The holy grail of online advertising is contextual ads that speak to your needs as an individual, at the time you're most ready to buy. Getting an offer for cut-price flights when I'm ready to book my ticket home from Orlando should be a win for both of us. But the baby steps along that road tend to be annoying (Gmail gets like Clippy: "I see you're breaking up with your girlfriend - would you like help with relationship counselling?"). And AOL had no contextual information about the user; they put wedding-related ads in the Wedding area and PC ads in the technology channel - it was just themed advertising.
Google can probably do a little better because it can mine your searches and your history and your email and all that information you publish about yourself in those memes you do. And you should get used to advertising 24x7 everywhere you look online courtesy of Google, and be thankful. Because Eric Schmidt is reminding me of that content comment. As he said to an interviewer from CNBC at the Milken Conference: "Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers."
He goes on to admit that yes, they've already made the classic AOL blunder about monetising social networks. AOL made very little money from the most popular areas of the service: chat. You see, when you're talking to your friends, you don't interrupt the conversation to take a sales cold call, you don't click through to an advert. Social networks are the same; you care that your friend has a new car; you don't necessarily want to go look at the slick video of how a professional driver made it look good on TV, still less see a deal to buy one yourself. Who's buying all those ads on Facebook applications? Other Facebook application developers.
Other Schmidt nuggets
On not buying back stock: We love watching that cash sit in a well-managed bank and not get lost.
The new consumerism: Everybody wants the same thing. They want fashion, they want information, they want products, they want e-commerce, they want it now.
On discovering that running a big company means having a Microsoft-style formal process rather than spontaneous startup energy, even when you're a small fraction of Microsoft's size: [the biggest challenge today is] the ability to manage the creative process, deal with the complexity in what is a relatively large company, in terms of people, who's doing what. We have 50 development centers all around the world, people in different time zones, `Are you doing that? Are you doing that? Do I work with you? How do I check in my code?'...The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people.
I did wonder if even after all this time it would be unprofessional to mention why I left AOL or to discuss the public record of someone I worked with; on consideration I thought it would only be unprofessional to snark about it*. I think ethics in journalism matter. That's why I thought this comment in the CNBC interview at a conference last week was pretty low.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo: Yeah, you can bet, I guess, who tipped off the DOJ about the phone call that was made, Steve Ballmer or somebody from that side."
Not only it is a very soft-pedal interview, that refrains from asking any difficult questions (like if the Google tenet is do no evil, are they doing the right thing in China, if the Google tenet is don't trap user data, why are they complaining about being told 18 months is too long to keep it for?), but an unsubstantiated presumption about Microsoft behaving badly shouldn't go out at all, let alone be given authority because it's said by a journalist.
*I don't think I'm snarking by saying that Bull's departure from AOL was also three years before his prosecution as part of Operation Ore so probably not connected to the actions that led to his conviction and jail sentence (and for clarity, he's not the Guardian sports writer Andy Bull), which you can read his take on; that doesn't mention his time at AOL, which was during those four years, and it doesn't say whether he was paid for writing that article. I'm processing my own reaction to finding out that he was one of the few people caught by Ore who hadn't had their credit cards stolen but was looking at dubious content. I find it a little disquieting, but I'm far more offended by his suggestion that ISPs and search engines share his guilt by not have censored the sites or otherwise taken over the responsibility for his actions he should have taken himself.
From nanoscale processing to measuring and simulating crowds, from phone calls inside your browser with Adobe’s Flash-based Pacifica service to Google on your phone with Android, from Google predicting the future to the Department of Defense taking nine months to build a wiki to speed up procurement, ETech looked at what might emerge next.
