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Elon Musk explaining falcon wings

In contrast to gulf wing doors that sweep out and up and take up considerable horizontal space, the Model X falcon wings lift up and have a double hinge so they take up a lot less horizontal space. Tesla designed the doors not only to add that extra cool-factor, but also to appeal to, say, a Mom or family driving to the mall and parking in a tight spot.

Because the doors open up vertically there’s also room to stand in the car while getting in and packing cargo (see photo) like kids and groceries. I fully stood up in the car with the doors open and I’m 5’11 and I had ample head room. The Model X is as roomy as any minivan out there and then some — it seats seven, and has cargo space in both the back trunk, and the front trunk (please don’t make me say frunk).

Rear of the Model X with trunk closed

The Model X is built on the backbone of the Model S, Tesla’s sedan that will be delivered to customers this Summer, and the Model X prototype that we checked out on Thursday was Tesla’s most advanced prototype at a launch to date and little will be changed for the production version, said Musk.

Tesla execs drove us around a short driving track and the car handled like the Model S — it has the same low, long, bottom battery pack design. It’s pretty amazing to ride in a minivan/SUV that can handle like a sports car. Musk says the Model X can go zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. Think of it as the first cool, green, sporty minivan.

The Model X will be priced similarly to the Model S, said Musk, (Model S costs $50,000 to $70,000) and will have about the same electric driving range, with potentially 10 percent less range, because it’s a heavier car (the Model S has three range option, 160 miles, 230 miles and 300 miles).

OK, enough talk, I know you want to see the first photos of Tesla’s Model X! So here you go:

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Amazing — because I just finished a post about Google’s me-too-ism affliction. Amazing because as MG Seigler points out, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant will make hardware.

Amazing, because Google thinks that it will actually be able to crack the consumer electronics marketplace. Amazing, to think that this company will build a supply chain and manage relationships with retailers and get people to buy it. (Or it can sell directly over the web, much like it did with its Nexus phones — pun intended.) Amazing, considering that the company’s track record on products beyond its core offerings — search, advertising and communication-oriented software — is spotty, at best.

Amazing, to see one of smartest companies show such lack of discipline and self awareness. Amazing!

PS: By the way, this is the mystery Google device that Stacey Higginbotham reported last week.

Like Dropbox, Google’s storage service, called Drive, is a response to the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and the rise of “cloud computing,” or storing files online so that they can be retrieved from multiple devices, these people said.

Drive allows people to store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers so that they could be accessible from any Web-connected device and allows them to easily share the files with others, these people said. If a person wants to email a video shot from a smartphone, for instance, he can upload it to the Web through the Drive mobile app and email people a link to the video rather than a bulky file. [The Wall Street Journal.]

The question we should all be asking: How is it that Google, with its vast army of smart people and billions of dollars, couldn’t build a cloud storage drive over past five years? Why did it fail in its previous attempts and how is it that a company whose core competency includes “infrastructure” has failed to build this very basic cloud offering? And most importantly, how can a company that is intimate with the concept of cloud and owns Android, the mobile computing platform, not be able to understand the strategic importance of an “online storage drive”?

What’s Wrong With Google?

The answer for those questions lies in what I see is a growing problem at the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant — me-too-ism. Saying that won’t win me any fans — certainly not amongst the Google faithful — but the fact remains that with the exception of “search & advertising” & “communication” — its two areas of core expertise, Google has been unable to predict where technologies are going to lead the society (and yes that does include business.) Android? That came through an acquisition and that too at the insistence of one of Google’s founders.

Where Google does have a stellar track record is web infrastructure and innovations in network design and architecture. And that is because, infrastructure is Google’s DNA. The companies, I have always maintained, have a DNA and it is what makes the companies self-aware, which in turn defines how they view the world, how they compete, hire people and most importantly build products. Google has spent a lot of its corporate energy chasing Facebook instead of focusing on what was really important — not only its present, but its future.

