I came across this video showing some interesting interface elements for navigating through ebooks:

I have been a big fan of ebooks from back in the Rocket eBook days (Anybody remember this device?), and am really excited that the publishing industry seems to have finally reached the tipping point with going to digital. It’s clear that refinements like these will simply accelerate the ebook adoption process, and I love seeing innovation like this taking place in this space.

My current e-reader of choice is the iPad Kindle app. Amazon’s development and continued support of the Kindle has been the critical factor in getting the ebook marketplace to this point. Of course, Apple’s announcement of iBooks Author last week is a sign that things are starting to heat up here and I’m excited about that as well. Clearly, the future is still up for grabs, and there is no shortage of opportunity for creative minds to evolve and shape this space moving forward.

Kudos to the folks at KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence that developed this – it is really well done.

Microsoft has always been able to pull together great demos of pre-released products. Unfortunately, many of the most exiting features from those demos never seem to make it into the released versions of their products. Here is the most recent demo of their upcoming Windows 8 release for CES 2012:

‘Over promising’ isn’t something Microsoft can have happen with the release of Windows 8. Microsoft is playing catch-up on a lot of fronts – especially in the mobile arena – and needs to seriously ‘over deliver’ if they have a chance of grabbing some market share. With Windows 8 not slated to come out until the later half of 2012, there will be a lot of innovation that takes place on both the Android and iOS platforms before it arrives. What they offer will need to standup to comparison with both of these established players on every front: interface, features, stability, and applications.

Not an easy task by any measure.

Microsoft will also have a very small window to make headway and establish credibility in the tablet space. Apple will probably be releasing their iPad 4 (two full generations of the tablet from what is available today) in the beginning of 2013 – grabbing the media spotlight with rumors long before it eventually rolls out.

If what they are demoing here can make it on to lightweight tablets devices with true ‘all day’ battery life and price points starting at or below $500, they have a chance of success – especially if they can leverage their Office franchise as a differentiator.

If instead it turns out to be a bloated OS running on $1000 hardware with a laptop level battery life, they will be dead on arrival.

At this point, my money isn’t on Microsoft.

Samsung just introduced their ‘Transparent LCD Smart Window’ technology at this years CES, and I am really excitedby the potential of it. Here is a video of it in action:

In the same way that the touch experience ended up being different when moving from the iPhone to the iPad, touch on a ‘window’ scale also has it’s own unique attributes. The ‘blinds’ demonstration is a perfect example of the types of applications that could work at this scale. I could see this technology being equally at home in conference rooms, office spaces, or home settings – or even built into counter-tops or coffee tables.

In store settings, it could become an advertiser’s dream, with shop windows and display cases providing up to the second information about special offers, availability, or complimentary products. If that could be matched with personalization from a nearby smartphone, targeted retailing could move in an exciting new direction.

I could also see this become a foundation for augmented reality applications. Imagine a 24″x24″ panel of this that someone could look through as they work on something complex, with technical details overlaying what they are seeing. Combine that with Siri like capabilities for interaction, and you could have a killer commercial tool.

I’m excited to see touch moving beyond phones and tablets, and believe that both the scale and transparency offered by this type of technology can really open the door to a whole new class of applications and innovative uses.

Samsung claims that it will be shipping ‘soon’ – so hopefully we won’t have too much longer to wait.

My knees are in pretty bad shape. In fact, every doctor I’ve worked with over the past 10 years has told me that the only real fix available to me is to have them replaced.

But they always give me this recommendation with the qualifier “at some point” tacked on to it. Despite the difficulties my current condition entails, all of them believe I’m about 10 years too young to have the procedure done now. So instead, as a half step to delay the inevitable, I had knee surgery again last week (my 6th knee operation over the past 15 years) to try and provide some temporary measure of relief.

My reason for sharing this with you isn’t a play for sympathy. What I find so interesting here is the justification doctors have for wanting me to wait. There is no doubt that I would benefit from having this procedure done today. Their reticence instead boils down to a conservative view of the future:

I grew up during the 1960′s, when science established itself as the engine of progress and shaped my view of an unbounded future. With this as motivation, I have spent my entire post-gratuate career developing and commericalizing new technologies in a series of startups, seeing entire industries reinvented and new ones created in ways no one imagined previously.

In these types of creative environments, decisions aren’t made based on what you know can be done today – to do that would marginalize progress. Instead, they are based on what you ‘believe’ you’ll be able to do at a given point in the future. Innovation isn’t simply a happy upside surprise that occasionally interrupts an otherwise slow, predictable march forward. It is the ephemeral, yet paradoxically substantial, foundation that every significant thing you accomplish will ultimately be built upon. Innovation happens through strength of will and the conviction that you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to – even if the necessary details aren’t clear when you begin.