The BBC micro was the first computer I got my hands on; I spent weeks writing a program to draw the Union Jack (you can tell I'm not a natural programmer!). It was the era when the PC and the Mac were becoming available, but when you could also replace your 8-bit gaming machine with a 16-bit gaming machine of dubious ability (Enterprise Elan anyone?) or a true home computer like the ST or Amiga. Even on a gaming machine you were probably typing in the last of the games listings. You got your hands dirty with these machines. Moving into either programming or just thinking programmatically was a natural progression (read Jeanette Wing of CMU on why computational thinking should be on the curriculum with the three Rs). Consoles were slicker, glossier, faster - and I think they deprived us of a generation of programmers, because fewer people were challenged to start tinkering and if they wanted to tinker they couldn't.
Extreme Tech's interview with Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, has him arguing that the day of the console is done. Never say never; it's a huge industry that's profitable the way razors and printers are, but his argument about changing economics is persuasive. And I love the way he ends up with the interviewer answering the questions; it's a judo flip someone extrememly knowledgeable can do, but the interviewer makes a good if slightly tetchy recovery.[My snark in italics]
ASJ: [argues that the Wii proves cheap graphics are good enough for consoles]. That means that if there is another generation, it's gotta be about either input devices, or online community. Graphics will just be good everywhere. And if it's about community, that puts the console out of business. Because why the hell does Wal-Mart want to sell a money-losing loss leader device, when all the valuable content will be tied to online services and subscriptions and downloadable stuff? So for all the talk about downloadable content on the console, the console depends on the retail channel for that market to be valuable, and the retailer, if they don't get a cut of that, is going to say why the hell am I trying to sell these consoles at a loss for?
ET: [this is where the interviewer starts having a conversation rather than running an interview; always very tempting when you have someone smart to talk to] True…there were rumors last year that the next PlayStation would not have an optical drive. Everything would be downloaded.
ASJ: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good—that's a very interesting—and here's another point. Why is World of Warcraft the most profitable game on the PC?
ET: [definitely conversation now] Community.
ASJ: Yeah, but what makes it so profitable? There are a lot of community games out there. What is it about a massive multiplayer game that makes it make so much revenue? Is it just community?
ET: [aaaand swiftly back to interview mode!] Why don't you tell me?
ASJ: There's one very important feature: DRM. You can't f---ing steal the thing.
ET: Ah. Gotcha.
ASJ: You can't pirate a community. So an MMO has two properties that make it hugely valuable. One is community; frankly, that's almost secondary. The truth is, you can't steal a community-based game. And because you can't steal it, you get all the revenue from it. All a console is is a giant DRM device. A console's job is not to enable you to play games, but to stop you from playing games you didn't pay for.
[A lot of interviews go like this in real life. But a lot of editors and some readers prefer the interviewer to take out their interjections and would have wanted the back and forth edited to sound like ASJ asking and answering rhetorical questions; one of the rules of journalism is that the writer is not part of the story and should absolutely never be in the way of the story. I loathe Sunday magazine interviews that are all about the interviewer's arrival at the location, their reaction to the decor, their family anecdotes, their alleged rapport with the celebrity, their sparkling conversation and only peripherally an actual interview. But podcasts and blogs are taking the broadcast interview model where the interviewer is on screen and can't be edited out; plus there's a trend to personalised writing and the journalist as expert making a personal connection with the reader. I think this is a charming example of the interviewee turning the tables briefly and perhaps I'm only imagining 'Why don't you tell me' coming from slightly gritted teeth']
My CES top ten for Tom's Guide including the Casio EXILIM Pro EX-F1, a camera that does more with being digital than replicating film
The MacBook Air is shiny in both senses but there was something smaller at MacWorld I liked more
My review of this is up at Tom's Hardware.The latest ultramobile PC from OQO really is ultramobile rather than just ultraportable. Not only does it pack a decent processor, 1GB of memory, an 80 or 120GB hard drive and a 5” screen into a 1 pound form factor, the OQO model e2 also has built-in HSDPA connectivity as well as 802.11a, b and g versions of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Differences in HSDPA - and the difficulty of getting devices approved for connection to U.S. cellular networks - means the e2 is only available in Europe and Asia at the moment. Yet, the device offers a tantalizing hint of mobile PCs to come.