Social as it stands today is a battle between two companies — Facebook and Twitter. Google’s quest to become social is making it do some unnatural things. Instead, Google should have been figuring out ways to use its infrastructure and delivering magic on the Android phones. Some good examples include Google Voice on Android or Google Mail on Android.

The reason they are so impressive are because they leverage Google’s awesome infrastructure. A virtual online storage drive should have been top priority for the company. Why? Because it would have enhanced company’s Android experience. Many of Google’s customers — handset makers like HTC who are using Android are turning to Dropbox to add more space to the phone.  In an interview  Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told us:

Dropbox can help deliver on the “connected anywhere” promises that have been around for years, but that he doesn’t think have truly materialized with regard to data. But once consumers experience having their “stuff” with them wherever they are, it will be “like the first day of the rest of your life,” he explained, like when we first were able to boost productivity by using e-mail and other applications on our phones.

A month later, when Houston and I chatted on stage at our GigaOM RoadMap conference in November 2011, Drew hinted that the company was looking beyond what was simply storage.

Dropbox will also be able to store not only a person’s photos but the metadata about that photo, the location information. “All of these things become possible. We can index all that metadata in the pictures and then tell you where the picture is taken, and maybe give you all the pictures taken within ten mile radius.” This sounds like a lot more than storage.

Google, too, should have been looking at its “drive” from the perspective as Dropbox long before now. It would have allowed the company to get better traction with app developers and at the same time differentiate from its biggest mobile rival, Apple.

Google is really good at finding information and using the “drive” as a hub to connect to various services, and then finding information on top of that should have been a primary focus for the company. Instead, it went chasing Facebook and social. Much like Microsoft kept chasing and chasing and chasing opportunities in search and advertising.

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While I’m impressed by most of the hardware, Samsung skimped a little on the cameras. They’re adequate for basic shots or video and video chatting, but won’t replace a modern smartphone. The software is where I find the new Galaxy Tab 7.7 lacking. Oh, it’s obviously usable, or I wouldn’t be using it as my daily device.

But Android 3.2, or Honeycomb, still doesn’t impress me. I prefer Android 4.0 on phones and tablets so I’m looking forward to the update that Samsung has promised. In the meantime, Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface makes up for some of Honeycomb’s issues. And my hope is that third-party developers update their apps to take advantage of the high-resolution, but relatively small, tablet display; often icons and text is small because of this. Even with these challenges, this is the fastest small tablet I’ve used yet for browsing, and it’s great for watching video, playing games and social networking.

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Mobile now accounts for 15 percent of all visits to LinkedIn, CEO Jeff Weiner told investors and analysts on the fourth-quarter earnings call. That’s up from 9 percent of traffic that mobile accounted for about halfway through 2011. Growth is coming in part from improved mobile applications and just more customer adoption from those products.

One thing that isn’t growing tremendously in mobile is revenue, however. That could change in the future, as the company looks to add monetization through advertising on mobile devices. “We were very focused on getting the product right and the user experience right,” Weiner said. “Now that that’s in place, we’re going to start to run some tests with ads within the mobile environment.”

Of course, LinkedIn isn’t the only social network that has yet to monetize its mobile apps. Facebook, for instance, has much higher engagement on its mobile apps, with about half of its unique visitors coming from mobile device. It too, doesn’t place ads on those apps yet, something that Facebook highlighted as one of its risk factors in its recent S-1 filing.

The good news for LinkedIn is that to date, mobile isn’t cannibalizing engagement on the company’s website, which it does place ads against. In fact, LinkedIn is seeing an increase in the connection density it gets from mobile users and the number of connections on the network.

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C.O.R.E. stands for Content Optimization and Relevance Engine, and it’s the system Yahoo uses to personalize the homepages for Yahoo users. (Psst … it also personalizes advertising. You know, like Google is currently being taken to task for.) Yahoo is touting some interesting data points on C.O.R.E.:

• Yahoo’s homepage clickthrough rate has increased 300 percent since implementing C.O.R.E.
• Every hour, C.O.R.E. processes 1.2 terabytes of user data. According to Yahoo, that’s the equivalent of 644,245,094 printed pages.
• Every day, C.O.R.E. personalizes 2.2 billion pieces of content.
• As a result of all this, more than 300 articles a month on Yahoo’s homepage receive more than 1 million clicks.

