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- Over 300 iPhone Apps Use Location Look-Ups (Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:39:22 -0700)
According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% -- far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix). The Social Networking, Local Search and Navigation Categories represent over 50% of the apps. Social Networking includes Twitter clients and friend finders like Whrrl and Pelago. Once Apple adds background location updating (I hope -- Radar post) I expect the Sports category to bloom with pedometers, life-trackers and faux-GPSs. Skyhook knows this because all of those apps use their service to determine a location. They've been tracking the apps as they've come out. Skyhook cannot publicly reveal the number of look-ups from location apps, but it's a lot. Right now the look-ups are evenly split between using the iPhone's GPS, WiFI (Skyhook's WPS), and Hybrid (Skyhook's XPS product can use Wifi, celltowers and GPS for a faster, more accurate lookup). Skyhook has been making this data available for a while. You can find more on their site. All slides courtesy of Skyhook and posted with permission (regardless of what the Confidential footer may say). I'll be discussing location-aware apps with Skyhook Wireless CEO TEd Morgan (along with Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits), and Rich Miner (Google) ) at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you have any questions for them let me know in the comments. - Seeing political links in color (Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:02:41 -0700)
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter teamed up to create a totally interesting project for the political season: a way to immediately visualize the links from political blogs on Memeorandum based on how they tend to link -- to more conservative (shown with red tint) or more liberal (shown with blue tint) blogs. They write: ...we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. I love the idea of getting a quick, visual indicator of a blogs' social peers (in the link sense). Check it out. - Open Source in Defense (Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:56:15 -0700)
I’ve been meaning to write a post about open-source software in defense for a while and today my inbox achieved critical mass with the arrival of yesterday’s GCN article on the subject. The article previews a memo being prepared by the Defense Department’s CIO that should be released in early November. It will provide additional guidance on the use of open source software in defense and is meant to make it easier for the government to obtain the benefits that come with open source. In particular, the memo will make it clear that government defense programs should evaluate open source as legally equivalent to commercial off the shelf. It also will clarify policy about participation and contribution back to the community. I’m particularly interested in that latter part as I’d really like to see the DoD improve its karmic positioning vis-a-vis open source consumption vs. contribution. The GCN article was spurred by comments Dan Risacher gave this week at the Red Hat Government Users and Developers Conference. Dan is the principal author of the memo and previously gave an overview of the policy intent at our inaugural Barcamp.mil in August. Dan and I will be discussing the policy and its hoped-for impact (among other things) further on a panel at the 4th DoD Open Technology Conference in DC on October 29 if you would like to hear more about it. - Did you read the book from that movie? (Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:48:29 -0700)
New Radar blogger Brett McLaughlin is the executive editor of O'Reilly's Head First books and a Java developer-turned-author. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that media is changing the way books are viewed. In fact, video - and YouTube in particular - has already changed how books are sold. Most big fiction releases are heralded by short "book trailers" that give an almost movie-like feel to the contents of the book. But in a recent article published by the Christian Science Monitor, I was surprised to see that there's an even more notable link between movies and the sale of books: In the upcoming Christian movie “Fireproof”, screenwriters created a book as plot point. The movie tells the story of Caleb Holt, a firefighter with a troubled marriage. To help prevent divorce, Caleb’s dad suggests he read a book called “The Love Dare.” The book changes Caleb’s view of marriage and transforms his life. As soon as preview audiences saw the film, they began flooding bookstores with inquiries. The only problem: The book didn’t exist. It does now, however. Brothers and associate pastors Alex and Stephen Kendrick, also co-directors and producers of “Fireproof,” sat down and penned such a book in the space of a few weeks. It hasn’t hit bookstores yet but has already sold 300,000 copies and may go on to become the bestselling Christian book of 2008. This is pretty remarkable. Keep in mind, we've long seen books-turned-into-movies re-released with movie-centric covers. We've seen movies come out, and then books released that are adaptations of the movie, in cases where the movie's based on an original screenplay. But books that happen to be featured in movies? That's a new one. Is this an isolated case? Or perhaps a phenomenon related more to religion and self-help tomes? Not so much; from the same article: On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s the story of the “Sex and the City” book. When Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) sat in bed reading a book called “Love Letters from Great Men” in a scene in the film, women viewers everywhere decided they needed a copy. Again: As the press was quick to report, the book