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).

Fermi Paradox: life is extremely rare

My preferred Fermi Paradox solution is that technological societies have only a short-lived interest in roaming the physical universe. A more common explanation, now that rocky planets seem ordinary, is that life is extremely rare. I liked the way this physics professor came to that conclusion ...

Information Processing: Evolution, Design and the Fermi Paradox - Stephen Hsu

... What is the time scale for evolution of complex organisms such as ourselves? On Earth complex life evolved in about 5 billion years (5 Gyr), but one can make an argument that we were probably lucky and that the typical time scale T under similar circumstances is much longer.

There is an interesting coincidence at work: 5 Gyr is remarkably close to the 10 Gyr lifetime of main sequence stars (and to the 14 Gyr age of the universe). This is unexpected, as evolution proceeds by molecular processes and natural selection among complex organisms, whereas stellar lifetimes are determined by nuclear physics.

If T were much smaller than 5 Gyr then it would be improbable for evolution to have been so slow on Earth...

Basic Bayesian reasoning, and a new perspective for me. Good one Dr. Hsu!

Update 10/29/09: Some nice comments, but, above all, Charlie Stross drops the hammer. It's an intellectual tour de force from someone who gets paid to think about these sorts of questions. Charlie flips the question around, and shows that waiting-time-for-stuff-like-us is actually very short. He doesn't fess up to his answer to the Fermi Paradox though.

Update 10/29/09b: Through some back and forth in Charlie's comments section, I end up searching on his treatment of the FP in Accelerando -- and one of the top hits is my 2006 Amazon review of his book. He's very much in the church of "post-singular societies don't go a wandering" (me too), but he explains why. According to Charlie Stross, life without bandwidth is intolerable ...

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Progress is not guaranteed

With the past week I needed to put a personal web page and I had to work with a problem best managed by a cross between an Outline and a database.

For the first task I wanted the equivalent of Front Page, a powerful document centric wysiwyg authoring tool from the previous century. For the second task I needed GrandView, a DOS app from the 1980s (if I had a Mac at work I'd use today's OmniOutliner Pro).

It's not just old software tools that vanish; current tools are losing advanced functionality. iTunes Smart Playlists are withering and the smartest parts of OS X are falling away.

On the bright side, I'm not getting any smarter either. So maybe software is simply getting ready for my future self.

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That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.

Despair, Inc: Adversity: "That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable."

Love 'em.

I'm with the ancient Greeks. Embrace tragedy.

Apple does things differently

I've read this before. Apple has very small, very productive, engineering teams ...

/dev/why!?!: The loss of ZFS

...I recall having a discussion with the head of a university FS team who was discussing the FS he was working on. He was pitching it to a group of Apple engineers. It was some interesting work, but there were some unsolved problems. When he was asked about them he commented that they didn't have enough people to deal with them, but he had some ideas and it shouldn't be an issue for a company with a real FS team. It turned out his research team had about the same number of people working on their FS as Apple had working on HFS, HFS+, UFS, NFS, WebDAV, FAT, and NTFS combined. I think people don't appreciate how productive Apple is on a per-engineer basis. The downside of that is that sometimes it is hard to find the resources to do something large and time consuming, particularly when it is not something that most users will notice in a direct sense...

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AT&T surprise charges with added lines and phone switch

When we first switched from Sprint to AT&T I catalogued all the extra fees and surprises. Recently I switched Emily from a BlackBerry Pearl to an iPhone 3GS (very successful move) and added one child to our family plan ($10/month – in theory).

These were the surprise charges this time around:

• $18: “one time charge for upgrade fee” for Emily’s BB to iPhone switch
• $26: “activation fee” for my son’s added line

By AT&T standards these are minor hits. They annoy me, but I’m more annoyed that I have to pay for SMS and MMS messages I can’t block. (I’ve written my representative about those, every time I get these charges I send off another email to a federal legislator.)

We get a “national account discount” (many large companies negotiate these plans). I confirmed Emily is still receiving it after the switch, but I didn’t see it on my son’s plan. So I’ll follow-up on that with the AT&T corporate service number.

I also need to inquire if the “national account discount” should have covered the “upgrade fee” and “activation fee”.

Incidentally, when I reviewed our online account settings I discovered new options to opt out of AT&T’s despicable SMS spam.