But if you’re not into big data porn, perhaps the C.O.R.E. visualization tool will just let you see how you stack up against the rest of your demographic (that happens to sign into their Yahoo accounts). As a male between the ages of 25 and 34, I should be reading a lot more sports stories than I am. Females of the same age range, they’re most concerned right now with celebrities, weddings and beauty treatments. Only 16 percent of those concerned about Peyton Manning’s arm are women, but the exact same percentage of men are reading about Scarlett Johannson’s look-alike twin.

Women, it appears, also spend more time in each story. Looking at men’s top stories, very few readers spend more than 2 minutes in any given piece.

C.O.R.E. relies heavily on the Hadoop framework, which lets companies like Yahoo (which actually played a big role in Hadoop’s development) store and process the terabytes of unstructured data that users generate as they click their ways across the web. According to a Yahoo spokesperson, C.O.R.E. “leverages Hadoop to distill this information into a content personalization model, which is updated every 5 minutes based on the most recent data.” Yahoo researchers often tout that Hadoop is “behind every click at Yahoo.”

To learn more about Hadoop, check out this post explaining it in more detail. To learn more about how some companies are pushing the bounds of analytics on the web and elsewhere, check out this story. Or, just attend our Structure: Data conference in New York next month, where veterans from Yahoo, Google and other data-centric companies will talk about where the big data movement is heading.

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Six of the top 10 apps use the Foursquare API to augment their features, providing a location layer for the services. The top vote getter so far is Scene Near Me, a mobile web app that pushes notifications to users based on their Foursquare check-in about famous movie scenes shot nearby. Another top app called Work+ taps Foursquare to help find good working locations for remote employees. Phoundit is an online service for lost and found items, providing users who check-into a location with information on items that have been lost or discovered at that location.

Foursquare has been used by developers in previous BigApps competition and this is the second year it’s been featured as an API. But this year, the competition opened up a new category for apps that also utilize an API from a local New York company. That has provided a new boost for Foursquare along with other local companies such as Tumblr, Etsy, bit.ly and others.

The BigApps competition is the largest open government initiatives of its kind and provides access to more than 700 city data sets. This year’s competition awards $50,000 to winners in 13 categories of apps. The city has 95 submissions in the competition this year, up from 58 last year. Voting and judging continues through March 8 with the winner announced on March 29. The competition in the past has produced some notable start-ups including NYC Way, a popular choice award winner in 2010, which I previously profiled.

The strong showing of Foursquare highlights some of the work the company has done to raise its profile in the developer community. Last year, it announced it had hit 10,000 developers using its API, which now gets thousands of requests per second. The company also hosted two hackathons last year and has worked with the city to promote the local tech community, said Erin Gleason, a spokesperson for the company.

“We’re in touch with the NYCEDC (New York City Economic Development Corp.) regularly about how they can continue to support the growing startup community in NYC and bring more engineering talent to the city. And, since a lot of the public data utilized in the competition is tied to physical places, the Foursquare API is a natural fit,” she said.

I agree it makes sense for Foursquare to be a popular API in New York, which is a city that is perfect for location-based services. Even without the new category, I think Foursquare would have been a favorite choice of developers, who are realizing how location can be utilized in a lot of creative ways.

But more than that, I think it’s cool to see all the different apps inspired by this competition. There’s some obvious parking and taxi apps, but there’s also some other creative takes that are enabled through the release of so much city data. There’s apps that let you know how your local political representative voted and where to find green markets or volunteering opportunities. Hopefully, other cities will take note and see that their municipality can become a platform for developers, who can use open data to do some pretty awesome things that governments can’t do themselves. That ultimately benefits residents, who end up being the real winners in these types of competitions.

