2008 August

Will Comcast crush internet innovation?

August 29, 2008 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

If you’ve been following the story about net neutrality, Comcast’s games with bandwidth throttling and the FCC rebuke of these practices, then you’ll really want to know about Comcast’s decision to place a 250GB per month ‘cap’ on your use of bandwidth.

My favorite blog that discusses this issue, Om Malik’s GigaOM, had these two posts that are a must-read if you care at all about this issue:

a) 5 Questions About Comcastâ€™s New Bandwidth Throttling Plan by Stacey Higginbotham

b) Memo To Comcast: Show Us the Meter for Metered Broadband by Om Malik

While I completely understand that Comcast has a business to run, shareholders to please and profits to make, it is also crystal clear to even a casual observer that they now hold too much power in residential broadband.

If you don’t believe me and are in a Comcast-served area, just try to get bandwidth even close to what Comcast offers for a reasonable price and you’ll quickly find that you can’t. At my home, I have Comcast 768kbps upload/8mbps download speeds, but with their “Powerboost” technology I’m achieving ~2mbps up and ~16mbps down frequently. Qwest, for example, could offer me a flavor of DSL with 384kbps upload/5mbps download for nearly the same price. Slower is NOT better when it comes to broadband!

250GB’s per second might seem like a lot, but it’s not, and if you don’t care about what the ramifications are of this for you personally, then also consider how this will stifle innovation.

Assisting People New to “BuzzDocs”

August 27, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

As more of us are always-on, always-connected, and participating online in a dizzying array of web applications, you’re probably learning the same sorts of lessons that I am: inviting the newbies, the less-than-tech-savvy or those who need just a bit more TLC than most, is quite a challenge and turning us into quasi-trainers, coaches and tech-mentors.

My interactions with client executives; their teams; my own staff or other small teams in which I participate; has taught me that what seems obvious to those of us who use web apps all day, every day, is not so apparent to most people.

You and I need to step-up-our-game to ensure those we invite to use collaborative apps are comfortable and that they have as seamless an experience as possible. The screenshots above are one example of the current situation: when you create an online document in either Adobe Buzzword or Google Docs and choose to share it with others, if they don’t have an account with either system and click the link in the invitation-to-collaborate email you’ve sent them, they’re brought to these respective pages.

What’s the issue? Neither system recognizes that the email address to which the link was sent isn’t one recognized in their system. Consequently, they both go ahead and present a login to the user, rather than to present them with a prominent "We notice you’re not yet signed up with _______. Would you like to create an account so you can collaborate on this document?"

I understand that both companies have a goal of getting people to opt-in and signup. But for those of us already using either application and interested in using them collaboratively with others — regardless if those folks are signed up or not — this small thing presents an obstacle and barrier to sharing with the uninitiated, and people over-n-over again relate to me that they were confused about what to do in order to collaborate on the document with which I invited them to participate.

One other thing that I need to note about user experience and inviting others to collaborate. Just look at the two screens. Buzzword is gorgeous and using it is cinema-like, and Google Docs landing page (and their user interface overall) looks like it was designed by artistically challenged fifth graders.

Filed Under: Web 2.0

Computerworld on Information Overload

August 25, 2008 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

When I was contacted by a journalist writing an article for Computerworld on information overload, I was delighted to participate.

Not only did Mary Brandel get to the essence of the issue in her article published this morning, she captured exactly what I was trying to get across to her when being interviewed. This was particularly refreshing since that often isn’t the case when I’m interviewed or even quoted.

Give it a read if you’re wrestling, like I am, with the siren’s song of all the new communications methods at-our-fingertips from RSS readers, to Twitter, IM, SMS, social networks, FriendFeed and other like aggregators, along with all the other internet-centric offerings seductively calling to us to give them our attention.

Filed Under: Internet

NSF & the Birth of the Internet

August 21, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

"There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the world was not connected. But then a small group of visionaries created the internet," is how an absolutely fascinating new special report from the National Science Foundation starts out: NSF and the Birth of the Internet.

"We know today that the Internet has changed our society in ways not seen since the invention of the printing press. But how did we get here?

Just as the development of the printed word was really about two technologiesâ€”the invention of movable type and mass produced paperâ€”the story of the Internet is about computing and the development of sophisticated networks to connect them. This report tells the story of how NSF helped these two technologies develop into the modern Internet.

The potential power of computers to transform the world started to become a reality in the 1960s. Computer scientists and engineers began building more powerful computers and finding new ways to use them, from helping NASA to put a man on the moon to speeding up accounting at major corporations. NSF funded the development of several academic computer centers across the country to help advance the field of computing. The pace of innovation and development was so fast that researchers needed new ways to communicate and share ideas."

The best part? What a great resource for remembering how this all got started. For me personally? I was relieved to discover that the internet is not, as I was led to believe, a series of tubes.

Filed Under: Internet

SproutCore: Demos Start to Prove the Point

August 16, 2008 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Developers I know will often evangelize their chosen platform, framework, or approach. Vendors like Adobe and Microsoft have theirs (e.g., runtimes and tools to deliver AIR and Silverlight respectively) and they expend a lot of effort examining the entire value chain — from developer, designer tools to finished runtime container — and figure out ways to make theirs the dominant runtime and thus control the upstream value chain and potentially make bazillions.

