Social Mode

I’ve had a good time messing with this iPad. The hype is justified I’m afraid….

It’s true many of the ideas coming to life in the iPad aren’t new but like so many apple products they just put them together better than anything we’ve seen before.

Touch screens
Manipulative interfaces
Long battery life
Tablet format
Simple, controlled ui
Virtual keyboard
Wireless connectivity
Spelling correction
Universal access features
Ereader
And so on…

Bits and pieces have been tried before. This is just a whole different package.

Sure it’s got some things that can be improved… I keep pressing the caps lock key, sometimes the screen mode gets weird, and the screen gets dirty quickly like the iPhone (dorritos aren’t a viable snack anymore). This are things that can be refined overtime.

One major concern I do have… The iPad doesn’t seem rugged. It’s so pretty and so smooth but I fear moving it out of my lap. Reminds me of holding our children during their first week of life…

Apple takes a lot of criticism for lack of multitasking and closed os. Frankly though it flat out works. I think if you don’t have constraints on a system it gets sloppy quickly. My droid phone has all sorts of oddities that my blackberry and iPod touch do not. I’m not saying one approach is better than another on os and devices… Different devices different needs. I want the iPad to work well on my most common tasks and it appears to do that. I will take some loss of functionality for a great experience on key elements. Also I noticed that most good apps include the right functions so that multitasking in the os isn’t really that important. E.g. Code editors including a browser an FTP function in app.

The economics of the ipad will change the industry. The hardware is so functional it’s hard to believe you can get one of these for 500 bucks. And this is gen 1. The software In the app store is already very good. And it’s easily 80% cheaper than typical laptop / desktop apps. The fact that you can attach a bluetooth headset to this and run Skype pretty much could do in landlines and typical voip. When the 3G models ship with their decent data plans the cellular economics have got to change.

I played a few of the games. They are very fun and very good looking/sounding. Beyond being a very big threat to other gaming machines like the ds and psp, I think the iPad will do what the Wii did – bring about a whole category of gaming and a whole new category of gamers. Board game dynamics are going to be much more interesting on this platform than in any other platform. At the controller less experience with a screen as part of the interface is very enjoyable. And unlike the iPhone the experience is bigger in every way.

My favorite apps so far are Wolfram|Alpha, iWork, brushes, word press, AIM/life stream, and Theo Grays The Elements.

Civ revolutions and Tap Tap radiation are awesome games.

And my ultimate test for whether this will be a long term device for me… Can I type fast and in great enough quantity to be able to write emails and script/program? Yes! Both the keyboard and the text editors are very functional.

By Christmas time the consumer software, gaming and computer industry are going to look very different. New companies, new economics, new approaches…. Yes, it will be that fast of transition…

iPad impressions and iPad’s best apps so far

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Apr 3
CNN has a very unnerving report about some crazy loophole, government meets private sector dealings.

First, doctors as PR people:

Internal company documents show that Pfizer and Pharmacia (which Pfizer later bought) used a multimillion-dollar medical education budget to pay hundreds of doctors as speakers and consultants to tout Bextra.

Pfizer said in court that “the company’s intent was pure”: to foster a legal exchange of scientific information among doctors.

But an internal marketing plan called for training physicians “to serve as public relations spokespeople.”

According to Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “They pushed the envelope so far past any reasonable interpretation of the law that it’s simply outrageous.”

Pfizer’s chief compliance officer, Doug Lanker, said that “in a large sales force, successful sales techniques spread quickly,” but that top Pfizer executives were not aware of the “significant mis-promotion issue with Bextra” until federal prosecutors began to show them the evidence.

By April 2005, when Bextra was taken off the market, more than half of its $1.7 billion in profits had come from prescriptions written for uses the FDA had rejected.

Second, fake companies to get through legal issues:

“We have to ask whether by excluding the company [from Medicare and Medicaid], are we harming our patients,” said Lewis Morris of the Department of Health and Human Services.