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Handcuffing the FCC

In a letter released Thursday Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) asked the two Congressmen who are overseeing the passage of the bill through the House and Senate to eliminate the provisions that strip the FCC of its ability to set rules about who and how wireless companies could bid in the hoped-for auction of TV spectrum. In recent weeks AT&T has gone into overdrive defending its efforts to stop the FCC from setting any rules that might limit AT&T’s attempts to bid for the hoped-for spectrum.

AT&T’s machinations are puzzling, since it has managed to pick up a considerable amount of spectrum under the rules that the FCC has set in previous years for auctions, and because it actually seems like it wouldn’t want a completely neutered FCC overseeing the wireless industry, especially given the amount of partisan bickering that can hold up its favored legislation in Congress. Sen. Kohl has other concerns that most consumers might share. In his letter he writes, “This essentially eliminates the FCC’s ability to conduct auctions in a way that maintains a competitive marketplace.”

After the FCC and the Department of Justice put the kibosh on AT&T’s attempts to buy T-Mobile on fears that it might harm mobile competition (and because the FCC claimed AT&T lied about job creation), one would think AT&T would lie low for a while instead of drawing the attention and possible ire of senators, several consumer watchdog organizations and most of the nation’s other carriers. Verizon has been silent on this issue so far, but I reached out to see if they wanted to address the rumors I hear that they, too, are lobbying to put legislation in that limits the FCC’s ability to limit who bids, but I haven’t heard back.

Here’s what should really frustrate Silicon Valley and broadband nerds.

Making it hard for existing mobile operators or upstarts to get the spectrum they need to compete against AT&T and Verizon is bad, but this bill also contains language that could kill or maim white spaces broadband before it’s even born. The legislation makes it impossible for the FCC to Allocate unlisenced spectrum in the TV white spaces — an issue I’ve written a lot about. Unlicensed spectrum is an important part of our daily lives, because those are the airwaves that Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, baby monitors and cordless phones operate in.

Heck, even wireless toys rely on that shared spectrum. And under a plan to create white spaces broadband, some of the airwaves between the digital TV bands were going to be used for fixed wireless broadband. That technology would provide a free over the air link to existing Internet pipes in homes, in the ground or in businesses. Unfortunately, under the proposed payroll legislation it’s looking like the FCC can’t even allocate any of those airwaves to unlisenced use at all — something 40 members of Congress wrote the heads of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee to protest on Thursday.

It’s frustrating when important technical issues become balls swatted around by Congress. Given the importance of passing this legislation, which is supposed to cut the amount of payroll taxes employees will pay, the inclusion of this language as a hope to cram it through without a public debate seems like a low blow at the FCC, consumers and broadband in general.

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For anyone who loves taking pictures, the arrival of digital photography has been a huge benefit: for one thing, even the cheapest smartphone has a camera in it whose quality would have seemed almost unimaginable a decade ago. The result is that it is easier than it has ever been to take a good snapshot, but it also means we are drowning in digital photos. And instead of taking up a few shoeboxes in the corner of the basement somewhere, they are piling up on memory cards and hard drives and DVDs, as well as dozens of incompatible photo-sharing services and social networks. Where are these digital memories going to be when we need them in the future?

I have been thinking about this ever since I got my first digital camera (which had a then-impressive resolution of 1.2 megapixels), and it comes to mind every time I try to organize all of the photos I have taken across multiple computers and devices and services. I was reminded of it again on Thursday when I attended the funeral of an old family friend. As with so many life events, there were stand-up photo galleries put together by his daughters and other relatives, with hand-picked prints from his early years: his wedding, his children when they were babies and so on. Afterward, there were family albums to look through, each with treasured (if slightly yellowing) photos of special moments.

Will our digital photos be there when we want them?