didn’t actually exist. (At least not with that title.) But there was something close enough: a 1920s title called “Love Letters of Great Men and Women” reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing. On the strength of the movie, the book suddenly became a hot item for booksellers. So what does this mean for publishing as an industry? Even more poignantly, what does this mean for learning books; the sort of books that O'Reilly and other technology, math, science, educational, etc. publishers routinely put out? I'm not completely sure, although I plan on positing a few ideas in the coming days... but one thing that is clear: the competition for a book sale is no longer just other good books. Movies, videos on YouTube, even the latest Metal Gear Solid game on PlayStation 3 are increasingly key competitors. They're informing buyers about what to buy, in very unique and surprising ways. And when the competition is no longer just books, everything changes... whether we acknowledge it or not. Anyone - or any company - that doesn't realize and react is going to be hurting before decade's end. - Radar Report on Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web (Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:15:05 -0700)
The amount of geocontent on the web is expanding. With it has come an increased ability to use this data to sell location-based services that are tied to the web. Andrew Turner and I cover this shift in our new report "Where 2.0: The State of the Geospatial Web". In the 55 page report we examine: How Web 2.0 is empowering millions to publish and contribute geocontent to open services How both community and public geodata are becoming available and freely disseminated How mobile devices (like the iPhone and soon via Android) are becoming location-aware and leading to new privacy and data access concerns. Open formats are leading the way for open data How the net has caused the rise of immersive imagery and the use of How crowdsourcing is being used to build up mapping data and imagery How location-based gaming platforms are on the rise, but are still looking for the category-killing game The report ends with a directory of the most significant companies in the Where 2.0 space. For 15 of the largest companies we include acquisitions, products and key public employees. If you're a regular reader of my geo/mapping/location posts or an attendee of Where 2.0 then this won't be anything new to you. However, it will collect a lot of the key information, products and companies into one document. My co-author Andrew Turner has also written a post on the report's release. We've made the first 15 pages available on Scribd. Where2.0 Excerpt - Upload a Document to Scribd - Thoughts on the Financial Crisis (Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:32:45 -0700)
The other day, we received a blistering email from a Radar reader complaining about our silence on the subject of the economic meltdown. I wrote back: There are a lot of people bloviating about the financial crisis. It's outside of our area of expertise, so there didn't seem to be a lot of urgency to add to the hot air. Even professional economists and financial experts disagree on where this is going. I've been reading a lot, and sharing the best links via my twitter feed, but frankly, I'm feeling that we're in the middle of a wave that no one completely understands. Meanwhile, I did in fact spend my NY Web Expo talk on the idea that "I sense a storm coming" (Rilke quote), and the idea that companies and individuals need robust strategies (ones that can work even in uncertain times), with one robust strategy being to "work on stuff that matters." That Rilke quote, from the poem The Man Watching, translated by Robert Bly, has this great line about letting ourselves be washed over by events greater than ourselves: I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes that a storm is coming... What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights us is so great! If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names. I've been feeling a lot like that. Watchful. Listening. Learning. Not rushing about fighting the small things of the moment but letting the storm wash in. It will change us. That can be good. And as the storm washes through, it will become clear what we have to do. I've been quoting that poem in my talks since Why I Love Hackers at ETech in March. It ends with a ringing invocation to work on challenging problems, problems that stretch us, as the wrestlers of the Old Testament were challenged by wrestling with the angel. That seems to me to be the heart of what we need to do now. I hadn't thought to do this earlier, but it occurs to me that I might also share here the message that I sent out to all O'Reilly employees by email a week or so ago (edited slightly to remove a few company-specific details): Many of you have no doubt been alarmed by the developments of the last couple of weeks in financial markets, so I wanted to put a few thoughts out to all of you before disappearing on a combination of vacation and business travel for the next 3+ weeks. ...at the last company meeting, I talked about a theme that I've expanded on in public talks like the one I did at Ignite Boston and at Web 2.0 Expo in New York the week before last: the idea that robust strategies are ones you'd adopt in good times and in bad. And I argued that we probably end up with more robust strategies if we assume the worst rather than the best. We could be in for a long, rough time in the economy. I'm not going to say otherwise. But I also want to point out that rough times are often the best times for creativity, opportunity and change. We transformed ourselves from a technical writing consulting company into a book publishing company as a result of the huge economic downturn of the mid-80s. After the dotcom bust in 2001, we