset’s plane. Google does have some experience in this fields as well, they did something similar with their Google Image Labeler, which paired random people in a game of labeling images. Unlike Mechanical Turk, Image Labeler was mostly harmless fun and a game to kill time for participants. It is this fun part that I find really important in these things. I think Google accidentally or on purpose have also some fun elements in Building Maker, in addition to it’s crack-like addictiveness level.

The best thing about the Building Maker is that it runs in your browser and is dead simple to use. It’s fun. It’s like a small flash game, but instead of just wasting time you waste time in benefit of a commercial, listed company.

So, now I have 25 models worthy of Google’s acceptance criteria. It’s these accomplishments that keep me coming back to model things. Unfortunately, many models were rejected by Google and that of course isn’t fun. The main reasons for rejections so far have been “Incomplete texturing” and “Floating”. The frustrating thing about this is there’s very little I can do about these two problems. It’s a bit frustrating to notice that Google doesn’t have imagery for all sides of the building after you have started to model a building and short of renting a plane and taking pictures yourself there’s not much you can do. Floating is even more frustrating, because there’s very little hinting you can do to tell the modeling software that the box you’re trying to make should, in fact, be on ground level instead of floating couple of meters in the air.

Yes, if you want, you can import the model from Google’s servers into SketchUp and refine the model there, but that’s both extremely difficult and requires a lot of effort. Not fun, but maybe, just maybe, that refining could get your model listed…

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On my trip to Africa the most inspiring thing that happened to me happened on my last day, on the Nairobi international airport. This post isn’t about technology, but about globalization and, well, maybe in a small way how technology is only an enabler, it just has made things easier – but it doesn’t do things for us.

It was still couple of hours before the flight would start to board but we were already at the gate. And sitting next to us was  Phil. I don’t remember if his name was really Phil, I just think he looked like a Phil. Now, Phil was a huge, white, bald, old guy with diabetes and thick glasses. Really huge. He was wearing a traditional Kenyan suit/robe-thing. He looked like a fat white Masai. He was dozing off and told people around him that they should feel free to wake him up if he started to snore. He wouldn’t mind.

Phil really was a Buddha. He was out there. I don’t know if he knows it.

One thing lead to another and Phil started to tell why he was in Kenya. I don’t think he has ever been to any other country. Phil’s from Virginia, USA. He’s a schoolteacher.

I don’t remember all the details correctly, but that’s okay, because the details don’t matter. You see, Phil’s dad had some money, but he was in a home. Got MS. Now, being a good Christian, he had donated a bunch of money to missionaries to build a church in Africa. Church of Nazarene. Now, Phil was a good son and visited his father now and then. His dad was a bit sad about there being a church after him somewhere in Africa and he was there in a nursing home on the other side of the world. So, naturally, Phil goes and says “Gee, dad, if I could just go there and take pictures for you, I would.” So, his dad takes out his check book and asks “Would you? Here’s some money, it should cover your tickets?”. Here Phil said to me, “Who was I to say no to my dad?”

So, Phil got himself a passport and all the other stuff. He only knew that the church was somewhere in Kenya and that it was called Church of Nazarene. And that he knows no-one there but that didn’t stop him from booking a trip over the weekend to Kenya. Someone might think Phil was either simple or just insane, but, I don’t think that. He was just this unassuming guy.

At some point during his story, another flight arrived and people started to come in through the doors of our gate. There, sitting on an airport’s plastic seat, around 9pm in the evening, with the red robe on, this guy starts to greet all the people going past him, “Welcome to Kenya, hope you have a nice stay”. Most of the people don’t even blink in his general direction. Some say thanks. Some smile. But I bet most of them felt at least something. So what if you can’t please all the people who just don’t care when you can make some people feel a bit better?

So, anyway. A day before he’s leaving he gets an e-mail from some missionary that yeah, the church exists and they can take him there. So, he goes to Kenya, gets on a jeep, takes out his digital compact and starts taking a lot of pictures of the church and gets back to USA to go back to work on Monday.