There was a DVD of some photos as well, but it wouldn’t play on the funeral home’s DVD player for some reason. That got me thinking about the technological aspect of trying to retain our digital memories — the need to transfer photos and video from incompatible format to incompatible format, from old memory card or Mini-Disc to new ones, the fears about DVDs deteriorating over time until they become unreadable. Printed photos may get yellow, but at least you can still make out what is in them.

Of course, we should all be printing out special photos that we take, and storing them carefully so that we will always have a copy. But who has the time to do that? The same people who are scanning all of their old printed photos and saving them somewhere other than a shoebox, presumably. There are services that will do this for you, of course, but that also takes time — and it’s expensive. Like many people, I try to back up my pictures to an external hard drive, and I also use Flickr as a backup. But how do I know Flickr will still be around in 20 or 30 years? Facebook clearly wants to be the main repository for your digital memories with its new Timeline view, which looks better when you upload all your photos, and it is a useful feature. But what happens if Facebook becomes the next AOL, or the next Friendster? Then you have to download all of those photos (if Facebook still has them) and find somewhere to put them.

That’s the other downside of digital photography: at the funeral I attended, there were a handful of photos of special moments, and it probably didn’t take all that long to pick them out, even though this friend took a lot of pictures during his life. But with film cameras, most people would wind up with perhaps a few dozen photos during the course of a year, taken at birthdays, on holidays, etc. Now, it is so easy to take pictures that it’s difficult to stop — I went on vacation for a couple of weeks and took over 300 photos. More than 250 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook every day.

Easier to take, but harder to find

Not all of those photos are worth keeping, of course, but when storage is so cheap and sorting through them takes so long, why not just put them all somewhere and forget them? And so they pile up, gigabyte after gigabyte. Some recent research found that 39 percent of those surveyed couldn’t find digital pictures of a recent life event — even one that took place less than a year earlier. Instead of helping us remember the key moments in our lives, digital photos seem to be making it harder.

Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting, or someone you are with, or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to the service every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there’s a filtering problem.

All of these problems are compounded when it comes to video, of course — it is just as easy to shoot, takes even longer to process or edit, takes up more space and yet is likely to be just as ephemeral in nature, not to mention all the videos that are trapped on Hi-8 tapes and mini-DVDs and other formats.

In the past, photographs were treasured because they were so rare: it took so long to make them and the process was so expensive that having one meant a lot. It was like a moment in time had been frozen forever, and the way those photos could trigger memories was unlike almost anything else. Now, photos are just another form of digital detritus; there may be treasures in there somewhere, but we don’t have time to find them, if we can even remember where they are. Photography seems to have become more ephemeral, less permanent — whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Dear Photograph and Flickr user Leon Rice-Whetten

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According to the WSJ, the device is “a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company’s own brand.” It’s reportedly been developed over the last few years from within Google’s Android unit, and could possibly stream other media (like video?) to connected devices as well. But to me, the whole thing sounds a whole heck of a lot like what Sonos already does.

Of course, what’s most significant about the story isn’t the type of device that Google is developing, but that it’s considering making hardware at all. Up until this point, Google’s Android unit has developed software that it offers up to consumer electronics manufacturers and lets them do the actual device making. That’s worked for Android mobile phones, tablets and its Google TV devices.

But with the development of Google’s wireless streaming device, as well as its pending acquisition of Motorola Mobility, it appears the company is shifting away from a pure software play to building its own branded hardware as well. Whether or not that’s a smart strategy remains to be seen — the consumer electronics world is notoriously cut-throat, with low margins and intense competition between device makers. That said, having its own hardware capabilities could enable Google to gain a little bit more control over its own destiny, as it positions its Android software and devices against Apple’s vast iOS platform and ecosystems being developed by CE makers like Samsung.

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The code, which can be viewed with any browser, shows a button labeled “Add to My Drive,” but the button itself is currently not visible to end users within Google Docs. Notable about this is the capitalization of “My Drive” — The Journal reported that the product will simply be branded as Drive, but this suggests that at least the personal storage component of it may actually be called My Drive.

