Herein you’ll find articles on a very wide variety of topics about technology in the consumer space (mostly) and items of personal interest to me. I have also participated in and created several podcasts most notably Pragmatic and Causality and all of my podcasts can be found at The Engineered Network.
Smartwatches: You Might Want One, Or Not
The Pebble has been the most publicly visible smart-watch recently and with speculation growing ever since the previous generation iPod Nano that Apple may build their own smart-watch.
For those not up to date with what we’re talking about, a smart-watch is wrist-attached interface to your smart-phone that tells the time (isn’t that odd) as well as display notifications for Emails, Messages and so on as well as supporting a discrete vibration to notify you of those messages. Some models may even give you a brief summary of what was in the message and the ability to initiate/end calls from the smart-watch.
There are two problems with a smart-watch: 1) It’s something extra you need to carry/wear/charge and 2) Apart from telling the time it’s otherwise useless without a smart-phone.
Historically Apple has focussed on products that “stand alone” as it were and are optimised and focussed on being very good at a specific task. The iPod Shuffle is the most portable music player they offer and has been optimised to be light, small and unobtrusive. The iPad and iPhone have been focussed on being either a good tablet or a good phone with clear lines of distinction between them. A smart-watch can not stand on its own unless it somehow displays the time better than other watches. Unlikely.
For most people that have been around a while, before mobile phones we all wore a watch on our wrist (except those that told me I was letting time rule my life - it’s a long story). When phones became more common and people carried them everywhere the watch started to fade in popularity as one could easily reach into their pocket and check the time on their mobile phone instead. As people started using PDAs they carried a phone and a PDA. In time Blackberries came along and then iPhones and we’re back to a single device again.
The other question is effort: How much effort is it to pull back my sleeve (if I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt) turn my wrist and look down as opposed to lifting my arm pulling my phone our of my breast pocket? Most people would agree that checking the wrist is marginally easier but I would suggest that history has already shown us where that path ends.
There will always be people that want to wear a watch irrespective of whether they have a phone on them or not. People wear watches just for fashion too. That’s fine. No matter how I turn this over in my mind, I just can’t see the smart-watch being a runaway success. It will sell, but in AppleTV numbers perhaps, if they’re lucky. I imagine Apple have bigger fish to fry and more profitable niches to explore.
What Made Hypercritical So Good
My favourite podcast of all time, Hypercritical, on the 5by5 network concluded this week with its 100th episode. Hosted by Dan Benjamin and John Siracusa the show has been consistently good over the last two years and could have easily continued for more. However Siracusa decided that it was time to end it, feeling that he had exhausted much of what he wanted to discuss.
How it became my favourite podcast was more about the evolution of my tastes as a listener. The initial few episodes I listened to, I found his hyper-pickyness to be annoying. I preferred the chattier, talk-show style of podcast at the time with more back and forth between the hosts. As time went on I became more interested in detailed analysis and much of the talk-show banter began to grate on me. There were other shows with analysis in them but what made Siracusa different was that he was prepared to be wrong and admit simplifications when they were being or had been made. At the same time he wasn’t too afraid to tackle topics that he wasn’t an expert on and the variety of topics was excellent as a result.
Siracusa had no interest in starting or participating in conversation that didn’t relate to either follow-up on previous episodes or the topics he wanted to discuss (almost all of which were tech related). Unlike several other shows on 5by5 at the time, this show was focussed, analytical and there was a respect for the international audience of listeners. The title selections were only ever those Siracusa approved of despite Dan’s best efforts to push his preferences on many occasions. John knew what he wanted and was uninterested in deviating from his intentions.
The key to what made it so good was that Hypercritical was more audience involved that any other podcast I’ve listened to. I’m not talking about hammy “ring-ins” or special guests or that it had a live chat room. John would entertain any and all feedback on the topics he had discussed at any time during any of the podcast episodes on some occasions discussing feedback from episodes as far back as a year prior.
