Blog | | Page 16

Nokia give the N-Gage another go

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Ray

New York Times reported that Nokia is priming a relaunch of the N-Gage after two failed attempts at providing a portable phone and gaming platform. Following two attempts to market the N-Gage in 2003 and 2004, Nokia pulled the line of devices from Europe and North America in 2005, after lukewarm sales, well below their sales targets. Not giving up, Nokia hired the legendary design firm IDEO, for a user-centric design approach for the next iteration. Now, the new N-Gage will allow people to play games with their friends and strangers, and try-out and purchase games from their phones. They will also know more about the skill levels of the other people they are playing against, so they can find people of similar abilities, which was a user need that was discovered through IDEO research. If the re-launch is successful, the N-Gage could become a textbook example of user need driven product design.

Combining a portable gaming device and a phone seems like a no brainer, but success has still been elusive. Besides Nokia, the other obvious places to look have been slow in making progress as well. Sony presents yet another example of the Japanese giant having a difficult time getting their individual arms to work together, but it looks like they are starting to work it out. After years of rumors, Sony has filed a patent on a mobile gaming platform that will combine the PSP with Sony Ericsson phone technology. Seeing that the patent was only filed in May 31, 2007, seeing a product to market in the US, could take time. However, as unwired review notes, if it can play PSP games, it could have immediate impact.

Putting aside the success of the DS line and the Wii console, Nintendo is still strangely silent, despite filing a similar mobile phone gaming patent way back in 2001.

Of course, Sony, Nokia, and Nintendo will also have to deal with the US carriers, who lean heavily toward restrictions on their ondeck services, as they too want to earn revenue from the mobile gaming market. It’s not clear to me, how the N-Gage will integrate with US mobile carrier services. I’m definitely going to follow up on the agreements that will be made, and how the services will play out. The complexity of the current system definitely makes it even more clear that, the FCC mandate of device and software interoperability for 700 MHz auction was important, even if some people think the FCC compromised too much.

Posted in auction, devices, gaming, innovation, mobile, telecommunications | Comments Off

How do you spend your work day?

Posted on August 25, 2007 by Ray

Two nice work office related new items hit recently about what people who at work when their not working.

The first one tries to estimate the cost of playing fantasy football during the work day. Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc came up with the number of US$435 million per week in labor is spent on people playing fantasy football while they should be working, or only US$275 million per week if they only spent 10 minutes a day thinking about it. Of course, they also point out that similar productivity is lost due to a host of activities, like smoking breaks and off-topic web surfing.

Another article on Wikipedia made the internet circuit on tracing back changes to entires to various companies and organizations. A lot of fuss has been made about people at Walmart and Congressional offices altering pages about themselves. However, I thought the more interesting findings were the people editing off-topic pages from work.

Someone from the CIA corrected lyrics used in a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There seems to be Democrat party employee who loves tennis, and keeps tabs on the soon to be retired Tim Henman page. But the best example has to be someone at the Minnesota Republican Party who replaced the entire Harry Potter entry with a one-liner spoiler of the last book.

Posted in Uncategorized, work/life | 1 Comment

Battle of the Social Networking Sites: Facebook Versus MySpace

Posted on August 22, 2007 by Ray

Image source: flickr

I’ve recently been poking around in Facebook fairly frequently. It helps that I got a handful of invites, as friends migrated from MySpace to Facebook, and used the email addressbook suckers to contact me. Noah recently posted about Facebook, so I was inspired to add my proverbial two cents on the topic.

Over the last month, I am spending far more time there, than either I ever spent in MySpace or during my first foray into Facebook. The key difference between than and now, is that Facebook opened up their platform for developing widget by third party developers.

I’ll admit that last spring, I figured that Facebook was a niche social community for college students, which had passed its height of relevance. After it started opening its doors to high schools and then to anybody, I thought that the site was ruining its brand, alienating its power user base, and was headed to the social networking graveyard, right next to Friendster.