It’s unclear when exactly Google added the button to the Google Docs code. A quick Google search revealed that the Spanish Tecno-Net blog stumbled across the code snippet as well some time last month.

Update: Traces of the product apparently popped up in Google Docs as early as last September, as one commenter pointed out below. Also, take a look at some of the rather interesting things reader Brian Ussery has unearthed.

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user Sebastian Fuss.

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For the uninitiated, OpenStack is a set of open-source cloud-computing building blocks currently being developed and used by a large number of IT heavyweights. Founded as an open source project in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack members now include Cisco, HP, Dell, Citrix and dozens more vendors. Many are already selling or in the midst of creating software and/or services based on the technology. The goal is to create something that can compete with the likes of VMware and Amazon by making it relatively inexpensive to deploy, and that promises users interoperability across a large ecosystem of OpenStack-based public and private clouds.

Randy Bias

However, according to Cloudscaling Founder and CTO Randy Bias — who also played a large role in building GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure as an early employee there — the core OpenStack code and even most of the commercially available distributions of it aren’t suitable for building webscale clouds that actually let a provider operate like AWS does. OpenStack is “completely devoid” of tools for managing, analyzing and scaling a large cloud infrastructure, he said, and when Cloudscaling has helped cloud providers build their OpenStack-based offerings in the past, it ended up building these features itself.

“A lot of the OpenStack community is focused on adding sexy features at the expense of features that bring robustness and scalability,” Bias told me during an interview this week, but running a cloud takes more than just slick software.

That’s why Cloudscaling is going to announce next week its new business model centered around what it calls the Cloudscaling OCS (Open Cloud System). OCS contains three components, which the company explains thusly:

Open Cloud OS: An OpenStack-powered cloud operating system for production cloud deployments. Open Cloud OS extends core OpenStack software with production capabilities and features including management, scalability, security, and performance.

Hardware Blueprints: Proven deployment configurations for compute, storage, and networking equipment. Hardware blueprints detail turn-key, scale-engineered hardware configurations to meet specific price/performance and availability targets.

CloudBlocks: Cloudscaling’s unified architecture integrates Open Cloud OS with hardware reference blueprints to define modular cloud building blocks.

Cloudscaling is launching OCS along with partners Arista Networks and Quanta Computer Technologies, both of which are heavily involved in efforts to commoditize the gear within webscale data centers. Quanta is a particularly interesting partner, as it builds servers for a number of major server vendors, and was the company tasked with building Facebook’s custom-designed Open Compute servers. Bias wrote on his blog in October, “My money is on the success of [Open Compute Project] and Cloudscaling has designs we hope to push back.”

“We steal a lot of pages from the book of Amazon network art, as well,” Bias told me, which — along with its hardware partnerships — actually says a lot about the customers to which Cloudscaling is selling. As CEO Michael Grant explained, Cloudscaling isn’t going after legacy workloads that other cloud-software vendors tend to target. Instead, it’s targeting customer-facing clouds from carriers and MSPs, Internet applications from companies like Facebook, and entirely new applications within large enterprises. The types of applications, Bias said, that need the ability to spin up 1,000 instances for 15 minutes, and then scale back down with ease.

Cloudscaling might find itself in a tough competitive spot trying to sell OpenStack software and services against the likes of large companies Rackspace, Dell, Citrix and others, but Bias thinks his company’s experience in building numerous large clouds will carry the day. Perhaps he has good reason to be confident: Cloudscaling’s latest customer win is AT&T, which announced its OpenStack-based developer cloud at CES in January.

Feature image courtesy of Facebook.

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What can SpeakToIt Assistant do?

I spent some time with SpeakToIt on both an old iPhone 3GS and my iPad 2 earlier today, and while it’s somewhat limited compared to Siri — more on that later — the $1.99 app can assist with certain tasks. Using the software, I was able to compose and send text messages and emails from my iPhone and my iPad; note that on the iPad, SpeakToIt appears as an iPhone app with support for pixel doubling.