In short, pricey but nice if you need the portability. There are some questions on the review page and I can't seem to post a reply there at the moment, so here are some extra details for those readers. Also, the final edit suggests the e2 is smaller than an HTC TyTan - that should read "half as big again as a chunky Windows Mobile device like the HTC TyTan" or 1 e2 = 1.5 TyTans.
There were questions about how the e2 and Eee PC compare. I'm answering those, but I'll also explain why they're not comparable - and it's not just price.
I've looked at both the OQO model 2e and the Asus Eee PC and the e2's performance, screen quality and usability when surfing are all far superior to the Eee PC. As I said in the review, the screen quality is superb. Vista performance is no problem with enough memory in* and this machine was able to deliver enough power for image editing plus running five or six business applications at the same time without noticing any slowdown at all. Watching video with Sling or decoding DiVX video files are both quite demanding and the e2 performed excellently at both. That's about the limit of what it would be useful to do on a machine with a screen this size; you wouldn't spend this much money on a device for playing games and I don't think many people would be doing video encoding or other more demanding tasks on this size of screen. For what it's sensible to do on a machine this size, performance is impressive.
I'm impressed by the keyboard compared to anything except a real notebook keyboard - and if you want to type without a table a real notebook keyboard doesn't always prove the best thing anyway. It's the secondary keys that matter as much as the QWERTY keys. The @ key is needed so much these days that OQO promotes it to a function on the apostrophe key (next to P). The euro, yen, backslash and similar symbols are functions on the other keys, along with volume and brightness controls and the keyboard light. Not everything is where you expect it to be - but it all makes sense where it is.
Not everyone wants a tablet and a thumb-sized keyboard - but not everyone wants a miniature notebook form factor either. That means I was looking at the e2 compared to the whole range of ultraportable devices I've evaluated, not just the Eee PC - they are quite different beasts and not only because of the price tag. I don't think that they're equivalent or that the same person would want both.
Do I think the e2 is expensive? Yes.
Are there people for whom it will be good value anyway? Yes.
Are you one of them? Not if you're going to say the Eee PC is better value and you're happy with the compromises it makes. (I'm not implying you are wrong about the Eee PC; I am implying the e2 is wrong for you)
Am I one of them? Borderline - but since the Motion LS800 which I consider the closest alternative is no longer available and I want to be able to write on screen on something that fits next to my plate at lunch, the e2 is attractive. For me personally the HSDPA connection is a luxury anyway, but a very convenient one. Like the vast majority of cars and consumer electronics, not everyone needs luxury but a lot of people want it.
Time to get online depends on the method you use to connect more than the PC. Over wi-fi, the e2 is pretty much the same as the Eee with Windows XP or Linux, allowing for the fact that the e2 is a more responsive machine. I didn't test the Eee PC with HSDPA because it doesn't come with connectivity built in and it doesn't have a PC Card or Express Card slot for my HSDPA cards, but again, the speed limitation is down to the available bandwidth in the network more than the PC you use - if the network has sufficient backhaul and the cell isn't full of other users, you get a DSL-like experience. HSDPA has a connection time longer than most wi-fi hotspots but that doesn't vary much between devices; I did mention that the HSDPA software on the e2 is also the best I've tried - better than the equivalents from Vodafone or Toshiba, for instance.
Screen size and surfing; again, the higher screen resolution of the e2 and the better screen give a better experience. I talk in the review about how you can scroll down with the finger-touch capacitive scrollbars without opening the keyboard - the Eee PC doesn't have the tablet format so you can't as easily hold it in your hands, you don't see as much of a Web page on screen and the screen quality of the Eee PC is nowhere near as good as the e2 (or an ultraportable Sony for that matter). With either machine you have a full PC browser so there are none of the compromises you make on a smartphone.
One reader comment asked why this got a good review - or rather suggested that my review wasn't entirely independent. I trust I don't need to say to anyone who knows me that my opinions are independent and have been for the nearly 18 years I've been writing about technology. This isn't a positive review because of the opinions of the supplier; this is a positive review because if you need something this portable and you have the budget for the e2, you'll have a good experience using it. Hope that answers some of the reader questions.