Back in US, he goes to visit his dad with hundreds of pictures and he’s dad’s all excited – but he doesn’t even look at the pictures. He almost pushes the pictures away and asks “Do you wanna go over there again?” And, again, who’s Phil to say no?

“At this point I realize that I’m going visit that church every year for the rest of his life.” And so he does. Phil’s not that into the whole Church of Nazarene thing, he’s a schoolteacher. So, this one time he asks if he could visit a jail in Kenya. Normally this would be totally impossible, but as it happens, there just happens to be this guy who’s the head priest of all prisons there in the group. And well, at this point Phil’s been there for some years already so he has some street cred and the doors to the jails are open for Phil.

I totally forget if we wanted to teach these guys something or if it was something else, but anyway, Phil’s visit is a success. He starts to visit the prisoners in addition to going to see how his dad’s church is holding up, all this in over a weekend. Many years pass. I didn’t ask, but I guess his dad’s passed away since I understood he doesn’t visit the church anymore. He still visits Kenya every year for a weekend and goes to visit the prisoners.

To drive the point home: This guy takes a long-haul flight every year at the same time, for a weekend, to visit these guys. And these guys wait him like he’s Santa Claus. And to them, he is just that.

I guess these prisoners don’t get much visitors and I’ve no idea who they think Phil is back home, I don’t think Phil has any idea who they think he is. But they write to him. Last year, the prisoners asked if Phil could get them a electric piano. Now, hauling something like that from USA would be impossible and expensive, so he just arranged the piano there otherwise. These guys don’t have even clean water or anything, and they ask for a electric piano and this guy delivers. He knows that there’s a very small chance that these guys actually get to use whatever things he can procure for them, but I guess it’s the gesture that counts. Someone actually cares.

Coming back to the robe Phil is wearing. It’s not Phil’s first, and not his last. The prisoners make them for him. This year, a tailor took a measures of Phil so they can make a new one for him when he comes to visit next year. Again, these guys who are living in conditions I can’t even imagine are making these robes for this one guy who comes and visits them every year.

Now, Phil says he’s ready to die. He says it’s really great to know that you’re ready to go. This is not exactly something I look forward to hear before a 8 hour flight, but he might have a point. I’m not ready to go. Phil has had an heart attack and he tells how excited it was to be transported to ER by a helicopter. Phil said he’s on VA so it was all covered. He hasn’t talked about religion at all before this point, but it’s hard to escape the Buddhist vibe from this guy.

I told Phil that for the sake of the prisoners, I really wish that he makes it next year.

There, on Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, among all the people coming and going, mostly young western tourists going to volunteer to build something and who are there to naively save the world, was unassuming Phil who no-one took seriously. I shook his hand and thanked him for being a human.

–
Phil also told when he got his heart attack at home and somehow made it to the hospital, a doctor came to see if he had got all the necessary medications. A nurse would go that yes, except for one that’s barcode didn’t register into the system. The doctor then took the medication and gave it to Phil noting to the nurse that the needs of the patient went before some accounting system.

Thinking that this guy wouldn’t have been there telling me how he gives hope to more people ever year than I ever will because of a nurse wouldn’t give some stuff to save his life because she couldn’t register into a system is something that really scares me.

–
It’s wrong to say Phil said he gives hope to people. He never said that. He just told what he does and how he ended up doing that. I got the impression that the people who he teaches don’t know what he does over a certain weekend in September. Why he keeps doing that, he never said.

–
I honestly don’t remember all the details correctly. I wrote this to tell you about Phil. I decided to wait for some time before writing this down so I could think the whole story over and better distill it to the point that there are way too few Phils around and too many people to whom Phil is a lifeline.

Why I decided to publish it is also in some part due to this post.

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Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS  is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use Wordpress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

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What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former executive at Nokia, and it tells the story how Nokia was able to challenge Motorola, Ericsson and other big players of yesteryear.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

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Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there.

UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies.

Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the x- and y-axis and pressure modified that loop. It was an interesting idea, because it didn’t look like just pushing buttons to make sound.