launched Safari Books Online, Missing Manuals, the Web 2.0 conferences, Foo Camp, Make: magazine, the O'Reilly School of Technology, and a host of other initiatives that have fueled our growth and that define the company today. We diversified and invested in new ideas. It was a painful period but one that made us better and stronger as a company. And if you look at history, you see that this has always and everywhere been true. It's not an accident that economist Joseph Schumpeter talked about the "creative destruction" inherent in capitalism. Great problems are also great opportunities for those who know how to solve them. And looking ahead, I can see great opportunities. The energy crisis (both global warming and the oil price shock) is helping people to focus on how technology can transform the energy sector. The financial crisis has demonstrated just how out-of-whack an unregulated, proprietary, black-box approach can get. This will lead to an emphasis on regulation, but I hope, above all, on transparency. This is of course analogous to what happened with open source software. Meanwhile, the mobile revolution will continue, regardless of the state of the economy. If it can prosper in Africa, it can prosper even in an American downturn. And all the stuff we're exploring with Make: new materials, new approaches to manufacturing, and the "open source" approach applied to hardware, will take us in unexpected directions. And all of these areas can benefit from what we do best: capturing and spreading the knowledge of innovators. We don't know yet how problems in the overall economy will affect our business. But what we can do now are the things we ought to be doing anyway: Work on stuff that matters: Assuming that the world does go to hell in a handbasket, what would we still want to be working on? What will people need to know? (Chances are good that they need to know these things in a world where we all continue to muddle along as well.) Exert visionary leadership in our markets. In tough times, people look for inspiration and vision. The big ideas we care about will still matter, perhaps even more when people are looking for a way forward. (Remember how Web 2.0 gave hope and a story line to an industry struggling its way out of the dotcom bust.) Be prudent in what we spend money on. Get rid of the "nice to do" things, and focus on the "must do" things to accelerate them. These are all things we should be doing every day anyway. Sometimes, though, a crisis can provide an unexpected gift, a reminder that nobody promised us tomorrow, so we need to make what we do today count. This seems like good advice for Radar readers as well. I will try to write further on the theme of "work on stuff that matters" in the days ahead. - The Connected Economy (Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:00:00 -0700)
As the financial markets battle the fallout of years of poorly regulated unwise greed, the language of analysis is revealing. Commentators talk of "contagion spreading", financial "gears jammed", and "turbulent" markets. This is the language of non-obvious connection, where it's theoretically possible but impossible in practice to predict the future state. Listening to This American Life's new episode on the spreading financial market failures brought this home. It talked about Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and how hedge funds would both buy and sell these so that they were making money from the interest even as their clients were covering each other's principals. This worked fine for a while, but because hedge funds were each others' clients there arose these long lines of dependencies—if A failed to pay B, then B couldn't pay C, who couldn't pay D, and so on. When the markets started to choke on rotting mortgages, the CDS chains began to unravel. The CDS game was a bugger because it was easy to check one fund's books and say "yes, we are covered". But there was no way to identify these chains of dependency: the connections between funds were invisible. And, as it turned out, the connections between funds were so much more impotant. Just as one person dying isn't as important as the fact that they can infect others, so too one hedge fund going belly up wouldn't have been anything like the disaster of the dependencies. With globalisation, these connections can span markets, borders, currencies, and languages. This newly-realized importance of the network reminds me of biology, where we thought we could understand an organism by mapping its genes. Now we realize an organism is a complex mixture of manufactured and transformed chemicals and even other organisms, and the genetic blueprint is necessary but not sufficient for understanding. You can no more understand how an organism works by reading its DNA than you can understand how San Francisco works by reading its phonebook. This "whole organism" multi-level integrative approach is called systems biology. Nodes often aren't as important as the connections between them. Reductionist science and analysis from the 19th and 20th centuries focused on nodes. I believe 21st century science, economics, political science, and computer science will use more complex systems theory to understand the interactions between chemicals, speculators, nations, and users. Social network mining, exemplified by Duncan Watts' six degrees work, is just the tip of the iceberg. I think this kind of modern network analysis can make the world a safer place, our futures more secure, and even our bodies more comprehensible. In 100 years time, historians will say that this century's Einstein, Watson, Crick, and Feynman were students of network analysis, and that this was the Connected Century. - eInk: A Possible Future for Paper (Wed, 08 Oct 2008 03:38:26 -0700)