With this as context, having doctors defer taking beneficial steps today based on concerns about limitations that may exist a quarter century into the future seems counter intuitive to me. Believing in innovation isn’t a ticket to be reckless, and I do understand that there are risks involved. That said, it should give us the confidence to move forward with things we see as reasonable, even if we currently lack the clarity of detail we will need at some point in the future to execute on it.

To me, that is what believing in innovation is all about.

I do appreciate that doctors need to balance a range of medical, legal, and business factors that are all significant elements of these types of decisions. My comments here are really meant as a more general call for us to recapture that fundamental belief in our ability to solve the challenges we face and to the capture the opportunities we have in front of us – even when they initially seem overwhelming. We need to view risk in our society less as a yoke of uncertainty that we should avoid, and more as a liberating force of possibility that we should embrace.

This belief is an essential component of building an innovative culture. And it’s what makes America a beacon for so many people throughout the world.

My son recently took the PSAT exam, the first of the many standardized tests he will need to take as part of the acceptance process we have in place for admission to colleges and universities. He is still a sophomore, so this was really just a practice run for process that will kick in to high gear for him next year. There is a whole industry that has built up around taking these exams, with preparatory schools, private coaches and tutors offering students the ‘skills’ they need to score well on these exams.

Performing well on these tests is – in large part – a mater of practice and repetition. The questions have known formats on specific foundational material, with clear strategies on the best ways to approach selecting answers and optimizing guesses. The goal of all of this preparation is to avoid surprises and be able to instinctively play back the most appropriate approach for every type of question on an exam.

And this is really unfortunate…

Finding solutions to the most challenging problems we have will require people that can think creatively, identify previously unseen relationships, and suggest and tear down new models of innovation in a continuous cycle of refinement. We don’t need a generation of graduates who can play back solutions from the past note-for-note. We need people that can improvise on the past, seeing our present world through a different lens, and creating new and astonishing things to take us places we’ve never been before. We need people that are passionate about the course they want to pursue in their lives, and are looking for an opportunity to accomplish something meaningful.

And that has little correlation to being a well trained test taker.

In fairness, most Universities do consider a broader range of criteria in selecting candidates for admission beyond standardized test scores. That said, these “other factors” are now being prepped for in similar ways to the more structured testing models. Many parents are starting to build their children’s “college resumes” while they are still in grade school, making sure their kids are involved in those socially responsible projects and extra-curricular activities they think will help them stand-out on their applications. They bring in coaches for help with writing the necessary essays and handling any interviews as the application process kicks off – in addition to standardized test preparation. All of this is being done to create the most effective packaging of an applicant, regardless of their underlying interests, motivations, or abilities. Everything becomes subservient to just getting that acceptance letter.

With all of that in mind, it is unfortunate that colleges place so much emphasis on these types of screening methods for determining admissions. I simply don’t believe that the current approach can really identify those applicants with highest potential for success – the ones that can most benefit from the opportunities top tier universities can provide.

But with everyone trying to game the system to get a leg up, I not sure that there is any easy fix here. Perhaps the process needs to be less predictable, forcing applications to navigate off script and show how well they can think on their feet. Or maybe it needs to take place over a longer period of time, allowing continuous engagement with students throughout their high school years. This could help Universities see past any well-constructed artifices and really get to know the students that would like to go there.

While I am not optimistic that things will change any time soon, I think it would benefit us to start a discussion around this topic as part of the current national debate we are having about the future of our educational system. We need to find better ways to identify and nurture those individuals with the real potential to impact the fields they are passionate about.

If admission to our advanced educational institutions simply becomes a ticket to making a lot of money, we will end up squandering the true potential of a whole generation.

In any ecosystem, there is a natural resistance to change. From simple familiarity to structural interdependencies, many elements converge to support the existence of the status quo. That doesn’t mean that the status quo is ideal or even good – simply that the cost of changing out of that state is more expensive in some aggregate way than the cost of remaining there.

This ‘cost of change’ creates a form of static friction in the system, allowing it to continue in it’s current state even when pressure for change exists. But like at the fault lines that define the boundaries between the continental plates of our planet, this pressure for change will continue to build up until it reaches a level that can no longer be resisted. When that point arrives, the built up pressure gets released in a single, significant shift (an ‘earthquake’ event) that ushers in change – producing a period of instability as the system searches for a new state of equilibrium. This is an unavoidable process in any dynamic, living environment – be it economies, technologies, political systems, or even cultures.