See also:

• A deal with the Devil- We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone
• How to unlock the BlackBerry Pearl (AT&T)
• AT&T A List feature
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear

H1N1 - things new to me

I have an average physicians knowledge of H1N1, so most of what I read is uninteresting. This MinnPost article by a local physician, however, had some real gems. Osterholm is a national expert on pandemics living in MN. His predictive record is imperfect, but he has some interesting observations (emphases mine) ...

MinnPost - Tapping Minnesota’s top H1N1 expert: Michael Osterholm

... Osterholm chairs a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored panel that tracks emerging influenza infections. This year's meeting included a group of virologists and influenza experts that Osterholm considers to be the best in the world. "And every one of them said without a question that if this H1N1 acquires a certain PB2 gene, we're in big trouble," Osterholm recalled. "Well, it did it [acquire the PB2 gene] in the Friesian islands off of the Netherlands this August, and we didn't see that. Everyone was holding their breath, but at least, so far, nothing has happened with that. And so we don't understand in many instances what components of the mutt are really critical, which ones are important and which ones don't make any difference."

... I have been concerned from the beginning about over-promising and under-delivering on this issue. Just knowing this vaccine and what it takes, when they put the 140 million-dose estimate out that would be here in mid-October, I just knew that that was going to be a great overreach....

... I find it remarkable that we have as much as we do as early as we do, given the timeline..."

Long before the arrival of the novel H1N1 virus, Osterholm and other infectious disease specialists were lamenting our country's antiquated vaccine production system, which he points out relies on 1950s technology that's slow and unreliable. And even the way in which influenza vaccines work is a little bit murky.

"On Monday, I'm giving the keynote address to the NIH vaccine research meeting," he said. "I'm actually using H1N1 to highlight the many problems we have today with the vaccine industry. It's a simple as, 'You know, we don't have a clue what protects you in a flu vaccine.' So we measure hemagglutinin [the 'H' in H1N1] using outdated measures for antigen [a molecule on the surface of a virus that our immune system uses to key in on it], but we don't really know."

"When the CDC did their sero-survey looking for hemagglutinin antibody to novel H1N1 in the elderly, they found about 30 percent of them having pretty good titers to the H1 N1 virus," Osterholm recalled. "But the bottom line is, the protection we're seeing in the 65 and older age population far exceeds 30 percent, and the point of it is that there is probably a huge part of cellular immunity that's tied to protection with the flu vaccine, and that's something we don't even understand....

... The one thing I do feel pretty good about is the safety issue. It's not because we know it from this vaccine, but from the time-tested seasonal flu vaccines we've used over the last 30 years."

So the vaccine will get here when it gets here, but do you have a sense of when the peak of infections will be?

"You know, I don't. As I said at the flu summit six weeks ago, I thought that by mid-October we'd be seeing what I call 'peak activity,' which is what we're seeing right now. That's how I thought it would build. What I don't know is how long this is going to last. Is it basically going to go into retreat for a while and then come back again in, say, December or January? We're burning through a lot of central people right now, meaning the rate of new infections is growing at such a rate that I think that we're not going to have that many [unexposed] people left in November, December or January to get a second wave...

The iMac 27: missing resolution independent OS X

Resolution independence means pixel counts wouldn't matter; very high pixel density screens needn't create itty-bitty text problems.

Once upon a time OS X 10.4 was going to have a scalable UI like this. Didn't happen. Then it was to be 10.5.

Now nobody mentions it.

On the other shore Microsoft has had some RI since Windows 95, but it's never worked quite well enough to be truly useful. Windows 7 takes RI further, but it's still not quite ready to go all the way.

It looks like the iMac 27 inch may remind aging Americans why RI is important ...

Apple iMac Review: 27 Inches and Less Chin - Apple imac 27 inch - Gizmodo

... at this pixel density, which is sharper than my notebook, it's almost too sharp, requiring me to sit closer than I would ordinarily do with a 27 inch display. I like the feeling of crispness — 16% crisper than the last generation. But my eyes feel like the pictures are being delivered by a land shark holding a laser pointer straight into my corneas, and I can feel the strain within minutes. I would have to jack up as many font sizes as possible or sit as close as I do to my MacBook to make it work for long long periods of time.

I'm as presbyopic as the next GOMER, so this matters. I'm going to have to work with this screen in the store for a while before I decide it's manageable at home. Lack of RI might save me a few hundred bucks.

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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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Use Get Satisfaction to talk to Google

Today's announcement of Google's mind reading technology (for example) tells us where the Google Reader team looks for feedback (emphases mine):

... we'd love to hear your feedback — share your thoughts on our help group, Twitter or the Reader section of Get Satisfaction, a third party support community.

