Autopsis

Sarah Says Goodbye – and What That Implies.

July 4, 2009 – 18:49

Last night I did a very unusual thing. I was in the room while CNN was on and I watched Sarah Palin’s goodbye-for-now press conference. It was unusual because a) I don’t watch television and b) I especially don’t watch European and American news television. So, it was an unusual event for me, and, obviously an unusual event for Ms. Palin, the residents of Alaska, the Republican Party and the American political scene as a whole.

I had actually never seen Ms. Palin speak before. Fortuitously, we have been out of the country for the last two presidential election cycles, although we did vote in each. Consequently, I missed the cut-and-thrust of the campaign, including the entire Sarah Palin saga.

So, to me, she came across as someone who, at a minimum, should have chosen decaf yesterday rather than leaded. I’m not sure if she is normally that fragmented and borderline ADD or just when she resigns from power with 18 months left in her term.

I’ll leave all the discussion of motivations, hidden agendas and conspiracies to all the pundits, talking heads and everyone else with nothing better to do.

Instead of her individual act and its implications, what struck me was what the American hyper-partisan political process does to the people who engage in it, and what that implies for the United States and its citizens. By that I mean what is striking about this is not that she is, presumably walking away, but who remains.

Who remains, who survives the meat grinder that passes as the electoral process, are the people who have such a thirst, such a lust for power, that they will subject their friends, families, and themselves to anything as long as it means that they individually achieve and retain power.

That’s who runs the states and the country. That’s who makes the laws, establishes policy and interacts with the rest of the world–the surviving narcissists, power hungry, and glory seekers.

Is that the best we can do?

Posted in US Politics | No Comments »

iPhone 3.0 – An Untethered View

June 9, 2009 – 03:34

To all those I know who are Apple-onians (or is it Apple-ites?) -

First, let me say that I think the iPhone is a very cool device. I may even end up with one. Soon.

But before I drink the Kool-Aid and join the cult, while I still have a teeny, weeny bit of objectivity left, I have to stifle my snickering for a moment and point out a few things from the Apple launch web page for this new model http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3g-s/   (link  kindly provided by my friend and Apple Guy - Floyd).

First, and the winner by a landslide is: “Cut, copy, and paste words and photos, even between applications.” Imagine that, “even between applications.” Earth shattering. Now if I could only have more than one app open at once…

A close second is: “You can even forward one or more messages to others.” I hope you were sitting down for that one.

My personal favorite, but the irony would probably be lost on most: “Internet Tethering – Surf the web from practically anywhere. Now you can share the 3G connection on your iPhone with your Mac notebook or PC laptop.

Tethering is not currently offered in the U.S. and some other countries. See your carrier for availability.”  

Unfortunately, I don’t have a font small enough to approximate the 2 point used on the web site. Only in America. Or perhaps only on AT&T’s sclerotic  network already overwhelmed by all you iPhoners sending each other photos. Or Facebook updates. Or Twitter feeds. Or whatever it is you do with those things. Just wait until iPhone users jailbreak their way into clogging the network with all the videos they can shoot with the new model. Can you say “All circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later.”? I think you can.

A somewhat techie thing: Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m). It’s a really good thing we didn’t use an unlocked iPhone as our GSM phone in South America. It would have exploded at the altitudes we were at.

A somewhat more techie thing.

Q. What is missing from this list?:

Video playback

Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

 A. Flash support. Adobe Flash is the web standard used for video, animation and applications. It is by far the ubiquitous standard for video playback on the web, e.g. YouTube, etc., with over 90% market share. I think there’s some deeply rooted emotional scarring around Apple’s competing Quicktime standard being among those sharing the remaining 10%. Consequently, I’m not holding my breath for Flash on the iPhone, as much as millions would like to see it.

There’s lots more that’s missing from the iPhone platform, even with 3.0, but it’s hard for people who are already down the rabbit hole to appreciate that, being addled by the apps as they are. If you are wondering what the iPhone could be, in the way of capabilities, OS functionality, business tool synch, etc., spend a little time with a Blackberry tied to a corporate BB server or, better yet, take a look at webOS on the Palm Pre. They are way ahead in areas that matter. But then again, so was Beta, but we all bought VHS.

