Everyone needs an AI in their pocket

Two articles from my share feed today …

Transit systems are growing too complex for the human mind

… “What makes it messy is the presence of different possibilities," Barthelemy says. "When you arrive at a specific point, you have many choices."

The Paris system has 78 such choice points. The New York subway, the most complex in the world, has 161. New York's system is so sprawling and interconnected, Barthelemy and colleagues Riccardo Gallotti and Mason Porter concluded in a recent analysis, that it approaches the maximum complexity our human minds can handle, the equivalent of about 8 bits of information.

“But then if you add the bus,” Barthelemy warns, “the 8-bit limit is exploded."...

and

Google Research: An Update on fast Transit Routing with Transfer Patterns

What is the best way to get from A to B by public transit? Google Maps is answering such queries for over 20,000 cities and towns in over 70 countries around the world, including large metro areas like New York, São Paulo or Moscow…

… Scalable Transfer Patterns algorithm [2] does just that, but in a smart way. For starters, it uses what is known as graph clustering to cut the network into pieces, called clusters, that have a lot of connections inside but relatively few to the outside…

… Frequency-Based Search for Public Transit [3] is carefully designed to find and take advantage of repetitive schedules while representing all one-off cases exactly. Comparing to the set-up from the original Transfer Patterns paper [1], the authors estimate a whopping 60x acceleration of finding transfer patterns from this part alone….

Humans can’t manage modern transit complexity — but the AIs can. Including the AI in your pocket.

Everyone needs a portable AI, including people with no income and people with cognitive disabilities. That’s one reason I’m writing my smartphone for all book.

See also:

• Life in the post-AI world. What’s next? 9/2011

Smartphone Calendaring: survey results

Our family loves our Google Calendars. Today, looking at Calendars 5.app on my iPhone, I see that our 5 (human) family members own 8 calendars and I’m currently subscribed to 7 organizational calendars and 3 or so related to weather, holidays and the like. We’ve been doing this kind of coordinated calendaring since I got our family (free then!) Google Apps about 9 (!) years ago. The early days were painful, but now it’s smooth — Google hasn’t done any recent damage.

So I was looking forward to talking about Calendaring in my special needs smartphone book (working title: Smartphones for all: Supporting independence with iPhone and Android.). Then I started writing … and ran into a wall. What we did works, but it’s far too geeky. I needed “The Apple Way” (iPhone) and “The Google Way” (Android and iPhone) to be understandable. 

The first step to that was learning what normal people do. So I wrote up a Google Form 2.0 survey (now closed) and promoted it on app.net (mostly geeky) and Facebook (not geeky) and my blogs (sort of geeky). Today I dug through it.

I received 74 responses, about half from experts and half from my target group.

 

Of this group of 74 about 1/6 didn’t use any personal calendars on their smartphone. I didn’t ask this group any further questions, so my survey data is about smartphone users who have personal calendars - about 5/6 in this case.

Among the 5/6 who did calendaring the iPhone was more common than I’d expected - 87%!

Since most smartphones in the US are Android devices, that’s an unexpected result. I suspect some of that is an app.net effect (it’s pretty Apple-centric), but I wonder if many Android users don’t do calendaring. I did notice in the survey that Android users were disproportionately “expert users”, maybe Android users fall into an expert group and a web/messaging/youtube only group. I’m speculating there, but I think the non-expert responders to my survey are a lot like my book audience.

I looked briefly at my 33 expert respondents. Almost half had both personal and employer calendars, most had Google Calendars (many had both), and many viewed and edited multiple calendars. The only surprise was how many iPhone using experts made do with the native iPhone Calendar.app - 2/3 of them! Since most view multiple calendars they must be using Google’s obscure calendar sync web page.

Of my 28 non-expert Calendar few used an employer’s calendar and only 3/28 used Android. Of the 25 that used iPhones about 1/3 were using either Google’s Calendar.app or some other Google Calendar client (Calendars 5.app, etc) and 2/3 used iOS Calendar.app. Most of the iPhone users of Google’s Calendar service used multiple calendars and sent event invitations. iPhone non-experts who didn’t use Google Calendar also didn’t access more than one calendar and most had never sent an invitation. Many were unsure if their iPhone Calendars sync’d to iCloud (the default setup).

Despite obvious limitations with my sample I came away with some useful working conclusions for my book:

• I can’t assume my readers have ever looked at the Calendar app.
• I need to explain the relationship between the phone calendar and the “web” calendar and that changes made to one will show up in the other.
• Many iPhone Calendar users are not aware that they sync their Calendars with iCloud and that there’s a web view of their iCloud calendar. Many use their iPhone Calendar like a paper datebook or the original PalmPilot Calendar.
• Calendar sharing is effectively limited to Google Calendar users. It’s not only that subscribing to public calendars is basically a Google-only thing, it’s that most iPhone/iCloud users never make use of Apple’s relatively obscure iCloud shared Calendar overlays.
• I need to explain what sending an invitation does.
• Calendaring is not an Apple strength.

Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome are all very different.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

I want a Zenith CruisePad for my iPhone

I finally realized what I want.

I don’t want an iPad.

I don’t want an aWatch.

I want a Zenith CruisePad for my iPhone …

Rather than a free-standing slate/tablet computer, the Zenith CruisePAD was a remote terminal to one's PC. It was designed to allow the user to interact with that PC's applications from a distance over a wireless network. What made it interesting to me was that it let one do so directly on the CruisePAD's screen, using either a stylus or finger.

This was an interesting approach given when it was released. In that year, 1995, neither Wi-Fi (which came into existence in 1999 with the formation of the Wi-Fi Alliance), nor the IEEE 802.11 protocols on which it was based, were available (the original version of the IEEE 802.11 standard was not released until 1997). Hence, it relied upon a proprietary 2.4 Ghz spread-spectrum radio protocol which they called CruiseLAN…

We played with tech like this at a 1990s Electronic Health Record/transaction processing startup called Abaton.com (no trace of it on the web btw, domain taken long ago). Ultimately impractical, but very cool. This was the era of the PalmPilot device, and we (ok, I) imagined walking up to a wall display and automatically switching from the itty-bitty Palm display to something real big.

That’s what I want for my iPhone. I don’t want the cost and hassle of another OS with all of the overhead of apps and licensing and bugs and DRM restrictions and updates and hacks. I just want a frigging wireless dumb display that can be shared between multiple devices. It would be nice to play video on it, but really I want to read. I’d be delighted if it used Digital Ink and cost $100 with a 1 week battery life.

That’s what I want. Google is much more likely to do this on Android than Apple on iOS; it’s the one thing that might tempt me to the Dark Side.

I wonder if Apple’s App Store rules prevent a 3rd party (Amazon?) from producing a reading app that would communicate with a Digital Ink display via Bluetooth….

Android's curious advantage: lawbreaking made easy

Remember when Apple made ads about ripping CDs? iTunes and the iPod made it elegantly easy [1]. The ads were coy but clear -- wink, wink steal that music. Used CD stores made good money loaning out CDs for extraction. This was after Napster launched digital music, but before legal DRM-free tunes crushed CDs.

Now, of course, Apple is again virtuous, and iOS is a hard target. There's still no iOS 7 iPhone 5s jailbreak. Not only is IOS more secure, there's also less interest in iOS jailbreaking. The hacker community has moved to Android. 

With good reason, because Android is oddly easy to jailbreak. Almost as though bypassing DRM were to Google and Samsung's competitive advantage. Which, of course, it is.

That's interesting, albeit unsurprising, but it gets better. Not only does Google keep Android rootable, the Google Play store sells apps that require rooting to work. Wink one.

It gets better still. WiFi Tethering, one of those root-requiring apps, exists only to bypass carrier restrictions on tethering. So Google sells an app that's designed to at least violate contract terms. Wink two.

That shouldn't be a big deal to carriers who charge for data [3], but for 'unlimited data' [4] carriers like Sprint and TMobile it's money out the door. A single LTE connection can support quite a bit of traffic.

Story done? Not quite. There's one more interesting bit. Nobody writes about this [5]. It's a de facto conspiracy -- because we all hate carriers [6]. Wink 3.

I suspect Google will clean up its act soon. With 80% of the retail market this is a good time to go straight. Android will become harder to root, Google will make more money from DRM, and the Play store will stop selling apps that bypass tethering restrictions.

The wild days will become a passing memory. Who remembers now when Apple was rad?

- fn -

[1] iTunes was a LOT simpler in those days.

[2] Really, that is remarkable.

[3] I dislike AT&T as much as the next geek. Go get 'em!

[4] Of course carriers play games here -- data rates can get pretty slow after first few GBs and unlimited data plans have become pretty expensive in the US. So the real advantage is people who are holding on to low cost legacy unlimited plans. I am so jealous of these (mostly) guys -- they have the equivalent of a rent controlled apartment in Manhattan.

[5] Yes, of course there are a zillion articles about how to bypass tethering restrictions. I mean nobody writes about Google/Samsung's business strategy. By contrast when Apple made ripping CDs easy there was a lot of coverage. Fortunately i'm not giving anything away here -- my readership is very small.

[6] Even people who work for them. Ok, maybe we don't hate Ting - notice they don't have unlimited data.

Android tablet price crash: do we have a cereal box computer yet?

Fifteen years ago, I predicted sand-based tablet devices would soon follow the price-collapse trajectory of the pocket calculator. They would become so inexpensive that cheap versions would show up in cereal boxes. I was remembering the price crash that happened shortly after my family spent the equivalent of 500 2013 dollars to buy me a four function desktop calculator. (We were poor. That hurt.)

Like a stuck clock I continued to repeat my prediction over the many years to come, albeit with less conviction. Finally, in 2010, Gassée told us Google was aiming for the $80 smartphone [1]. Which may have happened this year, albeit without much attention.