And for those that need to go through these shifts, it can be very scary and painful.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of two key forces that exist in most ecosystems – regulation and innovation. Regulation is typically put in place to ‘raise the cost’ of the system moving in certain directions. Innovation, by contrast, attempts to ‘lower the cost’ of the system in moving in certain directions. While both of them try to influence what the system should look like in a future state, they are fundamentally different in nature and intent.

Regulation can take two forms – proscriptions and mandates. Regulatory proscriptions artificially raise the cost of certain actions through the implementation of penalties. For example, fines can be imposed, businesses licenses revoked, taxes levied, or even people locked up if they try to do certain things that are no longer ‘allowed’. Regulatory mandates can impose similar penalties if certain specific actions are NOT taken, forcing activity to take place that would otherwise not happen on it’s own. Sometime, regulatory mandates will eschew penalties to take the form of incentives – rewarding certain actions by artificially lowering the cost of the system moving in a particular direction.

The whole premise for creating regulations is a belief that we can understand enough about a desired future state to formulate an optimal plan to get there. Because of this, the broader or more far reaching a regulation is, the harder it will be to get right. The more complex an ecosystem is, the harder it will be to change or influence predictably.

What makes innovation different from regulation is that the innovator, unlike the regulator, doesn’t get to impose their view of the ‘best future’ path on the system they operate in. Instead, they need to offer something new and compelling enough that it can lure people away from the status quo. They constantly need to compete with other visions of the future – other potential options that are being offered. This forces them to continuously adapt and improve what they offer, or to drop out of the ‘selection process’.

In an innovation driven system, bad ideas don’t last long. The costs and the benefits of every path tend to be exposed early, and choices made at one point can constantly be reassesed against new alternatives being offered and adjustments made. Nothing is ‘locked in’, lending an efficiency to the process that biases it to positive outcomes.

Regulation, on the other hand, doesn’t provide anywhere near the same clarity. Since regulations aren’t about choices, their benefits can only be measured against the hypothetical end state they were implemented to avoid (‘Millions would have lost their jobs if we hadn’t done XYZ…”). There isn’t an actual alternative path their effectiveness can be measured against, allowing regulators justify them against theoretical extrapolations of past conditions that normally assume nothing else in the system would have changed to provide a different, better outcome. The only time a regulation typically gets challenged is when the damage it does – the only real measurable cost of a regulation – clearly outweighs the perceived benefits of keeping it in place. This biases regulation to negative outcomes.

My point here isn’t that all regulation is bad and all innovation is good – just that it is easier to identify and correct bad innovations than it is to identify and correct bad regulations. Innovations need to prove they are better before being adopted, and are constantly challenged by new ideas moving forward. Once passed, regulations are not normally challenged, and usually need to reach a point where they are demonstrably bad before being thrown out.

This means that regulations tend to create a status quo that is highly resistant to change, making the inevitable dislocations extremely painful when they finally arrive. Innovations tend to reduce the strength of the status quo, allowing change to happen on a more continual, ‘just in time’ basis.

Both have their place, but I strongly believe we need to be looking to innovation as the defining component of our path to a better future.

FOCUS…

It’s one of the things that can give small startups an edge when they compete against bigger companies. And while focus on an aggregate corporate level is definitely an important piece of this, the real ‘force multiplier’ I’m thinking about here is the focus that takes place on an individual level.

Startups tend to be driven by survival. They don’t take their own existence for granted. Every individual in a startup recognizes that they play a role in their company’s ultimate success (or failure). More importantly, they also understand where in the company they need to focus their abilities – the specific things they need to concentrate their efforts on – to help make the overall mission a success.

In contrast, large organizations simply take their existence as a given. The company is perceived to exist independent and decoupled from the day to day actions of its employees. Most people there don’t feel any direct connection between their own personal efforts and the success of the overall business. They operate in a complex ecosystem where success or failure is hard to associate with any specific cause and effect – much less with the actions of any specific individuals.

Lacking any meaningful link to the overall well being of their organization, most people – on both the individual and group level – begin to focus more on their own parochial success within the larger organizational structure. Engagement is no longer around what is best for the company in the context of the overall market and opportunity. It is now around what is best for me as an individual in the context of the overall company.

Unfortunately, this is a completely rational way for people to act given that type of environment. Motivated people feel the need to compete and win. Absent a way to realize that in the market, it is only logical for this competitive need to transfer inward to their peers within the company.

This is why strong political climates seem to exist at most large companies. Walls get put up, allies and competitors begin forming, and compromises start to abound. Organizational maps end looking more geopolitical than operational, and decision making starts to take that in to account. Ultimately, their size advantages end up getting erased by in-fighting and inefficiencies, creating huge distractions to everyone simply trying to get the job done.