Fail whale at LHS

UCB: Raymond Yee, “Mixing and Re-mixing Information”

A lecture from a course on web mashups. Yee has written the book, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The students need to plan and work on a mashup project. There were lots of interesting ideas, but I was worried that most of them were remixing for remixing’s sake and didn’t add value along the way.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Our contact at UC Berkeley had warned this place was mostly for children, and sure enough, this is a place to avoid unless you’re 7 years or less. Almost as complete waste of time as our Google visit.

We had also pizza available for but no-one from UC Berkeley came (we were too scary). Except one guy, whose name I forget. But he took some of us for drinks downtown, so that was great.

Digital Chocolate / Trip Hawkins

Hawkins really loved "Bowling alone"

Trip Hawkins talked a lot about how leverage is the key to successful business and what are the differences between the supply chain in when he was at EA and in operator-controlled world of mobile gaming. He told how he built EA so that it was NFL who wanted them to use their brand, not the other way around. This is why he sees that his competitors who just put out license games based on movies will ultimately be driven off the market, because they do not control the IP.

He thinks that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and how the rest don’t get it: “If you’ve played around with Storm or Android you know, wow, these suck”. In his view, the others had focused in Features (“What it is”) and not on Advantages (“What it does”) and not at all at Benefits (“Who cares?”).

Digital Chocolate’s game development doesn’t depend on the device, because they change all the time and they can publish all their games in every device. This is the only way to make the business work in the mobile space. Hawkins doesn’t see that there will be any standardization, because that would move the leverage away from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.

He also believes that the social starving that began around 1950’s because of TV is the reason people are so keen on the social gaming and internet services and is the driver for “omnimedia”. His suggested reading are The Innvator’s Solution and Bowling Alone. Even in the old days, he didn’t see gaming as waste of time. When playing, he said that “I was thinking, learning and motivated”.

He recommended that we try Tower Bloxx, their Facebook game. I was a bit disappointed, the game itself isn’t that bad if you want to kill time, but it is really spammy. Not only is more screen real estate spent on questionable ads than on the game, not only does it notify your timeline every time you play the game, not only the “social aspect” is just a high score table of your friends, but it also spams your friends every time you play to add the game. Not exactly what I’d expect from the guy who’s partly responsible for the great games EA pushed out in the early days. I asked why is it that as a former hardcore gamer, the only interesting game I played last year was World of Goo. In his opinion this down to how big corporations work and can’t innovate. If Tower Bloxx is Digital Chocolate’s answer to this, I don’t think it’s just big corporations.

Sun Microsystems / Mårten Mickos

FAQ: "If heating is a problem, why is it black?"

We were given the tour at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. They showed the SunRays and other stuff and it was pretty nice to see up close the Black Box.

Afterwards, Mickos gave us a presentation about open source development and MySQL. He said that MySQL is like “New Orleans” of web apps in that if you want to control an important river, you need to control the important cities and this was the reason Sun acquired them. He also anticipated the question about superiority of Postgres, which is probably asked from him all the time. “When I joined MySQL, Postgres was better. Some say it still is. But who cares?”

He also started a discussion about “Why are web companies so closed?” – a poke directed among others Google, who benefit a lot from GPL software, but due to a loophole in the agreement can get away without publishing their improvements because the software isn’t redistributed. This is what he calls the hypocrisy of open source: “People just want to get stuff for free”.

Like Hawkins, he said that the most important thing for startup business is category-leadership. One advice he gave for Finnish start-ups was “not to be Finnish”: MySQL didn’t have sales offices in Nordics, only in the US. Other thing was that if something sounds good in Finland, it takes 10-15 years for until it’s widely accepted as a good thing, so don’t go to market too early. “There’s still time to make a Google-killer”, he said.

This was one of the best sessions we had, not only because Mickos isn’t there anymore and looks like Sun won’t be either but also because we got vodka and swag. You could see there was an economic crisis, because elsewhere we didn’t get anything.

