Back in the late 1990′s, the internet was starting to blow up into something big. Tiny companies with no revenue – but outsized ambition and fanciful business plans – started going public with astonishing valuations. More established businesses, looking on with envy, made getting on the web in some form a strategic mandate.

In those heady days, any company that wanted to be perceived as ‘hip’ started forming a digital division to manage their web presence, and advertising agencies rushed to form web consultancies to help them. Billions of dollars were spent setting up new ‘online’ divisions. It didn’t matter if what they did on the web really served a business goal – or even if had anything to do with the business they were in. It was more about flash than substance, and being digital was a virtue in and of itself. Everyone involved had a real sense of the major shift that was taking place, and no one wanted to miss out or be left behind. Even though so much of what was being done then was just bad business, it didn’t seem to matter.

At least until the crash of 2000 gave everyone a new perspective on things.

After that wake up call, businesses started reevaluating their approach to the web. It stopped being the ‘new thing’ and started becoming another tool – albeit an important one – in the suite of tools they used to service customers. Being digital shifted away from building a walled off silo of technical coolness, over to providing the technical foundation needed to support an organization’s overall business strategy. It was a tough way to learn the lesson, but the tech bubble collapse was – in retrospect – a positive turning point in the development and maturity of the commercial internet.

Unfortunately, history seems to be repeating itself in the mobile space.

Mobile is the new pillar of technical coolness. Companies are rushing to get their iPhone apps developed and approved. They are touting their ‘mobile strategies’ and setting up mobile groups to let them take advantage of this new channel. The sense of needing to be on a handset is everywhere. So many of the mobile apps being developed by businesses are poorly designed and executed, lacking the substance needed to make them valuable. But that doesn’t seem to matter because businesses are once again afraid of being left behind in the rush. Being mobile is good – no matter how it gets done.

Like the internet, mobile can be an incredibly important business asset – but only if its adopted in a rational way. Businesses need to think clearly about how and where their services can benefit from a mobile connection with their clients. They won’t win by simply showing up for the party – they need to bring something to it with real value. Mobile, like the internet, needs to become a foundational component of a fully considered business strategy – not just an expensive checkbox on a list of cool features and capabilities to deploy.

Lets hope we don’t need the ‘mobile bubble’ to burst before businesses start to see the connection.

Those that may have glanced up at the URL bar of your browser while reading The Digital Edge over the last couple of months probably noticed something a little strange with my domain name – it wasn’t ‘thedigitaledgeblog.com’ anymore…

As I blogged about earlier, chronic problems at my old hosting provider have forced me to relocate my blog to Hostgator. Since I made that switch, I have been working to transfer the domain name over here as well. Unfortunately, the process has been far from painless. (At one point, I was afraid I might actually lose the domain altogether!) It ended up that the least risky thing for me to do was to simply redirect traffic from ‘thedigitaledgeblog.com’ over to a temporary subdomain I set up here at ‘blog.gnural.net’ – and work in the background to get everything resolved.

That was the domain you were seeing…

Well the saga has finally come to a close, with my blog and it’s domain name happily reunited. I’m not sure what any of this has done to my search ranking, but hopefully that will just take care of itself over time. What I am excited about is that I can now focus more the content side of blogging again, and continue working with all of you make this community a worthwhile place to spend a little time each week.

Thanks for your continued support of The Digital Edge.

Having Google and Verizon trying to reach their own compromise around net neutrality has me concerned. Having the FCC threatening a regulatory approach to net neutrality also has me concerned.

I’m just not sure which concerns me more.

I absolutely believe in the importance of net neutrality. It is the driving force behind the evolution and phenomenal growth of the entire web universe. It has allowed tiny startups to have global impact, and has provided the foundation for outsiders to challenge the status quo within institutions and across industries. Preserving net neutrality is central to securing the future viability of the internet.

The thought of having two major corporations – both representing today’s status quo – sitting down together to define what net neutrality should mean for everyone is a bit unsettling. I completely understand the FCC’s reaction and side with their desire to preserve an open internet:

Any outcome, any deal that doesn’t preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet for consumers and entrepreneurs will be unacceptable.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

So what concerns me with the FCC?

It’s really simple – ‘Regulated Net Neutrality’ isn’t the same as ‘Net Neutrality’. The net neutrality that has existed so far has been based on an ethos – a shared way of looking at the net. It can easily adapt to change and make exceptions as needed, because any decisions that are made are done through the lens of open and equal access.

Unfortunately, that isn’t how regulation works.