* I'm happy to discuss Vista performance. I'll discuss it with people who have used Vista and who can provide the specification on the machine they used and the figures for the performance they're not happy with. I'll agree with anyone who says Vista file copying and related operations are absurdly slow; in a couple of days I'll have an opinion on whether SP2 fixes that. I'll agree that Vista needs a lot of RAM; I use 2 or 3Gb on my machines and get excellent performance - memory is cheap enough that I'd not consider that an extreme amount. A 4200RPM hard drive is also a bottleneck and I plan to replace that on my Toshiba R400 ASAP to improve performance. I'll agree that 2007 Office is slower than it should be. Other than that, I find no problems with Vista performance personally.
- Location:buried by cats
Predictions for next year are common at this time of year and dailies and online titles will find them useful (print titles wrapped those prediction pieces up some weeks ago; dead tree media needs time to kill its trees). Sending them as a flavour of the areas your client can address or to see if there's a trend we'd like to ask you to extrapolate, with a note saying you're looking into the 5-10 year span we asked about is fair enough. Sending them to go into the 2015 piece because it's easier than doing the work involved in actually answering the query and being surprised when we come back and say they're not suitable isn't.
And if you're going to ask 'why 2015?' I'll be more impressed if you ask whether we're picking that year because of the AMD targets, the Cisco predictions, the Millennium targets, the Crossrail completion date, the climate predictions or simply because it's a round number in the 5-10 year period - because having thought about any of that before you ask makes me feel you're more likely to have useful predictions for the piece rather than just an attempt to get your client a mention, which gets the answer in the title...
BTW, for the benefit of my most-welcome PR readers who may be wondering what happened to 'the sweet Mary Branscombe' as characterised by TWL: this isn't a swipe at anyone in particular but at something of a trend in my mail in the last 24 hours.
But one of Jon's examples is how Amazon ships everything to you using tracked services. Yes, but, as he'd say. One of our Amazon orders - quite an urgent one as it's Zorb for dealing with Horrid Beasts - was sent by Royal Mail without any tracking. So it may or may not be the item they tried to deliver on Saturday morning - when we were in - and wouldn't give us at the sorting office this morning (they were fresh out of explanations as well; the Royal Mail complaint line, for future reference, is on 08456 112471). Could the police keep an eye out for my parcel while they hunt for the CDs?
Regent Street didn't wait; the lights went on the evening we went to see The Bourne Ultimatum on HD DVD. I knew what they were going to look like because I'd already written them up but it was nice to see them in action. They're collections of LED spheres that change colour and flash on and off in response to people walking past, light levels, wind, temperature... When the Nokia Store opens next month I shall pop in, not to look at the phones but to press the buttons in the window that let you control the lights. Kinda cool...
EDIT: note - I'm curious in terms of how many people have said they want the Eee PC with a 3G card, which means I consider it fair game to price the Advantage with a data contract, reducing it significantly from the non-contract price. The comments make me think it's the price for the size that is appealing to most of you,.
Plus I was pleased that the story hardly got edited at all, and that was for euphony rather than structure. Go me!
If you keep an eye on my upcoming features I have just updated the list on www.marybranscombe.com - next stage is flipping it to a scraped list rather than a static div. What's the Web equivalent of dead tree media - dead bit div's?
When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...
Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...
I find mysef pitying the intern over at Rainier who had to read (or hopefully search with a macro) 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire to see how many such words I'm ignoring. "Out of 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire in June, “best” appeared 68, times followed by “latest” recurring 29 times and “largest” 24 times. Descriptive words such as “biggest”, “fastest” and “hottest” weren’t far behind." Andy Smith points out that you can blame the client and the PR both; and lots of comments abuse journalists for everything from cutting and pasting to refusing to work the way PRs want to needing superlatives to take an interest.