We have since moved closer to the cereal computer; eqe reports buying an Android tablet for $35 in Hong Kong in Nov 2012. That price presumably omits patent payments [5]; it is possible because AndroidOS is available without charge and Chinese factories have excess capacity to produce commodity components.

So, at last, the price collapse seems to be happening. So the question is why now?

One answer is that Moore's Law is failing; computers that were once good for only 2-3 years now work perfectly well for six years or more (barring component failure).

On deeper reflection, however, I think that's the wrong answer -- because the question is misleading. The price of computing has not really collapsed; only computers have become inexpensive.

So we may soon have our cereal box computers, but they won't be worth much. That's because an AndroidOS based 2013 tablet is both a network peripheral and an ad-consumption peripheral that requires network access to be truly useful. Network access is still relatively costly, on the order of €250/year in cutting-edge Estonia [3].

Alas, just as it seemed I might hit my old target it split in two. I'll never hit it now, it no longer exists.

Eventually, of course, the direct cost of a certain form of computing will fall. Eventually GoogleOS devices will be able to access GoogleFunded networks for a very low cost [4]. Whether there will be other forms of computing at different prices remains to be seen.

The cereal computer remains one of my worst predictions.

See also

• Palm III and PalmPilot Devices 2008
• The $80 ultra-portable - in unexpected form 9/2010
• Calculators are really weird tech, but their time may finally pass 9/2012. Rather like fax machines.
• Making better predictions 3/2011. I review my failed predictions, like the cereal computer.
• Computing's calculator price collapse at last? 8/11 

[1] I assume anyone reading this is smart enough to know that contract-bound prices aren't worth discussing.
[2] Perhaps by low cost 4G wireless piggybacked on the fiber network they're building out in the US.
[3] Much more in lagging-edge America. 
[4] We will be pay in other coins. 
[5] I believe part of the reason calculator prices crashed is that there was minimal IP protection in those days; software patents had not been invented. I recall reading that large parts of calculator functionality were not patented.

Update 5/26/13: @danielgenser pointed me to a 2012 article on a limited circulation issue of Entertainment Weekly that included the guts of an ultra-cheap Chinese Android smartphone.

Google's war on standards: RSS, ActiveSync, now CalDAV

I remember when Google seemed to be somewhat friendly to standards and to the idea of open interchange.

That was, of course, Google 1.0. Now we live with Google 2.0.

With the neglect of Blogger, the end of Google Reader, and the RSS-free launch of G+, Google has put a stake in the RSS/Atom subscription standard. (Google played a big role in the development of Atom, when most of us write of "RSS" we mean "RSS/Atom".)

Recently Google limited support for ActiveSync, a de facto standard based on Microsoft Exchange technologies.

Now Clark reminds me that they've also ended CalDAV support, which I use to view my Google Calendars on my 11" Air:

Official Blog: A second spring of cleaning

... CalDAV API will become available for whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013. Most developers’ use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API, which we recommend using instead. If you’re a developer and the Calendar API won’t work for you, please fill out this form to tell us about your use case and request access to whitelisted-only CalDAV API...

I'm glad I never committed to Android. I'm deeply enmeshed in the Google ecosystem, but it is time I started digging out.

Nexus 7 - what is it good for?

I bought a Nexus 7 four weeks ago, deliberating violating Gordon's Laws of Acquisition. In particular, I wasn't sure what I'd do with it. I took a calculated risk.

Time for a progress report. I haven't figured out how it can help me. It has however, taught me what to look for in a future device.

The biggest issue is that it's a network-centric device that's wifi only. That would make it potentially useful at home, but here I have my iPhone and my computers. At work there's only the corporate network; some of our offices have a BYOD 'guest' wifi network but we don't. I tried it on the corporate network, but it doesn't easily connect to our peculiar VPN protocol (Lion has no problem. I didn't persist because even if I could make it work there was little added benefit).

In theory it works for reading documents, but I've found that drag and dropping over a wired connection doesn't always put docs in places where the reader app can find them.

I could install standalone added value software that doesn't need a net connection, but I already have a computer at work -- and I have my iPhone.

I can't give it to the kids because there are no parental controls - it's a wide open net device. We like to monitor the kids net use.

I'm still playing with it; technically it's impressive. I'm sure I'd have a use if it had a LTE chip, but then it would be significantly more expensive.

I suspect when if/when I get an iPad of some kind, I'll sell the Nexus 7.

Update 9/2/2012: Charlie Stross has the best guide I've seen to worthwhile Android apps. Ironically for me, the best use of the Nexus may be as a Kindle reader. Also, thanks for comments on this post. To clarify: If I had tethering or mifi there's no doubt it would be useful. In the US that hasn't been cost effective for me, but see American MIFI - priced for a limited and shrinking market and Mobile broadband hope: Walmart, TruConnect, Netzero, Sprint, Amazon and why I'm waiting on my next iPhone.