Guest blogger Nick Bilton is with the New York Times R&D Lab during the day and NYC Resistor at night. Working in the R&D Labs at The New York Times, I'm constantly asked, "How long will paper be around?" or more to the point, "When will paper really die?" It's a valid concern, and a question no one can answer with a timetable. But there will be a point--and I believe in our lifetime--when we'll see the demise of the traditional print newspaper. After all, paper is just a device. It provides a way to communicate information, just as a TV, radio, cell phone, and billboard do. This isn't to say that newspapers will go away. The way they are delivered will just change, and in turn, the narrative as we know it will have to adapt--more on this in a later post. But paper can easily be replaced--and the factor that will drive this is simple economics. Let's put books and magazines aside for a moment, and focus on newsprint. The cost of printing a national newspaper like the Wall Street Journal is close to $150k a day. That's just for the newsprint. When you factor in printing plant rental or ownership fees, machine maintenance, shipping, and wages for plant employees, drivers, and packers, the final cost is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now if you have an average of 1,000,000 subscribers to the newspaper on a daily basis (this is a rounded-down average of a few top papers) and you stopped printing the paper, but instead gave your readers an eReader at $200 apiece, it would take fewer than six months for you to recoup your costs. If you factor back in books and magazines, people who read more than one newspaper a day, and throw in the odd journal or two, you've got a multi-billion dollar industry that could collectively save billions of dollars a year by moving away from ink on paper. But there are problems associated with this model. There's the environmental effect--devices may not be as benign as they seem, after the impact of manufacturing, materials, and shipping is considered. There's a human cost--people who print and deliver the paper would lose their jobs. There are the immense difficulties of advertising on small, different-sized devices--do advertisers create one ad at one size, or many different ones, do they animate, etc. And then there's the issue that you have to treat the device with care, something you don't need to do with paper. But for every argument against digital paper, eInk or whatever you want to call it, there is a rebuttal, or at least there will be over time. The simple fact that an eInk device today can carry a thousand books and that it only needs recharging once a month speaks paramount. The ability to download content over the air instantly--something that the "digital native" generation fully expects--is compelling. And as far as cost goes, this will be a non-issue in the coming years. Look at the cost of a 15 Megabyte hard drive 20-plus years ago, it was $2495! Today, you couldn't buy or find that size hard drive anywhere, and if you could it would cost mere pennies to create. I'm willing to bet that the cost of an eInk device will be negligible in 20 years. A common response to the prospect of an eReader is, "But I love the feel of paper, I love a good book in my hands." I can empathize with that sentiment, but I don't think the digital generation can. If it's not a touch screen, or hyperlinked, or instantly available at the press of a button, then it's not worth their time. And as soon as a reasonable iPod-like replacement comes along, paper won't be worth the publishing industry's time either. Update: The title was updated. - Web 2.0 Expo CFP Extended One-Day; Now Closes 10/9 (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:33:01 -0700)
Because of the emails, IMs, and phone calls asking about late submissions to Web 2.0 Expo SF we've decided to leave the CFP open an extra day. So if you wish to speak you'll be glad to know that the CFP for Web 2.0 Expo SF will be open until October 9th. We use this Call For Participation to find speakers for our sessions and tutorials. With the of help our committee, my co-chair Jen Pahlka and I select the content that will best service the attendees. Your submission should clearly answer the following questions: "How will this session will benefit the attendee?", "What will they learn?" and "Why are you the person to speak on it?". Including a brief outline of your talk shows us you've thought this through. These are the tracks we are trying to fill (with an abbreviated set of questions): Main Conference Tracks (approximately 13 sessions each) Strategy & Business Models What are the critical and key strategies for building Web 2.0 businesses, platforms and business models? What should attendees be preparing for during the downturn? How can they compete in Asia and European markets? Marketing & Community How can a company best use its web marketing dollars? What's the best and most manageable way of using social media to interact with your customers? What's the latest magic behind SEO and SEM? How can you protect your brand online? Design & User Experience How do we bring the skills that have served us well for the past several years to mobile devices? How do the expectations of your users change when they're interacting with you on the go? How do you meet -- if not exceed them? This track looks at the technical concepts, process innovations, design patterns, and frameworks that inform today's web applications, from the perspective of user experience and interaction design. Fundamentals We'll discuss the state of the art and the relevant open questions around the building blocks of Web 2.0: user-generated content, tagging, collective intelligence, co-development with your users, licensing, policy, identity, trust, transparency and data ownership and access. This track is designed to help those newer to the Web 2.0 understand how to bring the core concepts of Web 2.0 together to deliver a great web application. Development The Web