And it ends up getting reflected in what they are able to produce.

This is also why so many small companies seem able to out innovate and out execute much larger competitors. Its focus that gives them that power.

I find Sir Ken Robinson a breath of fresh air on the whole topic of educating the next generation. He is able to move beyond the narrow debates taking place in political circles to challenge the entire premise of our current educational structure. If you haven’t heard of him before, he is one of the thinkers you should have on your radar.

Here is an excellent animation done on top of one of his talks.

If the future of education is at all interesting to you, its worth your time to watch this.

A friend of mine sent me this picture of a math problem and it’s solution:

I though it was a great (and very funny) example of giving someone what they are asking for instead of what they really want.

Sadly, this happens quite a lot in the technology space. People often ask for something to be added or changed in a device or program with only a superficial understanding of the implications of their request. As engineers or designers, the challenge for us is to not simply come back to them with the “Here it is” solution, but to understand the context of their request and try to give them what they really want.

And that requires real engagement and iteration:

• What problem are they REALLY trying to solve with a given request?
• What will different solutions cost them in terms of complexity and usability?
• How should it work across the different platforms they may want to use it on?
• Is this a unique requirement or something that needs broader feedback?

All of this is as much a part of engineering a solution as any of the technical details needed to implement it. Without having a deep understanding of both their goals and their workflow, delivering a truly successful solution to a client will be nearly impossible. Engineering is ultimately about solving problems without creating too many new ones. And that involves more than just an understanding of technology.

Like doctors who have taken the Hippocratic Oath, our first duty to the people we try to help should be “Do no harm.”

For those who have wondered, I am still here and alive…

The past four months have been incredibly busy for me. I have been consumed by a project at work, and barely seem to have enough free cycles for sleep anymore.

One of the things that has suffered with all of this is my blogging. I have been MIA for the last couple of months, and only did a few posts in the months before.

I really want to thank all of you for sticking with me during this unplanned hiatus. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and hope that I can resume regular blogging soon.

I miss it tremendously.

I’ve been asked many times about the best way to travel abroad with an iPhone without being hit at the end of the month with a jaw-dropping bill. Probably the best way to do this is to jailbreak your iPhone so it is no longer locked to AT&T. An unlock iPhone will let you use prepaid SIM cards you can purchase from local carriers – some even with data plans – giving you the full benefits of your iPhone wherever you travel.

The catch here is that you need to be willing to jailbreak your iPhone and deal with life outside the “safetynet” of the Apple ecosystem. Though the risk of problems with jailbreaking is low and the benefits are real, I made the personal decision a long time ago not to jailbreak my iPhone. I have enough technical complexity in my life, and just didn’t want to deal with another device requiring special attention. The entire iPhone ecosystem has worked really well for me, and I’ve never felt limited by the standard capabilities offered by Apple – except, of course, for the phone being carrier locked.

So can those of us with un-jailbroken iphones still make use of them abroad? Absolutely!

Here is a quick guide to maximizing your iPhone outside of the US:

1. Unless you have money to burn, turn off data roaming on your iPhone. This will prevent it from connecting to data network of the local carriers in the country you are in – and save you potentially thousands of dollars in data roaming charges.

   Just go into SETTINGS->GENERAL->NETWORK and make sure that Data Roaming is set to off:

   

   If you really want to be certain that you won’t be pulling data, you can also turn off the Cellular Data option above it.

2. If you don’t already have an account, you now want to sign up for Skype. Go to www.skype.com and click on the Join Skype button:
   

   It will give you a basic form to fill out to get your FREE Skype account:
   

   Once you have your Skype account set up, just log in to the site and you’re ready for the next step.

3. Next, you need to buy Skype credits. For pennies a minute, Skype will allow you to place calls to actual phone numbers – not just other Skype users. This ends up being a tiny fraction of what any carrier would normally charge.
   

   For a recent week long business trip I took to Minsk, I ordered $20 worth of credits. I ended up making about 3 hours worth of calls but burned through less than $10 in credits. Skype absolutely is the most cost effective way to call people globally.

4. If you would also like people to be able to call you via Skype from a regular phone, you can order what they call an Online Number. You can pick numbers local to any of 25 countries. I have a United States based Online Number from New York City, so anyone that has called me from there only needed to pay local toll charges – even when I was in Belarus.