Nexit Ventures / Michel Wendell

Wendell, from Nexit Ventures, a VC firm interested in Nordic IT startups, told how the VC market works and what kind of mistakes Finnish companies usually make. He told how he ended up in the business of helping Nordic companies make it in the US. Being a VC has lot to do with knowing people.

Lots of interesting discussion, but it was late in the evening and it’s pretty hard to upstage either Hawkins or Mickos.

IDEO

We got a standard theme park tour at IDEO. If you have seen the documentaries on TV or at YouTube, there’s not much to see. I was surprised that they actually avoid any systematic or analytical approach to design and focus more on a holistic, iterative and therefore probably pretty expensive (to the client) approach. As a case study they presented Nokia N-Gage platform they did concept work for. A surprising choice, because not only being old was also a spectacular flop. I guess they thought that being from Finland and the course given by ex-CTO of Nokia, we’d be interested in Nokia or something. If we were, we probably didn’t need to come all the way to Palo Alto for that.

Stanford University / VHIL

At Stanford, we got a nice presentation from Jeremy Bailenson from Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He was talking about the Proteus Effect, or how avatars change humans and their behaviour. For example, even though Blizzard has nothing in World of Warcraft code that gives advantage to taller avatars, they nevertheless level up faster than shorter ones. Also, taller avatars get better results in the Ultimatum Game, the real world height of the human is irrelevant. As I’m interested in behavioral decision making, it was nice to see that it might be possible to do empirical studies in virtual worlds, where we can control many variables that social sciences haven’t been in the real world.

Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto

First NDA of the tour. They showed us some research projects they were working on and had the worst slides of the tour. Most of us came out there frightened how out of touch Nokia can be.

Stanford University / Entrepreneurship Week / “Next Big Thing” Panel

Tim Draper, Tony Perkins and Michael Moe talked mostly about Twitter and iPhone and how making revenue is irrelevant. Draper really loves the free trade. Apparently ad-supported business model is the next big thing.

These guys were either drunk or lived in a bubble of their own. Probably both.

IBM Almaden Research Center / Ray Strong

There's pr0n in it, I'm sure.

Strong talked about how IBM tries to predict the future. First of all, the Almaden Research Center looks like a super-villain’s secret lair from Bond movies (it didn’t help that the guy we met had a Bond-esque name). Forget Google, this is the place to visit. There was the world’s first hard drive in the lobby, which was a nice monument to how long IBM has been in the game.

The main thing Strong told was that it isn’t possible to predict technology in to deep future, only in to the business horizon of up to 5 years. This is what they told to an unnamed government agency that wanted them to do so. As government usually gets what it wants, IBM decided to find a way to do it. They brought in people from academy, futurologists and social scientists. Their approach is half scenarios and half technology landscapes, but their ideation emphasizes backcasting from deep future (>50 years) using trends that can be with high probability assumed to continue.

One problem with scenarios has been that it’s really hard to transform them into strategic actions a company should take. IBM tries to close this gap between scenario planning and strategy by using what they call signposts. These signposts are future events that are both recognizable (when they happen) and actionable.

Strong also talked about how predicting future, it’s important to stay in the qualitative side of things, not only because quantitative side of things usually doesn’t work and might be harmful because of the tendency to use numbers to calculate expected values or other figures, even though they are full of uncertainty and can be harmful.

This was by far the best visit during the tour.

Google

NDA. It was a standard theme park tour. It was pretty clear that Google is exactly as “open” as SEC demands it to be, not an inch more. I guess many for many of us the myth of Google was totally burst.

To be fair, this was the only place where our contact wasn’t executive level so we might have gotten a better experience with a more suitable contact. Even though our host was great and all that, he probably wasn’t the right one for our group.

HP Labs

Runner-up in best architecture for a research lab.

NDA, but they mostly showed published academic research about nanophotovoltaics or something to that end. Our guess is that they didn’t want to tell us anything but out of courtesy showed something. When they talked about things I could understand, they talked about MagCloud and how HP is transforming from a printer and computer company into printing and computing company.

Next day, couple of us went to see the garage (more like a shack) Hewlett and Packard started from and what is considered as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Not much to see, but at least it had some historical value.