SpeakToIt Assistant can also search the web for various information. I asked it to search Amazon for a product and the results were spot on. A small window with results opens in the top half of the display, but with one tap, these can be expanded to a full screen. Other searchable items include images, maps, news, stock information, the IMDB site and weather nearby or around the world.

Search results take place quickly; in some cases faster than Siri. That could be due to more people using Apple’s software and servers versus those using SpeakToIt. You can customize the look of the assistant and turn conversation mode on or off.

Multiple skills, but not hooks into iOS

Also in the list of skills are features to organize events or your agenda, tasks, translate words or phrases from English and a calculator for basic math or conversion of currency or measures. I rely on Siri’s “what’s my day look like?” function on a daily basis, and a “what’s on my calendar?” query worked just fine. I first had to give the OK for SpeakToIt to see my Google Calendar; the app isn’t hooked into the native iOS Calendar software.

And if you allow SpeakToIt to access your Twitter or Facebook accounts, you can send tweets or update your status by voice. You can also check in to FourSquare, although I didn’t try that function yet. Tweets and status updates worked out really well in my tests; better than the email dictations I tried.

Limitations and voice input

Here’s where the limitations come in. Although SpeakToIs Assistant is powered by Nuance, the same as Siri, I found message dictation to be marginal at best for some reason. With Siri, I can speak multiple sentences, along with punctuation, and the text is perfect nearly every time. With SpeakToIt, even when trying to add punctuation, my dictations became giant run-on sentences without punctuation.

And although the app has a coversation mode, so that you don’t have to hit the microphone button for every command, it’s not quite as conversational as Siri. If you want to talk about weather in several places, that’s fine. But the process of creating a message ends with the message dictation. You have to manually send it by tapping the Send button.

Siri also has better native app integration as well. I tried to create a reminder with SpeakToIt assistant, but it could only do so with Evernote. No such luck setting an alarm with the native Clock app, either. This is where Siri shines: It’s integrated at a lower level with iOS than any third-party option likely ever will be.

Worth a try if you temper expectations

Still, SpeakToIt assistant shows promise as a $1.99 app, as I’d expect it to keep maturing and improving. Folks that don’t want to pay for the app just yet can take a free chance on Valentine’s Day: the software will be free to the first 100,000 people who download it, and $0.99 after that for the remainder of the day.

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• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
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Over the weekend, blogger John Cozen posted a recent e-mail exchange with AT&T about why his smartphone data connection was slowed down after he breached 2.1 GB in his last billing cycle. His argument was his usage couldn’t be subject to throttling since his data use must be well under the top 5 percent cut-off AT&T stipulates in its terms. AT&T’s response was very interesting:

“To give you a baseline – the average data use across the country by the top 5% of AT&T smartphone customers was 2GB per month, effective August 2011. The amount of data usage of our top 5% of heaviest users varies from month-to-month and by market, based on the usage of others and the ever-increasing demand for mobile broadband services. To rank among the top 5%, you must use an extraordinary amount of data in a single billing period.”

When AT&T introduced throttling in October, its highest-tier data plan was 2 GB for $25, compared to the $30 charge for unlimited plans that Cozen and millions of older AT&T customers still hold on to. That seems reasonable enough. If the 2 GB is what the top 5 percent of smartphone users consume and is at the level AT&T considers abusive, then 2 GB is a good place to set its cap, charging customers more if they exceed it.

But AT&T just overhauled its plan pricing. It’s newest mid-tier plan charges customers $30 for 3 GB. Why is AT&T inviting new customers to consume a full gigabyte more of data while telling older customers – who pay the exact same monthly fee – that 2 GB of data is excessive? My bet is that the former is really a false invitation.

When AT&T first announced these new plans, I wrote there was good and bad in them for consumers. The bad is that new subscribers will have to pay $5 more a month than their predecessors for any of AT&T’s plans. The good is that AT&T is actually lowering the per-MB charges on data, which is ultimately necessary if average mobile broadband consumption continues to grow. Now I’m not so sure.

