When Firefox, previously called Phoenix and Firebird, launched tabbed browsing (well, after Bloatzilla), I was super-excited and pimping it to all my friends. It’s been a while since I felt this way and, with tab-saving in browsers (which I of course turn on), I tend to choose the browser with the least tabs saved in it. Apps like Choosy for the Mac, which gives me a pop-up with a choice of browsers whenever clicking a link, or which chooses the best-performing browser running at the time, are a life-saver, but they are just a piecemeal solution to a greater problem.

Firefox, in its latest version (3.6), introduced a nifty feature for a better tab user-experience, which I hope they expand a little more. Basically, when you click on the little icon on the top right (see screenshot), you get a nice overview, called “Showcase,” of all the tabs loaded in your browser at the time.

A similar implementation is of course Safari’s and Chrome’s start-window, which shows you an overview of your most viewed sites, making it a visual replacement for your bookmarks and/or history managers.

For some time now, you’ve also had the feature of restoring tabs after closing your browser, either voluntary, which makes sense as tabs consume an insane amount of ram and CPU (especially for Flash sites, but for plenty of other things also), and as a safety feature, when your browser crashes. Saft for Safari (Mac only) introduced a tab-recovery user-interface (see picture), where you see a list of tabs previously loaded and where you can tick or untick sites that you want to start up with. I believe Firefox has a similar interface for tab-recovery after a crash.

But it’s all still a hassle and I really haven’t come across a perfect implementation of dealing with several dozens of tabs. I wouldn’t mind having the option of starting Firefox tab-free, with option of restoring whatever tab I used previously, in its original state, via something like the Firefox Showcase interface. There are some Firefox extensions that do just that, but I’ve so far not come across something that is intuitively usable.

There is the other problem, which is that sometimes you want to open a browser for a single purpose, such as Google Maps, Gmail, or the weather, and it’s annoying to have to open a browser with 50+ tabs in it. Some sites have become applications rather than sources of information and just like it doesn’t make sense to open the full Office suite when opening Microsoft Word, it doesn’t make sense to open several tabs to go to one site.

Since last night, I’m experimenting with Fluid on the Mac, one of a few, I’m sure, applications that turn websites into applications that launch from your application folder. So I now have a Google Calendar app, a Google Docs app, etc. For Gmail, I really like Mailplane, which also uses Webkit, Safari’s open source sibling, as a basis for creating a service dedicated to one site, or in Mailplane’s case, multiple Gmail accounts.

So far that is the best user-experience for me if I want to go to a site that is also an application. Tabs, I’m sure, have a purpose, but they just invite information overload and the guilt for not being able to deal with it all. If you, the readers, have similar experience, feel free to share them, and if you found solutions, please let us know as well!

Addendum: talk about measuring the real cost of tabs… In the last weeks, I received 12 identical letters from the Dutch government regarding an access code I requested once. Turns out that it was one of my 50 saved tabs in Firefox that, every time I restarted the browser, requested a new code when the page loaded.

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Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts  in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

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If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape.  You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.

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Dear everyone,

I am extremely happy to start off this new year by introducing a fresh face on Tech IT Easy, Anand Kishore Raju, who will be blogging with us in 2010. His main areas of focus as a blogger will be greening the internet, carbon footprints, energy and power figures of the internet and web2.0.

Anand is currently working as a Research Engineer at Telecom ParisTech (ENST). His area of research focuses on the Energy aspects of the Internet, what the scientific community calls “Green Networking”. His efforts are directed towards making Computer Network Science aware that processing, moving and storing bits has a cost in terms of energy and in terms of the Carbon Emission Footprint.

In the past, Anand had also worked at Collaborative Systems Group (ColSys) at Bilkent University, Turkey, where he developed a taxonomy for user properties, influence factors for feedback quality in web 2.0, existing and novel models for deviation types and their detection. He also holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering and aspires to join HEC in near future.

Anand joins a smart team of collaborators, some of which also work in green computing and many of which share an interest in this important topic for sure. As such, please join us in welcoming Anand to the team and I hope you enjoy reading his words on Tech IT Easy!

Happy New Year,

The Tech IT Easy team

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I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible.

Sarah Lacy writes about SMSONE, a ultra-local news provider in India similar to Outside.IN, a Union Square Ventures funded US-only company that provides news updates via the web. SMSONE does it, as the name suggests, via SMS. And it spreads through a franchising model, working with local entrepreneurs that pay a franchise fee and also collect a share of the advertising revenue from locally focussed businesses. It is able to do this because of something that apparently doesn’t exist in the US (but does in Europe): receiving an SMS in India doesn’t cost the recipient anything.