   It costs about $60 a year to have an Online Number. Go in to your account details on Skype, and you will see the option to sign up for it:

   

5. The next step is making all of this available on your iPhone.
   
   
   With that all set up, you now need to install the Skype application on your iPhone. Just go to the App Store on your iPhone, search for Skype. Select the Skype application and click FREE to get it:
   

   The Skype application interface looks very similar to the standard phone interface on the iPhone and works in pretty much the same way:
   

So what’s the downside with this approach?

Skype requires that your iPhone be connected to the internet, and with Data Roaming disabled, that means you’ll need to be connected via a wireless hotspot. In most places you visit, there are many options available for this. Almost every hotel will have it available for guests, and many restaurants and coffee shops provide it for free. A useful resource for finding hotspots globally is a site called Hotspot Locations. You just need to choose a country and city, and it will give you a list of places there that offer wireless access. Make sure you pick several alternative locations in case certain ones are no longer available.

Another useful tip to keep in mind is that text messages can be sent and received even outside of hot spots. They will typically cost $.50-$1 per message, but can be a useful backup way of communicating when a hotspot isn’t available.

What I’ve outlined here is essentially what I use myself when traveling abroad. If any of you road warriors out there have other suggestions for world traveling iPhone users, just leave them in the comments.

One of the things that has been keeping me so busy recently is the release of our new iPad app – Curator HD. Curator HD is the first full featured curation application for the iPad, combining a great feed reader with commenting and sharing options for social channels, email, and even custom newsletters. It also allows for the creation of folders to store and organize stories that you might not be ready to share yet.

I put together a video overview of Curator HD, both to introduce it to the market and to help people get started using it:

Curator HD is available now for FREE in the productivity section of the iTune App store.

Just click here to download.

Microsoft’s has been struggling for several years to unhook their mobile strategy from their previous “Windows Mobile” initiative, and effectively reinvent their footprint in this space. This week, they took what I hope is just a first step down a new mobile path with the launch of Windows Phone 7.

Unlike Apple’s iPhone or most of the Android phones I’ve seen, Windows Phone 7 is not an “App Centric” device. It presents an interface built around ‘information tiles’ that provide a composite/mosaic view of the things that are going on around you. The following video offers a good overview of this design:

While I applaud Microsoft for actually trying to forge their own path in this space, I do have several concerns about the approach they have taken:

• Easy access to applications is an important aspect of mobile computing. In the mobile world, applications are replacing generalized search for many uses, and easy access to both productivity and entertainment tools is important to many people. In its current ‘first release’ version, Windows Phone 7 seems to provide a less direct way for people to access its applications – a real limitation in my opinion.
• Having used the iPad since it first came on the market, I can attest to the importance of the tablet form factor to mobile productivity. While I have no doubt that Microsoft understands this as well as anybody, I am not sure they are willing to abandon their Windows based focused in going after this market. I have yet to hear any mention of a “Windows Slate 7″ version of this platform in the works, which concerns me. The mobile and full size computing experiences are fundamentally distinct, and Microsoft’s entire mobile strategy should be built around a single mobile-centric OS platform – not a stripped down Windows hybrid. We’ll need to see where Microsoft and it’s hardware partners go with this.
• As Apple has shown, success in mobile requires not just great software and hardware, but the evolution of an entire ecosystem to support it. This is not something Microsoft can simply farm out to their hardware partners. They need to own it and focus on it. Unfortunately, this is not an area that Microsoft hasn’t been strong in historically, and I haven’t gotten a clear picture of their plan for developing this.

I am looking forward to seeing how Microsoft evolves this platform. There are clearly some well thought out aspects to Windows Phone 7 that are not (yet) available on competing platforms, and also some parts that seem to have received a lot less attention. That said, you really can’t judge what the ultimate impact of Phone 7 may be based on what we are seeing now. What will matter is how quickly Microsoft evolves the platform over the next year, and the strength of the ecosystem they are able to build around it.

For Microsoft’s long term prospects, this is far more important than the release of Windows 7. The success or failure of the Windows Phone 7 platform will define the impact Microsoft gets to have on the next major generation of personal computing.

It wasn’t that long ago that most of the computer technology used by people was provided by their employers. It started out being desktop systems physically located at their offices. Everything installed on these computers was work related. They connected to corporate services via an internal network, and accessed the internet in a controlled way through corporate firewalls.

As the workplace became more distributed and mobile, computing shifted over more to laptops. Since these systems were with people all the time, they started to get used for both work and personal things. Access to the internet became open, with people connecting via their home networks and public hot spots. To accommodate these mobile workers, internal corporate systems started shifting to browser based interfaces, letting them access these systems via secure connections back to the corporate network. Many corporations also supplied phones to these mobile workers – typically RIM Blackberries – to let them make calls and access email. In total, it was a fairly complete set of corporate sponsored tools.