Regulations are lists of rules – not a code or belief. Some will be vague and others specific, but they will boil down to a list of behavioral do’s and dont’s. Once regulations are passed, the ‘moral code’ they are based on in some ways becomes irrelevant. Lawyers and courts start to become the driving forces behind what is and isn’t acceptable. The specific language of a regulation gets parsed, loopholes get added, and the process ultimately becomes political.

So where does that leave us?

On one side we have an internet defined by lawyers, courts, and politicians, and on the other side an internet defined by large corporations.

I’m simply not in a hurry to embrace either one right now.

I’m still not ready to walk away from the ethos of net neutrality.

After spending over a week on my new Android phone (Samsung Captivate Galaxy S), I can’t help but wonder if the experience I’ve been having with it is typical for other Android phone users.

The Captivate has a lot going for it – a beautiful screen, fast processor, excellent video camera, and good battery life to name a few. It just seems to me that the software – Android 2.1 – isn’t really a serious production release. There seem to be so many things with it that simply don’t function well or reliably. And some of those things are pretty significant on a smartphone:

• The device constantly loses the settings I’ve configured for my Exchange server email. It completely forgets that the account existed on the phone and prompts me to enter a new email account as if I were starting email for the first time. I had it happen at least 7 times before I simply gave up and stopped setting it up again.
• During those times when it did remember the account, deleting emails would be problematic. I would select a set of emails and press Delete, but still see those ‘deleted’ emails sitting there even after the app said they were removed. Sometimes they would go away if I waited a bit. Sometimes I needed to exit out of mail and then return for them to be gone.
• The unit often becomes unresponsive if any I/O is taking place, with the touch screen remaining frozen until it finishes what it is doing. There were several times when I thought the unit had crashed on me only to have it spring back to life 20 seconds later.
• Getting the GPS in the unit to lock on to my position is a complete crap-shoot. Sometimes it connects right away while other times I need to try repeatedly to get it to work – with both experiences happening in the same location right outside my office.

Given my lack of familiarity with Android, my initial reaction was that I was doing something wrong that was causing these things to happen. But after doing a little research to try and figure things out, I’m not so sure. It seems that I am not the only person having problem like this. Whatever the causes, I find myself in a position where I have no confidence in the device.

I had even considered returning it to AT&T for a different smartphone.

What kept me from doing that, despite the problems I’ve been having, is that I can see some real promise in the platform. It absolutely doesn’t feel completely baked or debugged to me, but I can still see glimmers of ‘something powerful’ in the software that are making me stick with it – at least until the new 2.2 FROYO version is released.

Once it’s out, I’ll do a through review of the device, and compare it in detail to my experiences using the iPhone.

And I’ll decide then for myself what I’m going to do next.

At this point, I couldn’t recommend (this) Android phone to anyone if it were the only smartphone/portable computing device they wanted to carry. The reliability just isn’t there – at least for the things I’ve been trying to do with it. If you needed to choose something right now, I think the iPhone is still the way to go – assuming you can deal with being on AT&T.

If you can wait, the best option is to see how good the Android 2.2 released ends up being, and to make your decision then.

I’ve been creating and manipulating media digitally in a variety of formats for over 20 years. For most of what I do, the mouse and keyboard are my main tools. Every tool – digital or analog – influences the creative process to some degree. That said, the digital experience still lacks the immediacy and transparency you can get when using just paper and pencil. In the same way that a tool like PowerPoint shapes the way you think about presenting information – and ultimately what you present – most digital media tools I’m familiar with seem to channel your creative energies in certain preordained directions. I know first hand that you can do some awesome original things in the digital space, but the technology behind it does seems to leave a lot of its own fingerprints on the creative process.

But this might be changing.

Touch based platforms are letting digital tools come closer to replicating the analog experience most of them are modeled on. The video below is an example I found on YouTube of an iPad based art program called “brushes” in action:

The video is really a bit too long, but it is worth skipping through it to see how things are starting to evolve in this space. Both the process and the end result are impressive. What makes this so significant is that everything in the video is happening on a basic portable device – the iPad – that costs just $499, running an inventive drawing program that costs just $7.99. You don’t need to be a digital artist to appreciate just how revolutionary this could end up being.

And this is just the first generation of these tools. Imagine where they’ll be in a couple more years.

Touch computing will be transformational.

There is a certain almost mythical image of the lone programmer burning the midnight oil in front of a computer screen coding the next great thing in software. Having come of age in the technology community as a programmer, I can attest to working many a late night to meet a client deadline, figure out the details of a complex algorithm, or track down an elusive and frustrating bug. And while the passage of time may somehow reshape those memories into something more than just the caffeine addled work marathons they were, it is still clear that those late nights were not the world changing, defining aspects of my programming career – and certainly not the peak of my creative energies.