Yes, the iPhone definitely has sexier apps, and the AppArmy will ensure that it will dominate in that area from this day forward, mark my words, unto the end of time (as we know it). So no matter what, iPhone owners will always be able to just shake it and it will do something incredibly cool and fun. Even if it’s just to entertain the kids, as our friends Jay and Alice demonstrated to stunning effect for us in NYC last week. iPhone as kid tranquilizer. Who knew?

And before you all start burning crates of apples on my front lawn (as if I had a front lawn), I’d like to remind all of you that I used to write software for Macs. I’m not an Apple basher. I’m just not a member of the cult. Yet.

Posted in Gear, Sci / Tech | 1 Comment »

The Bandwidth Gap

June 6, 2009 – 21:20

One of the downsides of the insularity of the American culture and the self-enclosed European culture is its bounding effect on opportunity space thinking.

One example that is easy to illustrate is in technology. People in the post-development societies of western Europe and the U.S. live in a bandwidth rich environment. If they ever venture outside the post-development nations, they tend to travel to centers of commerce, bandwidth oases in the global bandwidth desert.

Due to thier limited world bandwidth view, what these post-development society people miss is that the rest of the world lives in a reality of low- to no-bandwidth.

The bandwidth rich conceive of, develop and implement technology solutions that further enhance and accelerate the bandwidth enabled. Meanwhile, the four to five billion people who live outside the high bandwidth areas are locked out of those solutions and those enhancements to life and development.

While many are aware of the digital divide, they conceive of it as representing those who have and those who do not have computers. In reality, the digital divide is a bandwidth gap between the high-, low- and no-bandwidth people on the planet.

High bandwidth costs real money, low bandwidth costs much less. Who can afford real money? Mostly those in the wealthiest one billion people on the planet. Who can afford low bandwidth? Just about everybody in the next segment lower, the three to four billion next wealthiest people, because they almost all have mobile phones. Who can’t afford any bandwidth? Many to most of the people in the remaining bottom tier.

The next wave of technology winners, those who understand what the bandwidth gap is all about, those who will define the next ubiquitous technology capability on the planet, will leverage the billions in the middle tier who have access to low bandwidth phones. Why? Because those who have low bandwidth phones now are the same billions who will have high bandwidth mobile devices in the future. Technology always climbs up the food chain, not down. Technology dominance always starts at the bottom and consumes the market as it moves up. Build a solution for the bottom now and consume the top later.

In this case, future technology dominance starts with those who have the least available bandwidth, not the most.

That’s a very challenging market to comprehend for those trapped inside the insular, inside-looking-out, high-bandwidth fishbowl.

Posted in Business, Sci / Tech | No Comments »

A Milestone. Or Not.

June 5, 2009 – 04:45

After 9/11, and especially after visiting ground zero, I had some strong personal reactions.

I wrote some magazine columns and also wrote quite a bit about the issues and challenges surrounding the event in non-commercial venues.

In addition to doing what I could within my sphere of influence and expertise, I also wanted to learn more about how it came about, the people behind it, their culture and their religion.

To that end, I read a lot of books on those topics. The books provided important information on the region, its politics, its religions and its history.

Not satisfied with the books, magazines and newspapers, I also took a trip to the Middle East, and got to know some people there, as well as a little bit about the realities of their countries and cultures.

My in-person, eyewitness experiences taught me things I could never learn from a book.

While there I witnessed some things and interviewed some people. Some of those events and people were covered in the mainstream western media, including the New York Times. That coverage taught me the reality of western media: that the facts–the truth–had nothing to do with what was reported by the mainstream western media.

Many of the local people I met in the Middle East begged me to return to the U.S. and “tell them what we are really like.” I endeavored to do so, with varying levels of success and impact.

As a result of my experiences there, I have continued to be be interested in the countries, cultures, religions and people of the region, and especially in how they relate to the West and how the West relates to them.

Consequently, I was particularly interested in a watershed moment in that relationship, President Obama’s speech in Egypt.

As with all news, if you want to know what actually happened, you had to be there or watch or listen to the raw media feeds. Fortunately for us in this case, you can avoid the media filters, formation and spin by watching the raw video of the speech here. It’s worth investing the 55 minutes.

If you watch nothing else, the last five minutes contain some core messages and are worth viewing.