If 2 GBs is the average use for AT&T’s 5 percent hungriest users, that means 95 percent of AT&T’s customers are well under 2 GB each month. So the vast majority of A&T customers don’t get any real benefit out of the new 3 GB plans. To them it just amounts to a $5 a month price increase.

To be fair, AT&T can’t just price for what its customers are consuming today. It has to price for where they’re going, otherwise it would just be adjusting its rates every few months. It’s not unreasonable to assume that its customers average monthly data consumption will grow beyond 2 GB in the next few years, especially as mobile video services take off. AT&T is also a business that wants to make money off of mobile data, though this may be a rather sneaky way of doing it. Ma Bell’s data rates still far undercut those of its main competitor Verizon Wireless, however.

But AT&T also claims to be facing a capacity crunch. Since its planned acquisition of T-Mobile has failed, the carrier has used every podium it can find to proclaim that its networks are reaching critical mass in an effort to justify its spectrum acquisition aims. On its fourth quarter financial call, AT&T Randall Stephenson even blamed the government’s failure to let it have T-Mobile as the reason why its forced to raise data prices.

If AT&T is so network constrained, if 2 GB of monthly usage is too much for its networks, and if it doesn’t have the spectrum to meet future demands, then why is it opening up the data spigot, actually encouraging its customers to consume more for an extra $5 a month?

iPhone image courtesy of Flickr user mark sebastian

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“We’re not ready to discuss our future product roadmap . . . but it was a useful tool to demonstrate to the FCC where innovation is headed in the TV space for both over the top and over the air/QAM,” we were told by Boxee VP of Marketing Andrew Kippen. The filing itself also states that “both the Boxee Box with Live TV and the products under development provide consumers with competitive alternatives to traditional pay cable delivered via rented set top boxes.” Of course, one could argue that any over-the-top offering with access to online sources like Netflix can be an alternative to your cable box — but that is already true for the existing Boxee Box. The need to black out two entire paragraphs in the filing leads me to believe that Boxee is instead working on additional ways to access and consume over-the-air broadcast and cable TV.

So what does it have in store for us? Here are some possibilities:

• DVR functionality. This has been the most-requested feature ever since the Boxee Live TV tuner came out earlier this year. The tuner currently only displays what’s airing at any given time, but a software update and an attached hard disc could turn the combination of Boxee Box and Live TV tuner into a full-fledged DVR.
• A Boxee TV. Viewsonic was supposed to release a TV set powered by Boxee last year, but it scrapped its plan when consumer demand for smart TVs didn’t materialize. Of course, that doesn’t mean that another TV manufacturer couldn’t fill the gap. A TV with a built-in tuner would obviously also have access to Boxee Live TV and as such be impacted by any attempt to encrypt basic cable.
• A revamped Boxee Box with internal storage. This would go well with any DVR offering, in part because not every consumer wants to have an external hard drive and a USB dongle dangling from their Boxee Box. Of course, it would also be possible to directly add the TV tuner to the Box. But this could bring costs up even further, so I would expect this to be sold separately for the foreseeable future. Iomega is already selling a Boxee device with a hard drive in Europe, but the company told us it doesn’t have any plans to bring the device to the U.S.
• A cable set-top box. Yes, you read that correctly. Boxee has been big on cord cutting rhetoric lately, but the company is reportedly also talking to smaller cable operators about using Boxee’s platform as an alternative to the traditional cable box. This could be done with the existing Boxee Box and a Live TV tuner, but one could also imagine slightly revamped hardware that could offer subscribers online video, basic cable channels and a DVR for a small monthly fee, much like Sezmi used to offer. But instead of selling it directly to consumers, Boxee would offer the device through a regional cable company.

We will likely have to wait a while until we know what the company has up its sleeve. However, the success of the Live TV tuner — the device is currently sold out and on back order — shows that the company is clearly on to something here. And while the list of possible products above is admittedly pure speculation, it goes to show that there is a lot of potential for Boxee to innovate in this space.

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