So Pfizer and the feds cut a deal. Instead of charging Pfizer with a crime, prosecutors would charge a Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc.

A couple of thoughts.

If the federal government ever wonders again why the public doesn’t trust them/listen to them the officials need to review this situation. It’s just crazy that the bailouts of all these financial entities went against major popular opinion and really didn’t end up solving problems (I know, that’s debatable…).   In the aftermath the government came out and said how tough they were going to be with people that abuse taxpayers.   So, now in this case….

“If we prosecute Pfizer, they get excluded,” said Mike Loucks, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the investigation. “A lot of the people who work for the company who haven’t engaged in criminal activity would get hurt.”

Did the punishment fit the crime? Pfizer says yes.

It paid nearly $1.2 billion in a criminal fine for Bextra, the largest fine the federal government has ever collected.

It paid a billion dollars more to settle a batch of civil suits — although it denied wrongdoing — on allegations that it illegally promoted 12 other drugs.

In all, Pfizer lost the equivalent of three months’ profit.

It maintained its ability to do business with the federal government.

The Obama administration should take a stand on this because all the new health care reform is likely to stimulate more of this type of activity – strange dealings with the government.   This situation is exactly why I want either a completely private health care system OR universal one. This hybrid system is just terrible. We’ll see more of this as long as their are big government programs that use private companies with profit incentives.   I don’t think it’s bad to profit driven, I just think it’s dangerous when it’s the government handling the relationship, and not the customers.

And maybe the fed prosecutor was right in that a lot of people will get hurt for holding Pfizer accountable… but I just don’t see how that’s a justification for letting them off the hook.   Ends don’t justify the means and all that.

And this is the zinger:

“I worry that the money is so great,” he [Loucks] said, that dealing with the Department of Justice may be “just of a cost of doing business.”

Oh, I’m sure that’s already true.

Pfizer Fraud?

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Apr 3
It’s fairly obvious that the next “advertising” land-rush is in mobile. Really, it’s been that way for a solid 5 years.   What’s not yet clear is how the marketplace will develop.   Up until the explosion of iphones and android there hasn’t been enough demand (inventory) to put into a marketplace that supports bidding, yield management and the associated structures.   It’s now time.

A couple of clear distinctions between mobile advertising and other mediums is how much more you know about the user and little real estate (display and attention) you can get from the user.   i.e. the targeting has to be GREAT for this to work en masse.

Here are my thoughts on what the basics of the algorithms would be for a great mobile ad marketplace.

Targeting

Targeting the user isn’t terribly challenging as a great deal of information is available to the advertising engine about a user.   Knowing where someone is and how often they frequent a location and browse certain info reveals pretty much as much as an ad server would need.

Targeting facets:
- Time of Day
- Location (lat/long)
- Demographic (gender, household income, age)
- Service Provider
- Phone/Client
- Connection Speed
- Segment (business user, soccer mom, etc.)
Yield Management

Targeting only gets you so far. The most important aspect of “online” advertising isn’t hitting someone right the first go ’round, it’s getting the funnel right. Can you take someone from initial view/siting/click of an ad through a transaction with the most profit possible? that is the essential question in advertising.

Yield Management facets:
- User click history (time of day, location patterns)
- price per click/action/view
- advertiser account balance and history
- Time of Day
- Location Features (bar district, business, sports complex, etc.)
- type of advertiser (restaurant, national advertiser, services business, website, application)
- type of advertisement (offer/coupon, brand ad, registration, etc)
Creative Execution

Beyond getting the math right it’s important to get the creative – the design, content, UI, IA – of an ad correct. Targeting and yield can only get you so far… if the ad stinks, well, it stinks. Local ads are of a different type than Super Bowl ads. What’s good creative in a specific time and location and context isn’t always what wins a CLEO award.

