Let’s Grab A Coffee!…

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For those that only use a feed reader to access The Digital Edge, things have changed a bit on the site. I’ve done a complete refresh to make it more friendly to mobile devices – and hopefully make it a bit easier to get around and find things on. It’s a work in progress, and I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions on how to make it better.

There is one change in particular that I’d like to point out.

In the process of doing this refresh, I’ve added something that I’ve wanted on the site for quite a while – a direct way for readers of the site to schedule time with me to exchange ideas, discuss technology, or tap into my experiences with the tech startup scene in NYC.


I would love to connect with the readers of this blog face-to-face, and would be happy to grab a coffee and talk at any coffee shop around the city. And for those of you who aren’t in the city (which probably applies to most of you), we can still connect via Skype for a virtual chat. Either way, just reach out to me and we’ll get something scheduled. I’ve set up a TUNGLE.ME account to make my calendar available online, but you can also just email me to set something up.

My goal with this is to connect directly with as many of you as possible, and to open up the lines of communication with everyone that takes the time to read this blog. I get so much out of sharing on this blog, and look forward to connecting in-person.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Believing In Innovation…

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My knees are in pretty bad shape. In fact, every doctor I’ve worked with over the past 10 years has told me that the only real fix available to me is to have them replaced.

But they always give me this recommendation with the qualifier “at some point” tacked on to it. Despite the difficulties my current condition entails, all of them believe I’m about 10 years too young to have the procedure done now. So instead, as a half step to delay the inevitable, I had knee surgery again last week (my 6th knee operation over the past 15 years) to try and provide some temporary measure of relief.

My reason for sharing this with you isn’t a play for sympathy. What I find so interesting here is the justification doctors have for wanting me to wait. There is no doubt that I would benefit from having this procedure done today. Their reticence instead boils down to a conservative view of the future:

The mechanical technology that goes into a knee replacement will only last 25-30 years, and the surgical techniques for the procedure are sufficiently invasive that they would rather not do it a second time.

I grew up during the 1960′s, when science established itself as the engine of progress and shaped my view of an unbounded future. With this as motivation, I have spent my entire post-gratuate career developing and commericalizing new technologies in a series of startups, seeing entire industries reinvented and new ones created in ways no one imagined previously.

In these types of creative environments, decisions aren’t made based on what you know can be done today – to do that would marginalize progress. Instead, they are based on what you ‘believe’ you’ll be able to do at a given point in the future. Innovation isn’t simply a happy upside surprise that occasionally interrupts an otherwise slow, predictable march forward. It is the ephemeral, yet paradoxically substantial, foundation that every significant thing you accomplish will ultimately be built upon. Innovation happens through strength of will and the conviction that you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to – even if the necessary details aren’t clear when you begin.

With this as context, having doctors defer taking beneficial steps today based on concerns about limitations that may exist a quarter century into the future seems counter intuitive to me. Believing in innovation isn’t a ticket to be reckless, and I do understand that there are risks involved. That said, it should give us the confidence to move forward with things we see as reasonable, even if we currently lack the clarity of detail we will need at some point in the future to execute on it.

To me, that is what believing in innovation is all about.

I do appreciate that doctors need to balance a range of medical, legal, and business factors that are all significant elements of these types of decisions. My comments here are really meant as a more general call for us to recapture that fundamental belief in our ability to solve the challenges we face and to the capture the opportunities we have in front of us – even when they initially seem overwhelming. We need to view risk in our society less as a yoke of uncertainty that we should avoid, and more as a liberating force of possibility that we should embrace.

This belief is an essential component of building an innovative culture. And it’s what makes America a beacon for so many people throughout the world.

Preview of Windows Phone 7

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Wired Magazine put up a quick look at the technical preview version of Windows Phone 7 that Microsoft has been floating around. This video doesn’t show much in the way of details (and is a pretty lame review overall), but it does give you a general sense of the thinking and flow behind their new UI design:

With the caveat that I haven’t actually played with the new phone myself, I’m left with the impression that the ’tiles’ design of Microsoft’s latest mobile OS – what they call the “Metro” UI – is going to require a lot of scrolling around – especially if you have a lot of applications you normally work with. For better or worse, Windows Phone 7 is clearly not another iPhone knockoff – something I do give Microsoft props for. It is approaching the phone as a social tool, and weaving all forms of communication you have with people together into a cohesive stream anchored by the people you connect with instead of through discrete services.

That said, I just don’t have a good feeling about this. I’m getting the sense that Microsoft is getting the spin machine started up early – never a good sign. No amount of PR is going to save this phone if it fails to deliver, and the competition is only getting tougher the longer it takes for them to release it. Their ambitions and focus seem to be in the right place, but the OS will need to translate that into something that is easy for people to understand and use in real world set ups and situations.