Update 9/17/2012: I sold it to a colleague who will make good use of it. He got a good deal; when I sell things I want the buyer to be delighted. In the end 7 things killed it for me:

• Jelly Bean has a longstanding bug with 802.11X EAP connections. That meant I couldn't turn it into a word device. I'm sure this will get fixed, but it doesn't work now. It's been broken for a while.
• It's a network-centric device without built-in cellular connectivity. An iPhone works well when disconnected, the Nexus doesn't.
• I expected better identity management -- including OS level support of my 3 primary Google identities. There is some identity support, but it's inconsistent and weird.
• Jelly Bean reminds me very much of Windows 3.1. I have to manage Win 7, OS X and iOS. I don't have time for Windows 3.1. It's very crude compared to the iOS environment (sorry, true).
• The App Store is weak, but the Play store is even weaker.
• Android's security issues.
• I'm not sure in the end that I really need a pad.

The last one means I'll hold off on an iPad purchase for a while. I do most of my reading work on my iPhone, and I like my MacBook Air for portable work. A low end Kindle may make more sense for me, but at this time I'm holding off on all pad purchases.

The iPhone - Android cost difference is getting large

A colleague of mine bought a $200 unlocked Android phone made by Acer. He's pairing it with an AT&T paygo plan using an automated purchase option that effectively costs him about $200-300 a year total for some voice and a modest amount of 3G data. Of course in many locations he's using WiFi.

So his total two year smartphone cost is on the order of $700.

A minimal iPhone plan, assuming purchase of the 4G without jailbreaking, would be perhaps $1,800 with all the fees and taxes of non-paygo plans.

That's an $1,100 gap.

The iPhone 4 (much less the 4S) is much better than his Acer phone - and iOS is mostly better than Android [1]. I'll count that as a $300 offset against that $1,100 gap.

That leaves an $800 value gap and an $1,100 gross gap. This is not sustainable. Apple's brand isn't worth a value gap that large.

I'm awfully glad Android is out there. As Android captures more of the geek market, and as the cost of Android data falls, there will be enormous pressure on the cost of iPhone plans.

[1] However Calendar/Contact/document functionality with iOS 5/iCloud is much worse than Android/Google Apps.

Update: Lots of great comments on this post. I hope I get to do a f/u post, but in the meantime ...

• Apple missed analyst expectations today... "Net income in the fiscal fourth quarter was $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per share ... Analysts ... were expecting $7.28 per share... iPhone sales were up 21 percent from last year at 17.1 million ... Analysts, however, were hoping for 20 million". There are lots of good reasons for this expectations gap, but it is consistent with price pressure.
• I'm only writing about the US. The US Apple Store doesn't yet sell an unlocked iPhone 4S, but it sells an unlocked iPhone 4 for $650. Unfortunately, it's not clear that US users can use it with a PayGo data plan, or even that AT&T officially allows it to be used as a voice-only phone. So using an unlocked iPhone might increase the price gap (unless you can live with T-mobile's limited service area.)
• It's easy to forget that in the US the purchase price of a phone is a fraction of the cost. The real basis is the costs of ownership over two years. That's why I don't compare unlocked phone purchase costs but compare phone and service. There are a lot of odd and disturbing rules about how and where iPhones can be used.
• I think the Acer phone is probably more like an bizarro 3GS than a 4, so I'm overstating the value gap by comparing it to a 4.

Apple can obviously close the price gap significantly, but that will impact their margins and, eventually, their share price. The good news for families like mine (five iPhone devices) is that our costs are likely to fall. (It's good for us if Apple's stock price falls!)

Smartphone choice made easy: iPhone vs. Android

Asymco estimates half of Americans will use a smartphone by the end of 2011. That means either an Android OS device or an Apple iPhone, since there are no viable competitors.[2]
Which one should you choose?
It turns out the decision is quite easy.

• If you want to stay with T-Mobile or Sprint -> Android
• if you are with Verizon or AT&T then ...
  • the phone is for a younger teen or child -> iPhone, Android has no parental controls
  • you want software without advertising -> iPhone, Android apps are almost entirely ad supported
  • you are an iTunes user and buy iTunes video/movies -> iPhone, Android phones can't play iTunes DRMd video or music
  • you want to avoid malware -> iPhone, the Android marketplace is not curated
  • you want the device to have value in two years -> iPhone, it can be used as an iPod touch equivalent after its phone lifetime has passed
  • you want software and OS support over the lifetime of the device -> iPhone, Android device manufacturers rarely provide more than a few months of updates
  • Google voice is very important to you -> Android, on the iPhone it's not fully integrated
  • You don't have, or don't want to use, a classic (legacy) computer -> Android [3]
  • You want Google Apps support -> Android [4]
  • If none of the above is true, you can save 20% of the phone cost by buying an Android phone [1]

Most Verizon and AT&T customers will be happiest with an iPhone.
[1] Assuming $500 in mandatory data fees over the 2 year contract span, prices are about $550 for an Android device and about $700 for a comparable iPhone.
[2] BlackBerry is walking dead. Talk to me about Microsoft's phone in a year or so. Nokia? What's that?
[3] I assume Android doesn't require a legacy (Windows/Mac) computer. The iPhone expects one, I don't know if you can really use an iPhone without iTunes
[4] iPhone is a mediocre fit for Google Apps. I assume Android is better, but nobody talks about this.