has shown us a new way of building and releasing software. Moving at lightspeed is expected. Lightweight frameworks with support for standards and interactivity are the chosen weapons of the day. This track is for experienced programmers looking to improve their understanding of the technical ecosystem --what's baked now and what's lurking below the radar. Focus Tracks (approximately 5 sessions each)) Web Operations Web Operations are critical to every organization that depends on the web for revenue. Sessions will cover infrastructure automation, scaling Rails and LAMP stacks, virtualization and cloud computing, caching, load balancing, monitoring, and more. Mobile The mobile web has been been undergoing a dramatic evolution, with the prevalence of the iPhone, Android and forthcoming Blackberry platforms. This track looks at the technical, business, design and marketing aspects of mobile web applications. Security It should be no surprise that as Web 2.0 hits the mainstream, security issues move into the spotlight. This track looks at technical, design and business aspects of security, from the assumption that true security is not a question of code alone. Entertainment Games, videos, and other digital content are finding forms of expression as media mash up, brands become content providers, and the social web looks more and more like a big game every day. With unparalleled engagement and monetization metrics, what do other Web 2.0 developers have to learn from the innovators in the online entertainment space? Looking for other way's to participate? This year's Expo we will be reprising the Web2Open (our onsite unconference) and Launchpad (a startup judging contest). More details for each program will come later. - Mobile Advertising: You're Doing It Wrong (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:26:41 -0700)
Don't miss this great post by Chris Heathcote deconstructing Google's first steps into map advertising on the web and mobile map apps. There's still some usability and use-case work to be done, but it's interesting to see their initial take. As many people have predicted, text ads are difficult to make work on the mobile screen; in Chris's words, "On the web, a banner is 1-5% of the page; on a mobile it’s close to 30%". Chris doesn't feel Google has the problem solved yet (and, in fairness, I doubt Google does either). You're Doing It Wrong - A Star is Born? NY Times syndicates outside blogs but that's not enough (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:53:00 -0700)
Recently the New York Times announced that it will be syndicating content from three well-known blogs, Read/Write Web, Giga Om and Venture Beat. The New York Times is using these blogs as an extra-sensory organ; they can dial into what is happening in the tech sector (and particularly the West Coast with this trio) without allocating a lot of internal resources to it. Smart move. As newspapers are locked in a desperate bid for survival I get the sense that we are watching the business equivalent of A Star is Born. In this case the iconic, shaggy-maned newsman falls for a feisty blogger with a horrific perm. Two strangers meeting in life's stairwell; One headed down - the other headed up... Let's hope this pairing has a better ending. Syndication seems to have one goal - leverage that content to build online ad revenues. I hope the Times has more up its sleeve because this is just a “more of the same” strategy. Ad revenues for newspapers dropped $3 billion in the first six months of this year. With the Wall Street implosion it looks like revenues will continue to collapse as overall big-spend, ad budgets decline. I say this despite predictions of growth in '09 online ads because big print newspapers need both online/offline revenue to stay viable. Bumping online ad sales in place of plummeting offline ad revenue will not come close to solving the fundamental problem. In order to survive newspapers need to: 1. Get better at their core revenue business: advertisting. Use behavioral targeting to maximize ad prices - better user profiles equal higher revenues. Currently traditional newspaper ad networks are outsourced, weak and generic. Understanding these technologies should be a core competence inside a modern news organization. 2. Aggressive online diversification. U.S. Newspapers missed a chance to claim the classified space. Craigslist got there first and locked the newspapers out (in most U.S. markets). Schibsted, a pioneering media company in Europe, has a very healthy online classified business because they got there first. (Similarly Schibsted is competing with Google for search b/c they have huge data assets in content and video etc. that they are using to compete). Online services like this feed off of network effects - leaving precious little for runner-ups. It is too late for US papers to compete with Google or Craigslist but there are other areas that have not been claimed. Newspapers need to move aggressively to create services that deliver value; all-things-local; niche classifieds, local real estate, political polling data, creating decision markets with their readers etc. Newspapers still have assets that are hard to rival: large sales teams with great relationships; top-notch content-creation teams; established brands with public trust and, last but not least an online readership that can help become a pillar of new innovation. 3. Gene Therapy: This is what I call “the harder stuff.” Traditional newspapers require a DNA transplant. Many of the tenets of the social web: innovation from the outside, publish-then-filter, rapid adaptive behavior (fail forward fast) and learning from failure all meet with stiff organizational resistance. If newspapers do not empower their online businesses, take more small risks and get out of the way there will be nothing left in a few years to reclaim. Newsgathering organizations serve a vital civic function - but without a clear revenue model they will become an artifact of the last millennium. Time is not on their side. What else do newspapers need to do to save themselves? - Effect of the Depression on Technology (Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:00:00 -0700)
Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance on China for material goods unreciprocated by a reliance from China on American goods; and this adds up to difficult times for business in America for at least three years and possibly longer. From these premises, it's possible to cautiously guess at what the future will hold. (Bearing in mind that every day brings new revelations about the grim state of world finance, so the crystal ball is murky at best) First, this recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are. During boom times, companies direct development and occupy great talent with at best evolutionary improvements over the state of the art. Companies are great chasers of new things, but aren't great at making new things. A recession means technologists cease to be paid vast amounts to duplicate the work of others. The Great Tech Bust of Ought Two gave us 37Signals, Flickr, and del.icio.us and there's a strong argument to be made that many companies spent the next six years chasing what they created. Second, this recession will be great for free and open source because of the shortage of cash. Last recession saw the mainstream legitimisation of open source operating systems (youngsters, take note: there was a time when it wasn't automatically okay for an IT department to use Linux) because it was clear and away the most cost-effective choice. The saying I use is, "come for the price, stay for the quality". Perhaps this recession will legitimise many of the applications (CRM, finance, etc.) higher up the stack. (However, I'm not about to stick my neck out and predict 2009 as The Year of the Linux Desktop) Third, open source services and cloud computing will benefit from the tight financial situation where conditions will favour opex and not capex. It wil be nigh impossible to borrow to buy hardware or a major software license. An open source software product is free to get through the door, and services around it are delivered from opex not capex. Similarly, cloud computing lets a company pay a little to use someone else's enormous capital investment. It looks like, if the rumours are true, Microsoft will launch Windows Cloud just in time. Don't expect to see anyone else putting in new data centres any time soon—in fact, the days of deep-pocketed investors covering high burn rates are over for a while. Most consumer apps will be a harder sell with the US dollar in the gutter while the country haemorrhages cash overseas. This is bad but won't make profit impossible, you just have to really be making something consumers need. Apps like Wesabe might find a whole new audience in a recession (disclaimer: O'Reilly is an investor in Wesabe). The conditions don't suit speculative acquisitions, so expect a return to the focus on the bottom line that (very briefly) characterised the fallout from the '01 tech bust. Sorry, dreams of getting people to pay for your toothpick collector social network may have to wait until the return of the stupid money in 2013. As Phil Torrone said, people will have more time than money. This is good for open source software, but also for hardware and Make-style reconnection with the objects around us. The low-cost high-impact physical events we've created (Ignite, hacker meetups, coworking spaces, foo/bar camps) will thrive even as big-ticket conferences feel the effects of pinched pennies. The killer app in the "web meets world" space may just come from a Maker with spare time who sees a great need. That's how I see the world and what I think it might favour and disadvantage. How do you see it? What am I missing? Share your views in the comments, and a Head First SQL fridge magnet set for the commenter whom I find the most insightful. - Numbers for Digital's Rise (Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:00:00 -0700)
I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to songwriters: Digital downloads grew 38 per cent from 2006 to 2007 to become a $1.26 billion business, making up 23 per cent of the market for recorded music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sales of physical music media such as CDs, cassettes and DVDs declined 19.1 per cent to $7.5 billion in the same one-year period. I'm still looking for convincing numbers on film and TV movement to digital. For example, does anyone have numbers on how well Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog (the web-only offering from Buffy creator Joss Wedon) did? - DonorsChoose Giving Campaign Technology & Learning (Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:34:03 -0700)
DonorsChoose is having their annual Blogger Challenge. O'Reilly's blog network hat is in the Technology Blog category along with Fred Wilson, AllThingsD, BoingBoing and Techcrunch. Let's see whose readers will bring more donations in. Donate here. I personally just donated to help a kindergarten class get WiFi. We've selected other technology-oriented requests for us to assist. Join me in helping to bring technology to the classroom. In a time of financial crisis it's good to never lose sight of how important education is to our collective future. Technorati Tags: donorschoose - Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview with Lane Becker (Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:42:10 -0700)
The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong. Lane (co-founder of Get Satisfaction) speaks better than anyone about the power of building relationships via a strong customer service focus. During the Web 2.0 Expo New York we had a discussion that digs into