Despite the solitary mythos of the profession, my best programming came when I was part of a great team of programmers, designers, and creatives. When the mix of people is right, there is a collaborative aspect to this type of environment that seems to produce extraordinary results. I think this is probably true for everyone in this field, and it happens for a variety of reasons:

• Teams increase the “surface area” of knowledge acquisition – The best programming efforts tend to push things to the edge. They look for the best algorithms, tools, design elements, and user experiences. Some of those elements will fully originate from within the team, but most will be inspired, synthesized and expanded from work happening in other technical communities people are connected to. For the individual, that exposure to the outside will be limited. But for a team, it can open up an expansive vista of thought provoking ideas and approaches.
• Interactions stimulate creative thinking – I am a big believer in brainstorming. Creativity ultimately comes from interactions like that, even if there isn’t a linear path between the two. Even casual conversations about one topic can be sometimes be reprocessed into the solution for something seemingly unrelated. Creative people continuously disassemble and reassemble the world around them – often at a subconscious level – trying to find out how to make things fit together in a better or more efficient way. That process seems to be accelerated when you’re surrounded by other talented, creative individuals.
• Teams allow specialists to develop and flourish – It is extremely rare for a single individual to excel at every aspect that goes into making a product great. I’ve had the privilege of working with some incredibly talented people, but none of them had every based covered. It’s very different with a team. As a team starts to gel and mature, different individuals within it will naturally emerge as the main drivers of specific aspects of a development project. Some of that may be planned, but a lot of it will happen organically. This dynamic allows the collective talents of the group to shine through in the final effort despite limitations each person may have as an individual. I have seen far too many promising solo efforts fail when mediocracy in one area simply masked pure brilliance in another.
• Groups provide a sanity check on direction and decisions – Every development project is made up of a continuous stream of individual decisions. And even in a team environment, most of those decisions will end up getting made by individual people in the day to day course of their efforts. What make a team environment different from an individual effort is that the inevitable bad decisions that will be made seem to surface sooner and get resolved quicker. I also feel that the decisions that are made in this type of environment often reflect a greater appreciation for the broader impact they can have on other parts of a project. People on a team are more likely to solicit input from others in areas they are less proficient in. That said, a “well adjusted” team environment should NEVER promote ‘group think’ – the death knell of so many ‘large company’ development initiatives. At it’s best, the team environment helps each individual apply the right amount of critical perspective to the decisions they need to make, while still encouraging the creative leaps that are so important producing something great.
• Teams challenge everyone to reach that next level – There is a healthy competitiveness that exists inside any talented group of individuals. It pushes people beyond their comfort zones, and helps them refine and grow the skill sets they bring to the table. This same force also motivates everyone to put in that extra effort to get things done right – nobody wants to be the one that lets the team down or causes a release to fail. This interplay between the members of a team makes the overall success of a project something personal for each of them. And that creates the right environment for people – both collectively and individually – to excel.

It is important to remember that a team isn’t just a random collection of people with various skill sets. And a great team isn’t just a collection of individual superstars put together. In fact, the best teams I’ve worked with tended to form naturally over time. They had a mix of skill sets and proficiencies, with natural leaders and contented followers. But what every member of these teams had in common – at least on the most successful teams I’ve been a part of – was a shared passion for what we were working on, and the desire to deliver something really great at the end.

After reading a post on Fred Wilson’s AVC (highly recommended), I started thinking a bit about the conceptual framework of the world as a set of loosely connected networks, and the dynamic that exists between physical and virtual communities.

As counterintuitive as this may be, the biggest problem with the way virtual networks form is that people end up grouping themselves. Because of this, networks become comfortable places connecting people that share a great deal in common. We have a natural – almost unconscious – tendency to seek out those that think like us, and we often end up in groups that simply reinforce the belief structures and world views we already had before joining them.

Consider that in light of the following: Creativity and innovation are most often born amongst limitations, and refined through disagreement and rational (even if passionate) argument. Social progress isn’t built out of consensus and congeniality, but through periods of confrontation and discord. Any quest for enlightenment and understanding ultimately forces people to shun conformity and accommodation. That is the nature of personal growth, and by extension the growth and vitality of a society.

This kind of ‘social friction’ isn’t difficult to experience in the “physical world”…

The physical world specializes in random aggregation. People of all different backgrounds and upbringings end up working with each other at their jobs and living next to each other in their neighborhoods. They shop is the same grocery stores and stand in the same lunch lines at the deli. They go to services in the same houses of worship, and suffer next to each other in the same hospitals and clinics. Diversity, in it’s many dimensions, becomes a virtue in and of itself – something to be embraced instead of avoided. Acceptance, appreciation, and integration become the natural outgrowths of this kind of social structure. And the ability of members in a social group to simply ‘agree to disagree’ on some of the more contentious things allows for diversity to continue thriving without the need for either conflict or conformity.