The iPhone iAd framework and parental controls

iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) come with parental controls. Android OS, interestingly, does not. This is rarely discussed [1].

Parental controls should be important to parents with children who, by age or disability, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and injury. They are, of course, also important for cultural reasons.

Even though Apple's iOS includes parental controls, they are very weak. Disabling Safari does not disable embedded browsers, and many, many applications embed WebKit browsers. It is not hard, for example, to navigate from the NYT's iPhone App to Google's image search.

The worst offenders use Google's AdMob/AdSense/Mobile Ads platform. That platform, unsurprisingly, uses WebKit. A product that uses Google's Ad Platform breaks iOS Parental Controls.

Apple has an ad platform too. It's called iAd. It's not based on WebKit, it's an Objective C (Cocoa) framework. This morning I viewed the Tron iAd featured on the New York Times iPhone app. The Ad was ... impressive.

Clearly Apple's iAds have a high barrier to entry. Perhaps not as high as a television or major print advertisement, but much higher than traditional web advertising. The one I saw was essentially an application. iAds will need to scope their material to the parental control rating of the container application.

The Tron Ad did not have an obvious WebKit escape. Whether one exists or not, it is clear that iAds can achieve their goals within a fully constrained environment. Apple's iAds are Parental Control friendly, Google's Mobile Ads are not. If Apple were to enable a Parental Controls block for embedded browsers, they'd break Google's Ad Platform on iOS devices. Children are an important advertising target. This should be interesting.

[1] Another unmentionable is that iOS comes with FairPlay DRM (digital rights management), Android OS lacks a DRM standard. Even Gruber, a giant of fan blogs, does not seem to get this. FairPlay is worth billions to the iOS App market.

Cricket’s $149 Android and the future $4000 Dell desktop

We are way past the tipping point if the no contract $149 Android phone is real [1]. The replacement for the $150 ChromeOS Netbook has come before the netbook, and Google’s $80 ultra-portable (with FM radio a cell phone too!) is a year ahead of schedule – though Microsoft’s lawsuits will slow things down.

After the lawsuits settle down the contract free low end iPhone will go for $250 in 2012 and Android will hit a billion users by 2013 (including China’s forked Android phone). By then RIM, Windows Mobile and so on will be history. Nokia and Motorola will make Android phones. Microsoft will be an IP parasite, a shadow of its former self.

So what about Dell?

Here’s where it gets funny. I’m used to thinking Dell will go away. After all, even today’s phones can have external monitors and keyboards. Who needs a Dell after 2012?

Well, verticals will. Software development. Servers.

Thing is, vertical gear doesn’t sell for $800 a pop. Remember what Sun workstations cost when Sun was profitable? Desktop prices are going to start going up, and up. By 2013 I expect Dell will sell far fewer machines – but they’ll be much more expensive. One day we will see the $4000 desktop, even as much of Africa carries a supercompter in their pocket.

[1] But what will it cost after the patent suits?

The $80 ultra-portable - in unexpected form

Jean-Louis Gassée, once CEO of Apple head of Mac development, drops a stunner in mid-column ...

The Carriers’ Rebellion | Monday Note

... Google wants to see smartphones priced at $79, without subsidy, thus taking away the carriers’ opportunity to dictate features. At $79 and no contract, consumers can change handsets and carriers at will. This frees Google to have a direct relationship with the consumer, allowing their money machine—advertising today, entertainment and business services tomorrow—to run unimpeded.

That's quite a precise number. Not "below $100", $79.

Think about that. Take your time. I'll be back.

We're talking about a computer that outclasses the desktop G3 iMac of 2001. There's no reason it couldn't work with an external monitor as well as an external keyboard. Incidentally, it's a phone too.

Yeah, they're thinking big. Forget the "Chromebook" I was so excited about a year ago (though I still hope we see it). This is so much bigger.

Can they do it? Today's smartphones cost about $500-$800 without a (carrier) subsidy. This seems like a big price drop -- unless you're about 50 years old.

If you're old enough, you remember the calculator price drop. In a few years they went from about $500 to cereal box prizes.

That never happened with computers. Instead the capabilities skyrocketed -- but the price never truly fell. A 1988 Commodore 64 and a 2010 bottom-of-the-heap netbook cost about the same. The difference was partly moving parts, calculators were almost pure silicon -- computers had drives and big power supplies and keyboards and so on. A lot of the difference though was IP protection and patent licensing.

I think this would have happened to the original Palm III if it had survived, but they didn't have a business model supporting a $10 PalmOS device. Google has the business model.