Ad Capabilities:
- Text only
- Display
- Connected to App
- Click to SMS/private offer
- Alerts
- Customized to user info
- Connected to Inventory Feeds (where it makes sense)
Bidding

To put the above three in play you need some sense of a bidded marketplace – some way for advertisers to compete for real estate. Generally that was determined, on older local sites, by very basic algorithms involving who pays the most for the top spot within a category and location (e.g. who pays the top cost per click for Restaurant in NYC gets the top spot).

This approach is no longer sufficient. The market is there to compete for “top spots.” However, what’s changed is the concept of top spots. Owning a keyword on a search engine, even if it’s a “local” search engine doesn’t matter that much and isn’t worth bidding on. What matters now is are you the ad/sponsor/location/brand that pops up/shows up/is presented when the user passes through a particular latitude+longitude?

Amazingly, the world has been here before. It’s called a billboard. Very quickly that’s what local advertising online (in mobile apps) becomes – a competition for a couple of premium “billboards” in navigation and “check in” apps and social networks.

Bidding algorithm will center on figuring out who pays the most, has the most inventory available and converts the most users over time. You’ll pay more as advertiser if you are further away, don’t spend enough and/or can’t put buts in seats. Figuring out how to report those metrics back isn’t that hard as more of our systems (e.g. FB Connect and Open Table and pos systems) become tightly coupled.

Recommendations

If you are still buying online ads based on category and general location keywords or IP location you are wasting your money. And if your ads are still “click” based you are wasting your money. People don’t click on their mobile phones. They act.

The Algorithm To Rule Them All (…Locally)

To be published soon!

it goes something like (and this is very much not real math):

show_particular_ad? = category_segment_action_history+historical_action_per_impression*(budget_remaining/cost_per_action) is greater than (other ads values in consideration based on basic relevance of lat/long, keyword, category).
Bidding Algorithms for Mobile and Local Advertising

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Apr 2
If you believed you knew the future your behavior would…?

At first blush you might think Flashforward, the book or the tv show, is scifi fluff. Actually though it presents an interesting question about beliefs and behavior. If one believes in a destiny does one do things to make it come about? (Its not about whether there really is destiny…) do we really behave, or justify our behaviors, in a self fulfilling kind of way?

I think we do to a certain extent and its often very subtle and very powerful. Infact, there are many experiments that deal with this. The famous milgrim experiments come to mind.

This effect permeats American culture. From manifest destiny to “yes we can”….

Flashforward philosophy, more real than you might think

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Apr 2
Now that both the iPad and Wolfram|Alpha iPad are available it’s time to really evaluate the capabilities of these platforms.

Wolfram|Alpha iPad

[disclaimer: last year I was part of the launch team for Wolfram|Alpha – on the business/outreach end.]

Obviously I know a great deal about the Wolfram|Alpha platform… what it does today and what it could do in the near future and in the hands of great developers all over the world. I’m not shy in saying that computational knowledge available on mobile devices IS a very important development in computing. Understanding computable knowledge is the key to understanding why I believe mobile computable knowledge matters.   Unfortunately it’s not the easiest of concepts to describe.

Consider what most mobile utilities do… they retrieve information and display it. The information is mostly pre-computed (meaning it has been transformed before your request), it’s generally in a “static” form.   You cannot operate on the data in a meaningful way. You can’t query most mobile utilities with questions that have never been asked before expecting a functional response. Even the really cool augmented reality apps are basically just static data. You can’t do anything with the data being presented back to you… it’s simply an information overlay on a 3d view of the world.

The only popular applications that currently employ what I consider computable knowledge are navigation apps that very much are computing real time based on your requests (locations, directions, searches).    Before nav apps you had to learn routes by driving them, walking them, etc. and really spending time associating a map, road signs and your own sense of direction.   GPS navigation helps us all explore the world and get around much more efficiently. However, navigation is only 1 of the 1000s of tasks we perform that benefit from computable knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha has a much larger scope!    It can compute so many things against your current real world conditions and the objects in the world that you might be interacting with.   For instance you might be a location scout for a movie and you want to not only about how far the locations are that you’re considering you want to compute ambient sunlight, typical weather patterns, wind conditions, likelihood your equipment might be in danger and so forth. You even need to consider optics for your various shots. You can get at all of that right now with Wolfram|Alpha. This is just one tiny, very specific use case. I can work through thousands of these.