All pictures by me. All rights reserved. Originally published in my private blog, but I decided to get rid of it so I republished this thing here for people interested.

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Couple of days ago there was some “inside rumors” about Nokia working on an Android phone. This rumor was pretty quickly denied by the Finnish giant.

Full QWERTY and dual screens. Eat that iPhone. Also works as a fishing net weight.

It was a good rumor because it sounded plausible until one starts to seriously think about it. Yes, Nokia is one of the few handset manufacturers who doesn’t have Android plans so it just a matter of time, right? Not exactly. Sure, some might think Android is a better platform than S60 and yes, in my opinion, the current S60 UI and user experience are a crapfest but at least it’s Nokia’s own crapfest. And that’s the important thing.

The reason why other traditional cell phone manufacturers are pushing out Android phones is that it doesn’t really matter what software runs in their phones as long as it sells. And of course Android sells, because carriers finally get to bill for data usage when mobile users discover the web.

Does SonyEricsson, Samsung, HTC have a smartphone that matters? They all pump out smartphones on different platforms and don’t really focus on building an ecosystem across their phones. Their main customers are phone operators, who’ll eventually brand the phones and fill them with their own software and sell them to their customers. This is ture for Nokia too as far as Nokia the mobile phone manufacturer goes. Nokia, however, isn’t just about manufacturing hardware. Take SonyEricsson as a counterexample. As a part of Sony, SonyEricsson is more about extending Sony’s brands (Walkman, Cybershot) and not solely about mobile phones. Same goes for Samsung. Nokia, on the other hand, is a brand on its own and has interests in all aspects of mobile communication.

SonyEricsson is a good example also because it shows what would happen to Nokia if it’d adopt Android. Those who remember time when it was just called Ericsson, the company actually did have pretty nice technologies and phones. Today, that history is pretty much nonexistent in their phones.

Unlike the other phone manufacturers, but like Apple and Google, Nokia has a wide application ecosystem. Nokia is betting a lot on services, even though Ovi Store and other Ovi services haven’t caused similar nerdgasms like Apple’s Apps Store. In fact, one might say that Ovi services are a source of a lot of nerdrage instead. Nokia would also need to port its Nokia Maps and Mail for Exchange support over to Android, just to mention few. Also, why invest in Qt if you’re going Java?

The only way for Nokia to remain relevant in the marketplace is to own the software its phones and services run on. It’s about vertical integration and it’s about mattering in the smartphone market. This vertical integration is why Google and Apple suddenly matter in smartphone business. Vertical integration is why Apple still matters in the computer business.

This is also why no other mobile phone manufacturer has taken Symbian seriously. It would give Nokia, their #1 competitor, immense strategic power. The reason Windows Mobile has zero traction in mobile phones follows the same logic.

As Trip Hawkins, whose Electronic Arts was first to bypass the game resellers and went straight to retailers, has put it, “it’s all about leverage. If you don’t have it, you lose”. With Google’s recent announcement of Chrome OS for netbooks, there are many unhappy netbook manufacturers who decided to build something on Android. On the other hand, by bypassing the need for a real OS and focusing on the Web, netbook manufacturers can try to cut costs – at the expense of becoming dependent on Google.

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Like some of you might know or notice, we recently moved from Wordpress.com’s blog hosting to our self-hosted version (for hardcore fans, this is the second time this blog has moved). As good web citizens, we here at Tech IT Easy believe in sharing information, so here’s how we did our migration.

Moving over the WordPress content

There are couple of issues we hit during the migration, and might be good to know for anyone who plans to do the same. Many Google searches were used and multiple blog posts were read in order for our migration to happen, so hopefully this summary makes it easier for future generations…

Preparing for the migration

Our blog had its own domain name already on WP, so one thing to keep in mind is that you need to update the nameserver records from wordpress’s to whoever you’re planning to host your site. However, this is the last thing you will do. Just make sure you have access (or you know how to contact the right guy) to change the  nameservers.

