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.
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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.eceHotel Guest Behavior
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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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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.
Biggish Thought of the Day
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Don’t let me sit on the sidelines.
Never let me watch others make the world go round.
Never let me watch others dance the night away.
Never let me see the band play on without me.
Never let me… wait for others to suck it all in.
This is all there is.
Sidelines
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i finished a book. it’s not clear to if i liked it. sparse, existensial, left hanging.
point omega. a novella set in the desert in the recent past.
characters searching for slowness and vastness…. zen…. the moment, a moment. an author searching for a moment. 100 pages that seem like 300 because all the talk of vastness. or maybe it was the music pouring from headphones or the vastness of the ground 5 miles below my rightside 757 window.
read the book. we wont share the same experience. it’s a weirld empty vessel ready for your filling. might have been the author’s point… or his side effect.
and so it is with everything else. an existence of disconnects. these disconnects arent bad they just exist. we all have private experiences. you cannot know me. i may not be able to know me. we know facts and ocassionally find a narrative to group the facts. facts = events. things interact. self awarenes is the exhaust, the by product of our nueral narrative.
im writing this on a droid phone. it is a terrible writing instrument in general. however on a plane it provides a compact canvas with no digital distractions. i am not using a word processor with all its algorithmic fixes and helpers. it is refreshing to me to be able to screw it all up and not have technology try to make it all right.
messy technology is my favorite. technology that tries to be too coherent, too slick, too well design fights against the disconnects i write about above. it elimimates the magic of accidents… happening into a different way of doing it, a nifty new view a mistaken stroke that changes the course of a project, business, country or life.
this is how i write software. i cut, paste, try something, try something else, fix, start over, change editors, change monitors. i start with the smallest, sparsest description of a project and dance. i like people to play with software and media early. not so they can see if it fits the spec but so they can grow along with the software. this is the only way to turn wide disconnects between users and end products into the necessary, and fragile, into bridges of usuability. software should be a vessel that the user can bring their unique experience too and the software can dance with the user.
i do not love the iphone. it forces me to waltz when i want to hip hop or stomp or jazz. as a user amd a developer conformity is a requirement. conformity doesnt increase knowledge or enjoyment. it increases habit and eliminates accidents.
this is also why i despise collaborative filtering aka recommendation algorithms. these always tend towards everyone seeing the same things. a bookstore or a library or music store is still a womderful experience because things are not organized by what you might like…. alphabetical or front tables or genres with spines, cases to catch your eye is a great way to run into a different thing. we see the same movies, read the same books, use same phone, have the same views and yet its all false because really, as i said, were all very different. why not celebrate and fully experience that reality in everything we do? doing and buying the same thing wont make us satisfied or generate understanding. its just boring and reduces experience.
and thats all we get is experience. this waking string of 28000 days. experience what the senses send in. i want more of that….soak it all up. i dont want less experience in exchange for less discomfort or ease of use or a common experience. those are false chasings…. unachievable and entirely boring.
i didnt like the book. i did enjoy the experience. read it or dont… but do tell me about what you do read.
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For one thing, the smartest people do not necessarily make the best political choices. William F. Buckley once famously declared that he would rather give control of our government to “the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, recently coined the term “clever sillies” to describe people who hold wacky political views seemingly because of—rather than despite—their high intelligence. Conservative writer John Derbyshire has also observed that political naivety exists at both extremes of the IQ distribution, not just the lower one. The reason is that brilliant people can sometimes be so consumed by abstract philosophy that they forget common sense.
Hahahaha.
It’s the “Bell Curve” argument all over again.
There’s no way to really answer this. It’s clever writing and fun with stats, but it’s a bogus argument. a) impossible to really categorize political beliefs in such binary way b) there are so many behavioral factors involved in your belief system that it’s hard to draw a cause strong enough to justify the distinctions here.
Fun read but fairly useless.
Unless it’s true.
I’ll leave the last words to the article author:
The bottom line is that a political debate will never be resolved by measuring the IQs of groups on each side of the issue. Even if certain positions tend to be held by less intelligent people, there will usually be plenty of sharp thinkers who take the same side. Rather than focus on the intellectual deficiencies, real or imagined, of certain politicians and their supporters, people should strive to find the best and brightest spokesmen for the opposing side.
There is a certain devilish fun to contemplating the intelligence of liberals and conservatives, but it should have no effect on how we think about issues. Political debates would be better without it.
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4-8 weeks max before someone puts linux on iPad.
Maybe I should do it? I did, after all, invent the LiPhone several years ago.
Linux iPad – The LiPad
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Perhaps a more apples to apples competition is HP/Microsoft vs. Apple for the yet to be valuable category of “tablets”.
The HP Slate and Apple iPad devices are remarkably similar.
Here’s the Slate:
Here’s the iPad:
That’s right… the same basic concept and function.
you know why Apple will sell more than HP? Marketing. Look at how Apple polishes everything up from the product design to the silly video.
HP Slate vs iPad
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Social Mode 