Highlights:

• ~13:00 commonalities
• ~18:30 extremists
• ~27:40 two state solution
• ~33:00 sons of Abraham
• ~45:00 development versus cultural identity

 

If the embeded player doesn’t work, use this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BlqLwCKkeY

If you’d prefer to read the transcript, it is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09/

Viewed from a strictly inside-the-U.S.-looking-out perspective, the speech will probably have less impact than it does to those who have been to the Middle East or who are there now. After all, all politics are local, and if you have no interest in the region other than their oil, there won’t be much there except grist for the polarized partisan mill.

Viewed from my perspective, having had a small taste of the realities of the region, it is a significant foreign policy speech, and it could be a significant milestone in relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Or not.

How do other countries, with different perspectives view it? Here are some samples:

• People’s Daily – China: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90854/6672051.html
• The Dawn – Pakistan: http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/04-barack-obama-speaks-at-cairo-university-qs-013
• The Times – India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Obama-woos-Muslims-gives-Kashmir-a-pass/articleshow/4617934.cms
• The Times – UK: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6430692.ece
• Moscow Times – Russia (there’s no story link because I couldn’t find one, and that in itself is a story): http://www.themoscowtimes.com/index.htm

Notes:

a) The president gives a greeting of As-Salaamu ‘Alaykum. It is an Arabic spoken greeting used by Muslims as well as Arab Christians and Jews. The term Salam in Arabic means “Peace”. The greeting may also be transliterated as Salaam ‘Alaykum. It means “Peace be upon you”. The traditional response is wa `Alaykum As-Salaam, meaning “and upon you be peace.” (source: Wikipedia)

b) The president refers to “zakat” in the speech. Zakat (or zakah) (Giving of Alms) is the fourth of the five pillars, or obligations, of Sunni Islam. The five pillars are Shahada (Profession of Faith), Salah (prayers), Zakah (Giving of Alms), Saum (Fasting during Ramadan) and Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). Shi’a Muslims subscribe to eight ritual practices which substantially overlap with the five Pillars. (source: Wikipedia)

c) The president mispronounced “hijab” (headscarf), instead saying “hajib.”

d) The president refers to the “Sons of Abraham.” This is in reference to the three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, who trace their major prophets’ bloodlines (Moses, Jesus Christ and Muhammad) back to the common ancestor of Abraham.

e) My favorite word from the speech was “rectitude,” which means “righteousness as a consequence of being honorable and honest.”

Posted in Cultures, Geopolitics, Religion, US Politics | No Comments »

Mis-Invention

June 4, 2009 – 21:55

Legend has it that when Thomas Edison created his phonograph he conceived of it as a method to record and playback messages between individuals.

Legend also has it that Alexander Graham Bell envisioned the telephone as a device useful for transmitting musical performances from concert halls to people in other locations.

In each case, the inventor completely misinterpreted the potential and future use of their invention. They mis-invented.

We may be witnessing a similar event now.

On 28 May 2009 Google unveiled a secret two-year development  project named Google Wave. The product was conceived and developed by Lars and Gens Rasmussen, the same brothers who brought us Google Maps. Gens originally conceived of what became Google Wave as a re-invention of email. The 50 person development team largely followed this conceptual model, while leveraging their take on all the capabilities that modern computing enables.

What they ended up with made for a compelling, if very long, demo at the Google I/O conference. The truly curious or dedicated can watch the 1:20 (yes, that’s one hour and 20 minutes) demo here:

If the embedded player doesn’t work, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Since most of you will probably miss all the fun in the video, I’ll summarize: they re-invented email.

What’s interesting though, and what makes Lars and Gens periously close to the next Thomas and Alexander, is while they were merrily re-inventing email, they created a global, real-time, collaborative, object/file/application/whatever sharing, open and extensible platform that can interface on any computing device. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?

The first part of that last paragraph will probably get a few of you thinking. Maybe even thinking enough to watch the video instead of that rerun of Conan. The rest of you no doubt noticed “free.”

There may or may not ever be a global shift from good old email as we know and curse it to Google Wave. But there most certainly will be some paradigm shifting things happening on the Google Wave platform when it gets released to the public around the end of the year.

A little mis-invention, anyone?

Posted in Business, Sci / Tech | No Comments »

The Book Shelf

June 1, 2009 – 20:15

One of the traumas of moving to an eReader such as an Amazon Kindle is that you have no more books to display on your bookshelves. Bookshelves can be a trauma in their own right, as my friend Lee Wochner describes here. But the prospect of not having any books to display on those shelves, makes moving to an eReader a life-defining decision for many.