When reading about this, I was immediately reminded of a similar business model employed by a Dutch entrepreneur in Russia, Ms. Annemarie van Gaal, founder of Independent Media, a company that distributed Russian versions of magazines like Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire en Good Housekeeping (source). When she spoke at the Star entrepreneurial seminar in Rotterdam a year ago, she told us about how she differentiated herself from the competition (paraphrased as I haven’t got my notes with me):

The trouble with getting your magazines distributed in Russia was that you had to pay quite a lot of money (some would call it bribes) to companies that would then take care of it… badly. Instead van Gaal decided to do it differently. She would hire street kids to distribute her magazines, similar to the gold days of newspapers: the newspaper boy.

If you read Sarah Lacy’s account on Techcrunch, you’ll see that SMSONE does it similarly, hiring local kids, often without much education, to take care of distribution. Doing it via official channels is likely a nightmare over there, and centralising distribution kind of defeats the purpose of micro-news.

It’s a different way of thinking, which many of us westerners don’t have. I mean, would you entrust your products to a beggar on the street or to a street musician? Not only is it probably against the law (except if the government does it), we pride ourselves on our super-organised infrastructure, where anything from temp-workers to interns are there to provide companies with a flexible workforce, and anything from printing presses to mobile internet exists to produce and distribute your stuff.

Of course, I wouldn’t just leave you with these two examples. In the beginning of 2008, Boston Consulting Group published a study of “local dynamos”— domestically focussed companies, which use creative business models to capture value from emerging markets that are filled with challenges, like lacking infrastructure and low-income consumers. The map below shows how widespread these companies are.

Some very interesting examples are mentioned, like:

• Shanda, a Chinese gaming-company, that, in order to combat software-piracy, focusses on providing interactive services through gaming, services that are impossible to pirate. And to overcome a lack of a financial infrastructure to pay for online services, they work with pre-paid cards.
• Indian CavinKare, which sells cheap sachets of shampoo through small local retailers, while using educational marketing to teach customers how to use their products.
• Goodbaby, which targets the many 1-child families in China, who are both willing to spend more on their child than multi-child families would, but are also in need of education.
• Amul, an Indian food-and-beverage-marketing-organisation, which collects and pays for milk locally, while tracking all operations via satellite and uses ERP solutions to make analysis based on the data and gauge whether future supply needs to be increased or decreased.
• Wimm-Bill-Dann Foods (Russia), which works extensively with local partners, and has devised leasing schemes for expensive machinery to boost their production and is able to serve 280 million consumers nation-wide.

The BCG, of course, takes the stance of its customers, Western companies, and the study is mainly aimed at how multinational companies (MNCs) can replicate 6 of these dynamo’s advantages, in order to compete with them. They are:

1. Customising to local needs – which involves first understanding these needs, and then meeting them.
2. Devising innovative business models that overcome local challenges – a logical follow-up to the last point, how to make money from the info you gained.
3. Leveraging the latest technologies – meaning that these emerging economies are less burdened with traditional infrastructure and quicker on the uptake of more affordable, newer, and easier-to-spread technology, e.g. mobiles.
4. Benefiting from low-cost labor and overcoming shortages of skilled labor – there’s two ways to look at this; a local workforce will be better equipped to interact on a local level, a highly-trained workforce will be better equipped to run a business. Tough call.
5. Scaling up fast – Russia, India, China, Brazil, etc. are all giants with the promise of huge rewards when you capture them. Many of these dynamos grow quickly through both through acquisitions and building up their network of suppliers and distributors.
6. Sustaining long-term hypergrowth without imploding – this kind of follows on to the last point

Some of the Western companies mentioned, which have managed to compete on a local level, include:

• General Motors, which has adapted its luxury-liners to meet the demands of its Chinese customers, who are usually sitting in the back;
• LG, in China, which has learned that the audio-quality of its televisions is more valued by its customers, who often reside in noisy environments;
• Carrefour, which has started to work with local municipal governments in China, as these don’t meddle in their operations like local dept. stores would, and are able to provide access to prime locations;
• Perfetti Van Melle, in India, a candle/chewing-gum manufacturer, which has found local means to advertise, interacts frequently with local partners, and has adapted its products to local tastes;
• and Yum! Brands, which owns Pizza Hut and KFC, and has adapted its menus to meet local Chinese tastes, started a new food-chain aimed specifically at the market, and uses its international expertise to integrate IT, lean supply chains, and a higher level of food standards into their offering.