Install Wordpress

Next, install Wordpress on your new host. For example, we initially installed it at techiteasy.webfactional.com. Many hosts allow you to do 1-click style of installs with takes much of the pain away.

Copy the settings over from your wordpress.com blog as well as you can to your new. Make sure you keep the same permalink structure. Do set your blog URLs to your temporary URL instead (in our case, techiteasy.webfactional.com).

Don’t get fancy just yet, but just go with the admin account. We’ll get to user accounts later.

Install plug-ins and themes

Another thing to note when hosting your own blog is that you’re now responsible for security issues in your blog. This means that there are couple of plug-ins you’ll need to install. If you allow user-registrations, you really need the WP-reCAPTCHA -plugin. Also remember to set-up the Akismet-plugin with your Wordpress.com user account API code.

On some hosts WordPress’s normal way of sending e-mail doesn’t work (like at our webhost, Webfaction) and you need to install Configure SMTP-plugin instead. Also, if you want to keep your experience similar to what you had at WP.com, be sure to install Wordpress.com Stats and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Some other plugins you might want to consider are Google Analyticator (If you’re into Google Analytics), Google XML Sitemaps and WP Super Cache.

Back-up Wordpress.com

First of all, do a backup of your blog at wordpress.com. Don’t worry about images or other content, they’ll join your post texts when you’ll import the backup to your new blog later.

It probably goes without saying that all content that arrives to your blog after this point isn’t in the backup, so you might want to do this when it’s quiet in your blog and afterwards remember to manually add all the “missed” content.

Import backup

Our back-up file was about 12 megs in size, which turned out to be a problem because you need to upload the backup using WordPress’s web admin panel. Some web hosts will allow you to override PHP’s maximum file upload and script execution times (default is 2 MB), but some don’t (In WordPress’s Restore page you’ll see what is the effective limit). Even though we did increase both limits, uploading the 12 MB backup didn’t work. At this point I did wonder what use is a back-up you can’t restore.

Your best (and almost only) way to work-around this is to split the XML file into smaller chunks. You need to retain the headers and footers in each chunk, but otherwise it’s quite straight-forward.

You probably want to change to the new site pretty quickly after importing, so you might want to do some of the tune-ups mentioned here only later. What you really should do now is  to now check that the URLs you care about look the same in your new site as they do in the old one (fe. www.techiteasy.org/2008/09/01/random-post and techiteasy.webfactional.com/2008/09/01/random-post).

Fix user accounts

At least for us, user accounts did not transfer smoothly over. First of all, the usernames are wrong and you probably can’t login with them. On top of that, your author links are probably screwed on the new blog. To fix these, you need to do some SQL to fix the entries in database. This isn’t a clean solution, but so far seems to have worked for us.

The easiest way is to create a new account with the same username you have at WP.com and then transfer all the “old” account’s posts to you (and then delete that old account). This takes care of the author URL’s to remain same as previously.You can transfer the posts to your new account by noting your new and old account IDs in the wp_users table and then doing UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author = <your new account ID> WHERE post_author = <your old account ID>. You can check from WP’s admin panel that your new account should have all your posts and the old account should have zero. You can now delete the old account.

If you want to have another username, you need to change the user_nicename field in wp_users table to your WP.com username, if you want to keep your author URLs.

We also had some problems with duplicate and non-working categories, but for most part those are easy to fix using the WP admin panel (except for the categories that show up as numbers, no idea where they came from).

Change nameservers

Image search gave this for "nameservers", but changing them isn't as hardcore or cool. Beards are recommended, though.

Once you change your domain’s nameservers to your new host, it can take some hours before DNS caches around the intertubes get updated. In the meantime strange things can happen and people might end up at different places or your blog might be unreachable. Also, if you take advantage of Wordpress.com’s Gmail integration, remember to copy over those DNS entries too. (We didn’t, so no idea how that is done.)

Now is the time to go to your new blog’s settings and change the blog URLs to the “real” ones (in our case, from techiteasy.webfactional.com to www.techiteasy.org).