The trouble with Wolfram|Alpha (its incarnations to date) people cite is that it can be tough to wrangle the right query.   The challenge is that people still think about it as a search engine.   The plain and simple fact is that it isn’t a web search engine. You should not use it as a search engine. Wolfram|Alpha is best used to get things done. It isn’t the tool you use to get an overview of what’s out there – it’s the system you use to compute, to combine, to design, to combine concepts.

The iPad is going to dramatically demonstrate the value of Wolfram|Alpha’s capabilities (and vice versa!). The form factor has enough fidelity and mobility to show why having computable knowledge literally at your fingertips is so damn useful. The iPhone is simply too small and you don’t perform enough intensive computing tasks on it to take full advantage. The other thing iPad and similar platforms will demonstrate is that retrieving information isn’t going to be enough for people. They want to operate on the world. They want to manipulate. The iPad’s major design feature is that you physically manipulate things with your hands. iPod does that, but again, it’s too small for many operations.   Touch screen PCs aren’t new, but they are usually not mobile. Thus, here we are on the cusp of direct manipulation of on screen objects. This UI will matter a great deal to the user. They won’t want to just sort, filter, search again. They will demand things respond in meaningful ways to their touches and gestures.

So how will Wolfram|Alpha take advantage of this?   It’s already VISUAL! And the visuals aren’t static images. Damn near every visualization in Wolfram|Alpha are real time computed specifically to your queries.   The visuals can respond to your manipulations. In the web version of Wolfram|Alpha this didn’t make as much sense because the keyboard and mouse aren’t at all the same as your own two hands on top of a map, graph, 3d protein, etc.

Early on there was a critical review of Wolfram|Alpha’s interface – how you actually interact with the system. It was dead on in many respects.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance…

In an iPad world, natural language will sit back-seat to hands on manipulations. Wolfram|Alpha will really shine when people manipulate the visuals and the data display and the various short cuts. People’s interaction with browsers is almost all link or text based, so the language issues with Wolfram|Alpha and other systems are always major challenges. Now what will be interesting is how many popular browser services will be able to successfully move over to a touch interface. I don’t think that many will make it. A new type of services will have to crop up as iPad apps will not be simply add-ons to a web app, like they usually are for iPhone. These services will have to be great in handling direct manipulation, getting actual tasks accomplished and will need to be highly visual.

My iPad arrives tomorrow. Wolfram|Alpha is the first app getting loaded. and yes, I’m biased. You will be too.

iPad’s Killer App? Wolfram|Alpha iPad.

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Apr 2
I seriously wonder about this all the time.

Spending a lot of time thinking about collective intelligence and collaborative filtering over the last decade has led me to believe that most of the stuff we’re creating actually reduces our vision.

From Facebook to twitter to iphones…. we’re pruning our networks and our opportunities to actually run into new people, new experiences. Why have a new, uncomfortable conversation at a school function when you can just text your friends on your phone? why participate in a town hall meeting when you can just join a Facebook group? why surf the web anymore when twitter can just tell you what’s hot? why go to a bar for a band you’ve never heard of when Pandora can just pick what you like?

Maybe it’s just me.

Food for thought.

Read the following Edge piece or check out “You are not a gadget”.

34. The Internet today is, after all, a machine for reinforcing our prejudices. The wider the selection of information, the more finicky we can be about choosing just what we like and ignoring the rest. On the Net we have the satisfaction of reading only opinions we already agree with, only facts (or alleged facts) we already know. You might read ten stories about ten different topics in a traditional newspaper; on the net, many people spend that same amount of time reading ten stories about the same topic. But again, once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. One of the hardest, most fascinating problems of this cyber-century is how to add “drift” to the net, so that your view sometimes wanders (as your mind wanders when you’re tired) into places you hadn’t planned to go. Touching the machine brings the original topic back. We need help overcoming rationality sometimes, and allowing our thoughts to wander and metamorphose as they do in sleep.

