Jul
18
Go tell it to the Robots.
Filed Under Blog, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Workflow | 1 Comment
Do you get sudden flashes of recall for no obvious reason? Last week I recalled a moment forgotten for a decade, and found it raised a question that I really wanted to ask. I remembered a panel at an MIT seminar in the mid-nineties. I seem to recall that Stewart Brand was one of the experts, and also Arno Penzias (who kindly signed my copy of his book) but despite my research efforts on the web I have lost the actual event and what was said. But I do recall my question (why do one’s own infelicities get remembered?) and the answers. Having spent a few years watching lawyers interface with primitive online services, I asked whether it was true that the keyboard was the greatest barrier between the internet and mass usage, and whether we would make much progress before it was abolished and replaced by a more sympathetic way of getting into networked communication.
And, yes, I am blushing slightly as I write this on my keyboard. But I have at least, in some arcane memory reflux, remembered their answers. The three gurus agreed that the keyboard was a problem – all about speed, the crazy survival of Qwerty as an organizational principle, and the then low-status of keyboarding (only for clerks and secretaries). One said that voice was the obvious answer, and that perfecting voice recognition and, alongside it, linguistic exchange, was the only reasonable step forward. After all, merely going to another interface without solving the great problem that users do not understand each other’s languages was pointless. The next guy up said that we were entering the age of the sensor and the camera, and that all interfaces would be driven by video and image, with minimal input from choice keys on a selection device. And the third quoted William Gibson and insisted that we would be actors on our own stage, avatars within individualized interfaces where we could simply select the services we needed and “physically” go where we wanted to go in the networks.
Well, it was a long time ago, and billions of people are now using hopeless Qwerty to communicate in the network. But the predictions came to mind, and having uttered them, it also occurred to me that they need updating. For example, wearable computing seems like an effort to merge the man into the machine and this implies a wonderful world where, as Sergey Brin demonstrated to the New York Times, even the Google inventor can become 60% machine on a transient basis. While the Singularity University always seems a bit like Silicon Valley at its most crackpot (http://singularityu.org/news/2010/06/the-new-york-times-explained-our-singular-purpose/) we are steadily interfacing with thinking computing in a way hard to envisage a decade ago, and we shall see the output of this first in workflow and process solutions.
The area of Media Lab work that most intrigued me all that time ago was Seymour Papert and LEGO. We were going to make such strides in education so quickly, but like our work on replacing this keyboard, progress has been agonizingly slow. But, soft, here comes Hope from South Korea, bearing a robot called EngKey who recognizes English and will replace all those gap year students in South Korean classrooms who are now, in the new austerity, too expensive to import. Anyway, humans were never so very good at teaching: you want something endlessly patient and wholly repetitive, as well as accurate in assessment. Robots are far better equipped. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robotside.html
So as it happens we were looking in the wrong direction in this discussion on interfaces. The key to change was not what we needed to do to interact better with the machine, but what the machine could be developed to do to work more sentiently with us. So only when the machine recognizes our facial expressions (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/02-09EinsteinRobot.asp) and listens to our speech intonations will progress be made. Progress today, in terms of helping autistic children or pre-schoolers (the RUBI Project at San Diego), and progress tomorrow in terms of the productivity gains that robotics will deliver in workflow and information handling.
This is all a long diatribe to encourage all of us to keep reading science fiction and going to conferences where you don’t understand what is being said: if my experience is anything to go by, you one day will. And then you will be much more able to understand why some things happen immediately and some things seem to be going backward rather than forward. On the latter topic, I saw today (an event like the first cuckoo of Spring) my first report on what has happened at The Times following the imposition of the paywall: Experian Hitwise reports that during the five weeks when readers were asked to register their payment details, visits to the site fell 33%, and that they are now off by 66%. So where will they go when the introductory special offer comes off? You soon won’t even be able get your robot to read it.