Hypercritical was, in essence, a never-ending conversation between John Siracusa and the rest of us and we helped him and ourselves distill the essence of what was right and wrong about a given topic. There is no doubt in my mind (I’ve never talked with him or even met him) that John learned a great deal about different topics from people all over the world through their feedback. His re-sharing of this feedback made us all the better for listening.
To my knowledge there has been no other podcast quite like it and I fear there may never be again. The opportunity to participate in the show has gone but the episodes remain for posterity. If you haven’t listened then I encourage you to do so. If like me, you’ve listened to every episode (some more than once) and appreciate what it was, then raise your glass and toast with me, Thank you John Siracusa. You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Your next podcast, Ultracritical, awaits you whenever you’re ready.
Too Easy To Kill
It was with great sadness that I watched yet another mass slaughter of innocents in America. Although I was born, raised and live in Australia I spent several years in North America and am well acquainted with the American desire for individuals to own their own firearms. I once listened to a well educated man proudly list off his arsenal of firearms using names I’d never heard of - I guess I’m not a gun guy. For him it was a source of pride. For me it was just terrifying.
The level of difficulty in how one obtains a firearm is the single biggest problem. Easy access to a firearm is ultimately the means for such large scale murder. Take away the weapon and it’s very difficult for the average person to kill another. It’s true that a stick or even ones own legs or arms can be trained in a martial art and that training can make a person into a “weapon” of sorts. Using martial arts to kill takes much longer to kill so many people and it is far more personal and difficult emotionally than simply pulling a trigger. Very little training is required to use a gun to kill people.
It comes back to we humans being flawed. We are emotional. Some of us have trouble differentiating between reality and fantasy. Some of us are insane. Hand a thousand guns to a thousand people and wait a few years and several people will be killed. Don’t hand them guns and there will be several punch-ups, maybe a broken limb or two but few if any will be killed. If we can’t easily change human nature then take away the means to easily kill and the problem is significantly reduced or possibly eliminated.
If America is ever going to prevent future massacres within its own borders then it must begin disarming its population and start making it very difficult to obtain firearms. However with such a deeply entrenched belief that holding firearms is their god-given right, it may be that they are too far gone to return. A large scale move by the government to strip firearms from their people could well trigger another civil war and more bloodshed. It’s a problem that Australia doesn’t face, thankfully, in no small part due to the fallout from the Port Arthur massacre and subsequent gun laws introduced by the Howard government.
I hope that Americans can begin to take their gun problem more seriously and do the right thing to bring an end to this self-inflicted chaos. They are a great country and they are better than this.
Advertising Addiction
Many years ago the web consisted of many small web sites, mostly text, and there were only a handful of ways you could find them. Web Search pioneers Yahoo followed by Excite became the place to visit on the web because they provided the only way to search for web sites based on what content they had.
They started out without advertising however needing income they turned to advertising in order to pay their bills and become a viable business. As the years passed they added more and more advertising progressing beyond static text and images to animated images with lots of flashing and annoying banner ads surrounding the one small area of the screen that people wanted to use: the search box.
Fast forward to a few years ago and think of Twitter and Facebook. Both free services also introduced advertising in order to pay their bills. Twitter clamped down on third party developers and pushed their own applications that included sponsored tweets and rearranged their home page to include people they think you should follow - sponsors even. Facebook added advertising early on and also found ways to monetize through applications and games played through Facebook and it was recently revealed they would be adding video advertising that automatically plays when opening Facebook.
No one wants ads.
Ask any person if they want the same web site with ads and without and they will always pick the web site with the information they’re looking for without ads in the way. Some people will even pay money not to see ads.
Getting back to web search, what happened to Yahoo and Excite?
Google.
Not only were Googles results better than their competition they had (and still maintain) a stict no advertising policy on their search page. They have found other ways to monetize and like them or not, there’s no going back to web search 1.0.
Facebook for social feels much like web search 1.0. They’re the most popular social platform in town right now but in a few years time when the next platform comes along that beats Facebooks features without the same advertising in users faces, Facebook will slide into obscurity like Excite and to some extent Yahoo before them. They’ve become addicted to the advertising revenue and like any addict their tolerance builds up over time until it’s too late.