I don't doubt that it will be possible in 2012 to produce a somewhat junky version of a 2009 iPhone for a marginal manufacturing cost of less than $80 -- if you can manage the IP costs and if the payor has a separate (subsidizing) revenue stream. To do it Google will have to buy some IP, and cut deals that appeal to IP holders only when you start to talk a billion devices.

In the meanwhile, China will be doing the same thing internally -- and they don't really worry about IP costs.

Interesting times.

Thunder in the Cloud: Lessons from my hacked Google Account

It was just another week in the age of insecurity. Yet another low tech Windows-only trojan spread throughout American corporations, costing a day or so of economic output and probably acquiring a rich bounty of passwords. Twitter implemented a defective OAuth security framework. Oh, and my Google (Gmail) account was hacked.

The last of these was the most important.

Cough. Go head, laugh. Check back in three years and we'll talk. For now, trust me on this. There are some interesting implications.

First though, a quick review. Nothing obvious was done to my Cloud data by the hacker, I only know of the hack because of defenses Google put in place after they were hacked by China. Secondly I used a robust and unique password on my primary Google account and I'm a Phishing/social engineering hard target. So, in order of descending probability the security flaw was

• Keystroke logging > Google false alarm (no hack) > iPhone app credential theft > WiFi intercepts >> Google was hacked > password/brute force attack.

I changed my password, but that doesn't deal with the real security problems (keystroke logging, WiFi intercepts, App credential theft). The other changes I'm making are more important.

That's the background. Why is this interesting? It's interesting because of what we can infer about motives, and the implications for the future of Cloud computing, iOS devices, and Apple.

Consider first the motives. The hackers owned my Google credentials for 24 hours, but they did nothing. They didn't change my passwords, they didn't send any email. The most likely explanation is that the next move was to identify and attack our mutual fund accounts by taking advantage of harvested data (58,000 emails, hundreds of Googel Docs), accessible internet data, and the stupidity of mutual fund security systems.

We're not rich by American standards, but emptying our accounts would be a good return on investment for most organized criminal organizations.

Secondly if I can be hacked like this, anyone can. I am the canary in this coal mine, and I just keeled over.

Ok, maybe the impractically pure and young Cryptonomicon live-in-a-thumb-drive-VM-with-SSL geeks are relatively safe, but, practically speaking, everyone is vulnerable. Windows, OS X or Linux - it doesn't make a difference. (But the iPhone/"iTouch" and iPad do make a difference. More on that below.)

When history combines motive (huge revenue hits) with opportunity then "Houston, We have a Problem". Sometimes freaking out is not unwise. 2010 network security is a market failure. The business model of Cloud Computing is in deep trouble.

I think I know how this ends up. Somehow, some day, we will all have layers of identity and data protection, designed so that one layer can fall while others endure. Our most critical data may never be committed to the network, perhaps never on a digital device. If I were running Microsoft, Google or Apple I'd be spending millions on figuring out how to do make this relatively seamless.

That part is fuzzy. What's clear is good news for Apple, though everyone else isn't far behind. Untrusted devices, untrusted software, and untrusted networks are all dead. That means shared devices are dead too. Corporations need to own their machines and trust systems, we need to own our machines and trust systems, and when we have both a corporate and a personal identity we need two machines.

Practically speaking, we all need iPhone/iTouch/iPad class devices with screened and validated software that we carry everywhere [1]. That means the equivalent of iOS and App Store, but software apps that provide Google access need to be highly screened. Practically speaking, they need to come from Google or Apple.)

We need secure network access. For the moment, that means AT&T 3G rather than, say, Cafe WiFi (Witopia VPN is not quite ready for the mass market). Within the near term we need Apple to make VPN services a part of their MobileMe offering with seamless iOS integration. Apple currently provides remote MobileMe iPhone annihilation, we need the iPhone/iPod Touch FaceTime camera to start doing facial/iris biometrics.

Yes, Apple is oddly well positioned to provide all of these, though Google's ChromeOS mayb be close behind.

Funny coincidence isn't it? It's almost as though Apple thought this through a few years ago. I wonder what they're planning now to enforce trusted hardware. Oh, right, they bought the A4.

The page is turning on the remnants of 20th century computing. Welcome to the new world.

-- footnotes

[1] Really we need iPhone/iTouch class devices with optional external displays. Maybe in 2013.

See also:

Post-hack posts (past week):

• My Google (gmail) account is hacked - by ductus.com
• After the Google Hack: Life in the transparent society
• After the Gmail hack - passwords and security

Pre-hack posts

• CrashPlan Fail - you still can't remove an account
• Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems
• Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium?
• Cloud Lesson #72: The risk of letting Google own your web site

And some warnings of mine that were premature -- because Team Obama converted Great Depression II into the Great Recession.

• Dapocalypse Now
• Dapocalypse now. Grab your data and run. RUN.