You might want to use something like IntoDNS to check the status of your DNS entries and that they’re working.

Once this is all clear, you might want to use Google’s webmaster tools to see if there are any problems with your site. You can do this earlier, but you need to verify the domain to access all the stuff (and you can’t verify it while on WP.com).

This is also a good point to send e-mails to other authors of your blog of all the changes you’ve done (Sorry, guys) and that they might need to create new accounts.

One nice side effect is that people who access your blog’s ancient address (yourblog.wordpress.com) are redirected to your new place as long as you’ve subscribed to WP’s own domain thing. This also goes for RSS feeds. However, it’s a bit troublesome trying to access your old blog’s admin panel anymore at WP.com, because even that tries to redirect to the new one. Once you get there, though, you might want to write an entry explaining that the site has moved for the time when your domain add-on runs out at WP.com.

Conclusion

And that’s pretty much that. Now what you need to do is to keep on cranking out blog posts.

Maintaining your blog on your own does add a bunch of overhead. You need to make sure your setup is up-to-date and secure. On the other hand, you have complete freedom to tweak every aspect of your blog. For us, the benefits of latter were big enough to do the change. If this had been my personal blog, I wouldn’t have bothered.

The migration is far from simple and there are lots of things that can go wrong, so do set a good amount of time to do the migration (fe. a weekend). Basically as long as you don’t update nameservers, you have a nice test environment where to test out different aspects of your new and shiny blog. The only problem is syncing the content (including comments) between your “live” and test sites.

So far, I’ve been very pleased by the set-up Webfaction has and do recommend them. Full SSH and their custom domain/app/site panel are excellent. It beats hands down many of the other hosts that I’ve used so far. Even though with the latest WordPress that doesn’t mean so much because you don’t have any reason to dig into the system with FTP or SSH because everything is available from the web interface.

Photos by Bethany L King (CC BY-ND 2.0) and rangerdawson.

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Since last September, I’ve been taking a Ph.D. level course on the future of internet, IT and related fields called Bit Bang at Helsinki University of Technology’s Multidisciplinary Institute of Digitalisation and Energy. The students are all Ph.D. students from either TKK (HUT), University of Art and Design Helsinki or my own Helsinki School of Economics. The course is given by a former CTO of Nokia, Yrjö Neuvo. So, the course is a kind of a dream team of Finnish education system…

During the fall, we were divided into groups and my group’s task was to write about the implications of carbon nanotechnology until 2025. The other groups wrote similar papers on other technologies such as Processors & Memory, Telecommunications and Printed Electronics. Now, during the spring, we’ll do similar papers but on much broader topics: intelligent machines, globalisation, future of media and future of living. These papers will be combined into a book at the end of spring term (thanks to the Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund). To get a feeling of what we are writing, here’s an excerpt of our nanotechnology report’s introduction (PDF).

But, now to the more important part. As a part of this course, we’re going to a week-long study trip to California at the end of February, between 23th–28th. We’ll be visiting Berkeley, Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, and some other places and most of us will spend the week-end at San Francisco. If this sounds familiar, long time readers of this blog might remember Jeremy’s original Tech IT Easy SV trip in 2007.

The program for the trip is starting to form and these are some of the places and people we’re probably going to visit. The official program isn’t out yet, but this is what I quickly jotted down.

• University of California, Berkeley; David Messerschmitt
• Stanford University, and coincidentally, Stanford Entrepreneurship Week (We’ll also be attending the Fair on 24.2.).
• Trip Hawkins at Digital Chocolate (he’s probably more better known as the founder of Electronic Arts)
• Mårten Mickos at Sun Microsystems (was CEO at MySQL)
• The Google
• Ideo
• IBM (most likely one of their research centers somewhere in Palo Alto)
• HP Labs
• Nokia lablet & Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto
• Michel Wendell at Nexit Ventures
• And probably some others that I already forgot about

It’s starting to look like a busy week (perhaps not as busy as Jeremy’s, though.) and the guys we’re meeting with aren’t exactly small players. So, here’s my question to you: What should we/I ask from these guys? We have the amazing opportunity to talk with these guys and it would be nice to know what the Tech IT Easy crowd would be interested to know.