I was completely caught off guard, when they opened up their platform to let anyone release apps and widgets. That announcement was a game changing move and immediately drew my attention. It was especially well timed, as MySpace was being criticized for being a closed system, as seen in their blocking of Photobucket, the third party image / video service, from their pages just before they bought the company.

A year ago, I first ventured into Facebook, after chatting with a cousin who was in still an undergrad. Using an old grad school email account, I made a profile with the least amount of information they allowed. I found her profile listing 700+ friends, which was a little overwhelming. All I saw as I clicked around, was a lot of college kids and not much else, so I moved on to other concerns. My experience in MySpace was basically the same. I logged on just enough to see what it was about and to get to some walled content, like the Tracey Thorn page and blog, when her new record was coming out. But mostly, it just looked like a competition to make the most number of friends, which seemed like a lot of work. Basically there was little reason for me to go back to either site, after signing up for a profile.

Now with Facebook, there are the reasons to go back. I lost a couple of evenings playing Q-Bert in the retro-arcade application. The apps give me a reason to regularly return to the site, whether it is to see the cities friends have travelled to or getting your friends to compete with each other. The open platform is an easy way for developers to access a wired pool of users. It’s a great example of the gift economy at work.

Of course, in the end, the measure of success between the sites will probably come down to money. Just because I love free apps doesn’t mean that Facebook will ultimately be more profitable than MySpace or some other social networking site. It will be interesting to see who can monetize their user base more effectively, just as Andy Chen recently queried. Until then, I’ll be playing Centipede and wishing I had a track ball.

Posted in information, innovation, social networks | Comments Off

My Pilgrimage to the Prelinger Library

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Ray

I’ve been back from San Francisco for a couple of days, and I want to go straight back as soon as I can. I finally got a chance to see the Prelinger Library, about a year after I had learned of its existence while at the institute. What can I can say? The library is pretty impressive.

In a somewhat nondescript office building in downtown San Francisco, Rick and Megan Shaw Prelinger have made their 40,000+ book collection open to the public. Megan has taken intricate care to create a unique taxonomy of the collection. I love the idea of describing a narrative for a collection of discrete units of knowledge of the physical book. Here, the narrative is one step abstracted from the normal way people construct them, which is based upon of the ideas in book as the unit, rather than the book itself. Starting with San Francisco, the collection’s organization ends in outer space, with land use, urbanism, suburbanism, communications, media and business in between.

I started taking pictures of shelves so I could document what might be interesting for future research. I was surprised to find a business section, with some great titles such as “The Organization Man” and “The Firestone Story.” Current business books are rather disposable forms of publishing, so it was great to see business books from the past. It’s not important that every page may or may not have been read by the Prelingers or a visitor to the Library. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in his insightful and current business book bestseller “Black Swan,” the importance of a personal library is just as much knowing what is unread as is what has been read.

If you are in San Francisco and have some down time, definitely try to make a visit.

Posted in information, work places | Comments Off

The Bourne Redundancy

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Ray

Image source: amazon.com

Currently, a campaign for the new book in the Jason Bourne series is plastered on many of New York’s subways. The timing of course coincides with the latest movie of the third novel starring Matt Damon. As I understand it, the novels have little similarity to the movies. After seeing the ad many times, I finally noticed the wording, “Robert Ludlum’s” in the title, which I realized implied that he didn’t write the book. The actual author Eric Van Lustbader is listed below on the book cover in the ad. As it turns out, Ludlum died six years ago. What is the implications of having other writers take the helm of a character after the original author dies?