Managing the Google-Apple war: keeping options open, expecting the Android bicycle computer

The Google-Apple war continues, with a new front opening last week. The notorious Larry Ellison, close ally of the infamous Steve Jobs, has attacked Google from the left flank. With Schmidt, Jobs and Ellison business is personal. They are more like feudal kings than the mythical servants of the board imagined in business schools.

On the main front Apple continues to block iPhone customers from delicious Google (Android) Apps (emphases mine) …

Practical Traveler - Google Maps Add a Feature for Bike Riders - NYTimes.com

… “For Google Maps not to have bike directions is like the Gap not selling underpants,” said Eben Weiss, the author of the BikeSnobNYC blog. “Even though it’s not 100 percent reliable, it’s still better to have it than in no form at all.”

Yet the reviews within the biking community, notorious for its outspokenness, have been mixed at best. There are the technical glitches, like its unavailability on the iPhone (it’s available only on BlackBerrys and Androids) …

At the moment my family is still best served by the iPhone/iTunes/App Store/OS X ecosystem, but between iOS weaknesses and Android strengths the balance continues to shift towards Google. I can imagine the day when I’ll call on resolution 242 and write-off the sunk costs of our FairPlay investments for the entire family.

Towards that day we keep our family domain in Google Apps, and use only Google’s Calendaring, Contacts and Mail services. MobileMe is the enemy, Microsoft’s (!) ActiveSync is our friend. I track my Apple dependencies, with a close eye on Apple’s Data Lock.

I’m also expecting to see an Android showing up in special purpose devices, such as Android bicycle computers and Android car computers. I’ll be favoring those as a partial end-run around Apple’s failures.

Life would be a lot easier if Jobs and Schmidt weren’t replaying the 10th century. Given Jobs undeniable genius, I’d love to see Schmidt take early retirement.

Whitewater world - the insane numbers of iOS and Android

Tim Bray works for Google, so he's not a great source on the state of Android phones. (He's a smart critic of the iPhone though.)

On the general mobile market though, he's very credible ....

ongoing by Tim Bray - The Great Game

... The Numbers Are Really Big · Insane, I mean. The billion-plus phones sold per year. The number of active subscriptions, which is greater than half of the human population. The number of new Android devices that check in with Google every day. The line-ups outside Apple stores for every new iOS device. The hundreds of thousands of apps. The ridiculous number of new ones that flow into Android Market every day. Everywhere I look, I see something astounding.

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen...

Robotics will be huge over the next decade, but today this is where the revolution is. The numbers are insane. Within seven years most of the world's population between the ages of 20 and 60 will have a net connected high powered computing device in their household. [1]

This is not business as normal. This is the whitewater world. The Great Disruptors of technological innovation and the rise of China and India aren't going away.

Expect severe turbulence.

[1] Moore's Law. Within 3 years it's so cheap to put an app phone together that there's not much cost advantage to build a dumb phone. Then it's all about software, and that price will fall to zero.

From iPhone users to Google: Thank you for the Nexus One

I love you Google. Thank you for the Nexus One Phone.

Sold unlocked even when subsidized. Google Voice baked in. Navigation. Location sharing. Speech recognition text entry. Speech UI. OLED. Removable battery. Memory on Micro SD card (to 32GB). Noise cancellation. Ogg Vorbis.

I've got six months left on my iPhone AT&T contract. I'm in no hurry to get a new contract now. You can buy this phone without a data plan, stick in a pay-per-use voice/data cash card, and, once Google announces their Google VOIP service, use it largely free with home and office WiFi.

Apple and AT&T will need to be very sweet to keep me.

Glad I am to have sworn allegiance to the House of Google.

Update: Arrington review online. The battery life is very short, but even with the iPhone I'm always near a charger. It's life.

Update b: As I read reviews on the Nexus One I'm a bit surprised by admissions of how weak yesterday's crop of Android phones truly are. If I'd bought one I'd have been b*tching big time. Sadly, most geek bloggers are too committed to defending their purchases. In my blogs, I savagely attack the things I own :-).

Update c: The very best sort of competition. Reminds me of the golden age before Microsoft crushed all competition on the PC platform.

Update d: The Nexus is up to 50% cheaper than the iPhone. I think this comparison overstates the gap, but it's technically correct. My bet is the Nexus is closer to 30% cheaper for most users.

Update 1/6/10: Pogue is not amused. I think he missed out on the advantage of using WiFi for data and a very cheap minimal voice plan for voice.

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Google vs. Apple - Stross on the phone wars

Charlie Stross is a literate geek who makes a living inventing plausible worlds. That's why he can write one of the best tech posts of 2009 ...

Charlie's Diary: Gadget Patrol: 21st century phone

... I think Google is pursuing a grand strategic vision of destroying the cellco's entire business model — of positioning themselves as value-added gatekeepers providing metered access to content — and their second-string model of locking users in by selling them premium handsets (such as the iPhone) on a rolling contract.

They intend to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like wifi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access...