But then a few interesting things happened:

• Laptop prices dropped dramatically, fueled in part by the popularity of very low cost netbooks.
• Apple introduced the iPhone and AppStore.
• Social networking tools became a popular way to communicate.
• Free, cloud based services expanded the range of capabilities available to people.

As laptop prices fell, people started to purchase their own systems to use. Some wanted to use MacBooks instead of corporate provided windows systems. Others wanted systems that had specific features or form factors not offered by their organizations. Instead of finding ways to squeeze the applications and services they personally wanted onto the systems supplied by their companies, these users flipped the model – looking at ways to integrate what they needed to do for work onto their personal systems.

The introduction of the iPhone continued the push away from corporate sponsored systems. The iPhone was the first mobile phone to offer a real browser, and people quickly gravitated to the promise of having the real internet available on something they could slip in their pocket. Despite little initial interest by IT departments to support the iPhone, people simply bought their own and used them for both work and personal needs. The introduction of the App Store a year later cemented the iPhone as a true mobile productivity platform, making it the smartphone everyone wanted to have.

Along side these developments, social networking started to grow in importance as a viable channel for people to communicate across. This led to more sophisticated social applications appearing – both on mobile platforms as well as PC’s – making social networking a practical tool for professional users as well as consumers. However, outside of cost saving tools like Skype, corporations have typically been slow to bring social applications into the sponsored fold.

Also during this period, cloud based applications started growing in both popularity and sophistication. Beyond the free emails services that had been popular for many years, this generation of cloud based services covered everything from comprehensive office productivity applications to services like CRM systems, cloud based disk storage, and even cloud hosted databases. Most were free or very low cost, and didn’t require technical sophistication on the part of users.

Collectively, these developments have had a real impact on the way employees view their corporate IT services, and where their expectations are now set.

People can now afford to buy their own equipment, and are comfortable using all of these tools on their own. There are now free or inexpensive applications and services available to these people that cover all the capabilities of their traditionally IT sponsored equivalents. There are also applications that people use on their own – like social networking – that aren’t yet being considered by most organizations.

In short, many people are now able to become their own IT providers, leveraging only a limited set of capabilities that are uniquely available from their employers. This represents a real shift in the ‘balance of power’ between users and their IT groups, and fundamentally blurs the role and mission of many corporate IT departments. Without acknowledging and adapting to the realities of this new environment, traditional IT departments run the risk of becoming irrelevant – or even worse, a liability to their organizations.

I find the tools most social networks give you to share with your contacts to be fairly primitive. They typically force you to explicitly organize people into a flat set of groups, and then use those groups as the granular basis for all of your sharing decisions within the network. This can be useful for interacting with groups that mirror actual real world groups (eg – family, coworkers, teammates), where a person’s membership in the real world group is the reason for sharing with them. However, I think it falls short for sharing around less rigid associations like interests or skills – the exact things I find be most valuable in my ‘real world’ relationships.

To better address this, I would like to see social networks offer tools for sharing that are based around taxonomies of attributes in addition to the typical ‘flat groups’ model. Conceptually, this approach would assign attributes to individuals in my network and share any content I post that I tag with a matching attribute. My posts could still be constrained to more structured groups like ‘Family’ or ‘Friends’, but they would end up being better targeted to just the members of those groups that would most likely have an interest.

The challenge with this approach is its complexity. A simple rule of thumb is that the more effort and understanding that’s required to use a feature, the less likely it is to be used. To have any chance of being successful, the ‘heavy lifting’ required to configure a taxonomy like this would need to be automated; letting individuals tune it over time.

The first step would be having individuals ‘self describe’ – defining the things they are interested in sharing around. The network could make a pass based on an automated classification of their posts and the content they read and link to. A user could then make any manual adjustments they wanted to directly, but could also train the system based on the content they see. By tagging things as either interesting or not, the platform should be able to statistically analyze the content and use it to tune their user profile.

The next step would be automated tagging of content that gets posted or linked to. This tagging can be based on the content itself, but tuned by the profile of the person posting it. There are well-understood and highly efficient methods for doing this type of analysis.

In this model, the ‘flat groups’ would still allow a poster to define the total audience they want to make something available to. However, the tagging and self-description then become the targeting mechanism to route it to just those members in the audience that would have an interest in it.

A multifaceted approach to sharing no longer requires the poster to know who in their network might be interested in something they post. By decoupling these two aspects, posters could share more broadly knowing they wont be spamming their network, and the value of an individual’s network can be preserved even at larger scale.