This phenomenon isn’t new, as many James Bonds books and stories were published after Ian Flemming’s death. (What’s up with the JP initials? I’ll leave that one up to the conspiracy theorists.) Generally, these posthumous works are mostly amusing, and generally confined to the realm of genre fiction, either thrillers or mysteries. They do have two interesting potential effects on the ideas of intellectual property, which surround the ideas of authorship. On the short term, these works seems to support the status quo, that the owner of the rights, most likely the author’s estate, can and should commissions new works, which are sometimes based on remaining notes or drafts. Just because an author dies, doesn’t mean that the audience stops desiring new stories for their favorite characters. In this perspective, the owners will take a strong and closed intellectual property stance to increase the revenue generated from the new and old works. Especially if they own the author’s notes, the new books have a preceived legitimacy.

in the long term, however, this kind of cultural production starts to erode that legitimacy and further pushJames Boyle’s notion of the “romantic author” which supports the tightening intellectual property regimes that cross the bounds of reason and the original intentions of the copyright. In that, seeing Lustbader’s name associated with the series starts to weaken the brand. If they are of equal or perhaps even better quality of the original author, readers start asking what makes the original author so special? If the new books are bad, readers start questioning why one author gets the privilege of penning new works and they may be more apt to enter the world of fan fiction. Increases in fan cultural production will hopefully then add pressure against restrictive ip attitudes, which make the fan work illegal. The application and defense of an author’s rights extending beyond his death may actually encourage the weakening of those rights.

Posted in innovation, ip, marketing | 1 Comment

Carrier growing pains

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Ray

I’m back from San Francisco and ready to post. More posts will be coming, but here on my two cents on AT&T’s censoring of anti-Bush lyrics during a webcast of a Pearl Jam performance that they hosted. AT&T shifted blame to a third-party vendor did the censoring, and they are working to put up an uncensored version.

What is most notable is that in carriers and media companies are now converging. When AT&T was a pure-play telecommunications services company, they didn’t need to worry that much about the information being transmitted over their wires. Now that AT&T and other carries want a piece of the “information service” pie, they are finding themselves in uncharted areas. It is not surprising then, for something like the Pearl Jam mishap to occur. This convergence of traditional telecoms and media companies will be bumpy because telecoms don’t have much experience being media companies. Content is a fiercely competitive arena, where audiences and marketers are extremely fickle. Telecoms on the other hand are only used to a handful of competitors, if any at all. As the telecoms push into more content related areas, it will be interesting to track their successes and failures.

Posted in access, telecommunications | Comments Off

Day 3

Posted on August 15, 2007 by Ray

I’m on Day 3 of a trip to San Francisco for work. I haven’t been in downtown San Francisco in almost ten years. I’ll write more very soon, but here is a tidbit to keep the blog posts flowing. It is what it looks like, a mailbox that has been branded to look like r2d2. It’s totally random, but then totally makes sense… I think. Not bad from a camera phone. The photos that I really want to post will have to wait until I get back to New York, because I left my camera cable at home.

Posted in marketing | Comments Off

Blink of an eye

Posted on August 11, 2007 by Ray

Image source: heroswiki

I love this study that NBC did, looking to see if people remember anything about the commercials they skim over then they fast forward them using their DVR. They used vests with sensors to record physiological data including, heart rate, respiration, galvanic skin response and physical activity, on 20 viewers of Heros (of course they had to choose that show.) The researches found that the volunteers in the study were just as physiologically responsive to the fast forwarded commercials as people watching at normal speed. Further, they had about the same brand recall as the others.

They raises some very interesting questions. First, to what extend are people susceptible to messages that they made have a physiological response, but may or may not recalled them. What the ethics of tapping into those responses?

Another question is more practical, how should brands, marketers and agencies react to finding out that audio-less micro-version ads have a similar response and recall to the million dollar full length originals?

Posted in marketing, television | 1 Comment

Breaking news in 2005: Google buys dark fiber, builds data center, to create its own Internet

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Ray

Image source: John Hoffmann’s Weblog

I’m back from a short trip to the beach, only to return to a massive thunder storms which lead to an extra long commute due to flooding and the sweet smell of raw sewage in Soho that was percolating in 90 degree summer heat. Ah… it’s good to be home.

With that said, let’s get back to Google. (Did you think I could go five posts without directly mentioning them?)