Please go now and read the entire essay ...

... Fun, isn't it? Charlie can write.

Charlie compares Apple to high end and luxury auto companies. It's an old metaphor, but it works. Extending that metaphor, what Google wants to do is deliver the Model T platform -- a super-cheap internet-connected phone and netbook for use in Detroit, Seoul, Kabul and Kampala.

2010 will be a very interesting tech year.

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Google’s consumption of the mapping industry

Wilson Rothman (Gizmodo) has a great essay on Google’s consumption of TomTom, Garmin, and the map data industry. It isn’t just the new Droid-only Google Maps Navigation (Apple’s App Store non-rejection is pending). It’s also that Google has built their own US (and Canada?) map database. Google no longer needs the data they were buying from “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.

Presumably Apple or someone else will buy up the remnants of the mapping industry.

Google is a disruptive company. Per Rothman …

… This is not an attack of Google's business practices, but an explanation of the sort of destructive innovation that has made them so huge so fast … Though predecessors like Microsoft experienced similar explosive growth, and grew a similar sudden global dependence, we've never seen the likes of Google. The GPS business isn't the only one that will be consumed by its mighty maw before it's had its run…

Rothman is a bit too confident about Google’s ability to take down Office (Google Apps aren’t that good), but he’s right about things like Google Voice.

Next up? Chrome OS beta is out already. I expect to see the Google branded netbook within the next few months. We’ll see if they hit my $150 predictive WiFi price point (free with a Verizon/Google 2 year bandwidth-adjusted data contract).

The African mobile phone revolution continues

A few millennia ago I read quite a bit about "appropriate technology" applications for what was then known as "the third world" or "less developed nations".

In those days the idea was to find or invent product designs that returned value, but that weren't dependent on a lot of supporting infrastructure. Sometimes this might be a type of plow, or a type of solar oven. In the past decade or so there was a wind-up radio, More recently, there was the well intended originally MIT based OLPC laptop project

I think some of these ideas worked out, but others, like the OLPC, have been at best indirectly influential. Today's world is, despite our recent economic maelstrom, far more prosperous than the world of my childhood. These days "appropriate technology" may emerge to meet the needs of rural China or from African manufacturing, but it can also emerge in somewhat surprising ways (emphases mine) ...

Africa calling: mobile phone usage sees record rise after huge investment The Guardian

Africans are buying mobile phones at a world record rate, with take-up soaring by 550% in five years, research shows.

"The mobile phone revolution continues," says a UN report charting the phenomenon that has transformed commerce, healthcare and social lives across the planet. Mobile subscriptions in Africa rose from 54m to almost 350m between 2003 and 2008, the quickest growth in the world. The global total reached 4bn at the end of last year and, although growth was down on the previous year, it remained close to 20%.

On average there are now 60 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people in the world. In developing countries, the figure stands at 48 – more than eight times the level of penetration in 2000.

In Africa, average penetration stands at more than a third of the population, and in north Africa it is almost two-thirds. Gabon, the Seychelles and South Africa now boast almost 100% penetration...

Uganda, the first African country to have more mobiles than fixed telephones, is cited as an example of cultural and economic transformation. Penetration has risen from 0.2% in 1995 to 23% in 2008, with operators making huge investments in infrastructure, particularly in rural areas. Given their low incomes, only about a quarter of Ugandans have a mobile subscription, but street vendors offer mobile access on a per-call basis. They also invite those without access to electricity to charge their phones using car batteries.

Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.

... The share of the population covered by a mobile signal stood at 76% in developing countries in 2006, including 61% in rural areas. In sub-Saharan Africa, closer to half the population was covered, including 42% in rural areas...

This isn't new, the Economist and others have been covering mobile phone use in Africa for since the 1990s. It's a noteworthy and encouraging sign. It's "appropriate technology" that emerged somewhat unexpectedly, but has since received extensive support from governments and aid agencies, including Kenya's investment in new fiber optic connections.

Today these are fairly minimal phones, but Google has done some pretty ingenious things to provide voice and texting interfaces to Google services. In 3-4 years, today's simple phone users may have Android phones comparable to the iPhone of 2008.

We're gradually moving towards the Teledesic/One Laptop per Child vision, but along a less expected path.

Great news for humanity.

See also:

• A good thing happens: fiber optic connections to the Horn of Africa
• Reducing Poverty (old web page, mine)
• Google Brings Texting Services to Africa | Sustainability | Fast Company
• Official Google Africa Blog
• Google SMS push services in Africa: the sale of goods through SMS
• Dan's Data: Laptops for all, and for all a laptop (OLPC and more)
• Laptops become a commodity (2004, not such good prognosticating!)
• Sachs Reith 2007 - Lecture Four - Social engineering
• Reducing poverty by leveraging globalization: SciAm
• Africa: Outsourcing 2008?
• One Laptop per Child - Wikipedia
• Teledesic - Wikipedia (1994 project that promised to deliver computing servies to Africa)

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