Networks built around information sharing will continue to grow in importance – both in personal and professional settings. I believe we are just at the early stages of this model of collaboration, and automated classification will play a central role in shaping it’s evolution.

This is a topic I’d like to explore a lot more of in future posts…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the domain you were seeing…

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

Thanks for your continued support of The Digital Edge.

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

I’m just not sure which concerns me more.

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

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

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

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

So what concerns me with the FCC?

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

Unfortunately, that isn’t how regulation works.

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

So where does that leave us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But this might be changing.

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

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

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

Touch computing will be transformational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wired Magazine put up a quick look at the technical preview version of Windows Phone 7 that Microsoft has been floating around. This video doesn’t show much in the way of details (and is a pretty lame review overall), but it does give you a general sense of the thinking and flow behind their new UI design:

With the caveat that I haven’t actually played with the new phone myself, I’m left with the impression that the ’tiles’ design of Microsoft’s latest mobile OS – what they call the “Metro” UI – is going to require a lot of scrolling around – especially if you have a lot of applications you normally work with. For better or worse, Windows Phone 7 is clearly not another iPhone knockoff – something I do give Microsoft props for. It is approaching the phone as a social tool, and weaving all forms of communication you have with people together into a cohesive stream anchored by the people you connect with instead of through discrete services.

That said, I just don’t have a good feeling about this. I’m getting the sense that Microsoft is getting the spin machine started up early – never a good sign. No amount of PR is going to save this phone if it fails to deliver, and the competition is only getting tougher the longer it takes for them to release it. Their ambitions and focus seem to be in the right place, but the OS will need to translate that into something that is easy for people to understand and use in real world set ups and situations.

Train wreck, wild success, or something in between, with Microsoft’s entire mobile strategy riding on this new OS, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Once I get to spend some time with it, I’ll post something more detailed on the specific pros and cons I see – stay tuned…

I want to start posting about some of the mobile apps I use on a regular basis, and decided to start off by taking a look at an app I’ve been using for quite a while: Instapaper.

Instapaper allows you to ‘clip’ articles you find on the web and copy them to your mobile devices for later reading. It works on both the iPhone and the iPad, though there are a few subtle differences between the two experiences.

Here are a couple of short videos I put together to show you what it takes to get started using Instapaper:

Signing Up:

Clipping A Web Page:

When it comes to reading the articles I’ve clipped, I use Instapaper on both the iPad and the iPhone – it depends on the situation. (And though I don’t show it here, it is also possible to use Instapaper to create a batch of articles that can be printed out on paper, or to set it up to deliver updates on a periodic basis for viewing on Amazon’s Kindle. This range of options should cover most people today.)

I started with Instapaper on the iPhone. The iPhone experience has really been optimized for ‘on the move’ reading:

Click To Enlarge

One incredibly nice feature of the iPhone version is turned on by clicking on the blue icon on the bottom of the iPhone display. This option allows you to scroll the display as you read by simply tilting it down. This makes it ideal for reading in commuting situations like a crowded subway car.

Where the iPhone version focuses on convenience, the iPad version of Instapaper, with it’s larger display, is more about reading comfort:

Click To Enlarge

It has a slightly tinted background that makes the display easier on the eyes. It also offers a landscape mode that combines both headlines and articles, making it convenient to quickly browse multiple shorter articles .

In addition to viewing articles, both platforms make it easy to share and save them as well. They include built in links to both Tumblr and Tweetie, and an option to send articles via email. In addition, articles that might be worth a second read can be added to the built in ‘Starred’ folder, or you can create your own folders (in the paid version) and file them in a more organized way.

For me, Instapaper is like TIVO for the web. It lets me time shift the reading I’d like to do in a way that blends seamlessly into my workflow.

If you aren’t using it already, I highly recommend checking it out.

In a post I wrote last week, I took a look the impact 3D video is likely to have in the consumer marketplace. After that post went up, I had two people mentioned to me that they simply couldn’t see themselves wearing special glasses to watch television, and one more thought that it was just a fad and wouldn’t want to waste their money. While there was certainly interest in it as well, only one person – an avid gamer – seemed really excited about it. It wasn’t much of a sampling, but the feedback wasn’t exactly what I expected.

So I wanted to open the question up to all of you:

Would you consider getting a 3D Television at some point in the future?

If Yes:

I really would appreciate whatever feedback you’d be willing to give. The questions are just a guide to help you think about an answer, so any opinions or insights on the subject are welcome. This will be a lot more interesting if more people are willing to comment (or if you feel more comfortable, just send me an email instead). I’ll discuss whatever feedback I get in a follow-up post, and if the interest is high enough, I’ll spend more time covering 3D Television and 3D video production in the future.