Somehow I don't think my tweeting about a really obnoxious Reader bug is going to make much of an impression. On the other hand, the Get Satisfaction site is kind of neat. It's a startup that allows businesses to outsource their customer community.

It's free for customers of course, and, like all new startups, you can authenticate with Facebook, your Google ID or OpenID (without sharing your password of course).

Looks like Google is a paying customer -- they currently have 42 products on GetSatisfaction.

I posted my plaint on the Google Reader page: Shared item web page feed includes non-shared items.

Google's Help Forums have always felt like a waste of time - both when they were on Google Groups and in their current incarnation. I'll give Get Satisfaction a try.

Update 10/23/09: It worked. Get Satisfaction is where Google lives now. Forget the official help forums.

Honda knows its customers

What if we paid the CEO of Honda and four of his picks $1 billion to take over GM?

Just wondering. Honda knows its customers very well ...

Honda Element gets dog-friendly ... Consumer Reports Cars Blog

... The Dog Friendly components include a soft-sided cargo area kennel made from strong seat belt material netting, a cushioned pet bed in the cargo area, a 12-volt DC fan, second-row seat covers with a dog pattern, all-season rubber floor mats and a spill resistant water bowl. An extendable ramp will also store beneath the bed, so it can be accessed when the tailgate is open...

Incidentally, this post was not on my regular reading list. It was "suggested" to me by the Great God Google.

Google knows its customers even better than Honda.

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iMac Intel 27" Teardown: essential reading for would-be customers

Andy M has ordered his 27" Nehalem Blu-Ray and USB-3 free* iMac from (no tax) Amazon.

I'm tempted. My 10 yo has done his part, ranting to his mother about how slow the G5 is. On the other hand, I just know the Nehalem stuff will be hotter than hell, slower than expected, and buggy to boot.

The iMac Intel 27" Teardown from iFixit is helping me decide if I feel lucky. For example, the RAM is easy to upgrade, but the hard drive is untouchable. That means when the drive fails (mine have 2.5 year lifespans) the replacement will require a trip to an Apple Store.

* I suspect Blu-Ray licenses have some very evil aspects - not only on cost and complexity, but with IP and functionality implications as well. Those implications extend to the operating system

... Apple lacks software support for playing copy-protected Blu-ray movies, so if you install a Blu-ray drive, you'll have to boot into Windows to enjoy the show....

This machine is designed to take high quality video output from an copy-protected DRM compliant Blu-Ray.

More than Blu-Ray I'd love to see USB 3, but I remember the introduction of similar standards. The first versions rarely work properly, you usually need to wait a year after initial products before you get something that works. In the meanwhile the new tech displaces something that does work (like Firewire).

Update: Andy tells me the current Intel iMacs have the same hard drive configuration. I've been spoiled by the wonderfully serviceable G5 iMac.
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The Dinosaurs were tougher than we thought - Shiva

We knew the dinosaurs were tough. Turns out it may have taken a hell of a lot to kill the non-Avian dinosaurs ...

Mass extinctions: I am become Death, destroyer of worlds | The Economist

... The Chicxulub crater, as it is known, may have been a mere aperitif. According to Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University, the main course was served later. Dr Chatterjee has found a bigger crater—much bigger—in India. His is 500km across. The explosion that caused it may have been 100 times the size of the one that created Chicxulub. He calls it Shiva, after the Indian deity of destruction.

Dr Chatterjee presented his latest findings on Shiva to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon, on October 18th. He makes a compelling case, identifying an underwater mountain called Bombay High, off the coast of Mumbai, that formed right at the time of the dinosaur extinction. This mountain measures five kilometres from sea bed to peak, and is surrounded by Shiva’s crater rim. Dr Chatterjee’s analysis shows that it formed from a sudden upwelling of magma that destroyed the Earth’s crust in the area and pushed the mountain upwards in a hurry. He argues that no force other than the rebound from an impact could have produced this kind of vertical uplift so quickly. And the blow that caused it would surely have been powerful enough to smash ecosystems around the world...