It shows the value of out of the box thinking in terms of reaching people, and I believe that traditional “Western” thinking should long ago have been thrown out the door anyway, particularly in light of the troubles that media-, automotive, and financial industries are going through. We are in the flux of disruptive innovation and only those quickest to grasp new technologies and ways of thinking are able to survive another day.

No shortage of lessons on that from entrepreneurs in emerging economies…

Vincent out

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Hi, Vincent here. I have neither the intent, nor the talent to develop this application, but it was a thought/pain I experienced at a museum today and an iTunes search didn’t reveal an app like it.

A brief background. I’m pretty a-cultural, but I find audio-tours in museums generally a must, which means I usually spend the 5 or 10 euros extra to get one of those players to walk around the exhibition with headphones on. A little anti-social, but it helped me discover the lives of some amazing artists, like Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. And my favourite nation of artists: Japan!

Yesterday, I was an an exhibition of “That Scream Guy” Edvard Munch. I was there with my sister and it seemed a little wasteful (it was only 3 rooms of lithographies), not to mention anti-social, to get an audio-guide. Still, it helps tremendously to get just a little background on a picture, really adding to the experience.

Here’s the iPhone app I would like to see.

1. Point the phone at a painting (an immediate weakness there),
2. image recognition happens (how?),
3. it hooks into a source of info about it (preferably in an audio-format) such as Wikipedia,
4. and you get to hear or see a description of the painting you are seeing.

It’s nothing genius and apart from perhaps the image recognition part, it seems fairly cheap/easy to produce.

The one weakness: cameras in museums aren’t always allowed. I would guess this means that you have to work together with museums to get things going (which sucks!).

Well, this is just something I want to throw out there, a la the much underused twitter hashtag #freeideasiwanttoseehappen

So if someone is looking for a creative challenge, you have your first customer right here!

/Vincent

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Whether or not to design a new OS is probably the wrong question to ask at this point. Gruber says that hardware makers should strongly consider going the Apple route and design their OS and hardware combined. I think that the iPhone vs. any other mobile OS battle, and any other standards-battle really, proves that it’s not so much about the OS as it is a about critical mass of apps. At the same time, had the App-less iPhone v1 (lame pun intended) been a badly design hardware+OS, then no one would’ve bought it. But that was threshold 1, which the iPhone got out of and we are in threshold 2 now: features, i.e. Apps.

PC OSs are in the same boat. As much as I like Mac OS X, if it didn’t run the apps that I needed to be productive or unproductive (you know, media & games…), then the chances of me getting a Mac are zero. Any new OS maker is in the same boat, having to think about both their OS and the apps that run on it. A hardware maker designing an OS would have to think about all three dimensions (+ all the other stuff: consumers, partners, etc.).

I think I was fairly down on Android as an OS and fairly up on Chrome OS (COS), long before it either came out. I’m still sort of down on Android and very much up on COS. The reason is for once not hardware or software, it’s the changing world of telecommunication.

I haven’t been silent about my feelings about mobile operators. They’re not good, mostly for people in Europe that travel internationally a lot. And just when some positive movement is happening in terms of mobile and sms roaming charges, we now get Internet roaming, where operators still find plenty of opportunities to gouge consumers. It’s not unusual to pay several Euros/dollars/pounds per MB for instance, which is o.u.t.r.a.g.e.o.u.s.

As such, when I saw the ASUS EEE and all the other Netbook models being offered with subscriptions, I was skeptical. But what I didn’t think much about, because I wasn’t a user at the time, was the opportunities that ubiquitous internet (within roaming reality) offered: by buying a subscription with a laptop you are in fact instantly online, which makes any argument against a NetOS moot. It completely opens up the road for a NetOS maker, like Google, but also like Nokia, RIM, Palm, Apple, Microsoft, etc. to build an OS that entirely operates on a connected backbone. This is the opportunity that I see Chrome OS exploiting and why I think it, as well as the iPhone netbook/tablet if it comes out, will be massively successful.

I still don’t like the idea of hardware enslaving itself to telecom-operators. But I think we really can start thinking about a cable-less world a few years from now, with all the implications (no more offices, augmented shopping, etc.) that it can bring.

Yay mobile net. Yay Net OS.

/ Vincent

(Picture: city in clouds, courtesy of www.crestock.com)

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Read today about a new service in the Netherlands that is doing very well. It’s called doehetzelfnotaris.nl, which translates roughly as ‘Do-it-yourself Notary,” and has already attracted 13,000 visitors since it launched 2 weeks ago (for NL, that’s a big deal). By allowing you to automatise certain services, like preparing the contracts and wills, it claims to save you 30% of the price of having a notary take care of these things. Needless to say that during these financial troubles, people like it when they can save some money.