Train wreck, wild success, or something in between, with Microsoft’s entire mobile strategy riding on this new OS, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Once I get to spend some time with it, I’ll post something more detailed on the specific pros and cons I see – stay tuned…

The New Cisco Cius Tablet. Why?…

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Cisco and Intel have partnered to launch a new tablet device called the Cius.

The Cius (intentionally pronounced as “See Us”), is a small, Android based tablet being pitched to communication/collaboration focused business and educational users. When it comes to describing gadgets, images just seem to work best. So to get a feel for what the Cius is like, just skim through this two part demo of the device given by John Chambers at last week’s Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas:

I’m not sure what Cisco was thinking with the design of the Cius. At this point, Apple’s iPad has set the standard for tablet based devices, and by that metric, the Cius is a major fail. It comes across as a thick and ungainly piece of plastic. The large speaker grill (I’m assuming) in the front takes away from the usable touch surface of the device, and the choice of a 7″ screen makes it too small for running productivity apps – yet too large to easily carry around or use as a camera. Even the look of the software being run was unimpressive – very “last decade” in it’s style and interactivity.

I’m sure there is some segment of the business marketplace that will find this device interesting – I just don’t see it getting any real traction beyond that hard core Cisco fan base.

From what I’ve seen here, Cisco would have been much better off focusing their efforts on supporting 3rd party developers for the iPad/iPhone 4 as well as the nascent Android tablet marketplace. The results they got from doing it all in-house are, to put it mildly, unimpressive.

A Downside Of The App Store Model…

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About a month ago we launched a newsletter publishing app – Publisher HD – on the iTunes App Store. We were really pleased with the response we got to the app, and were jazzed that it even spent some time in both Apple’s “What’s Hot” and “New & Noteworthy” sections for productivity apps.

Publisher HD allows you to hook in to your free Google Reader account (or your professional InfoNgen account) and use content you find there to assemble and customize newsletters for redistribution. It lets people act as web curators, picking out things of interest that they find, commenting on them, and packing them up for redistribution to a targeted audience. (This is effectively the same model some popular publications like the Huffington Post use to serve their readers).

About two weeks ago, Google decided to make a change to the technical methodology they use to authenticate with Reader. Since Google doesn’t publish a formal API to access Reader, this change ended up breaking Publisher HD in a significant way – feeds from Google Reader would no longer refresh. Once we found out what happened, we were able to push out an update, test it, and upload it to the app store all in less than three hours.

Unfortunately, the rest of the App Store process doesn’t move as quickly.

We had to wait about 9 days before the updated version of Publisher HD became available for download. During that time, our download count went way down, and those folks that did download it ended up with an application that probably didn’t work for them. We had to modify our application description on the iTunes Store to let people know that there was an issue and that an update for it was done and awaiting approval. (We didn’t want to pull the App from the store since our professional InfoNgen clients were not affected). It was incredibly difficult to watch all this play out, knowing that we’d already made the fix but were powerless to influence it’s release.

While the App Store’s 7-10 day review window is manageable when dealing with planned updates and enhancements, it can end up being incredibly damaging when something urgently needs to be updated. There should be some avenue made available to developers for the delivery of critical fixes, even if it involves additional costs or an upfront certification that would let them do this directly. Perhaps it would make sense for Apple to allow a certain number of updates with a ‘post release’ review, and with severe penalties for anyone that abuses it. Though situations like this will ideally be infrequent, their typical severity when they do arise should earn them some special consideration.

The fixed version has now been available on the app store for about a week. Even though this episode dampened some the incredible momentum we had from the initial app launch, downloads have started picking up again and I’m optimistic that everything will get back on track. We’ve been lucky in this regard.

Despite having gone through this, I still love the entire app store concept. It provides a delivery and service platform that we could never realize alone as a small development shop – especially in the mobile space. Hopefully, Apple will consider the impact of these kinds of situations as they evolve their app store policies. I’m sure many other development teams have found themselves in a similar situation and have their own tales of woe to tell.

Sadly, some of them probably have a less happy endings.

A Short Movie Shot And Edited On An iPhone 4…

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While I gave you a quick look last Friday at the quality of video produced by the iPhone 4, that was done without any attention to lighting and with the iPhone propped-up against a monitor. The movie I’ve embedded here, while also shot using the iPhone 4, was produced professionally, and leveraged an array of techniques and equipment to produce a clean stable image.