Many online communities, in contrast, seem to specialize more in homogeneity. They tend to form around common interests or activities, and often discourage conflict and debate outside of very narrow threads of discussion. Anyone that strays too far from the “standard of acceptable behavior” can easily be silenced or removed from the community. More often, they are driven away by simply being unwelcome – either attacked or ignored when voicing an opinion that strays too far from the ‘mainstream’. Online social groupings that end up functioning in this way ultimately stagnate, and the dynamic that may have made them initially attractive becomes lost – replaced sometimes by an orthodoxy that may attract adherents but few others.

I do appreciate the reason for this pattern of behavior. In a completely unregulated social environment like the web, sowing discord is almost a sport with some people. It seems there are ‘trolls’ lurking at the edge of any discussion waiting to become disruptive and counterproductive – effectively ruining the value of a community for all of the other participants. Every community needs some basic standards and enforcement policy to remain relevant as it grows. Every successful society is built around some set of core beliefs and corresponding rules that allows it to function and flourish. The unfortunate temptation here though is to not simply curate behavior, but to also start curating thought and opinion in the interest of group harmony.

Online or in the physical world, that’s not a place we want to end up.

It is no secret to anyone that reads this blog regularly that I am a big fan of the iPhone. I just upgraded my personal phone to the iPhone 4, and I’m extremely happy with it. I’ve been in the iPhone camp since the very beginning – I switched off of RIM on the day the first iPhone was released, and I haven’t looked back since.

For a variety of reasons, I recently needed to get a second phone specifically for work. My initial reaction was to simply get another iPhone and carry on. But in thinking about it more, I decided it would be more interesting to go in another direction and get an Android based phone instead. I felt that this would give me the perspective I needed to better judge where Apple is going with the iPhone, as well as to get some real-world experience with with what will no doubt be the most significant competitor to iOS.

After looking around, I decided to go with the Samsung Captivate Galaxy S (also on AT&T). It seemed to have a highly regarded implementation of Android 2.1, and Samsung has committed to have an upgrade to Android 2.2 available for it when it’s rolled out.

I still have a bit to learn with the Captivate, so I’m going to hold off commenting on it in detail until I come up the curve. My initial impressions are fairly positive, with the AMOLED display, responsive touch screen, and excellent camera all toping the list of well done features. The interface lacks the polish of iOS, and it has some non-intuitive aspects that I’m going to need to figure out. The app store also has relatively slim pickings and is difficult to find new things in – definitely not impressed there at all. That said, I’m really open to having a good experience with Android – especially as 2.2 is about to be released and more development focus moves to the platform.

I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with you as I adapt to my first non-Apple phone in a long time.

The concept of limiting the release of something to a particular country or region seems almost naïve. At best, country based filters only slow down the propagation of media by cutting off any legitimate channels of distribution. The result, predictably, is that it also accelerates the distribution of popular media across all of the ‘less legitimate’ channels out there. The reality today is that you can download just about any season of just about any television series by using tools like bittorrent, with zero benefit going to the creators of those works. And I would bet that the lower down the global distribution pecking order a region is, the more adept the people there are at finding ways to get what they want.

This clearly isn’t the outcome any of the media companies want.

Now I do understand that there is a whole syndication framework that depends on these regional restrictions being enforced. The whole concept of “region codes” in both video tapes and DVD’s was added almost 30 years ago specifically to support this. But as much as the media companies my want to preserve the economic benefits they were able to enjoy from this aging model, the whole concept of geographical segmentation simply doesn’t apply in a digital world. The topological boundaries that separate people in the real would simply don’t exist in cyberspace. People are connected with family, friends and colleagues globally through sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or even XBox Live. They talk with each about the movies, music, and television they enjoy. There is a uniquely inclusive social fabric that develops online that is no longer governed by local conventions. Nobody in America is going to hold back from talking about the final season of a show like “LOST” simply because it hasn’t been released yet in a country where one of their friends lives.

Media at it’s most successful becomes part of the common culture.

And common culture – in a digital world – is global
(Region code 0 for all you old schoolers)

For a very funny take on this issue, check out this video clip of “Walt Mosspuppet” commenting on the release Hulu Plus – a paid version of the Hulu video service jointly owned by NBC, FOX, and ABC:

There is a world of people out there who are willing to acquire media through legitimate means, but who are simply being turned away. If even empty headed puppets can understand this, why can’t the media industry?…

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…