At our financial trust, I’m currently filling out a pretty long survey from the Luxemborg statistical office (STATEC) regarding our level of “internetisation.” It’s not easy being digital in a world where you often deal with highly sensitive data, sometimes coming from individuals who do not like dealing with you through digital means. The very word “Trust” in our company description, already forces you to ask the question: can clients trust us using digital communication?

The answer is in most cases No. Go to any bank and try to get significant things done and they want you to sign for it. Same with notaries (and doehetzelfnotaris.nl does not automatise the signing part). The financial sector is particularly stuck in what I would call “the old world,” though not, I would say, without good reasons.

My question to you is:

• is there such a thing as fool-proof communication, which cannot be falsified by any means?
• Is there a surrogate for being there in person and signing your name?

I don’t know of any, but I always assume that our readers are smarter than me.

Chime in, if you can.

Vincent
(Picture of a Robot Accountant. Waah!?)

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Briefly. With all this Chrome OS and HTML 5 talk, you’d think that we were already at the stage where we could run all apps in our browsers. Close, but one thing that I think is terrible about the current state of browsers is that they become so damn bloated the more you use them. Here’s Firefox, for instance, after just loading it and about 30 tabs:

My Macbook’s fans are running like crazy.

Apart from the obvious, that there needs to be better memory / processor management for tabs—optimally, unused tabs should use minimal percent of both—another big problem is the lack of visibility of what you have open in your browser. As soon as I have 10+ tabs open and a number disappear of the page or are in different browser-windows, I have no overview, not to mention little idea of what little flash- and other widgets are being opened in each page.

Some innovations, I’d like, are:

1. Grouping of tabs by domain-names, similarly to how Windows allows you to group windows by app.
2. The ability to control whether Flash is being loaded, what kind of flash, and what kind of other apps. Yes, I know about flash- and ad-blocking, but something more elaborate.
3. Better than 2, a common webpage standard for how much memory / processing a web-page should typically take. And perhaps a browser-imposed limit as to what pages get loaded or not.
4. An indication of where a tab is when I’m trying to load the same webpage or domain-page. E.g. I use Netvibes often, each of which has 5-15 widgets in each tab and thus consumes a fair amount of power. When I can’t find the right tab, I open multiple instances, which obviously slows down the browser some more.

All of this is relevant, I feel, both because of the “shift” we are seeing towards “Browser-OSs,” but also because there is a trend towards buying less powerful single-purpose machines often for use on the road. A bloated browser can use as much battery as running a game, the difference being that most mobile travellers know better than to run a game on the road.

Rant over. Would love to hear about Firefox extensions or Browser innovations that overcome some of these problems.

Vincent

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Just briefly, as the only reason I’m standing is due to the fumes of caffeine, rather than a good night’s sleep.

I just finished going through the Lesson’s Learned blog post on “The Principles of Product Development Flow,” which I think is an excellent review of a book that I does not seem to be on public release yet for us Europeans. Well, you could order it from Amazon.com.

I’m fascinated with things like lean manufacturing, total quality management, agile development, etc. Basically, product development, which Eric enticed me with, as it’s the crucial link between invention and commercialisation (aka the definition of innovation).

That said, product development is something that you best learn in university and not (just) from a book. Several reasons:

• anyone can say that they read a book
• there are no tests at the end of books, no accreditation for you.
• it’s a singular view at a problem, while in a course you (hopefully) get presented with multiple views
• you equally don’t have your peers or teachers to discuss problems and solutions with.
• And, the most important reasons of all, a good university provides a link between theory and application, by providing you with opportunities for doing internships and/or jobs.

None of this is sadly provided by books and is why I feel that reading a book on product development and management will only help someone actively engaged in this activity and/or doing a study in this field.

That said, I think that those are all areas where bloggers, authors, companies, and educational institutes can do a lot about improving the system of learning and particularly the link between learning and application.

Just my point of view, I’d love to hear yours.
Vincent
(Picture courtesy of sinesoflearning.blogspot.com)

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From the European FT this weekend:

“Blackberry owners will soon be able to download music wireless tracks to an application that will help the smartphone compete with those made by Apple and Nokia. … Most tracks will not have copy protection software, which restricts how many devices the music can be moved to.”

It’s the word “most,” which has triggered today’s rant on PR, technology, media, and more. First of, what kind of statement is that most tracks will not have copy protection? Why not all, why not none?

Looking at the past, we all know that copy protection, aka DRM, has plenty of negative associations attached to it. And, as with most negatively perceived technologies, it has been hacked so often that the word “protected” has just become a PR term. Copy protection is not a feature, it’s a handicap, but clearly most songs on the Blackberry platform will not be handicapped, which is… a feature??