... Extensive dating research at Chicxulub, however, now suggests that the object which created that crater actually struck 300,000 years earlier than the dinosaur extinction, meaning there really should be two ejecta layers. That there are not could be explained by the fact that the accumulation of sediment in most rocks is so slow that the two layers are, in effect, superimposed. Alternatively, it could be that no one has been looking for two layers, so they have not seen the double signature or have ignored its significance. Indeed, two iridium layers have been found in some places. Anjar, an Indian town north of the impact site, is one. That is leading Dr Chatterjee to suggest that the two big impacts did take place at different times.

The picture that is emerging, then, is of a strange set of coincidences. First, two of the biggest impacts in history happened within 300,000 years of each other—a geological eyeblink. Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active. Or, to put it another way, what really killed the dinosaurs was a string of the most atrocious bad luck.

Dinosaurs were even tougher than we'd imagined Bayesian reasoning suggests the earth has also been more dangerous than we've thought.

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Corporations rot from the top - the GM story

This does not surprise me ...

Barack Obama to order salary cuts at bailed-out firms | guardian.co.uk

... Feinberg's move against top corporate pay came as Obama's former "car tsar" attacked the "stunningly poor management" he encountered at Detroit's carmakers as he worked to avert a collapse of the biggest US auto firms this year.

Steve Rattner, a former private equity executive, was the treasury secretary Timothy Geithner's top adviser on the car industry between February and July – when the US government acted to rescue both General Motors and Chrysler.

In an article for Fortune magazine, Rattner offered a savage verdict on the leadership culture at the industrial giants, singling out GM's former boss Rick Wagoner for his "friendly arrogance", and top executives' reluctance to mix with workers.

"Everyone knew Detroit's reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures," he said. "Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company."

Rattner attacked GM's top executives for sequestering themselves on the top floor of the Renaissance Centre skyscraper in Detroit, with exclusive lifts, to avoid mixing with lower-ranking "drones"...

This is to be expected since ...

1. If the management weren't fairly average GM wouldn't be in the mess it's in.
2. No exceptional person would tolerate this kind of management style, so they wouldn't take a job at GM.
3. Power is an amazing intoxicant. Only those with exceptional abilities can keep any kind of perspective while they enjoy the high. Given #1 and #2 though, we know GM executives can't have those abilities.

Corporations rot at the top. Off with their heads.

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The Google branded netbook is coming in early 2010

This rumor is mostly about the Google phone, but that's not the interesting part (emphases mine) ...

There Really Might Be a Google Phone. No Seriously!

... According to Kumar, Google will embed the same iteration of Android as the one currently being used in the Motorola Droid and the device will be based on Qualcomm baseband chips. Google will also introduce its own branded netbook, again embedding Qualcomm Snapdragon, early next year...

That's Google Chromestellation, a version of this netbook will probably be sold through Verizon -- "free" with a 2 year data services contract.

Update 10/23/09: By chance I came across a post I wrote in 2004:

InfoWorld: Wal-Mart breaks price barrier with Linspire Linux laptop

Wal-Mart is offering a laptop that dives below the $500 pricepoint, and it's no accident the machine, from Linspire, runs a Linux-based operating system.

The Balance laptop, at $498, enters a mass market at a price that will undoubtedly accelerate Linux adoption.

The laptop comes with the OS, Internet suite, and Microsoft-file compatible office suite and can be used with both dial-up modems and broadband connections. The machine comes with a VIA C3, 1.0 GHz processor, 128 MB of RAM, which is expandable up to 512 MB with SODIMM (Small Outline Dual In-line Memory Modules). It includes a CD-ROM drive and a 14.1-inch LCD screen...

... The laptop's included Mozilla Internet suite comes with a fast-functioning browser and email program that can display Web-based forms, PDF documents, images, and multimedia files. The suite's included instant messenger program works with AOL, MSN and Yahoo logins.

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No-one makes money on desktop machines. I recall reading that if one excluded the kickbacks Microsoft provided Dell, that they lost money on their best selling desktop machines. Laptops were different -- they still had a solid margin.

Not any more. Only Apple will be able to demand a premium for their top selling entry-level laptops, and the iBook may drop to $900 or so. Updrade this thing to 512MB and hook it up to a monitor/mouse/kb and there's a very compact and virus-free machine for my mother to use -- with gmail for her email.

*Cough*.

So five years ago I predicted that only Apple would be able to demand a premium for laptops (sort of true, but I was thinking 1 year) and that the "iBook" would drop to $900 (MacBook is now $999 - but this isn't 2005).

I think I'd better temper my Netbook optimism a wee bit.

Update 11/20/09: It's late 2010 and it won't be cheap?! Wow. I sure missed this one!

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