This short movie is called “Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film from Michael Koerbel. At the end of the movie, a small ‘making of’ segment is included that shows exactly how the various shots were composed, blocked, and shot.

Over all, this is an interesting look at how short films are made, and the best example to date of the true quality of the video that can be produced on the iPhone 4.

Not only that, but it was edited entirely on iMovie for iPhone. Without any of the post production tools offered with Final Cut or Avid, I consider this an impressive feat on it’s own.

Enjoy.

What Exactly Is A Browser?…

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If I asked you to define exactly what a Browser is, could you?

At first blush, this may seem like a dumb question. Browsers have been around since Netscape Navigator introduced the concept well over a decade ago, and most technical people can rattle off the names of popular browsers like “Internet Explorer”, “Safari”, “Firefox” and “Chrome” without hesitating. But while it may be easy for people to provide this kind of ‘definition by example’, I would argue that getting people to offer a definition based on more specific criteria would end up being a much bigger challenge.

Let me assert that this isn’t simply an academic question that I’m asking as some intellectual exercise. It has actually become a very important issue that will need to be resolved – both legally as well as in the ethos of the web. To understand why, consider the recent tussle between the NY Times and the young developers of the successful iPad RSS reader called PULSE.

PULSE was one of the applications profiled during Steve Job’s WWDC keynote. It’s a popular application that marries the traditional RSS reader with an innovative browsing interface, creating something really unique. Shortly after that keynote, Apple received a letter from the New York Times demanding that PULSE be removed from the App Store. Here is a clip taken directly from the legal take down notice Apple received:

The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.

Though there’s a long discussion I could have on the commercial use clause in the above quote, for this post consider the line I called out that talks about “framing” sites. Historically, “framing” was the practice where one website would use an HTML ‘<frame>’ command to embed the contents of another web site into it’s display. This was predominantly used by unsavory sorts on the web as a way for them to “capture” the value of another site instead of investing directly in creating value of their own. In response to this, most quality websites started including Terms of Use that specifically banned people from framing them in this way. If nothing else, it gave a site the legal basis to going after any other site that tried to do it to them. In those early days of the web, recognizing this practice was pretty clear and straight forward.

Fast forward to today…

There have been two significant threads of web evolution that have made things far more complicated and less clear. One is that ‘browsers’ have continued to add features and functions that make them much more than simple utilities for browsing web pages. The other is that an increasing number of applications being built today include some form of integrated web browsing as a native component of their functionality.

What this has done is blur the line between browsers and other internet savvy applications, blending code based features with HTML rendered options to enhance the web experience. To get a better sense of this, consider some of the capabilities that are now available within modern browsers.

  • TABS: Perhaps the most basic extension that is now a part of every significant browser is the TAB bar sitting above the browser display:

    Tabs allow multiple web pages to remain open at the same time, simplifying switching between multiple sites. What TABS end up doing, effectively, is framing individual sites and showing only one of them at a time based on which ‘TAB’ is selected. It isn’t using HTML FRAMING, but it uses code to achieve the same result. It is also core to the way most people browse the web today. While this type of function may seem trivial, it is actually one of the issues PULSE came under fire for.

  • REFORMATTING: Some browsers are starting to go a step further and actually reformat the content displayed on a web page. Consider this snapshot I took of the new READER feature in the latest version of Apple’s Safari browser:

    READER lets a person take any web page with a single article on it and view it in an easy to read window without any images, ads, or other distracting ‘web noise’. Though this capability is built in to Apple’s latest version of this browser, I think it clearly falls outside any traditional definition of “web browsing”. In many ways, it does something even worse than ‘page framing’. READER creates a denatured version of the page, removing any branding or advertising the creators of the content originally packaged with it. You can even mail it or print it in this reduced form.

  • PLUG-IN’s: Beyond the capabilities offered by browsers natively, most modern browsers also provide ways for their feature sets to be extended through Plug-ins. Plug-ins are lightweight applications that ‘plug in’ to the back-end functionality of a browser to extend it in some way. Plug-ins can leverage a browser to do things like communicate with hosted services across the internet, direct the browser to open different web pages, analyze the content being displayed on a page, or even augment it with outside content. Consider this screen shot of a plug-in called GLUE. In this case, the plug-in has been activated by someone looking at a specific book on the Barnes & Noble web site:

    One of the features ‘GLUE’ adds to a browser is the ability to analyze what is being shown on a page, find specific items that are being mentioned there, and give people additional options for interacting with those items. In this case it has recognized the book and, among other choices, has given them the option to buy the book – on Amazon. I have no doubt that B&N would much prefer that choice not to be a simple left mouse click away on their site.