A few weeks ago, Steph and I were hosted for a wonderful dinner by Lee and his wife Val, during which Lee’s ongoing struggle to abandon analog media, both newsprint and books, came up. Lee and I both share the habit of examining others’ bookshelves. Since we both consider your books to be an open window to your defining characteristics, your thinking and your soul, we both indulge in this short-cut method to figure people out. In the same manner, we both consider our bookshelves to be a detailed, public billboard of what we are, what we’re thinking, what we’re researching and what we find interesting. Obviously, with an eReader, there are no books to put on a bookshelf, so how will people know what and who we are? And for that matter, how will we know what and who we are?

You will probably find it no surprise that some bright kids programmed up an answer to this dilemma. It’s called Shelfari. You can see what it looks like here: http://www.shelfari.com/douglashackney  If you don’t want to look there, you can get a feel of it by scrolling down on this page and looking at the books I’ve got queued up, am reading, and a small subset of those I’ve read.

It’s a pretty slick system, and solves the dilemma of the bookshelf-less future. In this way, we still have a method to check out people’s books to see what they are about, as well as to display our own.

Oh, and BTW, those bright kids who programmed up Shelfari sold the business to Amazon in August of 2008. The site launched in October of 2006, so less than two years from launch to exit. Well done.

Posted in Business, Media, Sci / Tech | No Comments »

IPPY Awards

May 29, 2009 – 20:08

I couldn’t understand it, as soon as I started to thank my third grade teacher, I was applauded off the stage…

It was a fun event, replete with interesting anthropological studies of authors, publicists and various posses and hangers-on. The food and drinks were actually top rate, and the diversity of authors’ personalities matched the range of categories.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Fuso Update

May 28, 2009 – 22:19

Our Fuso is still in South America. We’ve had some issues with the American shipping company we contracted to ship the truck from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Long Beach, California.

It has been a very challenging and stressful experience so far, and it’s not over yet.

We are making some headway, but it will probably be a while before the truck gets back to the U.S.

I’ll post the entire story once we resolve the situation.

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

How The World Works wins 2009 IPPY Silver Medal

May 21, 2009 – 16:12

How The World Works, one of the books I wrote last year, won a 2009 IPPY silver medal.

There were 4,090 entrants for all categories in the awards. How The World Works tied for second place in its category, Juvenile-Teen-Young Adult (Y/A) Non-Fiction.

The awards ceremony is in New York City on 29 May. We haven’t decided if we’ll attend yet.

You can learn more about How The World Works here: http://www.howtheworldworks.com/

The IPPY awards press release is here: http://www.independentpublisher.com/IPPY_09_Results_Rel1.pdf

The IPPY awards announcement and list of winners is here (HTWW is in category 23): http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1298

Since I doubt I’ll have the chance at the awards ceremony for an Academy Awards type opportunity to thank everyone in my life, beginning with my third grade teacher, Mrs. Neighbors, I’ll do it here:

Special thanks to:

• My daughter, Amber, for making the request that led to this book.
• My son, Adam, for encouraging me to fulfill that request.
• My wife, Stephanie, for supporting and encouraging me throughout its creation.
• My friend, Dennis Stajic, for his invaluable reviews of and feedback on the manuscript iterations.
• And my grandfather, Clarence Hackney, from whom I learned much of the content.

Tags: awards, Books, How The World Works

Posted in Media | 19 Comments »

How Not To Do It

May 21, 2009 – 14:31

Check out this home page: http://www.lijit.com/

Tell me if you have a friggin’ clue what they do.

So, since it’s a huge mystery, you click on “about” http://www.lijit.com/about

I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything that said so much but yielded so little. This is called the “Valley Effect,” where people spend so much time within the Silicon Valley and venture capital bubble, they develop their very own version of being on an intimate, first name basis with the bugs in the bark but are incapable of describing the forest. This is common in Silicon Valley and other startup clusters, but somewhat remarkable for Lijit considering they are in Boulder, Colorado.

At a loss, you finally click on the “Learn even more about Lijit…” link in an effort to do so http://www.lijit.com/help/front/map_your_world

Ah! Finally a story a non buzz-word/buzz-concept-addled brain can identify with and understand.

Note to marketers and businesses: If your home page does not clearly state what you do, who you do it for and your differentiators, you are toast.

Posted in Business | No Comments »