Jun
13
Getting into the Info-Drug Argument
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, STM | Leave a Comment
It was an argumentative week in New York last week . Not that I found myself arguing with the publishing and information community , of course . As ever they were gentle and sapient beings who could see all three sides of every question . Yet more than on a number of recent trips I found that the relationships of suppliers , intermediaries and hooked users in the info drugs trade were strained , and this was not , and wouldn’t be in this sector , about users being threatened with cold turkey after a reduction of supply . In fact , we are flooded with the stuff and users often beg for less , or better ways of monitoring the flow . And it is about price . And the arguments of last week were being played out against the backdrop of BP’s overflow , the movement of world oil prices , and BP’s share price and dividend decision. Indeed with Presidents and Prime Ministers in phone meetings to ensure that we understood that the raging argument was not a raging argument , the scene was set for the media classes to fall to bickering on their own .
First off the blocks were the New York Times , Apple Inc and Alphonso Labs Inc . Who ? You may be forgiven for not knowing that the last-named are a brand new , boys -in- their- early- twenties -working -in -a-Palo-Alto -garage set-up . We shall no doubt hear more of Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , not least because their first product , the Pulse News Reader App for the iPad, was specifically mentioned last week in his WWDC speech by Steve Jobs , first in line of great Palo Alto garage graduates , as a great example of how Apps could focus usage and intensify reader experience .
So it was a great surprize when Pulse was withdrawn mid-week , apparently at the request of the New York Times . Was it because the Pulse advert featured the NYT in its frame ? Was it because the Pulse application was better than the NYT’s own reader app ( while it was up in its original state the app was downloaded in a few days 35,000 times at £2.39 each ) ? Or was it because , although as yet it has no paywall policy , the NYT objects in principle to being framed by anyone ( are we really going to get back to that tired old internet argument ) ? Or did the NYT simply want a cut of the action and didn’t know whom to ask ?
The iPad is the latest ace hookah from which we take our info-drugs . The Pulse App is simply a smarter way of collecting RSS feeds , for which individuals could register for free , and playing them on the new hookah through a software called Safari , which everyone , including NYT , have to use if they are to have access to the new habit . The boys from the garage just gave the NYT 35,000 new subscribers to a service they already offer , and featured the NYT in their advertisements . Seems to me that editors with bouquets should attend their garage doors , not lawyers with writs . And Apple , far from removing the kids ( who won a Stanford Institute of Design award for this ) should give them a job . But Apple , having moved from hardware/software supplier to access controller and owner of the user profile on the Web , must now play a different game with content suppliers . And this one is a dangerous one .Apple , like Google in a similar role , would be too powerful in this position to make life comfortable for either growers or smokers .
( PS I understand that Pulse has now gone back up – with the NYT amputated . Who does that help ? )
At the same time in California a noisy spat was taking place between the University of California and Nature Publishing Group . Nature has been renegotiating its deal with the California Digital Library . Talks surrounded the depth of discount that the library should enjoy : Nature says it currently gives California an 88% discount on its list prices , and wants this to be close to the average of 50% that it gives other users , while California stigmatizes this as a 400% price increase . California wrote an open letter to faculty representatives on its ten campuses , thus “outing ” the argument in an attempt to put public pressure on Nature . , who point out that they have capped list prices at 7%, and are the major publisher most compliant with the so-called ” green agenda ” of open access .
No one is going to win this one either . Nature’s output is “must-have ” to an outfit of California’s standing , but not beyond price . As a major buyer the university authorities could imagine that by making an example of a medium-sized player they will soften up the negotiations with the larger lists of Elsevier , Wiley-Blackwell or Springer . Both parties are in a recession , and both will plead poverty and the need to guarantee survival . It is however as unthinkable that California will not supply its students and researchers with Nature magazine at an average download price , under Nature’s proposed pricing , of $0.56 per download , as it is that Nature will walk away from an institution where its authors litter every street corner . So who blinks first , and who blows smoke in the faces of addicts and users everywhere ?
At the end , these are power plays . Is the University a big enough power block to make its will felt , and can the newspaper use its ownership any more to control how the end-user views its content ? These struggles used to take place behind closed doors . Then the golden rules were – never push your power too far , for in the exercise of using it you are losing it . NYT is clearly some way down that track : if the University of California forces its students to subscribe seperately to Nature then it too begins to lose control of the argument . How much do you need it and can you kick the habit are still powerful questions in the world of commoditized information .
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