— David Gelernter

and do all this before midnight tonight when you pre-order your vision reducing iPad, like me!

oh well….

Does the Web Let us Discover Anymore?

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Mar 11
I warned you that I’d do it… just as I did with the iPhone… I’ve already invented the LiPad.

Here are highlights from my launch video.

Linux iPad – Introducing the LiPad

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Mar 11
If you thought most of the population watched a lot of TV and did nothing while at home, consider what they do at a hotel.

* 98% of guests use the television*
* 70% of guests use interactive features**
* Guests average 4 hrs per night television use***
* Guests average 167 minutes of WiFi Use in Hotels****
* Up to 19% of guests will watch a short form programming channel*****
* 57% of business travelers never leave their hotels. What’s more, one in four never even leave their rooms.*******

and if that wasn’t enough! consider this as well…

“95 per cent of hotel guests don’t leave home without their personal gadgets (with laptops (55 per cent); digital cameras (55 per cent); and mp3 players (46 per cent) being the most popular digital companions). Sixty-seven per cent of us now want to use personal gadgets during our hotel stay. Listening to music from mp3 players over the hotel entertainment system was the most popular demand – from 42 per cent of respondents.”
– Samsung Research

* Industry figures, multiple sources
** Lodgenet figures
*** IIPTV vendor logs
**** Ipass wifi study http://www.ipass.com/pressroom/pressroom_wifi.html#venue_types
***** LodgetNet Press Release – 19% of hotel guests with access to DoNotDisturb TV watch the short form programming channel – a viewership percentage higher than many popular cable channels. In addition, since the channel’s test launch this summer, there have been over 1.7 million DND “plays” viewed through the hotel’s iTV system.
******http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/business/article5221463.ece

Hotel Guest Behavior

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Mar 11
Cory Doctorow has a pretty interesting set of ideas in his latest book, Makers.

I found the writing/arc absolutely dreadful. I found the ideas fascinating.

Usually I power through a book like this in 2-3 days. This took me a week because by page 250 I was tired of the act of reading. I did power through because I wanted to see the full shape of Doctorow’s ideas about the near, and very clunky, future. Also, I’m biased for any story that’s about people hacking, making, constructing or goofing off in a garage.

The cool stuff Doctorow put together here is the idea that the future will be so incredibly “makeable” that everyone with an idea will just make and remake stuff. And that will create a larger and larger riff between corporations with fancy trademarks and people, often fans of those corporate thangs, ripping the corporations off.   In the end those corporations will just have to keep giving in time and time again to the fans and hackers and just buy up their knock offs and mash ups. Now don’t go thinking this is just digital media.   Doctorow literally means everything will be printable with in the home 3d printers. (Which isn’t very far from what’s possible considering that you can gank a 3d printer for less than $1000.)

The part I was hoping he would go into deeper was about the idea of printing self replicating machines… and exploring the ideas that the machines themselves would just keep that remashing and remaking without humans.

The downside of this whole experience was the dreadfully lame backstory involving Disney and cheesy corporate characters. I also thought the main characters were a little shallow.   Almost caricatures of people who like to make shit. The cheesy story i was amused by was the idea that in the future we figure out how to mess with metabolism enough that lots of overweight people opt for a treatment to keep them skinny for life… except they have to eat 10k calories a day to keep up with the metabolism. It’s not that far of a stretch to imagine this treatment and people willing to do it. Also, IHOP makes an appearance in this book… exciting me a great deal.

In short – read the book for cool ideas.   don’t expect a page turner. power through it and let’s talk.

Makers Book Review

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Feb 26
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

— Herbert Simon

Biggish Thought of the Day

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Feb 9

Targeting

Yield Management

Creative Execution

Bidding

Recommendations

The Algorithm To Rule Them All (…Locally)