We all know that optimally, no producer (or organisation associated with music production) would allow music to be released DRM-free. But the very fact that protection means Zilch, means that actually there is no point to implementing any kind of DRM-system, except on the request of the owner(s) of particular songs (which probably happened here). So, instead of all or none, we get “most,” which is just BS. I already predict that this new initiative is going to fail, by the sheer indecisiveness of the PR message alone, which is a reflection of how little thought-out the business strategy must be.

My point in all of this, infused by a single expression of vagueness, is that somehow technology has spun out of control. There is a system of checks and balances in place, there is a self-correcting mechanism at play, but no one has the complete overview of how it works and when it will work. In the case of the recession, for example, things will balance themselves out again. And hopefully we will get a system in place, the more open the better, that will regulate what is happening. But there will very likely be many casualties of war.

In the case of media and profiting from it, it looks bad, very bad. The word “most” perfectly reflects the uncertainty of where it is all heading, but anyone can see that with production and distribution becoming cheaper and more decentralised, there is hardly any need for centralised music companies, except to build systems that track what is out there and rate it (e.g. CBS/Last.fm, Hypemachine) or to fund the more expensive part of the formula: getting on TV/radio (which will also disappear at some point) or setting up a concert (which will hopefully never disappear, but is hopefully self-sufficient).

Sadly, the only solution I see to saving “the industry” is to silo everything off, which is arguable already happening when you look at the behaviour of businesses like Pandora, CBS/Last.fm, and Hulu) and sue the crap out of anyone infringing. That would make everything nice and predictable again, but only if you could make it impossible to go from one side to the other. Star wars.

Some systems where this is the case, more or less, would be gaming consoles, and you would need the same for audio and video content. But because the light and the dark side (traditional media vs. new media vs. piracy) are not separated, you will continue to see a shift towards freeing everything until the only thing predictable will be that there is no money to be made from media, just from the products (e.g. merchandising) and services (e.g. concerts) around it.

Yes, I continue to be very down on traditional media. Feel free to lift my spirits in this area.

Vincent

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Comments on this blog? No, not many, and I know I’m not alone either. Another blogger thought that the main casualty of Twitter isn’t blogging, but actually commenting. We alluded to something similar a few years ago, when Kari and me both wrote blog posts on where the conversation was going. Ironically, back then, we did get comments, but my conclusion was that comments were moving towards more specialised platforms, like Digg, Slashdot, and now Friendfeed, and maybe Twitter.

Back when I followed 300 people on Twitter you couldn’t pay me enough to read my Twitter-stream. I called it trying to drink from a waterfall several times and you all know what happens when you drink from a waterfall: you fall in!

No, the only way I read Twitter content and pretty much the best way to catch my attention these days is to @vincentvw me, just because I have an rss-feed just for that.

The traditional, “writing for success” way? Write a compelling title. But that has back-fired on me as a reader more than once. You can also write posts to p*ss off people, which is pretty effective, but leads to stuff like death threats.

I like the idea of pinging someone personally, à la the Twitter reply, much more. What I would like is something as follows:

A system that gives people the option to register with their names, contact-details, and interests (in the form of tags, maybe). And when, and only when, that particular interest is being written about, then you get pinged.

I guess you could already do this with some fancy Google tracking or just by subscribing to a tag-based rss-feed (Delicious allows for this, not sure about other platforms). But I see this as a great way for blogs to become relevant once more. It would also force bloggers to connect more with their readers’ interests and perhaps lead to a stronger community feel.

What do you think?

Vincent
(Picture, called “Emptiness is form,” is courtesy of Scott Snibbe.)

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I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

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Dear readers,

For a reunion event of people all over the world that I am co-organising, of which a certain part cannot show up, I am planning to give the latter a chance to send their greetings recorded across the internet and shown in either video or audio-format (with picture) at the event.

However, I am a need of the appropriate service that can facilitate this process. Essentially, I am looking for:

1. Something that is web-based and does not require a user to install software on their computer
2. Something that will take video and/or (preferably both, but not necessary) audio
3. Preferably at an adequate resolution / audio quality to be played on a large screen in front of a large room of people
4. Something that I can export into an application like iMovie for Mac or Windows Movie Maker
5. As this would likely be a compilation of 50 or so people, something that requires minimal effort on my part, except for setting up the service, doing the downloading, and post-editing.

I realise that this is likely unknown territory for many of you, as it is for me, but I think would actually generally be pretty cool and hope to brainstorm about your ideas and/or the possibilities/limitations with you.

Any ideas?

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of Kimpton Middle School)

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