I really appreciate whatever time you can take to respond.

Thanks!

Cisco and Intel have partnered to launch a new tablet device called the Cius.

The Cius (intentionally pronounced as “See Us”), is a small, Android based tablet being pitched to communication/collaboration focused business and educational users. When it comes to describing gadgets, images just seem to work best. So to get a feel for what the Cius is like, just skim through this two part demo of the device given by John Chambers at last week’s Cisco Live conference in Las Vegas:

I’m not sure what Cisco was thinking with the design of the Cius. At this point, Apple’s iPad has set the standard for tablet based devices, and by that metric, the Cius is a major fail. It comes across as a thick and ungainly piece of plastic. The large speaker grill (I’m assuming) in the front takes away from the usable touch surface of the device, and the choice of a 7″ screen makes it too small for running productivity apps – yet too large to easily carry around or use as a camera. Even the look of the software being run was unimpressive – very “last decade” in it’s style and interactivity.

I’m sure there is some segment of the business marketplace that will find this device interesting – I just don’t see it getting any real traction beyond that hard core Cisco fan base.

From what I’ve seen here, Cisco would have been much better off focusing their efforts on supporting 3rd party developers for the iPad/iPhone 4 as well as the nascent Android tablet marketplace. The results they got from doing it all in-house are, to put it mildly, unimpressive.

About a month ago we launched a newsletter publishing app – Publisher HD – on the iTunes App Store. We were really pleased with the response we got to the app, and were jazzed that it even spent some time in both Apple’s “What’s Hot” and “New & Noteworthy” sections for productivity apps.

Publisher HD allows you to hook in to your free Google Reader account (or your professional InfoNgen account) and use content you find there to assemble and customize newsletters for redistribution. It lets people act as web curators, picking out things of interest that they find, commenting on them, and packing them up for redistribution to a targeted audience. (This is effectively the same model some popular publications like the Huffington Post use to serve their readers).

About two weeks ago, Google decided to make a change to the technical methodology they use to authenticate with Reader. Since Google doesn’t publish a formal API to access Reader, this change ended up breaking Publisher HD in a significant way – feeds from Google Reader would no longer refresh. Once we found out what happened, we were able to push out an update, test it, and upload it to the app store all in less than three hours.

Unfortunately, the rest of the App Store process doesn’t move as quickly.

We had to wait about 9 days before the updated version of Publisher HD became available for download. During that time, our download count went way down, and those folks that did download it ended up with an application that probably didn’t work for them. We had to modify our application description on the iTunes Store to let people know that there was an issue and that an update for it was done and awaiting approval. (We didn’t want to pull the App from the store since our professional InfoNgen clients were not affected). It was incredibly difficult to watch all this play out, knowing that we’d already made the fix but were powerless to influence it’s release.

While the App Store’s 7-10 day review window is manageable when dealing with planned updates and enhancements, it can end up being incredibly damaging when something urgently needs to be updated. There should be some avenue made available to developers for the delivery of critical fixes, even if it involves additional costs or an upfront certification that would let them do this directly. Perhaps it would make sense for Apple to allow a certain number of updates with a ‘post release’ review, and with severe penalties for anyone that abuses it. Though situations like this will ideally be infrequent, their typical severity when they do arise should earn them some special consideration.

The fixed version has now been available on the app store for about a week. Even though this episode dampened some the incredible momentum we had from the initial app launch, downloads have started picking up again and I’m optimistic that everything will get back on track. We’ve been lucky in this regard.

Despite having gone through this, I still love the entire app store concept. It provides a delivery and service platform that we could never realize alone as a small development shop – especially in the mobile space. Hopefully, Apple will consider the impact of these kinds of situations as they evolve their app store policies. I’m sure many other development teams have found themselves in a similar situation and have their own tales of woe to tell.

Sadly, some of them probably have a less happy endings.

While I gave you a quick look last Friday at the quality of video produced by the iPhone 4, that was done without any attention to lighting and with the iPhone propped-up against a monitor. The movie I’ve embedded here, while also shot using the iPhone 4, was produced professionally, and leveraged an array of techniques and equipment to produce a clean stable image.

This short movie is called “Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film from Michael Koerbel. At the end of the movie, a small ‘making of’ segment is included that shows exactly how the various shots were composed, blocked, and shot.

Over all, this is an interesting look at how short films are made, and the best example to date of the true quality of the video that can be produced on the iPhone 4.

Not only that, but it was edited entirely on iMovie for iPhone. Without any of the post production tools offered with Final Cut or Avid, I consider this an impressive feat on it’s own.

Enjoy.