This is my second trip to USA and first to San Francisco, so another question from me is: What should I do and see at SF? Basically we have four days of official program and two “vacation” days.

The above program is just the official program, and there’s a group of us eager Ph.D. students from Finland’s top universities who would probably want to see more of what’s going on in SF. All ideas are welcome, but keep in mind our strict time constraints.

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I’m pretty sure that by now many of you have read at Times Online, or at some blog linking to it, how Google, not only destroys the moral backbone of China, but how they are destroying the world – one search at a time. Nick Carr, as usual, has already written already quite nicely on the subject.

A data center you can drive around to cause even more greenhouse gas emissions.

I wasn’t that surprised to find out that Times had referenced Gartner and, I assume, Koomey’s paper (PDF) on IT power consumption, because these are the first, easiest-to-find and only reliable results one gets if one searches for such information… on Google. I was working on a paper recently and tried to find this same exact information on ICT power consumption and ended up using both above-mentioned papers as my sources.

Anyway, according to the Times and the guy who estimated all this, a Google search pops out 7 grams of CO2, everyone’s favourite greenhouse gas. To put this into perspective, that’s about 58 meters worth of driving on a car that meets EU’s 2012 target of 120g/km. As Carr points out, it’s pretty sad that the calculations behind this number aren’t public, because they’re, as he says, pretty “dubious”. Times talks about actual grams of CO2 and not some hypothetical grams, so I’m assuming that is the average amount of actual CO2 pumped to the atmosphere from a normal search.

So, let’s mangle some other numbers too. EIA estimated 2006 CO2 emissions (from consumption of coal) of US at 2 306 million metric tons and the world total at 12 064 million metric tons. According to Nicholas Carr’s calculations, Google search would account for 0,02% of the world’s CO2 emissions or about as much as Argentina. At around €15 per EUA ton (EU emission Allowance), the cost of those emissions would be about 180 000 MEUR, which is pretty good from a company whose market capitalization is less than half of that (99 billion USD). Also, by combining Google’s emissions with Gartner’s estimate, the global ICT industry is about the size of 100 Google-equivalents. (I think that’s pretty low number.)

This dicking around with guestimations and numerology is, in my opinion, pretty stupid and totally counter-productive. This is suboptimization at its worst. This whole thing reminds me of Blackle, the “black version of Google”. The idea was that white pixels consume more electricity than black ones. Well, it turned out that this was totally wrong.

Your computer does not pump out greenhouse gases through its fans like airplanes or cars do. Much depends on how that electricity is generated. Writing this post caused no CO2 emissions on my part – my computer’s electricity comes from renewable or nuclear sources. And as for hosting this blog post, I think it’s safe to assume that my marginal costs on Wordpress.com are pretty negligible (Wordpress.com says that there are today over 151 000 posts besides mine). As for you, dear readers, I’ve no idea where your electricity comes from.

As Carr points out later on in his post, the problem isn’t Google and it’s a bit wrong to focus on Google, whose interests and profits are aligned with consuming as little energy as possible and who has been active in being energy-efficient. Carr asks readers to look at themselves instead. The additional energy consumption of ICT equipment is pretty massive and it’s only growing. There’s very little we can do to change this, as many see benefits in all their new gadgets like laptops, cell phones and, now, netbooks. And modern laptops are pretty energy-efficient already. I think the solution is to use energy sources that do not cause harmful emissions. The keyword I’m after is sustainability.

Besides, what are you going to do instead of searching on the internet? Surf aimlessly? Even though this just numerology, I’d like to know what’s the break-even point at which it would be more efficient to search instead.

There are many good ways to “save the planet” that are based on facts. Feel free to use Google (or any other search engine) to learn about them.

Unpaid advertisement: The guy who originally started out this blog, Jeremy Fain is running a startup to help companies and other organizations to be “green”. If you are worried about your organization’s sustainability, why not try out Verteego to build up your sustainability report?

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