It’s funny because the spectrum auction has been a big deal in telecommunications circles every since the FCC made television broadcasters switch from analogue to digital, which freed the 700MHz band of spectrum in the first place. But Google makes news, and their public announcement of their concerns about the auction turns a business section article into front page news on the New York Times (albeit below the fold.) All this analysis leads to a lot second guessing. The what ifs and predictions can be fun and are an important part of the game, however separating the signal from the noise is difficult. More over, after a week passes, most people will move along with the rest of the blogosphere to the next bright and shinny news item, like the new iMacs. In the short window of coverage, it is easy to forget that Google has been concerned about access and pipes for a long time.

On that note, let’s return to 2005, when the internet was abuzz with rumors of Google buying up “dark fiber” and their mysterious job postings.

At the time, Robert X Cringely (who made the great documentary Triumph of the Nerds, not to be confused with the movie about a nerd fraternity of a similar title.) commented upon the dark fiber speculation and the even cool super-secret plans to building their own Internet using home grown US$500 million mobile data centers housed in shipping containers.

Two years later, we haven’t seen or heard much more about these plans. It is also interesting to note how Cringley opened his article:

“Google’s strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I’m not saying they aren’t doing that (I simply don’t know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn’t play to any of the company’s traditional strengths.”

Two years later, Google hasn’t created a new internet, nor they have entered the desktop OS market. Although, they have rolled out word processors, spreadsheet, photo album and calendar tools to join their email service which launched on April 1, 2004, which overs a lot of people software application needs, even it isn’t specifically called an OS (but if it walks like a duck…) And Sun created something that looks a lot like what Cringley was talking about.

The internet is full of rumors and wild guesses at future actions. Cringley is smart enough to know that he can’t see into the future. Further, he is humble enough to put a section which lists his predictions and review his track record when he does make a prediction. He is currently batting 0.533, which is say that he is right a little more than half the time.

This abundant media speculation is good when it focuses national attention on important, but often dry, issues as interoperability and access to wireless networks and services. Getting people to wonder why they can’t use their mobile handset on a carrier of their choosing and why they can’t control their on-deck applications are important first steps to insuring fair and reasonable telecommunications policy. However, the telecommunication industry can change surprisingly quickly. Historic perspective helps put these changes in context. Amid these changes, we have to remember where we’ve been before, and even where we thought we were going.

Posted in google, innovation, spectrum, telecommunications | Comments Off

Keys to the Kingdom

Posted on August 5, 2007 by Ray

Although I didn’t invent this correlation, I am highly amused with the idea that the number of keys someone carries is a function on his or her power. People who lack power own few or no keys. Extremely powerful people have no keys as well. Those somewhere in the middle, like myself, lug key chains brimming with keys.

How many keys do Michael Bloomberg or Bill Gates have? Can you imagine Queen Elizabeth barreling down on the M3 going to Windsor Castle saying, “Cripes! I left the house keys next to my DS Lite. I guess I’ll have to use the spare, hidden in the flower pot round back of the garden.”

Graphing the Power Key Curve is an interesting exercise. As you can see in Figure 1, the function looks quadratic. (Of course, this is only a rough approximation. The actual curve is unlikely to be symmetric, but I couldn’t intuitively guess at how each side would taper different. Please leave a comment, if you have any ideas.) Looking at the graph, we see that an increase of key ownership reflects an increase in power. However, at a certain point, a continual increase in power reduces the number of keys in one’s possession.

One feature of quadratics is that each value on the y-axis has two values, as show in A and B on the graph. Of course, it’s easy to know how many keys you own, just count them. The tricky and fun part is figuring out which side of the graph do you reside, especially as the number of keys your own change.

Here’s my current key situation. The dip last fall was the least amount of keys I carried in a long time. As I stared freelancing full time and moved into a new housing situation, I was down to a mere three keys, which was a good thing… I think. Regardless, that didn’t last long, as the number of keys for various work spaces crept up. My storage space is showing up as the Misc. key. Looking at this chart might motivate me to get rid of it.

But the real question is… how many keys do you have on you?

Posted in power key, work/life | 3 Comments

Archives