Making strategic choices as a creator or even as an end-user on next generation internet-centric applications — be they “Web 2.0″ or hybrid desktop/web — is a challenge. None of us want a repeat of the video days when one had to choose Windows Media, Real or Quicktime (or all three) to deliver video, and even the right choice wasn’t a good experience for the viewer since WMV or Real didn’t run well on a Macintosh or at all on Linux.

The flip side with that video example is that content creators today are delivering video and applications to the most widely available runtime container, Flash, which means that Adobe is in a much better position to control the upstream value chain than anyone else and sell design, development and end-user tools and licenses to everyone along that value chain. That’s one reason why Silverlight is of such extremely high importance to Microsoft as they certainly don’t want to abdicate the hybrid application space, and everyone along that chain, to anyone else.

Apple is eerily silent in this video battle, as well as one emerging to connect all the different devices we use (desktop, laptop, mobile phone) to application functionality delivered via the ‘cloud’. For example, there’s been a lot of talk about the lack of Flash on the iPhone — and conjecture on how Apple disallowing it is placing Flash at a competitive disadvantage as a runtime container — but it’s all speculation about how Apple is doing so to keep a proprietary platform from gaining hold of the iPhone delivery model.

With respect to video runtime, the lack of Apple discussing publicly the installed base of Quicktime, which is undoubtedly close to Adobe’s touted 97%-of-all-computers claim for Flash due to every iTunes instance installing Quicktime on that computer, is a puzzler since they could be a player in the runtime battle for video delivery.

Why hasn’t Apple made Quicktime a target runtime container to compete with Adobe and Microsoft and ensure they dominate the value chain?

SproutCore and Web standards are two reasons why (see W3C and WSOrg for more on why standards matter).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Hybrid Apps (RIA's)

Are we in the midst of the internet revolution?

August 11, 2008 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

As a lay student of history, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it must’ve been like as the world shifted from an agrarian, farm-based economy — with most people living on farms — to a mechanized, industrial one in the late 1700′s and early 1800′s when people migrated to cities and to jobs in factories and offices.

According to Wikipedia, “The industrial revolution brought about various shifts in agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, which had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain. The changes subsequently spread throughout Europe and North America and eventually the world, a process that continues today as industrialisation.

The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human society; almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in some way.“

Think about the pain and angst people felt as their kids left home for the city, children labored in factories, wages were low and conditions horrendous, and how much time it took for some sort of equilibrium to occur. It took many decades.

I would argue that we’re right in the midst of an internet and cleantech revolution that’s just begun and is influencing almost every aspect of daily life right now. As Bruce Sterling so famously said, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.“

The internet, and my business, personal and learning use of it, has fundamentally changed my life and those around me. The same could be said for many others I know. Of course, then there are those in my life that don’t even have computers, or use their mobile phones for voice only. It will take years (decades?) for the future internet to get evenly distributed, though I predict it’s going to happen far faster than anything that’s come before.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Computing, Current Affairs, Innovation, Media Shift, Metaverse, Technology, Vlogging, Web 2.0

Steve Borsch for President

August 5, 2008 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

A buddy just sent this to me asking if this was me…with a link to a News 3 website with this video below. Since there actually is a Steve Borsch on the east coast who’d been a state legislator (in Pennsylvania, if I recall correctly) I instantly assumed it was him, but moments in to viewing it I could see its generic nature and text insert (reminiscent of what JibJab offers). Still, it was fun enough that I passed it on to three others.

Want to make your own and prank your friends? You can do so here.

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

iPhone 3G: Mobile GPS Still in its Infancy

August 4, 2008 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

The iPhone is fundamentally altering my perception of being mobile (in a good way) though I’m not without some tinfoil hat paranoia about using GPS in the iPhone 3G to track us or some stalker stumbling across the GPS coordinates of a photo just taken and instantly submitted by my daughter, and traveling to that location to do God knows what.

Rather than succumb to fear or risk attitudes, I’m instead going to briefly describe my observations about why this capability, ease of use and just plain fun aspects of the iPhone is pointing the way to the future of interpersonal communications and access to anything you and I deliver via the Web.

I’ve purchased or downloaded free GPS-driven applications (see a few below). From uploading photos with coordinates, to seeing restaurants, coffee shops and other outlets in my vicinity, to using services like Locly to see Flickr images, Twitter tweets and other inputs by others near where I happen to be, you can begin to foresee the possibilities of location and presence awareness when you have a GPS-driven device that’s with you all the time.

Searching for, say, an HDTV pulls up Google results that show retailers near you. Friends located nearby are (if they allow their presence to be telegraphed) available to be seen by you if you’re their friend. Retailers could ‘see’ you walk in to their store, do a lookup on you as a customer, and if you’re a frequent one, give you deals. If you’re new, give you a "new customer" deal. Snapping a photo and uploading it to one of the many and emerging photo-geo-located services lets you ‘see’ on a map photos of a place before you even go there. The possibilities are endless.

I’m still in "observer mode" as I experience my iPhone 3G and these sorts of applications. What I see is that they’re all interesting and still toy-like in some respects, but there is no question in my mind that this GPS capability so in its infancy, yet executed so simply and well by Apple, will make location and presence aware services explode and become expected by us.