In all of these cases, the browsers are providing functionality that goes beyond simple browsing. In some of them, the functionally is either passively or actively at odds with what the site providers would like to have done with their content. At this point in time, all of these capabilities – since they are happening within mainstream browsers – have become accepted practice on the web.

Compared to what some of these browsers can end up doing to web pages, what PULSE did to tick off the NY Times is almost trivial. Safari can let people browse through their RSS feeds (another built-in ‘browser’ feature) and open any interesting articles they find using the ‘READER’ interface show above. However, because PULSE is “an application”, the same basic type of functionality falls afoul of the NY Time’s terms of use – a distinction in form but not in function.

It’s clear that the way many web sites (and possibly even the law) view this distinction is out of touch with where the technology has progressed. Drawing a clearly defined line between browsers and applications would be a fruitless exercise. In fact, given the shift to the mobile web, I would expect browsing to start happening a lot more via application embedded browsers. Our underlying norms of ‘browsing’ may actually be changing at this point.

I have no doubt that finding common ground here between content publishers and consumers won’t be easy – but this is an area that needs to be debated and discussed. A compromise of some kind will need to be reached and a new “cultural standard” established in this area.

The great thing about the web community is that it still has the capacity to do that.

A Quick Look: The iPhone 4's Video Camera Quality…

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As I mentioned earlier, one of the features of the new iPhone 4 that I’ve been looking forward to using is the built-in 720p HD video camera. Here is a short video I recorded on the iPhone 4 that I hope will give you a feel for the image quality you can get with it:

This video was recorded with just the ambient light in the studio, and was compressed into h.264 and uploaded on to YouTube.

I would love your feed back.

Bringing 3-D Video Production To The Masses…

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I’ve been getting ready to begin producing new video podcasts for The Digital Edge again, and that has made me start paying a bit more attention to what is currently going in the video production space. While not immediately applicable to what I plan on shooting, one of the most interesting new areas in video now is the production of 3D ready content.

3D has become a key draw for many new movies and big budget productions, most notably James Cameron’s recent movie Avatar. The basic premise of 3D filming is to record two distinct image streams simultaneously from lenses that are spaced apart by the same distance as a normal person’s two eyes. This spacing is known as the inter-ocular distance. When played back on the correct viewing equipment, these two streams combine to produce images that appear to be three dimensional. The best 3D playback systems being produced today are based on a display that is synced up with a special pair of glasses. These glasses alternately block the image for one eye or the other, with each eye only seeing one of the image streams recorded on the 3D camera. Our native “persistence of vision” (the time the retina holds on to an image after it is gone) lets the system impress a unique image on both eyes while our mind ends up processing it as a single complex image. The “stereo imaging” this creates provides a person with a perception of depth equivalent to what they would see in real life.

But 3D is more than just a technology for movie theaters. 3D televisions with alternating shutter glasses have just started to become available in consumer channels, with top CE firms like Sony actively supporting it. Content providers are also moving into this space with major producers like ESPN and Discovery committing to creating channels carrying nothing but 3D programming. While adoption may start off slowly, 3D has made a good start in establishing itself as a viable delivery model for high value productions both big and small. I expect it to start moving mainstream over the next three years.

The place where I do expect 3D delivery to really take off very quickly is in video games. The detailed environments developed for most video games today can easily be repackaged for 3D delivery, allowing game producers to come to market with a substantial back catalog of 3D material without a significant ramp up delay. A strong selection of 3D games would likely accelerate adoption, and make the purchase of any new equipment required for 3D playback an easier decision to make. Gamers also tend to be experience junkies and would naturally be drawn to something that offered the kind of truly immersive experience that 3D can.

I’d like to get the chance to see more 3D programming first hand – especially 3D sports – before committing the money needed to buy a system like this for myself. But from what I see of it so far, I do expect that 3D television will become a part of my home technology arsenal at some point in the foreseeable future.

It just won’t be coming to my Digital Edge productions quite yet…

Early Delivery…

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I received the following email from Apple Store early this morning:

Dear Apple Store Customer,

You recently received a Shipment Notification email from Apple advising you that your iPhone has shipped.

This email is to confirm that your delivery will occur on June 23rd. Although Apple and FedEx tracking information may currently indicate a later date, you can check the FedEx website the morning of the June 23rd to track your package to your doorstep.

In the event that you will not be available to accept delivery on June 23rd, it may be more convenient to use our pre-sign delivery option by visiting our Order Status website at http://www.apple.com/orderstatus.

Sincerely,

The Apple Store Team

Early delivery? – No Problem!

Now that’s the kind of email I like to get. :-)