That's a six gun's worth of messenger shooting. Current press releases are almost uniformly trash even without superlatives. I often can't work out what a Microsoft press release is talking about because the language is so rounded and diffuse and marketed (like the email quotes santised by a marketing department to take out all interest, that I'll never use and regret wasting time on asking for when they arrive). But to me a press release is nothing more than a lead or a trigger, like a blog post; the real story I'll go find rather than waiting for it to arrive in a spoon. And I wonder. How many journalists do need to be 'woken up' by bombast and adjectives? How many do swallow the best/first/further, faster, furrier claims? Surely not many?
And are we to blame for being polite when we see terrible press releases? I cover the excesses of press releases when I do media training and I don't normally tell PRs their job without being asked to do so. But should we start saying 'this is meaningless - I had to look on the client Web site to work out what it was talking about' or 'that's plain wrong - it's not the first such but it is interesting because of x' or 'don't tell me what's hot/cool/significant - it's my job to decide that for myself'? It could take up a lot of my time - and I don't want to sound as if I'm insulting people who work hard and deal with deamnding clients. But if we don't say anything, are we implicitly condoning releases that make our journalistic lives harder?
Feel like shouting at your PC? Or your mobile phone? Like the Nationwide helpline that lets you say what you want rather than pressing buttons? Wish you could phone up Google? I've taken a look at the current range of voice recognition services and where they're going for FT Digital Business...
The HTC Excalibur - also known as the T-Mobile Dash - is a smart, capable, lightweight smartphone with multimedia features good enough to let you keep it in your pocket out of business hours. By the time the Motorola Q finally makes it to the UK, the S620 may have stolen its market.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/118512/h
The first BlackBerry to combine a full keyboard and camera, the 8300 Curve doesn't have the visceral desirability of the Pearl - or the slab-like bulk of the 8800 - but it does have QWERTY and trackball, spell checking and competent multimedia in a small and neat package.
Read on at http://www.itpro.co.uk/reviews/119405/b
I like them both and I've stuck with the Excalibur for personal use to replace the Treo 750v - the battery life, the better call quality and the standard connector plus the slimmer size made up for losing the extra software features. If you're a BlackBerry fan - and you have BES - the 8300 is an excellent phone. Incidentally, I wrote the review of it on the flight from San Francisco to Indianapolis...
And yes, he's going; the vote was just in his favour and someone from Microsoft either lost or gave up their place for him. It's very Microsoft; there will be a fixed process but if it bites you, the 'softies will work very hard to work around it and get you what you need. It's like running any other conference or convention; something unexpected will come bite you a few days or hours before the event. And it's very blogosphere; the blogging vs traditional journalist polarity is very much in evidence this month.
Windows Vista Home Basic
The cheapest version of Vista is limited in scope
Windows Vista Business
Full networking capabilities, but no entertainment
Windows Vista Home Premium
The best value version of Vista includes Media Center
Windows Vista Ultimate
The most comprehensive version of Windows will cost you...
read Microsoft's facts, figures and HD DVD fandom, courtesy of the eloquent and convincing Kevin Collins, and see some of the interactive features that did impress me
If you've used an Oystercard on the London tube, you've used what is called Near Field Communications (NFC). You get the card near the reader rather than having to make physical contact. Such contactless tickets or passes are common in Europe; key fobs, for example, open office doors across the UK. In Hong Kong you can use the same Octopus card to pay for bus, train and ferry journeys or to buy a cup of coffee or an ice cream when you get off the bus. And anything that's small enough to build into something the size of a credit card can be built into a device you already own, a device you already carry with you every day - your phone.
In some surveys people claim they'd be more worried about leaving their phone at home than leaving their wallet behind; with NFC, your phone can be your wallet. It can be your train ticket, your library card, your supermarket loyalty card, your gym membership, your cinema ticket, even your credit card. According to Nokia's Gerhard Romen, "touch becomes the new click".
And if you want to know why France will get it before we do, read my piece at TechWeb